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Marketing Playbook Recap: Bringing Life Back into Life Sciences Marketing

March 2nd, 2018 Don Lewis

For a long while, the life sciences industry has not had the luxury of enjoying today’s digital transformation. Regulations, and the fear of running afoul of them, have limited the use of digital solutions. But the influence of digital tools, and the lifestyles they enable, is forcing the industry to change its approach.  For example, in-person meetings today are increasingly difficult to arrange. And, even when they are set up, the time a salesperson has to influence a prospect is growing shorter. Exacerbating this, are prospects who turn to online resources for self-education, a growing trend for younger healthcare practitioners. The longstanding practice of meeting, greeting and sealing the deal is coming to a close.

Data backs this up. Two-thirds of all drug launches fail to meet pre-launch sales expectations during the first year the product is in the market. According to McKinsey, approximately half of products achieve less than 50 percent of sales that were forecast a year before launch. A new strategy is necessary to meet growth expectations.

So, what strategy works? The answer is a digital solution that both appease the need for HCPs to self-educate and for life science marketers measure interest and engagement while staying compliant.

Last week, I had the good fortune to host a short webinar called Marketing Playbook: How to up Your Game in Life Science Marketing. In it, I discussed how life science marketers can take advantage of the ongoing digital revolution to better target, connect and communicate with prospects and HCPs through webinars.

To summarize: webinars boosts your organization’s content by distributing it through a centralized system that scales with your target audience. Webinars can do this because they invite prospects into a captive environment, one requiring registration and a base level of interactivity. ON24 webinars, in particular, do more because they help organizations to disseminate additional content — from white papers and studies to video demonstrations and surveys — from within a single platform while measuring an audience member’s engagement through data points on every digital interaction. It’s content, context and data put together in one place.

And that’s an increasingly important perspective to have as more connections are made online. In fact, according to a Manhattan Research study, HCPs have increased their use of digital communications programs by 63 percent over the past two years. It will be increasingly important to push a digital effort on new drugs, new products and new procedures through a medium current and future HCPs will actually use. Additionally, with the right approach, practitioners can also leverage new digital mediums to unite and extend the reach of their content, allowing organizations to use, refine and repurpose content across the entirety of a product’s lifecycle.    

Just as important is pushing these messages while remaining compliant with regulations. Because content, attendees and messages are recorded through a single gateway, meeting compliance requirements with ON24 webinars is easy. In fact, organizations can push continuing medical education (CME) credits through ON24 webinars — and offer certifications as well — all while being tracked for reporting purposes. These education and certification efforts can also be easily extended to global sales training, as well.

Because ON24 tracks all interactions within a webinar, organizations can easily identify which messages resonate with target audiences. This helps marketers to repurpose or integrate engaging messages with key audiences across the buying and education cycles. In fact, webinar-generated data can be used to inform sales, allowing them to refine and target their sales efforts based on the behavior and interest of prospects within an event.

There are several advantages to using ON24 webinars in your marketing efforts. The main one, however, is a webinar’s unique ability to reach prospects on-demand while measuring their interest and engagement with your content. It uses your content to drive connections while distributing it in a way your audience wants to read it. Data is at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry and drug development. It’s about time that data played a bigger role for life science marketers.