Why is the healthcare industry overcomplicating omnichannel?
The basics to getting omnichannel right the first time.
A thought paper by Dazur Digital.
Introduction
The likelihood is that if you work in the pharmaceutical industry and any part of your job is to engage with customers (patients, patient organisations, payers and physicians), you will have heard of, seen an email, or watched a presentation about omnichannel! You will have probably read a White Paper too – we promise you this will be the last you need to read.
Omnichannel is everywhere at the moment.
And the problem with the philosophy of something being everywhere, is that it can turn people off using it. People roll their eyes when someone mentions it. Not only are people mentioning it all the time, many are using it as a term for a whole host of different engagement and marketing techniques.
This struggle to embed and get people excited about omnichannel is a real shame because the potential omnichannel brings to engaging with your key customers is huge. And it doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t have to be a complete overhaul of what you are currently doing. It doesn’t need you to scrap your current plans. It really is an add-on and a way of working that will truly help you use content, channels, and messaging to work harder and faster. If done properly it makes your life easier. Let’s help you get there.
In this White Paper, Dazur Digital will try to dispel some of the myths, the hyperbole, and overcomplicated processes of omnichannel to help you embed a simple philosophy into the way you work moving forward. Our aim with this White Paper is to ensure that when you next speak to a colleague at the water cooler, on MS Teams (other video conferencing tools are available) or present an updated marketing plan, you are doing so with confidence and knowing that your definition of omnichannel is correct and also the use of it will help you achieve greater outcomes!
Let’s start with the basics and see how it can help you deliver better.
We hope you enjoy the read.
What is omnichannel, where does it come from and why is it important for the pharmaceutical industry?
Before we delve deeper into omnichannel marketing and how it can be better used within the pharmaceutical industry, we need to understand where it comes from and why there is a big buzz around it among marketing professionals.
The simple definition of omnichannel marketing is:
A strategic approach that focuses on providing a seamless and consistent customer experience across multiple marketing and communication channels.
The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create a cohesive and integrated experience for customers, regardless of whether they are interacting with a brand through online channels (such as websites, social media, email, and mobile apps), offline channels (such as brick-and-mortar stores, call centres, and direct mail) or face-to-face interactions (specifically in healthcare) with medical reps, key account managers and medical science liaison teams.
In its simplest form, omnichannel is about making sure that every interaction you have with your customer works with and not against all your other interactions. It is for this reason that it is critical in healthcare that you clearly define the channels to use and what their purpose is. In healthcare this could be continued medical education, access on demand, or to discuss brand/therapeutic applications to name but a few.
Omnichannel marketing builds upon the earlier concept of multichannel marketing, which also involves using multiple channels to reach customers. And this is where many people are getting confused and mixed up around how omnichannel is different. Omnichannel is an evolution of multichannel. It takes all the best bits of multichannel and adds personalisation to it. How does it do that? It does that by creating better integration between, and consistency across, the relevant channels. This is the vital part. Whereas, multichannel, delivers lots of messages through lots of channels, it lacks providing a personal journey for the user, correlating what has been interacted with and providing a personalised next step. Omnichannel ensures you can tailor the information to that user’s needs.
The origin of omnichannel marketing can be traced back to the rise of digital marketing and the increasing influence of technology on consumer behaviour. More specifically it started in retail business in the early 2010s.
Retailers realised the need to integrate every available channel to create a seamless experience for their customers, whether in store, online shopping or even just surfing the web. The role of omnichannel was to have a greater understanding of each individual customer to work out what that customer not only wants but also what they don’t realise they need. There is a reason why all the big retailers want you to use loyalty cards, it creates data that allows them to have a clearer picture of you.
Brands began to realise that customers were interacting with them through various touchpoints, both online and offline, and sought ways to provide a unified and compelling experience across all these channels.
What starts in one industry, follows in others, for the pharmaceutical industry it took a little longer than it maybe should have but we are now starting to see omnichannel approaches to engage with their customers being at the forefront of planning – where it rightly should be.
Omnichannel and pharma is a natural fit.
The healthcare industry is complex with multiple players having an influence on the success of a pharmaceutical product. Add to that the amount of competitors, the complexity of each country's healthcare set up, and the continuous movement to more personalised care – a more personalised approach to how you engage with your customer (and their patients, peers, and key opinion leaders) is obvious. If not a little daunting.
We only have to look at the changing shape of the healthcare market to know that an omnichannel approach to engagement with customers is a must, not a nice to have. By 2026, 20% of all medicines approved will be orphan medicines. The ability to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message is about to get harder.
Doctors receive between 50 and 200 work related emails / day while trying to meet patients’ needs. At the same time there are over 700,000 journal articles published every single year*. This creates an overwhelming amount of information that they are unable to process. It makes it difficult for you as the marketeer!
In a world where doctors are swimming in content it is more important than ever to create personalised information. Physicians want content adapted for their personal needs - we see this when HCPs are talking to pharmaceutical reps either f2f or online, they expect the content to be adapted based on their answers to questions in the meeting. This is at the heart of what omnichannel can be. It can create an easier way to be more personalised, meeting your customer needs and the objectives of the business you are working for.
Summary
Omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach that strives to create a seamless and consistent experience across multiple marketing and communication channels. It emerged as a response to changing consumer behaviour and the need to adapt to the digital age. For pharma, the increasing complexity of the healthcare market and the move to personalisation means it is here to stay.
How to make omnichannel marketing a reality for you and your teams
Keeping the key principles behind omnichannel marketing in mind, you now need to outline what it is from any marketing plan or campaign you are trying to achieve - what change in behaviour, need for the market, or educational gap. Identifying what success would look like and the steps to achieving it. When you overlay the communication touchpoints with your educational messages, you have the beginnings of your personalised journeys!
Everything starts with setting up the right strategy with its proxies (target audience, unique selling proposition, which behaviour change do you want to drive etc) followed by deciding on which conversation points to use (content and services), looking into the relevant tactics (channels, capabilities), what are we going to prioritise and how are we going to measure success. Once this is clear you can really get started to action on it.
Dirk Abeel – Omnichannel Expert, Omni-x-elleration Ltd & Pitcher AG
At Dazur Digital we have key principles that we follow when implementing our omnichannel campaigns with our clients.
Key principles for omnichannel marketing:
1. Consistency: You must maintain a consistent message, look, and feel across all relevant channels to reinforce their identity and value.
2. Integration: Data makes all the difference. Use the data and insights you gather from various channels to better understand customer behaviour and preferences, and then adapt. This is an iterative process, especially when making use of modern data collection tools (AI and predictive analytics) resulting in predictive and prescriptive insights/outcomes.
3. Seamlessness: Customers should be able to switch between channels without any disruption in their experience. For example, a physician may research a new medicine on a website, look at info on social channels, and then discuss with a sales rep face-to-face – they must receive the same informed experience in every interaction.
4. Personalisation: Your marketing and communications needs to be adapted per audience segment, and where possible per person. Setting up the right data capture for customer preferences and behavioural information will allow you to easily identify how to tailor future content. The tools are available to help automate much of this for you.
5. Customer-Centric Approach: Omnichannel marketing should always focus on the customer's needs and preferences, rather than just pushing your business agenda – your comms has to highlight how you are meeting your customer’s needs – whether that by with payers around value and price, patients around quality of life, and physicians around improved patient outcomes and care. To achieve principles four and five you must have a detailed segmentation strategy in place from the outset (personal styles of audience, level of advocacy towards a brand etc…).
What we hope the above shows the many of you reading this, is you’re probably not too far away delivering against these five key principles already. The integration of omnichannel in your working is a shift not a revolution. It is about truly understanding what works well from a marketing and communications perspective, and adapting accordingly.
Many of the tools and platforms are already in place within pharma to ensure you can capture the data needed to adapt your content and channels. Most of these tools are already utilised to cascade your communications digitally. It is about understanding which ones are best for your organisation, that they are adopted internally, and to ensure they are integrated.
Content has always been King in health communications, but actually that isn’t really the case now …not without the right technology and channel to ensure it is seen, interacted with and personalised for individual HCPs. You shouldn’t create a content plan without also setting out your communications plan too - incorporating how content is digested and the needs of each HCP segment. All the tools are there to implement this more dynamic approach to content that omnichannel offers.
Andy Burke — Head of Strategic Development at Dazur Digital
But before selecting tools there are four key secrets to omnichannel success:
1. Clearly determine your expectations and hopes around what you are hoping to achieve.
2. Start small and build slowly, little wins ensure broader team confidence. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
3. Test, test and test. Start with one audience, one channel or one messaging track and evaluate before scaling more broadly.
4. Make sure your approach is scalable and can be rolled out at speed depending on the maturity of the market, the team and its audience.
If you can live by these key principles and secrets, the route to success will be more manageable and achievable.
The following section sets out the five staged approach to embedding omnichannel in your team and broader business strategy and plan. Each step is clearly defined with examples of what you need to do.
Staged approach to launching omnichannel
We’ve created our own approach to embedding omnichannel in your team.
The key difference from this approach and others that are out there is a balanced focus between creativity and technology. You need to do both well to succeed and they need to have a direct connection in all that you do. On top of this, as with any approach, you need to have a clear feedback loop and ability to course correct throughout.
In many examples we have seen companies only look at reach and initial activation of your customers through their content. This isn’t enough. For long term customer buy-in you need to ensure they come back for more and also drive more customers to your information and content. You want and need ambassadors. With omnichannel this becomes a reality.
Denis Kovalskikh – Omnichannel Head at Dazur Digital
But how do you do this? There are five simple steps Dazur uses to make this happen:
1. Distil
Know your audience! In detail! To do this you need to be not only harnessing data at the beginning of your omnichannel journey, but also throughout. Having the right technology to support this through workable CRMs, marketing automation and integrating with external tech is vital. At the same time, use the data that is readily available from not only your teams but external sources too to really delve deep into your target audience as individuals. Investing in knowing will ensure the investment in development of content and channel to use isn’t wasted.
2. Define
Be clear about your goals and why you want to use omnichannel. Be clear about the barriers you may face internally through stakeholders. Ensure you get buy-in at this stage because if you don’t it is unlikely that you will later down the line. Key stakeholders internally should include: BI and analysts, IT team (integrations, choice of systems), Brand/Marketing/Medical Affairs managers on content creation and budgeting, Medics on content approval, and Digital or OCM dedicated team on triggered abilities. This is a critical phase and one that will need face-to-face meetings and the development of complete user-focused journeys aligned to your business goals. At this point you will be creating a hypothesis of what you are likely to achieve and will agree the KPIs and outcomes you want through the programme.
3. Develop
This is the start of your content and channel building journey. In many cases testing is vital at this phase. Bring in your target audience (if possible) to help you co-create the information that is most likely to resonate. Ensure the people supporting you to develop the content and channels have a deep knowledge of UX, and how and where the content will work best. At this phase you may consider prototype testing of content with a small selection of your target audience. This will help iron out any problems your content might have.
4. Deliver
You’ve now launched your campaign. Job done. But that isn’t the case. This stage is where you will start to draw down on your KPIs and own data generation, allowing you to be agile and adapt where appropriate. Testing is key, data is key, and understanding your CPA (cost per action) to adapt when needed is important. The whole point of omnichannel is you are able to tailor content and the use of channels to the needs of your audience. Listening to what they are saying through analytics or direct conversations will give you greater reward. We track all your content in a way that is digestible and allows you to make informed decisions quickly.
5. Decide
The evaluation stage of the cycle. This in itself is slightly misplaced because to truly embed omnichannel, evaluation happens constantly and throughout the project. The five step cycle becomes a natural approach that can happen quickly or over the longer term. Always look to evaluate the messaging or the channel used. What is working? What isn’t? Why isn’t it working? Focus your efforts on the channels that are harnessing the greatest results and put the investment where the ROI is largest. The end of a programme evaluation, although helpful, can sometimes be too late. We work with you to create live dashboards of data to make quick decisions throughout. You don’t see stock brokerages making end of day decisions, the market is live and they make decisions every minute of the day. This agile thinking to decision making has to be considered while developing an omnichannel approach.
What to do before you go ahead with omnichannel
Before you go into your next project thinking that omnichannel is the way forward, consider the below checklist and information gathering process. This will give you a greater sense of the scale of work needed from a time and monetary investment point of view.
- Outline all client expectations from omnichannel and formulate a hypothesis; what impact do you expect to see.
- Check clients current contact base: consents, activity, purity.
- Assess clients current campaigns and touchpoints; do they understand the user journey and conversions, can they find answers on why they see those results.
- Check the behavioural data that is captured, and assess what is needed to start capturing required data.
- Assess the IT capabilities, do they have what they need.
- Review competencies in the team to launch these new campaigns, plan how to acquire them or raise skill sets of the current team if gaps are identified.
- Make a project plan that is based on observations.
Dazur Digital helps clients at every step of their journey to achieve their omnichannel goals. Applying the principles shared in this white paper, and helping clients to tackle the basics first then scale is a proven and manageable approach to success.
This is why Dazur Digital has often started one CLM presentation at a time. Adapting both the creative storytelling and technical functionality for omnichannel will not only improve engagement and outcomes of the presentation, but also ensure the right data is captured on the audience. Through this the client can segment appropriately and build effective on-going personalised communications.
If anything in this white paper has resonated with you, why not take advantage of a free Dazur Digital CLM review now!