How marketers can leverage big data for big campaigns

In the world of medical marketing, reaching healthcare providers requires a significant level of market visibility. If marketers don't understand how physicians consume and interact with content, they'll have a difficult time engaging with target personas.

Big data offers a new level of market insights that can be leveraged across multi-channel campaigns.

What is big data?

Big data is a term that's been thrown around the internet quite a lot over the past few years, but it's still a relatively new concept. Technology marketing expert Lisa Arthur, writing in Forbes magazine, explained that chief marketing officers and the rest of the c-suite may not be on the same page when it comes to leveraging big data in a meaningful way. Arthur noted that many stakeholders may not fully understand how big data differs from what data marketers have been using for decades.

Here's Arthur's one sentence definition of big data: "Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis."

Big data is either unstructured or multi-structured. Unstructured data could be something like a database of tweets, a massive collection of meta-data or another text-heavy resource. Unstructured data is neither easily organized, nor interpreted by traditional methods. Multi-structured data, on the other hand, tends to be easier to digest. Examples include web traffic, site engagements or statistical information.

At the end of the day, the usefulness of big data depends on the volume of available data and the speed at which that data can generate value for the organization. Unlike traditional data, which may be useful for a single project, big data represents an on-going source of useful information, which allows marketers to be more flexible and responsive as they develop and implement campaigns.

The efficacy of big data depends on the volume of data and the speed at which it can be analyzed.

How medical marketers can leverage big data to reach healthcare professionals

Today, physicians have more ways of accessing medical content than ever before. From printed journals to expert-curated digital content, medical marketers must address many content distribution avenues. Big data can help marketing managers better direct their spend and craft responsive campaigns targeting specific personas.

For example, a report from Forrester consulting revealed that 42 percent of B2C marketers are already using big data to achieve higher levels of consumer responsiveness and engagement, as well as gaining deeper insights into audience behaviors. These same methods can easily be applied to an HCP-directed context. For instance, big data gives medical marketers the ability to view campaign engagement in real time, rather than waiting weeks or months to gain those insights.

The use cases for big data in the HCP marketing space are endless. James Paine, a growth hacking entrepreneur, writing in Inc. magazine, reported that big data gives marketers the ability to craft highly targeted campaigns, develop content that's more relevant to key audiences and leverage machine learning algorithms to parse dense analytic data.

Medical marketers who leverage digital and print channels to reach HCPs can see amazing benefits from an investment in big data. Pulling information from multiple sources and analyzing it with powerful digital tools allows marketers to do more with their data than ever before.

Data and analytics go hand-in-hand, but they need wide-reaching distribution channels to make a truly successful campaign. HCPs consume content differently than other audiences, and marketers need a partner who understands how to find and engage physicians in a targeted manner. Visit ELSMediaKits.com today to learn more.