The pharmaceutical industry has taken a digital approach, gradually shifting from a sales model led by a representative to a more different tactic. Healthcare marketers have now several channels of communication strategies to choose from in order to drive sales of pharmaceuticals to cope with this changing world.
What Exactly is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a new phrase that marketers have come up with for marketing across different channels. It came to be as a result of the fast rise in the number of communication platforms due to a vast increase in the customer base.
Omnichannel marketing has been used to improve the customer experience and help to build better relationships between industries and customers across channels. These channels include traditional and digital ones. It involves working across all these platforms and yet creating a unified experience for one’s customer base.
This is the type of marketing that will help to lift pharma sales. While it can be difficult to rely on social media websites like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, there are other suitable channels and opportunities that can be explored by pharmaceutical companies such as pharmaceutical websites, blogs, email marketing, and even online medical education. All of this could help improve the customer experience.
How Does One Improve Their Omnipresence?
In this century, which is largely dominated by computers and mobile phones, the average customer spends more than 6 hours online per day, which is 40% of their waking life, and a third of that time is spent on websites, social media like Facebook and Twitter that are easily accessible via mobile phones. This is the reason why digital marketing in the context of omnichannel marketing is gaining the upper hand in the pharmaceutical market over multi-channel marketing.
The pharmaceutical company’s engagement towards customers improved over the last decade thanks to the significant increase of online digital media and the interconnectivity of the physical and digital worlds without forgetting the help of voice assistants, chatbots, websites, smartphone apps, and other devices. Healthcare practitioners (HCPs) are no longer using websites or smartphone apps to only communicate between themselves, but also to connect with their patients about diagnosis, treatment, thus promoting interaction with HCPs and other stakeholders.
Stick to the Basics
Although pharmaceutical companies and HCPs are now taking a more omnipresence approach to marketing, the pharma industry is still far behind when compared to the other ones due to financing, retail problems, and marketing technological limitations. To bridge this technological gap, pharma must learn to master technologies like hyper-automation, cloud computing but first and foremost learn to manage customer experience and see efficiency gains.Â
They should carefully select their mean of communication and not pick a new technology just because it is trendy. Furthermore, they should remember to always put the consumers and customers first by building a strong relationship with them before starting to elaborate their strategies. Lastly, they must learn to track and monitor their success, to know which strategies work and the ones that don’t. This will help them to reap the benefits of omnichannel marketing.
What are the Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing?
Some of the benefits of omnichannel marketing are:
- It helps to boost customer loyalty
- It improves brand strength
- It increases engagement rates
- It helps to keep sales value up and hence increase revenue.
