It’s not exactly a revelation to note that competition for engagement continues to surge in the life sciences space, or that financial constraints are squeezing more tightly than any time in recent memory. Given the dynamic nature of the current environment, it’s more essential than ever for companies to prioritize its customers and deliberately engineer every interaction to meet their specific needs.
Which is why it’s slightly puzzling that some organizations continue to drag their feet on implementing a robust lead-generation strategy, which remains a sure-fire way to fill funnels with quality leads.
As field teams report that the majority of their leads are unproductive, a more focused approach is required, one that emphasizes personalization and the use of robust campaign analytics. Without this, too many interactions fail to drive demand or pull leads through the journey to treatment, toward the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes.
The customer treatment journey could well serve as a framework for this. It may differ slightly by disease or target group (HCPs or patients), but it would generally follow a similar blueprint: interest and awareness, consideration, decision-making and access, treatment and follow-up.
In the past, marketers often concentrated on the interest/awareness stages of the customer journey, primarily evaluating a campaign’s success based on the number of impressions generated. This approach, however, provides only a partial view; it doesn’t allow marketers to assess the quality of the leads that were produced or their progression through subsequent stages, much less whether they ultimately lead to conversion, treatment and improved outcomes.
Sounds like something a more effective lead-gen strategy can help achieve, no? Here are four pieces of advice for any life sciences organization hoping to up its lead-gen game.
Don’t skimp on the process: It’s key for all lead-gen programs to put into place concise, well-documented processes designed to manage and track interactions with potential leads—and do so well in advance of when new leads are generated and assigned to field teams. This serves the goal of enhancing efficiency, via guidelines on managing initial interactions with new leads, determining appropriate contact methods and frequency, categorizing leads for subsequent actions, and recording pertinent information in the overarching CRM system. Additionally, establishing clear criteria for closing out leads should prevent that system from becoming cluttered with inactive or uninterested leads.
It’s equally important for organizations to know exactly who is accountable for the lead at each stage of the process. Such internal stakeholder alignment ensures a smooth journey for the lead, minimizing mixed messages from different departments that cause confusion and frustration.
Strive for quality over quantity: The use of digital and social platforms has expanded the scale and reach of lead generation, which makes it even more important for organizations to clearly define and identify quality leads. Differentiating between a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a sales qualified lead (SQL), as well as establishing clear criteria for what constitutes a good lead before it is handed off from marketing to sales, are crucial.
Requesting both a phone number and an email address usually ensures that only genuinely interested prospects complete the form fills. This may diminish the overall number of leads, but it should boost their quality. As always, it’s important to strike a delicate balance, as constant monitoring and adjustments to campaigns can increase costs associated with resource allocation and content modifications. To enhance the effectiveness of these campaigns, we need to test them vigorously; implementing A/B testing on specific data gathered from awareness initiatives should lead to improved lead-gen quality.
The integration of AI platforms can help on the quality front as well, especially during the interest/awareness phase. Anything we can do to further streamline lead capture and follow-up will contribute to better results.
Get warm, clear and familiar: If there’s one lesson we all should have learned from the digital marketing revolution, it’s that companies must connect with customers—and the most effective way to do so is by enhancing and emphasizing warmth, clarity and familiarity. To that end, organizations need to create detailed customer profiles and segmentation (demographics, geography, psychographics, behavior) using insights gleaned from across the treatment journey. Accurate mapping of this journey is an essential component of developing a successful nurture campaign that drives leads to treatment, rather than just generating them. And don’t forget about an aligned content strategy plan, which further bolsters personalization across all stages of the journey.
In order to guide customers to subsequent stages of the journey, it is similarly essential to identify critical information, messages and calls to action appropriate for each stage. Understanding the preferred medium for communication—whether email, SMS or phone calls—can help in personalizing the touchpoints with the lead.
Measure and optimize: To accurately monitor the ROI of a campaign and make necessary adjustments, companies must gather specific data from each stage of the campaign. A performance measurement framework should be agreed upon by all stakeholders well in advance of the lead-gen campaign going live. Among the KPIs that companies might want to track: impressions, click-through rates, cost per click, website analytics and the number of SQLs generated.
That’s only a start, however. Any well-planned lead-gen campaign must identify the metrics that matter for both short- and long-term objectives, align on how they are measured and, most importantly, agree on the manner in which those metrics will be used. Only then can an organization focus on how to distill important metrics into broader business impact narratives that communicate ROI and the increase in patients at all stages of the journey, especially the number of patients on treatment.
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The good news? Everything outlined here is easily doable for any life sciences organization. The most successful lead generation and nurture strategies, after all, hinge on a meticulous understanding of the customer treatment journey and a focus on relevant metrics that tie marketing efforts to tangible business outcomes. By aligning messaging and content with each stage of the treatment journey, and maintaining flexibility to measure and refine strategies continuously, organizations can optimize their impact.
Nikki Murphy was most recently senior manager, hemophilia BU marketing, at BioMarin Pharmaceutical.
