The Intersection of Content and the 5 Foundational Elements of Omnichannel

Omnichannel is an evolution of marketing that drives a more relevant, seamless and personalized experience across any channel and interaction. These personalized experiences can live across all the key digital touchpoints including websites, ads, emails, detailing (virtual or in-person), events and/or customer care. These touchpoints across all channels ultimately represent your brand. So how do we evolve to Omnichannel? Omnichannel doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, it’s a “crawl, walk, run” progress over years that includes technology and channel integrations, test and learn experiences, automation technologies and, most importantly, the right content for the right moment for the right person.

Every foundational element of omnichannel requires content, creative, voice scripts and experiences that speak to the person, based on what you know about them and where they’re looking to go next on their journey. Below are the 5 foundational elements (or “building blocks”) of an omnichannel experience that ultimately will align with your organizational vision, objectives and goals:

1. Marketing-Driven Relationships – With the rise of ad and cookie blockers, relationships will become more and more critical to build your first-party data with health care providers (HCPs), patients, caregivers and stakeholders. Without third-party cookies, remarketing will become tougher and contained to “walled gardens” only. More importantly, without an email address (and appropriate marketing consent), it will become increasingly difficult to continue building the relationship. If/when people opt-in for email, it’s an opportunity to continue telling your story and/or providing education, resources and contact information. When you have an email address, not only can you leverage it for targeted email marketing, customer care and relationship building, but you can leverage it across third-party platforms including Facebook/Instagram, Twitter and certain programmatic advertising platforms.

2. Personalization – If you’re reading this, you likely found this on the internet, and as you know, the internet is a cluttered mess. There is too much “noise,” and staying relevant is critical to reaching and engaging your target audiences. Being relevant doesn’t require a treasure trove of data and a sophisticated setup, and personalization isn’t “scary.” Start small. Think about the individuals you are looking to target with each audience. Make sure you start with basic smart segmentation of your target audience. Then think about how you can enhance and optimize their journey, starting with the creative approach, then through the website and email. Once you understand the journeys, personalization and being relevant can mean something as simple as male vs. female, “old” vs. “young,” day (when they are working) vs. night (at home/in bed), and the individuals city/geography. Dynamic creative platforms have been maturing over the past five years and are likely the best place to start. If you are leveraging platforms that allow for web personalization, consider the path from ad creative to web and how you can reflect a continuity of experience. Then, you can start the “crawl, walk, run” of increasing the number of journeys and personalized experiences from there.

3. Content Operations and Integrations – Content is at the center of all marketing, yet the process to create content is all over the place. For those companies that have not yet taken the time to invest in their process and platforms, 2023 is a great year to do so. Why? Collaborating virtually has never been more critical to success and content operations and content management platforms that are truly multi-channel and even omnichannel in nature have advanced significantly. These platforms are increasingly adding new third-party integrations to ensure that whatever your tech and MarTech stack is, they can help drive efficiencies, control (critical for quality and compliance) and automation. Most importantly, direct integrations and partnerships with Veeva Vault and Veeva PromoMats can shave precious time by avoiding back and forth emails, meetings and calls.

4. Modular Content – Directly related to the above, the way I describe “modular content” is “technical design with scale and efficiency of the outputs in mind.” The premise is simple – when you are creating content, have the outputs in mind. Easier said than done, but if you understand where every key message, call to action and image will go when it comes to websites, social posts, social ads and emails, then, theoretically, there are two key benefits. The first is from a design perspective as building the final assets will be faster from a creative and tech build. The second, directly related to the first, is that if all individual components are approved by legal, regulatory and directly tied to the claims library, then the final approval of assets will be more efficient.

5. Trigger Marketing and Trigger Analytics – Both represent an amazing evolution of customer journey orchestration and marketing automation, and we are beginning to see the trend in pharma already occurring. Trigger marketing allows us to identify the intersections of our customer experiences we can orchestrate and automate. In pharma, we have strong signals to indicate “active intent” when an HCP is actively investigating and/or engaging with the brand, the product and/or key topics directly related to the disease and/or therapeutic area. These actions include clicking on an ad or email, visiting a specific page of the web, or researching a topic online. When we see these signals, we have an opportunity to automate the “if this, then that” business rules that bring trigger marketing to life. What can we automate? Well, that’s the amazing thing about digital marketing. Almost every media channel can be integrated into these efforts, whether web, ads (including digital TV and social), content relationship management (CRM) and email (including rep-trigger emails and next best actions) and even direct mail.

When all the foundational elements come together the hard part is a truly seamless activation and creative strategy to provide an end-to-end holistic solution for the end user, customer and/or stakeholder. Where have we seen this go “right”? Ideal state: A clear vision, a very thoroughly documented process and requirements are critical to the success. Omnichannel efforts typically take 2 – 3 years to realize its full potential and only works when everyone is on the same page, on the same “playbook” and working towards a vision, with the end stakeholder in mind.

Learn more and connect with Adam on Twitter @AdamHirsch and LinkedIn /In/AdamAHirsch.