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Blog
From Essential to Enthusiast: Engaging the 5 HCP Archetypes
Build connected experiences for every HCP by finding the right balance of push and pull strategies
Venky Lalapet, Sr. Principal Tech, Customer Engagement
Mar 12, 2021

We’ve seen a rapid shift to digital engagement of HCPs in the last year as pharmaceutical companies, like most industries, adapted their strategies in the wake of COVID-19. As the situation matures, it is evident that a blanket approach, while simple, is not as effective with some sectors of your audience as others. Furthermore, digital engagement is only one part of your overall customer journey, especially when you aspire to create an omni-channel experience.

The heart of these interactions ought to be HCPs and their experience. Pharma companies sometimes lose sight of this concept—barreling headlong into what they want to say and how often to say it. Lost in that rush is awareness of what HCPs want to learn, when, and how they want to consume it.

Evolving your Commercial Engagement Model

Broadly speaking, we can bucket enterprise outreach and communication (digital or non-digital) into two approaches: push strategies where you proactively deliver messages to your audience and pull strategies, where HCPs reach out to you for information.

An effective engagement campaign uses a combination of both push and pull channels to build connected experiences. In today’s world where healthcare is accelerating its way to a digital-first future, we are seeing an increasing focus on pull channels to balance the approach to engagement. Both strategies should place HCPs at the center of all engagements.

Effective Commercial Engagement Balances Push and Pull

Align your engagement strategies to HCP engagement personas

Knowing how HCPs interact, that is, their preferred channels, will help you build out your connected experience. My colleagues in Commercial Effectiveness Solutions analyzed HCP general preferences on how they want to be engaged in combination with other key HCP characteristics. This resulted in the development of engagement personas which broadly captures preferences under five archetypes.

The profile of the engagement persona will allow you to build engagement strategies that includes the right balance between push and pull channels for each group.

New and existing digital and non-digital channels can be included in this exercise. Reviewing your existing marketing plans and calendars is a great place to start. After all, these plans have most likely been approved and funded for the year. Why not leverage them within the context of how HCPs engage? For example, does it make sense to send direct mail notifications to HCPs who belong to a persona that indicates a high preference for receiving information via email? On the other hand, you may find great success sending direct mail to HCPs who prefer non-digital communication. The goal is to maximize ROI by focusing on using the right channels to reach the right physicians.

Incorporating HCP engagement personas in your multi-channel outreach is an essential part of your ‘best practice’ toolkit. To achieve a true multi-channel push engagement, I recommend starting with your segmented targets, layer in HCP engagement personas, and align with your marketing calendar.

The goal of pull tactics is to get your HCPs to come to you. The self-service aspect of these channels allows HCPs to engage with you at their convenience. For example, an information portal helps create brand loyalty, keeping HCPs coming back, and your brand top-of-mind. Pharma companies generally will use pull marketing when HCPs know what they are looking for, or what problem they need to solve. Conversational AI agents and response centered digital journeys, where the information sought is presented based on HCPs' inputs to a text or audio interface, are great examples.

As mentioned above, it is finding the right balance between push and pull approaches for each audience that is key. In other words, orchestrating the components of the engagement plan. The experience for your client should be seamless and continue to move them ahead in their journey with you.

The term “marketing orchestration” is still relatively new but the concept of orchestrating experiences is not new. In fact, it’s something marketers have done well in the past. In a nutshell, marketing orchestration is the synchronization of data from multiple sources, both internally and externally. It makes it possible to use that unified intelligence to power more relevant and personalized experiences in real-time across all departments, especially customer engagement teams such as marketing, sales, and medical information. Unfortunately, managing high volumes of customer data and ever-increasing amounts of channels have increased the complexity.

Create a holistic experience that’s almost as good as F2F interactions

In the age of hyper-connected digital engagement, keep in mind how the HCP experiences your interaction. HCPs are people just like you and me—experiencing email fatigue and inbox clutter. Creating that curated ‘white glove’ experience is key to your campaign success.

This is an exciting time for pharma marketers. HCPs are accelerating their digital engagement with pharma companies. Now is a great opportunity to build a holistic experience that’s almost as good as face-to-face interactions.

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