The results from a recent survey conducted by HITMC and sponsored by StudioNorth revealed that Account Based Marketing (ABM) in Health IT is till in its infancy. Most respondents have not deployed ABM or are less than 6 months into their programs. The survey also identified the top challenges for healthcare marketers and how tough the past 12 months have been.
Survey Background
During the summer of 2021, the HITMC team in collaboration with StudioNorth, conducted a survey on ABM. The goal of the survey was to:
- Identify (at a high level) the maturity of ABM initiatives in Health IT
- Determine most important goals of ABM initiatives
- Gauge the overall marketing performance relative to 2021 goals/objectives
64 responses were received, with the majority coming from Health IT vendors.
Still Early
The survey found only 25% of respondents have deployed ABM for 6 months or more. The other 75% had no plans to start with ABM, planned to start in 6 months or had just started.
This result was surprising and shows that we are still early in the adoption of ABM in Health IT. This means that early adopters potentially have a longer first-mover advantage over competitors who are slow to incorporate ABM practices into sales + marketing.
ABM Challenges
The early state of ABM was confirmed by the responses to the question of the challenges ABM initiatives faced within the organization.
The lack of understanding of ABM was by far the top challenge. Clearly more education and internal socialization of ABM is needed before company executives buy-into funding ABM programs.
“Other priorities” was the next biggest challenge – an understandable result given the challenges of COVID-19 over the past 12-18 months.
Important Goals
The survey asked respondents to rate ABM goals on a scale from “Not Important” to “Extremely Important”.
Two of the top three important goals align nicely with traditional ABM goals – mindshare and long-term relationships with customers:
- Brand Awareness (mindshare)
- Marketing & Sales Alignment
- Customer Retention (long-term relationships)
It was interesting to see Marketing & Sales alignment as an important goal of ABM. I always thought alignment was a prerequisite for ABM rather than an outcome of ABM. Perhaps people were hoping that by going through the implementation of ABM they could better align their Sales and Marketing teams?
Challenging Marketing Environment
The survey uncovered a concerning statistic. Over two-thirds of respondents were performing at 50% or less of their marketing targets at the time of the survey:
This either means that marketing plans are back-end loaded for Q4 of 2021 or, more likely, that marketers heading for an underperforming year. Only 16% of respondents were achieving 90% or more of their marketing targets.
Given how tough and unpredictable 2021 has been this isn’t wholly unexpected. Remember also that late in 2020 there were signs for optimism with vaccines rolling out and a plateauing of COVID-19 cases. That optimism may have resulted in overly ambitious marketing targets for 2021.
What does this mean for 2022? To me, it indicates that marketing budgets may not increase in the coming year. Given the lower-than-expected performance in 2021, I can see more most Health IT executives opting for status-quo marketing budget or a slightly smaller one.
To find out more about the survey and insights drawn from the results, download the full report from StudioNorth here: https://www.studionorth.com/advanced-targeting-for-abm/
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