According to PWC research, 4/10 global healthcare CEOs don’t think their organisation will be economically viable a decade from now if nothing changes.
Why?
Because digital transformation is now a must have, not a nice to have. In 2022, 60% of executives surveyed stated that digital transformation was their organisation’s most critical growth driver.
This ‘digital transformation’ has another name. You guessed it – omnichannel marketing!
But that poses some important questions: what is omnichannel marketing, why is it so important in pharma and life sciences, and what do you need to do to ensure omnichannel success to deliver customer experience excellence?
Many businesses in your industry who adopt omnichannel are doing everything they should be, but aren’t seeing success. This is because the success of your omnichannel approach ultimately relies on the belief and engagement of the customer facing cross-functional teams. If their mindsets aren’t right, the strategy won’t work.
Fortunately, you’re in the right place! In this blog, we’ll be answering all of these questions and more, helping you make informed decisions to successfully execute your organisation’s omnichannel approach.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Smart Insights define omnichannel marketing as:
“Planning and optimizing always-on and campaign-focused marketing communications tools across different customer lifecycle touchpoints to maximise leads and sales - all the while delivering a seamless customer experience to encourage customer loyalty”.
Many pharmaceutical and life sciences organisations are often seen to be lagging behind other industries in providing a strong omnichannel experience.
This is because many organisations still work in silos, failing to create cross-functional teams that work together to drive growth. In addition to this, pharma customer journeys are often overly complicated, and face-to-face communication is still prioritised over all else (even when unnecessary or detrimental to the overall customer experience).
Modern organisations are adopting omnichannel marketing because it works. Reaching healthcare professionals (HCPs) in the right way and delivering the best possible customer experience is essential – here’s why.
Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important in Pharma & Life sciences?
Your organisation relies on a high level of trust and credibility.
HCPs, patients and your stakeholders all rely on the information you’re providing, an expectation that is only growing in our digital age.
People expect more from your business; communications need to be personalised and engagement should be prioritised at all times. This can be achieved through tailored content, bespoke comms and timely follow-ups.
However, it’s not as easy as putting together an omnichannel strategy and hitting the ‘go’ button. In order for your omnichannel approach to truly succeed, you need to ensure that your people embrace the technology and truly get behind it.
If your people don’t fully adopt omnichannel, it’s dead in the water.
Get it right, and you can reasonably expect an annual revenue increase by 5-10%, as studies by McKinsey have shown.
Get it wrong, and you’re throwing budget away that could be better used elsewhere.
The key lies in your customer-facing teams’ mindsets, and the customer experience they are providing.
The Secret as to Why Your Omnichannel Approach Isn’t Working
Omnichannel fails when the objective is incorrect.
Ask yourself: why are we implementing omnichannel marketing?
The answer should be: ‘To build on and improve the customer experience we’re providing.’ Omnichannel is the vehicle to the wider goal of great customer experience.
Omnichannel also fails when your people aren’t engaged with it, or do not have the right mindset to implement it properly; it’s time to talk about a realistic way to ensure your omnichannel marketing delivers the results you need.
How can you (Realistically) Implement Omnichannel Marketing?
Following Covid, pharma companies realised the limitations of their overreliance on face-to-face visits.
Chances are you already understand the shortcomings of the old model, and understand the importance of adopting a new, more comprehensive approach, but do your customer-facing teams understand the importance?
Many pharma and life sciences organisations that we talk to tell us the same story, and it goes something like this:
“We’ve invested a lot of money into developing our omnichannel marketing approach, but we keep hitting roadblocks when it comes to getting people to fully adopt it.”
Most people don’t really like change, especially people who are comfortable with how their job has been working for the last decade or so.
Uptake’s Melissa Dagless phrases this issue beautifully in this article, stating that we need to shift ‘from traditional to future-proof’, and that ‘In the pharmaceutical industry, the history and structure of siloes have posed significant challenges’ when trying to implement omnichannel.
As Melissa says, pharma and life sciences organisations have been ‘characterised by silos’ and ‘driven by regulatory and process requirements.’ This makes change incredibly difficult to implement if your people don’t have the right mindsets for change.
The Great Omnichannel Mindset Shift
To ensure omnichannel success, you need to build the right mindsets in your customer-facing teams.
If your people don’t fully understand the benefits of omnichannel, then they’re more likely to default to old methodologies that they’re more familiar with.
We’re calling it the ‘Great Omnichannel Mindset Shift’; it’s a shift from historical ways of working to a more entrepreneurial mindset – one where your commercial and medical teams embrace technology rather than shy away from it. Technology can and will help us connect with our target audiences if we take the time to work with it.
Those with an entrepreneurial mindset will put the customer at the centre of everything that they do. You need to nurture and spread these mindsets across your organisation if you really want omnichannel success.
Sounds great, but what mindsets should we be prioritising?
This is a great question.
The Future CX team have been working tirelessly behind the scenes for the last few years, putting together a list of the most important mindsets and behaviours for omnichannel success. We’ve managed to narrow that list down to two key mindsets, both of which fall under the ‘customer fascination’ umbrella.
By this, we mean that your customer-facing people need to be enthralled with the customer, to want to learn everything they can about them and adjust their approach accordingly.
The mindsets you need to nurture are:
Insight Led
While your brand, product or service helps to differentiate you from your competitors, the biggest differentiator (that is often overlooked) is the depth and quality of insight that you have on your customers.
With the benefit of rich insight, you can adapt and refine your approach to ensure that every single word that you say, and every element of your value proposition is best suited to resonate with and engage your customer. A one size fits all approach is no longer sufficient, if you want to be truly effective.
You need your people to invest time in generating and utilising consistently deep insights into your customer base.
Embraces Technology
This one is likely self-explanatory. If your people don’t embrace technology, they’ll stay permanently stuck in the past.
Technology is a powerful aid to creating value for you and your customers, so it needs to be embraced!
It holds the power for you to provide each customer with a truly bespoke experience, helping you enhance and build deeper customer relationships and value at every interaction opportunity. The ability of technology will only grow, so understanding the technology available to you and embracing it will ultimately help drive your business success.
This is why nurturing mindsets that embrace technology is so essential. Your competitors will be, so failing to do so is to put yourself at a disadvantage.
Omnichannel is great, and will deliver results regardless, but these results can be so much better if your people have the right mindset. That’s where the Entrepreneurial Edge Evaluation (E3) really shines.
How to Begin Your Mindset Shift
Throughout this blog, we’ve featured some of the preeminent thinkers in the world of pharma and life sciences omnichannel marketing.
It is universally accepted that to deliver amazing customer experiences omnichannel is the future, so it’s time to begin your mindset shift.
However, you can’t change mindsets until you understand mindsets – specifically the mindsets of those in your customer-facing teams.
E3 provides you with unique insights into the mindsets of your people. It delivers personalised reports on an individual, team and organisation-wide level, meaning you’ll know exactly who has the right mindsets for omnichannel success, and who needs to change their thinking for success.
This data allows organisations just like yours to develop the right omnichannel mindsets, meaning that your ongoing investment into omnichannel marketing will deliver significantly better results.
It’s time to maximise the opportunity in front of you. Many organisations just like yours are wasting budget, time, energy and resources on strategy change without knowing whether their customer-facing teams have the right mindset to execute!
Redefine performance, maximise on opportunities, boost customer-facing success. How? Book a free trial today to see Future CX’s E3 system in action.