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Indegene and Tealium on the life sciences industry’s first-party data imperative

25 Apr 2023

Life sciences marketing has undergone an immense transformation over the last few years. Organizations have realized that there is a need to redesign and evolve their commercial models to deliver maximum impact. This warrants a need for integrated data management and curation to drive these new models, which can then be leveraged to deliver a more customized experience for patients, healthcare professionals (HCPs), payers, and consumers.

This also requires that brand teams and marketers adapt their approach to better understand customer data to drive messaging and activation. Marketers must now understand:

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Fast-changing health systems and customer needs

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Complex challenges in promotional strategies such as digital enablement and omnichannel messaging

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Changing customer expectations, content requirements, and experiences

Shifting priority from third-party to first-party data

To date, life sciences organizations have combined data from third-party data providers such as Google, Meta, and other traditional advertising platforms, with their own first-party data to drive marketing activities. However, this traditional approach has proven to be rather siloed within organizational teams and not integrated with the overall commercial goals of most life sciences brands.

With third-party data nearing obsolescence, first-party or self-curated data will increasingly show its true value to the life sciences industry. It can fill not just the gaps between disparate and disconnected data pools but also help in orchestrating omnichannel and personalized marketing. But this requires life sciences marketers to have a well-planned customer data platform (CDP) and first-party data strategy.

Why is first-party data better for life sciences?

The life sciences industry already generates a large amount of first-party data and insights from direct customer touchpoints. It provides validated, compliant, and relevant information—which can then be used to drive further engagement.

A huge amount of behavioral and engagement data is generated via first-party/owned brand websites and portals, emails, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, social media, subscription lists, sales interactions, customer feedback forms, etc. To manage, life sciences brands must collect such first-party data inflows across several touchpoints in a central CDP.

Execute an industry-leading first-party data strategy with a CDP

Customer data platforms (CDPs) play a crucial role in utilizing first-party data. A robust CDP provides insights into your first-party customer data, including their interests, channel engagement, and customer journey. With this level of insight, CDPs help marketers deliver relevant, real-time, and personalized communication. As a result, marketers can optimize their expenditure, reduce the delivery of unrelated messaging and advertisements to their audiences, and improve the overall customer experience.

CDPs have a few key benefits, particularly for life sciences.

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Profile Stitching: First-party data provide marketers with unique and specifically identifiable information—collected into a single customer view. Over time, as the customer profile data enrich from various sources, they become more granular and detailed, providing behavioral analysis and decision likelihood.

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Defined Badges: With standard data rules across brands, geographies, and functions, first-party data create a uniform and centralized customer data store across systems and teams that can then be segmented for marketing activation. This not only creates standard data practices across brands, teams, and regions but also ensures that the data are segmented and badged, as well as ready for use.

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Data Security and Regulatory Compliance: While collecting first-party data, there is complete control of inflow and rule-based gathering. Rule-compliant data flow and identity management guidelines for both global and local regulatory compliances can be managed with real-time data curation in CDPs. All first-party personally identifiable information (PII) is scrubbed, curated, and encrypted in a secure environment to ensure that data are appropriately protected, siloed, and consent-managed.

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Granular Data and Insights: Marketers can assess customer engagement in real-time customer dashboards built using first-party data. Established key performance indicators (KPIs) across channels and brands can be collectively tracked and processed to generate valid and authentic user insights. These can be used to drive Next Best Actions and also predict behaviors.

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Future-Ready MarTech Ecosystem: By designing a connected ecosystem of content, channels, and campaigns powered by data-driven insights and reporting, first-party data lay the foundation of a future-ready MarTech ecosystem. For the life sciences industry, this is directly linked to customer experience (CX) and commercial strategic priorities.

A real-world use case for HCP engagement

This illustration shows how the Tealium AudienceStream CDP captures first-party interaction data and assigns preferred content type badges to HCPs by calculating key message category scores. By analyzing these scores, the CDP can determine the HCP's preferences. Once the scoring is complete, the CDP assigns a content badge to the HCP based on the highest score and relevant messaging topic. These badges enable organizations to create tailored journeys for HCPs by providing specific details about brands or topics that are likely to appeal to them.

So, how can life sciences marketers get started?

With extensive data curation and customer profile augmentation via CDPs, life sciences marketers reduce their dependence on external or third-party data which are disparate, siloed, and lack authenticity.

However, to get started quickly, industry marketers must focus on a few key areas:

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Invest in first-party owned data: Marketers should invest in data collection capabilities for their owned media (offline, i.e., surveys, events, and conferences, etc.; and online, i.e., websites, emails, display ads, etc.). This can be achieved by integrating a comprehensive data management strategy across various channels and content formats.

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Elevate focus on customer centricity: As a strategic priority across the board, life sciences organizations can dramatically reduce churn with their data strategies built around elevating the customer experience. A strong, organization-wide push on a CX agenda helps in driving connected data strategies specific to target segments.

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Position trust as the foundation for building loyalty: The use of first-party data provides an opportunity for marketers to re-establish trust with their target consumers. Especially vital in life sciences industry, consumer consent and privacy-first approaches are the pillars of building loyalty and transparency.

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Engaging the right experts: Transforming your current data, insights, and marketing strategy may seem daunting at first, but bringing the right experts on board can help ensure that your CDP implementation meets industry standards and works for your very specific needs.

Indegene x Tealium

The Indegene and Tealium partnership offers a proven solution to your marketing transformation and data management goals.

Tealium's CDP collects and unifies first- (and third-) party data across channels in real time, helping deliver personalized and specialized care to patients, members, and pharmaceutical providers. The Tealium CDP offers life sciences organizations an enterprise-grade data foundation across all their properties while ensuring customer data are secure and protected in a HIPAA-compliant, private cloud deployment. Digital and offline data are combined seamlessly in a marketer-friendly tool, making first-party data the primary source for 1-to-1 marketing.

Indegene's unique five-stage city planning approach to consulting and implementation ensures that life sciences organizations effectively implement and benefit from their Tealium CDP investment. Starting from a 360-degree analysis of your existing MarTech stack and data model, integrating new and existing tools to your CDP ecosystem, to creating business rules and defining segments, Indegene's expert consultants customize and implement the Tealium CDP to fit your first-party data strategy. Indegene also evaluates and optimizes the implementation with industry-leading tracking and analytics expertise, giving organizations the capabilities needed to deliver the best cross-channel experiences in real time.

The result is a robust first-party data management and insights foundation that will shift your life sciences organization from a reliance on third-party data sources and providers.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is vital for life sciences marketers to quickly establish relevance and trust with their varied audiences. As a world without third-party data approaches quickly, marketing leaders must drive strong customer-centric strategies. They must be prepared for a cookieless future. And working with an industry specialist not just helps them approach this goal with a core customer-centric and privacy-first view but also enables them be future ready.

Author

Sharanjit Singh

AVP of Strategic Solutions, Indegene

Jay Calavas

Head of Vertical Products, Tealium