A rapidly evolving and complicated omnichannel marketing ecosystem is making it more challenging than ever for healthcare marketers to deliver on their commercial goals. A post-COVID rush toward digital-first HCP engagement has led to more clutter, noise and even more competition for HCP attention. Achieving authentic, meaningful engagement is certainly challenging and it’s easy to miss the mark. In fact, HCPs agree that most pharma companies are falling short and are frustrated with messaging that lacks personalization and relevance.
A recent MM+M survey found that 54% of marketers see personalized communication as an opportunity, while 42% of marketers rate no-see docs as a significant challenge.
This TrendTalks roundtable, “Breaking Through the HCP Clutter with Data-Driven, Personalized Omnichannel Engagement,” sponsored by Relevate Health and moderated by Julie Granberry, chief insights and strategy officer at Relevate Health, addressed these challenges and focused on how pharma companies can leverage and operationalize data insights to deliver more relevant and precise omnichannel healthcare engagement.
Roundtable participants said they are increasingly focused on identifying data points that can enable personalization, such as where specific doctors get their clinical information or what those HCPs are interested in.
“We are focusing on getting our field teams to understand the value of capturing sentiment, segmentation or any information that’s going to inform what a customer experience should look like,” said Sohni Dailey, director, omnichannel operations at Bristol Myers Squibb.
At Organon, Leanne Miller, associate director, CX and commercial acceleration, and her team are working to develop a consistent end-to-end customer experience framework that can be applied across all brands to help marketers identify gaps and where and when they can intervene in relevant ways.
Panelists agreed that the ability to define end goals goes a long way in making a case for personalization. “The insight part of the strategy is my guidepost. If you’re not thinking from the end user point of view, you’re going to miss the mark. You can correct for channels or messaging, but if you don’t know what your customer wants out of this transaction, you don’t have a business model,” said Jennifer Ryan, director, patient marketing, microbiome at Ferring Pharmaceuticals.
Ryan added that while medical science liaisons (MSLs) expect to be the go-to when a physician has a specific clinical or scientific need, they rely on marketing and sales to generate those leads and bridge those connections. She added that data insights are also useful for ferreting out information that give reps a reason to visit HCPs when there’s no big brand news. “There are always relevant topics that physicians are interested in. They love the clinical data and rely on their pharma reps to bring them the latest news on what’s happening in the marketplace, but they’re also interested in other lifestyle aspects of data, about what’s happening on broader macro trends with patients,” she said.
Panelists spoke about how concrete metrics are giving them more confidence in campaign performance, and highlighted the measurement/results they value most as well as the barriers they experience in obtaining them. They agreed that setting meaningful KPIs is very important.
To obtain a weekly read on campaign performance during rather than post-campaign, Harshit Jain, M.D., founder and global CEO at Doceree, put test and control studies together on a dashboard to determine how campaign performance data was attributed to script lift.
The ability to course correct during a campaign is key. MM+M survey data revealed that 83% of marketing professionals said they’ve revised or relaunched a marketing campaign, with 38% citing under-performance of that campaign as the reason.
Marketing pros are harnessing data to improve performance in other ways. Yacine Baroudi, director, customer insights at Regeneron, is using predictive analytics to tag physicians on the likelihood of taking actions as well as a metric that measures action afterward. Paola Franco, U.S. marketing customer experience product director at Johnson & Johnson / Janssen, uses correlation analysis to measure what’s driving prescriptions and conversion. “We found that there are two specific KPIs that mostly drive market share and created a tracker customized to the market,” she said.
Lori Holland-Hancock, director, channel strategy and engagement, at Merck, believes companies need a model to ensure enterprise support. “It’s important to share successes with stakeholders, and how it helps achieve business goals.” she said.
Having the right analyst to pull together and interpret data can make a big difference in how that data is received. “The insights story I’m telling the marketing team, other stakeholders and senior executives is the same, but you need to know your audience. The level of detail and data can be different, because of varying levels of understanding and interest. It has to be very tailored,” counseled Joyce Ercolino, director, digital excellence at Harmony Biosciences.
