PHARMA NEWS, MULTICHANNEL & CROSSCHANNEL MAKETING

Pharma companies’ marketing communications to their target audience of healthcare providers are increasingly digital. That's not terribly surprising, considering the uptake in digital channels among physicians for professional use.

What is changing, however, is the way pharma reaches doctors, according to an annual report from from healthcare and pharma solutions provider Indegene. In 2016 in the U.S., brand promotional emails, healthcare provider portals and key opinion leader webinars are the top three ways pharma companies reach out. However, by 2018, KOL webinars, social media and mobile apps will top the list, with social media and mobile apps growing the fastest, by 50% and 27%, respectively.

The social media investment is already underway, which will power the expected usage jump, Urvi Mehta, strategic relationships manager at Indegene, told FiercePharma.

“Social media is a very powerful channel that can help in understanding the end consumers. It’s easy to make marketing decisions like segmentation, course of patient education, and influence adherence through listening and analysis of the social behavior,” she said.

While KOL webinar growth will be smaller at 8.8%, that channel was identified as the best return-on-investment generator by the more than 100 global pharma and life science companies that responded to the survey.

ROI, in fact, is an ongoing concern. Even among the rise in projected spending, seven out of 10 pharma companies noted that demonstrating ROI is the biggest barrier when implementing new communication strategies.

U.S. pharma companies are second globally in digital spending, with 31% of companies spending more than 20% of their budgets on digital. By 2018, Indegene expects that to increase to 40% of companies. China leads with 33% of its pharma companies spending more than 20% on digital, and that figure is expected to rise to 50% by 2018.

How pharma distributes information to doctors is changing as rapidly as how doctors prefer to receive and process such information.

Most physicians do not seem to know that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." Medscape's 2012 Ethics Report survey, for example, revealed that 72% of 23,710 physician respondents answered "Yes" to the question "Do you feel that you could be unbiased with prescribing habits if you accept lunches from pharmaceutical representatives?" (see here).

But, according to other researchers, such thinking is a "slippery slope" on which "Physicians fail to recognize their vulnerability to commercial influences due to self-serving bias, rationalization, and cognitive dissonance" (see "Physicians Under Pharma's Influence: Are Physicians Powerless Pawns of Pharma Psychology?").

Time and time again, when I write about physicians getting free lunches delivered by sales reps, someone always comes forward and says something like "It's ridiculous to think that I can be influenced by a $10 lunch!"

But what if it was a $20 lunch? More recent research indicates those lunches have significant ROI in terms of prescribing brand name drugs.

Read more about that research here.

Doctors who attend the American College of Chest Physicians' meetings will now receive targeted messaging on their mobile devices from advertisers on non-medical websites. 

This represents a new way for medical associations to diversify their revenue stream and it also opens up new channels by which to target healthcare professionals.

The American College of Chest Physicians announced a new partnership with Social Reality, an advertising platform provider that delivers targeted ads to healthcare professionals attending the ACCP's meetings. It's Social Reality's first formal partnership with a medical association.

“We're able to target physical locations, be it hotels or convention centers within a 100-meter radius using cellular data and inside the building utilizing IP or WiFi targeting to meetings, hotel and practice locations,” explained Erin DeRuggiero, Social Reality's co-founder and chief innovations officer.

Physicians are not individually targeted. Instead, the platform targets specific spots and serves them in-app and mobile web banners. The ads show up on non-endemic, or non-medical content, like sports or news websites. Doctors may check these sources more frequently than they look at a medical journal's website.

Inventory on Social Reality is sold through its own programmatic platform.