Multichannel marketing works best when your creative, position and message is optimized to the user experience no matter what device they are using, and to do that you need to develop a responsive design strategy.
To some, multichannel marketing means carving up a creative campaign and getting the look and feel of the tactics across all promotional channels. But that’s not multichannel marketing. It’s really about consistency of creative, positioning, messaging and being responsive to the needs of customers as they travel along the customer journey (whether they are physicians, nurses, patients or caregivers).
The statistics on the shift to mobile and tablet devices across all audiences don’t lie: By 2015, 81% of U.S. cell owners will have smartphones 25% of U.S. mobile web users only access the web from their phone 61% who visit a mobile unfriendly site will go to a competitor’s site Mobile traffic from tablets is expected to grow 205 times larger by 2015 83% of MDs do not have a separate personal mobile phone
If you are required to respond to customer needs across such a wide array of devices, how do you create consistency of creative, position and message while delivering the right content at the right time? How do you tailor/optimize the customer experience? Build 16 different versions of everything? That’s simply not cost-effective or efficient.
The better method is to develop a responsive design strategy. Responsive design enables a website to adapt its layout and content to the viewing environment —across all smartphones, tablets and desktops using a single source of code. The user experience is literally tailored to the behavior of the customer and the device they are using to view the information. The desktop experience is rich and robust. Mobile is fast, efficient and optimized for on-the-go access. And tablet can be somewhere in between. By using this design strategy you are demonstrating to your customers that you understand them, know what they want and are being responsive to their needs. And the advantages to the pharma marketer and drug company are huge:
• Single-source code displays content across majority of devices
• Delivers content and user experience that is device specific
• Creates message consistency across devices Med/legal compliant (including boxed warning drugs)
• Meets 2,253 fi ling requirements
• Efficient to develop/update
• Cost effective
SO, WHO’S DOING IT RIGHT?
The Boston Globe (bostonglobe.com) was one of the earlier adopters of responsive design, turning a sometimes cluttered news site into a seamless visual experience on desktop, tablet and mobile. Starbucks (starbucks.com) has also been ahead of the curve, showing us how to integrate extensive video content into a clean, easily digestible format. It’s important to note that a responsive layout does more than improve the design of a site across platforms. It can also be used to rearrange copy to best convey key messages to your audience on the device they’re using—and the Open Medical Device Research Library (omdrl.org), for example, does just that. However, the true test is seeing how your website stacks up. Visit www.responsinator. com, then simply type in your website URL and see how well you’re responding to customer needs.
