Integrating on-line and on-the-ground sales and marketing activities

According to Veronica Johow, Web Manager for AstraZeneca, coordination between all the actors in a sales and marketing campaign is essential to success.

By Editor on Oct 17, 2007

According to Veronica Johow, Web Manager for AstraZeneca, coordination between all the actors in a sales and marketing campaign is essential to success. In April, Johow spoke at an eyeforpharma conference entitled Online Marketing and e-detailing, Europe 2007. Her talk, Integration of On-Line Activities into Sales and Marketing Strategies lays out exactly how such coordination can be managed for maximum effectiveness.

Actors, their objectives and how they interact

In order to effect a coordinated e-marketing strategy, says Johow, it's important to know who is involved, what they want and how they work together.

Any e-marketing effort must necessarily involve the sales and marketing teams. These groups have their own objectives. They want to, for example, minimize the impact of generics, consolidate and cement relationships with key opinion leaders, and deliver key brand messages to customers. If the sales and marketing team identifies a non-detailing strategy for marketing, they may solicit advice and information from the company's global or local e-marketing experts.

In order to conduct their activities and stay within the laws and regulations of local legal and regulatory bodies as well as within the ethical codes a company sets for itself the sales and marketing people must coordinate with the company's legal teams whose goal, naturally, is compliance.

The important task, says Johow, is to discover how to meet the goals of the different functions [sales and marketing, legal, e-marketing] and integrate the e-channel into brand and overall commercial strategy.

The stages of e-business adoption

According to Johow, when adopting e-business tools, companies go through several layers of increasing sophistication as their e-business activities mature. Companies may start out with simple online visibility (the brochurewave), then progress to activities that allow some limited interaction with users (dialogues, Q & As). From there, many progress to customization (Johow's give me what I ask for stage), personalization (understand me and predict what I want), and ultimately to closed-loop marketing done through many different channels.

The key to success at each stage, says Johow, is to understand the 4-step cycle that must take place for every marketing strategy introduced.

Four steps to success:

I. identify

Every new e-marketing tool should be put through a four-stage process to guarantee a tool that is effective and delivers the best ROI. Says Johow, first you need to identify new initiatives that decrease the cost of doing business or increase sales. e-business teams can help by providing broad expertise on e-marketing best practices.

When AstraZeneca launched Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug, the company initiated an online e-marketing effort unprecedented in AZ Italy. AZ global e-marketing teams already had knowledge on how to maximize web visibility and brand reach, and on how to conduct e-learning and e-promotional activities, and it shared this wealth of information. Says Johow, effective transfer of information from AZ global e-marketing on best practices of a large variety of e-marketing initiatives was essential.

II. Implement

Once initiatives have been identified, it's time for implementation. Again, sales and marketing teams need to be operating in coordination with legal teams in order to ensure legal and ethical compliance. In the case of Crestor, AZ leveraged its relationships with vendors who had large, dedicated databases of health-care professionals. AZ selected ideal targets from these lists, then had vendors send emails to the selected recipients. These emails contained brand information and links, and 60% of the emails resulted in click-throughs by the recipients.

Sales force teams were included in the initiative through feedback surveys, but also through an innovative request form. These forms were for doctors to request a visit from a sales rep in order to obtain further information about the drug.

III. Evaluate

Once a new marketing initiative is underway, it's important to evaluate its success. Johow gives the example of AZ's online patient tutorial initiative.

In this initiative, search engines were used to promote patient tutorials. Patients were driven to the AstraZeneca website, where they had to register in order to gain access to the tutorials. AZ wanted to evaluate the key performance indicators for online visibility of the tutorials.

After five months, the campaign had generated 790 visits to the tutorials. At first, this was thought to be a disappointingly low response, but further investigation showed that, given the relative complexity faced by users (eight steps to access), the response was not so negative. More importantly, the teams had learned an essential lesson: avoid conflicting interests (in this case, online visibility vs. registrations) in the same initiative.

IV. Improve

No evaluation is worthwhile if there is no attempt at improvement. In the case of the online tutorials, AZ improved online visibility through search engine optimization and by opening up public areas of its website to all users, no login required. These strategies proved very successful in increasing AZ's presence on the Web.

Ultimately, utilization of the four-step process for each e-marketing activity will allow companies to move up the ladder of e-business sophistication. By including all the actors at every stage of the four-step process, a company guarantees e-marketing tools that are informed by a broad range of experience and expertise.

Says Johow, The integral management of the four main steps of each single e-marketing activity is key for the integration of the e-channel into brand and overall commercial activity.

It's 2007 do you know how effective your e-marketing tools are?