"You should allocate at least 30% of your promotional budget to digital channels"
A budget directive from the Region Management.
Ok but how can I do that?
I already cancelled my conferences, reduced my field force budget for face-to-face interactions and stopped organizing evening meetings for doctors. Nowadays, all I can do is to provide a webinar that the doctor connects upon my kind insistency, yet he/she may or may not listen to.
My product is registered as medicine. Due to healthcare regulations, I cannot advertise it anyhow, no matter digital or not. Asking me to allocate 30% of my budget to digital means reducing my total product promotion. How can I grow my market share then?
Does this sound familiar?
At this point, we turn back to the doctor and ask,
"Dear doctor, what do you need? Let me do something digital for you..." The doctor suggests:
You can sponsor online education programs.
You can organize online sessions for our congress.
I am teaching courses online, and you can bring participants.
Okay, we can do those. However, what about our commercial planning? Well-known truth: Pharmaceutical business is not just about selling drugs; it's also about contributing to health. Still though, we need to make some profit too. It is ok to expect profit in return of our investments.
Recently, our focus on projects have been finding a digital way to reach doctors. Our clients on female health and weight loss industries (with products registered as medicine) have asked us to find a way to reach their doctors digitally.
First of all, we need to remember that we are marketers. Marketing is about identifying the needs of a certain target group and shaping the solution to meet those needs. We can do this through various channels, including the digital channel.
Saying "let's find a digital project" is not much different from saying "let's sell something in the market." We need to understand the doctor's (and the related patient/patient's family's) world well. We need to know what they are experiencing, feeling, talking to, and saying in my therapeutic area of interest. We should explore details.
Instead of directly asking what they need, we can dig into their experiences and understand their world through a dialogue consisting of ten, fifteen questions. This way, we can find recurring patterns around the disease. Hence the "patient/consumer journey.”
Here is an example of the journey we created for a pregnancy journey we worked on recently:
Do you see how it shows itself when sketched into an image?
· If they download an application on their phone in the 5th week, I can target those who have this application.
· If they go through a specific test in the 10th week, I can target the Google keyword list searching for that test or advertise to those who visit relevant websites.
· If they shop in a certain area and are physically located in a specific place during a certain period, I can surround them with my promotions by tracking their phone signal.
I need to define my target well. I can't just throw one bait and expect to find Midas' treasures at the end of the hook. Just like the old days when we didn't aim for millions in sales in return of one advertisement on a newspaper.
What is marketing communication? It is a journey. It is a matter of orchestrating thoughts.
Now, a new channel has been added to this journey: digital.
In this way, we can shape perception in months or - even shorter – in weeks. This was used to take years before.
The better we know our target audience, the better we can communicate, and the more skillfully we can surround them. This is the omni-channel.
"But Esra, you started talking about doctors and gave an example of a target audience that doesn't even use medication."
Do they take any action without consulting their doctor? Then we may make them ask their doctor and manage the dialogue.
That's why channel integrity and omni-channel are important.
I surround my doctor's environment with the same logic of omni-channel. From the message given by my sales team, the message on the iPad, the email I send next, to the message that appears on Instagram, the sentence flow in the digital programs they use regularly, and the messages from literature networks.
Then in this case when a soon-to-be mother comes and asks the desired question, the doctor most probably gives the answer we hope for.
Let’s never forget: What makes a marketer good at their job?
It is being able to ask the right questions and connect the dots.
Then comes the methods… The channels, the digital projects, physical activities that contribute to sales and it just comes off like pulling a thread from a sock.
“The 30% of budget to be spent on digital projects” directive from regional management also loses its meaning then. In terms of budget, sometimes we demand more percentage or money, sometimes we negotiate for less.
In the end, when we do the job consciously like this, it is the region that follows us, don't you think?
Sincerely,
Esra
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