Pharmaceutical Digital Marketing Strategies for OTC Brands Posted on May 16, 2024November 12, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin According to the FDA, there are up to 300,000 OTC drugs marketed in the U.S. alone. Without a solid digital marketing strategy in place, how can you expect to stand out from such a massive crowd, drive sales, build brand awareness, and cultivate long-term customer loyalty? Consumers are increasingly turning to digital channels for research, purchases, and engagement with brands. Rising healthcare costs have led to a surge in self-medication, with 27% of patients across 17 international markets choosing OTC drugs over prescription drugs due to expense, as revealed by a YouGov survey. This trend presents opportunities for OTC brands to connect with consumers through tailored digital experiences. Source: YouGov To stand out in this highly saturated OTC market, you must embrace digital transformation, harness data-driven insights, and deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences that resonate with modern consumers’ needs and tastes. In this article, you will discover digital marketing strategies for your OTC brand to help you establish meaningful relationships with your target audiences. What is a Digital Marketing Strategy? In the past, businesses used to communicate with their target audience through marketing channels like television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and outdoor advertising. Digital marketing strategy refers to using online channels (such as your website, social media, organic search, paid ads, and other platforms) to improve your online presence and reach your marketing goals, like enhancing your business’ visibility and gaining new customers. Let’s explore the topic further with this digital marketing strategy example. Imagine you want to increase traffic to your website by 25% in the next 12 months. First, you would define your target audience analyzing everything from their demographics to interests. Then you should pick the digital channels you’re going to involve. For instance, paid social media advertising, Google search ads, and content marketing. Your key strategies would be: Paid social and Google ads to drive website traffic for high commercial intent searches Use social media posts and videos to nurture the audience and showcase products Create high-quality blog content optimized for SEO to build organic traffic You can test social media ad creatives and audiences, multivariate landing page optimization, monitor top organic traffic sources, and put an emphasis on what works best. To help you launch and successfully run omnichannel campaigns while having a strategic overview, you can employ content experience platforms like eWizard. Importance of Digital Marketing for OTC Brands OTC drugs are essential for public health as they provide accessible solutions for common health problems. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the eCommerce sales of OTC drugs spiked, with people giving preference to shopping online over going to physical stores due to its convenience and competitive pricing. With the consumers’ tendency to search for information online before making purchasing decisions, OTC brands must leverage digital marketing to reach customers where they spend their time to educate them on their products. Digital marketing enables you to build closer relationships with your customers through multiple channels like your website and social media. Moreover, you can precisely target specific consumer segments, based on demographics, behavior, and interests using digital marketing tools. They allow to create personalized messaging and product suggestions, enhancing relevance and engagement. On top of that, with robust analytics OTC brands can accurately measure engagement, conversions, and ROI, as well as continuously optimize their strategy based on their performance data. As eCommerce disrupts traditional retail, OTC brands must differentiate themselves from the competition through compelling digital brand experiences, content, and consumer value-adds their competitors may lack. Besides, digital marketing can be highly cost-efficient compared to traditional channels while enabling OTC brands to reach a much larger audience through organic, paid, owned, and earned media strategies. Main Components of Digital Marketing Strategy An effective digital marketing strategy should consist of well-thought-out paid advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and web analytics. Let’s discuss them one by one. Paid Advertising Numerous platforms can be utilized for paid advertising. Each of the platforms may have different ad types available, like search ads, display ads, native ads, video ads, and others. This diverse range of paid advertising formats enables brands to develop integrated strategies that span several platforms in order to meet awareness, engagement, and conversion goals. Social Media As of 2022, it was estimated that over 4.59 billion people were using social media worldwide, and spending almost 2.5 hours there daily. This is why OTC brands have to leverage social media in their marketing efforts. They can reach a wide audience there and raise awareness about their products and their benefits. Moreover, social media provides a channel for direct interaction and customer engagement. SEO Search engine visibility is paramount for success in today’s digital landscape. Google Health Vice President reports that an estimated 7% of Google’s daily searches are health-related, equivalent to 70,000 every minute. Both patients and doctors look up and research products, symptoms, treatments, and insurance questions using search engines. Web Analytics Web analytics provide quantitative insights that OTC brands need to refine their digital presence, enhance user engagement, and drive conversions. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics show how people interact with the brand’s website and content, which includes metrics like traffic sources, popular pages, conversion paths, and bounce rates. In addition, analytics can reveal where your visitors tend to abandon the website or purchase process which will let you know where optimization is needed. How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy Creating a proper digital marketing strategy takes experience and expertise, so be ready to test your theories, and don’t get discouraged if your first campaign doesn’t get the traffic you wish. With so many other brands competing for customers’ attention, it’s crucial to consider what can set your product apart and highlight it in your marketing content. And if you want to involve experts to create your digital marketing strategy, drop a message to Viseven. Let’s go through the key steps to creating a pharma digital marketing strategy. Determine your target audience Digital marketing allows you to reach new audiences. However, not all of them are going to be interested in what you have to offer. You need to conduct market research to identify your buyer personas whose interests and preferences match your offerings. Personalization is a big trend with consumers now, so you also have to think about segmenting your target audience into smaller groups to customize your messaging for each of them. Engage and educate through content Content marketing is essential for your brand for a few reasons. First, well-optimized content can bring you organic traffic from search engines, spreading the word about your brand and products. Secondly, both providers and patients use the internet to find information about symptoms, treatments, and products. By providing them with interesting and educational content targeted to various groups, you can not only address their pain points and concerns but also establish your brand as a thought leader. In-depth blog articles, innovative email marketing campaigns, and engaging social media posts can all play a crucial role in your content strategy. Additionally, high-quality content helps build trust and credibility with your audience, positioning your brand as a reliable source of information. Moreover, content marketing can support your lead generation efforts by attracting and nurturing potential customers through the sales funnel. Finally, it allows you to showcase your expertise, differentiate your brand, and foster stronger connections with your target audience, ultimately driving better brand awareness, loyalty, and conversions. Gather and utilize data The beauty of digital marketing for OTC brands lies in the wealth of data it generates. Website analytics reveal traffic sources, user behavior, content performance, and audience insights vital for optimization. Search data displays consumer intent and common queries to guide content strategy. Social media listening unlocks brand sentiment, product perceptions, and messaging opportunities. During marketing campaigns creation, OTC marketers can leverage this data to shape targeting, develop resonant messaging, enhance user experiences, plan digital marketing tactics, and measure performance. An insights-driven approach fueled by tangible consumer data allows continual campaign refinement and improvement over time. Current Landscape of the OTC Pharma Market The OTC drugs market size is estimated at $137.39 billion in 2024, and is expected to hit $163.10 billion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 3.49% during the forecast period. The OTC drug market is witnessing substantial growth, primarily driven by the escalating costs of prescription medications. As healthcare expenses continue to soar, consumers are increasingly turning to self-medication with OTC drugs as a more affordable alternative. According to Bloomberg, the average American spends an astounding $1,300 per person annually on prescription drugs, with the launch price of a new drug in the US reaching an average of $180,000 for a year’s supply in 2021. This massive rise in Rx drug prices is fueling the demand for self-care solutions through OTC medications. Self-medication with OTC drugs is becoming a global phenomenon, with prevalence rates ranging from 11.2% to 93.7% across different countries and target populations. This growing trend towards self-care is further propelling the growth of the OTC drug market. As the cost of prescription medications continues to rise, consumers are embracing the accessibility and cost-effectiveness of OTC drugs, enabling them to manage minor illnesses and maintain their overall well-being without breaking the bank. This shift in consumer behavior, coupled with the increasing approval of new OTC drug options, presents a significant growth opportunity for the industry. Furthermore, online sales of OTC medicines through e-pharmacies, retailer websites, and marketplaces like Amazon are booming, necessitating an omnichannel marketing approach for brands. To remain competitive in this landscape, OTC pharma brands must leverage digital marketing capabilities, focus on consumer education, eCommerce enablement, and innovative product offerings aligned with self-care trends. Best OTC Pharmaceutical Marketing Strategies Here are several ideas that can help you map out and execute a more efficient digital marketing strategy. Think Outside the Box with Mobile 56% of shoppers globally use their smartphones to shop or research items while in a store. The majority of pharma brands already provide mobile-optimized sites to boost their mobile presence. However, few utilize mobile in creative or innovative ways. This is your chance to set yourself apart from the competition. For instance, Pfizer offers a mobile app that allows patients to track their injections, log symptoms, set medication reminders, and access a wide range of resources to help them set and maintain goals throughout treatment. Engage with Health Apps & Wearable Gadgets The adoption of mobile health and fitness applications witnessed a surge in recent years, propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, these apps were utilized by 23% of consumers in the United States. However, specific categories like health tracking, workout apps, and meditation apps saw broader adoption, reaching approximately 36% of the U.S. consumer base. When it comes to wearable tech, in 2021 it was estimated that about 526 million wearable devices were shipped globally, with more than 80% of consumers believing that wearables are beneficial to their health. OTC brands can tap into the health tech-savvy user base by leveraging targeted advertising within popular health and fitness apps, as well as forming partnerships with leading health tech companies and influencers in the digital wellness space. Allocate Resources to Both Time-Specific & Ongoing Marketing Efforts Undeniably, OTC medications are intrinsically linked to seasonal cycles as consumer needs fluctuate throughout the year. Flu, colds, allergies, and sports-related ailments resonate with different consumer segments during their respective peak seasons. To capitalize on these cyclical demands, OTC brands can implement ongoing marketing activities and tailored time-specific activations. These initiatives not only foster brand loyalty by addressing timely health concerns but also provide a strategic avenue to highlight the seasonal benefits of their OTC offerings. Ongoing marketing efforts can include subscription-based models or loyalty rewards that incentivize repeat purchases aligning with the ebb and flow of seasonal ailments. Targeted time-specific activations can consist of a multi-channel marketing blitz, spanning digital marketing campaigns, in-store promotions, influencer collaborations, and educational content tailored to the relevant health issues of that period. Develop and Share Valuable Online Content Content is king, and it’s vital for all industries, especially for pharma where people may rely on it to improve their well-being. With consumers’ tendency to research their symptoms and possible treatment online, it’s crucial to share valuable content about your products, what they do, and how and whom they help. Consider branching out from just full-blown blog articles to videos and infographics to bring variety and originality to your content. Your content distribution plan is of the same significance. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if your audience doesn’t see it, so make sure to think through your distribution and repurposing plan. Utilize Social Media Platforms With approximately 50% of users considering health information obtained from social media as reliable, OTC pharma brands have a prime opportunity to utilize this channel effectively. OTC brands can reach out to this large, health-conscious audience by sharing educational content on health conditions and self-care tips, highlighting product information and usage guidance, engaging with customers through responsive service, collaborating with influencers for credible endorsements, gathering consumer insights through social listening, running targeted advertising campaigns, and seamlessly integrating social efforts with their broader omnichannel strategy. For instance, P&G’s Vicks and Metamucilt have vibrant presences on Twitter and Instagram. Vicks frequently shares cold/flu season remedies and collaborates with influencers, while Metamucil focuses on digestive health through recipes and expert advice on social. Summing Up At the end of the day, the digital world opens up a huge playing field for OTC pharma brands to really connect with their customers in new and innovative ways. But it’s not just about blasting promotions everywhere. It’s about using data and consumer insights to have totally relevant, engaging conversations across channels like search, social media, and eCommerce. As consumers keep evolving, craving more personalized experiences, a focus on preventive wellness, and digital self-care solutions, the brands that truly tap into the digital marketing game will be the ones calling the shots. They’ll have built genuine relationships and empowered people to take control of their health journeys. The future belongs to the brands that can adapt quickly, get creative and innovative, while always putting the consumer first in their digital approach.
Interactive Email Marketing Benefits: How to Win the Race in the Pharma Industry Posted on July 29, 2022November 19, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin Email is one of the core channels for building and developing communication between pharma brands, patients, and HCPs. As a marketing tool, email allows delivering well-targeted messages to the recipients, highlighting the key point of your emails and it is a fast and simple way to communicate with your target audience. Thoughtfully designed email campaigns may benefit pharma brand image in multiple ways: Increase brand awareness Increase sales Develop trust Increase traffic Communication automation Today pharma email marketing has the capacity to reach patients, clients, and HCPs on a personal level, giving brand sales the opportunity to create a close connection with the audience. At the same time, large-scale email campaigns designed for reaching more generalized target audiences, allow marketers to work with customers on an international level. Modern marketing practices in pharma and life sciences industries show that email marketing is not only a powerful standalone tool but also has to serve as a vital part of the omnichannel approach as well. However, many marketing specialists working in the pharma sphere nowadays face multiple obstacles when it comes to a better understanding of the effect of email communication. As well, many marketing practices and tools frequently turn out to be task-irrelevant or simply obsolete. And when it comes to international campaigns, the quality of communication can be compromised due to the large target audience volumes and the lack of data which may result in complete entropy for email marketing managers. All these major concerns witness that pharma companies require a powerful email platform, that will allow its users to make informed decisions. The modern pharma market requires an approach reaching above “universal”, above non-industry-specific tools and pre-omnichannel marketing conventions. Nowadays it is not a question of whether it will be a benefit to use AI and ML-based algorithms for reaching high personalization in mail targeting, but a necessity recognized by both pharma brands and top MarTech companies working in the field. In the present blog, we will highlight some of the top obstacles that stand before sales representatives in pharma and will focus on the major directions of marketing innovations that help break through the noise and make thoughtful analytics-motivated solutions. But let’s start with some of the key specifics of email marketing for pharmaceuticals, so we can understand the challenges better. What is interactive email? Interactive email is, basically, an approach in digital marketing that allows creating complex digital letters featuring such interactive elements as dynamic templates and AMP elements. The other important element of the interactive email ecosystem is the analytical tools suite that helps gather relevant data, process, segment and employ it for better personalization of your email campaigns and customer behavior prediction. For businesses, interactive email is a great opportunity to boost email marketing and contribute to the digital maturity of the brand. Email marketing in Pharma: Channel-specific features Marketing approach and, namely, email marketing codes are, of course, not the same for all industries. When we are talking about the pharma and life sciences field, it is important to understand the smallest nuances, to get a clear understanding of how the workflow can be optimized. MLR requirements Every piece of content and information provided by pharma marketers has to go through a legal audit before the information can be published. This requirement adds a certain complexity to the production of big volumes of content, increasing its value and time required for production. However, with the help of advanced digital content practices like module and reusable content approaches, the marketing team can save resources by smartly dividing content into semantic modules that can be used multiple times across different channels. Hybrid marketing approach When we are talking about marketing in pharma companies it is also important to keep in mind that conventional, face-to-face marketing methods are still playing an important role in communication between different stakeholders. Hence, all digital marketing efforts should stay in line with the non-digital activities, complementing each other within an omnichannel approach. This means that effective marketing strategies imply the integration of all related activities and all marketing agents, whether they communicate with customers via digital channels or in person. Various stakeholders in the patient journey Sometimes the sales funnel can be a little bit complex when it comes to marketing services and goods in the pharma industry – multiple HCPs like doctors and pharmacists are important agents that may influence the decision made by the patient. This means that each valuable groups of influence have to be targeted at various levels, to build and support effective communication with all stakeholders involved in the process. Privacy matters Quite often the most valuable information that can be used by the marketing team to draw up a roadmap and better understand the market is classified. When we are talking about the healthcare industry, we face multiple information-protective legislations aimed at concealing patients’ personal data and other sensitive information. However, modern AI-based algorithms are frequently applied to get a better understanding of the market and the audience based on information collected by your system. This means that valuable data is not unreachable, still, it requires some special solutions to be extracted. Interactive Email Campaigns by Viseven Interactive Emails Solution is a specialized tools kit designed for building effective strategies. With more than 12 years of experience in the MarTech sphere, Viseven has built numerous omnichannel marketing strategies, utilizing all advanced marketing automation platforms and essential analytics. Interactive Emails functionality can be integrated with the eWizard content development ecosystem opening opportunities for automation of the content production process, implementation of a modular approach, and achieving cost and time reduction. So, let’s have a sneak peek at some of the key Interactive Emails features and find out how they help marketers to break through the noise and deliver the key ideas to the users in a most engaging way. Analytics and performance metrics As we already mentioned, advanced analytics is crucial for the pharma industry, since the spere has numerous legislations aimed at the protection of the personal data of the patient. However, it does not mean that marketers have to stay completely “blind”, once they can rely on advanced behavioral data collected by AI-powered algorithms. Interactive Emails solution allows collecting basic metrics like delivery rate or click-to-open rate, processing large volumes of behavioral data, and coming up with a better understanding of the target audience. Dynamic Email Theme Template Dynamic Templates is a technology that, foremost, helps to save time and resources spent on the production of email content. The major benefits of this approach are: Reduced number of template archives Single email master template The production time is reduced by 20% The present Interactive Emails feature is very much rooted in the modular approach to content production. It means that you will be able to use multiple reusable content modules like MLR-approved segments or you can make edits to the master email, automatically editing all the subordinate emails at once. This interactive email approach facilitates email content production and helps pharma businesses to free time for a creative part. AMP Emails (Interactive elements) AMP Email (Accelerated Mobile Pages Emails) – is a feature that helps to add dynamic elements to the email design. AMP features primarily serve two major purposes – to make your pharmaceutical emails more engaging and to organize visual information and written content in a more appealing and structured manner. With the help of AMP, the designers can add interactive visual elements, action buttons, gamification elements, mini-applications, etc. Also, an interactive email service allows inserting a customer survey. For example, surveys on user experience or a personalized questionnaire for clients and long-time subscribers. Nowadays, email marketing is almost unthinkable without advanced design elements that help you to add interactivity to your design, break through the noise and make a strong impression on the recipients. Email automation This important module allows sending automated interactive emails triggered by some of the actions made by the subscribers. It is an essential feature that is crucial for providing fast and relevant feedback to the clients who are already engaged in their journey. Automated emails also serve for client retention, informing about policy changes or events. Automated emails also allow personalizing email content, with the help of user data collected by your system. AI and Machine Learning Algorithms Interactive Emails Solution help marketers take the personalization of communication to the next level, being able to collect essential behavioral data which also contributes a lot towards the automation of all processes. For example, ML algorithms help analyze the attributes of each subscriber for better management of the customer journey. In this case, every next channel of communication can vary in each next journey, depending on system recommendations. Also, AI and ML-based algorithms may help set the best sending time for each subscriber, which helps maximize the efficiency of the email campaign. And with a reliable database, the marketing team can implement the omnichannel approach to its furthest extent, introducing prediction models and personalization on a scale of each individual subscriber. Interactive Emails within an omnichannel approach As you can see, Interactive Email is a powerful tool that can be used for building a solid email marketing strategy based on an innovative approach to email marketing. However, you can get even more out of your digital campaigns, once you learn to orchestrate all channels and manage the content according to the omnichannel approach, which implies the unification of all marketing channels into a single ecosystem. The great advantages of this level of system integrity are the ability to assemble the global marketing data and to create marketing campaigns that use several channels of communication which allows reaching higher engagement rates among your audience. The omnichannel approach is proven to provide a 20% higher click-through rate and a 250% higher engagement rate in the pharma industry. One of the main conceptual points of the approach is that unified channels create more customer journey opportunities, while the well-targeted, personalized content also helps reduce the cost of each contact acquired. The Interactive Emails by Viseven are fully integrated within the eWizard Platform, which allows marketers to build global omnichannel campaigns, orchestrating multiple digital and non-digital channels via a single management ecosystem. Remember that content is king Interactive Email Solution can do a lot to help you optimize email strategy, boost your omnichannel marketing efforts and provide you with relevant data. However, the content still remains the key element of the success of your email marketing. No matter how well-targeted and aesthetically sophisticated your mail is, how good it is in terms of interactivity if the subject line does not resonate with the interests and needs of the receiver. That’s why we also included several essential tips for content production you may find helpful. Goal and task of pharmaceutical email marketing: Email is not a blog, neither it is a white paper or a complex guide. That’s why you need to define the main goal and task of the email, so you will have a clear vision of what exact information you want to communicate. The major goal of a marketing team is to lead the customers through the journey and reach the expected results. At the same time, the task of the email can be far narrower. It is defined by the key influence that the message is expected to make. We can designate the following key tasks of email in the pharma: Awareness Engagement Registration Acquisition Retention Special The key influence, in other words, the task of the email, will define the style and tone of content you provide. Also, a clear understanding of the email marketing objectives helps to manage your content according to the mission it serves, segment and store your content according to its major purpose. Content testing There is no other universal way in email marketing to find out if your headline is really killing it, rather than to test it in the field. When planning a large-scale campaign, it is important to test your content – define the most clickable headlines, engaging core text, eye-catching interactive elements and define the most effective letter from the point of your strategies and goals. Simple A/B testing will help to increase the efficiency of the headline and express the main point of the letter in a clear manner. When your digital reaches a certain level of maturity, the data acquired during testing will also contribute to your global research data assets. Overview Nowadays it is no longer the question of whether pharma and life sciences industries need to boost their digital presence or not since it is becoming obvious that the role of digital is growing faster than many businesses manage to understand it. Since conventional door-to-door marketing can’t offer solutions for all the challenges the pharma sphere faces today, the importance of digital communication grows dramatically. Viseven interactive digital solutions designed specifically for carrying out marketing efforts in the sphere can offer all the required tools for building an effective marketing strategy for your pharma brand. Learn more about Viseven MarTech solutions for pharma and life sciences industries and how your business can benefit from them. If you have any questions about interactive email marketing for pharmaceuticals, in particular, fill out the form below and our representative will contact you with more information about Viseven products and solutions.
Healthcare Content Marketing Essentials: Channels and Strategies Posted on July 12, 2022November 12, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin Content is king. You’ve probably heard these three words many times. But only a few know that it’s the title of Bill Gates’ essay published on the Microsoft website in 1996. Here’s a little excerpt from it: The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies plan to create content for the Internet. Now, it’s finally true for healthcare and life sciences. In digital marketing, medical content is experiencing groundbreaking changes. Having gotten through the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized the pivotal role of technology in human interaction and business engagement. The Clinician of the Future 2023 report made by Ipsos reflects these significant changes: 73% of respondents see it as favorable for doctors to possess digital expertise, while 71% hold the same view for nurses; 48% consider it desirable for physicians to incorporate AI into clinical decision-making; 55% of clinicians view telehealth as favorable for serving as the primary method for routine checkups in the next 2-3 years, whereas 28% regard it unfavorably. More patients consider themselves customers. More healthcare professionals (HCPs) naturally require the same customer-focused attitude, where face-to-face visits are only the tip of the iceberg. It means that one of the healthcare marketers’ top priorities is to reconsider how they create and provide their medical content. Content management in Pharma has become more than just looking for the target audience and publishing suitable content; it now encompasses a holistic approach that integrates collaboration, data security, compliance, and many other elements. According to the State of Content Marketing 2022 report by Semrush, healthcare content marketing is in the top ten trending searches related to content marketing, with a volume of more than 40,000. If you regularly google the equivalent topics to become a medical content ninja, you’re in the right place. Regardless of your target audience — patients, doctors, pharmacists, or any other group of HCPs — this tutorial will help you: discover the channels that are most necessary in medical content marketing; learn the tips to get started with these channels; grasp the practices to optimize your content strategy in healthcare and make it successful. Prepare a cup of your favorite beverage, and let’s begin! Most Vital Channels for Medical Content Creation A customer-first paradigm has widened the boundaries of medical content, its creation, and its marketing. With that in mind, we highlighted the most vital channels for medical content marketers so far: Medical Websites; Medical Blogs; Landing Pages; mHealth Apps; SMS; Messaging Apps; Social Media; Email; Video. Let’s analyze every channel and see how you can use them within your content strategy. Optimize your medical website content A website is a primary channel for any non-commercial institution or business in healthcare and life sciences. Most of the website traffic comes from search engines. That’s why when you create medical website content, you should optimize it according to the search engine optimization (SEO) practice called on-page SEO or on-site SEO. Also, any specialist who creates medical content for websites should comply with three factors that affect the website quality: User experience (UX) is a set of practices applied to make websites more convenient to visit. In other words, UX is how people feel when engaging with a website and its content. Medical websites with better UX get more conversions; User interface (UI) is the way people interact with a website. The typical UI elements of a medical website are menus, fields, tabs, buttons, and beyond. This specific type of medical website content requires in-depth analysis and research before creating. The level of UX mostly depends on UI; Customer experience (CX) is an overall impression of customers over a business. In other words, CX is how a medical brand engages with its clients. Here’s where website content plays a crucial role, along with customer support. A medical website should have enough content resources to generate traffic and constantly increase it. There are three main types of medical website content resources you can use for that: Webinars. Generate leads by inviting professionals and non-experts to online events to discuss various topics and trends; Events. Tell how your team participates in offline healthcare events such as conferences and presentations; Blog. Post about your business and niche using multiple kinds of healthcare content. Become an authority with an SEO-friendly blog Blogging is the best way to grow a medical website organically. If you regularly fill a medical blog with organic healthcare content, you’ll get the most influential source for increasing your website audience. At a proper pace, website traffic will increase, leading to more readers and conversions. More conversions result in higher profit. Here’s how to produce relevant, captivating, and high-quality healthcare content for this channel: Master SEO techniques. Learn how search engines work to improve the content writing process and boost the positions of your medical content on search engine page results (SERPs). Start with search engine optimization basics such as crawling, indexing, ranking, keyword research, competitor analysis, and link building; Write on multiple topics. Divide your content into a few categories to make it varied and engaging. These categories can include short articles about news and updates in your company (its services and products), research-based long reads, infographics about industry trends, and beyond; Provide unique insights. Publish information that no one posted before to become an industry influencer. Google loves it when content writing on health has real value. It can be case studies about clinical research, articles that contain statistics, interviews with clients (or patients), and beyond; Post regularly. Create content plans and schedule articles every month. The more you post, the more traffic you can generate; Share content via social media and email. That’s how you’ll facilitate the growth of each channel; Be patient. Keep posting no matter what. Blogging brings benefits in the long run. Create landing pages to convert your leads A medical landing page is a single-page website where your leads land after you engage them with your medical content on any other marketing channel. The goal of a medical landing page is to convert a lead into a customer. A medical landing page content depends on its marketing objective. Must-have content elements for a medical landing page: A catchy headline that shows the value; A simple copy that evokes interest; An image that reflects the landing page goal; The lead form for filling the lead’s personal information; A call-to-action button for collecting the lead’s personal information. Develop a mobile app to increase the target audience As of 2024, the global smartphone user base is expected to reach 7.1 billion. In the United States alone, more than 90% of the population owns a smartphone. mHealth apps span various categories among the top five funded digital health sectors in 2023, with consumer demand steadily increasing. The mHealth market size is forecasted to reach $861.40 billion by 2030. Medical content development in mobile apps can increase the target audience of any institution or business that belongs to healthcare: Health apps can be helpful to users who want to improve their health conditions; Healthcare marketing apps can help marketers optimize their daily activities, such as task organization, team communication, customer engagement, results tracking, and beyond; Doctor apps can streamline the medical affairs of healthcare professionals of any kind. In such an app, doctors can store documentation, track patient visits, provide instructions, etc.; Patient apps can assist users in a clinic or hospital with health monitoring, medication reminders, and other features. Note: Viseven can develop a mobile health app of any type according to your requirements and needs. Use SMS as notifications Short Message Service or SMS is a traditional medical content channel used by HCPs to send: Critical information like health alerts or test results; Educational information like diet or pregnancy tips; Reminders about appointments or prescription refills; Feedback collection requests. SMS sending recommendations: Choose the best sending time; Send only the information that has value. Boost customer experience with messaging apps As a decent alternative to SMS, messengers or messaging apps are an effective medical content channel to generate high-quality leads and make customer communication more personal. Here are a few tips to help your company connect with customers in conversation: Develop live chat with a chatbot for your medical website. Boost customer experience and optimize the communication for visitors searching for simple answers for basic information; Enable live chat widgets on your medical website. Allow customers to chat via the platforms they like. For instance, you can add Messenger and WhatsApp chat widgets to your medical website; Test messaging ads. Launch targeted advertising campaigns as an alternative to social media ads. Targeting online ads via messengers can be a profitable opportunity to boost marketing results. For example, Messenger ads can have 61% higher message-per-reach than photo ads on Facebook. When creating content for your messaging ads: Keep a copy short; Use visuals that attract attention. When answering your customers in messaging apps, don’t forget to: Respond quickly to gain their trust; Keep the conversation personal and friendly. Boost social media to build stronger connections Social media is an extraordinary tool that allows medical marketers to re-establish relationships with their audiences using a variety of content formats on multiple platforms. Three factors determine any medical social media strategy: Social media platforms. Before creating medical content for social media, figure out which platforms are the most important for your clients (or patients); Content formats. You’ll need to find the formats to bring more likes and impressions to your accounts. It can be anything from a text publication with a visual to an audio podcast; The type of content. In addition to creating organic posts for free, you can use an advertising platform like Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager to target different audiences with online ads based on particular advertising objectives. If you want to succeed in creating social media content for healthcare, always listen to the feedback you get in the form of comments and messages, use a positive tone of voice, and be simple and precise. Here are a few important content touchpoints: Inform. Tell the news, schedule events, and do everything for everyone to stay up to date; Educate. Provide professional tips on the topics related to your healthcare niche; Inspire. Share reviews of satisfied clients (or patients), write human behind-the-scenes stories about your business and beyond; Support. Answer people who contact your profiles directly. Have a plan for medical content sent via email Email has always been a tried-and-tested channel in the medical world. However, the laws that worked a few years back have no power anymore. Even die-hard marketing professionals should accept that the email creation process in healthcare has become more consumer-centric. If you’re a rookie in sending such emails, here are a few basic practices to get started: Learn email marketing metrics. They’ll help you measure the success of your email campaigns. The primary metrics are open rate, click rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, spam score, return on investment (ROI), customer lifetime value (CLV), and cost per acquisition (CPA); Choose an email marketing platform. That’s the place where you’ll create and optimize your email campaigns; Segment your audience. It’s the first practice you should exercise once you choose your platform and set your goals. Email segmentation is necessary to send more relevant information and more specific offers; Experiment all the time. This practice is called A/B testing. Test different audiences and content to improve your results. A newsletter is the backbone of the medical content you send via email. Before sending your newsletter, you must have a comprehensive content plan that should conform to three things: Content. Plan the content to send valuable and attractive offers. The main thing here is to learn how to balance information and benefits in your content marketing for healthcare; Time. Choose the best days of the week and time of the day to send your medical content. If you don’t know when to do it, A/B test it; Frequency. Experiment with your emails to know the number of sending days. When creating your medical email, take into account the following: Subject line. Keep it relevant, engaging, straightforward, and short; Preheader. Find the golden middle between its length and the information you need to send; Body text. Pick ready-made email templates from your platform. To get better results, test different templates to find the best option. Shoot videos with best solutions for content (for medical video) Video marketing is one of the most powerful methods to promote healthcare products and services. It’s a perfect alternative to television which has been a traditional patient engagement channel for years. According to HubSpot: 86% of businesses use videos as a marketing tool; 92% of marketers claim videos are an essential part of their strategy. Unless you want to launch advertising campaigns, video is a must-use healthcare marketing practice because it doesn’t require a budget. All you need is a smartphone with a last-generation camera and imagination. It’s okay to focus on several platforms, considering the information above. It depends on your goals, the time you’re ready to spend, and your brand voice. Here’s how content practices on the major platforms differ from each other: YouTube — longer content that reveals the subject with lots of facts and details; Instagram — Stories adorned with text and stickers or tiktokish Reels; TikTok — concise, amusing videos. Here are a few golden rules you need to know before getting started: Viewers got used to watching tons of content every day. Lure their attention within three seconds; Viewers love storytelling. Create stories, not promotions; Test live streaming as an alternative to short and longer videos; Watch the content of your competitors and other creators to get more expertise. Watch a lot. How to Optimize a Medical Content Strategy Medical content can have an immense impact when created and targeted right. But here’s the question. What is medical content writing, designing, and targeting in its essence? It’s a lot of conscious efforts and hard work because marketers must simultaneously engage with multiple channels and hundreds and even thousands of customers. However, two advanced techniques can significantly simplify everything. Build an omnichannel environment Omnichannel marketing is a set of activities that provide customers with a personalized experience by integrating all online and non-digital channels into a single environment. It allows companies to use medical content and fulfill their objectives more effectively thanks to the ability to: Find out what content channels customers use and plan their journey in advance; Segment customers into multiple target groups; Tailor personalized information to customers at the right time and with no spam; Build consistent communication and strong connections with customers Automate omnichannel activities with the help of a single marketing platform. Master modular content creation The modular approach is a marketing practice that streamlines omnichannel pharmaceutical content creation by breaking down content into the tiniest possible semantic pieces called modules. A content creator can reuse, interchange, and customize modules across multiple channels and target audiences, which allows: Reduce content production period; Cut production costs and allocate smaller pharma content marketing budgets; Come up with large-scale personalized segmentation strategies; Accelerate the Medical, Legal, and Regulatory (MLR) review process for pharma content; Dedicate more time to other advertising affairs. Monitor the performance of your content Track how well your medical content performs. How can a marketer always ensure your audience genuinely enjoys your content? First, define the metrics you will track, such as conversions or tracking. Then, choose the tools suitable for the type of content you work with. You can also use various other methods to gather information about the performance of your content, such as polls, surveys, reviews, and more. Keep up with industry trends Every month, at least one trend arrives that everyone will be talking about. So, make the most of current trends to attract more customers and engage with your audience. From personalized medicine to artificial intelligence, a myriad of topics creates tons of discussions all over the internet, and it’s worth adding them to your content marketing ideas for healthcare. Reach out to the community According to The State of Influencer Marketing 2024, 85% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing. Collaborate with experts in the field as much as possible. From writing blog posts in tandem to conducting interviews, collaborating with influencers and experts can significantly boost engagement and enhance your content’s credibility. By partnering with healthcare bloggers and professionals, you can also increase reach thanks to content creators’ large number of followers. End-to-End Pharma Content Management Solution If you want to use omnichannel and modular approaches to accomplish your goals with medical content. In that case, Viseven can develop a custom end-to-end healthcare content management system based on your strategy. Send us an email or a message via a contact form to get a full consultation, and we’ll get back to you shortly. Also, you’re welcome to test eWizard — our content experience platform where you can create modular medical content for multiple channels. Want to learn more about medical content and pharmaceutical content management? Fill out the form below to get a consultation!
Top Commercial Benefits of Modular Approach Posted on June 23, 2022November 19, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin The faster digitalization goes worldwide, the more pharma companies find out about new tools and approaches for digital self-promotion. Digitalization brought new challenges to any industry related to online activities and social influence. Pharma and the specialties of pharma’s marketing appeared to be under influence as well. Modern days marketers are as good as quickly they adapt and overcome today’s challenges. The most successful of them create strategies to foresee the challenges of tomorrow. This is the reason why the omnichannel approach becomes a powerful methodology in the arms of a farsighted marketer. Omnichannel allows to both cover the whole customer’s perspective on the internet, reaching out to him wherever it is comfortable for them across channels, and provide them with an engaging experience, being flexible with content and message delivery from channel to channel. Being able to build a solid and at the same time flexible content production management for omnichannel purposes sounds like a never-ending nightmare full of additional costs and creative hell. Well, it is a truly unique experience, but definitely not a nightmare, and the ‘additional costs and creative hell’ part is quite overrated. The name of this idea is the modular approach, and it works perfectly when it comes to covering omnichannel issues. It may sound obvious or boring, but standardization is key. The main idea of effective resource usage is to standardize everything you can and personalize the rest to create unique and consistent modular content. The perfect thesis for omnichannel interaction will contain the same key message you promote in every channel with a small difference in delivery as different digital channels may require a certain attitude. In a few words, you can adapt it, but the core always stays the same, as you have a pre-approved solution. Modular content approach with omnichannel strategies: why they fit each other What does modular content mean in Life Sciences? Modular content itself is a combination of an image and text, organized relative to the content needs describing the required information in so-called blocks. These blocks can be combined depending on channel and purpose requirements, so they can be adapted to prints, landing pages, social media, and others. The best part of it all is that these blocks are reusable, interchangeable, and customizable. In a nutshell, modular content is the complex solution that helps to significantly reduce time and costs for content production, adaptation, and time-to-market. Let’s figure out how exactly this approach influences the commercial part of digital marketing. Why is it great for commercial purposes? How to decrease Time-to-market (TTM)? The first of the most uncomfortable issues that happen during content production is time planning. Missed deadlines are not only about additional costs for content rework or else, but also more about being on time with your product, ideas, or messages before someone else do the same instead of you. Fast TTM directly affects your sales metrics, as being first with something valuable in a market means winning the competition. Often, missing deadlines happen because of misunderstandings while collecting requirements and sharing them with your content agency or marketing team. Each separate detail of your plan has a chance to be lost, forgotten, or misunderstood which leads to more time spent on explanation or reference search. At this point, the modular content becomes a savior as standardization and unified branding design leave no space for incorrect interpretation but gives a lot of opportunities to go through past activities and find something to reuse or redesign. Thanks to the unification, there’s no need to look out for a branding design code or create content from scratch — go on with pre-approved modular content, interpreting it to suit your needs. Simple as that, the modular approach significantly improves your ability to self-representation and engagement. How to calculate cost efficiency? How much money have you spent on content creation agencies? Most often, agencies charge you for every separate asset that needs to be coded, localized, or reworked. The cancellation fee may cost up to 10% of the initial production cost. Along with standard content production issues like an unclear technical task, missed deadlines, or changed priorities, the price for being relevant to your audience in life sciences may cause a heart attack as the lack of standardization only creates more questions. From a modular perspective, there’s a way to significantly reduce the number of spendings as the modular content is highly reusable when it comes to gathering materials and coding automation. Metadata tagging allows searching for a needed piece of delivery faster and easier than usual research on the content subject. Again, thanks to unified branding and design assets, the change of missed time frames are reduced along with the possible cancellations. It’s easier to foresee upcoming spending and know how to balance your budget right when you know exactly what your end content should look like. he changes management How to measure content effectiveness? The main purpose of any content is to attract HCPs and call them to action in perspective. Without a clearly defined approach, the creation of supporting materials for any pharma company’s strategy becomes a mess and it doesn’t perceive as a whole concept. Of course, we know that a personalized customer experience approach always raises the number of KPIs, but personalization becomes a struggle to guess whether you need to concentrate on a new design or focus on the message delivery or else. The modules give you consistency in content management system and customer journey. A clearly defined initial thesis plus a unified design code make a perfect foothold to personalize it further, whether we are talking about a channel or HCP audience personalization. Modular content works perfectly for both cases, as it helps to collect the whole library of templates filled with unique meta tags for quick search. It becomes easier to navigate through sales representatives and local teams; as a result, sales reps become more satisfied as clearly defined modules allow them to precisely address the key messages in pharma industry. Reasons to try the modular content strategy Ecosystem. Implementing modular content into your daily marketing routine means building a whole development structure that changes many production aspects. Once you design and create your core modular templates, you are open to a huge number of opportunities. For example, being able to collect and analyze content interaction data and adapt content pieces accordingly significantly increases content re-use rate and reduces development costs. Along with that, content creation teams spent less time on gathering materials and creating concepts, as well as the risk of small mistakes, and MLR decline possibility is significantly reduced due to established and preapproved modules. The pharma sales representatives would be happy to work with clearly defined messages, personalized for particular needs without extra effort. Communication quality and agility. Modern HCPs are used to going through most of the pharma sales funnel without the direct involvement of representatives. It’s your top priority to make this way as comfortable, unobtrusive and engaging as possible, so your sales department will be able to catch that lead, continue communication and turn the lead into a customer. When it comes to such complex marketing approaches, as omnichannel in pharma marketing, the modular content reveals its potential as a tool for creating standardized messages that serve to close all possible conceptual gaps between customer and expert. Resource spending reduction. The best fact about the commercial benefits of the modular approach is the reduction of spending, as the modular content is based on template re-use and personalization technology. Stable production chains guarantee clear technical requirements, availability of required assets, and specific direction vector for development processes. The speed of modular content creation and content reuse increases in a few times. As there’s no need to regularly invent new ways of reaching out to customers’ points of interest, so the cost for development for all channels is based on what we already have and what can we do to adapt it for a certain case. MLR review. As your content strategy is based on modular content, there’s nothing to worry about MLR review and approval. Usually, it becomes such a pain to create, deploy and approve the piece of content for the medical legal regulatory review process as you rarely know what can be rejected and how much it would cost you to fix it. An unstandardized content development process usually only delays the process as your content creators must redo the whole work from scratch. However, the standardized modular content, built on previous feedback and highlighted for MLR representatives, significantly help to speed up the approval verdict. If the modules are approved once, content reuse becomes the everyday solution for marketing teams. Since all pharma companies dream about delivering their ideas to customers, the innovation of the digital era serves to translate these dreams into reality with a help of technologies and creativity. The more ways you find to deliver your messages, the more ways there are to raise engagement and make it more conceptual, and viral across channels. From the commercial point of view, modular content is the perfect marketing tool to optimize your production and delivery processes, increasing reply and interaction rates. It may sound a bit complicated for starters, however we provide full support during this journey with our educational materials and effective change management. Start implementing the module approach now. Don’t know where to start – ask our experts. We are here to help and guide.
How to Solve MLR Hurdles with a Modular Approach Posted on May 4, 2022November 11, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin As the unstoppable technological progress flow changes the focus of our daily lives, it also introduces a fresh approach to the field of digital interactions. It becomes quite a challenge for life sciences organizations to keep up with modern marketing trends, especially concerning the highly regulated and compliant pharma and life sciences industries. If you are familiar with anything that is described as MLR review, you probably already know what it means. This acronym represents “medical legal and regulators review” — a process used in which life sciences companies ensure the compliance of their marketing and promotion materials with internal and external regulations and guidelines. Your business can use another name such as MMLR review or MRC review. What is Modular Content? A typical pharmaceutical company spends a massive amount of time and money creating an efficient marketing workflow that needs to go through the medical and legal regulatory review process to get approval later. This approval is the bottleneck moment in the marketing production process. If the medical, legal, and regulatory representative finds the marketing materials accurate, you’re a winner. In any other case, they send your great content back, and you spend more time and money editing the information provided. Essentially, the back and forth complex aspects of this feedback are the worst scenario for marketing content management with strict deadlines and a personal nightmare for content creative teams. This is where the modular content idea comes into play for pharma and life sciences companies and medical legal review MLR for short. The name should speak for itself: basically, a modular content strategy is built around a block of content that describes different data. Although it sounds simple in terms of marketing operations, this solution allows easy access for the medical legal regulatory review. It directly impacts the compliance and review processes. The modular content approach helps management spend less time and effort on content creation, not to mention the savings for the organization. In this article, we will discover what modular content is and how it helps to solve typical MLR hurdles for marketing content management. If you know anything described as an MLR review, you probably already know it. This acronym represents “medical legal regulatory review” — the MLR process in which life sciences companies ensure the compliance of their marketing and promotion materials with internal and external regulations and brand guidelines. MLR reviews are sometimes called MMLR review or MRC review – your business may use either one to describe regulatory compliance. The solution to the MLR review process Content creation takes a lot of time and money, and marketing teams spend a lot of resources trying to find an idea and make it attractive as well as sales-worthy for healthcare providers and the life sciences industry as a whole. When this highly creative and useful content gets cut or even declined by the MLR reviewers, it becomes a major pain for the entire marketing department or even the company. This pain is associated with hindering many processes in the organization, impacting the marketing production process, missing deadlines, work-overs, limiting efficient marketing workflow, and more budget spending. MLR review solutions can be unpredictable, so the modular content was created as a fresh approach to overcome typical MLR process hurdles. This approach makes the life of both MLR review team and content management creative teams – easier. A module is a stand-alone piece of digital content that consists of the main claim and supporting text or media. The easy-to-use blocks separate the content inside the module. These blocks can be predefined and organized according to the main content requirements and used in various forms, from SMM content and emails to interactive presentations like an eDetailer. Among the many advantages of the modules is the possibility of quick MLR reviews approval. Life Sciences Companies’ Problems Solved Time A large amount of original and creative marketing content management takes time to be created and thus approved. It can take up to a few weeks for MLR reviews and its representatives to check the compliance and approve every page or piece of your training materials or guidebooks. Suppose, for some reason, the medical legal and regulatory approvers declined a significant amount of content. In that case, you need to launch the production cycle once again: content needs to be reworked following the medical legal regulatory review solution and applied to the MLR review for approval once again. If everything is fine this time, you get your smooth process ready to go. Otherwise…welcome to yet another round. So, a module is a great solution to eliminate the many complex aspects — it needs to be approved to fit compliance and regulations only once. When it comes to creation, it won’t take time to use prepared assets and templates. Your organization needs to align it with the regulatory policy and send it for review. Once approved, such a module is automatically highlighted for medical legal regulatory compliance representatives, reducing the risk of MLR decline and starting rapid process innovation for life sciences and healthcare professionals. Workload fatigue Workload fatigue is simply a human factor in content management. When you begin to research and write a large amount of information, your eyes may get clouded with words and digits, and anyone in the organization can make an unconscious mistake. This is an unfortunate part of the process for both MLR and content makers: when the marketing team spends weeks creating something useful and original, an exhausted copywriter or designer makes one mistake that entirely spoils and wastes these work hours. Another example: a stressed and overloaded with tons of work regulatory compliance representative declines some presentations because of some small things they found incorrect. Both cases aren’t pretty for management in the face of processes like missing deadlines and budgets. The good thing is that module is built on expertise and templates. Template structure makes it easy to create and edit. Also, it uses only pre-approved information for medical regulators, so there’s no need for additional research or a second check once the module is approved. Such simplicity reduces the possibility of decline because of incorrect information or human error; accordingly, it makes the regulatory compliance i.e., MLR process, faster. Global to local scaling The pharmaceutical business is something that can be scaled up and down. Whether your company works globally or locally, each market has its own medical legal regulatory specifics in different territories. So, every time the management needs to reposition your product in a different country or state, you must change your marketing strategy to follow the local specifics and compliance requirements. It can become a real struggle for the management and content team to re-target the materials for a new market and apply them to MLR review as the content needs to be compliant. Again, the structure of modular content is flexible when it comes to changes. The blocks, templates, and informational fields drive rapid process innovation and can be easily replaced with the required ones while still be in compliance with MLR standards because of the pre-approved and localized content. Different HCP fields It may happen to promote one product in different HCP fields. For example, if you are going to promote the same treatment for different medical fields like endocrinology and gastroenterology, the MLR process will be applied for both directions separately. It requires additional expenses for the management on content creation and doubles the risk of being rejected by MLR in pharma, as each medical field has its requirements. At this point, the module also can be adapted accordingly to the specific case. To avoid many regulatory affairs, you can create a separate module template personalized for different cases and pre-approve it accordingly. Outcome As you can see, the modular content is quite a solid solution to the most common problems related to the MLR review process. The pharmaceutical industry is highly regulated, and thus, the medical legal regulatory process is very demanding for a business presentation, marketing, and promotional materials. Such circumstances make it difficult to develop high-quality content, adapt it to different MLR requirements, and avoid losing time and money. This is where modular content changes the situation. It is flexible, smart, and easy to develop for every case. The simplicity and interchangeability of data inside the module is the core idea that makes modular content a good communication tool that makes the medical legal regulatory review process easy and predictable. Pre-approve content modules for further reuse. Make the MLR approval process predictable — fill out the form below to get personal expertise!
Digital Transformation in Pharma: Barriers and Impact Posted on February 22, 2022November 19, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin Over time, pharma gets under fire due to its excessive talks about ‘digital transformation.’ It needs to be clarified what these words refer to and whether these grandiloquent statements work for actual doctors and patients. How many healthcare professionals and patients have yet to see the impact of digital technologies in the healthcare industry? Has it already improved pharma’s daily operations? Let’s figure out where the pharma sector is on the road to the digital age, how this process is changing how they do business, and how it affects the HCPs and patient engagement. What is Digital Transformation for Pharma companies? “Every digital transformation is going to begin and end with the customer, and I can see that in the minds of every CEO I talk to.” Marc Benioff, Chairman, and Co-CEO, Salesforce. Digital Technology in the pharmaceutical industry pushes us to change, poses challenges we don’t want to take, and makes us move forward. These changes may be dramatic. But when life wants us to grow, it makes us change to remain competitive. The problem is that digital technologies are changing faster than we are, leaving us with no choice but to keep pace. When we speak of digital transformation reshaping, we mean the natural evolution of existing processes with new technologies, introducing patterns and strategies that enhance customer experience, and building a genuine dialogue with the customer. In the pharmaceutical sector, this process was launched three years ago, when the pandemic, without much readiness, forced life sciences to increase their digital innovation culture drastically or, in particular cases, grow it from scratch. Looking back, we may go through all cliches of that period, but the digital shift declared a standard of communication with customers. Digital Transformation Barriers: where are we? Where are we now on the road to digital success? Despite being spurred by the pandemic, the digitalization process runs slowly. In terms of pharma digitalization, there are still many regions on the map where companies’ digital development level is consistently low. This map shows how pharmaceutical companies assess their readiness to become digital organizations. According to this map, the digitalization process among countries remains uneven. This is primarily associated with the poor scalability of implemented solutions among the regions and resilience to changes. Now, 1/3 of pharmaceutical companies believe they need to be better resourced for digital engagement. The other 40% report a need for more talent and the right technology for transformation. It’s important to understand that each industry has its own specifics and digitalization in pharma won’t be as smooth as anywhere else. However, this process highlights the areas where the mindset change should happen and what soft spots digital business processes transformation is designed to cover. How does Digital Transformation reshape the Pharma industry? Digital innovation in the pharma sector can help companies perform better by increasing productivity and reducing costs through collaboration, digital technology centralization to optimize delivery, and empowering a company or department. supply chain A global pharmaceutical company is experimenting with VR in its manufacturing operations. Managers can cut training time in half by creating virtual training programs that render production environments and speed up the path to excellence. streamline processes and marketing efforts Another biopharmaceutical company reduced its marketing spending by 20% by building a global system. The move followed a duplication analysis, in which the company found that up to 60% of localized asset-creation activities were duplicative. The company now has a centralized content center to deliver standardized marketing materials in flexible formats to more than 40 local markets. acquiring talent more efficiently The medical company double-checked the licenses of applicants for a nursing license during the interview. This included visiting the verification website, taking a snapshot of the applicant’s license, and storing the information in the applicant’s file. The HR bot was able to automate 80% of the process. Robotic process automation resulted in a 65% reduction in labor costs and a reduced risk of errors. This freed up the equivalent of one full-time job, allowing employees to focus on more critical activities. Disruptive Technologies and Market Dynamics Digital technologies can help companies deliver a competitive, digitally enabled, engaging, impactful experience to customers, the workforce, and ecosystem external partners. Key disruptive technologies include using digital tools to engage patients and other stakeholders remotely, involving social and other community networks, and personalizing experiences with user data to deliver excellent value. Creating a platform for customer experience.The Patient Service and Care Management Platform delivers consistent patient experiences across all channels and enables treatment adherence and care coordination with an entire network of healthcare providers for each patient. Through connected apps and devices, it supports digital therapy, helps improve patient outcomes, and helps health professionals coordinate patient care management. The platform analyzes internal and external data to gain insight into patient care and interactions and can integrate with the platform to analyze real-world data. Connecting patients, biopharma, caregivers, health care providers, and other stakeholders. The platform helps biopharma companies build partnerships with advocacy groups and providers to enhance patients’ experience with complex, chronic, and terminal diseases. It supports a next-generation digital healthcare network focused on patient support and digital engagement. Patients who consent to share their data receive information and updates from the sponsoring organization (typically biopharma companies and patient advocacy groups) to help navigate their disease. Optimizing the content provided to health care practitioners. A large global biopharmaceutical company has created a self-service portal for more than 30,000 practitioners across Europe to access digital marketing and sales materials in various media. The content shared with each practitioner differs based on previous browsing habits, allowing for custom targeting and enhancing the effectiveness of the marketing approach. Artificial Intelligence in the Pharma Transformation Over the past few years, the use of Artificial Intelligence in the Pharma industry and Life Sciences has become a trending topic. Many pharmaceutical companies are progressively implementing more efficient automated processes that include data-driven decisions and use predictive advanced analytics tools. The next step of this advanced data analytics approach will consist of artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Some of the ways AI is being applied in the pharmaceutical sector today include the following: Manufacturing process improvement Drug development Processing biomedical and clinical data Rare diseases and personalized medicine Identifying clinical trial candidates Predictive forecasting Drug adherence and dosage From early-stage drug discovery to prescribing options, the use of Artificial Intelligence is growing steadily within the pharma industry, with an estimated market volume reaching $10 billions by 2024 (including diagnostics, AI-based medical imaging, personal AI assistants, genomics, and drug discovery). Can we hold the digital transformations back? Remember your life before the pandemic; now, it seems like a dream to you, right? Like no other, these two years greatly impacted our lives, habits, and priorities. In 2019, marketers expected a quick end to the pandemic and a return to routine communication with customers. After three years, again like a dream, the pandemic is slowly receding (at minor restrictions). It begs the question: do we need to digitalize further? And will this process be slowed down now? No. Because the digital shift catalyzed some fundamental changes. Pharma marketing has always been a complicated environment characterized by complex relationships with its target audience. However, the shift towards digital innovation in pharma has exposed many problems that previously needed to be tracked. Searching through the old reports is like getting into a time machine that can take us back to changes that have taken place. The retrospective looks as follows: In 2019, 77% of pharma companies reported issues with content localization/translation. Only 28% could repurpose their content with a little manual effort. Back then, 62% say their organization has yet to make plans for using AI-driven content technologies. The most significant impact of digital technology in the pharmaceutical industry was on HCP engagement. Before COVID-19, 64% of meetings with pharma sales reps were held in person. During the pandemic, this shifted to 65% of meetings being held virtually. The old patters revolve primarily around internal content production issues in the pharmaceutical industry and don’t consider the main factor – HCP’s experiences. Today, searching for personalized experiences for the customer is the cornerstone of all companies that want to withstand competition in the market and have a serious competitive advantage. In the end, we should remember that technology exists to make our life easier. In life sciences, the ultimate goal of Digital Transformation is to introduce new technologies that will allow space and time for more strategic decisions on customers. These technologies should solve the long-standing issues of MLR optimization, content and taxonomy management, and multivendor environment support. Transformation in the Pharmaceutical sector: what it refers to Pharma often speaks clichés, but most critics are associated with a lack of clarification of what it refers to. The pandemic exposed many problems in pharma that, in the new era of communication, cannot remain unresolved. We’ve tried to highlight them all for you to see that Digital Transformation usually touches people, processes, tools, and content, areas where innovations are needed to simplify the internal processes that often hinder the natural evolution of companies toward strategic marketing. Why do we need it? In communicating with our customers, we should remember that the biggest shift occurred in patients’ mindsets. Not speaking their language, we can compare our audience to distant stars we try to reach in the dark. The main driver of prescriptions in the pharma industry is loyalty. The main factor that affects loyalty is the message your brand translates. Feel free to learn about it by checking our pharma digital transformation case study. Companies that help with pharma digital transformation Such professional services companies as Mckinsey, Vaimo, and Viseven are driving Digital Transformation by offering an end-to-end content operating model that is aligned with strategy, and ready for scale and innovation adoption. Viseven combines technology and marketing expertise mastering the entire chain of enablers to deliver a best-in-class digital experience. Contact us to learn more about how we enable digital transformation for pharma businesses of all sizes and maturity levels.
2021 in Pharma: What We Have Learned and Where We Have Won Posted on December 28, 2021November 19, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin Are you still processing 2020? Well, here is the news, 2022 is almost here. And while you are thinking about how it could happen; we can only assume that the last year was so intensive and eventful that no wonder it passed before we knew it. It may seem a bit chaotic at least because it frustrates the hopes of all humanity associated with an early end of the pandemic. But in fairness, we must give the credit to 2021 as the one that brought us one step closer to defeating covid and many other diseases. With ongoing digital transformation and the success of mRNA vaccines, we literally can observe how modern technologies shape the healthcare system of the future. As for pharma marketing, we made a huge step forward to deliver personalized experiences to customers with the widespread of a modular approach and current innovations in omnichannel marketing. Wrapping up this year, let’s look closer at the achievement, hopes, and fears we have for the year we step in and arm ourselves with the most recent data on the hottest topics of 2021: Building a successful communication mix with omnichannel approach The rise of modular content and its role in advanced personalization Balancing of customers’ expectations and data security Collaboration to save the day: Viseven is the part of Veeva’s Digital Factory Accelerator Program (DFAP) The current trends, challenges, and opportunities Searching for a balance between digital and virtual promotion Stepping into 2021, our biggest hope was to draw a line under the period of the coronavirus. The emergency vaccine invention suggested a chance to overcome the pandemic in record time, but the year started with news on new mutated strains. They rained down like a bolt from the blue and now, when the omicron has entered the scene, we realize that the covid period is now an era. What does it mean for pharma? In terms of communication, it prolonged the prevalence of digital communication, making pharma look closer to the mixed communication where face-to-face now is just one channel. New 2021 Veeva Pulse Report demonstrates stability in HCPs’ preferences towards digital with the sixfold growth of virtual meetings. At the same time, it poses the challenge for pharma that now is looking for a balance between offline and digital promotion. Resilience to changes Can we say that pharma’s digital moment has arrived? The digital transformation is on every corner, but the biggest challenge remains the resilience to becoming digital and the unevenness of transformation among regions. This can be explained by the growing complexity of content production and the difficulty of digital tools adoption across regions. Technology is changing and sometimes much faster than we are. Currently 1/3 of pharma believe they are poorly resourced for digital engagement. To win this competition, pharma should ensure that content development process is accelerated to the needed extent. With the introduction of smart content, however, it is easier to keep content creation at scale and navigate the complex digital landscape. The concept assumes content and data to be synchronized and supports supreme enterprise context management (taxonomy, claims, business rules, and tags). It is the whole new approach to content management with more features designed specifically to support rapid content development. Personalization The word of the year in pharma would likely be personalization. Now all the habits that we, as patients and customers, have acquired in 2020 have finally taken root. And pharma is rushing to introduce something extra to the customers as the main ingredient to win this competition. According to Smart Insights, 72% of consumers say they now only interact with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. The number of channels has increased giving us additional opportunities to engage customers. However, we must admit that currently we use it blindly, bombarding HCPs with thousands of emails and other messages. To reach customers with the right message, it must be perfectly tailored to their needs. Only then, we can call it personalization. Where pharma won in 2021 Omnichannel to mix it up wisely A digital shift has turned healthcare to reach new heights in omnichannel. After two years, this approach has established its position as a key provider of flexible communication for generation covid who, above all, appreciate empathy, accuracy, and flexibility when it comes to interaction with a healthcare provider. In pharma, omnichannel covered the exposed gaps that were not that obvious before the pandemic. It turned out that besides being one the most expensive channel, according to data on Viseven’s projects, face-to-face visits cannot cover up to 80% of the database. It is especially painful for regions with a stable issue of low audience coverage. Thus, in 2021 pharma chooses to digitize and further actively spends an impressive part of its budget on digital tactics. However, not everything can be achieved by focusing only on digital activities. With HCPs who are still divided into tribes of digital natives and those who prefer in-person communication, face-to-face meetings do not get pale and remain especially important when it comes to product launches. Recovering from a pandemic, it is hard to predict where the channel mix will go further. However, in 2022 only 10% of pharma plan a big increase in budget allocations on-field force activities. And if recently the demand for a mix of virtual and hybrid interaction among HCPs was 85%. Now, this figure has grown to 87%. Top communication channels in 2021 A large number of omnichannel projects we were lucky to have this year allows us to share our internal observations regarding customer preferences and the channel that interest them the most. The email has confirmed its championship with 3x more demand among our pharma customers compared to the previous year. The second most relevant channel was SMS. And especially remarkable this year was for messengers that were in high demand among our customers. At their request, eWizard received a new feature, namely the support of messenger ad content creation for WeChat messenger. For us, these numbers and demands are just a confirmation of the industry’s ambition to move further towards digital and omnichannel excellence. Smart investment into digital The variety of channels, systems, and connections between them captures the imagination at first but later it creates some difficulties as the multiple means of communication make it difficult to track the performance of each activity in the campaign, leaving you in the dark about what you invest in and what you get in the end. Viseven’s experts in omnichannel suggest that pharma can easily drive efficient campaigning with a clear connection of how it influences HCPs’ loyalty and can measure and define the activities that spurge the decision of a particular client. The rise of modular content The widespread modular content has made the trend of personalization sound much louder. Over the years, content production in the pharmaceutical industry was considered a time-consuming process associated with many bottlenecks. The modular approach that was previously practiced exclusively by trailblazers is now entering the pharma mainstream. According to researchers, 54% of pharma use modular content, and a further 40% plan to start. These impressive numbers can be proved by the number of requests Viseven received this year. When we speak of our expertise in modular content, we mean a flexible and reusable digital asset living in the form of modular units that can be father used in various channel-specific templates, channels, and contexts. Modular approach of Viseven eliminates the need for affiliates to create content from scratch, but instead, successfully reuse (localize) global content and reap up to 65% of content development costs. The feature of auto-translation, in its turn, allows to translate only the needed assets that will by further reused. The use of pre-approved content modules can significantly accelerate content production, time to market and ensure rapid MLR approvals. But most importantly, it gives a green light to simplified content production that, in its turn, forces personalization and more creative work with content. Many of our great achievements in 2021 were marked by modular. Auto-tagging has become a feature the year with the ability to synchronize content and data (taxonomy, claims, business rules, and tags) within our Content Experience Platform. eWizard now embodies even more opportunities to sew various experiences together and create a unified, automated, and scalable content development standard for our pharma customers. This can be proved by Viseven’s experience on successful modular implementation in several leading pharmaceutical companies. Follow our updates to be among the first to reveal the details of these success cases. Establishing a secure hierarchy Today balancing between customers’ expectations and data security is the challenge for all who are actively digitizing. Digital technologies empower us to deliver more personalized content, tailored messages and cover the expectations of the target audience. At the same time, unfortunately, it rises data security and access management concerns. These are having a long history in life sciences. The tangled mess of countless laws and regulations don’t make it easier for pharma, posing the great challenge not to lose the customer’s trust, pursuing personalized experiences. 95% of customers say they are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust. Of the greatest features of meta-tags, except making it easier to find the information in the DAM is to provide accesses hierarchy, where each user role includes a certain level of access to certain information. Working with pharmaceutical content implies certain requirements and measures to be followed. The International Standards Organization (ISO) guarantees that the company works according to all required procedures, policies, and guidelines, protects, and has full authority over the Company’s assets. To confirm our determination to protect our customers’ data, Viseven has passed the supervisory audit ISO 27001 and regularly confirms its status and the ability to provide a secure environment for the pharma customers. Partnerships to save the day Partnerships has taken a new sense in pharma over the last year. Collaborative approaches and cross-enterprise collaboration are exactly what helped pharma to pass a rough test it has been put on. If you were reading comics, you know that even the coolest of superheroes cannot cope without trusting a partner on their side. The same goes for our partnership with Veeva aligned with greater achievement catalyzing our powers in aspiration to make healthcare invincible. Digital Factory Accelerator Program (DFAP) is designed and launched by Veeva initiative to provide additional support to narrow circle of Veeva’s customers that are building large-scale Digital Content Factories in place and using Veeva services. We are pleased to announce that Viseven Group is now among the first Veeva’s DFAP Partners. Parting thoughts 2021 was the consolidation of our habits as HCPs and patients and the ways we are consuming services. Agile and flexible communication is what pharma customers are striving for today. The current innovations in omnichannel marketing open up new horizons to meet customers’ needs and offer timely, sequential digital interactions in an appropriate format. The only MUST is the flexible content that will boost a content supply chain and will make it circulate through the omnichannel system. These two absolute prerequisites of today’s HCP engagement can fully be covered, regardless of your current level of digital maturity. Turn to us for assistance and help – Viseven’s mission is to enable digital transformation for businesses of all sizes and digital maturities.
Modular content: Pivot Your Content Strategy on the Fly Posted on April 23, 2021 by Andrii Nikulin The path of omnichannel in pharma has its twists and turns. However, this approach has turned into a daily routine of those who’s committed to delivering first-class experiences to their customers. It has changed the digital environment for good as pharma companies and digital solutions providers can no longer stick to just producing content — the realities require something greater than that: a new method of disseminating messages and materials. How do top pharmaceutical enterprises run this approach and pivot their omnichannel content strategy on the fly? An answer is a modular approach. This article is a sneak peek of a real-world case showing how the most flexible approach to content creation makes the highest impact on the customers. The game with the flexible modules If this is your first time hearing about modular content, these words are worth remembering as it inevitably becoming a substantial part of omnichannel marketing. Moreover, the flexibility of this approach makes it suitable to exist in any market environment. In July, the pharmaphorum’s How to Win With a Multichannel Approach in Pharma webinar in association with our experts became explosive. That session lifted the veil on the value of modular content in modern digital communication and provided many insights on how, with its help, pharma companies build highly targeted customer journeys. For those who missed the debate, modular content exists in the form of flexible modular units used in various channel-specific templates. They consist of a claim that is combined by supporting text and/or media and references. Together they are approved to be used across the channels. It means that you don’t have to create each piece of content from scratch and then compile all the materials together, review and approve it item by item. This significantly reduces the time and efforts you have to apply to content production. What’s more, such fragments can be used across channels – apart from an eDetailer in an email, and part of the email in a landing page, and so on. More wins of modular content: Accelerated content production Rapid updates Compliance with branding guidelines (materials can be pre-approved) Cost-efficiency Light-speed MLR More personalized approach becomes available Measurable impact Omnichannel support Omnichannel content excellence with modular approach Description Today, increasing customer expectations and changing competitive dynamics require more effective and impactful content with ever less investment. Therefore, the use of omnichannel activities calls for clearer governance and a higher content reuse rate. Again and again, it proves beneficial to set up a single workflow, where all assets are perfectly aligned, approved, and can be used repeatedly across multiple channels. This is what one of our global TOP 50 clients was interested in when they came to us early in 2020. We applied our expertise to establish more efficient practices in content management to streamline production without disrupting the current operations but with a possibility to scale the remodeled approach to multiple regions. This table is a chronology of changes we had to perform from today to tomorrow: Before After Go-to-market speed • 10 weeks between local customer requirements definition & agency briefing • 6 weeks between agency briefing & MLR approval/ # of iterations • 3 weeks for local transcreation & coding Time reduction, as a modular template approach will reduce the number of iterations to develop content by pre-structuring formats and accelerating MLR approval Cost efficiency • Cancellation fee ~7% of transcreation invoice • ~ 6,000 Euros for creative agency/cycle per asset and country • ~ 4,000 – 6,000 Euros for local transcreation and coding/cycle per asset and country Reduced costs for global transcreation as earlier demand forecasting lowers the cancellation rate Lower local transcreation and coding costs due to higher re-use rate of material, based on improved searching function (incl. metadata tagging) and automated coding Content effectiveness • Average HCP satisfaction score of 3.2 • Average sales reps satisfaction score of 2.7 Improved HCP satisfaction due to systematic and centralized customer insights generation from local teams and sales reps Improved sales reps satisfaction as clearly defined modules allow sales reps to precisely addressing key messages Results The project at hand required technological solutions to translate our vision into a reality. We engaged eWizard in the process to respond, pivot faster, and better with the modular powers contained in the platform. It became the feasible solution to supply the content in the amounts required and maintain a cost-efficient, coherent messaging. The platform has a library of approved digital assets to be reused. A single asset can travel across channels and projects, coming in handy for content creation whenever needed. This intelligent approach is designed to create highly personalized content with the ability to build a targeted customer journey. The gradual rollout on the markets started with the pilot spanning 5 markets to test the opportunities and possible challenges to work on further on the way. This was followed by a wave of regional rollouts in full scale. According to the newly established workflow, whenever a new content item is to be created, a chain process of instant evaluation is performed to determine what work can be excluded from the scope (as it has already been performed on other content items) and optimize the resource allocations. In this way, instead of a simple creation of content, a more flexible transcreation process allows for quicker assets’ production. Modular content is no longer a fancy legend, it’s the intelligent approach to content production we have mastered. The evolution is going on, therefore we adjusted the eWizard platform for the practical needs that arise in this respect. Download the PDF to get in-depth insights about the implementation process and the successful results of this case. Also, fill out the form below and our experts will reach you out.
5 highlights from Veeva Commercial and Medical Summit Online 2020 Posted on June 29, 2020November 21, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin There is nothing special about the fact that a summit hosted by the pharma digital tech giant Veeva is special every time. The North American edition of the Veeva Commercial and Medical Summit 2020 on June 9-10, however, was even more noteworthy. This was not just because of its online format or the very slowly dispelling shadow of COVID-19 lockdowns – but also since so many relevant topics were addressed from a practical point of view. Modular content, AI, digital engagement, customer journeys, omnichannel, data integration – over the past years, these topics were presented at pharma events from a theoretical, somewhat idealistic position. This time around, we are seeing a whole bunch of more practical takes on these. The seed of new tech-inspired visions seems to have come to fruition at last. Much of the content from the summit (except the roundtable talks) is still available on demand until July 8 on the official event page. Now, this would be too bad of a spoiler for the audience to give away everything we the Viseven team have appreciated about the sessions – and this would take at least 5-7 blog posts like this – so here are just the 5 top highlights for your consideration. Our own experts have more or less unanimously agreed that these will have the most impact on the way digital pharma will run engagement campaign and manage content in the coming years. Before we take the plunge, though, let’s have a very brief overview of the topics that defined the summit and its atmosphere. Veeva Summit Online: a bird’s eye view One of the recurrent topics at the summit was (naturally enough) the forced transition to different forms of remote engagement when interacting with HCPs and other stakeholders. With the “new normal” being the buzzword of the year so far, its meaning for pharmaceutical marketing and communications is more or less clear: it is time start that digital multichannel engagement already. With the new accent on remote eDetailing, online events and Approved Emails, enterprises are trying to discover digital engagement that is as personal as the F2F rep calls. An anxious-looking question on whether or not Approved emails can really be considered personal engagement (posed at one of the sessions) was a perfect illustration of that eagerness to stay in contact. Further delving into the issue was done in a session by Crossix on “bridging the gap” between personal and non-personal promotion. As part of the commercial operations flow within the summit, Mark Fleischer, CEO Physicians World, Veeva, delivered a presentation on virtual events organization, including the choice of content and platform. This, naturally, makes the companies lay more accent on customer engagement strategy – in an effort to avoid simply aggregating digital channels and look at the way it looks from the customer’s perspective. Jennifer Turcotte of Salesforce presented a practical take on building automated customer journeys. On the other end of the spectrum, an entire session (led by Veeva’s Ian Hale) was dedicated to the relevant metrics throughout the content lifecycle. Measuring content performance was an idea that reverberated across several superb presentations, including a take on modular content by Jay McMeekan of Bayer (accidentally, also the highlight #3 in this list, see below). An interesting moment was letting an HCP have a say and describe their perspective on digital engagement – in a Q/A session with hematologist/oncologist Andrew Moore, M.D. Another big question was data. The current situation requires a more progressive approach to insights – and approaches are not something that is solved in terms of CRM metrics alone. In Jay McMeekan’s words, Compared with other industries, and pharma in other countries, U.S. pharma has a preponderance of data. But for the most part, it’s not about access to data, it’s more about ho w to use it – and how we plan our engagement, taking into account that information, and not just using it as an afterthought, or justification for an outcome. An entire section of the event was dedicated to data and intelligence issues, with sessions on Veeva OpenData, Vault API use for data exchange (a topic that fascinates IT departments), as well as a marketer’s and strategist’s take on customer reference data from Biogen. A Veeva Data Cloud Overview (including planning, patient segmentation, commercial analytics, AI, territory design, targeting, and incentive compensation) on Day 1 should be noted, as well. Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive overview of the summit – with still more on commercial operations, expanding role of the rep, Veeva Nitro, compliance and Approved Notes worth noting for all those who plan to request the summit sessions. Meanwhile, let’s move to the highlights that impressed our specialists and are most likely to produce long-lasting impact. #1: Best Practices for Approved Email Success (roundtable) Approved Emails, Veeva’s own service for rep-triggered email messaging, has provided pharma with a way to sidestep the shrinking rep admission rates and keep up the frequency of interactions even before the pandemic. Now its relevance has skyrocketed for Veeva users, who are increasingly interested in, and aware of, the possibilities of this tool. This roundtable featuring Cindy DiNitto, Manager, Commercial SMB Customer Success, consultant Amy LaForgia, and Maria Ruoto, Senior Customer Success Manager (all Veeva professionals) reveals the key points about the service and channel. While Approved Emails present the way to maintain contact and is easily combined with other channels, recent months have seen increased use, not only with the traditional cases but also as a way to invite the HCP to a remote meeting. On the other hand, there is the problem of overloading the target audience. Email is a great channel as long as it is not annoyingly frequent. Everything above a certain saturation level turns it into spam, which is a great concern. According to Cindy DiNitto, It’s not like, “wow, I have all these templates on my iPad, let me just start sending these out”, it’s really having use [case] based training for your field so then you know when is the good time to send that email. Although (or even because) the system does not impose any hard limits on the amount of emails sent (only a warning message), field reps have to be trained in order to develop a sensitivity as to when sending an Approved Email is appropriate. We can add that this is, in fact, one of the staples of omnichannel thinking – operating in terms of touchpoints – applied to CRM field activity. Of course, there is also growing interest in the possibilities of personalization, such as free text fields in the templates. That factor draws in its “evil twin”, namely, the need to track and maintain compliance. As mentioned by Maria Ruoto, among other things, a good practice is setting restricted words for free text inputs; however, the truly best practice is providing adequate change management to allow reps feel in control while keeping compliant. #2: Automating Claims Management with Novo Nordisk (Session and Q/A) A core claim is an object that represents a piece of information, e.g. “Brand® demonstrates 48% higher efficiency in eliminating long-term effects of [condition]”. Besides the text, this object holds fields for supporting data, obligatory and desirable references, maybe diagrams and additional meta information (from text variants to notes as to how an agency should place this claim on a slide or email they develop). Managing claims is new and promising approach in pharma brand messaging, and was discussed by Bernie Klemmer, Director Marketing Operations at Novo Nordisk in a session and Q/A at the summit. At the time of writing this, his team is in the process of approving the first batch of such claims – the first stage out of four in a process of implementing this innovative mindset. Apart from, obviously, achieving greater consistency and compliance with medical and regulatory, the approach allows to streamline MLR review and make it easier and quicker for agencies to create compliant content. Once the claim document template has been developed with brand team and MLR, it becomes possible to build a library of preapproved claims for such use. Potentially, this allows for more advanced tracking, as well. At the initial stage of implementation, the pilot stage, Novo Nordisk singled out just one brand and one audience to test the approach and identify possible points that require attention. This involves, among other things, enhancing the claim object with fields to hold data for size and placement, additional text, footnotes, (optional) required or related diagrams, etc. At the second stage, more organizational questions are solved, covering the approval of text variations, expiration procedure for claims, etc. Overall, this approach is very likely to be adopted (with variations) across the industry, since it responds to pharma’s inherent MLR review issues and presents good opportunities to solve them. #3: Impactful Customer Engagements – Making the Modular Content Connection with Bayer (Session and Q/A) Modular content is a huge topic in pharma marketing circles right now. A module is essentially the molecular unit of any content – a claim (as in #2 in this review) plus a component or component group (an image, diagram, chart, etc.) that illustrates it or provides context. Such a building block is essentially channel-agnostic and can be featured in an eDetailing presentation, an email, a website, banner, or any other digital content type. This approach is now revolutionizing the way marketers and agencies work with content, with great benefits in terms of cost efficiency and message consistency. Jay McMeekan, Senior Director, Digital / Multichannel Marketing at Bayer, with his characteristically pragmatic take, starts addressing this issue with data. We have already quoted this session above: the way pharma uses insights is a more pressing issue even than where to obtain them. McMeecan continues along the following lines: how do you know if the content your organization pays for is performing well and resonates with the audience? In an analogy with personal finance planning, he proceeds to compare content with expenses and channels with payment methods. If you really want to track the ROI of your content, you have to be able to look beyond single channel and converge data: You need to begin with a clear measurable goal from the start, or you will never be able to access your performance against your expectations. Especially if you only rely on historical sales data or market share. Waiting until you get your credit card bill to know if you can pay it? I think we can all agree it is not a sustainable financial strategy. To this end, content modules created must be channel-agnostic and easy to use within different content types. This allows for an additional source of cost efficiency: not only is duplicate agency work eliminated (as predesigned modules are mixed and matched), but the marketer makes sure and continuously tracks that only the content likely to perform well is produced. This assessment of customer engagement in real time is made possible by a clear, hierarchical tagging of modules. Each module comes with a tag composed in a certain predictable was that is unified across the organization. We shall see in the very near future how this approach evolves further on – and it will be interesting to say the least. Our own expertise building modular content strategies for our pharmaceutical customers at Viseven has so far yielded impressive results and the concept is constantly improved. For more on modular content within this article, see the bonus section below. #4: Compliant Content to Support the Customer Journey (customer panel with Roche and BMS) This customer panel featuring Samantha Knott, Global Customer Operations Lead at Roche, Cara Pellegrini, Senior Director, Business Practices Group at Genentech (A Member of the Roche Group), and Dinesh Salvi, Head of Enterprise Veeva and Commercial Systems at Bristol Myers Squibb, and led by Pooja Ojala, Vice President, Commercial Content, Veeva, was an ambitious endeavor. In about 45 minutes, the participants managed to cover their organizations’ approaches and solutions to current issues with commercial content and operations – an impressively wide topic with dozens of possible starting points. In this case, the starting point chosen was a systematic overview of recent effort, starting with situation and challenges, through solution and outcomes for each of the organizations. The result was a panoramic view, with some of the challenges and aspirations overlapping. A focus on evolving the operational model is present across the companies. Among the challenges Roche encountered and solved was the huge decentralization, with notable silos, e.g. between commercial and medical – and no dedicated project resource. At the same time, BMS aimed at resolving the challenges of competing priorities and changing marketplace. The two stories coincide in their solution – namely, evolving operating model. The ways to achieve this were different, but sometimes involved thinking along similar lines. While Roche and Genentech supported this with end-to-end content management (and not just facilitating the MLR), Bristol Myers Squibb, too, made an effort to control and streamline the entire content lifecycle. In this latter case, the modularization (“atomization”) of content was also involved. #5: Veeva Andi Roadmap (yes, it is AI in your CRM) Veeva Andi is an AI embedded in Veeva CRM to make next-best action suggestions. As exciting as it is by itself, considering how this can enhance field performance with the ability to process loads of data, there is even more to help pharma users facilitate the workflows. Brian Mahoney, Practice Manager, Digital Field Engagement, Veeva, unveiled several key points about the roadmap for the upcoming Veeva Andi features. The roadmap was presented along two principal lines – (1) customer touchpoint optimization, and (2) making AI easier. With the power of data and intelligent suggestions, Andi is “poised” to offer additional digital channel models based on the analyzed interactions, as well as suggest what content will engage and perform better. Additionally, such features as weekly top territory insights and targets and models and traits for field users are supposed to be added later on. In terms of facilitating AI use, Andi is going to be more than a smart “black box”, with the possibility for the user to choose data sources in Cross Data Source Logic Agent Builder, as well as look inside the process and take a more proactive stance with a suggestions editor. This is by no means an exhaustive list – more functionalities covering samples and Marketing Cloud integration, to name a few, were also announced. One interesting observation When looking at the discourse in the pharma communications and tech circles over the past year or so, an interesting observation can be made. Business rules, workflows, people and skills, tech, content and strategy – all of these factors are now finally being treated in conjunction that they deserve. People have started talking holistic – and taking steps towards a holistic approach, where tech is part of the equation, as is everything else. At the same time, the very tech used in pharma has become more integrated and integratable – gone are the days when business unit heads had to break everything they had in place into pieces in the name of innovation; today’s technology is plugged into the existing business models. It adapts itself – and slowly, painlessly transforms the organization from deep within. + even more on modular content and how to start Modular content is an example of such a mindset. While enabled by tech solutions, the concept of modularization is a response to needs and challenges at multiple levels. Content reuse and repurpose possibilities boost cost-efficiency; the approved and redistributed nature of modules circulating across the company’s ecosystem facilitates MLR and improves agency workflows; core claim tracking enables greater data – coming full circle at ROI again. How do we know this? Viseven team has been among the enthusiasts and pioneers of modular approach and has successfully implemented it with a number of global pharma and life sciences customers. For example, a recent case demonstrated speeding up MLR all thanks to a modular content authoring solution integrated with Veeva Suite. This is where we as a Veeva Technology Partner help start with modular content approach. eWizard content authoring solution not only supports the creation of modules, but is integrated with Veeva, provides the possibility to dive into deep editing directly from Vault PromoMats, serves as a connector between Veeva and systems like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can see how easily all of this is done in practice in a set of videos showing the functionality and workflows – the shortest possible guide into starting out with modular content. Additionally, have a look at what eWizard platform can offer you to streamline Approved Email production and approval in Veeva. Select one of the sections below to access the overviews.
Pharma Content Marketing: How to Create once and Deliver your Content across Channels Posted on June 24, 2020November 21, 2024 by Andrii Nikulin The way your brand is presented matters. It’s crucial for pharma and life sciences to build new connective “tissues” between their brand and the audience. This new stage requires from pharma not just delivering their brand stories but making them valuable – if pharma ambassadors want to be “value providers” (not just product promoters, or data deliverers). When it comes to a more in-depth definition of this new approach, the quantity of the content matters less, while quality ultimately goes first. The multichannel way of thinking in pharma content marketing is consistently spreading: promotional messages become channelless; they are tied, thoroughly mixed, and ready to provide relevant information to healthcare professionals (or other audience) in the moment of search. That’s the new promise of multichannel, and, consequently, the new promise of pharma content marketing: creating and distributing relevant content with consistent messages across channels to attract the target audience and earn its loyalty. In a nutshell, there are two alternatives for pharma marketing leaders how to meet an ever-increasing demand from tech-savvy consumers: to care about the content only or to care about the customer first. In our guide, we will tell you more about content marketing production, explain what any given marketing strategy of pharmaceutical companies is, and share some pharmaceutical marketing tips with you. What is a Pharma Marketing Strategy? A marketing strategy for pharmaceutical products is a detailed plan for reaching the company’s target audience and converting it into its customers. A pharma marketing strategy is about understanding who might be interested in your services and what might motivate them to choose your company as a service provider. Effective marketing strategies in the pharmaceutical industry should include the following elements: Market analysis; Company vision; Assessment of the company’s target audience; Branding & messaging; Risk evaluation. The chosen pharma go-to market strategy must not only help your team determine the target audience but also be aligned with the overall company’s goals and objectives. The development of strategies for pharma marketing requires a lot of time and effort, and it involves high-level planning of all the necessary steps in order to achieve the desired results. An effective digital marketing strategy for pharmaceuticals should consist of defining priorities, identifying the target audience, allocating resources, and managing the implementation of all the stages that were determined beforehand. And don’t forget that often pharmaceutical strategy works in tandem with other processes and tactics, such as a marketing plan or a sales strategy. Even though marketers are not responsible for pharmaceutical sales strategies, they should work with sales representatives to ensure their marketing strategies are aligned with the objectives of other teams. Collaboration is key to success, and without it, both strategies won’t be as successful as they could be. What Kind of Content Will Win in the Pharmaceutical Industry? There are many types of pharmaceutical marketing strategies, but the one that is likely to be winning has to include the kind of content that’s both engaging and useful. That is the so-called true multichannel content, which is: Inspirational; Relevant; ABM-friendly; Measurable; Closed Loop; Emotional; Adaptive at every stage of decision making. To succeed in marketing strategies for pharma, the chosen type of content should address the concerns of a multichannel customer, and multichannel content is just the right choice in this case. What is a Pharma Marketing Plan? A marketing plan is a roadmap, meant to guide you through all the hurdles and ordeals on the path to the implementation of a chosen pharmaceutical digital marketing strategy. In other words, pharmaceutical strategies can be served as a high-level overview, while a marketing plan is an outline of all your marketing objectives, tactics, and efforts needed to achieve your goals. Here are some of the components a marketing plan typically includes: Content plan; KPIs; Situation analysis; Timeline; Budget; Team roles. Your pharmaceutical marketing plan should come next after your strategy, meaning that first you come up with the latter one, and only then you devise a marketing plan and use it to execute your ideas. The marketing plan is supposed to support your strategy and help you answer such questions as “Why? Where? When?”. Pharmaceutical companies’ marketing strategies and plans should come together, since implementing just one will not have such a positive effect as having both of them in use. How to Get Started with a Top-notch Pharma Marketing Strategy? Whatever marketing strategy was chosen, it needs to deliver the right content to the right audience. Thus, it’s worth relying on an account-based pharmaceutical marketing strategy (ABM) that allows targeting specific groups at the right time, place, and in the manner they expect pharma to reach them. How to switch your content marketing flow to the next level of quality, and make your content a trusted source? Before implementing a content strategy into a marketing campaign, do deeper research on your audience, using automated marketing tools such as content management systems, advanced web analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), etc. A platform for content creation can take over all the stages of your content marketing campaign. Such a solution helps to keep brand identity, maintain recognition on both global and local levels, and avoid redundant costly operations. Good pharma content should be based on strong customer insights from prior interactions (how HCPs/patients are interacting with your content; how much time they spend on each content piece; what actions are taken upon the initial interaction, etc.). By reviewing all past activities, your customers have with your pharma content, you can easily identify the types/formats of data which they better respond to, or what content was turned down. This is how an account-based content strategy works: it helps to create targeted messages that will impress and engage customers. Explore Content Marketing Production: Veeva & Viseven Integration Over the years, Veeva has been supporting global life sciences and pharmaceutical enterprises helping to bring their products to market faster and in compliance with all regulatory requirements. A powerful integration of Viseven’s deep expertise in omnichannel content creation and the full pack of Veeva products and services guarantees streamlined workflows and advanced digital content development and distribution – that, in turn, ensures the highest level of brand awareness. You can easily create the best-in-class interactive content from scratch, localize or approve your content in a few clicks – and distribute it across channels assuring a genuine omnichannel customer experience. A strong tool for multichannel content management is a must-have for every pharma professional. There’re countless capabilities incorporated into the eWizard platform to boost your content creation productivity. Thanks to the customizable integration of eWizard with Veeva Vault PromoMats, users gain a vast array of opportunities to skyrocket their content management to a whole new level: access global repository, find or leverage approved digital assets, publish them across multiple channels, and speed up time to market. When you have your eDetailing created in eWizard, you can open it in your Veeva Vault account, and get a deeper view on the exported PDF or any initial materials as well as find all the details of related modules. A New Concept of Pharma Content Management Truly multichannel content is channel-independent, limitless and timeless Viseven team has recently introduced its new concept of such a type of content creation to the digital pharma universe. A clear message is created once, and then distributed via channels to which that message perfectly fits. Don’t get it wrong, the channel matters; however, it cannot have the same power as the content behind the channel – that matters much more. The channel should become rather a means, not an end. To stay on the new level of content creation, pharma has to think of the message first. Based on these principles, here are some marketing strategy tips on possible steps to be taken: Forget about the one-size-fits-all market approaches The point here is to look through customer’s point of view, to feel their emotions. Let’s say, at what time, through what channel, and what content type they prefer to consume. Focus on interactive content Find a shortcut from static PDF presentation to create multichannel content for an excellent eDetailing; it would be perceived as an engaging story with a wide array of interactive visual aids. Such presentations are working in the most engaging way, especially when it comes to HCPs-pharma reps’ interactions. If you already have a PDF file, you can convert it into an interactive, Veeva compatible format as well as add navigation or any interactivity to your eDetailing if needed, and automatically publish it to the Veeva environment in a single click. Analyze, Localize, and Measure A quality measurement system is a stepping-stone for future success. Measure the time spent on the page, the number of downloads, shares on social networks, etc. – to calculate your return on investment. In such a turbulent pharma environment, it will be a tough task to sustain success in the long run if your assets are not updated regularly and adapted to local needs. The Importance of Storytelling as a Pharma Content Marketing Tool Storytelling in healthcare and pharma matters no less than in any other industry. Let’s make it clear, a good, uplifting story helps to tailor your content to customers’ needs. Initially, it comes from analyzing the pieces of content that are stronger than others; in other words, the ones that better resonate with physicians’ needs. Healthcare and pharma enterprises should tap into these particular emotions with whatever content type is chosen (engaging IVAs, videos, blogs, triggered email campaigns, messengers, etc.), and make effective use of them in the marketing. Your content should be able to affect, motivate, encourage, and inspire physicians to take the needed actions around your brand. No matter how well-structured your content is – it won’t work if it doesn’t stir emotions. This way the loyalty to your pharma brand won’t be lost. 4 basic practices that are of crucial importance to pharma professionals: Have all your assets constantly updated; Personalize each interaction; Use remote detailing for greater engagement; Deliver your content across all the digital channels instantly. Where data is, matters Let’s face it: the HCP audience has different needs at different stages. The initial stage (this is the so-called awareness stage) is where physicians gather data for early diagnostics. Then goes the consideration phase – HCPs focus on a myriad of pharma products; choose the brand that resonates with their needs. The last phase is the evaluation phase when the product is chosen, and it’s time to justify the ROI, gather analysis or get a more in-depth understanding of the brand. The peculiarities of these stages should be mapped to your marketing strategy. However, a multichannel marketing for pharmaceutical companies is often as good as the technology that powers it. To keep up with channel diversity, tech-savvy physicians, or Big Data splash you need to have an automated instrument at hand that is enriched with actionable insights. Get rid of content silos To jumpstart the launch of your multichannel campaign, consider using a content management system that will make your content creation flow fast and easy, and align your internal teams around a single, centralized data repository. The Viseven team has proven experience in transforming messages into channelless, flexible modules. This smart approach allows you to create content once – and reuse/republish it everywhere, from email to CLM presentation to the system of your choice. Our unique solution eWizard is integrated with Veeva Vault PromoMats, Adobe Experience Manager and IQVIA for easy access or distribution of content and modules. This is how pharma can meet any specific need and keep high-quality content lifecycle that’s digestible for HCPs’ audience to consume. Here, at Viseven, our pharma professionals can provide you with full support in executing a truly winning content marketing campaign. 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