Omnichannel Experience in Pharma - Why not?

A recent research completed with Medical Affairs and Marketing teams at Fishawack Health talked about the potential for all types of biopharma companies, big or small, to embrace the power of omnichannel for engaging health care providers. The limitations of face-to-face meetings with todays digitally-native healthcare professionals and the next generation of engaged, informed patients, coupled with the advances of mobile and technological connectivity, are driving pharmaceutical marketers into a multichannel space in an omnichannel marketing strategy model. Omnichannel marketing presents the opportunity for Pharma companies to turn their strategies into a really powerful engagement with customers by streamlining, customizing, and making a much better experience on their customers journey. Omnichannel markets in the Pharmaceutical Industry also allow companies to reach customers with the right messages, at the right time, and on the channels they prefer.

Omnichannel marketing is like multichannel, however, rather than providing separate channels to reach customers, each is connected in order to ensure seamless experiences. Omnichannel marketing is a collection of activities that provides customers with a personalised experience, by consolidating all online and non-digital channels in one setting.

Clearly, an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy Model is about providing a better experience through valuable, tailored content, with the customer in the centre. Video marketing is the ideal replacement to TV, which has been a traditional channel of patient engagement for years. Omnichannel engagement is all about moving towards a new model where Agile teams apply design thinking, digital engagement, and analytics to help sales representatives get the right messages out to the right stakeholders, through the right channels, at the right times.

To build closer relationships with customers in this digitally-driven world, you need to embrace an omnichannel strategy. In the modern, evolving digital landscape, companies are looking for better ways to enhance their customers experiences and engage them. The future of omnichannel customer engagement is changing, and advances in digital technology are giving us the ability to optimize and enhance customer experiences.

For Healthcare Providers:

It is simple, think about your marketing strategy, what you need to communicate to achieve the desired change in behaviour? with that in mind, you need to take few steps to ensure flawless execution for your omnichannel journey:

1. Proper behaviour segmentation to HCPs ( Channels behaviour, Potential on defined market)
2. Tag the persona to the HCPs in the MCRM
3. Engage with CFT ( Sales, Marketing, Digital) to build together the micro-journey for each persona ( Key messages, Channels, Content format)
4. Ensure Clear definition of engagement level for each persona ( Aware, Desire, Adoption, Advocacy)
5. Monitor, Evaluate and Optimize.

Patients and Caregivers:

Both patients and caregivers in health care could benefit from a seamless, omni-channel digital experience. By investing in consumer-facing, omnichannel capabilities, health care providers can quickly reap measurable benefits from next-generation patient engagement.

?While it becomes more complex with patients, here the objective is to raise awareness on the disease or empower patients to take action to drive better control for themselves.

1. Understanding the current patient behaviours through social listening
2. Understanding the role of Caregivers in managing the disease with their loved ones
3. Identifying Digital Key HCPs influencers should accelerate closing the awareness gap.

Advances in technology have already begun transforming how patients interact with their healthcare providers. The disruption by Big Tech in the pharmaceutical industry has transformed health care into a omnichannel, consumer-centric ecosystem laser-focused on customer experience. Marketing leaders in the pharma, health care, medicine, and all physician-facing and physician-professional-facing industries have seen the impact of digital disruption firsthand in the normal course of business

From Apples wearables acting as hubs for patients to digital healthcare platforms within WeChat by Tencent, Amazons recent rollout of Amazon Pharmacy, to Uber and Lyft providing healthcare transportation, technology giants have reshaped how patients interact globally in irrevocable ways. At the same time, companies in the medtech space have been speeding up their digital transformations and adding multiple roles and channels--including self-service portals, webinars, and social-media content--to support engagement remotely with both healthcare providers (HCPs) and nonclinical stakeholders, like payers, hospital leaders, and purchasing professionals. Medtech companies still need to reimagine how they interact with stakeholders in order to ensure seamless experiences across digital, remote, and in-person channels; indeed, 77% reported experiencing channel conflicts.

Pharmaceuticals and health care companies lag behind other industries when it comes to providing omnichannel experiences, since face-to-face interactions are advantageous as a component of the delivery of services. As such, modernizing patient communications using omnichannel technologies has been a priority for healthcare leaders looking to adapt to patients preferences, optimize communications workflows, and enhance overall patient experiences.

For pharma and medical tech organizations, shifting to omnichannel models promises personalized engagement, increased revenue, quality of care, and, above all, outcomes for patients. Pharmaceutical and health care companies are moving away from siloed, multichannel marketing and toward an integrated, customer-centric, omnichannel approach that is central to their strategies for meaningful rewards. By placing the customer at the center of the strategy, healthcare companies are able to curate a customers experience and organize channels and content to meet their needs.

When health care providers build personalized experiences to try and connect with consumers, they are able to communicate better with each other. Through digital interactions and omnipresent touch points, consumers are providing more data for healthcare professionals, which can help to provide personalized digital experiences they expect from no other industry. For providers, once these capabilities are established, health care organizations should be able to recognize unique members needs at important moments, design interventions tailored for each person, and continually optimize engagement with flexible, digital capabilities.

For example, a medical technology company looking to engage with healthcare providers as they are researching and evaluating products might have its product and digital marketing experts create a series of webinars and design supporting digital content tailored to each doctor. The digital marketing landscape is ever-changing, and for global pharmaceutical companies, effectively reaching out to HCPs and patients can be challenging.

To efficiently enhance a pharma customers experience, engaging consumers with a comprehensive digital marketing framework would not only enhance their health care journey, but optimize spending for promotions of new pharma products. With a successful omnichannel model, pharma can empower patients with access to treatments and methods through enrollment in trials and education, increasing accessibility of existing treatments and methods. We have tailored resources tailored to individual challenges and opportunities facing marketers in pharma/healthcare, learn more.

One of the highly recommend planning tools for your marketing communications for the pharma/healthcare sector is RACE framework. Reach, act, convert and engage. This comprehensive, step-by-step framework helps marketers and managers plan their digital media and experiences throughout the customers lifecycle: reaching, acting, converting, and engaging.

While Pharma objectives might be a bit different for the convert stage, I believe understanding the call for action can deliver the desired outcome to track the progress.

The goal of Omnichannel is to enhance customer-business relationships, appreciate the needs of every consumer, and deliver unique, end-to-end experiences. Companies should adjust how they engage with customers according to their needs, and that dialogue should be ubiquitous and dynamic, enabling them to deliver a compelling, personalized experience, offering rapid solutions for each customers particular needs, across both physical and digital infrastructures.

The change in providing not just more patient-centric healthcare, but consumer-centric marketing, and massive investments to promote and market these products for patients who are currently using them, has led several trends within the industry to come into focus, including "below the line" marketing and omnichannel engagement. Instead, consumers today want and expect health organizations to implement digital-first engagement strategies that address both evolving patient preferences and an increasingly mobile-first environment.

Case Studies:

A global provider of in-vitro diagnostics has overhauled service delivery across channels, using ethnographic research to identify unmet needs; building new digital tools, like an online service line; and improving collaboration between its call centers, field technicians, and sales representatives. A leading medical technology-diagnostics company is using a blend of digital and telechannels, including inside sales and self-service portals, to target a new segment of outpatients with tailored messages and support. A biopharma company planned to improve reach and engagement with core HCP customers for a leading dermatology product in non-US markets, with high efficiency, by taking advantage of existing customer insights, and not increasing the number of field staff resources. Leveraging existing technology platforms like Salesforce and SAP, a multinational pharmaceutical company created a Business-to-Business (B2B) engagement platform that will enable it to develop and end-to-end provide content to pharmacists across European markets in a localized way, without having to outsource to a third party.

Final Remarks:

Omnichannel marketing has two strategic benefits:

1. Transforming Customer Experience through tailored content and channels while maintaining the right level of engagement.
2. Disrupting the Regular SFE model for sales representatives, that you can easily expand the customer base by 30% at no cost and higher number of touch points vs F2F alone.