Make Your Marketing Efforts More Impactful, Relevant, And Engaging

Focus on your customer and ensure their needs, preferences, and expectations are met throughout their digital and non-digital journey

How can pharma companies align digital transformation ambitions with business priorities?

Aligning digital transformation ambitions with business priorities in the pharmaceutical industry involves several key steps. Here are some of them:

• Define clear business goals: Identify the business priorities and objectives of the pharmaceutical company. Clearly defining these priorities will help align digital transformation efforts accordingly.
• Conduct a comprehensive assessment: Evaluate the current state of digital capabilities, infrastructure, and processes within the organisation. It is essential to involve key stakeholders from various business units and functions to ensure a holistic understanding of the organisation’s needs.
• Establish a digital transformation roadmap: Based on the assessment, create a roadmap that outlines the digital transformation initiatives required to align with business priorities. Prioritise initiatives based on their potential impact on the business priorities.
• Foster a culture of innovation: Cultivate an environment that encourages innovation and embraces digital transformation. Encourage employees to adopt a growth mindset and continuously learn new skills to stay relevant in the digital era.
• Invest in digital capabilities and infrastructure: Allocate appropriate resources to build the necessary digital capabilities and infrastructure. Ensure that the chosen technologies align with the business priorities and have the potential to drive desired outcomes.
• Collaborate with external partners: Explore partnerships and collaborations in order to leverage external expertise, access innovative solutions, and accelerate digital transformation efforts.
• Continuously monitor and measure progress: Regularly track and evaluate the progress of digital transformation initiatives against predefined metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Use data-driven insights to identify areas of improvement, make adjustments, and optimise strategies accordingly.

How could AI solve some of the biggest challenges in pharma marketing?

AI has the potential to address several significant challenges in pharma marketing. Here are some ways AI can help overcome these challenges:

• Personalised marketing: AI-powered algorithms can analyse large volumes of data, including demographics, medical history, and online behaviour, to generate personalised marketing campaigns.
• Predictive analytics: AI can analyse historical marketing data, market trends, and external factors to generate insights and predictions about future marketing outcomes. This allows pharma marketers to optimise their marketing strategies, allocate resources effectively, and make data-driven decisions to improve campaign performance and ROI.
• Content generation and optimisation: AI can automate the process of content generation for marketing campaigns. For instance, AI can optimise content by analysing engagement metrics and user feedback to refine messaging and improve conversion rates.
• Social media monitoring and sentiment analysis: AI-powered tools can monitor social media platforms and analyse user-generated content to gain insights into customer sentiment, opinions, and perceptions about specific drugs or conditions. This information can help pharma marketers identify emerging trends, monitor brand reputation, and engage with customers in a timely and relevant manner.
• Compliance and regulatory adherence: Pharma marketing is highly regulated, and ensuring compliance with advertising guidelines and regulations is crucial. AI can help automate the review process for marketing materials, flagging any potential violations or inconsistencies.
• Competitive intelligence: AI can monitor competitor activities, such as product launches, marketing campaigns, and market trends, by analysing publicly available data. This helps pharma marketers gain insights into competitor strategies, identify market gaps, and adjust their own marketing approaches accordingly.

What is, in your view, the key to creating a seamless digital experience?

The key to creating a seamless digital experience lies in focusing on the user or customer and ensuring that their needs, preferences, and expectations are met throughout their digital and non-digital journey. After Covid, Pharma Companies have focused on elevating the digital SOV in terms of volume, so we created “manychannel” approach instead of “multichannel”, focusing on the first part of the funnel (REACH). We have to cut through the noise of information overload and make our marketing efforts more impactful, relevant, and engaging for our customers. We need to consider their experience as a whole, not only at a campaign, product or channel level.

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Alberto Martín is a Digital & Multichannel Marketing Director, Digital Transformation Lead at Iberia UCB with broad experience within pharmaceutical industry. He has spent the last decade leading Digital Transformation projects in local and global structures in companies like AbbVie, GSK and Janssen. Currently leading the Digital Transformation at UCB Iberia.