Category: Pharma Marketing

The Great Digital Transformation has brought pharma into the place where often it remains only to guess what is behind words about another big transformation, dramatic shift, or new normal.

Thus, at all times, amid periods of stagnation or great innovations, medical experts help companies not to lose the truth about their product and its essence.

When it comes to the proper use of new technologies, they are the single source of truth in pharma. Their role and rich clinical experience are credible sources for the protection of patients’ safety.

To send this message around, we held a dedicated session at the recent Next Webinar – to show how the dramatic shift towards omnichannel that occurred in the healthcare industry has made medical experts permanently change the emphasis of their work; how integral they are for the life sciences community and how they fit in such a rapidly developing environment.

What has changed for medical experts?

They say pharma too often throws the words “digital transformation” around. However, these people don’t understand that each business industry is individual and has its own evolution path. In the sense of digitalization, pharma has been behind for a long time, with many regions on the map where even in our days, sales reps were presenting information to HCPs exclusively on paper booklets.

That was until a “small incident” that shook our planet a year and a half ago forced pharma to reconsider old canons. Now even the regions with severe budget shortages have at least the grounds of a digital strategy in-places. And despite previous efforts, in our opinion, it was a true moment when the Great Transformation started.

2,500 companies around the world participated in the recent survey conducted by Twilio. 74% of healthcare decision-makers from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Singapore reported they had sped up their digital transformation as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. According to ABI Research, the overall digital factory revenue will exceed US$4.5 billion in 2030.

This great transformation is mostly associated with personalization, the rise of omnichannel – and the technology developments that enable all of these.

Omnichannel has become an evolutionary link in the lifecycle of pharma’s digital transformations as the approach to maintaining a consistent value-based dialog with the target audience. A recent study found out that the companies using omnichannel marketing strategies retain 89% of their customers, compared to only 33% of customers in companies with a weaker omnichannel marketing strategy.

The role of medical experts in the world of omnichannel innovation

Such a rapidly changing environment has modified the role of medical experts and, in a way, significantly expanded it. Both external and internal medical experts today are balancing innovation and accuracy of medical data during a product launch, providing tech-driven support to stakeholders, and making all messages aligned.

Internal medical experts:

• Company Employee
• Immersed in specialization
• Formed installations
• Limited by time resource

External medical experts:

• You can connect an entire team with large resources when you need them. 
• A broad view of the problem
• Have an understanding of Best Practices after working with other companies

These two groups include both highly specialized specialists and generalists with knowledge of all branches of medical science.

They help find new ideas for promotion while their advanced skills in the search and analysis of medical sources of information provide a larger array of data to be worked out. The pharmaceutical company also gets transparent and relevant information based on medical and economic analysis to demonstrate the value of therapeutics at the market scale – the benefits that the market will get if it’s going to accept and promote the drug in a certain territory.

It is statistically proven that the information the doctor hears from the Rep during eDetailing has an impact on the prescriptions process. According to the iPhysicianNet study, there is a 58% increase in the volume of prescriptions with eDetailing programs. A medical advisor with both medical and marketing experience has a deep understanding of prescription making. They help to prepare materials for each stage of the prescription process, as a result, making the number of long-term prescribers grow.

However, as it turned out, the work of medical experts is not limited to this, and their role in pharma’s omnichannel transformation is, in fact, unique.

Misinterpretation or a broken telephone

Channels are the foundation of the omnichannel approach. As your strategy grows stronger, you overgrow with more channels – and this is the first case when it’s worth involving a medical expert – to avoid a so-called ‘broken telephone’.

Under a broken telephone, we mean a common case when the product message may get distorted traveling from one channel to another. For example, when you have just two channels, there is a slight chance to distort the message. But when there are more channels, it becomes more difficult to achieve the integrity of the message (see figure 1).

Figure 1

This is where the medical expert may step in and make sure that your messages remain consistent and compliant at every step of the promotion.

Explicit advertising

In a bid to present the best side of the product, marketers can sometimes go to extremes, giving a rather distorted “portrait” of the medication. For example, let’s take a look at the properties of an ulcer disease product based on which you can extract 4-5 key messages. Each of them can be presented in varying degrees of scientific or emotional form. At these transitions, the marketer can get carried away and attribute the wrong properties to the drug or simply present them incorrectly. (see figure 2)

Figure 2

That’s why medical experts work in close collaboration with the marketing department, keeping an eye also on the correctness and scientific accuracy of the product messages.

The creation of omnichannel content is very specific due to the large amount of such content needed and a whole conglomeration of channels where it must circulate. This process may only be faster with well-coordinated teamwork guided by the experience of medical experts. They can provide:

• Adaptation of content for omnichannel and CLM
• Quick and inexpensive production of new content
• Finding of new medical articles and sources
• Offering additional opportunities for positioning
• Finding new advantages, selling points, potential indications, etc.

The team of medical experts also participates in the tactical planning of omnichannel campaigns, deciding on a digital mix (online + offline promotion) plan, customer journeys, communication channels selection, and social media planning.

Medical marketing – a single source of truth for marketing strategy development. The involvement of medical experts may also be significant cost savings going through rounds of obligatory regulations and approvals. Content is going through fewer approval stages and there is no need to involve KOLs to approve marketing materials. The approval of the material is faster since everything is done carefully and as medically correct as possible.

Whatever changes happen around, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and what you are doing. No matter how important it is to move forward, in the end, you don’t get determined by the level of innovation, but by the quality of the products you offer to the audience. 

Contact us to take advice and assistance of professional medical experts, which perfectly balance innovation and product quality when it comes to omnichannel communication building. 

Take a moment to think of how your health behavior has changed over 2020. Can it be measured exclusively by the number of thoughts about hygiene and clean hands? Or was there something more to it?

The positive impact of coronavirus (strange though it might sound) is in the change of mindset concerning our health. Some of us have started thinking more about our chronic diseases; some have been just evaluating the possible outcomes in case of infection. The truth is – we all did that. 

It means only that awareness has grown, that the management of our own health is above all in our hands whatever they are clean or not.

Let’s discuss the role of the modern post-covid patients in the pharmaceutical industry and figure out why it’s a good time to spread value with pharma content far beyond HCPs.

Set value with pharma content – cover all the touchpoints

Something important in pharma has changed for good. It’s not simply customers’ expectations – the patient’s mindset has changed.

The reasons for this were both the growing role of digital technologies in healthcare and the pandemic that has become a powerful impetus for change.

As per most surveys, close to 25 percent of the consumers today are driven by health and hygiene choices. – Gaurav Sharma, Investcorp India

Modern patients no longer want to surrender their health to the doctor’s hands, they want to be actively involved in the process of treatment. This new type of patient requires something more than just product information, they strive for assistance in aspiration to manage their own health.

Thus, modern patients need personalized, interconnected, engaging, and even entertaining interaction with a healthcare provider.

Meanwhile, 81% of pharma manufacturers still rely on healthcare providers to educate patients on their services. That’s why, in a big way, they target content primarily on HCPs, investing very little in patient and pharmacists’ awareness.

What can pharma do now?

We caught probably the most appropriate time to finally change our mindset as well and realize that our engagement shouldn’t be limited to HCP, it shouldn’t have boundaries.

How to expand the dialog with healthcare professionals

Pharmaceutical content for patients, in the traditional sense, is 100% valuable. At the same time, it’s not engaging, it’s not personalized, and it’s not even entertaining.

You might say that it’s not supposed to be ‘entertaining’  the purpose is different, BUT your target audience might have a different opinion.

• 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services
• 57% of customers have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience

If even these percentages are not convincing enough, then just think of billions of dollars spent on promotional materials when desired outcomes were never achieved.

Patients lose loyalty when they don’t feel that the brand cares enough about their treatment outcomes. Moreover, this leads to patients’ nonadherence which is every year responsible for the loss of between 100-300 billion dollars in the US alone.

Sometimes people do not follow a treatment or are unable to cope with side effects because they have little knowledge about their condition and treatment.

It’s about time to invest more effort and creativity in content for patients and pharmacists.

More pharma content for pharmacists and patients: Benefits

Pharmaceutical content enjoying success among patients

The goal of any doctor is to create a clearer picture of the disease and engage patients in active treatment. That’s why, above all, from a med rep, HCPs need corresponding materials that would help them complete their mission. Such content should be valuable, well structured, interactive, and contain the right message about your pharma brand. Concerted efforts, when pharmaceutical companies would provide HCP with corresponding materials, and further HCP deliver it to the patients could be referred to as «cascade sharing». These efforts have a strong potential to elevate patients’/HCPs’ engagement and fit well into the picture of modern healthcare. Health applications, websites, landing pages, portals, videos, and many other materials can perform this mission and explain all aspects of the disease to patients. Let’s dive deep into the characteristics and capabilities of such materials.

mHealth Apps

In the era when being healthy isn’t simply vital but greatly trendy, it’s important to stay focused on patients. With 67% of the world’s population being mobile phone users, the most feasible way to stay patient-centered is mobile applications – offering truly engaging, gamified experiences, communication and information –and above all, psychologically calculated ways to support the patient in their journey.

Moreover, these apps are great facilitators of patient adherence, providing beyond-the-pill value with its pill reminders, information on products, patient leaflets, calculators, symptom diary module (shareable to chat), information and articles on diseases. They may also contain video tutorials, quizzes, surveys, rewards and live chat 24/7 with the option to schedule calls with the HCP – offering a truly gamified patient experience.

Web portals, websites and landing pages

Today patients’ path to treatment begins online as over 70% have researched a prescription medication or medical device online in the past year. A brand’s websites, web portals, and landing pages have become a critical resource of true for patients. Therefore, they act as a critical entry point to access treatment and help patients improve adherence. 52% of patients rely on brand websites to research prescription information. 88.3% want pharma brand websites to connect them to providers. Thus, you can note that patients feel certain power being able to find the right information to manage their condition better.

To choose the right treatment,  pharmacists also should be updated with the latest health-related information. Therefore, if there were more such sites, there would no doubt be matching demand for them.

A well-structured, user-friendly, and interactive website provides your pharma brand an enhanced online presence, the ability to be available for customers 24/7, and to gain consumer insights due to collected analytics.

Emails

Broadcast emails and approved emails are default facilitators of HCPs engagement. It is impossible to imagine a more personalized way to communicate with HCP, especially with all the interactive features users currently can enjoy.

The truth is that one personalized email can generate more reactions than any other content. HCPs are eager to receive emails and they enjoy great success with an 18.58% open rate throughout 2020.

Would it be equally interesting for patients and pharmacists?

Definitely, yes. It would be beneficial for all sides of treatment as it would stimulate a dialog and inspire tight collaboration between them.

Pharma can send specialized emails with information that the HCP could later forward to those patients who would benefit from it. The email with information from the HCP currently managing their condition will certainly enjoy great confidence and inspire more loyalty. Meanwhile, pharma can create more trust in their brand and be sure that patients receive the information they need at the moment.

This practice is also beneficial for pharmacists, who are likewise required to work in concert with patients and healthcare providers to promote health and deliver patient-oriented support.

Self-detailing

Self-detailing is the practice when the medical rep invites the HCP to get familiar with an eDetailing presentation independently. Self-detailing has gained popularity among doctors because it is not tied to the doctors’ schedule, thereby giving them time and the opportunity to delve into the materials fundamentally. During the quarantine, the number of doctors interested in this practice was constantly growing. Also, the greatest value of Self-Detailing in the pharmaceutical market lies in its versatility and ability to complement any communication channel and any device.

This practice could also be favored by patients who might be able to learn more about their condition and the methods of treatment. The equally nonintrusive manner could inspire more patient loyalty and bring certain benefits for pharma companies as well. During self-detailing, the patients can look through the structure and key messages in the presentation at their own discretion. That way, this channel gives a better understanding of the target audience, and gives honest metrics for the campaign, as it is likely to see a different pattern of slides and time spent on each of them.

Parting thoughts

Now of all times those unique moments when patients are eager to take care of their health and cooperate with the pharma. Let us help them in their quest to be healthier. We hope that now you see that moving beyond the creation of pharma content just for HCP brings recognition and loyalty among modern health-oriented patients.

Finally, take a look at an example of a customer journey that reflects how all of these types of content can fit perfectly, complement each other and create value in pharma’s picture of customer engagement.

Imagine that you want to promote a special mobile application among patients with poor adherence. Here are two interaction models that reflect how these types of content can foster collaboration with the HCP and generate loyalty and success of your app among the patients.

An example of promoting a mobile application using content for a patient

You may have noticed that this model of interaction is rather multichannel, but note how the one piece of content that is valuable to both the HCP and patient complements the efforts of other materials and encourages the patient to download the app.

The next example shows how such content can encourage patients that have downloaded your application to fill the survey about the reasons for their non-adherence.

If you got interested in more details on all aspects of work with such content – contact our experts. We’ll help you to choose those options that will be right for you, develop promotional campaigns, and calculate the most reasonable ways of implementation to create value in the new era of healthcare and life sciences.

Every reputable company has to conduct some promotional campaign to spread recognition about their product or services, even in such times of fast-growing markets as the pharmaceutical one. When promoting your products or services, you do the same about your company brand. It would be better to elaborate on an effective marketing campaign if you’d like to reach a decent level of recognition.

The “effective visual marketing campaign” may sound quite harsh and complex for those familiar with the topic superficially. Nevertheless, don’t get flustered; there’s no need to invent a new method of product advertisement. There are many ways to promote your business ideas via visual aids like brochures, Thank You cards, whitepapers, etc. It especially became necessary in the pharma and life science industries.

Pharma Visual Aid stands in the first line when it comes to communication between the revenue team (marketers and medical representatives) and targeted audience (like health care providers (HCP)). Properly created attractive materials can increase your company’s brand awareness and add another score in the pharma industry leadership race.

Fancy-created pharma visual aids have all the essential product and service information that helps the viewer retrieve a lot of details. It should include the product company name, the compound of salts, the advantages, and other info that represent the complete picture of your business message. The pharma visual aids should be personalized and visually comforting for viewing as it dramatically influences physicians to decide to move forward with you or take a look at other proposals.

What is a pharma visual aid? 

The pharma IVA (Interactive visual aid) is usually a piece of printed work or an e-document providing product details. Healthcare professionals use it to show product detail to physicians. It consists of text, photos, logos, and schemes to illuminate all the information on the product.

The core visual aid for pharma companies is forceful

It takes a moment to understand an image that causes an enduring impression on the viewer’s mind. Graphics included in it help patients and physicians to recognize the product quickly. The famous aphorism that has gained time credibility states that a single picture speaks 1000 words.

Informative

Print and interactive visual aids provide all the critical details about the product. It combines texts, pictures, and symbols. Essentially, it assists the HCPs in keeping in mind medicine for a long so they would consider it relevant to prescribe it to the patient.

What are creative pharma visual aid design examples?

As mentioned above, such visual medical materials can be presented as e-documents, presentations, and eDetailers with interactive design elements such as navigation bars, pictures, graphs, diagrams, etc. It should consist of information that will nail all customer inquiries about the products or services designed and presented in the visual form.

For example, it could be an animation of the digestive process and an enzyme pill that gets inside and smoothes the process by unloading the pancreas and liver. If a particular process is presented as an interaction, it has to be consistent and creatively designed.

Why is it better for you to follow such an interactive pharma visual aid approach? We will dive deeper into the topic below.

Why is pharma visual design important for medical representative?

The evident reason is that it has all the necessary information about the medicine. It advises HCPs or medical representatives to acknowledge and consider the product comprehensively with a higher probability of prescribing it to the patients by a doctor.

Pharma visual aid design should clearly display all the info of the drug elements, such as a brand, compound, type, advantages, and indications for use.

Since HCPs are highly busy and hard to reach, medical representatives do not waste their time bubbling on the matter but catch their attention with concise pharma visual aid samples with interactive data they can follow and get what they need for their work.

The benefits of pharma visual aid

• Capable tool for Brand Awareness

An interactive data visualization of fine quality is a solid medium for brand awareness among the target customers, even in these modern times.

• Design Brand Identity

Pharma brands invest time and money to elaborate on conceptual pharma visual aid. They implement a design code that helps HCPs to understand and remember the brand identity.

• Compound Information

The main point of a pharma visual aid is to give in-depth details about specific brands in a way that provides enduring brand uniqueness. It includes brands’ composition, indications, advantages, and mechanism of molecules in a precise creative description.

• Visual marketing

A good pharma visual aid design assists companies in coaching their marketing team as if it gives a professional marketing pitch to customers. These solutions help them to remember the unique sales aid examples of their brands.

Pharma visual aid is a dominant and influential means to design a niche for emerging businesses in the pharma market. Currently, pharmaceutical and healthcare brands are rapidly entering an extremely competitive pharmaceutical market. In such conditions, memorable, creatively designed pharma visual aid for medical representatives can provide aid for sales and drive pharmaceutical purchases.

What are the challenges in visual aid pharma marketing?

The pharma visual aid contains a large number of slides, but navigating between them is tough and uncomfortable, so the rep doesn’t simply have the time to switch over. In the flow of the conversation with the HCP, even seconds count.

Here are some practical examples:

Suppose the doctor asked a question about a drug – and the issue is actually covered in the presentation quite well; there’s a slide to show. Still, since navigating to it takes time, the rep may be (subconsciously) reluctant to use it, sticking to the general flow. Of course, the result is a stale conversation.

Exactly what doctors complain about – in 64% of cases, it’s repetitive information again and again.

Here’s another situation: the rep sits across the table or next to the HCP, showing slides on the tablet. Now, what’s the screen size? Arguably not that large. And the slide is so overloaded with information that the font size is as if intended for a website. The HCP has either to strain their eyes to see the content, waste another several seconds to take the tablet in their own hands – or just ignore the entire slide. This is, unfortunately, quite common.

How to create a pharma visual aid design to gain more sales?

Many manufacturers create pharma visual aid as a way of adding general, but important, info about the company’s indications, statistics with some graphs, and cure rates. It can drive sales if you stick to some main rules while designing a pharma visual aid:

• Cohesive exact info

The main objective of a pharma visual aid design is to provide the compound, indications, and advantages of the specific product, so it should not meet someone halfway in the name of creativity.

• Edged brand purpose

Any pharmaceutical sales manager should have a clear and precise image of the main aim of the particular brand, and it should be shown directly in their story.

• Unique selling proposition

Your company will stick out among other medicines of the same compound if you succeed in outlining your unique selling proposition in your pharma visual aids.

• Visually attractive

A picture talks a thousand words. Design your core visual message through applicable images. It would help HCPs to keep in mind your brand smoothly.

Sticking to these four simple formulas will bring you a significant increase in your crucial and important productivity metrics.

Are you Interested in examining your available IVAs to find out how good they are?

You can download a complete checklist carefully prepared by IVA pharma professionals – and formulate your elixir for efficient detail cone or contact our team by filling contact form below.

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. Fill out the form below and start creating winning multichannel strategies that will surpass your expectations!

The tactics then work like this: providing the type of content the HCP finds most valuable and diluting it with the messaging that the company needs to make them aware of. For example, an HCP mostly interested in a cost-efficient treatment option can be engaged with a calculator, accompanied with information on prescription. Without this information, they would require a second step to consider prescribing the product – namely, searching for that information online. Making that step easier helps stimulate the dialogue.

When one message boosts the other

What’s important here is that each interaction presents real value for the HCP. Instead of engaging the physician at one touchpoint to capture their attention and then hoping to “push the agenda” on the next one, the two are combined whenever possible within one interaction – e.g. one email.

While this was more or less what field reps were trying to achieve in F2F calls, in remote engagement this becomes more important. A rep’s own experience and empathic skills allow them to sense when to say this or that, but with things like remote calls, emails and the web, without “seeing the eyes”, maintaining attention is trickier. No matter how great your previous email performed, there is always the chance (however small in the best case) that the next one will go unopened because the subject line did not engage enough.

And this is where the “digital oversaturation” starts to matter. With many a marketer freaking out at the start of national lockdowns, customers experienced a storm of messaging – and pharma recognized the dangers. With email, this is especially easily trackable – after a tipping point, the open rate starts falling down and unsubscribes get more frequent.

The good thing is that the solution was found quite fast – being twofold:

1. more value
2. think intensive, not extensive engagement

This is, in many situations, perceived as a matter of common respect to the HCP audience. A characteristic quote from an expert (in an interview to pharmaphorum) goes:

It’s time for the pharma industry to treat physicians as professionals, not as marketing targets. HCPs don’t prescribe something because someone says it’s a nice product. They want the good of their patient and offer them the most appropriate treatment. We need to have real discussions and move toward ‘augmented representatives’, who can use authorised sources on the internet or elsewhere to inform physicians and deliver better customer experience.

Florent Edouard, SVP, Global Head of Commercial Excellence, Grünenthal group

How difficult is it to implement this, though? Practices vary, and in many cases, this boils down to content. One does not simply launch the production of hundreds of, say, email templates to engage anyone in any possible combination of circumstances along the omnichannel journey.

Enter the new approaches to content creation.

“Smart content development” approaches

According to statistics, as many as 58% of pharma spent over $50 million on content annually – and only 13% of marketers in pharma/biotech thought they were efficient in leveraging content. This was several years ago, and now the situation is starting to improve gradually for some players (although the measurable impact is now only noticeable individually for each enterprise or affiliate).

The tactics that help improve are somewhat alike. Instead of “feeding the beast” and struggling to get the budgeting for evermore, pharma is adopting smarter material development approaches based on content reuse.

This means that instead of having to create a lot of similar (but a bit different) content items – email templates, CLM presentations, etc. – marketers first work to single out the “recurrent”, reusable elements in them. For example, telling the doctor about the results of a recent clinical outcome in digital content typically means the lines of code (and designs, and layout, and concept) that should look the same in different emails. However, traditionally, they were developed separately by different agencies, creating duplicates and making the company essentially pay for the same thing twice.

In the new approaches, these fragments are developed once to be reused across as many content items as possible. This is especially easy to illustrate with email templates: a fragment represents an entire block that can be inserted into an email template anywhere between the header and footer whenever needed.

What are Email fragments and how they work

As of now, there are two practical implementations of this strategy when it comes to email, and we at Viseven are now experiencing a surge of interest from different customers to both of them. The difference boils down to when exactly the predeveloped fragments are added to the template:

• In the office at the final production stage. This is also called Modular content, and the flow is like that: initially, email modules and templates are developed. The “dirty” work of coding and testing is done when there is time enough, and when the right moment comes to unleash the content to the market – the office (marketers, in-house teams) use a content authoring tool to simply combine these blocks into whatever final form they want. In a recent case, it took a company only 3 days to produce and approve fully functional emails for urgent communication.
• By the end users in the CRM/CLM system. This is as ad hoc as it gets, and this is an option that Veeva CRM The templates are produced with “slots” for a fragment to be inserted, and the fragments are published in Veeva Vault by themselves (and approved each one by one). The field rep can then send an Approved Email, to with they “drop” the fragment with which they decide to engage the HCP, making a lightspeed decision on the spot.

For a practical case with the former of these variants, look at this case study. Here below, we will focus on the practices with Veeva. What you will read is a summary of several cases into just two that generalize the trends.

Practice 1. Going beyond eDetailing to provide more value

As a reaction to coronavirus-related restrictions, many companies adopted remote eDetailing practices to keep HCPs and reps in touch with one another. Remote Detailing, as a channel, typically gets supplemented with email activity – namely invitation and confirmation emails, as well as follow up Approved Email from reps. This spelled opportunity for the users of fragments. A “standard” follow up email for a remote call typically thanks the doctor for taking the time to engage and provides a way to give feedback on the interaction. It is only natural, though, to include additional information that can interest the account. Some organizations practiced profiling their account database according to preferences and psychological types, some left this to individual reps. Suppose we have three types of HCPs:

1. those who value RWE and clinical trial data, and are interested in the scientific part of information about any product
2. the patient-centric thinkers who peruse profiles and want examples of how the product will actually solve particular issues and complaints
3. the HCPs with a strong sense of community, relying on guidelines and key opinion leaders.

A generic email template is first created: Then, the fragments are developed as soon as the general need for them is identified. In each individual case, then, it takes minutes to complete the Approved Email with additional valuable information: In this way, the field engagement tactics get more flexible, the HCPs receive more value from each interaction, the marketers can instruct reps on prioritizing fragments to give more emphasis on particular key messages, all the while content production itself gets rid of repetitive load and becomes more cost-efficient.

Practice 2. Having key message transported by transactional emails

In the previous case, it was one template, several fragments with different information/key messages. In this one, it’s reversed: one and the same fragment dedicated to driving home a particular message, is used across a number of email templates. The particular key messages used in this case may vary; for the demonstration purposes, we can assume it is an upcoming virtual event. A fragment is developed to promote it, providing information and a link to register: Then it can be inserted into the invisible vacant slot in different email templates: In this way, the promotion of the event does not require an additional touchpoint with the HCP, instead relying on the engagement and interest sparked by the email that hosts the fragment. The overall touchpoints reduce, eliminating the oversaturation risk, but their intensity rises. In both cases, the content was created and managed using eWizard content authoring solution by Viseven team – integrated with Veeva Suite and covering a broad range of functionalities useful for pharma content creation and management.

Pharma promotion in the post-COVID-19 world

COVID-19 may go away some day. The large push towards innovation that came with the quarantines will yield results that likely won’t. If one could summarize what is happening with pharmaceutical companies’ communication to HCPs now in 1 point, that would be

• fulfilling the promise.

While the industry has long promised – and to a considerable extent delivered – value-driven interaction, this was considered a long-term transformation that would take decades until the ideal would be reached. Under the present circumstances, though, this has become an imperative for here and now, ASAP. It is safe to assume that tomorrow’s HCP engagement will be exponentially increasing in personalization, infinitely attentive to the HCP’s needs and preferences – and much more efficient, flexible, with ROI expectations rising. Email fragment and modular content practices are just some practical steps on this way – but also among the first to take. Viseven is currently experiencing a rising interest for these practices and approaches. Our professionals engaged in such projects will be glad to share the insights and experience with you – as well as demonstrate the platform that enables them. Do not hesitate to request more information and a free demo here.

Pharma’s communication with HCPs can be an odd phenomenon. Strategically, it is a mission of bringing value to physicians; on a tactical level, it’s a complicated game of smart, creative approaches. The pandemic situation worldwide pushed ever more life sciences marketers and brand managers to emphasize engagement via digital channels. However, the fear of “digital oversaturation” (i.e. HCPs getting spammed and fed up) stimulated smarter takes on making communication more intensive at each touchpoint. In this article, we discuss 2 variants of an interesting approach to reinforcing brand messages – based on Veeva Approved Email fragments.

Turning up the volume on remote communication in pharma

The spring of 2020 may become material for a chapter in marketing books for future generations. Because of COVID-19, pharma marketing experienced a more violent disruption than ever before, as F2F rep calls suddenly stopped being an option. In a survey by PM360, 63% of respondents confirmed rep access was “near zero at this time”. The rapid, hectic rethinking of entire marketing cycles, with the obligatory shift towards every other channel except in-person calls is starting to bear fruit right now.

Until recently, many an organization, especially regional affiliates, used to consider digital channels of communication as supplementary to the “true” F2F eDetailing. Now these are no longer the experiments for the digitally advanced – the “alternative” channels have gained their moment in the spotlight in everyone’s strategy.

These include, among others:

• remote eDetailing sessions
• rep-triggered email
• mass mailing campaigns
• social
• messengers
• web (sites, portals, landing pages)

Of these, of course, email has become the general favorite – understandably so: name an HCP who does not have a mailbox. However, exactly this channel was where anxieties and questions have started to arise. As early as April 2020, experts already warned that inconsiderate and abundant use of email would desensitize HCPs – with more and more emails even from famous and trusted brands landing in spam, and doctors unsubscribing en masse.

This is where the already digitally savvy managers saved the day for many a campaign – instead of playing the old game of who shouts louder, they started experimenting with approaches more empathic to the physician – emphasizing value and providing fewer but more intensive touchpoints.

By May, about 60-70% HCPs still wanted to continue the dialogue with pharma even in times of the coronavirus – so it’s definitely worth it to study how exactly life sciences managed to maintain attention.

Personalization: a horizon, an asymptote… a necessity

In mathematics, an asymptote is that imaginary straight line on the graph denoting a value to which the main trend is getting closer and closer without ever reaching it completely. Even if it seems the graph has crossed that line, you only zoom in to find there’s still some way towards it. In a way, this is what personalization is to marketing; the more of it brands provide, the higher and more refined the audiences’ expectations and standards. It’s a horizon to follow indefinitely, chasing the sunshine of customers’ attention.

Putting aside the philosophical question of whether 100% personalization will ever be achieved, “chasing the sun” is definitely a necessity. Marketers in numerous pharma companies are now adopting omnichannel customer journeys and rigorous database analytics, raising the plank for everyone. Approaches to personalizing the engagement for physicians vary and multiply.

Just one of these involves studying the psychology of the target HCPs and establishing a segmentation based on their preferences and “archetypes”. An example of this approach has been provided by McKinsey and Across Health even before the pandemic.