An exploration of principles behind the modern customer engagement strategy in pharma.

The pharmaceutical industry braces against a perfect storm of circumstances, either unfortunate or fundamentally industry-shaping. Digital transformation is well underway, in some ways invigorating it - and in others challenging it and calling for innovation. The patent cliff is here, with its crucial implications, and the industry’s public perceptions remain poor. COVID reduced physical engagement, accelerating digital innovation and creating fundamental customer journey gaps.

Under these circumstances, few can agree on how to best shape a customer engagement strategy in pharma. There can be no universal solution to such multifaceted endeavor, but the field’s literature may illuminate better routes.

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Old And New Challenges, Shifting Trends

Initially, this shifting landscape needs its due contextualization. No new strategies may flourish without a firm grasp on why the effectiveness of old ones wanes.

The Digitization Of Customer Engagement

An initial factor lies in digitization. Even before COVID’s acceleration of digitization, digital marketing had already taken a firm hold – even of industries traditionally more resistant to it, like pharma. PPC services saw a surge in popularity over the past decade, and so did WordPress-minded agencies like WP Full Care.

Statista finds that digital ad spending worldwide continues to increase at a steady rate. This, too, is the case in the pharma industry, despite its inherent challenges. The impact of digitization on marketing has become so notable that agencies like Gate One now suggest a complete split and thorough mapping of engagement and marketing channels as separate entities:

Engagement Trends And Public Perceptions

This shift did find some fertile ground in the pharma industry, albeit arguably not enough. From traffic generation to conversions, the industry lagged partly due to public distrust and historical practices. Both of these factors naturally present challenges for any customer engagement strategy in pharma.

Public perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry remain poor for an array of reasons. The Edelman Trust Barometer finds the “world ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust” far beyond the industry’s confines. So does Gallup, noting both general distrust and poor public perception of the industry specifically, where:

• 31% of US adults view it positively

• 17% have an overall neutral view

• 51% consider it negatively.

This phenomenon may be too complex to pin down, but the industry’s practices should constitute a factor in this context. Citing Peppers & Rogers Group, Ttec identifies a “historically combative relationship it has had with payers and providers,” which is indeed reflected in marketing and engagement outlooks of past decades:

The Impact of COVID-19 On Customer Engagement And Trends

Finally comes COVID and the substantive effect it has had on customer engagement. This subject is too vast to analyze thoroughly in a single article, but the fundamentals bear noting.

For one, the industry has shifted its focus to sales and marketing. A 2021 AHIP study found that 7 of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies had “spent more on selling and marketing expenses than on research and development.”

In turn, remote channels and telehealth have surged. BiopharmaDive finds that, as COVID emerged, “there was a 75% decrease in promotional activity worldwide, and up to a 500% increase in engagement via remote channels”. It predicts that “telehealth visits will increase anywhere from 50% to 200% from pre-COVID-19 numbers”, depending on the therapeutic area.

Finally, and perhaps expectedly, the industry saw a renewed interest in e-detailing. Indeed, Ipsos research confirms that “HCPs are generally positive towards the shift to e-details,” which does present new opportunities:

Building a Customer Engagement Strategy In Pharma

These circumstances call for unique approaches; some strategic and cautious, others bold and daring. Thought leaders and researchers do not yet have a clear path forward, but some practices seem to find strong appeal. Among them, the following five bear noting.

Redefining The Healthcare Ecosystem

The first conceptual basis lies in reconsidering the healthcare ecosystem patients find themselves. This PwC’s Strategy& argues should be “a more holistic, customized and value-based model of interaction,” which they visualize as follows:

This they dub the “bold change” model, which addresses some engagement challenges outlined above:

“The new model has product-agnostic roles – a ‘Disease management partner’ and a ‘Health Systems Partner’ – in place of the traditional/functional roles of sales reps, MSLs, and field access. The new roles have no sales incentives and follow a new compliance framework designed to support the new approach (of integrating medical and commercial knowledge and insights without blurring ethical boundaries).”

Yet they also recognize the need for incremental change “for pharma companies that are active in specialized markets yet are not universal market leaders.” For such companies, the prevalent approach they broadly also promote comes in:

• A stronger emphasis on scientific communication and knowledge transfer, available through scientific content

• More profound data collection, through CRMs and similar solutions, to personalize digital communications

• New point-of-contact roles that facilitate external engagement and build trust

• Of course, exact implementations strongly depend on existing strategies, resources, and so on – making case-by-case approaches necessary.

Moving Past Marketing Personas

Such profound changes, incremental or swift, also require broader approach changes. A customer engagement strategy in pharma cannot rely on marketing personas, as Wilmington Healthcare’s Simon Grime argues.

First, he outlines the renewed goal of personalized engagement in response to the industry’s challenges:

“The goal needs to be a genuine and continually enriched 360-degree view of each customer, covering their stage of engagement, preferences, previous behaviors and touchpoints online and engagement with different content types.”

This view echoes the Strategy&’s in highlighting the need for value-based interactions. In turn, it follows that static personas cannot facilitate meaningful, long-term engagement as they cannot offer consistent value.

Especially following the model above, marketing personas can simply not account for the new ecosystem – as Grime continues:

“While personas are often comforting, they are seldom continually updated and therefore no substitute for precision engagement based on a deep understanding of the individual customer’s journey.”

Personas may remain valuable segmentation tools, but they can no longer spearhead engagement strategies. It is more profound, analytics-enabled engagement strategies that the modern patient requires – as McKinsey will also argue.

Embracing Telehealth And Exploring New Channels

Following expanding digitization and the aftermath of COVID, the pharma industry also sees two practices of immediate value. Namely, embracing telehealth and exploring new marketing and engagement channels.

As regards the former, the expansion and acceptance of telehealth are unquestionable. Market-wise, Statista finds that both the digital health and telemedicine markets are projected to grow significantly. It also finds US physicians embracing telehealth, and AHA corroborates this via hospitals’ use of telehealth:

As such, pharma's modern customer engagement strategy should account for this shift. Companies may initially leverage telehealth to fuel content marketing strategies, better aligning their communications and offerings with patients’ needs. As they do, they may consider such channels as Direct-To-Consumer Advertising, email, and social media, depending on their existing strategies. However, the critical component of such explorations would need to be data-driven personalization rather than mere expansion. Grime also highlights this, urging companies to “enable real data-driven digital programs, based on the understanding that customer’s context locally and using their preferred channels.”

Leveraging Analytics-Enabled Engagement

Finally, McKinsey offers findings that suggest “the traditional pharma commercial model will likely struggle to adapt to a different world.” Namely, surveying European physicians yielded stark differences in channel preferences and content expectations. Another survey further added to the “patchwork of responses” – for instance:

• “Only 18 percent of the physicians surveyed in May were willing to accept reps’ visits, but by September, that percentage had risen to 31 percent.”

• “More than 50 percent of HCPs in France, Germany, and Italy expressed a willingness to accept regular face-to-face visits from reps, but only 11 percent of their UK peers felt the same way.”

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Still, as in-person contacts between HCPs and pharma sales reps decreased drastically, “HCPs’ adoption of digital channels and telemedicine has accelerated interactions with patients and pharma reps alike.” In this context, echoing the above, they also argue for analytics-enabled engagement, including data collection sources including:

• CRM systems

• Sales records

• Quantitative surveys

• Claims data for providers at physicians’ offices

Thankfully, data collection from various sources has long been a digital marketing asset for pharmaceutical companies. Thus, with incremental model and outlook changes, companies can use it to truly deliver on the approach McKinsey suggests.

In Closing

In closing, no customer engagement strategy in pharma can remain purely traditional. While optimal routes are still unclear, data-driven personalization, channel expansion, and healthcare ecosystem introspections seem to be at the forefront of the industry’s thought leaders and researchers. In line with pharma marketing trends, the industry must embrace digitization more firmly and focus on valuable, relevant, and highly personalized engagement to address its present challenges.

For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on strategy.