Laying a foundation for marketing campaigns

- [Instructor] It's now time to learn how to develop your own marketing campaigns. While I'll be using a singular real life example throughout this section of the course, please know that you can apply the same steps to creating any campaign of your choosing, including marketing yourself to potential clients. To inform your marketing campaign, there are three foundational elements you must identify up front. First, what is your end game? What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? Once you identify this, it will be easier to determine the second detail: what obstacles are hindering your chances of success? Often, these obstacles help you identify your target audience, which is the third important element that you must identify before building your strategy. Let's walk through a real life campaign to better exemplify this process. Edwards Life Sciences is a medical equipment company and global leader in patient focused medical innovations for structural heart disease, as well as critical care and surgical monitoring. Driven by a passion to help patients, the company collaborates with the world's leading clinicians and researchers to address unmet healthcare needs, working to improve patient outcomes and enhance lives. When Edwards Life Sciences developed their Hypotension Prediction Index, a powerful AI software solution, that enables clinicians to take proactive steps to avoid hypotensive events during surgery. Edwards needed the market to take notice. At the time, an estimated 8 million people every year died within 30 days of having a hypotensive event during a routine surgery. Edwards had developed a tool that could predict an oncoming hypotensive event several seconds before it would happen, giving surgeons just enough time to adjust their patient and avoid the event entirely, thus, saving 8 million lives a year. With such an amazing innovation, you would think that hospitals would be lining up around the block to implement it, but several obstacles stood in Edwards' way. The first big obstacles centered around awareness. Hypotensive events were a largely under-recognized issue in surgery. The correlation between a hypotensive event and surgery and sudden death within 30 days that followed had only recently been discovered, and few publications were working to educate clinicians on these findings. Essentially, Edwards had a solution to a problem that the marketplace did not even know existed. Edwards not only had to build awareness around this need in the marketplace, they also had to build demand and education around a solution that had never been introduced to clinicians before. By asking surgeons to place their faith in an algorithm driven by artificial intelligence rather than a traditional medical device. Based on this information, we can identify the three foundational elements as follows. First, Edwards had a clear outcome in mind: to save 8 million lives a year by eradicating hypotensive events during surgery. Second, their obstacles centered around building awareness for the need and then building demand and education around the solution. These obstacles help to identify two core target audiences. You see, Edwards would need to communicate the need and the solution to the key decision makers charged with implementing life saving innovations in healthcare, clinicians and hospital administrators. Beyond knowing the audience, we also knew the mindset of this audience. For example, we knew this audience was largely unaware of the issue at hand, and therefore would need some convincing. We knew that the solution would be met with apprehension because it relied so heavily on new technologies, but we also knew that saving lives was and will always be the ultimate goal of this audience, which provides insight into the types of messaging that would appeal to them. Once you've documented these three foundational elements of any marketing campaign, it becomes far easier to identify measurable goals that your campaign should seek to achieve. To learn more about this type of goal setting, jump to the next lesson when you're ready.