Planning permission: Designing the systems behind successful e-marketing campaigns
pharmafile | May 14, 2010 | Feature | Medical Communications |
by Kathryn Bennett, Managing Director – TVF Communications
There has been much publicity, some recent and some not so recent, about how industry codes of practice are not conducive to digital marketing. This is particularly relevant to online activity. In the online arena, less stringently regulated industries than Pharma can take advantage of web 2.0 and develop cost-effective marketing campaigns where the consumer often becomes the marketeer. However, in our industry and certainly in the UK, the term web 2.0 is code for ‘losing control’ – a concept that is not welcomed for the most part. The UK pharma marketing community is amongst the hardest hit by regulatory guidance, but grey areas in current guidance have been identified, particularly in the digital arena. The growing unrest amongst marketers and agencies alike has now resulted in the PM Society forming a group to establish acceptable boundaries for using digital tools for advertising and communication, within the existing UK and EU regulations. This will hopefully make guidance much clearer, and could ultimately lead to a change in the PMPCA code.
Whilst the PMCPA and other regulatory bodies can aid the marketer by clarifying the ground rules for use of digital tools in external communications, there is already untapped expertise in the “how?”, the “why?” and the “who?” of digital communications in most pharmaceutical companies. In house training departments have long been pharmaceutical companies’ unsung heroes of digital – producing amazing online applications that push the boundaries of technology but which are largely unlauded due to their internal nature and the divide that exists in many companies between training and marketing. The field of eLearning is frequently overlooked by marketers, but it is an area with much to offer.
The majority of sales representatives who have been active in the last five years in the UK and Europe will have been trained via an eLearning platform at some point in their career. Many of these programmes are now highly sophisticated in terms of content, and include many varied formats such as text; audio; 2D and 3D animation; video; interactive quizzes; games; activities and offline supplementary materials to cater for a variety of different learning styles. Much research exists to illustrate the learning benefit of using a variety of different formats, a fact which should not go amiss in an evidence-based industry such as ours. Indeed, some pioneering pharmaceutical companies have embraced the use of different and varied formats for medical education – and why not? Our audience is people, after all.
However, the quality of what the trainees interact with at the front end of eLearning should be a given, and high standards are assured by current regulatory guidelines. The really exciting stuff is happening behind the scenes of these eLearning platforms, where integration of highly sophisticated systems is helping trainers and managers to do their jobs much more effectively.
The ability to gather information at the click of a button on an employee’s knowledge development over a set period, to design a training programme tailored to an individual’s goals, to assess the performance of teams against other teams and to react quickly to breaking data or new objections represents significant value to pharmaceutical companies; and if deployed successfully can have a positive effect on a product’s sales. These benefits and more are offered by eLearning platforms, and this form of integrated data management could potentially be applied to externally-facing digital tools as the grey areas over their use are clarified. However, this opportunity to maximise the value of an eLearning platform or other digital tools through meticulous planning, definitive understanding of the commercial objectives underlying its inception and appropriate integration into existing company systems is all too often neglected because the focus of the budget holder, tends to be placed on the front end ‘whizzy stuff’. To ensure maximum return on investment from such a platform or tool, regular collaboration between the different disciplines such as training; marketing; sales; business intelligence and IT is required, with decision makers being empowered to see and act on the bigger picture.
About a year ago I attended the Eye for Pharma conference about digital marketing. The success stories (mostly from countries other than the UK) had something in common: they had recognised that digital marketing did not fall neatly into one discipline. In each case, the company had seen the bigger picture and changed their structure and processes to accommodate the demands and opportunities of digital marketing rather than trying to force an existing structure to work. So what’s the key learning here? Simple: the lessons of the past do not necessarily apply to the digital arena.
Of course, most companies now have digital departments (or at least a ‘digital’ person) and it makes sense to have someone in overall charge of digital projects who sees beyond product-specific work and can make the most of synergies throughout a company and its different markets. However, the real success can lie in the extent to which these digital teams are empowered to incorporate the input of different disciplines. In doing this, trainers are one important group with a wealth of experience which shouldn’t go untapped.
In times of increasing regulatory scrutiny, medical education is an area of burgeoning importance within pharmaceutical marketing and digital is an ideal medium through which to conduct medical education projects. As alluded to earlier in this article, many of the lessons from internal eLearning can be applied to medical education and some companies are doing a great job of reworking digital material developed for internal training to be suitable for online CME or customer education. Both require the same high standards in terms of content and delivery and the more promotional and product-related elements can be easily removed at little additional cost to the company. What an appropriate ‘behind-the-scenes’ system will look like in this field is an ongoing question, but watch this space.
To develop a successful medical education programme which is delivered using a digital format we need to take on board the key learnings that our training colleagues have amassed over the years. Developing a well-written programme which is delivered via an engaging and interactive format will go some way to communicating important messages about a product and/or a disease.
However, it is the systems behind the medical education programmes which will start to drive digital marketing in our industry and once that happens on a more widespread level, it’s going to be a very exciting time.
Article taken from The Digital Pharma Guide, Click here for the e:edition
