There is yelling and then there is whispering. You yell when you have a message you want to get to a large group of people. It can be effective if you’re trying to give a generic message. But when you’re marketing pharmaceuticals, you and your marketing organization should be past broadcasting a generic message. Shouldn’t you then be whispering a specific customized message to each one of your target physicians? As Cynthia Ivan of Health Net of Arizona says in this video, “When you target everyone, you target no one”.
There are large variations in physician clinical behavior within individual practices, differentiated by variations in specialty needs, patient types and plan parameters, among other things. At the end of the day, how these physicians write prescriptions is greatly influenced by the many variations in practices.
Wait a minute, you say. Whispering takes more time and is one-on-one. It’s not effective. It’s not practical. I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be so. In fact, whispering can be very cost-efficient and can help you reach the right market with the right message. The only thing standing in the way for you to start whispering instead of yelling is effective use of technology.
Once you have segmentation in place, the other part becomes progressively easier. You can begin to deliver a customized message to each segment in the channel they are most comfortable utilizing. For example, once you know your physicians segments and the actual channels they are most likely to respond to and interact with, you are truly practicing segmented messaging and marketing. The technology infrastructure needed to accomplish this is already here.
In fact, this method can be so productive that you’ll certainly want to yell it out when you review the ROI report. As a pharma marketer, wouldn’t it be a huge boost to be able to target your communication to different physicians based on these variations? The economic lift to your marketing budget from such an approach would be tremendous.
In fact, this has been demonstrated time and again at Destination Hotels and Resorts. Here is what Andre Fournier has to say: “We had all these individual properties wanting to create their own messaging and their own timelines. With Destination Delivers, we can roll that up ahead of time…The consistency and the quality of the messaging was huge, and the return on investment was almost 10 times what we would have gotten out of on an individual basis.”
We’re preparing a case study video specifically focused on ROI-delivered marketing segmentation. The video will be posted on August 27, so be sure to mark your calendars.
