Channel Management in Pharma Marketing

As a pharmaceutical marketer, you’ll need a wide range of channels to reach your target HCPs effectively. This is why channel management is a crucial part of pharma marketing and could contribute to your brand being on an HCP’s preferred list of therapies that meet their patient population’s needs.

Learn everything you need to know about channel management in pharma marketing and its importance in your marketing strategy. Discover insights and six key strategies to manage your channels to maximize revenue for your company.

What Is Channel Management in Pharma Marketing?

Channel management is the strategic selection, planning, and execution of outreach across various communication channels to promote pharmaceutical products to healthcare professionals, patients, advocacy organizations, and other relevant stakeholders. These channels are crucial for reaching the target audience while complying with strict industry regulations and standards.

Marketing channels provide a treasure trove of sales and patient-related data, and you can improve your healthcare marketing results by deploying insights from these channels. So, channel management also involves tracking and analyzing data from various marketing channels.

This may appear to be an aspect of pharma marketing that requires no strategy. However, regardless of your product’s effectiveness, you may be unable to meet your marketing objectives without proper channel management.

What Are the Common Pharmaceutical Marketing Channels?

There are several pharma marketing channels available to pharma companies, and they play crucial roles in your company’s marketing success. These channels include:

The use of sales force for personal promotion
Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC)
Using digital marketing HCP engagement
Building credibility through key opinion leaders (KOLs)
Medical seminars and conferences

6 Channel Management Strategies to Reach HCPs Efficiently

1. Segmentation and Targeting

Marketing channels don’t all deliver the same ROI, and to effectively allocate marketing resources and avoid media waste, you must employ segmentation and targeting. This will help identify the most relevant channels to use and maximize the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Segmenting HCPs based on their specialties, prescription behavior, and preferences can help you determine which channels will most effectively reach them and influence their prescription behavior.

After segmenting your prospects, you can target them through the appropriate channels and with the right message. For instance, medical journals, conferences, and email campaigns may be more effective channels for reaching HCPs who prefer in-depth scientific information than HCP or broader social media platforms.

2. The Omnichannel Approach

Use a mix of channels such as direct sales, peer-to-peer approaches, pharmacies, and online platforms to reach a wider audience and accommodate various preferences for your target healthcare professionals.

However, don’t just stop at using multiple channels. Implement an omnichannel approach to help create a seamless and integrated customer experience across these channels for each of your prospects. This ensures that personal and nonpersonal promotional campaigns are integrated, rather than operating in separate silos, so, for example, an HCP engaging on a digital message can be followed quickly by an in-person rep visit, or vice versa.

3. Focus on Relationship Building

In managing your marketing channels, always ensure your strategies and messaging are geared toward building lasting relationships with your target HCPs. One major way to do this is to be transparent and ethical in all marketing communications. This will help you to build trust and credibility, as you often need to ensure a strong long-term engagement with relevant HCPs to last throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Always give your prospects the option to opt out of receiving marketing content. Also, ensure you never send unsolicited content or use their personal information in ways they haven’t permitted you to. This is particularly critical as the privacy landscape evolves rapidly.

As a bonus, you can create and assign dedicated teams to manage your key accounts, such as large hospitals, clinics, and pharmacy chains. As part of an omnichannel strategy that also incorporates tailored digital outreach, doing this ensures personalized attention and enhances relationships with the highest impact on your bottom line.

5. Adhere to Compliance and Regulations

Be aware of and adhere to strict regulations governing pharmaceutical marketing, both online and offline. Different channels may have different compliance requirements, so ensure your marketing efforts comply with industry standards and legal guidelines. Partnering with your MLR is critical to build and execute effective and compliant campaigns.

Also, regulations may differ from one geographical location to another. You may need to segment your prospects according to their locations and ensure you comply with their pharma marketing regulations to avoid legal issues.

6. Data Analytics and Feedback

Use data analytics tools to track the performance of different channels and understand how they work together. Also, collect feedback from customers and healthcare professionals to evaluate your efforts and continuously improve your channel strategies.

The effectiveness of your strategies can vary depending on the specific market dynamics of your product, industry regulations, and the behavior of healthcare professionals by specialty, region, or other factors. So, it’s essential to keep up with changing industry trends and customer preferences and adjust your channel strategies accordingly. Tools that offer dynamic, real-time analytics and allow channel management to be optimized in real-time offer a significant advantage, as these trends and preferences can change quickly and traditional media models offer a slower, delayed, and reactive media buying approach.

7. Leverage Industry-Specific Partnerships

Partnerships with other industry stakeholders can give you a wealth of information to inform your channel management strategy. These partnerships can provide access to market research, analytic data, and valuable insights to help your pharmaceutical company understand your target audience, their preferences, and where they are most active. This information is essential for choosing the most effective marketing channels, then deploying and optimizing campaigns.

Partnering with an industry-specific marketing company like PharmaForce IQ, for example, can help you build a more efficient strategy, reach your audience efficiently, and leverage specialized expertise you otherwise wouldn’t have access to that can maximize limited resources and driver higher ROI.

Manage Your Marketing Channels With PharmaForceIQ

Effective channel management is crucial to pharmaceutical marketing, and you can only achieve it by leveraging valuable insights from customer data. This is where many companies hit a wall, particularly since many data sources offer a ‘snapshot-in-time’ view that is incorporated at the start of campaign planning, rather than dynamic insights that adjust and incorporate changes in real time to allow real-time optimization.

PharmaForceIQ empowers pharmaceutical companies to harness the power of AI and the omnichannel approach to maximize their marketing efforts. With its intuitive platform, you can draw insights from dynamic customer affinity data throughout a campaign to understand the performance of your channel management strategy and optimize deployment over time as you understand results.

If you haven’t built a channel management strategy for your pharmaceutical products, PharmaForceIQ can help.