Once the pandemic hit and lockdown began, in-person networking became an impossibility.
Huggies Healthcare, the division within Kimberly-Clark targeting health care professionals with resources and products for infants, was hit especially hard.
Up until that point, its approach to marketing had been almost entirely face to face through in-person meetings with nurses and clinicians across high birth rate markets within large health systems.
The shift to digital was urgent.
Huggies Healthcare began working with Multiview, a B2B digital marketing company owned by Stagwell. Multiview partners with hundreds of professional associations for access to first-party data that powers its primary offering, a discovery platform that allows media buyers to connect with more than 16 million B2B professionals.
On Tuesday, Multiview launched a new self-service tool called Audienceview that allows advertisers to access its first-party data platform and target niche audiences by specific industry, title and professional association.
If it ain’t broke
The self-service element is what’s new here, as well as the transparency it provides to brands, said Yariv Drori, Multiview’s chief product officer.
“We are putting it in the hands of the market,” Drori said.
With Audienceview, advertisers can see every publication and relationship that Multiview has access to and customize a media plan based on marketing channels, specific associations within an industry, media placement and other strategic parameters. The tool also provides data-driven insights to media buyers to analyze the success of their campaigns.
Huggies Healthcare had long assumed, for example, that providing free education to maternal health nurses was a big draw, but it didn’t have proof. The data that Multiview provided confirmed that campaigns focusing on continuing education significantly outperform brand messaging.
All advertisers, regardless of whether they’re B2C or B2B, want direct access to data and transparent reporting. “I believe there’s going to be a growing demand for that,” said Multiview CEO Andy Keith.
Old dog, new tricks
Through its relationship with Multiview, Huggies Healthcare is now able to reach a much larger slice of its often hard-to-reach audience, according to Valerie Crummie Johnson, head of marketing at Huggies Healthcare.
“Boots on the ground can only go so far,” Crummie Johnson told AdExchanger.
There are “not enough people in the world to call on every single account,” she added, reflecting on the challenges that Huggies Healthcare faced before adopting a more thorough digital-first strategy.
That’s not to say Huggies Healthcare didn’t have an online presence in the past; it was just far less developed with a much smaller reach.
Previously, for instance, Huggies reps sought out maternal nurses at conferences and in-person events and would refer them to its somewhat “archaic” website, as Crummie Johnson described it. Now, her team can reach a wider audience through targeted ads that lead people to the more modern Huggies Healthcare site.
In associations we trust
But reaching association members can be difficult, even online, said Crummie Johnson.
Professional nurse associations, for example, don’t want to be seen as giving explicit endorsements. But once a connection is made between a brand and a professional association, it can reap results.
Many associations have existed for over 100 years, Drori said, so “the relationship between their sponsors, their members and the association itself as a community is really established.”
With community comes trust, which Multiview has been building for decades, said Drori. Its original focus was on helping industry associations transition their buyer guides and directories (remember those?) online.
Now, its mission is to connect professional communities with the right brands.
Buying digital ads in channels specifically targeted at professionals has helped Huggies develop its brand credibility and its expertise within the markets it serves.
Digital advertising allows the audience to “get to know the brand” over time, Crummie Johnson said. And having a self-service tool makes it easier not just to reach the right people, she added, but to optimize spend and messaging.
