3 Animal Health Marketing Strategy Tips from Human Healthcare

To say that things have changed for animal healthcare over the last couple of years would be an understatement. In the world of healthcare, we are seeing traditionally offline methods of customer engagement becoming increasingly ineffective as Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) prefer digital no-contact engagements as the default medium for product information and demonstration.

However, trying to blend the old with the new has created pockets of disjointed experience for customers. Within the broader pet healthcare ecosystem, human healthcare is a good point of reference to address this challenge. Leading organizations in AI in healthcare marketing and advanced healthcare marketing tools have embraced bold investments in technology to innovate customer engagement. Here are 3 of their tried and tested strategies that we believe animal health marketers could take inspiration from.

1. Enhancing Customer Experience with Healthcare Marketing Tools

While the pandemic has necessitated the adoption of digital channels, an ineffective paradigm would be to treat digital channels as an add-on (or piggyback rider) to the pre-pandemic animal health marketing strategy and operations. By integrating an omnichannel digital experience with the touchpoints used by their brands to interact with customers, human healthcare organizations have rebuilt their customer journey from scratch. Their marketing content and campaigns are created using digital channels in mind as the preferred medium for engaging customers; resulting in consistent, interactive, and accurate information on all communication channels.

Prioritizing digital content has helped human healthcare engage with customers via personalized messages on their preferred channels while driving cost savings, reusability of content, and helping them measure the success of their communication using advanced healthcare marketing tools.

Read how Indegene helped a leading pet food and nutrition brand reach over 5 million customers.

2. Centralizing Animal Health Marketing Operations for Impact

Building the right process, people, and technology stack across the marketing ecosystem is critical, but the mix is incomplete without a centralized vision and decision-making framework . Having a central “guiding force” helps immensely with change management and investments.

In a multibrand ecosystem, centralization makes it easy to operate consistently at a global scale by driving efficiencies and reducing the gap between sales and marketing. Human healthcare has achieved this by having a central commercial team that oversees revenue goals, manages brands, targets accounts, and monitors customer retention and engagement goals.

In addition, it makes it easier to observe, track, and better utilize insights from data-driven campaigns such as those that use strategies like audience segmentation. Segmenting one’s target audience and then approaching them with personalized campaigns is known to significantly increase conversion rates. Centralization enables marketers to track the performance of campaigns and make real-time changes to strategies. These insights then become the building blocks of future campaigns, helping brands achieve all-around marketing excellence.

3. Using Technology to Elevate Animal Health Marketing

Since the pandemic, the speed with which human healthcare companies have created highly interactive and personalized content has been incredible. This has been made possible by upgrading their commercial operations with a carefully selected marketing technology (MarTech) ecosystem crafted to suit their specific needs.

MarTech solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have maintained a solid presence in the healthcare space for over a decade, but the pandemic has seen healthcare companies adopting newer MarTech offerings like marketing automation platforms, customer data platforms, and automated modular content that enable brands with global customers to ensure consistent messaging across markets, while enabling content reuse to drive cost efficiencies.

For instance, consider the case of automated modular content. The healthcare industry has worked with modular content for years, using it as a more efficient way to create and approve content. However, it was always limited as it is a human-powered authoring process. Automated modular content on the other hand creates content using artificial intelligence, which makes exponential scaling of content possible and has the potential to reduce sales and marketing spends by up to 50% in some cases.

Read how Boehringer Ingelheim’s automated modular content revolution turned strategy into success.

Unlocking Growth in Animal Health Marketing

Animal health marketing is evolving rapidly. Pet adoptions, livestock care, and rising customer expectations are transforming how brands engage with veterinarians, retailers, and pet parents alike. Adopting strategies from human healthcare such as AI in healthcare marketing, centralized commercial operations, and omnichannel engagement can help marketers stay ahead of the curve.

But successful transformation requires more than new tactics. It takes a strategic partner who understands the nuances of healthcare and the power of digital, whether that means deploying the right healthcare marketing tools, automating modular content, or navigating the shift to digital-first customer journeys. Talk to us to learn more.