Lanmark360 cut its eyeteeth in the dental sector of healthcare. And, indeed, it continued to win new dental business in 2014, taking on work for Philips Oral Healthcare and Kerr Dental. But the agency has also been broadening its business base: Danielle Avalone, VP of account services, notes that dental work has declined from 85% of its business three years ago to 75% today.
“We’ll never leave dental, but we also want to broaden our reach. We have the capabilities to target other industries,” she says, pointing to oncology and dermatology as possible future targets.
What Lanmark is targeting them with, increasingly, is digital. Digital work comprised only 25% of the agency’s portfolio in 2013, but grew last year to 40% and could easily represent 50% in 2015, Avalone predicts. In 2014 the agency hired a director of digital project management, Michele Lomas, to oversee the company’s growing portfolio—and all the technical challenges that come with it. “Digital is becoming a mainstay,” Avalone says.
Perhaps belatedly, Lanmark clients started getting the message in 2014 that the shift from print advertising to digital has arrived and they’d better jump on the bandwagon. “We’ve always been aware that the change was coming, but I think the biggest challenge was to get clients to understand [its effect on] the future of advertising,” Avalone explains. “Print is still alive, [but] it’s more of an awareness product at this point.”
To that end, Lanmark strives to create what Avalone calls a “marketing ecosystem” that reaches consumers at numerous touch points. “This means [clients] are not just focusing or relying on one thing to get their message out. Those days are gone.”
Lanmark’s Demand360 product helps clients build just such an ecosystem, generating content while at the same time giving them valuable customer insight. “Demand360 is really about profiling each individual based on his individual needs. Everyone is at a different place in the lifecycle of a sale,” Avalone explains. “It’s really about content, developing the content people can find on their own and read for themselves. People want to make their own decisions.”
Lanmark’s contact management operation, essentially a call center, proved another growth area in 2014. The division handles such functions as event attendance recruitment, customer follow-up calls and the scheduling of rep appointments. While Lanmark has been offering such services for around seven years, demand for them has surged in 2015.
The center handled one recent effort to reach doctors to schedule a product demo, recording a 60% to 70% closure rate on its calls, Avalone reports. “The hardest thing is getting through that receptionist, but our guys are trained and know how to get through,” she boasts.
In 2015 and beyond, Lanmark expects to see a continued rise in digital opportunities. As a result, it will likely hire a host of staffers to accommodate demand. Unlike other agency execs who complain about a lack of qualified job candidates, however, Avalone says she receives plenty of promising résumés.
She attributes this to Lanmark’s location, which sits about an hour south of New York City near the New Jersey coast. “We’re a New York–style agency by the beach,” she jokes.
From the July 01, 2015 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
