Why your pharma brand doesn’t need a digital strategy in 2012 January 3, 2012
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing.3 comments
Last year my New Year post was 5 things I’d like to hear from pharma marketers in 2011, and you may like to know I’ve heard 4 of the 5. (I’ll leave you to guess the one I haven’t heard yet.) This year, 5 things I really don’t want to hear in 2012 or ever again… What do you think?
1. I’m not sure that digital is important to my customers
There are a number of problems with this. First, referring to ‘digital’ as if it is one channel, which it isn’t. Second, just about everyone in the developed world, and a great proportion in the less-developed world, use some sort of digital communication. In many countries of the developed world internet penetration is now around 80% of the population. When you also consider that, worldwide, 34% of people are either under 14 or over 65, you realise that almost all of the student and working population is online, together with a good proportion of older and younger people.
It might be social media, email, SMS messaging or a variety of other types of interaction, but digital is very important to most of us. But as I said it is not one channel, therefore it is important to find out what digital interactions are relevant for each customer and when.
2. We have a dedicated digital team; our marketers/medical people/reps don’t need to know digital
Once again we are making the assumption that digital is somehow a channel when it is not – it is a capability that all communicators should have. Reputations are made (and broken) in digital spaces – therefore your PR team must be savvy and your employees require guidance. Medical education is increasingly provided and sought online – pharma medical teams must be active here. The ‘self-made KOL’ is emerging through blogging, HCPs reach out to each other in online forums and networks – key partnerships can be developed in these places. Brand visibility, services, information and interaction are expected from your customers – all members of your brand team and your sales reps must have digital tools in their kit.
Training all communicators to embrace digital in all its forms must be a top priority for companies that are re-organising for the digital economy. This and developing and embedding best practice is the role of your digital team, who should be very busy in 2012.
3. I tried a website and it didn’t work
Whenever I hear a ‘I tried <interaction-type> and it didn’t work’ I want to shout ‘DON’T BLAME THE CHANNEL’!
It is like saying ‘I watched Big Brother and didn’t like it, so I’m never going to watch TV again’.
There are various forms of this, often from people who were ‘bitten’ in the early 2000s when there was a lot of mediocre execution. Companies and agencies alike had not developed best practice in pharma digital and many mistakes were made. Email was too often spam, websites became out-of-date brochureware, banners were irritating interruptions. Tactics didn’t ‘work’ and brand leaders, perhaps already sceptical or perhaps having fought for the budget and been proved ‘wrong’, became disillusioned.
However, if you are taking a more strategic approach to your customer, intending to interact with them at the right moment with the right content in the right format to delight and engage them, at some point websites, email, banners may indeed be the right interaction. You just need to execute well.
Also beware of blanket advice from cross-industry digital experts. You sometimes hear for example that ‘ email is obsolete’ and this may be the case in some sectors, but it is often not so for physicians – studies show many still use and value email from colleagues and also email news from professional associations and pharmaceutical companies. The important thing, once again, is to understand what your customer wants and will engage with.
4. Prove to me the ROI of that digital tactic
It is self-evident that digital interactions are more scalable than face-to-face (engage 10,000 people digitally for a similar cost to engaging 1000, not so for a F2F meeting) and therefore the cost-per-interaction can be lower than some other types of interaction. But measuring ROI per tactic? Think about it – what is the ROI of a single rep visit? Taking a doctor to an international congress? Can you measure it? No. Why? Because the ROI is delivered (a) in the long-term (may be a year or two down the line) and (b) is a result of the entire relationship with the doctor, not that one tactic. A brilliant congress impact may be completely overturned by poor service subsequently by the rep or a bad website experience.
Digital interactions are so measurable I think we sometimes get carried away with our metrics and blind people with science. Yes, we can measure clicks, readership, time spent, where they came from, where they went, and all this is important to understand how well we executed the tactic and the overall campaign’s success.
But real ROI comes from the overall customer experience or relationship. For example, a physician may be invited to a webinar or online discussion by a rep, they may sign up online, receive a reminder email, attend the event and then receive another email inviting them to comment on the event and request next steps. We must measure the success of each of these steps (e.g. uptake after the rep visit, registrants who actually attend and so forth) but the ‘ROI’ of one tactic alone is meaningless.
What we can track is the ROI in terms of customer satisfaction and market share of those who took part in this overall campaign and those who did not. We can also track the relative preference for our brand in terms of brand choice/brand equity studies over time, and evaluate what interactions those who prefer our brands have received. In this way we can start building a picture of the right mix for different customers and how well we are executing.
But seeking out short-term ROI measures from individual tactics is meaningless. We don’t demand this of other channels and should not expect it from the ‘digital’ ones.
5. My brand needs a digital strategy
There is no such thing as a digital strategy for a brand. In fairness, my team and I do run ‘brand digital strategy workshops’ but this is shorthand for taking a strategic approach to embedding digital into a multichannel brand plan. And that is the way to think. How can I put my customer truly at the centre of my planning and consider all the interactions that will be effective and how to combine them into a seamless and delightful customer experience and long-term relationship?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this in pharma, there isn’t a piece of software you can plug variables in and out pops the ‘channel mix’. You have to gather all the insight you can and take your best guess at the channel mix for your customer, execute with excellence and be ready to change the mix and iterate, iterate, iterate. Over time you learn what works for your brand and your customers in the market in which you operate. That’s where great measurement, analytics and CRM platforms come in – to help you ‘learn as you go’. But your first multichannel plan will have to be your best, most educated guess, drawing on all the knowledge and experience you can access.
Brands, in summary, should have a multichannel customer engagement plan – starting with a ‘channel agnostic’ planning process that evaluates all channels – digital and traditional – equally.
Companies, on the other hand, can – and should – have a digital strategy – by which I mean a strategic approach to embedding digital expertise and processes across the organisation. Only with the right competence in all channels can channel agnostic brand planning take place.
App-athy and the Wild West: eyeforpharma Mobile Strategies London Dec 2011 (#e4p) December 8, 2011
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, mobile.2 comments
At last week’s excellent eyeforpharma Mobile Strategies event in London (1-2 December) there was an interesting dichotomy between how embedded ‘mobile’ seems to be the lives of the delegates and how far from embedded it is in our professional communication strategies.
In a mini-poll I did as Chair of Day 2, 75% of the delegates had an iPad, 86% a smartphone. Three-quarters of delegates had used their phone as their alarm clock that morning, the same number admitted signs of anxiety if they didn’t have their phone and would not leave home without it.
Yet still we are not necessarily drawing on our personal experiences in order to develop the insight to deliver value for our customers. Here are my five take-aways:
1. Mobile App-athy
Brand teams and marketers in pharma are excited about the potential of mobile apps but our customers are perhaps less enthusiastic. As a result there is a large number of pharma-sponsored apps (one estimate put the total health apps at 34,000) with just a few downloads each. A panel discussion (chaired by Chad Daugherty from Lilly with Len Starnes – @lenstarnes, Duncan Arbour – @rbour and Andreas Claus Kistner) concluded that pharma is too keen to invest in “shiny things” without real insight into customer needs.
Companies want apps but many have not optimized their email and websites for mobile – even though doctors and patients use mobile devices mostly for email and websites. Too many emails will not even display properly on a mobile device, and Sam Walmsley (@sammielw) pointed out that only 12 of the top 2 pharma companies’ websites are mobile-friendly.
To me it feels like the late ‘90s when brand managers everywhere were saying “I want a website” without taking a strategic look about how the web might fit into the overall communications plan. Many useless websites later, companies started taking a more strategic, customer-centric view and websites grew up.
My advice – if your objective is to build an app, don’t. Spend time defining an objective that is about customer value, then see what channels/tools can achieve it.
2. The Mobile Physician – who?
We learned that Doctors download 50 apps on average, but like everyone else, use just 7 regularly.
A panel discussion with Doctors Rob Hicks (@DrRobHicks), Peter Ilves and Henrik Andersson observed that there are “mobile” and “non-mobile” doctors. “Mobile” doctors are doing hospital ward-rounds or travelling from patient to patient and need handy reference services in their pocket – often it is treatment guidelines, symptom checkers, calculators. One example of a this is the Psoriasis PASI calculator from Janssen, a simple tool to help determine the severity of the rash and therefore appropriate treatment.
“Non-mobile” doctors are sitting in their office seeing patients and will mostly use a laptop or desktop computer. We need to provide multichannel services to fit the requirements of each.
One interesting doctor-patient app we saw was the mini-atlas from EC-Europe – anatomical atlases for iPad, designed for doctors to share with patients, the most recent version of which allowing the doc to draw on and annotate the image, then send to the patient. Pharma companies are sponsoring these atlases and the platform is well chosen – 93% of tablets sold to HCPs in the US last year were iPads.
Rob Hicks put it simply: the doctor’s daily workload is already very high and overloaded with multi-channel information – ““Don’t give us lots more to do – give us stuff that will save work and time.”
3. The Mobile Patient and mHealth
MHealth is now an established force in the developing world, where mobile technologies are providing much-needed access to health care and changing lives. In the developed world, however, the picture is more fragmented and, as for physicians, there are a great many under-utilised health apps competing for attention in the app store.
The winners are once again those based on real customer need and insight. For example the Claritin pollen alert for hayfever suffers (I can testify to its usefulness); Medtronic’s Lenny the Lion ‘carb-counting’ game app for children with diabetes, and a sponsored app in Israel for finding the nearest public WC, with links to Pfizer’s advice about bladder control.
The most compelling opportunity to provide mobile health solutions we saw was not for the “walking well” – the traditional pharma targets of asymptomatic patients needing medication reminders – but the moving and inspiring story from the Teenage Cancer Trust. Presented by Simon Davies, CEO, Professor Faith Gibson and former patient-now JimmyTeens.TV developer Tom de Bruin (@deadlyhifi), this told of the problems faced by young people going through chemotherapy.
Isolated by necessity and often very ill, these teens feel even more alone if they turn to Facebook and see their friends having fun without them. They also have a million questions and concerns about their symptoms (as do their parents). The Trust has pioneered web-based solutions allowing patients to ask questions of a cancer nurse and get help, information and support online, as well as connecting with other patients. The mobile potential for this is exciting, and so the Trust and eyeforpharma are running a competition to design such an app.
4. Ready, Fire, Aim! – Reps and iPads
I have stolen the title from Armand Brevig (@BuyingeContent) of Reprints Desk and several of the speakers agreed with the point that companies have taken a “Wild West” approach to iPads for reps, in some cases providing the technology before any application has been identified. Back to those “shiny things” again.
However, there is hope. Roche has integrated iPad solutions for its reps. In the pilot reps said that the ability to update the CRM system right there after the call was saving them 2 hours of data entry each evening. Key learnings: keep it simple and quick, provide offline capabilities, integrate with the rest of the solution (not ‘islands of technology’) and learn to fail fast and learn from mistakes.
My favourite quote of the event is Andreas Claus Kistner’s definition of ‘fail fast’: “Technology is like chocolate, if it is fundamentally bad, you can’t fix it – throw it away and get some new stuff.”
There was also an interesting example from Murat Mendi of Nobel, who rolled out a fully integrated and tracked closed loop marketing system in Turkey with 100% rep adoption based on tablets, not iPads – demonstrating that CLM is about good strategy, strong execution and shifting the culture, regardless of technology.
5. Good Mobile Service/Marketing is Just Good Service/Marketing
Our (@CompleteDigital’s) own Helen Harrison (@harrassedmom) set the tone early on in the event with a story about how the First Direct bank – famous for award-winning customer service – developed their mobile app.
As a bank they had some parallels with our industry – they had a mountain of legal, security and personal data concerns and had to very carefully step through the hurdles and ensure high standards of compliance.
Priding itself on being the top bank in terms of customer satisfaction in the UK, First Direct started with its customers. The team developed clear and detailed customer personas and designed the app with the user at the centre. They chose not to do “everything” but to do the few key things that customers really wanted, really well. They tested, tested, tested, including sketching the designs on paper and sitting with customers refining them, then testing further at wireframe and design stage so that by the time the app was built it needed hardly any testing – it was exactly what customers wanted.
In other words, First Direct did the opposite to “I want an app”, they spent a good deal of time investing in finding out what their customers really wanted, then delivered it. With 100,000 downloads in the first month and 85% 4 out of 5 rankings, it seems to have hit the mark.
Medtronic’s Matt Thomas re-iterated this on day 2 when he advised us to start with the strategy, learn from observing customers and continually analyse in order to refine the service.
The best healthcare mobile solutions, like the best banking solutions, do exactly what customers want, really well. In Helen’s words and put very simply, mobile apps or other mobile solutions must adhere to the first rule of great customer service:-
SUCCESS = WORK NEEDED BY USER < VALUE OF SERVICE
Simple, really.
The Digital Maturity Curve – where is your brand? #efp reflections Part 1 March 22, 2011
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, Search, Social Media, Websites.2 comments
There were three themes that emerged for me from this year’s eyeforpharma (#efp) eMarketing Europe in Munich in early March and I’ll write about them in my next 3 posts.
First, there was a sense of “where are we on the digital journey”, what can we learn from where we’ve been and how do we get to the “next level”, whatever that is.
Second, there was looking to the future; the core content of our own Complete Digital presentation, but also featuring heavily in lots of others’.
Third, the angst that surrounds changing company culture. How can we get the behaviour change across our organisation that we need to make that future happen? Not just in marketing, but throughout?
First of all then, let’s look at the digital journey. Several commentators referred to this at eyeforpharma and Peter Hinssen (@Hinssen) in his opening address, The New Normal, asked “are we nearly there yet?” Meredith Ressi (@MeredithRessi) of Manhattan had a nice curve of development over time from “physician-led medicine” to “participatory medicine”.
For the purpose of discussion here I’m going to use my own Digital Maturity Curve. You might like to consider where your brand or business is on the curve:
The first step, that we all went through in the 1990s, is “Visibility” – recognising the potential of digital and sticking up a brochure-ware (in those days) website. In those days we were still in the “push” mindset and these websites did not offer much interaction – the days when the most of the home page of BMJ.com was a picture of the front cover of the BMJ magazine.
The BMJ has moved a long way since then, but Jens Monsees of Google challenged us in the pharma industry on this point – many of those old, out-of-date and frankly poor-quality websites are still out there. We should “eat our own dogfood” he said, spend some time reading your own website and see what kind of experience you have…. Even in 2011 “information seeking” is still the most important online activity for healthcare consumers and physicans alike (@MeredithRessi) and I ask you – if your customers are looking for information, what are you doing to provide it in an easily accessible place and relevant format?
We soon figured out that in this medium we can of course “Interact” – buy, sell, recruit, play, ask questions and get answers. For pharma this means the opportunity to offer higher-quality interactive experiences such as eDetailing , eLearning, video and games, interesting content on demand when customers want it. For example, at #efp Mark Petersen showed how gaming can engage people in serious subjects such as the FAS’s Immune Attack game: http://www.fas.org/immuneattack/
The next big leap on the Maturity Curve is to “Personalise” – if we are interacting we can learn more about our customers and offer a more tailored service, Amazon-style. Gareth Thomas of Doctors.net described how they carefully segment physicians on speciality, sub-speciality, seniority, location, medical school (and year of graduation), clinical interests, and, further, on their behaviours in the community.
Supporting our point about information, the top services for Doctors.net are “Email” and “Education” with the Forums coming in close third, but each member will be offered services tailored to his or her preferences.
On to our next big leap – “Multichannel Relationships” – recognising that the person on the website is the same person using the app and having the face-to-face interaction. Tesco, the UK supermarket did a great job of this – merging their “in store points/favourites” with “online points/favourites” first, and now have an iPhone app to update your shopping with. In all cases I am the same consumer with the same profile and Tesco “knows” me. In pharma we often refer to this as “closed loop marketing” – connecting the rep interaction, with subsequent digital follow-up. At #efp Fonny Schenck showed how AZ in the US is supporting Nexium with a combination of self-service digital capabilities from eSampling to eDetailing, combined with customer service helpdesk and telephone account managers, providing a seamless multichannel service to physicians.
The next big leap, of course is social media and networking. At #efp we heard about how Citibank has developed an internal social network for employees, a great way to help people learn how to use these channels effectively (and something we’ve employed here at Complete, too). We heard the term “Chief Listening Officer” from Lucien Engelen of Radboud University (first time I’ve heard the term outside FMCG) and saw a couple of great examples of UGC, such as Janssen’s excellent Living with ADHD YouTube channel (http://www.livingwithadhd.co.uk/ ), that allows comments from anyone about this controversial condition, and is moderated but only to remove comments constrained by regulation or the law, not those critical of the condition or company.
Interestingly at eyeforpharma, a digital-savvy audience you might think, a straw poll showed only 15% of the audience were regular Tweeters and a further 15% had “no interest” in Twitter at all.
You might ask where is Mobile on the Digital Maturity Curve? At #efp repeated speakers warned against “app for apps’ sake” projects given that most smartphone users use just 7 apps frequently and the rest hardly at all. Good apps, like good websites, meet a defined user need, are interactive, engaging, informative and fun to use.
Mobile is, of course, throughout the Curve, which is not really about technology but about behaviour - how we use the different platforms that are available to us. Twitter and facebook can be used as visibility tools at one level. So can mobile – creating your website so it has a user-friendly smartphone version is probably the most important thing you can do right now, since as Manhattan told us that most of the growth in internet use is mobile based – and physicians are now spending 14 hours a week online.
So there it is, the Digital Maturity Curve. You can see my #efp description of it here:
What happens next – at the top of the Digital Maturity Curve – what is the next big leap? The picture shows a fairly woolly “Web 3.0” but does not define it clearly. To answer this question, we leapt off the top of the curve and into the year 2016 to see what “Healthcare 3.0” might look like….that is the subject of my next post.
Why pharma should stop worrying about Web 2.0 February 10, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, Websites.Tags: Marketing, pharma
1 comment so far
Now there’s a thing.
Shouldn’t you worry about Web 2.0, when that means all your customers are talking and gossiping and complaining about your brand/company, without anyone listening/checking/correcting them? What’s going on? Aren’t all the experts telling us that reputations are built and destroyed in these places and we should be paying $£€millions for a Social Media Strategy?
Well, my point is this: Web 1.0 is still there and is probably more important right now if your target audience is physicians.
Remember, the read-only Web? The look-for-information-and-if-the-brand-is-doing-its-job-right-you’ll-find-it-Web?
Google your brand/clinical trial/therapy area. Now Google it in each of your major country markets…What do you see?
- An out-of-date Wikipedia page?
- An ad/page from an alternative therapist telling you you don’t need your brand?
- An ad/page from a Law firm offering to help you sue your company?
- A competitor’s ad?
What should you see?
Your (local language) home page, giving useful information and services about your medicine for each audience or stakeholder, perhaps?
If doctors, payers, patients, providers, journalists or anyone else wants to know about clinical trials or drug therapies, what do you think they do?
That’s right, 90%+ of them Google it. That’s it. And if they don’t get good service from you at this point – at this “request for information” interaction, what do you think they think of you?
In FMCG terms, if you’re not in the top 10 (some would say the top 3), you’re not “on the shelf”. Why should I buy your product if you can’t be bothered to put it on the shelf?
The healthcare professionals we speak to (mainly specialists) say that they are at the “dabbling” stage in social media but boy, do they want information to be on hand when they need it. Almost every one of them says – “I just want a one-stop shop where I can go and find out all I need to know about the therapy area or drug I’m interested in”. Pharma has that content, and we should provide it. Simple.
Here’s a non-pharma example. I Googled “budget accommodation near Heathrow” and this was the top sponsored link:
Cheap Hotel In Heathrow
Travelodge.co.uk/Hotel
Quality Budget Hotel In Heathrow From Only £19. Book Online Now
Click through and enter “Heathrow” (not sure why I had to do that), and I get:
3 clicks later (no use of the back button or need to use a site menu or map) and I’m at “Complete Booking”. Total elapsed time: 23 seconds.
The Travelodge team have mapped the likely customer journey, and figured out how to get from Google search to satisfied customer as fast as possible.
A near-perfect online service. Do I recommend the Travelodge product? Of course.
Do it. It’s easy – just get your brand/therapy area content online:
- Map the customer journey, figure out what your customers want and how to give it to them on a good old-fashioned website.
- Deliver high quality, engaging, informative, relevant, interactive content and services.
- Optimise the site for search engines.
- Promote it to your target audience.
- Keep it up-to-date. THIS is your primary “conversation” with your customers. This is the conversation you have when they have come to visit you – be polite, get it right, give them what they want and need right here before you go out to meet them in social networks or anywhere else. If you do a good job of it, they’ll come back and visit again and be your friend.
Then we can talk about Web 2.0.
What will Pharma Marketing and Medcomms be like in 2020? January 5, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing.Tags: CRM, future, Marketing, pharma
1 comment so far
The media have spent a week or three looking at the ‘noughties’ and marvelling at how far we’ve come, but we ain’t seen nothin’ yet in the digital revolution.
There are massive changes happening in our society, relationships with corporations and governments are shifting in ways never seen before, ordinary people have a voice in their community that they last had in feudal times…the difference is that today, the ‘community’ is global. We have moved from the ‘information age’ to the ‘interaction age’. The human need for a voice is the driving force, but there can be no doubt that digital is the key enabler.
I wonder what Medical Communications and Pharma Marketing will look like in 2020?
Here are a few thoughts. What do you think?
- The Pharmaceutical industry will spend 90% of its marketing communications budget on digital channels and 10% on face-to-face channels.
- Physicians will have, at their fingertips, on their phone/camera/handheld device, all the clinical evidence for any drug, and diagnostic/prescribing decision-tools for the majority of clinical situations.
- Medical education will be delivered in a multi-media format (sound/video/animation/game) and will most often be consumed in healthcare professionals’ living rooms or home offices. The hardware will be televisions (which will be computers, and vice versa).
- Each major disease area will have a global online community of stakeholders (HCPs, carers, providers, patients) who will drive decision-making in that therapy area.
- It will be the norm for the pharmaceutical industry to deliver “whole products” not just medicines. These will include services and information to add value and deliver better patient outcomes.
- Sales stories in pharma will be based on patient benefit (outcomes) rather than product features (efficacy/safety). Clinical evidence to support these stories will be well-developed and readily available in a variety of formats and media.
- Thought-leadership in healthcare will be created online, through blogs, microblogs and social networks – and their descendents.
- International medical meetings will still happen, but more than 90% of the content consumption from these meetings will happen remotely and digitally.
- Pharma companies will have a seamless, integrated relationship with each customer – a single relationship from clinical to commercial, global to local, brand to brand.
- The general public will see the pharmaceutical industry in a positive light as an important player in improving human health.
A little aspirational, perhaps, but all (and more) are achievable. Pretty exciting stuff. It gets me out of bed each day, anyway.
