Challenges pharma industry faces around digital communications & marketing

About Author: Preetha Vasanji is the President-Emerging Markets and Managing Director at Doceree. She has over two decades of experience in the Healthcare Communications and Marketing space, working with multiple multinational and home-grown organizations. Prior to joining Doceree in 2021, Preetha served as Sr. Vice President and General Manager-McCann Health, Mumbai where she was responsible for leading a team of 30+ people, driving company’s growth and managing its business.

In the post pandemic world, digitization has revolutionized the way of work across different sectors that is apprehensive to digital shift. Countries all over the world are optimizing digital more than ever now, especially in the healthcare sector, resulting in digital tools to become an indispensable instrument.

It was observed that businesses that invested in digital initiatives thrived while the ones that were completely offline managed to only survive. This digitization has been accelerated on the back of increasing consumer demand, giving audience the ultimate choice and power. The paradigm shift from offline to digital has increased consumer convenience. In the case of healthcare industry, pharmaceutical marketers can now reach healthcare professionals (HCPs) in a hassle-free and more precise way with the use of technologies like programmatic marketing, AI, telemedicine, blockchain, etc.

With ever increasing usage of digital mediums, it is also crucial to be able to interpret the outcomes of a digital campaign. It becomes even more imperative in markets where e-prescription data is unavailable. It is difficult owing to the fact that application of attribution models to campaign inputs versus campaign outputs becomes difficult. Hence, there is a need to put all the existing campaign efficacy markers in an organized manner to derive a quantifiable metric which could in-turn help marketers gauge the effectiveness of the campaign, build confidence and design campaigns better while understanding the variables that are critical to the overall success of the campaign.

In the pharmaceutical sector, while now there is larger digital adoption, there also is a need for a structured framework. Specially, at the time of prescription, how much a medicine is likely to be prescribed remains a mystery. Research work in this field requires resources and that must be regularized in order to aptly measure the likeability. A step in this direction would be immensely helpful to pharmaceutical marketers in running a digital campaign, thus, making it the norm in Indian healthcare sector.

In order to efficiently and effectively run a digital campaign, it is important for marketers to identify and evaluate the appended parameters so that marketers could take informed decisions:

Identification of the right channels

It’s important to efficiently manage a brand’s visibility. There is a need to identify the right mix of point-of-care, physician-frequented and other digital channels in order to achieve maximum ROI for a campaign to be successful. A marketer that can identify the right channel to advertise or market the product will be able to reach the HCPs in an effective way, thus making the digital campaign effective.

Identification of the right exposure  

A crucial step in decoding the success of a digital campaign is to identify the effective exposure range for a brand where it can create an impact while optimizing the media efforts. This identification will help marketers identify the appropriate number of exposures; thus, help optimize their campaigns.

Evaluation of the creative stickiness  

Creative or message stickiness is a message that cuts through the clutter and stands out from the rest. Many factors lead to a message’s stickiness – the message itself, engagement, view time etc. A smart marketer should be able to optimize the various parameters associated with it and be able to evaluate how much the creative/message would be able to attract its viewers.

In the crux of it

Though in its nascent stage of digital adoption, with technological evolution spurring the Indian healthcare ecosystem, the demand for digital campaigns is anticipated to rise exponentially. Pharma marketers in India are likely to double their investment in new-age technologies like AI, robotics, tele-medicines, IoT and digital therapeutics, among others, that will further strengthen the digital ecosystem. However, there is a scope of innovation when it comes to empowering pharma companies to arrive at a quantifiable performance score for their digital campaigns and initiatives. With positive measures like ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account), National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) under the Prime Minister’s Ayushman Bharat Scheme, India is bound to take its healthcare industry to next level.

**Views expressed by the author are her own.