Business transformation, or its offspring–digital transformation–is sweeping across the pharma industry. In reality, most pharma companies been slower to embrace transformation than firms in many other industries, such as retail and CPG. Now pharma companies are either racing or at least marching double-time to catch up with new business models and customer expectations. As a result, creating and deploying multi-disciplinary customer journey teams, strategies and tools are significantly higher priority now and for the immediate future.
The pharmaceutical customer journey mapping is a representation of how the typical user, or patient, move through the healthcare system and interacts with each entity along the way. For example; most patients begin their journey with the realization that something is not quite right and a trip to the doctor may be in order. From there, the patient moves through their journey by interacting with their primary care physician, a specialist, pharmacists, and finally the product itself. Optimizing how your company fits into this digital patient journey is an integral part of a smart pharmaceutical marketing plan and an amazing patient experience.
The top three things to aim for with your customer journey mapping are Engagement, Advocacy, and Adherence.
Engagement: Every marketer worth their salt wants high engagement rates. It’s a simple fact of Marketing 101.
However, pharma marketing is a little different in that brand engagement also lends itself to healthier patient habits and eventually higher patient adherence rates.
Advocacy: Another standard goal of marketing, advocacy is a critical asset to pharma marketing and the pharma patient journey as a whole.
Advocacy means that your product and brand are making a genuine, positive impact on the health and well-being of your patients and they genuinely want to share that goodness with their friends and anyone else who will listen.
Adherence: This is a big one. One of the most significant problems facing healthcare and pharma today is the average patient treatment adherence.
Becoming part of the natural patient journey and providing relevant, valuable information along the way helps improve adherence by boosting trust.
These represent both the overall goals of your patient journey mapping and marketing efforts, but the overall goals of the individual product itself.
The Pharma Marketing: Get Started on Creating Great Customer Experience with Journey Strategies research report explains how customer journey strategies are being applied in the pharma industry. This research report describes customer journey mapping and includes a hypothetical journey map for a fibromyalgia patient from diagnosis to successful treatment. In reality, a pharma company would have significantly more customer journey maps (in the hundreds) because of the complexity of its business process and business model. (However, these are highly confidential intellectual property so publishing actual maps is next to impossible.) It’s also important to state that no firm–no matter how aggressive–would implement all of its customer journeys at once. Instead, for example, a pharma company might first focus on the customer journey through e-mail, and then the journey via mobile, and next, the journey using social tools.
