Vishal Pratap Singh | Saturday, 23 April 2022
Pharmaceutical Industry has long been on a journey of exploring channels beyond traditional face-to-face interactions and print media when engaging with healthcare professionals (HCPs). In particular, the last few years have seen an acceleration of digital engagement. This has been supported by changing engagement preferences among HCPs with more and more digital natives welcoming virtual interactions.
“Growing pains of overwhelming, uncoordinated channel use and promotional waste are forcing marketers to explore omnichannel marketing to enable simultaneous orchestration across channels and multiple stakeholders”, says Gurpinder Singh, Associate Vice President, Indegene. The Indian omnichannel market size is expected to grow from USD 231 million in 2019 to USD 488 million by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.2 per cent during the forecast period.
Customer Journey Planning
Omnichannel enables pharma companies to work in new ways. By changing from siloed multichannel content to an omnichannel strategy, they can act like a travel agent by activating their ecosystem by designing specific pathways or customer journeys.
A customer journey is the customer’s digital path via touchpoints and CTAa through the ecosystem. In other words, it requires sequencing channels and content. People start at one point and then move forward through a series of interactions with the company or brand. If companies use adoption ladder, they know the major stops people must travel through to arrive at the destination. Customer journey planning takes this framework and details the itinerary. Even simple customer journeys can provide experiences of real value.
Each touchpoint builds on the last, enabling HCPs to develop their knowledge on a topic and that makes it effective. It is also engaging because it can present information in different ways by mixing channels and enabling HCPs to experience multiple-content formats.
Personalization
Based on the increasing availability of data along with technology and analytics, marketers can get closer than ever to their customers in order to satisfy their information needs. Addressing customers’ healthcare needs, while also ensuring their data privacy, will be essential to marketers and their partners, particularly as the global privacy landscape is evolving.
Turning Promotion On or Off
The omnichannel marketing approach will enable marketers to make data driven decisions on which promotional activities to dial up, dial down or turn off entirely. From a promotional journey standpoint, there may be over-promotion within a certain market segment and therefore excessive overspend.
Advancing Intersection of Communication across Audiences
Recently, new models of engagement between patients and physicians have been driven by the COVID-19 pandemic environment, with emphasis on the rise of virtual care and telemedicine. Industry experts look at it as a great opportunity for both patients and physicians to engage in new ways with one another. Because of this shift, marketers need to adjust their messaging to ensure it is reaching each party when they need it.
Optimization across Channels and Stakeholders
Traditionally, marketers might direct spending across a single or just a few channels but not across all channels or customer stakeholders. That ultimately erodes fiscal optimization. Omnichannel marketing provides the opportunity to work with brands on a continuous optimization cycle throughout the life of a campaign.
This is designed to recognize inefficiencies earlier in the process, while also identifying areas where ROI can be improved by reinvesting dollars that previously would have been wasted. This result can be considered as a win-win situation as there is improved patient health outcomes and greater contribution to the growth goals of a brand.
Few Shortcomings in the Way Lack of Audience Specific Content and Channels:
HCPs and patients want answers to their specific questions, relayed in a concise and engaging way and via channels convenient to them. Rather than addressing what HCPs and patients want to hear, pharma companies all too often focus on the messages they want to convey and the channels they themselves are comfortable using.
Poor Orchestration of Channels:
The success of omnichannel engagement requires the use of the right audience specific content and channels at the right time. Beyond a good understanding of customer preferences and behaviours, this needs orchestration and critically a feedback loop to assess how well engagement is working and how it needs to be adopted.
Different Channels but the Same Content:
Rather than creating custom made experiences based on a specific content channel mix, existing content is often reused and repackaged in a way that can be difficult to navigate and may not be appropriate for the given channel.
The Way Forward
The barriers to implementing a true omnichannel engagement are substantial. However, momentum towards omnichannel engagement is increasing, building on powerful market trends and changing customer needs. Pharma companies are being forced to rethink the way they interact with customers, driven by the proliferation of technology and mobile connectivity, increasing experience with digital engagement, growing price pressure, resulting need to increase the cost-effectiveness of engagement and restricted sales rep access.
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