Once you’ve signed off on your marketing plan, how often should you review and revise it? If you typically write your plan annually at budget time and then stick it on a shelf (either literally or figuratively), you may be making your work as a marketer more difficult. The truth is that, rather than serving as a static guide that directs your marketing activities over a fixed 12-month span, your marketing plan needs to act as a living, breathing framework, able to adapt quickly to any and all changes – whether they’re due to evolutions in the market, your products, new challengers or even new governments.

If you’re a healthcare marketer looking to energize your marketing programs, agile marketing offers a more reactive, responsive approach that can significantly improve your results and ROI. Instead of the top-down, traditional waterfall model, where an agency is briefed by the business, goes away, and comes back with a comprehensive communications campaign, agile marketing is about creating content that is timely, relevant and useful to communicate with customers in any phase of their journey. Agile processes and execution are the keys to succeeding with agile marketing.

Do you feel calmer when you’re in a room with walls that are painted blue? If you do, you’re not alone – studies show that blue is a calming color, and can even lower our heart rate and blood pressure. Do red walls energize you? That response is common, too. Whether it happens consciously or unconsciously, color can have a psychological impact on our moods and behaviors. Color plays an especially important role for people living with dementia or Alzheimer’s in care homes or hospitals. From encouraging a calmer mood to helping residents find their way independently to the dining or recreation room, the color of walls, floors and other elements can have a big impact on quality of life and comfort in these types of settings.

In business and in our personal lives, we turn to the experts to help us make important decisions. It’s human nature to seek out the best sources of insight and information. This is especially so in the healthcare world, with its emphasis on evidence-based research. From choosing the best treatment paths to developing a new product, we turn to the experts for their knowledge and guidance.

If your organization sells enterprise level solutions, you’re likely familiar with the concept of ABM, or account-based marketing. ABM represents the most targeted approach possible: marketing directly to a single company or organization. Under an ABM strategy, you identify the key companies that you wish to do business with, and develop a marketing approach that’s customized for each one of them.

With new drugs, technologies and treatments being launched every day, there’s a constant need for education in the healthcare world. From sales reps to doctors to patients, the demand for relevant and timely information on new developments is ongoing. For healthcare marketers, eLearning programs offer an efficient and practical way to support go2market strategies and new product launch programs, as well as a way to support end customers with information and training.

In many organizations, sales tools are like an iceberg. There’s the 10% that are above the waterline – the tools that everybody knows and uses - and then there’s the 90% that, for whatever reason, never see the light of day. Whether people simply can’t find these tools, or they don’t like them, the end result is the same – it’s expensive and frustrating to create a library of tools that sales just doesn’t use.

Making your mark as a healthcare technology company or pharmaceuticals supplier can be challenging, especially if your core business focuses on rare diseases. You can find yourself restrained by strict regulations, while trying to address the sensitivities of your various stakeholders.