In healthcare marketing, omnichannel engagement refers to the integrated and seamless coordination of interactions across various communication channels, both online and offline, to meet the specific preferences and behaviours of healthcare professionals (HCPs). This approach aims to deliver a consistent, personalised, and adaptive experience, regardless of the channel an HCP uses for interaction.
Here's a breakdown of what omnichannel engagement entails in healthcare:
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Seamless Integration of Online and Offline Interactions:
- Historically, biopharma companies relied heavily on in-person engagement models for sales and medical education. However, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift towards digital and analytical tools, leading to a new reality where companies must radically accelerate virtual engagement with doctors while integrating online and offline journeys.
- This means that communications should seamlessly straddle offline and online experiences, ensuring that all touchpoints, whether virtual calls, webinars, emails, or in-person visits, contribute to a continuous relationship. Despite its complexity due to the need for collaboration across various organisational areas, this integration is crucial.
- For instance, in medtech, this shift augments the traditional role of sales representatives with new digital resources and tools, coordinating them across channels to address stakeholder needs.
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Personalised Customer Engagement:
- Personalised customer engagement is becoming a key driver of success in biopharma. This involves leveraging data and analytics to understand the right content, right channel, and right timing of delivery to optimise outreach and engagement with HCPs.
- The goal is to respond quickly to customer signals with relevant "trigger" messages, which can be tailored combinations of content or offers.
- Customers, including HCPs, expect companies to deliver personalised interactions and can get frustrated when this doesn't happen. They value relevant recommendations, timely communication (e.g., when they are in "shopping mode"), reminders of things they want to know, and for brands to "know them no matter where they interact".
- To achieve this, marketers need to invest in customer data and analytics foundations, including systems to pool and analyse data, algorithms to identify behaviour patterns, and analytical capabilities to feed this information into dashboards. Advanced applications even use machine-learning algorithms to simulate the optimal content, channels, contact frequency, and sequencing for a given stakeholder.
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Responding to Changing HCP Preferences:
- HCPs expect long-term changes in how they interact with biopharma companies. A significant majority (over 75%) want to maintain or increase virtual contact, even if a vaccine becomes broadly available.
- The perceived effectiveness of virtual engagement has dramatically increased, with four out of the five most effective engagement channels now being virtual (e.g., webinars, virtual trainings).
- While in-person visits from medical scientific liaison experts still rank in the top five, there's a marked shift in preferred channels from in-person to email and video calls. Physicians also prefer digital and remote models for researching information, negotiating deals, and placing orders for medical products.
- Omnichannel strategies account for the fact that the preferred ways to engage vary across specialties, geographic areas, and even at a doctor-by-doctor level.
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Technology and Data as Enablers:
- Digital and other technologies are key to enabling accelerated virtual engagement, including virtual call technologies, webinars, and HCP support platforms. Medtech companies are also increasing digital marketing, inside sales capabilities, and online portals/e-commerce.
- To scale personalisation and thus omnichannel, data needs to be centralised and made available for activity in one channel to immediately support engagement in another, ideally in real-time. Integrated channels are necessary to coordinate communications and react to customer actions effectively.
- AI-powered analytics engines can provide deep insights into customer behaviours, automate interactions, and improve workflow efficiency. This includes "next best opportunity" identification, "next best action" recommendations, and "smart research assistants" for sales reps.
- While basic technology components like ERP and CRM systems are often in place, successful omnichannel models require integrating new capabilities into existing systems and workflows, with IT enabling the business-led transformation.