In today’s rapidly evolving industry environment, pharmaceutical marketers are challenged more than ever to reach and engage their customers. With the growing number of uncoordinated communication channels, the constantly changing behavioral influences on consumers, healthcare professionals, and payers and spiraling promotional costs, marketers are asking themselves how to best achieve commercial success by Embracing Omnichannel Marketing.

There is a lot of buzz around Embracing Omnichannel Marketing as a potentially more powerful approach to orchestrating and optimizing all the marketing efforts across all channels and multiple stakeholders. Omnichannel marketing is emerging as the way forward by enhancing engagement across personal, non-personal, and media challenges to meet the integrated needs of providers, patients, and payers.

However, adopting an omnichannel approach is not a quick fix. It requires a fundamental shift in how marketers simultaneously orchestrate and execute their promotional strategies and address the integrated needs of multiple stakeholders. Omnichannel marketing requires a breakdown of internal organizational siloes.

Media and marketing plans that include integrated messaging across a number of channels – both online and offline – is commonly referred to as Omnichannel marketing.

B2B pharma marketing will feature this heavily.

The Martech Advisor website states omnichannel marketing as “defined as a cross-channel marketing discipline that aligns content delivery across various marketing channels to provide seamless and consistent content experiences across the buyer’s journey and beyond.”

Embracing Omnichannel Marketing is based around the fact that our target audiences in pharma are not bound to a single channel, platform or medium. Those audiences will read physical magazines, visit a range of websites (owned and earned) and engage within both physical and online communities. They’re everywhere.

And those audiences are also low on time and patience and want to make purchases and gather information there and then, reducing waiting times for whatever they are waiting for. Pharmaceutical organizations are required to be there and then, but can gather feedback from those customers instantly.

There are several elements required to develop and execute omnichannel marketing that enable agility and speed of execution, and elevate the ability to connect and optimize communication across channels and audiences:

Turning promotion on or off: The omnichannel marketing approach will enable marketers to make data-driven decisions on which promotional activities to dial up, dial down, or turn off entirely. From a promotional journey standpoint, there may be overpromotion within a certain market segment, and therefore, excessive overspend. For example, if HCPs are already frequent prescribers of a given brand, is it necessary to frequently promote that brand to the HCPs? If patients are already asking for a brand, and adherence metrics are strong, is it essential to continue direct-to-consumer awareness campaigns? Great marketing is not only deciding what to do, but also what not to do.
Advancing intersection of communication across audiences: New models of engagement between patients and physicians have been driven by the COVID-19 pandemic environment, with emphasis on the rise of virtual care and telemedicine. This is a great opportunity for both patients and physicians to engage in new ways with one another. Because of this shift, marketers need to adjust their messaging to ensure it is reaching each party when they need it. For example, for point of care, how do you ensure patients have access to that same content if telemedicine is now used more frequently than it was pre-pandemic?
Optimizing across channels and stakeholders: Traditionally, marketers might direct spending across a single or just a few channels, but not across all channels and/or customer stakeholders. That ultimately erodes fiscal optimization. Omnichannel marketing provides the opportunity to work with brands on a continuous optimization cycle throughout the life of a campaign. This is designed to recognize inefficiencies earlier in the process, while also identifying areas where ROI can be improved by reinvesting dollars that previously would have been wasted. The result is a win-win: improved patient health outcomes and greater contribution to the growth goals of a brand.
Personalizing and targeting: Based on the increasing availability of data along with technology and analytics, marketers can get closer than ever to their customers in order to satisfy their information needs. Addressing customers’ healthcare needs, while also ensuring their data privacy, will be essential to marketers and their partners, particularly as the global privacy landscape is evolving.
Getting smarter with machine learning: The models and metrics traditionally applied by the pharma industry to measure marketing performance will need to be reassessed and modified to ensure measurement of simultaneous impact across channels and customers. A lot of the old measurements were stagnant, and the focus was solely on ROI. With advanced technologies (AI, ML, and NLP), omnichannel marketing can perform dynamic analytics and modeling and enable smarter campaigns.