Harshit Jain MD is the Founder and Global CEO of Doceree, the first global network of physician-only platforms for programmatic marketing.
The digital impetus provided the much-needed push to pharma messaging, globally. Once a digitally shy sector, predominantly dependent on sales reps and medical sciences liaisons (MSL) for personalized interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs), the pharma industry is now embracing digital technologies enthusiastically to engage its target audience.
With HCPs beginning to deliver better care to patients and manage their data more efficiently via telehealth, EHR platforms and apps, the life sciences industry is tapping into the opportunity to engage them digitally real fast. That’s a move in a great direction. But what’s the flip side to it?
The space is very new for all the stakeholders—whether it is life sciences brands, agencies handling mandates of many life sciences organizations or even publishers. Brands and agencies don’t know exactly where to start as they keep trying out new strategies in the absence of any historical data sets for the sake of referencing. Learning, executing, evaluating, reevaluating and executing again has become a cycle, leading to mimicking the same efforts and losing spends with little or no relevant insights. It is imperative to take into account some of the biggest challenges brands or agencies face to be able to arrive at workable solutions.
Multiple Stakeholders To Work With
Adapting to the new way of reaching HCPs via the digital medium has led life sciences brands to work with multiple online platforms. Having to work with different stakeholders is a tough job for those undergoing transformation in an evolving space. Managing tasks with different teams and partners isn’t the most effective way to work.
Channelizing efforts in a direction that is productive and best to bring results is often a lost cause in such scenarios, the result of which could clearly be seen in terms of subdued campaign performances and wasted dollars.
Innumerable, Scattered Data Sets
Quality data enables delivery of highly tailored and personalized HCP campaigns, based on accurate insights and real-time analytics. By making use of data—around HCPs’ behavior, the endemic and point-of-care channels they use, their geographies, their prescription behaviors—unique HCP graphs can be developed to serve them customized messages that they can consider for improving the health outcomes of their patients.
However, for the data to be so accurate to guide the next steps for the optimization of campaigns, it must not be scattered. The downside of working with many stakeholders is spread out data points, which are difficult to analyze, thus making informed decisions seldom happens.
Lack Of Transparency And Multitudes Of Reporting Methods
The rise in digital campaigns demands transparency around physician reach and engagement rates to let brands and agencies implement successful marketing tactics. Access to data points in real time is essential to make adjustments to campaigns and take necessary actions just when the campaign is live. Marketers face a challenge in having visibility to key metrics as they only become available at the conclusion of a campaign. By this time, they have lost crucial time and dollars to end up with unsatisfactory results.
Inability To Run Global Campaigns
Running global HCP campaigns is also a major challenge for life sciences marketers. Their targeting gets restricted to a demography in which platforms have a certain reach. So if a brand based out of the U.S. wants to target HCPs in the APAC or the GCC region, they are unable to do so since the platforms they have partnered with have limited geographical presence. While working in the digital domain, life sciences brands look up to engaging HCPs as widely as possible as they could do it without the constraints of getting into face-to-face interactions.
How To Address These Challenges
A disintegrated HCP-interaction ecosystem doesn’t serve the unique needs of life sciences brands. It thus calls for creating a model that’s connected and drives omnichannel experiences between brands and HCPs globally.
An AI-enabled omnichannel ecosystem, connecting different data sets and HCP touchpoints, can greatly transform strategies to engage physicians. It could enable marketers to draw meaningful insights from a centralized pool of information, applying global healthcare data analytics to their marketing strategies. With each and every HCP-patient interaction, and HCP action, the engagement would keep getting precise. This kind of “precision targeting” becomes possible only when all the data culminates in one place for seamless analyses and to build key insights that can optimize both ongoing campaigns and ad spends at the same time. Primarily, such insights are crucial to funnel spends toward channels and HCP segments that are most likely to resonate with brand messages.
Other than an omnichannel ecosystem, there are other tactics such as remote detailing, e-detailing and approved email that add significant value to the process of marketing to HCPs.
When it is about providing educational information to an entire department or to a group of physicians from around the world, remote detailing works fantastically well.
In cases where reps have to apprise HCPs about innovations or recent research in the medical science field—or have to train specialists or nurses about using pharma products optimally—e-detailing in those scenarios is turning out to be an effective way out.
Essential for life science marketers is to build and nurture one-to-one relationships with physicians. Personalization is a tactic that can yield the desired results. To drive campaigns, personalized communications are now also done via approved emails. All it needs for marketers or reps is to take a pre-approved email from the company’s CRM system and create a personalized version using a designated technology. Unlike a marketing email, which is sent to “too many” individuals, an approved email is shared with an individual HCP only.
Finally, irrespective of the strategy used to engage an HCP, it is important to sequence it with the physician’s journey so that the brand message could receive the due attention it deserves.
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