If you’re just entering the world of digital pharma marketing, you may be wondering which direction to take first. There’s a myriad of options, from paid advertising, content marketing, SEO, multichannel… It’s only reasonable if you’re feeling overwhelmed.
In our experience as a digital pharma marketing company, video is one of the top contenders for the pharma marketing crown. In fact, some of our clients were able to achieve incredible results using video as a strategy.
Here are some of the main reasons why video should be the medium of choice for your pharma marketing strategy.
Videos are much more engaging than words
Text isn’t really that fun of a way to spend time. Even more so if it’s a reprint of a medical publication. If you’re a physician with a busy schedule, going through a wall of text is hardly your idea of leisure.
Video seems to be much better at captivating attention than text. In fact, our brains process visual information 60x faster than text. On top of that, 4 times as many prospects would rather watch a video about a service or product instead of reading about it. In fact, if both video and text are present on the same screen, 59% of people are more likely to choose video.
Are your physicians struggling to remember information from your medical publications? It’s probably the overload of information from text. Video helps them remember up to 95% more information compared to the same content in textual form. If you present your medical publications in video form, they will be able to retain all the key information easily.
Videos are short
Physicians are strapped for time every moment of their workday. Between patients, paperwork, and trying to stay up to date professionally, they rarely have any free time. Unfortunately, the most common way of getting up to speed with the latest medical advancements and products is through scientific publications.
Why, unfortunately? There’s a large volume of papers being pushed out every day. At 10-20 pages per paper, it takes an average of 15 minutes for a physician to consume the information. When they do read a paper, chances are they probably won’t be able to remember the most critical data.
On the other hand, explainer videos are fairly short, with an average length of about 3 minutes. Most of our PubExplainers are 90 seconds long – which is a timeframe that HCPs can definitely spare to get updated about the latest advancements in life sciences.
Just imagine – if all publications were turned into explainer videos, at 90 seconds per video, physicians across the world would be able to stay up to date with their therapeutic area every day, by devoting less than 15 minutes daily.
Videos are easy to use
For a modern-day pharma marketer, making the transition to digital is one of the most important initiatives. However, a department used to working with traditional media may have a hard time battling with concepts such as landing pages, lead generation, or digital marketing campaigns in general.
However, when it comes to useability, there are very few tools that are as simple to use as video. You can simply embed them in your pages, send them out in your emails, and transfer them to tablets so that the sales force has something to show during calls, as well as many other low-hanging fruit tactics.
The fact of the matter is, that video can be used without advanced knowledge of digital marketing. What’s more, tracking how video performs over time is a piece of cake as well, as it’s incredibly easy to open up video analytics and see how your explainer videos are performing.
You can reuse videos
If you have a piece of content on your pharma blog, the best you can do to maximize its potential is to post links to it. If you have an ebook ready, the situation is pretty much the same. Whichever format you can think of, its use is very much limited to one channel at a time. Content repurposing is one of the most efficient ways to get the most out of your marketing efforts with limited amounts of time, and this is just not possible with traditional marketing channels.
On the other hand, videos embody the true nature of multichannel pharma marketing. They can be used on your website or in the emails you send to physicians. You can put them on tablets and phones so that sales reps and MSLs can share them during their calls. Videos are also handy for conferences, where you can play them in booths.
In this way, video has greater ROI than all other types of content. Depending on the type of video you do for your pharma brand, you can potentially reuse it hundreds of times.
It’s a great email marketing tool
Email is still one of the most effective ways of reaching physicians. However, like everyone else, they are swamped with spam on a daily basis. Luckily, video can amplify even the weakest of email marketing strategies.
Just including the word video in an email subject line will increase the open rate by as much as 19%. Going further, open-to-reply rates increase by 8x in emails containing a video. Finally, by putting a video in an email, you can increase click-through-rates by as much as 50%. For the best effects, make sure the first email you send to HCPs contains a video, as this increases click-through rates by a whopping 96%.
As you can see, video is immensely powerful for email pharma marketing. The best part – you can reuse the videos from your emails on other channels.
They’re inexpensive
If you think that creating videos for the purpose of pharma marketing has to be expensive – you’re badly mistaken. In terms of return on investment, there is hardly a better way to invest in digital pharma marketing.
One of the reasons for this is that you can see where each cent goes, once you create a video and run a campaign. For instance, you can know the following:
- which physician clicked on your video
- which part of the video was the most engaging
- where the physicians’ attention drops off
- what the physician did right after watching the video
- if the physician shared the video, and on which channels
Depending on the marketing goals you have, this setup allows you to track attribution with ease. Once physicians start contacting you for details about your publication, you’ll quickly be able to see that in terms of pure ROI, videos beat reprints, email campaigns, sales rep calls, and all other digital marketing channels.
For example, if you have 1000 reprints done, there is no way to track how many physicians received them, whether they read them, how many pages they’ve read, and what they’ve done after it. Because of the overwhelming amount of papers they have to read, many physicians read only the abstract to get the basic idea, without going into too much detail.
Videos simply work
What’s the one aspect of your pharma marketing strategy that influences the most physicians? Whatever it may be, we guarantee you that video can do better, and with better ROI.
Let’s talk about specific numbers and see why video is worth your time and money. First off, research by Aberdeen Group says that video marketers get 66% more qualified leads annually. Moreover, their brand awareness increased by at least 54%. Wyzowl’s 2017 research reveals that 83% of marketers who use video think it gives good ROI. Most interestingly, 73% of people not using video as a marketing strategy bought a product after watching a video about it.
According to research, 96% of viewers think of videos as useful when making a decision online, whether it’s a purchase or something else.
When it comes to visibility, having a video can do wonders for your SEO. In fact, if a video is present on your page, it can drive up to a 157% increase in organic traffic from Google. If you want to get really specific, you can use video on your landing pages. As a result, the landing page is 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google results. If you want hard metrics, we got you covered. By putting videos on your landing page, you can increase your conversions by more than 80%.
Physicians expect videos from you
Up to 82% of all consumer traffic by 2020 will come from video. Great news, if you’ve already begun using video for pharma marketing. As it stands, video is becoming the prevalent type of content, and your pharma brand needs to jump on board.
In fact, physicians spend at least 3 hours a week consuming video – a figure which will only increase in the future. HCPs are also actively looking for video materials, as it’s one of the top 5 types of content they search for on their mobile phones.
As pharma marketing evolves, so does the perception of HCPs. Namely, today’s physicians are twice more likely to watch a video about a new product than they were 5 years ago. Moreover, 81% of physicians watch educational medical videos online in 2018. Another research by Panopto states that 66% of physicians use video to stay on top of the latest clinical information.
However, does video have any impact on physician behavior? It does, and it’s quite significant. 49% of physicians who watch a video online state that it influences their clinical decisions. The reason for this can be the fact that the data from videos is easier to remember, as opposed to rehashed and repeated data from sales reps in their calls.
Videos can be edited easily
Once you’ve hired a reputable video marketing company to take care of video creation for you, you’ll be able to see the freedom and options that explainer videos provide.
With a few simple tweaks, you can try out different tonalities or voiceovers. Moreover, you can translate your explainer video to another language without putting in a ton of additional work. Alternatively, you can use subtitles and ensure that physicians can understand your message, no matter which language they use.
Videos provide relevant metrics
One of the biggest woes of using content for your pharma marketing is justifying the expenses. What’s the ROI of a blog post? How do you measure success? You can’t go much further than the number of visits on a single page. Measuring just the amount of traffic on a page is hardly a metric for measuring pharma marketing success. Inevitably, it is very hard to measure the success of written content for pharma marketing purposes.
Video, on the other hand, gives you so much info that you may be overwhelmed. As soon as a physician clicks on play, the tape starts rolling and you can start collecting data. Services such as Wistia (which we strongly recommend for hosting videos) allow for detailed insights into relevant metrics.
You can measure how many times your video was loaded and watched, and what your play rate is. Put simply, you can tell how many people who start the video end up finishing it. What’s more, you can use heatmaps to see which parts of the video were the most interesting to physicians watching it.
Speaking of which – knowing your target audience is half of the marketing battle. Compared to other types of content, video is excellent at gathering data on your viewers. You can capture data such as viewer location, the local time when they viewed it, how many videos they watched in total, their device type, the page they viewed the video on when they clicked on an annotation, and which parts they rewatched… The possibilities are endless. The best part – you can split-test all of these elements. Targeting specific physicians has never been easier.
Other pharma brands are ready for the future of digital pharma marketing
You may be thinking, the video does sound impressive on paper. But if my competition is not using it as a strategy, why would my pharma brand worry? In fact, there are plenty of reasons to worry, as well as jump on board.
As stated in a survey by We Are Social, 70% of marketers will include video as part of a marketing strategy in 2018. Those who are already using video only plan to amplify their efforts. Namely, 82% of marketers plan to spend more on video in 2018 than the year before.
However, not all is fine and dandy for video as a marketing format. As one content marketing report states, 64% of marketers claim that video is the most difficult type of content to make.
Over to you
Are you ready to make the leap and use video for your pharma marketing efforts? You don’t have to be part of 64% who are struggling to use video for marketing purposes. At BlueNovius, we can make all your pharma marketing dreams come true.
Your medical publication can be turned into a 90-second animated video laying out the most important data. No more reprints – just actionable bits of data that physicians can use immediately. You’ll have an easier time engaging with HCPs, as well as saving their precious time.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a medical explainer video – look no further. No matter the therapeutic area, BlueNovius creates captivating medical explainer videos that physicians and patients love. Watch as adherence rates go through the roof once patients clearly understand their disease, diagnosis, and treatment.
Do you want to find out more about the future of digital pharma marketing? Interested in the latest news, tips, and insights on pharma? Subscribe to our blog and we will deliver the freshest pharma content to your inbox, once per week. No spam – we promise.
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