In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, biotech and medical device companies are under pressure to engage their target audiences more effectively and more precisely than ever before. From physician outreach to patient support, the industry’s stakeholders demand timely, relevant, and personalized interactions. Enter “Next Best Action” (NBA) marketing—an increasingly popular strategy that leverages data analytics, artificial intelligence, and process automation to guide marketers on what action to take, when, and how.
In this article, we will explore how biotech and medical device companies can harness NBA marketing to gain a competitive edge, improve brand recognition, and deliver lasting value to healthcare providers, patients, and other key stakeholders. Written with marketing leaders in mind, this guide offers a straightforward framework to help you navigate the adoption and scaling of NBA marketing in your organization.
Table of Contents
- Introduction to Next Best Action (NBA) Marketing
- Why NBA Matters for Biotech and Medical Device Companies
- Core Data Foundations for NBA
- Developing a Comprehensive NBA Strategy
- Key Steps to Implementing NBA
- Use Cases in Biotech and Medical Device Marketing
- Challenges and Best Practices
- Measuring Success and Iterating
- Conclusion
Introduction to Next Best Action (NBA) Marketing
In an age where data-driven decision-making has become the norm, Next Best Action (NBA) marketing stands out as a strategic approach that aligns marketing and sales interventions with audiences’ real-time needs. NBA involves using advanced analytics and algorithms—often powered by machine learning—to evaluate an audience’s profile, behaviors, preferences, and engagement history. Marketers then use these insights to determine, in real time or near real time, the most relevant and impactful action to take.
For marketing leaders in biotech and medical device organizations, the promise of NBA lies in its ability to significantly boost the effectiveness of engagement strategies. Whether the goal is to educate physicians about a new therapy, encourage patients to adopt a course of treatment, or strengthen relationships with payers and administrators, NBA marketing focuses on delivering the right message through the right channel at precisely the right moment.
At its core, NBA helps unify audience data, automate segmentations, and create personalized touchpoints across various channels such as email, social media, events, and face-to-face interactions. For highly regulated industries like biotech and medical devices, this approach is especially relevant because it addresses many of the gaps that can occur when dealing with complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
Why NBA Matters for Biotech and Medical Device Companies
Shifting Healthcare Dynamics
The healthcare sector is undergoing fundamental changes fueled by technological advancements, regulatory updates, and patient empowerment. Today’s patients and providers have high expectations, demanding greater personalization and immediate value. Next Best Action marketing offers an agile way to keep up with these demands.
Complex Buyer Journeys
In biotech and medical device marketing, the buyer journey often involves multiple decision-makers and influencers. For example, a high-value medical device purchase might involve a hospital procurement committee, a surgeon, a physician assistant, and a medical director, each with different motivations, pain points, and buying criteria. NBA marketing uses data-driven insights to understand these nuances and tailor interactions to each unique profile within the stakeholder ecosystem.
Optimized Resource Allocation
Sales and marketing budgets in biotech and medical device companies are typically substantial, but they also face intense scrutiny and ROI expectations. NBA marketing ensures that these budgets are allocated wisely by focusing on the actions that yield the highest return on investment. By using predictive analytics, organizations can identify the most promising leads or existing customers for targeted outreach, reducing wasteful marketing spend and improving overall outcomes.
Regulatory Compliance
In highly regulated sectors, adherence to compliance guidelines is not optional; it’s mandatory. NBA platforms can be set up with embedded compliance rules to ensure that all marketing messages—whether they’re about product benefits, dosage instructions, or clinical trial data—meet regulatory standards. This automation helps marketers navigate complex compliance requirements without slowing down their initiatives.
Core Data Foundations for NBA
Clean, Unified Data
Next Best Action marketing relies heavily on the ability to gather, aggregate, and analyze data from diverse sources such as CRM systems, market research, and other data streams. A single source of truth across all these platforms is crucial. If data is siloed or inaccurate, NBA recommendations will be flawed, defeating the purpose of implementing an automated, data-driven approach.
Structured and Unstructured Data
Healthcare companies often encounter a mix of structured data (e.g., demographic info, purchase history) and unstructured data (e.g., physician feedback, social media comments). Modern data platforms and AI-driven solutions can ingest, categorize, and analyze both. For example, natural language processing (NLP) tools can help interpret physician feedback or patient sentiment from call center logs or social media posts, further refining the data pool used for NBA insights.
Data Governance and Privacy
Given the sensitivity of healthcare information, robust data governance is a cornerstone of successful NBA implementations. This includes following HIPAA and GDPR guidelines where applicable, encrypting data at rest and in transit, maintaining strict user access controls, and designing workflows that limit the sharing of protected health information (PHI). By adhering to these standards, your organization reduces the risk of regulatory violations and builds trust with your audience.
Real-Time or Near Real-Time Data
One of the strengths of NBA is its responsiveness. However, timely insights can only be delivered if your data infrastructure supports real-time or near real-time data processing. Tools such as streaming analytics and cloud-based data warehouses are essential to ensure that data is updated quickly, enabling immediate action based on the latest information—such as a physician requesting additional trial data, or a patient searching for user manuals online.
Developing a Comprehensive NBA Strategy
Defining Objectives
Before implementing NBA, biotech and medical device organizations should have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. Are you looking to increase physician referrals, drive brand awareness among patients, or streamline the onboarding process for a new device? By setting concrete, measurable objectives, you can tailor your NBA approach to address your specific goals.
Segmentation and Persona Development
Next, identify and understand your target segments. In many cases, biotech and medical device marketers segment providers by specialty, hospital type, or procedure volume. For example, a medical device aimed at orthopedic surgeons will require different messaging than a diagnostic tool targeted at cardiologists. Building detailed customer personas within these segments can refine your NBA algorithms, leading to more impactful marketing and sales interventions.
Mapping the Customer Journey
From the initial awareness stage to final purchase—and beyond into ongoing support—every step of the customer journey is an opportunity to engage. Map out each stage for your key segments or personas, and identify critical touchpoints. This journey map helps you plan how NBA will operate. For instance, if a physician attends a medical conference, your NBA system might trigger a post-event email with relevant product brochures or whitepapers to keep them engaged.
Choosing the Right Channels
In biotech and medical device marketing, the variety of channels can be broad—webinars, in-person events, sales rep visits, email campaigns, print ads, placements in medical journals, and more. Your NBA strategy should encompass the channels most relevant to your stakeholders. By analyzing historical engagement metrics and preference data, the system can automatically recommend the ideal channel for the next interaction.
Key Steps to Implementing NBA
Implementing Next Best Action in a biotech or medical device context typically involves several stages. Below is a high-level overview of the steps:
Step 1: Build a Cross-Functional Team
NBA marketing transcends traditional department boundaries, requiring collaboration between marketing, sales, medical affairs, IT, compliance, and sometimes external partners (e.g., data analytics vendors). Form a cross-functional team to gather requirements, design workflows, and ensure that the program meets each department’s needs. This team should also be responsible for monitoring and fine-tuning the system once it’s live.
Step 2: Assess and Upgrade Your Data Infrastructure
Review your data pipelines, storage solutions, and analytics tools to ensure that they can handle the scale and velocity required for NBA. If real-time data is a priority, consider cloud-native solutions that support streaming analytics. You should also implement robust data governance protocols to maintain compliance with regulations while enabling widespread data access internally.
Step 3: Select the Right NBA Technology
A range of platforms exist that offer NBA capabilities, from specialized healthcare CRM solutions to enterprise marketing automation suites with AI-driven recommendation engines. Evaluate these options based on your specific needs: regulatory compliance features, ease of integration with existing systems, customization, and scalability. Keep in mind that implementing NBA often requires advanced data science capabilities, so look for solutions with built-in AI/ML modules or open APIs that let you integrate custom models.
Step 4: Design and Train Predictive Models
The heart of NBA is prediction—forecasting which action will have the greatest impact. Data scientists and business analysts can build or configure predictive models that account for variables such as specialty, geographic location, patient population, device usage rates, and market dynamics. For example, a model might learn that surgeons with lower procedure volumes respond better to targeted educational content, while high-volume surgeons prefer direct calls from sales reps.
Step 5: Create Automated Workflows and Triggers
Once the models are in place, develop workflows that define when and how an NBA recommendation should be activated. For instance, if a physician views a certain product demonstration online, your NBA system might trigger a follow-up email offering a live demo or a personalized webinar invitation. These triggers can also be set up for patient engagement—e.g., a patient registers their new medical device via your online portal, prompting an immediate onboarding tutorial.
Step 6: Integrate With Omni-Channel Execution
To fully harness NBA’s power, your chosen platform (or custom-built solution) should integrate with all major marketing channels: email marketing platforms, social media management tools, CRM systems, call center software, and even field sales management tools. This ensures that NBA recommendations flow seamlessly to the teams and systems that execute the campaigns or outreach, enabling true omni-channel engagement.
Step 7: Monitor, Measure, and Optimize
After going live, track performance metrics such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction scores. Compare these figures against your initial objectives. If certain segments or channels aren’t delivering the expected ROI, you can adjust models or content strategies accordingly. Continuous monitoring and iterative optimization are the hallmarks of a successful NBA program.
Use Cases in Biotech and Medical Device Marketing
Physician Targeting for Diagnostic Devices
A biotech company manufacturing advanced diagnostic tools wants to target high-volume radiologists. By leveraging NBA, the company’s system identifies patterns in the type and number of imaging procedures, segments radiologists based on volume and specialty, and suggests personalized outreach. For instance, a lower-volume radiologist may be offered a data sheet emphasizing cost savings, while a high-volume radiologist might receive a clinical study demonstrating improved diagnostic accuracy.
Patient Support Programs for Biotech Therapies
Biotech therapies, especially those requiring ongoing patient support—like those for chronic diseases—can use NBA to deliver timely, relevant messaging. When a patient logs into the company’s support portal indicating side effects or additional questions, the NBA system triggers a nurse educator call or an email linking to FAQs and self-help resources. Over time, the platform learns which communication style (phone calls vs. emails vs. text messages) resonates most with specific patient segments.
Surgical Device Adoption
When promoting a new surgical device to hospitals, procurement timelines and multiple stakeholders can make for a lengthy sales cycle. NBA can help identify each committee member’s unique interests—such as cost efficiency for procurement, clinical evidence for surgeons, and patient outcomes for administration—and recommend tailored content. If a surgeon posts a question on an online forum about the device, the NBA engine might suggest a product manager or medical science liaison respond with a technical whitepaper and an offer for a hands-on demo.
Challenges and Best Practices
Data Silos and System Integration
One common challenge in implementing NBA is dealing with siloed data. Biotech and medical device companies often operate on multiple legacy systems for research, sales, marketing, and post-market analysis. Merging these data sources can be complicated and time-consuming. To mitigate these issues:
- Conduct a thorough data audit
- Prioritize the most critical data sources
- Implement APIs or data integration layers that can unify these sources
Regulatory Compliance
Healthcare regulations can be complex, varying from one region to another. NBA workflows need to account for these differences to avoid compliance risks. Some best practices include:
- Embedding compliance checks into automated workflows
- Employing role-based access controls to manage sensitive data
- Conducting periodic audits to ensure adherence to changing regulations
Change Management and Organizational Buy-In
Adopting a new technological and operational paradigm like NBA often requires a cultural shift. Sales reps may initially resist data-driven instructions, especially if they feel it undermines their autonomy. The key is to emphasize that NBA augments, rather than replaces, their expertise:
- Offer training sessions to familiarize sales teams with NBA features
- Demonstrate early wins to build trust and confidence
- Encourage collaboration between marketing, sales, and IT
Ensuring Quality Data
An advanced analytics model is only as good as the data feeding it. Ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and completeness is crucial. Some best practices include:
- Implementing data validation checks
- Updating data in real time
Scaling and Maintenance
As your NBA program expands, it may need to support additional products, geographies, or stakeholder groups. This growth brings new data sets, new compliance requirements, and new workflow complexities. Plan for scalability from the start by:
- Choosing modular platforms that can integrate new data sources
- Leveraging cloud-based solutions for elastic resource allocation
- Continuously evaluating the evolving product and market landscape
Measuring Success and Iterating
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
To gauge the effectiveness of your NBA strategy, consider tracking a variety of KPIs:
- Engagement Rates (email opens, click-throughs, webinar attendance)
- Lead Conversion Rates (from potential leads to qualified leads, and eventually to customers)
- Sales Cycle Duration (how NBA shortens or improves each stage)
- Customer Satisfaction Scores (surveys to gauge HCP and patient satisfaction)
- Product Adoption Metrics (repeat usage, reorder rates, upsell/cross-sell success)
Continuous Improvement
NBA marketing strategies should evolve alongside changes in market dynamics, regulations, and customer behaviors. Schedule quarterly or monthly reviews with your cross-functional team to:
- Reassess model accuracy
- Adjust segmentation parameters
- Update compliance filters based on new guidelines
- Optimize outreach channels
- Identify new opportunities for personalization
Leveraging A/B Testing
A/B testing remains a powerful tool to hone your NBA approach. By testing different messaging, subject lines, or timing of outreach, you can gather empirical evidence about what resonates most with different segments. Over time, your NBA models become increasingly refined, and your content strategy becomes more adaptive.
Conclusion
Next Best Action marketing offers biotech and medical device companies a transformative approach to engaging physicians, patients, and other stakeholders. By leveraging unified data, predictive models, and automated workflows, marketers can optimize each interaction—at scale. The payoff includes more efficient resource allocation, faster adoption of new products, increased patient satisfaction, and a measurable impact on revenue.
Yet, implementing NBA is not without its challenges. Data silos, regulatory complexities, and organizational culture shifts can all impede progress. That’s why a methodical approach—beginning with clear objectives, robust data governance, and cross-functional collaboration—is essential for success. By continuously refining your strategy through performance metrics and iterative improvements, you position your company to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive healthcare environment.
For marketing leaders seeking to enhance their brand’s visibility, growth, and customer loyalty, NBA marketing represents a compelling opportunity to deliver meaningful, personalized interactions at every step of the healthcare journey. As the biotech and medical device industries continue to evolve, adopting a data-driven, personalized marketing approach will be key to forging deeper relationships with healthcare providers and the patients they serve.
By adopting Next Best Action marketing in a strategic and measured way, you can transform not only your marketing efforts, but also how your entire organization engages and communicates with its most valuable stakeholders. The long-term benefits—elevated brand awareness, stronger customer relationships, improved patient outcomes, and a fortified bottom line—make this journey well worth the investment.

Nick Lowe
Senior Partner
BOSTON, MARS