This article explores how life sciences organizations in the USA can make omnichannel marketing work as a closed loop, turning customer insight into coordinated action. It sets out the five operating model decisions that determine omnichannel success long before any technology investment.
The loop between insight and action – capturing customer signals, responding to them, and feeding what you learn back in – is more complex in US life sciences than in almost any other sector.
In many industries, the loop can close within a single team or function. But in life sciences marketing, it runs through commercial, market access, field, medical, legal and regulatory (MLR) stakeholders, and agency partners, each with their own governance, timelines and goals.
The “customer” is an ecosystem, too: healthcare professionals (HCPs), hospital systems, patients and patient support services. Each is governed by different regulations, with its own preferences for engaging with pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics and other life sciences organizations.
Faced with this complexity, many companies reach for technology to drive omnichannel marketing. It’s tangible, easy to acquire, and it looks like progress. But in our experience, closing the loop in life sciences succeeds or fails on the operating model (ownership, decision rights, governance and operating cadence) long before a platform choice is made.
Platform investment won’t close the loop
The life sciences sector is data-rich, with no shortage of customer signals for organizations to interpret. But by the time that data has been compliantly gathered, analyzed and actioned, the lack of operational pace means teams are looking in the rearview mirror.
Heavy platform investment often ends up reflecting the silos of the business, and marketers stop trusting the technology.
Why? Because platforms don’t make decisions; people do. Life sciences organizations can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on customer data platforms (CDPs) and AI tools and still run their business through phone calls and steering committees, when nobody has defined who owns an insight and who acts on it. Without alignment, problems can go undetected for a long time.
One pharmaceutical client we work with reviewed their data retrospectively and discovered they were sending one particular HCP over 40 emails a day. The messages came from different teams across the business, with different styles of communication and competing calls to action. And nobody spotted it as it was happening. For the HCP, the experience was disjointed. For the business, it meant wasted spend and a damaged relationship with a customer they valued.
We see versions of this story across the sector. Technology will accelerate a good operating model, but it won’t fix a poor one.
Five steps to a closed-loop omnichannel operating model
Closing the marketing loop means bringing together functions that have historically worked independently, and that’s an operating model challenge first. These are the steps we encourage our clients to take when building their omnichannel strategies:
- Align your priorities
Omnichannel marketing programs often begin with conflicting viewpoints. Every function in the loop has different priorities: marketing wants speed and engagement, while MLR must stay focused on minimizing regulatory and legal risk for the business. Discussing these competing agendas early helps you anticipate friction and put mechanisms in place to handle it quickly.
“Omnichannel” itself is often a poorly defined, catch-all term that obscures these tensions. We’ve even run client workshops where we banned the word outright. It’s better to be honest about which objectives you’re committing to first, as they will determine where your resources are applied and how strategic decisions are made.
- Map your loop as it runs today, including data management
Firstly, before changing anything, sketch your marketing loop as it currently operates. You should be able to answer:
- Who decides on content, and who creates it?
- Who takes it through MLR, and who’s accountable for ensuring timely review?’
- Who activates channels?
- Who follows up in the field and through patient support programs?
- Who measures impact?
- How do findings close the feedback loop to ensure content is optimised?’
Most teams find surprises in this exercise, such as hand-offs nobody owns or reports nobody reads.
Secondly, apply the same mapping exercise to your data.
- Do all the brands in your portfolio define customer segments the same way?
- Is content usage and impact being measured?
- Are stakeholders measuring against relevant and consistent KPIs and metrics?
If functions aren’t speaking the same language, signals can’t be compared or combined, and no amount of platform investment will join them up. This is one of the biggest hurdles to cross-brand omnichannel marketing, and one of the least discussed.
- Set ownership and decision rights
Bring your whole brand team, business unit and cross-functional groups together to agree on roles, responsibilities, ownership and decision rights.
At this point, your operating model becomes hyper-critical. Understand your people and process, before technology, so that the whole loop can function: insight, action, measurement, learning and optimization. Without agreed ownership, the loop never closes, and performance is reviewed and adjusted on a much slower cycle.
Part of that agreement is naming a single customer owner. For specialist HCPs, ownership may rest with the therapeutic area. In general medicine, where one HCP prescribes across many categories, someone senior needs to make the final call on who owns the customer experience.
Establishing these decision flows will inevitably create tension. For example, prioritizing one brand’s message can degrade another brand’s plan, and commercial and medical stakeholders often compete for the same audience. However, a defined authority protects the customer experience, which is why senior leadership must set the hierarchy before any technology investments are made.
- Decide what to centralize
Centralizing channel standards, data standards, governance, technology administration, working processes and reporting frameworks gives your marketing loop a single guiding mind. The customer experience is viewed as a whole, while each brand retains the autonomy to operate within guardrails set by your customer principles.
Many marketers assume centralized operations means centralized work. But that team has fixed capacity, and therefore faces difficult choices about who it serves first, and in effect, which marketing loops get closed first. Launch brands, which carry the commercial health of the organization, inevitably take priority.
Setting service level agreements (SLAs) and brand hierarchies up front lets brands develop and activate their own omnichannel campaigns. And for consistent measurement, agree on your foundational objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) across the business.
We recently worked on a project with a large pharmaceutical company. Each brand team’s annual plan focused on maximizing sales through its own customer segments, while a new central function took a holistic view of the customer experience. Gate One helped this organization work through which of its capabilities should be centralized and which should stay with the brand teams, securing senior leadership alignment on major operating model decisions.
- Reset your decision-making cadence
Separate your annual strategic brand-planning cycle from the monthly and weekly decisions where you can close the customer loop faster.
Many life sciences organizations fall into a “set and forget” mindset, reinforced by annual budgeting cycles. Move instead toward operating models with quarterly or monthly budgeting and campaign effectiveness reviews.
Within these shorter cycles, agree what decisions need to be made weekly, monthly and quarterly, who has the authority to make them and which customer signals should trigger a change in plan. The pressure to move fast can be intense – we felt it on a recent large-scale marketing change program for a pharmaceutical company. But by testing the cadence first, the client gave teams a way to learn, adjust and act without overwhelming the business.
Prioritizing your operating model means a slower start but a faster finish. Leadership may view a six-month operational pause as stagnation, but skipping this stage can mean 12 or more months of catch-up after implementation.
Better cross-functional marketing decisions will close the loop
Closed-loop omnichannel marketing arrives disguised as a technology challenge, but at its heart, it’s organizational. Platforms don’t change how a business works; operating models do. Until that thinking reaches the boardroom, life sciences marketing leaders will see false starts and lost insights with each new implementation.
Future competitive advantage won’t belong to the organization with the most data or AI tools. It will belong to the company that makes better cross-functional decisions, faster, and consistently translates customer insight into coordinated action.
Before investing further in omnichannel platforms, it pays to understand whether your organisation is set up to use them well. Gate One can help you review the ownership, cadence and governance behind your closed-loop marketing model, and identify the constraints slowing progress. If you want help closing the loop in your omnichannel marketing, get in touch. Or for more insight, you can read our blog post on building a closed loop customer engine: four steps for CX leaders.
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