In the pharmaceutical industry, Dear Doctor letters are a fact of life. Black box warnings, recall events, labeling updates, and changes in prescribing information must all be conveyed to prescribers. Patient safety makes Dear Doctor letters essential. Yet, marketers often struggle to produce them efficiently.
No matter how much you try, your marketing plan can’t possibly account for every scenario that might require a Dear Doctor letter. You can budget for a typical number of letters every year. You may even be able to anticipate when some of them will come up. But, the need for Dear Doctor letters still sneak up on you.
Drugs that treat cancer, diabetes, and other diseases are developed with the best intentions. Yet, in recent years, many high-profile pharmaceutical products have come under scrutiny for a wide range of unforeseen shortcomings. A common blood thinner was found to increase the risk of dementia. Problems manufacturing cancer drugs led to a shortage that caused children to relapse. Taking two widely prescribed drugs in combination was found to increase the patient’s risk of hospitalization.
This is a healthcare marketing blog, but for just a minute, we’re going to talk about cars.
Picture your local dealership. On any given day, all the salespeople are milling around the showroom, just waiting for someone to walk in off the street. When that happens, a salesperson zips over and starts talking about the features of different vehicles, the latest financing offers, the manufacturer’s safety record, and anything else that comes to mind.
Not long ago, nurses didn’t really figure into the pharma sales cycle. Sales reps traditionally focused on the one or two key physicians in each practice, simply because their office time was limited. In recent years, as pharma companies have employed fewer sales reps, reaching multiple healthcare professionals in a single practice has only become more difficult.
Physicians today are overwhelmed by increasing demands on their time. An aging population and patients newly insured under the Affordable Care Act are driving up the need for medical services, while new electronic health record (EHR) policies force physicians to spend more time monitoring metrics related to healthcare quality and value.
KOL speaking tours, CME conferences, and other events.
There’s a healthcare event for every specialty and season. To get the registration numbers you want, you need to put the relevant event details in front of your target physicians in a timely manner. As the digital communication channel with the highest ROI, email is the most highly efficient way to do this.
The vast quantity of tracking data associated with digital marketing can be a tremendous asset, but also a liability. In theory, you can use all that data to truly understand your customers and refine your marketing campaigns. More data should mean better analysis, and ultimately, increased marketing ROI. In practice, more data is often just more data, which can be overwhelming.
Every pharma sales rep is looking for an edge. And, pharma marketers work hard to help reps optimize every interaction with their physicians. You train reps on your products and develop materials they can leave behind for physicians, nurses, and even patients.
