Success Story
Prescribing change: A marketing platform overhaul
We’re enabling this global, research-based pharma company to implement a B2B marketing automation hub that’ll deliver value across 3 languages and 10+ channels.
Industry
Pharmaceuticals
Date delivered
October 2024
Length of project
12 months
Solution provided
Understanding customers, Delivering personalisation, Connecting journeys, Measuring effectiveness, Managing operations
Technology
Marketo Engage
The Project
Our client is a subsidiary of a century-old pharmaceutical manufacturer, so strong relationships with healthcare professionals are everything. We’re working with them to safeguard those relationships. This digital transformation project centres on a new B2B marketing automation platform for the UK, France and Germany. It’s helping them enhance communication, streamline marketing workflows and deliver better experiences.
The Challenge
The company’s decision to implement a marketing automation platform arose from several coinciding factors:
- Marketing operations in France, Germany and the UK were siloed
- No standard processes or central hub for team communications existed
- Manual processes were time-consuming and restrictive
- Disconnection between marketing platforms and the CRM meant they couldn’t use marketing data to personalise experiences in any meaningful way
- COVID restrictions halted in-person events which were important for their relationships
They needed a centralised marketing hub that could bring in data from online and offline marketing channels, process it, and make it actionable for a variety of use cases and teams. It was time for a digital transformation – but which platform to pick?
The solution
We ran an RFP process for the client. They had a shortlist of marketing automation platforms but needed our unbiased expertise to evaluate the options.
After engaging with vendors met and assessing all requirements, we helped them decide on Marketo Engage. It’s ideal for account-based use cases, is strong on compliance, and integrates well with Salesforce CRM. Next, we embarked on a 9-month Marketo implementation in 3 phases.
Phase 1: Setup
- Implementing Marketo Engage as a central hub for France, Germany and UK teams
- Integrating Marketo and Salesforce CRM, including custom processes for a highly modified Salesforce instance
- Making marketing channel data available in the CRM
- Building consent management capabilities, including a self-serve user preference page hosted in Marketo
Phase 2: Advanced CRM integration
- Making web content capabilities available (landing pages and forms)
- Integrating event communications, including invitations, registration and attendance for in-person and virtual events
- Enabling the PowerBI team to access Marketo data
- Sales enablement, using Marketo Sales Insight to give teams access to engagement analytics and email capabilities
- Engaging Sales teams to facilitate their transition
- Establishing a Centre of Excellence to share ideas, processes and best practices
- Delivering personalised customer experiences
Phase 3: Scaling up and broadening scope
- Integrating social media and SMS data
- Building multi-channel automated workflows
- Strengthening sales and marketing alignment
The Results
Our first major milestone came when the first country-specific email campaign was sent. Before Marketo, this was prohibitively difficult. Since then, we’ve seen the teams gain confidence – and marketing automation gain traction:
- Bringing data from 5 marketing channels into Marketo
- Managing online events end-to-end in Marketo, from invitations to registration processing, reminders and follow-ups
- BI team using Marketo data for advanced reporting
With the implementation now complete, we’re moving on to strategic value-adds:
- Streamlining processes for efficiency
- Enabling Sales with customer engagement data from the CRM
- Creating a Centre of Excellence within Marketo
- Automating multi-channel B2B workflows
