February 10, 2021
Racial Equity
Race-based inequality in health-care access and outcomes has become a major talking point in the medical marketing media in the past year. The upside of the coin: People are ready to do more than just talk about solutions.
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Righting the Wrong
Steve Madden
GM and editor-in-chief, MM+M
Some scholars will tell you that racial inequity is the defining topic of American history. While not everyone might agree with that, it’s hard to argue that race-based inequality in healthcare access and outcomes has become one of the two defining topics of the medical marketing media in the past year, in a tight tandem with the coronavirus, whose appearance made those inequities all the starker.
Summit 2021
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Interest in the topic, born largely of how to right the wrong, drove record attendance for MM+M’s Racial Equity Summit, held virtually on February 10. (You can view the sessions on demand.) In fact, a custom event addressing the more specific topic of racial inequities in cancer that MM+M put on the following day drove record attendance for bespoke events. The upside of the coin: People want to right the wrong and are working toward, not just talking about, a solution. The other side of the coin: We’re still having this conversation. We must. We will.
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Omnichannel Marketing: In Pursuit of a Seamless Experience
No longer just a reductive industry buzz phrase, omnichannel marketing has become the de facto expectation among audiences of all kinds. However, most pharma companies are not fully taking advantage of the omnichannel touchpoints. In MM+M’s latest eBook, we continue our annual tradition of exploring the impact of evolving technology and how to reach consumers throughout their journey. We examine the lack of consistency in the way companies define omnichannel and the organizational challenges in implementing a strategy. This rapidly evolving and complicated ecosystem is making it more difficult than ever for healthcare marketers to meaningfully engage with consumers and deliver on their goals. Omnichannel continues to be the name of the game in healthcare marketing and that trendline is expected to hold steady heading into 2023. As the healthcare industry moves at a quicker pace, marketers need to respond in kind to advancements in technology along with an evolution in terms of how content is distributed and consumed. There’s a disconnect between the number of pharma leaders who agree omnichannel engagement is crucial for their organization and the actual execution of such a strategy — technological, change management, people and organizational challenges are hindering progress. But the good news is data and analytics, culture, customer insights, content delivery and cross-functional collaboration can help improve the journey. We hope you enjoy this eBook.
FEATURES
What it’s like to be black on a pharma brand team
By Kara Giannecchini
Half of Companies Don’t Optimize Omnichannel Physician Engagement
ByLecia Bushak
How Healthcare Brands Should Engage Audiences in a Post-Pandemic World
By Jack O’Brien
Getting Omnichannel Ready
By Melissa Fleming
Partner Content
From Merge
An Intro to Omnichannel
Patrick McGloin
From Medicx
When it Comes to Reach, Does Audience Size Really Matter?
By Stacey Levas
From Calcium+Company
What to Do When the Doctor Can't Decide
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Omnichannel marketing is no longer an industry buzz phrase. It is now expected among audiences of all kinds. Yet, there is a lack of consistency in the way companies define “omnichannel,” much less implement it. This rapidly evolving and complicated ecosystem is making it more challenging than ever for healthcare marketers to meaningfully engage with consumers and deliver on their goals. Often, pharma marketers use multichannel and omnichannel strategy interchangeably. But they are not the same thing. Multichannel involves the “use of multiple platforms, whether that’s online or offline platforms, that are, in theory, optimized for the interactions,” says Kimberly Coleman Clotman, former head of U.S. marketing at Nabriva Therapeutics. Omnichannel strategy, on the other hand, “focuses on thinking through the experience first and then figuring out the best way to tell a story that is consistent, but seamless,” she says. This means that brands have to understand the entire customer journey and the various touchpoints in order to create an integrated experience. “That is certainly the Holy Grail, but a lot harder to accomplish in practice,” she says.
Omnichannel Marketing
Conflating the terms can cause confusion and misalignment within companies, making it very challenging to get a strategy off the ground. If everyone is not on the same page, it is also more difficult to obtain the necessary resources for implementation. “A true omnichannel approach requires a lot of infrastructure that won’t get developed if people think that it is just a series of tactics without the integration,” Clotman explains. Regulatory compliance can also hinder progress. Issues about patient privacy and customer protection of data can make it especially difficult to envision what omnichannel looks like in pharma. “People certainly want to know how it’s all going to work before you get started,” she says. “And sometimes you don’t have all the answers until you go through the process.”
How to bring customers along the journey
BY Melissa Fleming
Learn more
The train is leaving the gate. Pharma had better get on and start to recognize our role, because once the train has left, you’re going to be years and decades behind.
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Wendy Wright
FNP-BC, an adult and family nurse practitioner
A true omnichannel approach requires a lot of infrastructure that won’t get developed if people think that it is just a series of tactics without the integration.
Kimberly Coleman Clotman
Formerly with Nabriva Therapeutics
Overcoming challenges
Integrating data
To get omnichannel ready, it’s critical to have a point person among the various departments from marketing to data analytics that have to work together in order to make the experience seamless. For most companies, that requires an internal cultural shift. “Organizations are set up to be siloed, so that everyone maximizes their particular function,” she says. However, with omnichannel, the customer experience cuts across multiple departments from marketing and medical affairs to corporate communications and advocacy. For an omnichannel approach to work, data from those different systems must be “integrated and shared in real time so that you can see a truly unified view of the customer,” she adds. To minimize risks, privacy regulations, opt-out policies and security measures will be critical when handling customer data and personally identifiable health information.
Words are important because they can transfer meaning, a mid-level practitioner automatically gives the patient a sense that they're not getting the top of the heap. All that terminology is very inappropriate because it has zero to do with the competency of the provider.
Angel Ribo
PA
Best practices
Smaller organizations may have an easier time building a culture and creating unified systems but face significant financial and human constraints. Larger organizations who have more resources are often stymied by legacy systems and corporate cultures. Change management is a key part of the omnichannel process. “That requires that top leadership and organization buy-in so it's clear what organizations want, how they communicate the approach to everyone and what the company is trying to accomplish to its employee base,” explains Clotman. It all begins with a cross-functional strategy that can be continually revisited. Don’t forget to have a “quarterback” on the team who can oversee everything, foster collaboration and ensure that as “people are brought in, they feel a greater sense of ownership,” she says. The good news is pharma marketing has made great strides over the past few years, laying the groundwork for faster future transitions. “The next evolution from single channel to multichannel to omnichannel won't take us as long as it's taken us to get to where we are now,” she emphasizes.
Patient outcomes resulting from omnichannel-dominant strategies
BY Jack O’Brien
Omnichannel continues to be the name of the game in healthcare marketing and that trendline is expected to hold steady heading into 2023. CMI Media Group released the 2022 edition of its Media Vitals report on December 7, highlighting the prospects of an omnichannel-dominant world and what it would mean for patient outcomes. The healthcare industry is moving at a quicker pace and marketers need to respond in kind to advancements in technology along with an evolution in terms of how content is distributed and consumed, the report stated. There has been a clear decline in pharma rep access and KOL meetings, while patient care delivered through telemedicine has risen, creating a greater need for medical information to be dispensed outside of a doctor’s office.
Omnichannel experiences are realized upon the expansion of potential channels that go beyond those directly managed by marketing.
Toby Katcher
CMI Media Group
Additionally, CMI predicted that hybrid opportunities will remain constant in 2023 as more in-person meetings get restored after going largely virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic. Toby Katcher, VP of video investment at CMI, said due to the changing nature of healthcare marketing, brands need to be “adaptable” and explore new ways to communicate and engage with both consumers and healthcare professionals by bolstering the end-to-end experience.
While there are challenges related to the growing popularity of omnichannel, the report stated that driving personalization through data analytics and technology has to become the new standard for marketers. This is especially key since HCPs now receive content through so many different, disconnected channels. There are opportunities to promote “seamless experiences” for consumers that remove the friction and make interfacing with a brand much simpler. By relying on an omnichannel strategy first and foremost, marketers can deliver consistent, relevant experiences for HCPs and patients at key points along the decision journey. This ultimately results in a competitive edge in the industry.
The report offers yet another analysis of omnichannel engagement and how some organizations need to walk the walk if they’re going to talk the talk. The CMI report was released the same week as an Aktana study that found half of healthcare companies don’t optimize physician engagement across omnichannel touchpoints. This was despite a near-unanimous agreement that omnichannel is “very important” for strategy. The Media Vitals report was also released one month after CMI, a 2022 MM+M Agency 100 honoree, announced the addition of three leaders to its audience intelligence group.
There’s a disconnect between the number of pharma leaders who agree omnichannel engagement is crucial for their organization and the actual execution of such a strategy, according to a study released this week. A December 2022 report out of intelligent customer engagement company Aktana indicates that this is particularly true in regard to healthcare professional (HCP) engagement across touchpoints. The report, which surveyed 50 executives across pharma digital, brand marketing and data analytics found that, unsurprisingly, 98% believe omnichannel is “very important” for strategy.
An employee shouldn’t have to feel like they need to fit into a box, but rather, be able to question what they can contribute to make that culture even richer.”
Julia Missaggia
However, half of the companies noted they’re not fully taking advantage of physician engagement across omnichannel touchpoints. The survey also asked executives where they felt their organizations currently stood in terms of omnichannel development. Just 11% noted they had fully embraced omnichannel across their business, while 14% reported they were still planning out their omnichannel operations. The vast majority fell in the middle, having a set strategy but are not fully there yet. Among the 11% who deemed their business fully advanced on the omnichannel front, they pinpointed cross-functional ownership, investment in intelligence tools and AI as the main factors that fueled their maturity. The report also highlighted the main challenges businesses face in reaching omnichannel success. More than half pointed to change management; 48% said people, skills and experience; 47% blamed their current organizational structure and 47% faulted a lack of alignment across teams.
Technology is another issue. Physicians are expecting seamless and personalized customer experiences from pharma companies, but without a “connected technology ecosystem,” the “real-time touch” is difficult to enact, the report noted. “Everybody expects that real-time touch,” Joyce Ercolino, director of digital excellence at Harmony Biosciences, said in the report. “This is how we work everywhere else in our lives. Physicians are no different. And we just have to meet them where they’re meeting us — it’s the path of least resistance.” The upshot from the report is for businesses to examine where they are in their omnichannel journey and to “be honest about your gaps.”
With so many more options for engagement, organizations also need a scalable way to prioritize actions with the highest impact, refine strategies and focus valuable resources where they’ll deliver the greatest ROI.
John Fitzpatrick
Precisioneffect
Read how W2O moved aggressively to place DE&I at the heart of its mission
Behind the birth of W2O’s diversity, equity and inclusion practice and department
Title
When W2O formally announced the debut of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practice and department this week, the company made clear that its goals were twofold. It hoped to bolster the agency’s internal practices while at the same time offering counsel to clients struggling with DE&I-related concerns. Indeed, the events of 2020 have led to a reckoning for many in the healthcare industry, as the COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter have laid bare many long-lasting inequities, both in healthcare and society broadly. That’s why W2O has moved aggressively, in terms of adding people and services, to establish one of the industry’s broadest offerings. “We gathered research and information from both Vaya Consulting and through our employees and our business resource groups—groups that we set up two years ago in the areas of racial equity, gender equity and sexual orientation,” explained W2O global president Jennifer Gottlieb. “We knew that we needed to hire a leader, or look internally for a leader or leaders, to help make this a reality. We decided that we wanted not to just hire a person but to create a department for DE&I that would report up to the C-suite and that would assure we have flexibility to build it out as needed.” To that end, W2O tapped former Interpublic Group senior leader of DE&I Marcia Windross as head of DE&I and promoted three-year W2O veteran Abby Hayes to the post of practice leader, DE&I engagement. Windross will drive the company’s internal DE&I practices, while Hayes will focus on client counsel. W2O’s decision to grow its DE&I practice was prompted in large part by clients turning to the firm for help navigating related issues. “We have been called in to help clients on the internal piece,” Gottlieb noted. “They tell us, ‘We would like to do more. Can you help us understand best practices right now? How much more can we do and how do we communicate it in the right way?’ I think that is an art, and we are helping them figure it out.”
Many companies have set their sights on an omnichannel strategy, but are still not fully executing it.
by Lecia Bushak
That includes taking a look at how data and analytics, culture, customer insights, content delivery and cross-functional collaboration are working together. Planning how to measure and communicate success, and taking time to “pause and get an objective maturity baseline will reap long-term rewards,” Amy Turnquist, a principal at North Highland, noted in the report. “It’s a strategic imperative for brands to transform the HCP experience into a seamless, cross-channel journey that’s personalized to a segment of one,” Derek Choy, cofounder and COO of Aktana, said in a statement. He continued: “With so many more options for engagement, organizations also need a scalable way to prioritize actions with the highest impact, refine strategies and focus valuable resources where they’ll deliver the greatest ROI.”
Derek Choy
Aktana
What to Do When the Doctor Can’t Decide
You may one day be told that a loved one — someone very close to you — has incurable cancer. More than likely, this has already happened. In that unthinkable, heart-rending moment, you reach for answers. And the first place you reach is right in front of you: the doctor who gave you the news. Surely, they have a treatment plan — ideally, one that targets the specific type of cancer afflicting your loved one. Now imagine that doctor tells you: “Unfortunately, I’m not confident in my ability to use a targeted treatment, so I’m just going to go with something else.”
Patrick Baffuto
EVP, Hybrid Healthcare Communications
Partner Content by
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This is no hypothetical. This is reality — and not just in oncology. Across the medical spectrum, a record-breaking bolus of treatments, of patients, of sheer data threatens to overwhelm those we entrust with our care. It’s a sort of sad irony that as we develop more and more life-changing treatments, it becomes more and more difficult for treaters to find the time and resources to prescribe the right one. Even if you’re not a doctor, you can relate to this surfeit of selection. Which TV show to stream? Which news source to trust? As our options grow, most of us simply don’t have the time or the patience to sit down and make a pros and cons list. So how do we decide? We go with our guts. We go with the option that tells us a story we want to hear. We choose with our hearts more than our heads. Unlike the choices a doctor must make, most of ours are not life and death. But doctors are people, too. And as they approach burnout in record numbers, they’re scrambling to simplify their decision-making. They’re going with the option that tells them a story they want to hear. They’re choosing with their hearts.
Eighty percent of neurologists, for example, say they’re “guided by their gut” and “make decisions at an instinct level.” But what if the right information, the right treatment, never got to their gut? Now we’re back to you, facing your loved one’s doctor, as they tell you they’re not “comfortable” with targeted treatments. As medical marketers and communicators, it’s our job to fix this. Because treatments aren’t slowing down, and doctors aren’t getting more time in their days. We must devise new and better ways to tell stories that reach them. Like targeted treatments, our approaches must be purpose-built. They must nourish thoughtful relationships between brands and doctors that speak a new language: one that educates with emotion, that imbues meaning and purpose to the treatment decision. It’s with this in mind that Calcium, once a singular all-encompassing full-service healthcare agency, has transformed into Calcium+Company. We have added three purpose-built divisions to answer this call for global pharmaceutical companies to venture-backed biotechs, and everyone in between.
Vitamin MD A medical communications division dedicated to progressive and compelling educational engagements contact: Brad.Quosig@CalciumCo.com PRotein A PR division — “people and relationships” — dedicated to building reputation and trust through a mix of traditional and progressive PR skills contact: Stacey.Gandler@CalciumCo.com Amino A full-service, highly selective oncology division dedicated to building stronger bonds contact: Josh.Righter@CalciumCo.com
Maybe … but what really matters is the quality of the audience …. Successfully reaching and engaging the optimal physician and often more importantly, potential consumer/patients, is becoming increasingly critical to the success of a brand. Pharmaceutical marketers face special challenges going into 2024, including a complex and an even more highly regulated commercial environment, heavy competition within certain therapeutic areas, physicians increasingly difficult to access, healthcare inequity and payer access, just to name a few. More than ever, finding and marketing to the right set of consumers requires specific insights about your audience, including what they’re looking for and the best ways to reach them along their healthcare journey. One approach is to use a look-alike model built on diagnosed patients or HCPs within a specialty of interest requiring consumer demographics and attributes as the features to help the model “find” the right targets. While this technique can be effective, it can run awry. These audiences often degrade quickly when scaled because the data used to create the model may be correlated, but not actually related, to the actual condition or treatment of interest. As a result, additional CPM costs are spent on consumers (even you!) who have no interest or need for your brand and may be over-exposed to ads for products of little value or interest to them.
Stacey Levas
SVP, commercial marketing
A newer, more effective approach is to use real-world healthcare data to build your audience, but how do you do this in the most privacy-safe way? At medicx, we advise our clients on audience quality with a proven process.
Profile and segment your customer to understand key characteristics and drivers that will help to describe the customer, where they are in their diagnostic and treatment journey, and what channels and content will be most engaging. Using a combination of de-identified healthcare claims integrated with consumer data from a large representative dataset can form the basis for this analysis. From the audience profile/segmentation, build your media audience using key diagnostic, treatment, co-morbidities and consumer features such as diagnosis of interest, severity of disease, prior therapy, favorite channels and programming content. Additionally, predictive modeling using a combination of healthcare and consumer data can be applied for later line therapy, more complicated or ill-defined diagnostic or treatment criteria. These models can add an extra layer of validation to the right patient type at the right time. Finally, the audience can be activated through medicx’s patented Micro-Neighborhood technology that provides a deterministic alternative to more common approaches with a level of granularity down to ZIP-9. Rather than targeting patients based on look-alike audiences based on consumer data, brands can leverage Micro-Neighborhood targeting and our patent-pending deterministic ID resolution technology, MX#. It’s a powerful combination that ensures ads reach and engage a diverse set of patients, regardless of where they live (think access) or their preferred media. This results in activation of nearly all available patients of interest in the database as well as the right level of scaling to protect privacy but without an unnecessary increase in spend.
So, does size really matter when it comes to reach? Medicx can prove it doesn’t. You don’t have to rely on an unsustainable, spend-more-to-reach-more advertising model. Instead, build your omnichannel marketing campaigns on a foundation of integrated and diverse high-fidelity data. This ensures that the audience you are targeting and the messages you are delivering are engaging and helpful in getting the right treatment to the right patients at the right place along the patient journey. Talk to one of medicx’s experts about our proven methodology trusted by over 61 pharmaceutical manufacturers, 154 brands and over 35 world-class media agencies. Email us at info@medicxhealth.com
Patrick M Gloin
Chief client officer
For brands and their customers, the traditional path to conversion no longer applies — at least to the extent it used to. Of course, leading a potential customer down the well-worn path from “awareness” to “consideration” to “conversion” is still applicable in some cases, but in this rapidly evolving digital age, consumers have shown a greater likelihood to skip some of these conventional steps and become brand advocates rather expeditiously. Much of this relies on messaging to targeted customers, but perhaps more importantly, it hinges on the timeliness in which customers receive said messages and their overall experience with your brand. With this, the onus is on brands to create and deliver a seamless and comprehensive omnichannel retail experience powered by the ability to share data across platforms in order to connect with customers precisely where they’re at, at precisely the right time, via precisely the right channels.
Even the most tenured individuals in marketing can get confused about what it means to employ an omnichannel strategy. The term "omnichannel" is often mistaken with “multichannel,” the latter of which is an approach that many brands utilize today. Brands that employ a multichannel strategy do so by reaching customers through an array of mediums — both digital and physical — that helps support customers during their journey. The traditional multichannel approach, while comprehensive in the ability to “make noise,” is wasteful and far less efficient. In short, it creates the feeling of someone talking at you or talking with you. Additionally, with a traditional multichannel approach, it lacks cohesion between channels and platforms. As a result, audience data is siloed, resulting in messaging and content being shared with target audiences (and non targets) during their journey in excessive amounts and at inopportune times, leading to an aimless, inefficient and at best a fragmented customer experience. Conversely, omnichannel aims to put the customer more squarely at the center of its strategy. By using data to cater to the various ways in which target audiences engage with brands, we are able to craft messages and experiences that are consistent with where the customer is along their journey, thereby increasing relevance regardless of the channel, be it digital media, CRM or a traditional sales call.
Merge takes a look at what omnichannel is, how we define it, and offers a preview of the critical components for building an effective omnichannel ecosystem.
What is omnichannel?
Creating an omnichannel experience is really about re-architecting your approach to customer engagement — moving from siloed media activation to a systems approach to audience experience design. Media activation is a part of the omnichannel experience, but just one part of a much larger and more sophisticated system. Success in creating an omnichannel ecosystem is grounded in a deep understanding of the target audience’s decision journey and having a learning system in place that is capable of providing the right content to that target audience within the right context to help them make more informed decisions. Context is a combination of channel, journey timing and content format. The ultimate goal is to create a frictionless experience, which means that the entirety of the process needs to be connected. Think of it like an oil pipeline. But in this case, what flows through the system is data. Just like oil, the data needs to be mined, refined and delivered to where it offers the most value. In our case, that would be in the form of an insight that drives more effective actions in the future. The data is ultimately what allows this whole process to work more and more effectively and efficiently over time.
The data makes you smarter about who you're targeting and more relevant in what you say to those targets, allowing you to improve on the experience and ultimately to track success of the overall omni approach. It's also critical to have a clear understanding of the brand so you can deliver a consistent brand experience at every stage of the journey. It’s really the only way to build a stronger connection with the customer, as without a consistent brand experience, the journey for the customer can feel overtly transactional, making it more difficult to build genuine long-term loyalty. It’s an often neglected step in the process where a lot of strategies can fall short. Being contextually relevant at every touch point is another integral place where many fail to deliver. To be truly omnichannel across each and every channel, from personal to non-personal and everything in between, you need to engage with the customer in a way that's appropriate for that touch point. As people, we communicate across different channels in different ways. In this case, a brand is no different than a person. If you aim to deliver a consistent brand experience across every touch point, regardless of channel, it's necessary to understand how to position your brand in different channels to ensure it appears in a way that makes sense to the audience you’re attempting to connect with.
Lastly, it’s important to avoid cookie-cutter solutions — yet another area where many brands are left wanting with their omnichannel strategy. It’s virtually impossible to be contextually relevant AND deliver a consistent brand experience if you're trying to apply a cookie-cutter approach to content. It takes a creative team that understands the nuances surrounding the brand, the customer, their journey, and knows how to show up in a way that's appropriate across channels. Installing the structure is easier said than done, to be sure. However, once the machine is up and running and the creatives have the data and insights to help refine their content, omnichannel can be a veritable game changer for brands.
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