In the old days, you could sit on a hilltop and watch a war! Battles, aka military engagements, took place on a field with both sides rushing at each other with their weapons at the ready.
Thankfully, we’ve reached a more sophisticated method of persuasion, which nevertheless still requires engagement between participants—and a field on which it takes place.
Why You Need a Digital Platform
With digital engagement, the “field” is the platform through which those communications take place, and the smoother and more organized it is, the better the quality of the engagement. For healthcare companies looking to develop an effective marketing strategy, building an digital engagement platform that encompasses all the tools and channels you use to connect with your audience is vital to help you manage the process and messages coherently.
Analyze the Landscape
To create the perfect digital engagement platform, you’ll need to identify:
- your customer personas, stakeholders and anyone else who may be interested in participating in the conversation.
- the channels they use
- the type of media they consume
- the frequency of their access
- ways to share information that appeal to the audience
- the right team members to manage the process.
When you have gathered all this information, you can start developing a strategy around how you want to engage with prospects.
Develop a Strategy
Begin by identifying your business goals. These could be developing brand awareness, improving the volume of leads, increasing value for shareholders and demonstrating innovative new healthcare products.
Find the Right Tools
For a digital audience engagement platform to be successful, it should ideally incorporate tools that “speak” to one another. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself duplicating your efforts across channels, which is unproductive and unprofitable. For example:
- A customer relationship management (CRM) program that delivers nurturing emails to prospective clients based on data input is more effective than a system that requires manually extracting data to use for creating and sending marketing emails to a list.
- Distribution services (e.g., HootSuite, Buffer) that allow marketers to post the same information to multiple social media sites simultaneously, with very little customization required.
Many suitable tools are free to use, but incorporating them into an official platform for your company probably isn’t free—in either money or time. It can be a worthwhile investment, however, if you’re able to do it correctly.
For more information on how to develop a digital engagement platform, call Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit waxcom.com.
