This past year saw a number of innovations in the digital world, with companies adjusting for pandemic transitions from 2020 and building towards the new normal. In order to help build some structure around 2022, a year that will certainly continue to push us forward as an industry, we have created a list of seven New Year’s Resolutions that may be a little easier to work towards than most.
1. Bring Personalization into Your Strategy
In recent studies, it has been found that most physicians are open to receiving useful messaging from pharmaceutical brands and are up to five times more responsive if those messages are personalized. Using predictive analytics and insights such as creative, message, and content affinities, marketers will have the ability to develop impactful messaging that can be deployed to the preference of their audience, and strategies that will be sure to increase ROI as well as the overall impact of the campaign.
2. Consider Access Hurdles When Speaking to Your Audience
Formulary access stands in the way of a patient receiving the optimal treatment with reports showing 1 in 10 adults delayed or did not get care due to cost reasons. As coverage continues to be a factor in 2022, it is worth incorporating access targeting within your campaigns to both patients, caretakers, and their associated healthcare professionals—especially when you are messaging to locations with lower access to treatment.
3. Acknowledge the Power of the Pharmacist
Pharmacists are among the most trusted professionals in healthcare due to their interpersonal interactions with many of their patients in the community. This trust has been vital to healthcare as nearly 4 out of 5 patients report they are more likely to vaccinate if it is recommended by a pharmacist—a key fact as it has been reported that pharmacists administer up to 86% of immunizations such as influenza. In addition to being a trusted member of the community when it comes to medical advice, they are prominent across the country with the average adult living within five miles away from a pharmacy. Keeping this in mind, pharmacists and their patients should absolutely be included in your targeting approach through both direct messaging and geotargeting, with messaging promoting important conversations between parties.
4. Upgrade Your Email Campaigns with Next Best Action
Building upon your personalization resolution, your email campaign can be upgraded by incorporating predictive analytics in order to make your next best action email approach as relevant to your audience as possible. By better understanding your audience, you can deploy emails at the right time, to the right place, with the right content to engage them best. This also allows you to better execute any drip campaign by segment—further nurturing any potential leads garnered from your campaign.
Trends have shown a recent increase from ~30% read time to ~50% among physicians, and while this may be a symptom of the increased digital environment caused by COVID, we can expect much of the same in 2022 with future interaction habits being murky.
5. Develop a Connected TV and Telehealth Strategy
Cord-cutting continues to be a trend across the U.S., with Forbes reporting as of 2021 that the number has tripled during the past seven years. To put a number on it, that is an estimated 50.4M who have either cut cable completely or limited their service in favor of alternative options. With this trend showing no signs of slowing down, the spotlight has shifted to connected TV (CTV), or advertising across your popular streaming services.
This transition does not come without its advantages, with marketers now able to focus their messaging at the device level as well as use telehealth data streams to determine locations where patients/healthcare professionals are spending more time at home than at the point of care. The telehealth component is key with McKinsey reporting use stabilizing at 38X pre-pandemic numbers during 2021.
6. Rally Executive Sponsorship to Champion Multi-Channel to Omni-Channel Transitions
It is barely an argument that the hottest word over the course of the last few years in digital marketing has been omni-channel. This is for good reason, with one company seeing up to 23% of growth when optimizing their omni-channel campaign. By definition, the two strategies have some similarities as they each use multiple channels to engage the customer; however, the execution is where the two begin to diverge.
Multi-channel marketing puts the product at the middle of the interactions and pushes out relevant information to the audience in different ways. Omni-channel puts the consumer in the middle, or in this case the patient/HCP, and personalizes (there’s that word again!) their experience through the engagement of different channels. This strategy comes at a time where patients have increasingly taken more control over their treatment journey as seen with the rise of healthcare consumerism. Executing a true omni-channel strategy will not only create true impact, but will also make the experience by those involved seamless.
7. Don’t Forget the Rep!
The pharma sales rep remains at the center—and is still the pivotal channel in your omni-channel strategy. Find ways to support cold outreach and medical science liaison calls fueled by deeper insights. Know what HCPs are hungry for when it comes to medical education, safety, and efficacy questions. When we arm remote reps with personalization suggestions, conversions to calls and meetings increase five-fold.
