Healthcare marketing brings a range of platforms and channels whereby pharmaceutical brands can engage with and derive intelligence from their targeted demographic, particularly healthcare professionals.
The unprecedented evolution of communication technology, early adoption by HCPs and bolstering of bandwidth will continue to validate new forums, vehicles, devices and media that offer alternative opportunities to drive both the communication and research needs of pharmaceutical organizations.
Embracing the transformative impact that new media can have on HCP engagement and education, and understanding the actionable intelligence is a game changer in this space.
Marketers should be well versed and confident in emerging channels in order to fully understand the scope of engagement across platforms from their targeted audience. Collecting timely and accurate HCP demographic and engagement data across a variety of channels enables improved design, delivery and measurement of future engagement and intelligence initiatives.
Game Changers—Interactive Engagement
Platforms rooted in trust are in pole position, empowered to curate and deliver new engagement and intelligence models. Of late, social communities and gaming platforms are proving to be viable differentiated channels for education and high-quality, crowd-sourced data and insights.
Social Communities
Social intel is already a key driver for brands, and social media brings the capability to seriously change the engagement model. According to Manhattan Research, 99% of physicians spend about eight hours each week online for professional purposes. One out of four U.S. physicians uses social media daily to seek out medial information. About one out of seven actually contributes content daily to a social media website with more than half sticking to physician-only communities, reports Healthcare Daily. According to the Journal of Medical Internet Research, 61% of doctors polled use social media once a week or more to look for information while 46% are actually contributing new information over that time span.
Clearly, professional social communities that foster trusted collaborative learning and engagement environments are highly valued and used. As such, applying social listening to derive sentiment, executing surveys for research and delivering targeted eResources in this environment will unlock highly valuable data and insights.
Gaming
Platforms that tap the competitive nature of physicians are emerging channels for amplifying key educational brand messages while also delivering real-time data and insights. According to a poll of 500 global MDs, administered via MedLIVE.com, 82% of MDs are interested in competing against global peers in online health games that test their knowledge. Like social communities, competitive education platforms that target participation from HCPs bring a unique ability to create influence and derive powerful data and actionable intelligence via crowd-sourcing.
The Future
Disruptive innovation is burgeoning across healthcare marketing, and this is a good thing. Technologies that augment historical practices will begin to replace what’s tried and true. Capture, curation, storage and application of crowd-sourced data collected across all channels, especially social, will help create correlations for spotting trends and determining the quality and efficacy of campaign engagement. As with all emerging trends, early adopters will pave the way. What’s most important is having a handle on where to source and how to interpret data derived so that decisions can be made efficiently to support the needs of HCPs and our industry.
