The last few months of 2021 have been challenging, especially for the medical marketing industry. However, this also opened a lot of great opportunities to look forward to.
As per Professor Scott Galloway, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many existing practices and quoted, “healthcare will be one of the most disruptive sectors in the post-corona world.”
Medical marketers are challenged with successfully navigating the amount of data and digging deeper into the main area of focus. With this, they are unable to identify the right priorities, objectives, and even their strategy for your healthcare brand.
In this blog, we will be looking at some of the key trends that are affecting the medicine and healthcare sector and see how medical marketers can respond.
RACE Framework: Defining your Medicine Marketing Strategy
To have an effective marketing strategy, everything should be built on a solid foundation to be adequately presented to coworkers, clients, and other essential stakeholders. Without this, it will be difficult to align across all teams to achieve the vital buy-in needed to execute your plan.
The RACE Framework enables our medical marketers to meet the challenges of reaching and engaging audiences – driving sales conversion and encouraging repeat business. It is modeled around the classic marketing funnel and provides marketers a blueprint for building an integrated marketing strategy that covers the full customer lifecycle.
Connect to our team of 1,000 savvy marketers that are using the RACE Framework to strategize their approach to medical marketing and use a data-driven approach to increase leads and sales for their pharma/healthcare business.
1. PLAN: Handling Consumerization in the Medicine Market
The public has not been empowered with their knowledge to make healthcare decisions, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. As consumers have been exposed to various medical information and terminologies during prime-time TV slots over the last few months since the start of the pandemic, this allows marketers to ask questions and provide the best possible treatment for any medical conditions.
The tendency of people to influence and direct their medical and wellness treatment is known as healthcare consumerization. This acknowledges the need for healthcare providers to build strategies that meet the demands and preferences of customers.
Consumers expect the same level of service from healthcare providers as they do from other businesses, and this understanding can help you define your goals and steer your marketing approach in 2022.
The data below shown from Econsultancy can help medical marketers in determining the appropriate target demographic and areas of focus for their marketing strategies.
2. REACH: Omni-channel in Medical Marketing
As a result of healthcare consumerization, increased competition within the sector is expected to attract the attention of consumers. Medical and healthcare brands would be on the lookout for new ways to reach out to the public.
One option for retail and consumer goods, which is already being adopted, is to follow the marketing effectiveness and brand-building principles.
Byron Sharp, an author of “How Brands Glow,” discusses in his seminal book the concept of mental and physical availability. He reinstates that for a brand to be successful, the key is to be available to consumers – mentally and physically. As the information will not always be available to consumers (even if they research online), the omnichannel marketing approach would be one of the best solutions.
According to Byron Sharp, Omnichannel Marketing is defined as:
“Planning and managing, campaign-focused, and always-on communication tools for marketing across various customer lifecycle touchpoints to increase leads and revenues while offering a consistent customer experience to encourage customer loyalty.”
3. ACT: Interaction between Patient Information Journey and Content Marketing
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many consumers have been given misinformation and disinformation that leads to confusion and anxiety in some sectors of society. Although consumers have access to medical and healthcare which is a sense of empowerment, this also provides a lot of issues. Due to this, the healthcare brands have come up with an action to create legitimate and useful content that is beneficial to both healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients, as well as weed out unfactual news.
Healthcare brands can analyze and understand their customers’ goals and which content type helps achieve their goals by using a customer journey analysis. This customer journey analysis also helps medical marketers in identifying gaps between what they think they’re delivering and what their customers are experiencing.
To build trust and support consumers during a stressful time with decision-making, the content provided to both prospective and existing patients on a particular ailment and their associated treatments need to have all the previous elements. Refer to the graph below for more detailed information.
4. CONVERT: On-Demand Medical Services
According to the top medical searches on Google, the top two were “Is bronchitis considered contagious?” and “How many calories should I consume?”. This is between January and November 2020.
When customers opt to seek treatment or guidance, healthcare, and medical companies must have the necessary processes and infrastructure in place to translate their interest into commercial results.
The on-demand healthcare platform allows consumers to connect to healthcare providers in real-time via websites, mobile apps, or even home visits. This includes follow-up appointments, mental health therapy, and specialist care which includes minor illnesses and accidents.
The need for on-demand healthcare has spiked due to the pandemic, while practical and logistical constraints will limit the widespread adoption of on-demand services across the healthcare industry. See the below graph as summarized.
5. ENGAGE: Platforms Designed for Patient Engagement
Healthcare consumerization has played a vital role in engaging and retaining consumers. This requires medicine and healthcare companies to revisit and invest in other platforms that they can use to build a consistent view of their customers across multiple touchpoints.
This strategy goes beyond the traditional CRM (customer relationship management). In doing this, marketers create a lifetime of value for customers, so they’ll give a lifetime of value back, and it is only possible within an ecosystem within the context of an ecosystem that offers a unified perspective of the consumer and their requirements.
Customers who provide personalized interactions based on their preferences, whether stated or derived, develop client loyalty and alignment with their needs.
Possibilities for Your Medical Marketing Campaign
Medical marketers will always be on the lookout for focusing their medical marketing activities, prioritizing the key touchpoints and journeys that will drive results. Additionally, they are looking to streamline their planning and tracking of their customers’ experiences.
We offer medication marketing strategy tools, templates, and training to help pharma and healthcare companies improve their customer experiences. Find out more about new medical marketing possibilities for your company.
