With HCPs expecting more tailored and personalized engagement from pharma companies, a multichannel strategy or your sales reps’ experience won’t cut it anymore. 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, the pharma industry experiences some unique challenges in implementing this strategy. Understand how to beat the challenges of implementing omnichannel pharma marketing to adopt it for your brand.

Challenges of Adopting Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma

Unlike other industries, the pharmaceutical industry faces significant barriers in fully adopting a true omnichannel marketing approach. This continues despite pharma marketers increasingly embracing digital marketing and beginning to integrate it with face-to-face sales rep interactions with HCPs. Data siloes, disconnected teams, and other hurdles continue to hinder omnichannel adoption.

What’s more common is still 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 cross-functional touchpoints to fit the HCP’s specific profile and needs.

Businesses in pharma and biotech must transition their targeting approach to better suit customer needs. With omnichannel marketing, you can create a hyper-targeted approach that minimizes HCP touchpoints to avoid advertising fatigue while increasing overall effectiveness. This, in turn, will help you drive more conversions through a more refined marketing strategy.

Here are the two main hurdles in adopting omnichannel marketing in pharma.

1. Lack of Deep Customer Knowledge

True omnichannel marketing requires 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. HCP preferences and behaviors have been evolving quickly, just like consumer behavior. Keeping track of customer affinity dynamically is often a challenge in an industry that usually works from a static, one-time-use affinity dataset early in campaign planning.

2. 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 not scalable. Modular content is beginning to tip the scales here but is not fully embraced yet as the media and creative campaign development processes evolve slowly. 

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.

Implementation also often means connecting disparate platforms and data sources, which can be resource- and time-intensive. Tapping into a multitude of datasets, channel types, and vendor partners can quickly become very expensive and unwieldy, and brand teams struggle to achieve success while this infrastructure is being built if it’s brought in house.

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. A partner can help overcome the barriers to doing this in house by providing end-to-end solutions that simplify execution. 

Our team has created and assessed the efficacy of our four-step process, ensuring marketing spend is optimized for high-ticket conversions. Here are the essential milestones of the marketing sales funnel in the pharmaceutical industry and how we adapt it for omnichannel excellence.

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 system that identifies the right time based on a variety of triggering criteria that are relevant for your indication and patient population.

Strategic Timelines

Marketing content should only be sent to physicians when it’s most relevant for them to learn about a specific drug as the industry moves away from the ‘spray and pray’ approach. 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 that budget towards highly targeted clientele—those likely to be interested in the product because they are seeing a relevant patient.

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 space, they aren’t likely to follow through on the next steps. With PharmaForceIQ, you can deploy marketing content automatically to the platforms where your customers will be most likely see it and respond positively – because they already use and engage with content on that platform.

High-Conversion Messaging

You increase the likelihood of high engagement rates when you leverage correct messaging that will resonate with your target audience, based on their preferences and past engagement data. If you send multiple messages to physicians who don’t understand your drug class, you are wasting time on providers who likely won’t make a prescription 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 across a set of channels chosen during the previous year’s planning cycle.

Our team has conducted direct research on the effectiveness of “always on” vs. hyper-targeted marketing for pharmaceutical brands. When physicians are overwhelmed with random marketing content that isn’t coordinated across channels, the results show poor engagement and a broken customer experience. Veeva data underscores that synced digital and field engagements can increase marketing effectiveness by 23%.

Hyper-targeted omnichannel marketing results in outreach to fewer physicians; however, engagement rates skyrocket substantially. As a result, more physicians follow through on prescriptions due to the strategy’s highly targeted, efficient nature.

How PharmaforceIQ Helps Implement Omnichannel Marketing

PharmaForceIQ will help you navigate touchpoints along your customer journey with first-hand data and analytics paired with AI-driven orchestration. Since “always on” marketing is no longer as effective as it once was as HCPs and patients struggle in the face of an overwhelming amount of information and advertising every day, it’s time to step up with a competitive edge.

Here at PharmaForceIQ, we implement our proven four-step process to help brands and medical teams break through in 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 pharma marketing strategies. By adopting omnichannel marketing and reducing the number of physician touchpoints, you can actually increase conversion and overall success rates in a time-efficient manner.