Marketing

Aaron Uydess, senior e-marketing manager at Novo Nordisk, on how to align Web 2.0 strategies to business goals.

Aaron Uydess, senior e-marketing manager at Novo Nordisk, on how to align Web 2.0 strategies to business goals.

Tactics must be aligned to strategy, says Aaron Uydess, senior e-marketing manager at Novo Nordisk. This may seem obvious, but in reality marketing often fails when people are seized by the sexy factor and work backwards to the strategy. There is an even greater temptation to do this when using new technologies, which are intrinsically exciting. Using Web 2.0 must be aligned to business goals, and these goals must be linked to messages, audience, and segmentation of the audience. If the audience comprises doctors, e-marketers need to remember that they don't all think alike there are well-recognized vertical groupings.

Define the strategy

For Uydess, the starting point is to define the strategy, and e-marketing must be part of this and not a silo of its own. If the goal is to be the number one drug in a particular indication, which requires winning over specialists, then the messages have to be the right ones to hit those targets. This leads naturally to questions of tactics. Uydess warns that there is no particular need to use any one of the well-established menu of sales and marketing tools every time.

One type of message may need a particular type of medium; another may be different. Thus the e-marketer must know the channels and tactics well enough to make the right choices. For example, they need to know whether the targeted audience segment uses Twitter or FaceBook, if those are among the channels being considered. Sometimes cheap and simple tactics, such as an email campaign with a new claim, are the most cost-effective.

It is all a matter of thinking like your customer, says Uydess. One way of doing this for a global organization is to talk to regional affiliates. They are closer to the customers. Primary care patients will be under widely variable influences. In the US, managed care is the driver; in the UK, the primary care trusts will be. But there are other detail levels. If treatment compliance is an issue, targeting specialists will not be fully effective, as nurses have a major role in influencing and counselling patients.

Leverage the silos

Uydess is concerned about the existence of silos within organizations, but hes realistic. They are inevitable, so the strategy has to live with them. Patients don't only communicate with companies online, so it makes no sense to constrain messages to an online channel. There are several others, such as print ads, call centers, telesales, sales people, and events. So again, he drives home the point that e-marketing is an integrated function, one of a range, and not raised above everything else.

The key is to leverage the silos by getting them all to transmit the same message. This means that collection of metrics data (for example, by Google Analytics) must be focused on the common message How is it getting across? E-marketing is not about systems, it is about communication, Uydess says.

To make these aspirations feasible, Uydess recommends creating a project team. This pulls together people from the various functional areas (or silos) so that delivery issues, such as resource allocation, can be agreed. But even more important is that the project team enables success to be shared and problems to be analyzed collaboratively. This has a valuable effect within the organization, as it disseminates credit when things go well.

Measure and treasure

If you can't measure it, you can't treasure it is one of Uydess' favourite mantras, because it is the foundation of what he calls the campaign scorecard. Quantitative elements of this include target audience size and segmentation, website statistics (visits, click-throughs, etc), and cost per sales conversion. The scorecard is a way of communicating over time how the campaign is going. The most important item on a scorecard is lessons learned, because e-marketing is, unlike traditional media, an ever-evolving entity.

Website statistics enable the well-known tactic of funnelling, whereby it's possible to see where customers are dropping out. This leads to much better targeting of messages, and deep insight into what drives customers. The result is a better e-campaign next time, declares Uydess. He extends his philosophy to internal communication, via the dashboard approach to senior management. Key metrics need to be extracted and derived from ongoing monitoring and delivered to top management in a digestible form. Audience sensitivity also applies to brand managers, who need to understand the campaign using their language and not IT geek-speak.

Uydess asks why e-marketing sometimes under-performs. It could be because return on investment has not been properly calculated, perhaps because investment has been unrealistically low and based on traditional media. If ROI is properly calculated, and strategy put at the sharp end, Uydess is convinced that the future of e-marketing is bright.