HCP Engagement – Rise Of The Digital Rep

A omni-channel approach

An omni-channel approach achieves something far greater than the sum of its parts. Each intervention magnifies the others, bringing together a cohesive, customised interaction likely to gain much greater traction than stand-alone digital interactions or even traditional, face-to-face methods. There are multiple digital opportunities available for exploitation; an experienced, native digital agency will be able to help your organisation to find the channels that best suit your brand and purpose.

When it comes to producing an effective digital strategy, it is important that you identify who your target audience is and how they interact with you and your competitors, to determine what works, and what doesn’t. By investing time in finding out what works best, you will be able to reduce wasting resources on activities that aren’t appropriate. This is no mean feat; traditional marketing agencies who have evolved to digital in order to survive often use tried and tested marketing methods that were cutting edge in their time, but fail to gain traction in the digital world. Native digital agencies with no industry-specific knowledge apply methods that worked for other industries, but which don’t support the life science industry’s strict compliance and regulatory needs. In order to be effective, an entirely new, creative yet industry-specific digital approach is needed.

Likewise, in order to achieve digital success, you need to consider what you want to get out of the interaction, what your customers (in this case an HCP) want to achieve, and what their customers (the patients) want. By starting with the patient and mapping out the motivations and interactions from patient to healthcare organisation, it is possible to create a strategy that has maximum impact. It’s simple really: to achieve digital success, you need to put the patients first.

Email

There are many advantages to sending emails - unlike cold calls, emails are unobtrusive, familiar and can be responded to at leisure (on the commute home, during lunch hour or coffee break). Add in the fact that there are several ways for a HCP to respond, and it is no wonder that approved emailing is the favoured digital asset of most pharmaceuticals. In fact, 66% of HCPs want to be able to receive emails from life sciences reps.

Effective emailing isn’t just about having the capacity to email HCPs, it is about knowing how and when to do so in a way that is engaging and elicits the desired response. A mass-email approach may be easy and cheap, but it is not necessarily productive. By tailoring interactions according to the target audience, organisations can vastly increase their effectiveness; the average open rate between HCPs and reps is 35% compared to just 3% from corporate sources, and personalised, relevant email content increases the industry click-through rate six-fold.

However, emails do have their limitations. Regulating email content so that every piece of content complies with guidelines while keeping on top of any changes in recommendations can be a challenge, particularly if you rely on multiple platforms interacting with each other. It can also be hard to maintain consistent branding and tone across a range of emails within a standard communication chain. In fact, achieving consistency and compliance across communication channels is one of the most significant limitations holding many proactive organisations back from going fully digital.

E-learning

e-Learning enables you to showcase your brand as well as getting the right information to current and prospective customers. Unlike paper documents, once published, e-Learning is instantly accessible to a variety of audiences across a range of platforms meaning that critical, up to date information and advances in knowledge can be distributed at the push of a button. e-Learning can also be a valuable tool for virtual meetings, allowing the rep to introduce a product to the HCP, which the HCP can access at a later date.

One of the biggest limitations when it comes to e-Learning platforms within the healthcare industry is security. Existing e-Learning platforms often meet the organisation’s practical and branding needs, but the lack of Open Source codebase means that it can’t be certified secure. This means that the route to market for e-Learning materials can be prohibitively long, as information must go via industry experts, designers and content creators before being compliance checked and published.

As with all digital interactions, the proof of the action is in the measuring. Your e-Learning platform should allow you to analyse how people interacted with your resources so that you can gauge what content is most relevant, compelling and successful.

Landing pages

So obvious that they are often overlooked, landing pages allow you to gain unsolicited contact with a broader target audience, as well as providing a platform to which you can direct leads and contacts.

However, many ambitious organisations fall short of the combination of industry compliance, data application and creativity, making it hard for them to attract a specific audience while maintaining industry standards. Similarly, some organisations may struggle to guide customers through a complete and compelling digital journey.

By putting your brand and your customer at the centre of every digital process, your digital marketing strategy can overcome these challenges to create a customer experience that is seamless from start to finish.