Breaking through the HCP clutter with data-driven, personalized omnichannel engagement
How to deliver more meaningful and relevant pharma marketing.
It’s more challenging than ever for healthcare marketers to achieve meaningful engagement in a rapidly evolving marketing ecosystem. There’s a consensus among patients and doctors that pharma is falling short at delivering on the omnichannel and personalization mandates. While the pandemic accelerated many marketers’ digital transformation, true one-to-one engagement remains elusive — and, possibly, unreachable.
During a recent sponsored MM+M vodcast, editor-at-large Marc Iskowitz sat down with Relevate Health CEO Tim Pantello and VP of corporate development Julie Granberry, to discuss the challenges of personalization and omnichannel in pharma marketing and how to leverage data insights to deliver more relevant and precise engagement.
Pivoting toward omnichannel
Granberry kicked off the conversation by noting that companies are at different stages in their omnichannel journey, “trying to achieve this quintessential one-to-one, and they’re struggling for a variety of different reasons from data interoperability to infrastructure challenges.”
As brands have moved away from analog and digital content to reaching consumers where they are, marketers have focused on one to three channels as a point solution, Pantello explained. Now, the pivot is toward “personalization through precision and tailoring the content and making it relevant.” That’s where Relevate Health can help clients “deliver a national message in a personalized way with locally relevant content to where they practice and treat,” he said.
Omnichannel places the customer at the center of the experience. “Whether [it’s] the HCP or the patient, figure out how to best surround them with a seamless orchestrated experience that’s going to be relevant for them,” Granberry said.
Engaging with targeted relevance
While marketers have yet to achieve true one-to-one engagement, the future looks optimistic. Start by finding ways to do local at scale and leverage segmentation, Granberry advised. It’s important to leverage data to “understand all the different factors that influence their behavior, through treatment behaviors, who they went to med school with, what congresses they’re speaking at, what channels they have affinities to,” she said.
The truth is “doctors want relevance,” she added. “They don’t want it to feel as if they’re building a relationship with your brand or your corporation.”
At Relevate Health, marketers “think about the power of local; and of tailoring to ultimately get to personalization and delivering value that’s relevant to the [HCP’s] practice and patients,’” Pantello said. That’s at the core of [HCPs’] data spine, so that they can subsequently “blend all of that data together to then power the right content, the right channel to deliver that in, and then in what sequence based on their preferences,” he explained.
Top information channels may differ based on individual preferences, Granberry said. “We leverage things such as brand segmentation efforts to understand what types of channels they might have an affinity for, and the longer we go in their journey, the more we find out about them and are able to create that precision.” To achieve meaningful engagement, it’s essential that pharma brands meet their needs in a variety of different channels, she said.
Creating personalized approaches
Relevate Health has more than nine years of historical engagement data across a multitude of channels, Pantello noted. “When we blend that with our clients’ data, we’re able to design very specific, personalized approaches for the actual individual physician in terms of tailoring the content and the sequence of channels,” he said.
The mantra at Relevate is “to meet our clients where they are on their omnichannel journey,” Granberry added. They have the ability to guide small to midsize companies that may not have the infrastructure, budget or time or to leverage and augment data for larger companies, with the ability to integrate our omnichannel engagement solutions, she explained.
The truth is “clients have more data than they have ever had before,” Pantello said. “The question is how to use it to drive business intelligence decision-making, the next best action that’s really personalized.” What’s challenging is that a lot of that data is “not organized in a way that they can activate on it or derive insight from it,” he added.
Improving performance
The journey to omnichannel requires a lot of change management, Granberry noted. “It’s a top-down initiative and there needs to be additional education on the value of it, but also the different challenges that they can face with it,” she said.
Omnichannel is a coordinated, collaborative effort across multiple departments and data sets. It’s important to have partners who can help deliver a better experience and “understand how to use the infrastructure, orchestrate it, design and deliver the content, and activate on all that data,” Pantello said.
Relevate Health helps clients “collaborate effectively with the media planners, the different agencies of record, and the different solutions providers and partners to be able to create that seamless experience through data,solutions, and guidance,” Granberry added.
The key is to “begin with an end in mind — one that fits into a broader performance framework for the client — and define what success looks like and what that criteria is,” Pantello concluded. As a partner, Relevate Health can eliminate “the burden on the client to orchestrate, simplify the experience, focus on how to deliver that locally relevant and engaging content that delivers on the omnichannel and personalization journey that we’re all on together.”
