First published in Pharma Industry 1/2019, February 2019. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.
The argument is that a digital strategy is not a different animal from an analog one, that attention is the scarce resource, and that most digital strategies fail on three things: no properly defined buyer, content built on assumption instead of data, and sales and marketing working past each other. That is the frame the whole piece is built on, and the three mistakes are set out against it. The note below goes through every part of the article, because naming only some of them would leave the others looking as though they had been checked.
The opening fact box is a set of 2018 snapshots and should be read as nothing else: the counts of blogs, of social media users, of internet users and of smartphone owners were all true of the year they were taken and are not current figures. Several numbers in the article are quoted from secondary sources, not from the studies themselves, and the reference list shows it: the claim that we handle 105,000 words and 34 gigabytes a day is sourced to a technology blog, and the alignment statistics under Mistake 3, the 67 percent more deals won, the 209 percent higher revenue from marketing, the 36 percent higher customer retention and the claim that only 8 percent of companies have strong alignment, are sourced to a vendor's blog post. The Aberdeen figures are from a 2010 study and the collaboration study is from 2007. Treat all of these as the state of an argument in 2019, not as evidence you can put in front of your own management today.
Two sections in particular need checking before anyone acts on them. The Zero Moment of Truth model describes the buyer searching, finding a mix of your material and other people's, and forming a view before contacting you; the article treats that sequence as settled, and it was written when such a search returned a list of links; generative AI arrived in 2023, so check how your own audience now reaches an answer before you design around the model. And the solution to Mistake 2 is keyword-driven content planning, a gross list narrowed to a net list on search volume and competition, backed by the recommendation to read KWFinder's "Learn SEO 2019" and to watch SEMrush webinars. The method the article sets out is to decide what to write from search data, not from opinion, and the specific reading, the specific tools and the assumption that search volume is the measure of demand all belong to 2019 and should be checked against current practice before the method is used. The free persona tool named on HubSpot's site should likewise be checked before it is recommended to a colleague. The evidence offered for Mistake 2 is a single engagement with an unnamed company on an unstated date, told from the author's own recollection, and the solution that follows is built on it.
Three smaller things. Mistake 1 and its solution set out the buyer persona as the fixed point that everything else in the article is decided against, and a persona built on "existing data" about identified individuals in a pharma context is personal data handling that belongs with your own data protection function before it is built. Mistake 3 proposes a service level agreement between sales and marketing with shared targets, and the support the article offers for that proposal is the vendor-sourced alignment statistics named above; the section does note that its own research says the two departments feel they collaborate more closely than they do. The article closes by inviting readers to send a question to the magazine's editorial address for answering in the next issue, and that invitation was open in 2019 and is not open now.
Every company today is running some form of digital transformation, whatever the industry, whatever the region. The work involves every department and it moves fast, because the risk is otherwise high that you lose competitive advantage in the market. With a focus on digital strategy and communication, digital strategist Fredrik Holmboe describes the three most common mistakes companies can make when they create a digital strategy, and how they can be avoided. The article contains a large number of links to references, which you reach most easily in the article's digital form at www.pharma-industry.se.
Interesting facts, you are probably thinking now, but what does that matter when you are building a digital strategy?
I have always claimed that a digital strategy does not differ from a traditional, analog one when it comes to the fundamental parts of a commercially driven business. At the end of the 1990s a potential customer had to find your offer, what you offered had to be worth as much as, or more than, the perceived value of what the customer handed over (often money), and in the end your offer had to hold its original promise so that the customer did not return the purchase the next day.
So far no differences, and the traditional market forces had free rein.
If you now swap the scenario above and move it into our world in 2019, we know that the "digital dimension" of our world is growing explosively.
For a commercially driven company that means, among other things, two things.
First and foremost it means that (probably) more enjoyable alternatives to your message keep appearing. The estimated 300 million people Netflix reached during 2017 alone consumed a total of one billion hours of film per week,[6] or why not think for a moment about the nearly five billion films YouTube streams to its visitors. Per day.[7]
After the above, the explosive development means that competition is hardening considerably. Not only in terms of the competition for your offer, but above all in terms of how well we today expect communication in every form to be adapted to us so that it is not added to the "noise" that is now entirely overwhelming.[8] There is a study that showed that we handle the equivalent of 105,000 words every day, or 23 words per second, if you count everything our eyes and ears take in from the world around us. Add material that does not contain words, such as images, films and so on, and according to the study our brain has to handle the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information. Per day.[9]
The upshot is that we would rather consume (probably) more enjoyable content from suppliers who have adapted their whole offering to me specifically, than even look at a marketing message from a commercially driven company.
Traditionally marketers focused on different steps in a buying process, and that process has been described in many variants: among them the traditional AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action), inbound marketing's ACD (Awareness, Consideration, Decision), or why not Avinash Kaushik's STD (See-Think-Do).
Google produced a model a few years ago in which they describe how buying behavior has changed in recent years, a model they call Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT).
The model is based on the buying process traditionally, that is before the digital era, consisting of three steps:
Step 1, Stimulus. Potential buyers are prompted to seek out a product. An example can be the way Circle K advertises cheap hot dogs inside the shop near the fuel pumps. The potential buyer seeks out the hot dog inside the shop and then ends up in step 2.
Step 2, First moment of truth. Whether the potential buyer considers the hot dog to hold the promise given in the stimulus phase is decided in step 2. If the promise is met a deal happens and the buyer passes the first moment of truth. After that comes step 3.
Step 3, Second moment of truth. In this phase the hot dog is tested against the expectations built up in the previous step, and with the experience that comes when the buyer eats the hot dog, the second moment of truth is met.
In every step the rule is that promises from step 1 have to be met in step 2 and hold in step 3 for the buyer to be satisfied.
To the three steps above Google has identified a fourth step: Zero moment of truth, a step they have placed between stimulus and the first moment of truth.
Today it is not only a selling company that provides potential buyers with information about its product or service. Earlier buyers, together with generally interested individuals who test products at hobby or professional level, also contribute to the total flow of information, and the combined picture of an offer is often the one a potential buyer examines.
Not entirely unexpectedly, Google considers ZMOT to be by far the most important step in a buying process, and taken together ZMOT shows the importance of continuously supplying the market with material that answers questions that may arise, not only about the offer but also about matters relating to the offer's "subject" and to the different ways a buyer can get the most out of the offer if they decide to become a customer.
If you want to see a short descriptive film about ZMOT you will find it on YouTube as "The Zero Moment of Truth".[10]
A fundamental change that has happened and is still happening in our part of the world is that it is no longer we as marketers who fully decide what ought to be said in a communication message.
Not really.
By that I mean that the scope for talking outside or beyond what matters to the recipient is shrinking step by step. If we do not find the right balance between what we want to say and what the recipient wants to hear, we risk being swapped for another source of information.
That is changing faster than we would like to think.
Seth Godin once wrote in one of his popular blog posts, "What you say is not nearly as important as what we hear".[11]
As a colleague in sales or marketing you have certainly seen many examples where different surveys have supported the fact that what we communicate affects the market. And so it does, of course, since all of us are affected by what we see and hear. But to be able to affect anything at all, we have to catch the attention of the target group.
An attention economy has arisen, and a book was written about it, "The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business", as early as 2002 by Thomas H. Davenport. It can be ordered from Amazon.com.
So how do you catch the attention of your target group in 2019?
A good start is to avoid the three most common mistakes when you create a digital strategy.
To begin with it may be worth pointing out that all the mistakes build on each other to some extent, and that they can largely be solved through one and the same process of training and collaboration, in which the sales and marketing departments work together with the relevant decision makers to create a solid foundation.
Most companies today have one or more more or less defined customer profiles. One of the most common phenomena, though, is that these customer profiles are based on the information, the conditions and the needs of the sales department. That is after all the department that is going to handle the customers.
But in a world where not even a website should be left "floating", without a defined business-driving purpose, it is all the more important that the collaboration between sales and marketing is well oiled and clearly defined. More on that in Mistake #3.
The collaboration between sales and marketing has a greater chance of becoming well oiled and clearly defined if the information, the conditions and the needs of both departments are used and met in the same customer profile. In inbound marketing this customer profile is called a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal (or wished-for) customer, produced on the basis of existing data and qualified guesses about where they are (mentally, physically, in relation to others and so on), how they act in different situations, what needs they have and what motivates them. Among other things.
So why do you need such a well defined persona profile?
Because it rarely works particularly well to communicate with statistics.
A customer segment produced on the basis of job task, purchase quantities or purchase potential is not enough if we as a communicating company today want to break through the noise and get a share of the recipient's attention.
As individuals we want to be spoken with and not spoken to.
We want to feel that the company communicating with us knows us and knows what we want.
And above all we do not want to be surprised, or disappointed, when we realize that the promise conveyed in a communication we took in was not met. Whether that is through the ZMOT process above or in a context as simple as going from one interaction with your company to the next.
Our brain is built so that, given the chance, we choose the path of least resistance.[12]
In a communication context that means we do not want to have to work out what is being said and which message it is we are supposed to understand. It should be natural in its context and adapted specifically for us and our needs.
Imagine that you are talking to your buyer persona in a social setting. In what way, and what would you actually say to that person to make sure the conversation continued, and continued in a direction you had chosen?
Surely you would not thunder on about the obvious value of your offer and how self-evident it should be that a deal is in the recipient's interest, the way much of today's marketing does?
You would probably read the situation, ask questions and possibly talk about things that were genuinely interesting to your new acquaintance. During the conversation you would probably consider whether your offer could be of value to the person you are talking to, and given a natural opening in the conversation you might mention something about your offer. But only in a suitable context, and after that you would follow up afterwards because you had both identified that a second conversation could be valuable to you both.
"Your customers don't care about you, your products, or your services. They care about themselves." Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing (2013)
So if people only care about themselves, what does the solution to Mistake #1 look like?
In a digital strategy it is to dare to go narrow and well defined enough when creating one or more customer profiles, and to create content on the basis of them. What you create then has a greater chance of being relevant enough to your best, ideal or wished-for customer to earn that person's attention over several steps.
When creating a digital strategy, a strong foundation in the form of a buyer persona is exactly what is required to have the best chance of succeeding. That description becomes the guiding star that centers your communication and gives you the chance always to keep the promise that your next piece of content will be like the last one. Something that is fundamentally important if you believe in the motto "whoever gets the customer to take more steps in their own world wins".
A buyer persona can be used in more settings than sales and marketing ones, and if you want to read more about buyer personas you can read the book called precisely "Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business", written by Adele Revella in 2015.
There is also a good and free tool on HubSpot's website called "Make my persona tool", where you can try your way forward.
In most of the companies I have worked with there has been some form of ongoing content production, published in channels such as the company's website and its social channels. Almost as often the company has committed Mistake #1 with a non-existent or far too unspecific customer profile, and as an extension of that they tend to commit Mistake #2.
The content that is created often has the product as its guiding star, mixed with the kind of assumptions that can arise when market research is blended with input from a small number of field-based colleagues.
That is an unnecessarily blunt and costly approach, since the risk is that the content created does not have enough impact.
One example of how a mistaken focus can lead in a mistaken direction was when I was going to work with a company to help them with search engine optimization (SEO, different ways of landing higher up in Google's search results among others). According to them they had no need of buyer personas, and were mostly interested in getting their content production going on the basis of their offer. They had a short list of keywords relating to their product and asked me to make sure they would land right on Google. In the process described in the next paragraph, the goal is to find several related keywords and then prioritize fairly hard in order to focus resources on a small number of keywords where the resources give the greatest impact. But with the product in focus the list did not become shorter, and therefore more focused, but almost twice as long, and therefore blunter, with even more suggestions for further searches that could be carried out.
With a product in focus every keyword becomes relevant, but for different potential buyers. Not all buyers are equally important, and with the setup above you are trying to take on the whole market. History has taught us that a war on several fronts is rarely successful, and unfocused communication is quite simply no different.
With a well defined buyer persona as the guiding star instead of the product, you have the chance to define with high accuracy what should be interesting and valuable content, focused where it can have the greatest impact, and to adapt your plan on that basis.
One way of moving in the right direction is to work together in a cross-functional group, often sales and marketing, where you brainstorm and write down suggestions for good content.
After that you identify a list of keywords from the subjects you have written down, which is then used as the basis in one of the cloud services for keyword analysis available online. The purpose of the analysis is to find related and relevant keywords with high search frequency and low competition. The result of the analysis gives you a gross list of keywords.
In the same group you then prioritize the gross list's keywords across three levels of priority: high priority, neutral, not relevant.
That gives you a net list of keywords that are with high probability highly relevant to your buyer persona, something that in the longer run gives more efficient content production, since you base the whole machinery on defined keywords and their actual potential in the form of data.
As a bonus, a net list of keywords that is reviewed and updated a couple of times a year gives you a good starting point when new content, whatever the format, is to be created.
Create content based on data, not on assumptions, with the right focus for better impact and better use of your resources.
"We aren't competitor obsessed. We are customer obsessed. We start with the customer and work our way backward." Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
If you want to know more about the process above with the development of a gross list and a net list, and about how you create content based on data, I can point you to KWFinder's article "Learn SEO 2019" and to SEMrush, who in their inbound marketing provide anyone interested with good information about SEO through their webinars.
Do you recognize the spirit of the following statements?
If you find a degree of recognition in the above, which is more common than we want to think, it can be a sign that the collaboration between the sales and marketing departments is bumpy.
In the study "Exploring Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing" from 2007, in which the authors examine three larger companies in England, they name a range of different reasons in their conclusion for why that may be the case.[13]
In the study the authors write that although the sales and marketing departments often work together and have a feeling that they collaborate closely, there are many earlier surveys supporting the view that they do not fully understand each other's contribution to the organization's overall goals. One of the reasons was that the salespeople were not always present at the marketing department's planning meetings, and that with relatively short-term sales targets a conflict often arose with the marketing department's more long-term goals.
The study also reinforces the central role of the attitude to good collaboration that has to exist in the organization's management, something that as a logical extension strengthens the need for a well defined service level agreement (SLA) between the sales and marketing departments.
In a global online study from 2010 carried out by Aberdeen Group, in which 453 companies were examined, it was found that the companies with well defined collaboration (best-in-class) achieved a 20 percent annual increase in revenue compared with a 4 percent average decrease in annual revenue among the companies with poor collaboration (laggards).
It was also found that 47 percent of future potential sales (the sales pipeline) was generated by the marketing department, compared with 5 percent on average among the laggards.[14]
More statistics supporting the value of clear and well defined collaboration between the sales and marketing departments can be found summarized through the reference below. A few examples from the summary:
Something worth noting is that, according to the source, only 8 percent of companies have strong collaboration between the sales and marketing departments.[15]
If you as an organization have worked cross-functionally through the solutions to Mistake #1 and #2, the internal communication and the view of collaboration around communication should have been harmonized.
The hope is then that there is a good foundation for answering the following questions:
Some of the things the salespeople can expect from the marketing department are that material is created that is fully focused on the right buyer persona. They can expect that, where the conditions allow, marketing will generate new potential customers (leads) or customer meetings. They can also expect a timetable for when content is created and in which format it is delivered, and they will have full understanding of the context in which it is to be used.
Some of the things the marketing people can expect from the sales department are that the material created is used according to plan and in full. They can expect that marketing activities are followed up within a set timeframe. They can also expect full support from the sales department in their work of planning and carrying out the organization's marketing.
Beyond that, the organization at large can expect the sales and marketing departments to use the same terminology for the customer's path, and to work together to create new opportunities for business (prescription) from the first contact, whatever the channel. The organization can also expect there to be more traditionally sales-focused goals for the marketing people and more traditionally marketing-focused goals for the salespeople, and that there is a clear process for what regular reporting on goal fulfillment looks like.
Taken as a whole it is about moving from the feeling of good collaboration that the research has identified to genuinely defining what good collaboration looks like in your own organization, where the terminology is the same, where the departments' contributions to the organization's overall goals are understood by everyone involved, and where the goals for the company's marketing and sales efforts are harmonized.
Service level agreement (SLA) is a term often used in the context of collaboration between two departments such as sales and marketing. Another term in use is "SMarketing". If you want to know more, you will find many good articles for deeper reading if you search Google for "inbound marketing service level agreement templates".
Perhaps you noticed that Mistake #1 was given more space in this article?
The reason for that is that a well defined buyer persona can often answer many of the most common questions, such as which keywords are relevant to focus on, or which detailed decisions you as a marketer should make in order to succeed in the zero moment of truth (ZMOT). A discussion through the question "is this relevant to [name of your buyer persona]?" often gives a quick and good answer that everyone can agree on.
So spend time on starting there, create a proper buyer persona, and do it cross-functionally so that all the relevant colleagues are involved in the process and get the same ground to stand on. It is a simple way of solving parts of the change management problem that can arise when the organization is running a digital transformation.
In all the articles I write for Pharma Industry I try, with a holistic stance, to mix the digital in context with actionable tips based more on actual measurement tools such as KPIs and checklists. This article was given a somewhat different focus, and my hope is of course that it has given a few new insights.
Do you have a question about digital marketing that you would like answered in an article here in Pharma Industry? Send your thoughts to redaktionen@pharma-industry.se and we will pick a question to answer in the next issue.
Well met online or in the next issue of Pharma Industry.
Fredrik Holmboe
Digital strategist
All the links to the references I have used in the article can be found in the digital version of this article at www.pharma-industry.se.
Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Getting the buyer defined first and then letting search data decide what gets built is the sequence the AI Adoption Sprint follows.