While multichannel has been thrown around a lot as an expression in pharma marketing, very few companies have come to fully utilize their capabilities across different channels. Limited to constraints such as time and staff, pharma companies often focus on a single channel, while leaving others up to a chance, or not covered at all. Here are some proven tactics to improve your multi-channel marketing and engage more physicians.
Automate as much as you can
The trouble with multi-channel marketing and digital, in general, is that there’s a constant need for new material. Especially in multi-channel, this is a necessity, since one piece of collateral or a campaign can be easily re-used across channels. This puts a strain on pharma marketing teams that need to produce new campaigns at a rapid pace.
The way to go around this is to create templates. As we’ve written before, the best way to automate your pharma marketing processes is to create an outline that will be approved by the legal team. Once the outline is ready, it can be turned into a template to be reused across channels – website, email, webinars, and social media presence.
This approach kills two birds with one stone. First, it solves the problem of creating large volumes of content. Second, it makes approval from the legal teams a lot easier to handle.
Take care of your content storage and distribution
Now that you have all that content available, it’s time to get it out there and seen by physicians. There’s only one problem – the marketing and sales team sometimes seem like they’re speaking different languages. In fact, one research states that team misalignment (particularly marketing and sales) has a scattered brand impression as an effect.
In order to get around this issue, it’s crucial to build a centralized content platform in the cloud with access to all relevant stakeholders.
Promotion
When it comes to promotion, many pharma marketers use the same methods as sales tactics. That means lots of effort and being present to the point of being considered pushy by their target audiences. Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this is not an approach favored by physicians.
To start off, focus on your email marketing strategy. It’s still by far the most popular method for HCP communication, but not for pure product promotion. As research has shown, physicians want to use email to get industry and product updates to replace in-person visits by sales representatives.
Email is the cornerstone of a good promotion strategy in pharma, and to couple it with templating mentioned above, it’s useful to utilize approved email. Not only will it be easier for your regulatory team, but for the marketing team as well.
Focus on digital instead of in person, as studies have consistently shown that physicians prefer to research themselves online instead of having sales reps in their offices. In fact, the latest data says that just 12% of physicians would agree to meet a rep in person. Moreover, 90% of healthcare professionals refuse to take cold calls for the same reasons.
Clearly, content needs to be delivered to the physicians instead of pushed through aggressive marketing efforts of the old age.
Reuse instead of creating new content
One of the biggest challenges for digital marketers in the pharma industry is the constant need for new content. Instead of coming up with a new campaign for different platforms, why not reuse existing content? By successfully leveraging what you already have available and adapting to different channels, your marketing teams will spend less time creating new content and more time on promotion to physicians. Do you have a reprint? Create a Pubexplainer. Do you have patient material? Create a MedExplainer.
Analyze your success
Did you know that the majority (65%) of all content strategists don’t measure their content’s performance and return on investment? After all the hard work invested by the marketing and sales team, it’s time to analyze your performance and see what’s working well.
Connect with a pharma marketing expert
If your content isn’t performing well and you’re looking for a new asset to add to your multichannel mix, you can try out PubExplainer, the medical explainer solution that turns your scientific publication into an engaging explainer video. These short videos can be shared across channels and they have a proven track record of engaging physicians. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us today to schedule a free demo with one of our experts!
