In today’s evolving landscape, mastering digital outreach and embracing an omnichannel Medical Affairs strategy is now essential for success.
The function has come a long way in just a few years, but for many leaders, the world of digital, cross-channel marketing and the nebulous omnichannel concept can still feel like a complex puzzle with compliance walls.
As they try to cut through the noise, teams are still grappling with what this shift means and how to truly achieve it while managing resource constraints, skills gaps, infrastructure challenges, and internal silos.
This post aims to demystify omnichannel and provide a framework for connecting the puzzle pieces to drive meaningful, personalized, and highly efficient HCP engagement at scale.
Why Omnichannel Isn’t Just a Buzzword
It’s crucial to distinguish omnichannel from multichannel. Multichannel simply means using multiple channels, often in silos, which can lead to fragmented and inconsistent experiences. Omnichannel focuses on delivering a consistent, integrated, and personalized experience across all relevant channels (non-personal and personal). This should be orchestrated around the HCP’s needs and preferences, and tech now easily enables it.
For Medical Affairs, many now know that embracing omnichannel means:
- Enhancing communication: Delivering accurate, timely, and relevant scientific information to support clinical decision-making and ultimately improve outcomes.
- Expanding reach: Supplementing the work of MSLs to connect with a broader range of HCPs, including those MSLs may not reach.
- Building trust: Providing credible information through preferred channels and platforms fosters stronger relationships.
- Maximizing tight resources: Leveraging every dollar spent by using real-world signals to only buy media when it’s a relevant moment to reach an HCP.
- Driving impact: Effectively educating HCPs and creating engagement ladders, potentially accelerating the adoption of new clinical practices and progression toward intervention.
The Shifting Sands of HCP Engagement and Preferences
Understanding how audiences want to engage is the first piece of the puzzle.
Today’s HCPs operate under immense time pressure and face a deluge of information: 68% of HCPs, and as many as 80% in some specialties like oncology, report feeling overloaded. 3 in 4 strongly prefer digital interactions, but they crave relevance and personalization. Less than 20% feel they receive tailored experiences currently.
A hybrid approach combining in-person and virtual engagement is preferred by most HCPs. Despite digital preferences, they value interactions with MSLs highly (76% rate MSL interactions as more or much more valuable than sales rep visits).
Achieving true omnichannel means building a framework with this hybrid approach, including integration of field and digital so these complement each other in real time (compliantly). Imagine an MSL call and a digital touchpoint on the HCP’s go-to educational platform building upon and reinforcing one another for a more valuable experience.
No matter your budget, it’s not enough to only use a few channels like field plus email plus congresses. In a recent survey, HCPs reported that they actively engage with pharma information across more than 10 digital and in-person channels.
As Stephen Onikoro, our Chief Operating Officer, stated during a panel discussion at the 9th Digital Strategy & Innovation for Medical Affairs Summit: “It doesn’t really matter if you have $300,000 or $2M. What matters is how you create a sophisticated digital media plan that takes into account where your HCPs are actually going. There’s no one platform that has a monopoly on where HCPs are.”
Audience insights help you understand the landscape and the most valuable channels for your HCPs are essential. Affinity data that reveals physicians’ preferences, interests, and behaviors can now easily inform campaigns in a compliant manner. This ensures the mix is optimized for the channels (personal and nonpersonal), platforms, and messaging types that make the most sense and will have the highest likelihood of impactful engagement.
Connecting the Pieces: Building Your Omnichannel Medical Affairs Strategy
Creating an effective omnichannel strategy requires connecting several key components:
- Deep customer understanding: Go beyond basic profiles. Leverage compliant affinity data drawn from CRM, market research, website, claims, and other data sources to build a 360-degree view of stakeholders and understand their content, channel, and platform affinities.
- Clear SMART goals: Clearly defining goals and what a campaign aims to achieve informs multiple elements of the plan and helps build alignment internally–as well as setting teams up better for continuity if company objectives and budgets shift.
- Content that resonates: HCPs are drowning in data but need credible, relevant, and easily digestible clinical and scientific information. Modular content drawn from your scientific communications platform allows easier repurposing across channels, and creating content options across several messaging types improves impact for HCPs who are more likely to engage with a certain type of information (e.g., safety vs. unmet need vs. MOA education).
- The right channel mix: Choose channels based on HCP preferences and the communication goal. This includes MSL interactions, email, microsites and portals, events, webinars, and a broad range of digital touchpoints. The key is integration: ensuring a seamless journey across touchpoints.
- Integrated technology and data: Siloed systems hinder omnichannel success. You need integrated field, digital, and event systems. Partners like PharmaForceIQ can help bridge gaps and deliver a broad range of integrations within an automation platform to enable personalization, tracking, and actionable insights without an expensive and slow internal implementation process.
- Cross-functional collaboration: True omnichannel requires breaking down internal silos to achieve a unified customer experience. Close, compliant collaboration involves shared planning, insight sharing (e.g., MA providing scientific context, Commercial providing market feedback), coordinated engagement, and establishing common goals.
Measuring What Matters: Proving Value
Measuring success requires moving beyond traditional activity metrics like number of MSL visits towards KPIs that demonstrate true impact.
As Onikoro pointed out, determining performance indicators early during planning is critical. Start with what types of activity you want to drive, like engagement with an MOA video or a publications microsite, then build your plan and define metrics. “How does a digital plan lead to those engagements? How do you define engagements?” he asked. “What does an email open or website visit mean? What does a banner click mean and when? How do you differentiate between a high engager and a low engager when it comes to your HCP universe? All of these need to be defined and crystallized before you even spend a dollar on a campaign.”
Consider tracking leading and lagging indicators such as:
- Engagement metrics: Reach and engagement across channels with an understanding of what each KPI indicates in terms of quality and funnel stage (e.g., webinar attendance, content downloads, time spent on platform, survey scores).
- Behavioral shifts: Are HCPs consuming more in-depth content, returning to a website, requesting follow-up calls, or changing stated beliefs?
- Clinical impact: Are you seeing indicators of change in clinical practice or scientific understanding among engaged HCPs?.
- Conversion/action metrics: Is engagement leading to desired actions like increased prescribing (where appropriate), ordering diagnostic tests, increased congress and event participation, or improved patient identification?
Conclusion: Embracing the Future of Medical Affairs
Solving the digital puzzle and implementing an effective omnichannel strategy is crucial for the future of Medical Affairs. It requires a strategic mindset, a deep understanding of HCP needs, the right technology, cross-functional alignment (compliantly), and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Aim for establishing a scalable pilot with a nimble partner as a starting point. Set the foundation for success by starting with a landscape assessment, clear goals, strong audience data and tech partnerships, and a measurement framework.
By connecting the puzzle pieces, MA teams can elevate their role, build stronger relationships, deliver exceptional value to HCPs (see a case study here), and ultimately, contribute more effectively to improving patient outcomes.
