Does your pharma brand have trust issues? Good customer data can help.

We know trust is also the most important factor in brand choice. Unfortunately, pharma brands are among the least trusted in the US. If you want to change that, you need to earn your customers’ trust by showing that you know them. And the way to do that is through thoughtful customer data investments that drive relevant and meaningful experiences.

The nature of your customer data and how it can be interacted with will dictate what’s possible for the experiences you provide your customers. All the shiny front-end solutions in the world will not deliver a trust-inducing experience if your back-end data is lacking. It would be as if your brand had amnesia, unable to remember prior conversations with customers, making every interaction like the first time you’re meeting them. Customer data is like the memory of your organization, and you neglect it at your brand’s peril.

So what is good customer data? In the analytics world, we use the 4 V’s of Data to help define data assets: volume, variety, velocity and veracity. For pharma brands looking to use customer data to foster deep relationships and built trust with key constituencies, it’s important to understand how the 4 V’s impact your data investment decisions:

Volume: The most important consideration is having enough records to establish sufficient audience reach for your strategic business goals. For example, if you’re launching into a crowded market then you likely need only have addressable records for the top 25% of the market. If your goal is market saturation, then you’re going to need much more. In either case, “how many records” is a function of the total market opportunity size and your strategic goals for market share growth.

Variety: It’s good to have a long contact list, but that’s not enough. You must also know enough details about them to speak with clarity and empathy regarding their specific situation, in the right place and right time. Put differently, your customer data records must have a complete and consistent set of attributes to enable effective segmentation and personalization. In today’s digital marketing world, basic demographics and contact info aren’t enough. You need individual-level interaction details from media buys and social posts, you want clinical signals indicating real-world needs, and you should always include key conversion events from your websites. With this variety of customer data attributes for each customer, you will be fully equipped to execute a nuanced communications strategy that’s closer to right message, right place, right time than ever previously possible.

Velocity: A key element often forgotten when developing data-driven marketing strategies is speed a.k.a. the time it takes for a data signal to impact it’s intended marketing touchpoint. It’s important to modulate the throughput of your omnichannel ecosystem according to the audience decision journey. For example, if a treatment decision usually takes a week post-diagnosis but we update our ICD-10 targeting monthly, then we will miss up to 75% of the data-driven opportunity. Ensuring that your data throughput cycle time is shorter than the decision cycle time of your target audience will enable the level of timeliness required for meaningful audience engagement. This means traditional data infrastructure like data warehouses might not be performant for marketing needs (Hint: you should probably be looking into a customer data platform or CDP).

Veracity: The degree to which data matches reality is known as it’s veracity. While data validation is often a task for analysts, data quality is encoded during data capture and thus front-line employees are often the stewards of data quality. Wherever data is captured for marketing purposes, all necessary attributes for future audience segmentation and campaign personalization should be autonomously secured at the same time. Otherwise, discrepancies will inevitably pop up and attempting to reconcile improperly captured data after the fact is a time-consuming task for your highly-paid IT or analytics group.

Personalization is how we express empathy with marketing, and you can’t personalize using data you don’t have or can’t deliver fast enough to make a difference. Even then, you must consider the reliability of the data and automate proper data capture or risk the expense of time-intensive data cleaning. But if you understand how to use data that’s high on the 4 V’s of Data, then you will be well on your way to establishing greater trust with your pharma brand through data-driven omnichannel marketing.