Political campaigning involves a tremendous amount of market research and advertising. Of course, their ROI is very simple—winning the election. TIME Magazine recently wrote an article that profiled one of the key components in Obama’s campaign strategy—data crunching. If Obama’s 2008 campaign invested in building robust databases of donors, voters, and volunteers, then their 2012 campaign decided to double-down on that strategy. Not only did they continue to further their data mining activities and market against it, but they recognized that merging their various databases would allow them to more effectively collect, analyze and target various data segments. Additionally, they merged basic demographic data with consumer data and were able to build predictive profiles. Once they had those profiles established, they ran extensive marketing tests, micro-targeted potential voters and raised huge sums of money for their campaign.
It’s clear that data crunchers will continue to play a growing role in presidential campaigning, since it gave the Obama camp a competitive edge in the election over his GOP rival who did not leverage data as extensively or as early in the campaign season. The same holds true for healthcare systems. Relying on heavy advertising budgets alone is not going to bare the same fruits of the past. As margins grow thinner and competition gets heavier, healthcare marketers can separate themselves from the pack with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Physician Relationship Management (PRM) platforms. These systems allow marketers to aggregate disparate data. They assist in identifying and targeting their customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate profitable service line business. This advancement in technology builds insights that make us more effective and strategic marketers. Create a winning strategy by investing in these platforms now. If you can build and integrate your databases before your competitors, you will have a big advantage in the marketplace. You can take the time now to iron out the back-end logistics, and come up with the necessary process to test marketing campaigns and optimize them to maximize financial sucess. CRM/PRM is the future of healthcare marketing and being ahead of the curve can make all the difference. To learn more about this topic, read the article: The Next Realm of Health Care Marketing.