DMD Intelligence

Multichannel is one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing, but this week it’s time to get down to business and define what it really means for pharma.

At the Channel Optimization in Pharma Marketing conference, experts from AstraZeneca, GSK, and other pharma organizations will connect the dots between multichannel, data, and physician engagement.

On Thursday, I’ll join them to talk about how audience identity data—and specifically, “digital journey” data from our online ecosystem of 300 medical websites—is essential to optimizing physician marketing across channels.

A few decades ago, digital engagement was very limited. While individuals in certain professional arenas got online at a frequency reasonable for their trade, many people preferred to correspond via postal cards and letters. Email and other online exchanges were thought to be a little too impersonal and quite honestly an afterthought. The average Joe opened up his inbox once a day—if that—and even then wasn’t always greeted with the infamous “You’ve got mail” if no one on the other end felt the need to connect.

Devesh Verma, Ph.D., leads the Marketing Solutions practice at Axtria.  His mission is to bring “customer centricity” to the heart of all marketing decisions. His solutions help marketing organizations transform their business models and generate higher returns from their promotional investments. Prior to joining Axtria, Devesh led Daiichi Sankyo’s hypertension and metabolic franchises to achieve record sales of over $3.3 billion. He also served on the Pharmaceutical Management Science Association (PMSA) Board from 2013 through 2017, during which time he launched the association’s virtual university program. Devesh’s experience also includes working for marketRx (acquired by Cognizant in 2007) and Delta Air Lines. 

Did you know that the average person has up to 70,000 thoughts per day? That breaks down to approximately 50 unique cognitive functions every 60 seconds. Of course, most of them are useless and unimportant, passing through your brain at almost lightning speed. The human brain simply cannot process them all, at least without landing you in a straitjacket.

Modern society has only contributed to the rapid fire. CNN broke ground with its 24-hour news cycle back in June of 1980, which was only the beginning of the 24/7 trend. From social media and streaming content to virtual reality, there’s a lot going on.

Doing digital marketing in a world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook can make even the most seasoned pharma marketer feel like a Lilliputian. Our individual campaigns are essential to our brands, but they’re inconsequential in the total scheme of the technology that underpins digital commerce.

In other words, the giants make the rules, and we have to play by them. That requires being nimble enough to stay on top of each successive change.  

When Hippocrates was composing the Hippocratic Oath, he could never have foreseen the impact consumer, peer-to-peer, and third-party commentary could have on a hospital’s ability to serve its patients.

From trusted sources such as U.S. News & World Report, Consumer Reports, and Healthgrades to buyer-based entities like Google and Yelp, it seems everyone has an opinion. We all know—as discussed in a previous blog—a numbered score doesn’t always tell the full story.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve considered a number of issues related to digital ad fraud, including how easy it is to create bots, how hard they are to detect, and how prevalent they’ve become on medical websites. Today, in the fifth blog in our “Pharma and Digital Ad Fraud” series, we’ll explore some proven techniques for safeguarding your digital marketing campaigns.

My Oncology Tomorrow experiment demonstrated how simple and inexpensive it is for cybercriminals to steal ad revenue from medical websites. For less than $200, I created a fake publishing platform, flooded it with bots, and generated $312 in first-month revenues.

Referral leakage has always been an issue within hospitals, health systems, and even smaller regional practices. General statistics indicate that on average, 55 to 65 percent of revenue is lost from leakage. That means a hospital could forfeit between $821K and $971K per doctor per year.

The financial burden speaks for itself.

Every pharma brand has its list of target doctors. Names come in from sales reps, conferences, webinar registrations, and in-person events. If your product is highly specialized, you may have a pretty good sense of who the relevant doctors are, but you still need accurate email addresses to reach them.

If your product is more general, your target audience is likely much wider. It may be hard to gather the names of all the PCPs, specialists, and NP/PAs who might prescribe it. In both cases, engaging the right HCPs requires more than just a list.

An insightful Forbes.com article I came across discussed the difference between mobile-friendly marketing, what author Gabriel Shaoolian describes as “the bare minimum required in this day and age” and mobile-first marketing, which takes a step beyond the simplicity of mobile-friendly and standardizes mobile as the status quo in digital and multichannel marketing efforts.

The former had been acceptable, because until just a few years ago, desktop was the norm and mobile was the exception. The tables have turned.

Information overload has become a way of life for most of us, physicians included. Between email marketing, pharma brand websites, online medical journals, and digital ads, doctors encounter more professional resources than they can possibly consume.

The futuristic television show “Black Mirror” includes an episode where an individual’s “worth” is determined by how many stars are assigned by others, based on a 1 to 5 scale. You can guess how much inauthenticity goes into characters’ daily interactions in order to receive a coveted five-star rating. Genuine encounters are severely lacking, to say the least.

You might also envision how one’s ranking could go terribly wrong—simply via a series of misunderstandings—which is exactly what happens to the main character, Lacie Pound.

Consider this: Two-thirds of physicians prefer email for professional communication, and more than 80 percent of physicians use smartphones for work reasons.

That’s good news in that physicians are ready to engage with email during the workday. But it also means physicians are likely to open your messages on a small screen, which presents its own set of challenges.

When working with email lists, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking “that’s just data.” In reality, it’s so much more. Each physician contained in your database is a real person; a human being with pain points that require resolution. While email marketing used to slide by with low-level personalization and still drive engagement, that approach is fading fast.

If you’re not speaking to physicians in a meaningful way, you’ve already knocked yourself out of the digital marketing game. This snippet from a recent article perfectly captured the personalization notion:

To date, our “Pharma and Digital Ad Fraud” blog series has focused primarily on how bots operate in the digital advertising space. In this fourth installment, we’ll consider how bots impact pharma brand websites.

We all know the web is overrun with bots that siphon off millions in ad revenue every single day. Most of us are actively looking for better ways to limit the damage, including getting smarter about how we buy digital media.

“If you’re not talking to your customers, odds are your competition is.”

That’s a fairly common understanding in marketing. You drop the ball, someone else is sure to pick it up. Of course, for the purposes of hospital and health system recruitment, “customers” translates to “physicians,” but the core message still stands: It’s a competition.