Roche Diagnostics builds deeper relationships with labs, hospitals and clinicians with Engagement Marketing.

Established

1896

Risch-Rotkreuz, Switzerland

diagnostics.roche.com

Enables content mapping at each part of the customer journey

Products:

Marketo Engage ›

Objectives

Engagement: Build lasting relationships with labs, hospitals and clinicians.

Personalization: Develop alternative to batch and blast marketing.

Digitization: Become the top digital marketing organization in the in vitro diagnostics industry.

Growth: Promote the value that labs bring to their organization.

Results

Provides a holistic view of customers to understand their interests and preferred channels

Enables content mapping at each part of the customer journey

Supports campaigns to promote lab personnel skills development

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Global healthcare leader forges new customer engagement to emerge as top digital marketing organization in the in vitro diagnostics industry. As a global leader in healthcare, Roche Diagnostics offers a broad portfolio of tools that help healthcare providers in the early detection, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases like congestive heart failure, HIV, hepatitis and diabetes, as well as other medical conditions, such as fertility and blood coagulation. These products and services are used by researchers, physicians, patients, hospitals and laboratories worldwide to help improve people’s lives. The US affiliate of Roche Diagnostics is comprised of 4 individual business units and competes in a complex industry where a limited number of multimillion-dollar contracts come up for competitive bids each year. It’s a long and complicated sales cycle where there’s a 70% chance that customers will stick with their current suppliers.

Understanding the customer

Roche Diagnostics needed to find a way to improve the company’s ability to engage and nurture potential customers and help them learn about their products earlier in the selling cycle, according to Kris Shorter, the company’s Director of Digital Marketing. “It’s important that we understand where our customers and prospects are in their customer journey so that we can provide them with the most relevant content possible. It also allows us to stay top of mind and helps ensure that our sales teams are involved earlier in the process,” he said.

"One of the reasons we chose Marketo was because we liked the product pipeline and the roadmap. When we looked at what was coming down the road, we felt like Marketo had a better growth curve.”

“Using Marketo, we now have a better understanding of the individuals who are interacting with our web properties and can use their digital body language to drive how we interact with them.”

Kris Shorter

Director of Digital Marketing, Roche Diagnostics

Choosing Marketo

Various business units in Roche Diagnostics started to deploy marketing automation independently about six years ago resulting in multiple platforms and departmental silos. That led to overlap and confusion and it became obvious to Shorter “that we were operating inefficiently and had no singular view of the customer.” But if his team was going to streamline communications and prove the worth of marketing automation, they also needed to align around a single platform. The company selected Marketo and it has become the foundation of its marketing efforts. Shorter said the decision was particularly influenced by Marketo’s product roadmap as well as by the way that the platform accommodates the needs of its complex marketing structure.

Currently, Roche Diagnostics is working to build out digital personas across the organization’s four business units. The goal is to ensure more consistency and understand where overlaps may still exist. Roche Diagnostics is about halfway through with the process but once they’re finished mapping out personas and the buying journey, Shorter says that content maps will accompany each part of the buying journey. “This approach allows us to be much more strategic in how we create content and communicate with our customers. It will allow us to take a more holistic view of our customer base and help us understand their interests, where they are influenced and in what channels they interact with,’” Shorter said. “It is a major shift for our marketing organization and it is exciting to see how it is being embraced.”

Improving the web experience

An important campaign currently underway at Roche Diagnostics is an initiative called LabLeaders, a campaign dedicated to helping lab leadership promote the value of their lab within their organization. Even though 70% of all medical decisions are based on lab results, according to Shorter, lab technicians still remain the forgotten heroes of the story. The site carries articles and other curated content to help lab personnel increase their skills and become more effective leaders. “It’s something that we’re really, really proud of and certainly, Marketo is a big part of that,” Shorter said. Roche Diagnostics now uses Google Analytics together with Marketo to get up-to-date metrics about who is coming to the site and what they’re viewing.

"I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do with the LabLeaders campaign and Marketo has been a big part of that."