“Multichannel marketing” (MCM) means developing marketing campaigns and disseminating messaging across multiple channels that are synergistically integrated. Utilizing different channels to market is especially important in the ever-evolving pharmaceutical industry. As technology advances, marketing methods are advancing at a parallel rate. Pharmaceutical companies need to stay relevant and modern in their marketing efforts to meet the changing needs of payers, HCPs (healthcare professionals) and their patients.
Traditional methods of marketing on a single channel are not as effective as they once were. In the present digital age, pharma companies need to market to their audience where their audience is receptive. Utilizing traditional marketing channels and neglecting digital marketing channels will exclude a vast majority of your marketing audience—and this oversight will reflect in your sales numbers.
Combining multiple channels into one cohesive pharmaceutical marketing strategy is beneficial for a number of reasons. Capitalizing on multiple channels is effective for educating HCPs and providing valuable resources for them. This approach can result in better treatment outcomes, as marketing efforts can be geared toward helping HCPs support their patients throughout treatment. Allocating marketing dollars across multiple channels has also proven to increase marketing ROI, as sales reps can be supported with the information and resources they need to make sales, and this approach enables marketing efforts to be more efficient and productive.
In pharmaceutical marketing, building trusted relationships with key stakeholders (payers, HCPs, caregivers and patients) is critical. To build valuable relationships with their audiences, pharma companies need to prioritize personalization. Digital marketing advancements enable greater personalization features, as digital campaigns can be highly-targeted to market to the right people at the right time.
Pharmaceutical marketing can be challenging for a number of reasons. Pharma companies must meet the demands of key stakeholders, including payers, HCPs, and the FDA. Meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders can be challenging, as everyone wants a say, and one stakeholder’s input can contradict the input of another stakeholder. Developing a cohesive, multichannel marketing strategy that meets all federal regulations as well as key stakeholders’ needs can be difficult for pharmaceutical companies if they don’t have an experienced agency partner to guide them.
How to Create a Multichannel Marketing Strategy
1. Identify Your Target Audience
The specific messaging you develop for your marketing campaigns and the media channels you use to launch your campaigns will depend on your target audience. Are you marketing to healthcare payers? Healthcare professionals? Patients? This makes a significant difference in how you’ll structure your marketing strategy.
What’s the goal of the campaign—to educate HCPs on disease states, signs, symptoms and treatments? Is your company launching a new drug and you need support from payers?
Once you identify your target audience, identify their pain points, motivations, needs and goals. Understanding the HCP, payer, caregiver, or patient persona is critical for personalizing your marketing message and tailoring it to resonate with your audience.
Where is your audience in their customer journey? What do they need at that exact time that will encourage them to buy-in to your offering?
During the market analysis and data collection phases, pharma companies must do the research to determine the specific channels where their audience is already present. Where is your audience actively looking for information, and what devices are they using to search for that information? In the current mobile-first age, digital channels (like social media, mobile apps, and search engines) are at the top of that list.
2. Determine Your Measures of Success
Before you can see success from your marketing campaigns, you have to determine what success means. What goal are you hoping for from each specific marketing channel?
Set KPIs (key performance indicators) as success factors, and track these consistently over time to measure how well your campaigns are performing. Assess these KPIs regularly to continue refining your marketing strategy, adjusting your message, and further tailoring your campaign to drive your desired results.
Set goals that make sense for each marketing channel and determine the specific time frame you want to see these results in. Continue tracking your campaign’s performance and setting new goals, in terms of reach, acquisition, website traffic, click-through rates for email and search marketing, and bounce rates or conversions made through campaign landing pages.
If the goal is to market a pharmaceutical product or drug, success measurements will also depend on the lifecycle of the product or drug. Is it just hitting the market, or has it been around for years already? Just as content should be personalized to speak to the audience’s needs at their specific point in the customer journey, success metrics should be personalized to speak to the needs of your offering, based on its unique lifecycle.
3. Integrate All Marketing Channels
Multichannel marketing utilizes multiple channels, but these channels aren’t intended to exist individually from each other. All channels should be connected seamlessly. For example, connect platforms by linking from your social media ad campaign to your landing page. In your marketing emails, link to the informational blogs or articles you create to support your campaign content.
Ensure that your landing pages, articles, social media campaigns, emails, and paid advertisements all connect naturally. Your message needs to be consistent across all traditional and digital platforms to establish a cohesive presence and to promote recognition of your pharma brand and marketing message.
Integrating your marketing channels means creating synergy between channels. Although your overall message needs to be consistent across-the-board, the way you present the message should be tailored to accommodate each platform. Always think of the customer experience when personalizing your message. The way you format your content for your social media campaign may not resonate as well with the audience of your email marketing campaigns—and vice versa.
4. Engage with Stakeholders
Engagement is critical—especially from key stakeholders! Pharma companies need to engage with stakeholders by creating interactive, personalized content that adds a human touch to the pharma brand. When information is stagnant, it may not be compelling enough to grab the attention of the audience. This type of information may not provide the audience with the information or solutions they’re currently looking for.
For multichannel marketing to be successful, information needs to be dynamic and relevant to that specific person at the exact point where they’re located in their journey. Live chats and mobile apps are excellent tools that enable pharma companies to disseminate personalized, relevant information to their audience. Chatbots with highly-targeted automation features that ask the user questions about their current needs and the solutions they’re looking for can provide valuable insight into the type of content needed in order to resonate with them.
The bits of data that users are providing through live chats and applications can be analyzed and used to further personalize the marketing message. Ongoing analysis of success factors will continue to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
5. Involve Pharma Sales Reps Every Step of the Way
After all, the pharma sales rep is representing your offering. If sales reps are left in the dark with any vital information, the chances of them making the sale decrease. If the sales rep is pitching to a payer or HCP, they need to be prepared with answers to any question the payer or HCP might ask.
Sales reps need to be informed and in-the-know with accurate information. HCPs and payers are increasingly busy with minimal time to dedicate to meetings with sales representatives. They need relevant information that’s valuable, concise, and consistent. If your sales rep contradicts the information disseminated in your marketing campaigns or doesn’t have answers to critical questions, this won’t sit well with stakeholders. The audience is likely to disregard your offering and save their time for a pharma brand that presents consistent information.
Importance of Utilizing Modern Marketing Methods
New technologies continue to give rise to new marketing platforms—specifically digital platforms. That’s not to say traditional, face-to-face marketing interactions don’t play a valuable role in present-day pharma marketing. The most effective strategy includes a modern mixture of both digital marketing and traditional marketing.
The key to successful multichannel marketing is personalization, and the advantage of utilizing multiple channels at once is also personalization. Multichannel marketing enables pharma companies the flexibility to adjust their message on each channel and personalize it to accommodate their audience’s individual needs. Pharma marketers know that what works for one audience on one channel may not work for another audience on a different channel.
Recent upward trends in technological advancements enable pharma marketers to gather data from the success of their campaigns, analyze the data, and use it to continually refine their marketing strategy. Digital channels also enable marketers to implement automation features that further improve the productivity and personalization of their marketing messaging and, in turn, make campaigns more effective.
The reason multichannel marketing is so beneficial for the pharmaceutical industry is because there are multiple types of marketing objectives within the pharma industry. Pharma companies may need to market to patients and HCPs to raise awareness of disease states, disease symptoms and available treatments, market new drugs to payers and HCPs, or recruit patients for clinical trials. Marketing for multiple objectives requires the use of multiple channels.
Multichannel marketing in the pharma industry requires a customer-centric, or audience-centric, approach. Who is your audience? What channels are they currently using when seeking the information you’re providing? Now more than ever, target audiences in pharma marketing are using digital methods to receive valuable information. Digital channels are efficient and often only require a quick Google search, and they’re generally more engaging than traditional print marketing methods alone.
How Good Apple Can Help
The pharma industry is inarguably one of the most difficult industries to market within. Pharma companies need to meet a number of demands, including from payers, HCPs, caregivers, patients, and the federal government, while ensuring target engagement through a cost-effective approach. In other words, pharma companies have a lot on their plates. But we understand that better than anyone else.
Our years of experience in pharma marketing have shaped us into experts. We know what works, because we’ve done it before. We use advanced media targeting technology that enables us to hone in your audience through a highly targeted lens. Each channel that comprises an effective MCM strategy requires extensive market research, using advanced, third-party data tools, to draw media consumption insights and develop unique targeting methods. Otherwise, your advertisements probably won’t reach your intended audience.
We have the cost-effective solutions you need to maximize the reach of your marketing efforts through successful digital and traditional marketing campaigns. We have the tools to identify exactly who your audience is and discover where they’re already looking for you.
Your pharma brand needs a personalized marketing plan to achieve the measurable results you want to see. See the brands we work with and the success we’ve had with them! Let’s work together.
