Compelling messages and attention-grabbing creative are great, but if they’re not delivered through the correct channels, what’s the point? Your campaigns will never reach your target customers unless they’re delivered based on a data-driven channel strategy that focuses on finding the best vehicles for the job.
To optimize the channels through which you deliver your next campaign, evaluate data from your own past efforts and take a look at what’s working for others in your industry.
Here are a few channels where top B2B and healthcare marketers have found standout success recently:
Healthcare technology company LUMEDX has a small staff but a large range of product offerings for cardiovascular information and imaging. To stand out in the face of competition from much larger brands, LUMEDX created a webinar-based lead generation campaign. The lead generation campaign stimulated over $600,000 in annual sales and led to increased contact with hundreds of clients.
If your company hasn’t considered webinars as a lead generation tool, it may be time to look into your options. Business and healthcare decision-makers are managing large budgets and need to make educated decisions about their service providers, especially when making high-value purchases. Webinars are an excellent way to connect with these potential clients and share valuable information. They can be a strong component of a cross-channel educational content campaign.
Agco’s brands manufacture and supply agricultural machinery. After careful analysis revealed heavy YouTube use among the brand’s target customers, Agco decided to build an outreach strategy for this channel. The strategy, which included support, training and demonstration videos as well as videos about the future of agricultural technology, drove about $10 billion in sales.
The lesson from Agco’s campaign is in the careful research they conducted before launch. This research revealed that many farmers were already producing videos for YouTube showing how they used Agco products, and that there was a significant audience for this type of content. Agco didn’t enter into a new channel blindly, and your brand shouldn’t either.
Merck (known as Merck Sharp & Dohme outside the U.S.) needed a way to reach healthcare professionals across countries and languages. To do so, they created Univadis, a hub for unbiased, relevant medical news from respected journals including The Lancet and The JAMA Network. To keep the site’s users engaged, Merck created a “self-learning” email marketing program that tailored email frequency to users’ behavior on the site and their medical specialty. The campaign included multi-touch reactivation messaging for lapsed users, which reactivated 35% of the U.K. user base in seven months. When the email marketing was optimized for mobile, engagement increased 64%.
By creating a site that provided valuable educational materials on health-related topics and delivering those materials via a smart marketing automation strategy, Merck established their credentials and built their following.
What content would fill a similar need for your audience? Host industry-relevant content on your own brand’s site or create a campaign microsite and use it to build thought leadership. Your business may create this content, strategically partner with other content creators, or both.
In each of these cases, the business in question chose one key channel that their research indicated could be successful and created a campaign that was well-suited to it. Then, other channels were layered into the campaign to strengthen its impact.
Cross-channel campaigns are most effective when tied to a strong brand and a robust digital marketing strategy. Learn more about how Movéo can help build your brand:
Photo by Heisenberg Media via Flickr Creative Commons
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