Traditional in-person pharma outreach tactics, including sales reps and in-person events, are slowly but surely being replaced with digital alternatives. While digital is efficient, it may also feel more impersonal to your customers. Transferring the warm interactions you traditionally conducted to online channels is more important than ever to establish 1:1 relationships with your customers.
But this takes time!
Best practices to influence prescribing habits
Pharma execs & HCPs agree—digital is here to stay:
- 84% of HCPs believe the content they are receiving is more relevant than before Covid1
- 82% of Pharma execs agree digitalization will likely continue post-Covid2
Digital content, when optimized correctly, can break through and change HCP perceptions. Leverage Sermo’s best practices which include:
- Personalization: establish a more familiar and lasting relationship with physicians—73% of physicians are more likely to engage with communication when it’s personalized3
- Snackable content: short and sweet content that can be consumed on-demand performs best online—41% of physicians use digital sources of medical & professional information daily (49% weekly)3
- KOL-led: 67% of physicians say Opinion Leaders have the most influence on clinical decisions vs. sales reps, MSLs, and field reimbursement specialists4
- Frequency: digital is not a “one-and-done” channel for educating doctors. 75% of physicians say engaging with 3-6 pieces of educational content about a treatment is needed before feeling confident enough to prescribe it3
This balance of valuable, snackable content and 1:1 focus is the playbook all Pharma companies should be actioning against. But, with so many platforms, tactics, and content executions, what does “good” engagement look like in this evolving digital landscape?
Let’s see how one brand’s campaign achieved a higher likelihood to prescribe and grant patient requests over the subsequent six months compared to the control group.
Physicians exposed to the campaign showed substantially higher rates of brand engagement
Campaign objective
Manufacturer wanted to drive physicians’ knowledge of the efficacy and patient benefits of a pharmaceutical product
Tactic leveraged
Mix of tactics including:
- Interactive Posts
- Image Ads
- Video Ads
- Direct Messages
- Poll
Flight
11 months; each “mini-campaign” ran for 1-2 months
Creative review: what made this campaign successful
Series of “mini-campaigns” ran over the course of a year, each built around one key brand message & set of educational assets.
Example mini-campaign:
| What’s consistent | What’s unique |
| Core message: KOL discusses safety profile | Headlines: Different benefits make each tactic unique |
| Video: Leveraged across both tactics | Post: Safety data reinforces video, creates an educational experience on platform |
| Flight: Ran at the same time to the same audience | Video ad: Links to brand.com so physicians can explore the full safety profile and other website information |
Campaign impact results
Campaign summary
Harnessing strategies that create “sticky” messaging through tactics like video content, KOL discussions, and purposeful 1:1 connections can increase prescribing habits among your target HCP audience. Reorganize your content calendar to include more serialized campaigns and begin optimizing your market outreach and engagement today!
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On behalf of Sermo, thank you for checking out our blog post on the power of building a 1:1 relationship with your customers over time. This is just one of the many examples of engagement opportunities and insights available with Sermo.
At Sermo, we turn physician experience, expertise, and observations into actionable insights for the global healthcare community. Engaging with more than 1 million HCPs across 150 countries, we provide physicians with a social platform that fosters impactful peer-to-peer collaboration & discussions about issues that are important to them and their patients. Sermo offers on-demand access to physicians via a suite of proprietary technology to provide business intelligence that benefits pharmaceutical, healthcare partners and the medical community at large.
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To explore our exclusive business solutions, please visit us at sermo.com/business or email us at business@sermo.com.
1 Accenture New Rules of Engagement Survey, 2021
2 Deloitte Biopharma Digital Innovation Survey, 2021
3 HCP Sentiment Series Part 7, Part 9; Sermo Platform Analytics 2022; Sermo RealTime Study October 2022
4 RxVantage, 2022
