Blogs

This is personal

April 2023

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Getting your marketing message to the right doctors at the right time and in the right way is make or break process.

Physicians working in stressful settings are busy. To get their attention, it is important to hit the right note the first-time around.

In 2020 McKinsey found the average number of in-person pharma marketing contacts was down 70% in 2020 compared to pre-pandemic levels and that in response to the pandemic HCPs were adopting digital channels at a rapid pace.

Most important to physicians is receiving content that is easily digestible, that respects their lack of capacity and their need to avoid information overload.

So, getting the content right is vital. Marketing teams are competing for the digital attention of buyers who may struggle to find the time to cope with this increase in digital sales traffic.

This means finding the right words that work for them and the right ways to get those words in front of them. Marketing approaches should respect their needs and meet them where they are.

Essentially, this means creating bespoke communications.

When formulating marketing communications, the person for whom the approach is intended must be squarely in the mind's eye of the team producing the content. How do they want to be approached? What works for them? These questions are central.

This also means differentiating between different targets and delivering content that works for each segment. One size marketing doesn’t fit all – it must be personal.

To deliver this, marketing teams will want to gather and use all customer insight and intelligence at their disposal – the more useful intelligence available, the more personalised and successful the approach will be.

Gathering in-depth and intense analysis of the market, understanding who the key players and influencers are, what their personality types are, what channels they use and what kind of content do they like, are vital starting points to delivering a successful marketing strategy.

The first step is defining targets' personalities or 'personas'. A persona is a fictional but recognisable type that embodies the characteristics of a particular market segment.

Doing this will deliver a more focussed marketing strategy, that cuts through the noise and complexity of a highly regulated, diverse and competitive market.

It facilitates tailored content. It makes it personal.

Objective data is the corner stone on which the must be strategy will be built. To be meaningful it must be collected from a sufficient number and variety of individuals to represent the whole spectrum of the full audience.

And the data must of course be relevant. Quantity does not necessarily imply quality. Data must be gathered with a clear objective – to help create strong and realistic personas. This often means going beyond customers well-known to the company and accessing wider databases.

In addition, marketers will want to mix in the specific characteristics of the diverse target individuals into the model. This allows interrogation of the different combinations of personal motivations and operational demands that underlie each segment.

This, in turn, allows teams to find overlaps among types of personalities to create groups and set a focussed marketing strategy for each group.

Having done the hard yards, targeting then becomes cost effective, efficient and personal.

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