Today, the relations between a brand operating in the pharmaceutical industry and its users are no longer as smooth and streamlined as in the past. It has become multi-faceted. Both doctors and patients have many communication channels to do exhaustive research and get tons of complex information.
Our role as communication professionals is to support our clients and help them produce content integrated into this framework and used in different digital contexts within a multi-channel structure.
We talked about this in our interview with Remus Frunza, Managing Director from The Ad Store Romania and one of our talented professional in The Ad Pharm - The Ad Store international health and wellness communication division.
How do you create engaging content in a highly regulated sector such as the pharma industry?
In order to build outstanding content with a high added value, there’s one thing that counts more than anything else: experience. Communication for a pharmaceutical product must be a 100% transparent process, compliant with all rules. It is essential that you have the medical and scientific know-how and a deep understanding of the industry specific regulation framework. This is why our The Ad Pharm is made by:
An in-house team: a dedicated, cross-country team– with a specific know-how on healthcare communication to patients and HCPs.
A consultant platform: a platform with over 40 consultants among medical specialists, HCPs, medical advisors, medical communication experts, legal and life science specialists. They are engaged in the research & development stages of our communication projects in order to target professionals and/or patients, based on their individual skills.
What is The Ad Pharm’s process to create an effective health and wellness communication?
Insight & analysis: target analysis capabilities in order to translate the scientific language into effective communication messages.
Scientific know-how: constant professional training and updates on specific regulations.
Human touch: we are the Human Network and we apply our human-to-human (H2H) approach to everything we do.
Novel thinking: we develop a storytelling style that has a strong educational and multichannel approach.
What approach is the best for a winning strategy?
As with any other sector, you have to begin by mapping the target's needs to produce content that is able to respond to their questions and needs in a way that is both credible and truthful. So the first question we should ask ourselves is:
Who are communicating to and what are their needs?
1. Patients and caregivers. They need to find the right information about their symptoms in order to identify their illness and relevant therapy. In this customer journey, a content marketing strategy is articulated and adapted to different channels, both digital and non-digital.
2. Healthcare professionals. From general medical practitioners to specialists to pharmaceutical professionals, HCPs have more articulated needs related to the context where they operate. The main driver is professional training, but the support that companies can provide in facilitating a patient-doctor relation is becoming more and more relevant. The HCPs look for partners to help them work in a better way and there are still many opportunities to communicate with them.
3. Healthcare facilities. Hospitals, clinics, and specialist centers need to communicate their excellence. At the same time, they need to support patients by offering all the necessary information for better decision-making and access to their services.
The final objective is putting the user at the core, whether they are the prescribing doctor, a hospital, or the end client. How can they be reached? Through listening and a multichannel marketing.
The core of this approach is synchronizing the communication strategy across multiple channels, such as social networks, email marketing, websites, mobile communications, apps and so on. The objective is to provide a global vision and create a communication circle that integrates marketing and sales strategies.
Today, using only one communication channel means giving up on maximizing your target market. Identifying the right media mix in order to reach and engage the target audience is key o success.
What are the main features of The Ad Pharm’s approach?
1. Strategy therapy
A storytelling that carries a strong educational approach and shifts from informative to narrative medicine up to fostering a therapeutic alliance (with input from researchers, testimonials and medical-scientific professionals) to give authority and credibility to the content.
2. Gamification & reward
Gamification and rewards engage our target effectively and make them want to go back to critical content several times, so as to create and strengthen their active engagement with the proposed therapy.
3. From awareness to conversion,
going through specialized compliance
We develop multi-phase processes aimed at meeting our stakeholders’ needs and requirements more and more effectively.
4. On-the-go & immersive
Our Customer Journey addresses different moments and demands and our contents are designed to meet:
• The need for quick reading and immediate answers
• The need to probe, plan, research, thanks to immersive content
