Multichannel marketing

Effective multichannel marketing (MCM) can increase pharmaceutical companies’ top-line growth and reduce operational costs. MCM unlocks cross-channel value by orchestrating interaction with customers with efficient communication across all touchpoints supported by actionable customer insights through business intelligence. Companies should see MCM as more than an ad-on to the traditional marking mix: it is a key mechanism to coordinate all off- and online interactions with customers.

Pharmaceutical companies have access to all customer information necessary to take advantage of MCM, especially valuable data of physician and pharmacy interaction from both digital marketing campaigns and face-to-face (f2f) interactions. However, many pharmaceutical companies lack a smart and comprehensive approach to extract all that information and use it, to approach customer individually.

The following key trends primarily affect pharmaceutical companies in doing their business:

• Patient to customer revolution - Patients are getting more and more empowered. As a result their opinion and perceptions gain high relevance for care decisions. That shows the need for new patient centered services and marketing communication.
• Wearables as game changer - Wearables incorporate the potential to turn punctual customer interaction into a constant customer engagement and more important improved outcomes of conventional medication therapies.
• Omni channel marketing and touchpoints - Customers expect to be provided with information via those channels that show the highest comfort for them. Additionally customers demand a seamless experience along various touchpoints.

An effective MCM will orchestrate information and all customer activities throughout the entire organization and beyond to enhance customer experience and to build long-term relationship. This leads us to focus on four steps:

1. Companies need to quick scan their organizational MCM readiness to define status quo on their culture, strategy, internal processes, IT architecture and skills.
2. Based on their MCM maturity, they have to decide which company target profile for building personal relationships make sense on the basis of the individual physician being targeted and the brand being promoted.
3. Integrate new channels, content management, big data and digital services to tailor channel activities and to meet individual customer preferences and habits.
4. Determine which combinations of channels and digital services will help to fulfill marketing and sales goals based on a specific brand or therapeutic area throughout the customer journey.

Our approach will provide transparency on capability due to our dedicated maturities assessment of different organizational levels as people & organization, processes and technology.

Capabilities for “Deliver and engage through multiple channels”

• Manage & store promotional media content
• Provide and distribute promotional material
• Manage social and user generated content
• Identify new channels with Potential
• Integrate new channels
• Manage and execute campaigns (customer journey)

In the current challenging pharmaceutical industry, MCM could no longer be seen as an add-on marketing capability. We expect that companies that follow our MCM approach can significantly increase their top-line growth and/or reduce operational costs. They will be able to enhance customer experience by streamlining customer processes, services and generate real insights by using data to become more familiar with their client and understand his preferences and needs.