The global pandemic served as an accelerant to pharma’s late but swift transition to digital marketing. Virtual engagement between reps and HCPs has increased tenfold, with both sides enjoying the advantages of increased flexibility and and better opportunities for customization. Even though reps are now back in the field, there’s no going back to old paper practices. 2023 will be all about virtual convergence, personalized digital content, and AI-enabled analytics to create targeted and tailored marketing campaigns. Here are five top trends to watch:
1. Self-Service E-detailing
E-detailing is the digitization of traditional print materials used by pharma reps, allowing HCPs to view materials online. Self-service e-detailing is the next evolution, delivering a self-guided content experience HCPs can engage with at their convenience. The result is increased time spent with material, and thus greater comprehension/retention on the HCP side, and improved delivery on the rep side, since the content does the heavy lifting. This means high-quality illustration, video, moa medical animations, and other custom content has never been more important as pharma continues its transition to digital marketing.
2. Video Marketing
Over 80% of online content is video, and that number grows every day. The omnipresence of video is undeniable, and marketers agree that video content helps increase traffic and dwell time on sites, enhances audience comprehension of products and services, and directly increases sales. And digital video is proving to be less costly and more effective than mainstream television advertising because of its superior ability to target and convert distinct populations, making mobile video the prime medium for digital pharma marketing in 2023 and beyond. Pharmaceutical animations developed to explain a drug’s specific mechanism of action now have the ability to reach far greater numbers of HCPs and investors, and for far less, than ever before.
3. Social Listening
Social media plays a critical role in smart pharma marketing, but reaching patients, providers, and physicians effectively online requires skilled analysis of the voluminous available data. Social listening allows marketers to monitor online conversations and collect publicly available data across all social networks, delivering deep insights into patient sentiments, cultural differentiators, language nuances, and other key metrics that allow brands to make meaningful connections and conversions.
2. Modular Content
The MLR (medical, legal, and regulatory) review process in pharma is notoriously onerous, even as marketers require ever-increasing customization in content to engage with providers. Add to that the transition to virtual meetings, and the content reps use to communicate with HCPs has never been more important. Enter modular content. Instead of requiring MLR approval for each asset, marketing departments are developing pre-approved individual content modules that can be used to assemble custom presentations tailored to the audience. Videos, pharmaceutical animation and illustration, charts and graphs, headlines and core claims can be ported into channel-specific templates, enabling content creation primed for a faster review process and highly tailored to the audience. Over time, brands will create module libraries that support robust and sophisticated omnichannel marketing.
5. AI / Machine Learning
The pharmaceutical industry is rich in data, and it recently has adopted even more stringent and disciplined approaches to data collection and management. The application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to these volumes of data means companies can transcend the largely descriptive outputs of analysis, moving into predictive models that enable sophisticated pattern recognition and deep insights. Key predictions being targeted are Customer Affinities, allowing the personalization of tactics that enable marketers to communicate the right message at the right time; Next-best Actions and Suggestions will empower pharma marketers to predict the most effective customer journey for any given patient, based on real-time data; Patience Switch Propensity and Adherence will help brands predict when and why patients might switch to competitor therapies. One estimate suggests that even a 1% increase in patience adherence can add up to $100 million in sales; Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Mapping and Influencer Networks is another way Machine Learning/AI will allow pharma marketers to identify leading healthcare professionals and the ways they influence their networks, enabling effective recruitment of KOLs for collaboration on product launches and speaking programs.
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-marketing-trends-pharmaceutical-industry-ajitha-surendran/
https://www.anthillagency.com/self-service-detailing
https://www.pharmexec.com/view/how-digital-will-redefine-the-role-of-the-rep-in-2021-and-beyond
https://www.zs.com/content/dam/pdfs/Boosting_Pharma_Sales_With_Marketing_AI.pdf
https://www.demandsage.com/video-marketing-statistics/
https://www.fiercepharma.com/sponsored/6-ways-pharma-brands-can-optimize-social-listening-tech
