The Evolution of Healthcare Marketing: Embracing Omnichannel Strategies

Over the last four-plus years, we’ve seen significant changes in how healthcare providers engage with information for a few reasons.

First, the healthcare sector, which formerly relied on face-to-face interactions, has gone digital. The rise of telehealth, wearables, and digital health apps continues to grow, with the digital health investments industry expected to reach $650 billion by 2026. More consumers also use e-pharmacy services, with an estimated 1 billion users globally by 2027.

Second, more drugs now exist, creating challenges for physicians to find the best medicine for their patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 55 novel drugs in 2023—the most since 2018.

Third, the time window for a pharma company to reach a prescriber with the correct medicine for their patient can run tight. This makes an accurate, real-time, data-driven strategy critical to healthcare marketing.

Hyper-connected HCPs present a massive opportunity for pharmaceutical brands to engage in omnichannel marketing. An omnichannel strategy ensures marketers can engage these healthcare professionals across various touchpoints with precision, personalization, and performance. The outcome: more efficient marketing spending, ROI, and customer engagement. However, doing omnichannel right as a pharma brand is often easier said than done without the correct data and systems.

Why Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma is Outstanding

Omnichannel pharma marketing uses all channels seamlessly and holistically to reach HCPs in a coordinated way.

With an omnichannel approach, pharma marketers don’t need to make channel decisions in advance. Omnichannel allows you to reach the HCP wherever they are, regardless of their path from brand consideration to trial. It leverages this data to tailor the timing of touchpoints and specific creative or messaging to maximize engagement impact. Through continuous, real-time data, omnichannel marketing can deliver a unified and integrated experience across all touchpoints, with real-time optimizations throughout the campaign life cycle.

This approach carries several benefits for pharma marketers:

• Consolidated brand dollars—such as platform fees and negotiated data rates—for greater efficiency
• Campaign management efficiencies, including budget and frequency capping
• One integrated data set
• Automated media management and content delivery with a unified campaign strategy across ALL channels
• The ability to review data from the HCP lens to measure the overall impact of your HCP instead of just channel engagement

As pharma brands navigate the intricacies of reaching HCPs, omnichannel marketing backed by data-driven insights and technology can redefine the landscape of HCP engagement.

The Siloed System Struggle for Pharmaceutical Marketing Campaigns

Data is the linchpin of omnichannel marketing done well. However, accessing and connecting this information can be difficult when you add other channels to your marketing mix.

The legacy approach to marketing across channels has been to use separate platforms for each channel. The argument is that these platforms specialize in a given channel, so they use campaign budgets more efficiently and produce better results. However, siloed systems fuel a lack of integration between real-time consumer audience data and omnichannel activation platforms. When data sits siloed, it’s almost impossible to orchestrate a cohesive omnichannel healthcare campaign.

Omnichannel requires one budget, one strategy, and one unified cross-channel set of data. And you can only get all three of those things with one platform—a centralized system with access to real-time audience data used to target and optimize reach.

What to Look for in an Omnichannel HCP Platform

A real-time, omnichannel view of a target audience’s digital and clinical activities is now a requirement to stay ahead of the latest trends and changes to treatment accessibility. To execute more intelligent campaigns, brands must find the right demand-side platform (DSP) with an all-in-one platform that includes these features:

• Advanced audience segmentation delivers highly personalized content to different segments, enhancing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Data privacy and compliance follow relevant health and privacy regulations, with robust measures to protect user data.
• Robust reporting and analytics tools can help you track campaign performance, optimize strategies, and demonstrate ROI to stakeholders.
• Full transparency into placements, performance, costs, and fees is crucial for evaluating the success of your campaigns and managing your budget effectively.
• Ease of use via a user-friendly interface can save you time and frustration during campaign setup and management.
• Vast and reliable data sources—ideally verified first-party data—refine targeting and optimization.
• The platform's reach and scale in terms of the number of impressions and users are significant if you're targeting a broad audience.
• Optimization features like real-time bidding, dynamic creative optimization (DCO), and automated campaign adjustments maximize your campaign's effectiveness.
• Adequate support and training can smooth the platform onboarding process and help you make the most of its features.

Perfecting Pharmaceutical Omnichannel Marketing with PulsePoint

PulsePoint manages dynamic omnichannel HCP marketing for pharmaceutical brands from planning and activation through measurement and optimization. In fact, 100% of organizations we surveyed said PulsePoint’s omnichannel insights are better than other platforms they’ve worked with or are working with.

Want to become one of them? Contact the team at PulsePoint today.