With HCPs expecting more tailored and personalized engagement from pharma companies, a multichannel strategy or your sales reps’ experience won’t cut it anymore. With many digital channels and touchpoints emerging, optimizing a multichannel marketing strategy is harder. So, if you aim to synchronize your marketing and get a commensurate ROI, a data-driven hyper-targeted omnichannel marketing approach is your answer.
Despite its revolutionary benefits, unlike other industries, the pharma industry experiences some peculiar challenges in implementing this strategy. Understand how to beat the challenges of omnichannel pharma marketing to adopt it for your brand.
Challenges of Adopting Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma
Unlike other industries, the pharmaceutical industry faces challenges in fully adopting a true omnichannel marketing approach. This is despite pharma marketers increasingly embracing digital marketing and integrating it with face-to-face sales rep interactions with HCPs.
What’s more common is the multichannel marketing approach. Multichannel marketing involves engaging HCPs via two or multiple digital channels with independent strategies. True omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, integrates, synchronizes, and personalizes interactions across touchpoints to fit in with the HCP’s specific profile.
Businesses in the pharmaceutical and biotechnical industries must transition their targeting approach to suit customer needs better. With omnichannel marketing, you can create a hyper-targeted approach that minimizes HCP touchpoints while increasing overall effectiveness. This, in turn, will help you convert more clients with a refined marketing strategy.
Here are the two main hurdles in adopting omnichannel marketing in pharma.
Lack of Deep Customer Knowledge
True omnichannel marketing involves high levels of personalization for your target audience. To achieve this level of personalization, you must have a deep knowledge of your target HCPs.
So, the modern pharma marketer has to be open to an ongoing learning process and rely heavily on data. In most cases, taking this route might cause changes to existing operational models within the organization and require an agile approach to work.
Complex Implementation
Implementing omnichannel marketing isn’t a walk in the park. It involves synchronizing different digital and non-digital touchpoints, which usually means creating custom content for the recipient based on each digital medium. In most cases, this is hardly scalable.
Typically, companies resort to repurposing the same content based on specific channels. The downside of this, however, is that if not handled properly, target HCPs may find the content hard to navigate, especially if the original message isn’t appropriate for the given channel.
How Data and Technology Amplify Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma
As a pharma marketer or brand, you must harness multiple digital channels to capture clients at the right time while converting them with tailored information and resources. Unlike the “always-on approach,” an omnichannel marketing strategy is hyper-targeted and uses data and analytics to connect the proper messages with the right physicians at the right time.
Our team has created and studied the efficacy of our four-step process, ensuring your marketing spend is optimized for high-ticket conversions. The following points outline the essential milestones of the marketing sales funnel in pharmaceutical industries and how we adapt it for omnichannel.
Physician Targeting
Instead of targeting a robust segment of physicians, you must intentionally target physicians that are most likely to convert into a prescription. PharmaForceIQ’s advanced technology allows for highly personalized targeting that reduces effort and expenses on your business front. You can focus only on physicians with eligible patients for your brand through an intuitive data-driven dashboard.
Strategic Timelines
Marketing content should only be sent to physicians when it’s most relevant for them to learn about a specific drug. Omnichannel HCP marketing ensures that emails and other marketing content aren’t sent to a physician if they have no appropriate patients for the treatment. In this case, you would allocate a budget towards highly targeted clientele—those likely to be interested in the product.
Proper Channel
Ensuring you send content through the proper channel minimizes the likelihood of important information getting lost in translation. If a physician receives marketing content in a low-volume account, they aren’t likely to follow through on the next steps. With PharmaForceIQ, you can send marketing content to the platforms where your clients will most likely see it and respond positively.
High-Conversion Messaging
You increase the likelihood of high engagement rates when you leverage correct messaging to resonate with your target audience. If you send multiple messages to physicians who don’t understand your drug class, you are wasting time on clients who likely won’t make a prescription or purchase while missing out on those who will.
Always-On vs. Hyper-Targeted Marketing For Pharma Businesses
Pharma digital marketing strategies typically use an “always-on” approach. The “always-on” approach involves continuous marketing activities throughout the year.
Our team has conducted direct research on the effectiveness of “always on” vs. hyper-targeted marketing for pharmaceutical businesses. When physicians are overwhelmed with random marketing content, the results show poor engagement and a broken customer experience.
Hyper-targeted omnichannel marketing results in outreach to fewer physicians; however, engagement rates skyrocket substantially. As a result, more physicians follow through on prescription sales due to the strategy’s highly targeted, efficient nature.
In 2023, the influence of technology on modern marketing will continue to expand, especially in the medical industry. It’s more important than ever to stay ahead of the curve with industry-leading technological solutions. It starts with expert software like PharmaForceIQ, crafted to support your unique business needs.
How PharmaforceIQ Helps Implement Omnichannel Marketing
PharmaForceIQ will help you navigate touchpoints along your customer journey with first-hand data and analytics. Recent years have proven that consumers are less susceptible to traditional marketing techniques, forcing businesses to experiment with new forms of outreach. Since “always on” marketing is no longer as effective as it once was, it’s time to step up with a competitive edge.
PharmaForceIQ eliminates the roadblocks that hold many biomedical businesses back from excelling in their industry. We are here to help you navigate the changing tides of 21st-century marketing with trusted systems that work.
Here at PharmaForceIQ, we implement our proven four-step process to help businesses break through the competitive pharmaceutical market. Our clients have experienced a 40% increase in incremental revenue, a 20% reduction in marketing spend, and an 80% increase in engagement rates.
While a traditional “always-on” approach was effective years ago, the evolution of technology is transforming the nature of pharma marketing strategies. By adopting omnichannel marketing and reducing the number of physician touchpoints, you can increase conversion and overall success rates in a time-efficient manner.
We’ve streamlined these processes through our state-of-the-art dashboard, which provides one central view of Marketing, Sales, and Impact on Brand Prescription. Learn more about PharmaForceIQ right here today!