Commercial launch strategies require research, insight gathering and decision-making for years in advance of FDA submission. These processes involve complex requirements and often involve timelines and project plans that are mapped out across functional teams and their agency partners. As teams move quickly into “launch mode”, there are many potential shifting priorities requiring contingency plans to ensure any roadblocks faced during the drug approval process can be mitigated effectively.
One primary area of focus that always remains a priority before, during and after launch is understanding and targeting the right customer with the right message, to ensure they have the information they need, when they need it.
In advance of approval, commercial teams start to prepare for their marketing and sales activities and specifically are working to understand their HCPs and begin to profile and better understand how they will engage with them. As the traditional pharma rep sales model has been challenged since the level of physician access has devolved, pharmaceutical brands have had to coordinate pre- and post-launch activities leveraging numerous channels ultimately, looking to achieve the “optimal omnichannel experience”.
Creating a Targeted Omnichannel Approach
The idea of omnichannel marketing is not new- banking and consumer industries have been doing it well for years. However, in healthcare, we protect the consumer and their identity and want to ensure that their privacy is maintained to ensure a positive experience. The same is true for an HCP.
To ensure that Life Science organizations– of any size– engage in compliant, omnichannel marketing, and create a positive, connected experience for patient and healthcare provider (HCP) audiences, a platform that enables the enterprise a comprehensive view into the HCPs activity and response to promotional campaigns can offer many efficiencies. Being able to respond and adjust to tactics in-market once they have been activated is as important as getting them initially deployed.
At the same time, life science marketers need to maintain a balance between highly targeted media campaigns while adhering to regulations around patient privacy and data security. Solving these challenges requires a data-driven approach that supports a streamlined omnichannel strategy that can be seamlessly orchestrated at the time approval is received across multiple channels, and allows teams from Medical Affairs, Marketing, Sales, Business Insights and Agency partners to leverage the same insights, while maximizing the same real-world data source in which to build measurement plans and to re-target the audiences effectively.
Solutions like PurpleLab’s HealthNexus platform allow incredibly robust insights to be connected across teams and agency partners through a simple web-based interface – to help eliminate the disjointed, siloed efforts that can create less efficient tactical execution.
Understanding HealthNexus Data & How It Informs A Personalized Experience
With HealthNexus, teams across a Life Sciences organization and their media partners leverage real-world data to identify and profile the HCPs that can have the biggest impact on their brand at product launch.
In minutes, brand teams and their media agencies are evaluating dimensions of HCPs, and their patients that can help them understand how to organize their multiple channel strategies across various campaigns to drive appropriate messaging and tactics.
Data available at the HCP and practice level include:
SDOH: Practice demographics including Social Determinants of Health (breakdown of gender, age, race ethnicity, income, education of the HCP’s patients and how that compares to the state and national average)
Patient Payer Mix: Understand what percentage of an HCPs patients have commercial, Medicare, Medicaid
Treatment Trends: HCP’s/practice/hospital treatment and prescription utilization across therapeutic markets, procedures, etc
HCP’s Clinical Trial Experience; HCP’s Payments from other Manufacturers (influence)
A 5-Step Sequence to Activating Your HCP Omnichannel Audience to Support Launch & Ensure Optimal Engagement
-
- Step 1: Create pre-launch awareness through a list of targeted providers based on defined patient criteria. Use HealthNexus to query and filter various ways; starting with therapeutic area, patient characteristics, or other data points to generate a list of National Provider Identifiers (NPIs). you can extract this NPI list to demand-side platforms, enabling precise targeting for pre-launch awareness campaign activities.
- Step 2: Establish a process for Sales Rep pull through. Establish a process using a regular response mechanism to create a feedback loop with leads from your website and media to Sales Rep to show the next best action and who requires a follow-up or will receive the next omnichannel touch.
- Step 3: Upon approval, activate your audience for branded promotion and media. Trigger post-launch activities targeted to the same target NPI list once PDUFA date is established. Initiate full omnichannel sales and marketing plan to include coordination with media and agency partners on execution and measurement.
- Step 4: Connecting all of the dots for a seamless customer experience. Your branded resources should be available when customers need them, so make the experience easy for them. Brand information, product samples, patient education, etc. should be available without a lot of difficulty, so follow their lead and be where they are…. your website, a trusted third party, even their Health System or IDN could be your primary target–that relationship can be identified as well through the affiliations maintained within HealthNexus.
- Step 5: Use the HealthNexus platform’s API to prompt in-person sales rep visits for first-time prescribers. Access data from the source directly into your CRM or outbound contact management system in which to trigger messaging to the sales force that will alert them of a first-time or new prescriber for your brand- integrate data at the source to call new opportunities for in-person engagement.
Omnichannel Orchestration For Launch Success
By adapting a sequence similar to this, you will be addressing various aspects of successful omnichannel engagement.
In summary, there are 2 key aspects for orchestrating success:
- Having a single source of targeting insights can ensure a highly coordinated engagement model that provides ongoing optimization opportunities across channels.
- Ensuring your Sales force is connected across the engagement experience while supporting the customer’s interactions with your brand is critical.
Ultimately, how you leverage the insights about the HCP, the combination of the channels in which you can engage with them, and the impact of the combined effect of all of these will determine how successful you will be at the time of your brand’s launch.
Operating with the most precision today can make or break your launch. Learn how HealthNexus is helping clients refine their targeting strategy and ensures teams have maximized their efforts on the right HCPs. Contact us today for a brand planning session to learn more!