Friday, June 3, 2016

Let’s Wake Up and Fight the Real Enemy


Chris Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer
Validic


Since starting our business, we’ve had a lot to celebrate at Validic. As the world’s leading digital health platform, we now have a patient population reach of over 223 million across 47 countries and our team has won a number of prestigious awards over the last several years. In the past year alone, Forbes named us a “Top 10 Healthcare Disruptor,” a leading  IT  research company said we were one of their “Cool Vendors” in healthcare, and Frost & Sullivan recently honored us with their 2016 Visionary Innovation Leadership award. These recent accolades have followed a string of ongoing successes that our company has enjoyed. 

However, my point in saying all of that is not to tout our triumphs, but to show how easy it would be for us to rest on our laurels. You might find yourself in a similar situation as your organization enjoys a successful product launch, an impactful campaign or significant company growth. Yet that is the time to be on high alert for the enemy that could so easily creep into the midst and erode both past successes—as well as the bright future that lies ahead. That enemy isn’t the competition in our midst, but a deadly side effect of success itself: complacency. 

What we do

To help you understand a little about what we do at Validic, our company’s digital health platform securely connects consumer/patient data obtained from an array of disparate sources—such as apps, wearables and in-home patient monitoring clinical devices—with the healthcare technology that their providers use. This provides a number of unique benefits—including enhancing the care experience, improving the quality of the care delivered, and reducing the costs of doing both. Researchers in a variety of environments are also making use of our offering to optimize clinical trials and studies for a number of purposes. 

Why not be unique? 

A simplistic approach would be executing sound traditional marketing disciplines focusing on lead generation, sales enablement, social media, etc. But, as marketers we crave more.  Why not strategically create a unique position in the marketplace? Why not create and define a category? Why not build something meaningful for influencers that also benefits many stakeholders in your industry?

Why not create a network? 

We’re all about growth, and we have strategies in place to drive lead generation, build customer relationships and set up partnership programs between Validic and our health contemporaries. Our marketing initiatives with mobile health device and app makers are helping fuel more innovation and use among consumers. On the other end, those targeted initiatives toward hospitals, wellness companies, pharma, and healthcare technology companies are helping them accelerate the use of mobile health patient data so they can provide better patient care and better management of their patient populations.  These efforts have created a network effect in our category. We’re seeing more evidence every day where healthcare organizations are successfully implementing the Validic technology—which is great proof that we are helping to actually transform healthcare.

As we look ahead, our focus is on maintaining the momentum that we’ve created so far—and battling the enemy that could easily sabotage our efforts: complacency. We, as marketers, need to champion this mindset at our business.  If we don’t, who will? The companies we work for need us to keep driving aligned execution across all areas of the business, with energy, and at an accelerated pace.  With digital marketing, today’s marketer has more data and more tools that we have ever had before.  We must become masters of the art and the science.  And we must have courage to try, test, fail, learn…having this courage will help us all overcome the enemy of complacency.

About Chris Edwards
Chris is the Chief Marketing Officer at Validic, the industry’s leading digital health platform. Chris has been running global marketing and strategy for healthcare technology B2B and B2C companies for over 20 years. Chris was recently awarded the Chief Marketing Officer Growth Award, among over 800 global CMOs, for demonstrating leadership in new strategies and programs resulting in significant company growth. Chris has a passion to put the “health” back into “healthcare,” and can be followed on twitter @chrissedwards.