Do you and your teams want to crush omnichannel?
(7-minute read)
Omnichannel success can feel like an elusive goal for life science marketers. Eager for growth, marketers grapple with rapidly shifting customer expectations and a deluge of emerging digital tools and techniques. Leaders ask about “shiny objects,” looking to marketers for quick fixes to sluggish revenue. Legal and regulatory are critical partners but often lack the systems, resources, and mandate to keep pace—further stalling progress. Customers, meanwhile, are drowning in information overload, struggling to navigate their own changing worlds and remaining skeptical of the industry’s ability to help.
What “was” no longer provides clear guidance on what “will” or “could” be. And, unlike the Sales process, there’s not even an established, foundational marketing model to evolve from. Life science marketing is suffering from an identity crisis at a time when companies need marketing the most.
The problem is, even beyond life sciences, marketing has lost its way. Just look at all the adjectives being put in front of the term marketing these days. In addition to omnichannel marketing, we have digital marketing, multichannel marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, performance marketing, and growth marketing, just to name a few. Somehow, we’ve come to use individual, go-to-market tactics to represent marketing. Marketing, of course, includes all of these tactics, but these tactics in no way embody marketing. These tactical labels constrict marketing to a downstream, less strategic activity. This stance also makes it hard for marketers to discover and prioritize customer opportunities for growth.
Let us reclarify marketing’s purpose and where omnichannel fits in. Marketing exists in order to identify, create, and deliver value for customers. No other function in a company is designated to do this. Marketing is responsible for—or at least should heavily influence—the 4 Ps of marketing (PRODUCT, PLACE, PRICE, PROMOTION). Marketers should be identifying customer need, prioritizing and driving company efforts and resources to create things that answer customer need, and developing and steering how these things are brought to satisfy the customer. Marketing connects the customer to the company. Ideally, marketing is the steward of the customer and the strategic engine for the company.
Omnichannel is a term that describes the approach a marketer uses to provide seamless, effortless, and motivating customer experiences within and between channels. It includes traditional PROMOTION and also PRODUCT things like information and service; PLACE like where and how you get the product, information, and service; and PRICE, such as monetary, time, and people costs. For sure, omnichannel is a part of marketing, but not all of marketing is omnichannel. This distinction is important to make, particularly in life science marketing.
Assess customers’ omnichannel experience on your business:
- Lay out all your materials on a table or virtual white board.
- Bring your latest version of the creative/project brief for the customer experience or campaign.
- Visually examine what might be the main takeaway and the associated feelings that are evoked.
- Go through your experience or campaign step by step—clicks and all—as if you were a patient or other customer (or you can watch a friend or family member do so).
- Pay close attention to where the transition from one step to another requires extra questions or gets lost altogether.
With your team, ask:
- Do you have a clear strategy about the desired belief or behavior shift you want customers to make as a result of your effort?
- Is your customer experience or campaign “on strategy,” and achieving what you set out to do?
- Where is there inconsistency across touchpoints or channels?
- Where is there friction for the customer?
To crush omnichannel, marketers need to deliver a relevant, friction-free, compelling experience better than competitors. But that experience must be grounded in a customer need and deep insight, as well as in strategic choices about what to stand for and what to do (and not do). Otherwise, it’s just tactical churn.
Marketing in an Omnichannel World: Go Beyond the Buzzwords
As an industry, we need to move away from the comfort of jargon and reclaim marketing for what it is intended to be. We’re not “doing” omnichannel marketing, digital marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, performance marketing, and so on—these are tactical approaches and tools. We are marketers, marketing in a digital, omnichannel world.
At Lime, we developed our Life Science Marketing FrameworkTM to help marketers thrive in an omnichannel world. Coming out of this framework are five marketing best practices marketers can apply to accelerate success:
Construct a Logical PremiseOmnichannel tactics—or any digital or traditional tactics—should rest upon a clear, specific customer foundation and goal. Teams must take the time to: make sense of the customers through a needs/outcomes-based segmentation, develop an integrated customer journey map based on the end user, and identify the pain points and barriers customers face in the journey to achieve their goals. A “logical premise” includes:
Hint: This logical premise serves as the basis of measurement, too.
- Who is the key customer segment and their need or desired outcome?
- What is the Moment That Matters in their journey?
- What is the belief/behavior shift you want to impact in that moment?
- What is the deep and hidden why behind what they believe or do now that is getting in the way of achieving their need or outcome?
Hint: This logical premise serves as the basis of measurement, too.
Anchor to the BriefGiven the proliferation of people, pieces, and technology that are involved in customer experience and campaign delivery, marketers must provide clear strategic direction and not toss it over the fence for other human teams or automated systems to figure out. The “brief” becomes an indispensable power tool for marketers to ensure ongoing alignment, allow experts to do their best work, and feed the AI machines. As such, marketers (not the agency) must own the brief writing and revising, keeping it current as circumstances or aims evolve. A great brief includes the goal and customer problem to solve, establishes the logical premise about the customer, and clarifies the strategic choices about what the brand stands for, offers, says, and does.
Go WideEfficient, effective delivery of customer experiences and campaigns means we must treat execution as a strategic priority, especially since most organizational functions—not just marketing—are involved in some capacity. Marketing must step up to lead, making sure efforts are coordinated, on-strategy, as well as monitored and improved. It can be as straightforward as orchestrating all digital tactics in your customers’ journey (e.g., social media, content, email, search engine optimization, web landing pages, paid advertising, and marketing analytics). Or, it may be more complex across functions to ensure appropriate touchpoints and handoffs are interlinked and in place (e.g., webinar enrollment, sales representative, call center, nurse follow-up, website, mailer). Marketing must be the conductor—ensuring digital channels, organizational functions, and customer touchpoints work in harmony to achieve specific goals. Marketing also must help the organization be open to, explore, and adopt new technology and ways to deliver better for customers.
Go DeepBig picture integration and oversight requires that the small stuff be in place. As a marketer, you should scrutinize every point in the customer experience or campaign to identify where there might be a gap or other disruption when the customer interacts with a piece or transitions from one piece to the next one. For example, how does a patient go from getting information on your website to a conversation with their doctor, and how much of that is facilitated by you versus left to them to figure out on their own? If you’re running a Spanish-language campaign, is your landing page in Spanish and is the 1-800 number answered by a Spanish-speaking representative? Omnichannel success relies on this level of attention and detail, as well as superlative project management skills to ensure flawless implementation.
Treat Sales as a “Channel”(Yes, we said it!) The sales force is a rich asset life science companies have for connecting directly with certain customer types as well as for transmitting first-person learning back to marketing. Reserve one of the most expensive channels—personal selling—for the most critical moments that digital or traditional venues can’t adequately address and make sure you’re taking every step to maximize this channel. An effective marketing-sales partnership amplifies omnichannel plans and creates a competitive advantage:
- Build trust by helping the sales team leverage their efforts and resources in a focused way to support the overall customer experience.
- Make it easy for them to see what’s happening in other channels so they can extend the impact they are making.
- Be compassionate as they work to figure out how to incorporate AI into what was more of an intuitive preference to daily decision making.
- Support skill building, seek their wisdom, and ensure the tools you provide them are relevant and practical for what you’re asking them to do.
Success in omnichannel marketing isn’t about presence in every channel—it’s about understanding your customers’ problems, curating what matters most, and orchestrating solutions across your organization. By focusing on these fundamentals, marketing teams can cut through the jargon and deliver experiences that make a difference to customers.
Example of a Lime Treatment Pathway to Help Break
Through Resistance to Change:
1
Understand what’s getting in the way of marketing effectiveness and develop a prioritized roadmap to improve how value is identified, created, and delivered to customers
2
Design a shared, best practice approach to developing and implementing customer experiences and campaigns across multiple teams and functions
3
Work with individual marketing teams and agencies of record to evaluate and strengthen existing customer experiences and campaigns
Is your team ready to crush omnichannel?
Download the Top 5 Things Life Science Marketers Get Wrong to
help your team diagnose what might be missing in their omnichannel approach.
help your team diagnose what might be missing in their omnichannel approach.
If you’d like to brainstorm or learn how we’ve helped other teams crush omnichannel,
reach out to schedule a free Let’s Grow! session.
reach out to schedule a free Let’s Grow! session.
