The pharmaceutical marketing industry in the United States has witnessed a profound transformation over the past few years: the shift to using an omnichannel approach. This has undoubtedly helped create a more customer-centric approach to marketing to American healthcare professionals.
Over here in Europe, we are trying to catch up with our stateside colleagues. Many organizations are only just entering the adoption stage of working in an omnichannel manner.
However, all of the signs point towards omnichannel being just as effective for engaging with physicians in Europe as it has been in the United States. Earlier this year, we at CMI Media Group released a report in partnership with Medscape/WebMD looking at the media channel habits and preferences across five key European markets: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
That research unearthed many interesting datapoints that reinforced the need for pharmaceutical companies promoting their medicines in Europe to shift to an omnichannel approach—and beyond.
Trends in Reaching Doctors Across Europe
The research showed that the decline in pharmaceutical representative’s access was not going to lessen post pandemic. A sizeable minority of European physicians, 25%, said they planned to decrease how often they met with reps (Figure 1). And only 14% wanted to see reps more often than they previously had. The trend of decreased access has been apparent for many years now, even before COVID. It warns us that the brand teams that rely too heavily on reps to spread information about their prescription medicines are only going to be engaging with a shrinking pool of doctors. Uncovering ways to leverage owned and paid media channels to reach the growing number of physicians not visited by reps is critical for the competitive positioning of branded drugs.
The research also showed that European physicians engage with a wide range of different sources and channels when looking for professional information. Limiting promotional activities to just one or two channels will not suffice. How long they spend engaging with a channel also roughly reflects how important or how valuable the healthcare professionals feel the channel is to their professional lives.
While general European trends were noticed in the research, falling into the trap of applying a uniform approach to reaching physicians across all European countries, whether working with an omnichannel mindset or not, will reduce the impact of any promotional activities. Physicians in different European countries, even neighboring ones, often have varying opinions on how useful a particular channel is (Figure 2). These differences are often a reflection of the capabilities of local publishers and media owners in each market; however, a blanket approach to targeting European physicians often fails to consider local nuances, such as the dogged resilience of print journals in Germany or the usage of HCP-specific apps in Spain.
All of this indicates the importance of having an omnichannel approach to reaching healthcare professionals in Europe. But for European pharmaceutical companies to thrive in an omnichannel world, they will need to unify their brand’s earned, owned, and paid media initiatives. And perhaps of increasing importance is the need to unify the disease awareness or corporate activity occurring across the numerous channels that are not compliant for promoting prescription medicines with their branded prescription medicine advertising.
Going Beyond an Omnichannel Approach
Even though, as already mentioned, many marketing teams in Europe are further behind on their omnichannel journey than in America, it is now time to consider how we can go beyond omnichannel and develop an approach that reflects the evolving needs and requirements of our customers and simultaneously takes advantages of shifts in technology and access to increasing levels of data.
At CMI Media Group, we are driving forward the progression of omnichannel into what we are calling Omnidynamic marketing. This is just as pertinent to European HCP marketing as it is already proving in the U.S.
Omnidynamic marketing is what unifies the leading marketing technologies with data insights into a coherent and effective strategy for increased HCP engagements across whatever channels the target audience is present on. This new Omnidynamic approach will ensure pharma marketers can remain one step ahead of their competitors.
Omnidynamic is a more sophisticated, more automated solution to ensure pharma marketers are effectively targeting their key physician audience where they are—here in Europe and across the rest of the world—and driving the long-term growth of their brand. It allows for the orchestration of measurable HCP media and engagement campaigns that integrate all necessary physicians in a continually optimizable manner. The Omnidynamic approach results in campaigns which deliver improved metrics throughout the lifecycle of the activity from one month to the next.
The transition from omnichannel to Omnidynamic European media campaigns will lead to significant growth and success for the teams that embrace it.
