DEEP CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOVING FROM MULTICHANNEL TO OMNICHANNEL IN PHARMA

Since pivoting hard in 2020, commercial marketing groups have been actively improving their engagement habits and looking for improvements and efficiencies everywhere. Screen-to-screen is the new face-to-face. 2022 will see a continuation of the in-person versus digital engagement dynamic tension, and coupled with the inevitable transition to omnichannel, coordinating marketing efforts will amplify the importance of machine learning adoption. There are limits to how far companies can take their omnichannel adoption, and seeing the shift unfold opens up a conversation about how to do this in pharma.

The pace of life sciences marketing organizations moving from multichannel to omnichannel efforts is picking up momentum. The conversations today center around “better customer engagement” and “personalizing” the interactions. But before we get too carried away with figuring out how companies are managing this transition, it is important to take a step back and delineate the definition of customer and how it relates to omnichannel. Marketing in pharma means that there are multiple definitions of who your customers are, and how you prioritize them. Prescribers and patients are both ultimately customers, but there is a difference in how companies see them; the omnichannel adoption patterns will reflect this.

There are four personas that matter when it comes to pharma marketing. First, there are the ultimate consumers – the patient and near-patient population(caregivers) – who have identified themselves and provided demographic information, either intentionally or unintentionally, via one of the various digital channels or electronic medical records (EMRs). They could also be known via a patient registry, something that is common for rare disease companies to maintain. Conversely, unidentified consumers include everyone else who might see a direct-to-consumer (DTC) television spot or who engage via social or search. Unidentified consumers are measured by anonymous web page hits, online TV views, and social media impressions. 

The third target persona is the population of unidentified prescribers – there are special promotions designed specifically to canvas and promote to this category, but like the unidentified consumers the feedback loop is limited in terms of reach and responsiveness. A promotional tactic here might be a website with answers to commonly asked prescriber questions and other resources. Prescriber-focused website visits are designed to offer a different level of information, but information is limited to a shallow digital trail. Finally, the fourth persona to consider is the real “target” in the eyes of pharma companies as this is the person responsible for ultimately recommending and prescribing a drug or therapy. Depending on the product this might be a doctor, physician’s assistant, or a nurse practitioner who exists in the company CRM system and who is called on by drug representatives. It is this person that pharmaceutical marketers pay the most attention to largely because of the richness of things that are known about these people, coupled with insights to their script writing history. 

One of the characteristics that makes running analytics on pharmaceutical data interesting is the access to patient-level claims and relative market share information. For the identified prescriber category, companies know whether health care providers (HCPs) are actively prescribing a particular drug and they can gauge the impact that these prescriptions are having on the receiving patients’ lives. Omnichannel marketing efforts should be tuned into these prescribing patterns. Within this population of identified prescribers, there are deeper layers of analysis that can be performed too, such as responsiveness by decile, specialty, or a combination of these. There is great potential for companies to segment their prescribers and predict behavior and none of this is possible without the backing of rich and timely data. 

Many pieces have to be in place to implement an omnichannel strategy: the coordination between channels has to exist, and companies have to be able to adjust quickly, for starters. And at the core of the omnichannel strategy sits a highly tuned machine learning model that can optimize and predict what the best sequence and combination of marketing efforts should be. The plumbing to act on recommendations needs to be in place, and marketers need to continuously ingest and process the data that feeds the model.  

As companies transition their marketing strategies to omnichannel, significant changes to the way things are currently being done will have to happen. The depth and breadth of this transition can be overwhelming. Can marketing teams really expect to satisfy the personalization requirements for all four different personas? How can you personalize the experience when you are limited in how to identify your audience? Is there a path to gradually assuming an omnichannel approach that can be specific to one or two of these personas but not all? With machine learning as part of the overall solution, can one model serve engagement recommendations for the different groups?

The initial outcomes of the omnichannel adoption path that many commercial pharmaceutical organizations will take means that “omni” does not really mean “all” when it comes to the four personas. Efforts to create an omnichannel practice for identified HCPs will be different from the approach needed to engage with unidentified consumers, for example. Should there be an overlap in the marketing offers? Can marketers be both multichannel and omnichannel at the same time, but pursue different strategies for the different personas? 

Enabling an omnichannel marketing paradigm does not happen without the fundamental pieces in place. In addition to having a team that can guide the process, the underpinnings rely on having timely data streams, the analytics to support decisions, and a machine learning framework at the heart of the operations. Top these off with strong, top-down leadership, and solid business experience, and the goal of achieving omnichannel capabilities is in sight. There are nuances in the execution, especially when it comes to separating the approach from the patients to the HCPs.