Part two
A short introduction to multichannel marketing in pharma
The benefits of multichannel for healthcare professionals
How HCPs can benefit from multichannel engagements
Understanding the benefits for HCPs is not only an incentive to act and create your own great multichannel communications. It also informs how you go about it. Knowing what customers want should determine the kind of multichannel that you deliver.
Summary:
- Multichannel offers considerable benefits to HCPs
- Match how different people prefer to consume content
- Increase content relevancy through automated personalization
- Be fresh and surprising
Ready to start a multichannel project?
Check out Agnitio’s ‘multichannel kickstarter’ which gets you up and running in a simple, structured, and cost-effective way.
Flexible content delivery
The simple truth is that different people want to receive information in different ways. Some HCPs like email, others don’t. Some people like audio channels like podcasts, others require the visual stimulation of websites. At its most basic level, a multichannel approach provides you with options to account for these preferences. The more options that you have, the better fit you can make your channel offering to customers.
A multichannel approach also offers the flexibility to be more strategic. Yes, different people prefer different channels, but they also want specific channels at specific times. An engagement like remote detailing will take place in office hours, while reviewing a website might take place during the journey home.
Multichannel customer engagement enables you to use channels intelligently, meeting different needs at different times.
There are no good or bad channels. Each offers specific benefits. What’s important is to find the right channel for the right person at the right time. Thinking this way means that you are no longer considering channels in isolation but rather in combination. That’s the difference, as we discussed last time, between just providing multiple channels and having a multichannel strategy.
Relevant communications
A major benefit for healthcare professionals is also increased content relevance. The information that they receive is more relevant to their personal needs and requirements.
Multichannel makes this kind of personalized, highly relevant communication possible. By choosing different kinds of channels and sequencing them correctly, you can both better understand customers and respond to their personal needs.
For example, sales reps can connect HCPs with personalized websites or ‘microsites’ that provide detailed information on specific topics. The data gathered from the interactions with an e-detailing presentation can inform the microsite content for each doctor. Where it’s clear that a doctor needs more information on a drug’s safety profile, they can be connected with a website that dives deeply into this topic.
Highly interactive channels like e-detailing are good at engaging people in topics and so are useful for determining interest levels. Other channels, like email or websites, are likely less interactive and therefore might be better used for delivering detailed information in follow-up communication.
Engaging experiences
In addition to the flexibility of channel choice and relevance of content, the variety of experience that multichannel makes possible is also a key benefit for HCPs. And one that is often underrated. Multichannel enables you to connect different kinds of experiences together – keeping things fresh and intriguing.
Rather than a standard four or five in-person detailing meetings per year, a multichannel approach might now include a mix of in-personal meetings, remote calls, personalized websites, approved email communication, opinion leader webinars, self-detailing systems, and virtual conferencing.
When these channels are sequenced, reinforcing each other, so that a story unfolds over time, the quality of experience rises – driving engagement in your message.
Better clinician education
According to HealthLink Dimension, 75% of medical providers want to receive information about continuing medical education opportunities from pharma companies. Multichannel offers huge potential to meet the need for quality medical education in a way that personalized to individual requirements and scalable. All three benefits of multichannel – flexibility, relevancy and engagement – apply equally here as they do for branded communication, if not more so.
The flexibility of multichannel allows HCPs to benefit from both on-demand educational content, which they can explore in their own time, and guided e-learning tools. There are also opportunities to connect opinion leader and conference programs to multichannel clinical education initiatives by incorporating ‘live’ channels like webinars and virtual conferencing.
As with branded communication, there are opportunities to demonstrate value and provide personalized service by making sales teams and MSLs central to the process – engaging HCPs in multichannel education programs and orchestrating the experience as required.
What’s next?
Looking at multichannel from a customer’s perspective is always useful, helping you understand what the benefits are and how you might provide them. Hopefully you’ll already see how these also advantage the industry. Engaged customers, receiving information that is relevant to their individual needs and provided in the way that they prefer, are obviously successes for any marketing initiative.
But there are other benefits too, specific to marketing and sales departments. These positively impact your work on a daily basis, addressing what you want to achieve and also the factors on which you are measured.
That’s what we’ll explore in the final part of this series, addressing how multichannel impacts topics like ROI, sales rep empowerment, and improved market segmentation.
Ready to start a multichannel project?
Check out Agnitio’s ‘multichannel kickstarter’ which gets you up and running in a simple, structured, and cost-effective way.