Here’s something that’s going to be buzzing in healthcare marketing technology circles within the next five years:

The marriage of a CRM (customer relationship management) and CMS (content management system). This holy matrimony leads to patients getting patients exactly what they want.

During “CRM Meets CMS: A New Paradigm for Digital Marketing Personalization,” John Berndt, CEO of The Berndt Group and Gary Druckenmiller, Vice President of Client Solutions at Evariant explained how both platforms needed each other to thrive.

First, a brief refresher on what each technology is known for:

CRM highlights:

• Right message, right time, right audience
• Customer journey map
• Personalized brand stories
• Omni-channel delivery

CMS highlights:

• Deeply personalized content
• Context aware
• Enhanced cross-sell
• Reduced cost to serve
• Customer delight and retention

Those are all great individual highlights, but just imagine what they could do together:

• More leads. Easy, automated form management into CRM; round-trip tracking and optimization.
• Better content marketing. Better content marketing with personalized calls to action, geographic personalization; better nurture tracks.
• Analytics that make sense. Richer data set, bringing together CRM data with content browsing profiles, geography and other variables.

Druckenmiller says it’s important to get these two platforms together because of the popularity of personalized marketing.

“This is really going to impact your world because everybody wants personalized marketing,” Druckenmiller says. “But what’s the only way you can get it? You’ve got to have a CMS and a CRM. If you don’t, you can’t do personalized marketing. And just remember: correctly personalized interactions can shift conversions by 10 to 15 percent.”

Both agree that it’s rare to see a vendor that’s combined a CRM and CMS into one platform, so hospitals are left to invest in both. This can be costly and time-consuming, but well-worth it.

“Once you put these two things together, you become very proactive in all the forms of outreach you can do,” Berndt says. “You become ahead of the game. You’re not just reacting to everything.”

Penn Medicine was mentioned as an example of a hospital that’s using both a CRM and CMS. It has a centralized hub that manages multiple channels of engagement. In this hub, it tracks various campaigns, events, emails, social media, mobile, analytics and call centers.

Since using both, Penn Medicine has been able to: build custom landing pages, create lead-capture forms and track event sign-ups.

“With a good CMS, you can set up interests, topics or profiles that are related to the content of your site,” Berndt says. “You can score the content on your site. As the user moves through it, they build up a score. In a system like this, you know what content the user likes the best. Based on that, you can give a personalized message.”

Druckenmiller says marketers are doing a great job of writing the content — but lacking the governance or structure on how to deliver it to consumers. That’s where a CRM comes in.

“We’ve got to create a world where we can pull chunks or nuggets of content that can be used in different formats or shapes,” Druckenmiller says.

Druckenmiller wrapped up the presentation by saying that EMR portals just aren’t going to cut it.

“Those portals aren’t going to solve necessary targeting and personalization,” Druckenmiller says. “The combination of the two is the best chance for realistic approaches to programmatic targeting. Your consumers expect unified, personalized content — and those who get it right, win big time.”