With HealthWise Data’s Anne Smith
If you want to be in the know, Anne Smith believes it is best to know everything. Leave no stone unturned. That is why her company, HealthWise Data, helps marketers and healthcare providers take a 360-degree view of their customers, patients and prospects by combining health and financial wellness with demographics and social determinants of health.
The firm’s data is developed using sophisticated analytics leveraging multi-sourced anonymized health data and as many as 2,000-plus consumer attributes. Smith, who serves as CEO, has more than 25 years of experience helping clients hit their marketing goals. Before founding HealthWise Data, Smith served as CMO of AnalyticsIQ and was in business development for Dun & Bradstreet, Claritas/Nielsen, Merkle and TransUnion.
We sat down with Smith to get her insights into the world of quantitative marketing in the wellness space.
Why is quantitative marketing important?
Over the past few decades, marketing and advertising have evolved from intuition-based to more analytically driven solutions. The advent of AI (artificial intelligence) and Big Data has driven much more precise targeting capabilities and more effective one-to-one marketing performance. To be successful in the wellness space, marketers must understand how to best leverage data and analytics in an effort to provide the right offer to the right person, using the right channel at the right time.
How do you combine quantitative and qualitative insights?
Qualitative and quantitative analyses can actually complement each other nicely. For example, at HealthWise Data, we use anonymized survey response information as the seed data to build lookalike models that will project the targeted outcomes on our universe of 265 million U.S. adults. This solution provides our clients with the best of both worlds—accurate predictions of health and wellness combined with excellent scale for nationwide marketing campaigns.
To be successful in this wellness space, marketers must understand how to best leverage data and analytics in an effort to provide the right offer to the right person, using the right channel at the right time.
What scares people about data?
Not sure that I have a good answer for this as I’ve never heard anyone share they were feeling scared about data. However, I’d say if someone is “scared” about data it’s largely due to a lack of understanding. In this case, it would be wise to partner with an expert in the data and analytics field to help them better navigate the landscape.
Understanding and connecting with prospects is more difficult than ever. What advice do you have for marketers with regards to engaging with the community via quantitative and qualitative data?
The first step is to really understand your best prospects and we do this by profiling existing customers. Using a sample of your best customers, we suggest using a combination of first-party customer data in conjunction with third-party consumer data to build comprehensive profiles. This insight will be the roadmap to target acquisition campaigns. More sophisticated marketers can layer in qualitative insights to better understand consumer attitudes around the brand and improve messaging. The combination of quantitative and qualitative data is ideal but I would suggested starting with a quantitative approach to fuel prospecting initiatives.
What advice can you give for the first steps in implementing data in marketing campaigns?
The first step is to fully understand your target market(s) and use this insight to design your acquisition campaigns. For example, you can work with an analytics partner to profile a sample of your customer universe using relevant third-party consumer data. You and your analytics partner can then use this insight to build custom personas to assist with audience selection, messaging and offer optimization. Using data and analytics insights on the front end will result in better back-end marketing performance.
Even better, if you have access to previous campaign data that includes consumers who responded and became customers, your analytics partner can build response models that will score a prospect universe for even more precise targeting. The beauty of this approach is that it is an iterative process, so you will gain more intelligence with each campaign and continually tweak the model. The result? Ongoing optimal marketing performance.
Data Me This
Mastering the world of data-driven content creation
If you are going to do content marketing, you had better do it right. According to Core DNA’s “Content Marketing Trends 2020,” that means aiming your content strategy at providing intentional and specific value to a specific audience. So, how are brands determining what value to provide their audiences? Did you say data? Getting into the data-driven content creation game is serious business—and something you need to master. Here, Core DNA gives you some tools for your belt:
1 – Adopt a data-driven mindset throughout your marketing team and organization as a whole.
2- Ensure you are focusing on the right data—the data that matters to your bottom line.
3 – To differentiate between metrics that matter and vanity metrics, you will need to do a bit of reverse-engineering. That means evaluating past successful content marketing initiatives and identifying the KPIs that typically precede financial gains. Next, determine what it was about this content or campaign that led to these numbers and follow that blueprint.