Today’s consumers are exposed to a variety of advertising mediums that fight for their attention while they’re on their smartphones, watching TV, or walking down the street.
If consumers are drawn to multiple marketing channels every day, shouldn’t your pharmaceutical brand meet them where they are?
This article will provide a full breakdown of multichannel marketing and the best ways to deploy it.
What Is Multichannel Marketing In Pharma?
Multi-channel marketing for pharma usually involves delivering advertising content across multiple channels like billboards, newsletters, in-store displays, and website banners.
By implementing a single strategy across multiple mediums and platforms, pharma companies can maximize their opportunities to interact with prospective customers.
The goal of multichannel marketing is to boost brand awareness and sales by delivering independent cross-channel ads to a target audience at a high frequency.
How To Create A Multichannel Marketing Pharma Strategy
Define Your Goal
Pharma companies can have varying objectives for their marketing campaigns, such as partnering with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), increasing disease awareness, engaging with HCPs, increasing script lift or or preparing for the launch of pharmaceutical products.
Each of these objectives is unique and will require the use of a different combination of marketing channels and advertising content.
Identify Your Target Audience
The target audience for your multichannel marketing campaign will be the same across each medium you advertise in. For pharmaceutical companies, there are two main audiences to choose from:
- HCPs: When targeting healthcare professions, it’s important to engage with medical professionals who are most likely to recommend your drug to their patients. For example, a heart medication distributor should focus on reaching cardiac specialists over pediatricians.
- Consumers: Pharmaceutical ads geared towards consumers encourage them to ask their doctor or pharmacist if your drug is right for them. These ads can directly boost brand awareness among consumers and indirectly among HCPs that are asked about the drug by their patients. This underlines the importance of an effective drug advertising strategy.
Select The Right Channels
With a multichannel approach, you’ll want to utilize both physical and online channels to reach your target audience at a high frequency and have the best chance of customer conversion. Collaborating with a pharma ad agency can help you navigate through this process.
Physical Channels
Wellness boards
Wellness billboards dispense sanitizing wipes below a prominently featured advertisement and can be placed at storefronts and pharmacy wait areas. Pharmacy wait areas are an optimal advertising space for pharmaceutical companies as it provides the correct contextual setting and is frequented by health-conscious consumers.
While other out-of-home (OOH) advertising mediums like billboards and street signage can reach a wide audience, they lack precision targeting capabilities. Terraboost’s wellness billboards can be equipped with geofencing and retargeting capabilities to track your target audience and send them preprogrammed ads to their mobile devices.
TV/Radio
Cable television and radio are traditional mediums that have always been good at casting a wide net and boosting general pharma brand awareness. TV and radio mediums can reach tens of thousands and even millions of consumers depending on the duration of your campaign.
While TV and radio ads can disperse your message to a wide audience, it is difficult to target specific groups and track engagement. In our increasingly digital world, consumers are encouraged to tune out to TV and radio ads and go on their phones. So, it’s nearly impossible to analyze how many impressions these ads actually generate.
Conferences
In-person conferences are a great way to meet and form connections with HCPs. At these conferences, you can disseminate information on your latest product developments, best practices, or the latest clinical data from your field.
For a multi-channel marketing campaign, you’ll want to ensure that your messaging throughout the conference is consistent and relevant to your ad material. Conferences can also be an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from medical experts on your products.
Sales representatives
It’s important to incorporate sales reps throughout your multichannel marketing campaign. A lot goes into developing an advertisement that can be distributed across multiple mediums, and you want your sales reps to be fully knowledgeable of the material.
HCPs will often ask sales reps questions about claims made in advertisements they see, and it’s crucial that your representatives can bolster those claims and not contradict information from your marketing team.
Online Channels
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to increase your online presence and organically boost your multichannel marketing campaign. Basically, SEO involves using specific keywords and phrases in your online content that search engine algorithms favor.
You’ll want to ensure your website landing page is optimized with key terms that users are likely to type in when researching pharmaceutical content. To further boost your brand’s online presence, consider writing informative articles and blogs related to your treatments and associated diseases. By including that list of key terms and phrases in your articles and blogs, search engines like Google will recognize you as an educator in your field and rank you even higher in search listings.
Paid search
Getting your pharmaceutical company to rank highly in search engine results can be difficult, but there is a shortcut. You can use paid search ads, such as Google Ads, to have your company placed at the top of search listings for keywords you select.
These ads are pay-per-click (PPC), meaning that you only pay when consumers click on your sponsored search listing. While these ads can provide you with a shortcut, they do have some drawbacks. Search engine users will see that your company is a sponsored advertisement and are therefore less likely to click through. Also, the bidding for highly sought-after key terms like “best heart medication” can become quite expensive and lead to $50+ per click.
Email marketing
Email marketing is used by pharma marketers to create a channel for frequent communication with both consumers and HCPs. Both of these groups can receive educational content, newsletters, and product promotions, but the content should be specified for each group.
For example, a newsletter for HCPs should include the latest medical breakthroughs, clinical trials, and pharma industry news that applies to their specialty. But for consumers, newsletters should focus on patient success stories, disease awareness, or even exclusive offers and loyalty programs.
For additional insights into how to effectively reach HCPs, consider checking out our latest blog post.
Monitor And Optimize Campaign Performance
Whether the objective of your marketing campaign is to partner with KOLs, engage with HCPs, or simply lift sales, it’s essential to track performance and ROI throughout the campaign’s duration.
Monitoring the success of online pharma marketing efforts is actually quite easy. Due to all the data collected from internet users, you can often see how long they view your ads, click-through rates, and how many sign up for email lists.
However, monitoring engagement levels with traditional mediums like cable television and OOH ads can be quite difficult. Just because a number of people tune into a specific show or visit a certain store doesn’t mean that they actually interact and remember the promotional material that’s featured.
If you’re looking to easily monitor the success of your marketing campaign, Terraboost and its wellness billboards make it easy. We help our clients analyze sales lifts and conduct match panel studies to test the effectiveness of their ads. Our wellness billboards equipped with geofencing and retargeting capabilities also allow you to track in-store shoppers to engage with them digitally.
Benefits Of Multichannel Marketing
The primary benefit of multichannel marketing is the massive increases it can bring to brand awareness and audience reach.
Delivering your advertisements across multiple physical and digital mediums provides more touchpoints for current and potential consumers. Plus, you increase the chance that a consumer or HCP will be exposed to your advertisement more than once. Frequent brand exposure is one of the primary factors that leads to new customer conversion.
Multichannel marketing also allows you to test which advertising mediums work best for your brand and result in the most engagements and customer conversions. This will help you immensely in future marketing campaigns and help you choose which advertising medium to invest more heavily in and which ones to discontinue using.
Multichannel VS Omnichannel
Many people mistakenly believe that multichannel and omnichannel marketing are terms that can be used interchangeably. While they are similar, they have important differences in terms of customer experience.
Multichannel marketing refers to using multiple advertising channels that operate independently from one another to expand your audience reach. Unlike the multichannel approach, omnichannel marketing works to synergize ad content across channels to provide consumers and HCPs with a seamless and integrated experience.
Let’s say an HCP receives a targeted email about a new medication. They could then explore the company’s website, sign up for a webinar, and then check social media content related to the product. This would be an omnichannel marketing approach that focuses on the customer journey and encourages them to continue exploring your brand across each medium to view unique content.
Generate More Pharmaceutical Sales
Rolling out a multichannel marketing campaign can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We at Terraboost have an extensive history of working with pharmaceutical companies and can provide you with some key industry insights and a free personalized quote.
Our network of 120,000+ wellness billboards is featured in top pharmacy locations across the country like Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS. Independent studies from Nielsen Media Research have shown that 66% of shoppers engage with our sanitizing kiosks and that 50% would take a coupon or brochure to learn more.
If you’re looking for an innovative and targeted approach to OOH advertising, get in touch with a Terraboost agent today.
