Your Omnichannel Strategy Guide

What does omnichannel marketing in pharmaceuticals imply? What advantages are there? How does it vary from pharmaceutical multichannel marketing? This article provides the essential approach along with helpful pointers for achieving excellence and giving healthcare professionals (HCPs) an exceptional experience after addressing the fundamental concerns. Therefore, if you’re just getting started with omnichannel marketing or hoping to maximize the potential of your current strategy, do read the full article!

For any clarifications, please kindly send an email to: michael.phee[at]drcomgroup.com

What is omnichannel marketing for pharmaceuticals?

After working on numerous omnichannel strategies for various pharmaceuticals globally, we’ve realised that many marketers were confused about the differences between multichannel and omnichannel. What’s the fundamental difference?

• Multichannel: Multiple channels with the same messages
• Omnichannel: Multiple channels with interconnected messages (one seamless ecosystem)

In omnichannel, your messages in one channel will support and/or be relatable to another channel’s content; whereas in multichannel, you’re basically repeating the same content across different different channels. As such, omnichannel focuses on the customer experience – delivering personalisation.

Here’s an example:

Place yourself in the HCP’s shoes. Will you visit different channels if the content is the same across the board?

Planning your customer’s journey

This is crucial, along with segmentation. By also leveraging on your deep understanding of your customer profiles, you’ll be able to deliver a more personalised and precised experience for your HCPs. Here are some possible segmentations which you can consider (but not limited to):

• Level of engagement (never, rarely, sometimes, often etc)
• Preferred channels
• Preferred type of content (product, disease or both)
• Knowledge level about a certain topic

For simplicity purposes, we’ll use discuss the differences between HCPs who doesn’t know about you (HCP ‘A’) and HCPs who’ve already engaged with you (HCP ‘B’).

HCP ‘A’ will have a different customer journey compared to HCP ‘B’ due to their difference in their product’s and disease knowledge.

• HCP ‘A’: Views a LinkedIn post -> Leaves contact details on a landing page -> Rep schedules remote detailing session to introduce product -> Receives approved email –> Lands on HCP Portal –> Registers for a webinar

• HCP ‘B’: Received approved email –> Lands on HCP Portal –> Registers for a webinar

Recommended best practices

Here are some of the best practices which you can use to enhance your omnichannel strategy:

• Data analytics: Leveraging data to make better and more precised customer segmentation
• Tracking KPIs: This will assist you in identifying issues to improve your future campaigns
• Personalisation: Delivering precise, preferred and a curated experience for your HCPs
• Time of delivery: When are your HCPs more likely to (e.g open an approved email)
• Storytelling: Making your content stand-out
• Framework: Useful to internally visualise your customer’s journey
• Message flows: Content sequencing for each customer’s journey

We hope that we’ve empowered your knowledge with regards to omnichannel marketing in pharma. If you’d like to view some case studies and to discover how omnichannel marketing can benefit you, please drop an email to: michael.phee[at]drcomgroup.com.