Every year, pharma marketers come up with new ways of making an impact and reaching larger physician audiences. Especially in digital pharma marketing, there are constant attempts to find the channel with the highest possible return on investment. There’s recently been a new contender for the crown – explainer video.
Today, let’s find out why explainer videos are effective, what their main strengths are and why your pharma company needs to add them to its marketing toolset as soon as possible.
Physicians have shorter attention spans
Getting physicians to read huge walls of text was significantly easier a decade ago, and there’s one key reason. Over the past few decades, the human attention span has shrunk by one-third, so the average person’s attention span is down from 12 to 8 seconds
Standing out with purely text content for physicians in 2018 and beyond is going to get harder by the day. When they’re online, it takes mere seconds for physicians to click away from a page if they don’t find the text engaging.
Explainer videos aren’t just a few seconds long – in fact, most that we make for our clients are around 90 seconds. However, those first couple of seconds is enough to grab physicians’ attention.
No, they work because all it takes is a few seconds for them to engage physicians. As they start reading a scientific publication, a physician will be tempted to click a link, image, banner, or simply go to a new page. An explainer video draws the physician in and grabs their attention in those first 8 seconds, so they stick around until the end.
Explainer videos can easily be shared
If your company has a really good scientific publication and wants to send it out to as many HCPs as possible, there are a few routes you can take. The most traditional one includes sending out publication reprints or distributing them via your reps and MSLs. Pro – you’re making sure physicians get the reprints; Con – it’s not easy to get into physicians’ offices. Finally, physicians barely read the reprints anymore – research says that for 60% of papers, they just read the abstract.
The alternative is to send out a link to a digital version of the paper. Pro – it’s cost-effective; Con – it will get lost in a sea of other links and promotional emails physicians receive on a daily basis.
How does an explainer video come into play? It can be shared in both ways we just mentioned. Once your rep or MSL is in the office, they can show the explainer video to the physician in their e-detail. Moreover, they can send the video immediately to their email so that the physician can share it with their colleagues.
That’s not the end of the road. Compared to traditional pharma marketing strategies, the explainer video has one thing that really sets it apart – it’s the epitome of multichannel marketing. Besides visits and emails, an explainer video can be shared on websites, on LinkedIn, and perhaps most interestingly, at conferences.
This also brings about another interesting point – an explainer video is an ideal tool for an omnichannel marketing approach. Since there’s hardly a channel where they cannot be used, one and the same explainer video can be used on multiple occasions, with no or minimal adjustments.
An explainer video provides a measurable return on investment
One of the major reasons for pharma going digital is the ability to track and measure absolutely everything. In this digital world, tactics such as print ads and reprints no longer have a place.
One could argue that you can measure the return on written digital content, but the attribution is not too easy to figure out. Explainer video sits on the other end of the spectrum. This medium allows pharma companies to track multiple data points, such as:
– The number of views
– Average length viewed
– Viewer information (location, device, email, traffic source…)
– The highest point of engagement
– Action is taken once the video is finished
Depending on your campaign and the goals you’ve set, you can easily calculate your return on investment for your digital marketing spend with an explainer video.
Physicians will expect an explainer video from you
At the moment of writing this post, the average physician spends about three hours every week watching videos. You may be thinking that this is just an ongoing trend and that it will be gone soon. However, predictions are that soon enough, 82% of all internet traffic will come from video.
If you’re still not convinced that an explainer video is exactly what physicians want, here are some more numbers.
Currently, HCPs are twice more likely to watch a video about a product than five years ago. And as the latest research states,
81% of all physicians watch educational medical videos online, including explainer videos.
Here’s the best part: an explainer video actually works. According to data from research, 49% of physicians state that watching a video online influences their clinical decisions.
Create your new explainer video today
At BlueNovius, we know the power of video, as we’ve witnessed success from many of our clients throughout the years. Working with over 50 pharma companies from all over the world, we created and perfected the ideal digital pharma marketing solution. It’s called PubExplainer, and it’s a medical explainer video solution that helps pharma companies present their publications in an engaging, 90-second video format.
If you’d like to learn more about PubExplainer, get in touch with us and we’ll set up a demo call for you.
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