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Upstream marketing is the strategic process of identifying and fulfilling the needs of existing customers. In the business of healthcare, there are many categories of customers; a customer may be a hospital chief of staff, the medical director of a clinical practice, or a community of healthcare consumer/patients. Each category of customer has different needs, and unique relationships with one another that intersect with the services or products you provide.
When we partner with you to improve your upstream marketing, our approach includes identifing the key markets and delving into the needs of the key stakeholders who make decisions about your company’s products or services. We identify their characteristics, pain points and unique benefit needs. We create integrated market positioning for your company built on the key factors that relate to your product, pricing, distribution and messaging. And because marketing must ALWAYS be integrated with sales, we map out a typical buying journey for your target customers. That journey is then integrated into downstream marketing plans for revenue growth.
Downstream marketing is the system of advertising, promotion, brand-building and customer-focused communications that we put to work for you through marketing tactics such as social media, trade shows, email campaigns, webinars, and PR. These activities are extremely important; they communicate and create interest in a product or service. However, we have found that companies often expend significant costs on downstream marketing activities while ignoring critical upstream marketing activities.
A physician who would treat a patient without listening to their concerns, ordering appropriate diagnostic testing, analyzing results, and creating a treatment plan would have disastrous results. And yet, companies sometimes make exactly this error of omission in their marketing efforts. Marketing requires just as much art and science as the practice of medicine. We use the information collected through our Upstream Marketing plan to ensure that our Downstream Marketing is focused on the appropriate target market with messaging that resonates with them and spurs them to action. And we ALWAYS track and analyze the results so that we can make adjustments based on data to maximize the bottom-line results.
Our integration approach includes the generation, analysis and report of “warm” leads to sales for follow up. We create lead-nurturing plans to keep potential business contacts warm throughout each prospect’s buying journey. Using the appropriate technologies, tailored strategies, and individualized communications drives marketing and sales integration. The benefits of alignment are proven: According to a 2011 Aberdeen Group study, organizations with highly aligned marketing and sales teams achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth; their less aligned competitors experienced a 7% decrease in revenue. Yet, according to another study from Forrester, just 8% of companies say they have tight alignment between sales and marketing. At Frost-Johnson Medical Marketing, we insist on bringing sales and marketing alignment to our clients.
In today’s digital age, marketing cannot be successful without the right technologies to support it. Marketing automation systems that centrally distribute marketing communications such as email, social media, pay-per-click ads, etc are cost efficient and crucial for analyzing results. Wouldn’t you like to know how many potential customers in your target market visited your website today—and who they are? Do you want to know who opened your emails? And who reacted to your social media? Most importantly, wouldn’t you like to give your sales team a global digital behavioral score for each potential customer, so they would know how to prioritize their lead contact, and could collaborate with marketing to help nurture those contacts?
This is the powerful data that marketing automation systems will bring you. Frost-Johnson Medical Marketing works with all of the major marketing automation vendors, and will help you select the automation services that best fit your needs and integrate with your CRM.