Agility is vital to modern biopharma marketing teams. To raise brand awareness in a competitive industry, teams need to quickly roll out websites, mobile applications and sales tools. The cloud is ideally suited to these tasks. Adopters of the cloud are now realizing it is also the foundation of a more dynamic, interactive form of marketing that uses real-time information and feedback loops to tailor messaging and ultimately improve health outcomes.

The first wave of biopharma digital marketeers to adopt the cloud did so to realize its core benefits over on-premise infrastructure. Procuring servers takes weeks, at best. Accessing cloud capacity is instantaneous. Digital marketeers saw the cloud as a better way to distribute static content because it enabled the fast build out and simple scaling
of websites. Handling spikes in traffic when new products were introduced became a trivial task for these early adopters.

These benefits are still relevant and remain an important part of the cloud’s value proposition over on-premise infrastructure. But digital marketing has changed a lot since companies began moving to the cloud in significant numbers about five years ago. Now, every major drug is accompanied by an ever-evolving, multifront digital campaign. These
campaigns do more than just put information out. They also capture signals on how a product is used and adapt in response to the feedback.

Companies no longer have to wait for dated sales data to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign. They have access to data on how people are responding to their websites and offers, what online communities are saying about individual treatments and the compliance of individual patients to treatment regimens.

Combining the data with the analytical capabilities of the cloud gives digital marketeers the means to quickly understand how a campaign is faring with targeted groups of patients and adapt to this information.

The story of the cloud’s evolution from foundation of static content to enabler of a new form of marketing is mirrored by the experiences of early adopters ofthe approach. Allergan is among the companies to benefit from — and drive forward — the evolution of marketing in the cloud era.