The Non-Personal Promotion Equation

Precise + efficient + thoughtful + personalized = engagement

Non-personal promotion is a foundational component of most brands’ omnichannel marketing strategy.Limited face time with healthcare provider (HCP) customers is a hurdle we all face; and reasons can range from restricted access in HCP offices to vacant or whitespace territories.

While budgets dedicated to non-personal promotion have grown, so too have the expectations of our HCP customers. Pressed for time and inundated with promotional messaging, they are choosing to engage only with those brands who present the most relevant content.

Successful non-personal communication must serve the customer at the individual level. This requires an approach that is precise, efficient, thoughtful, and personalized. Let’s take a look at each one of these attributes.

Precise

Precision is key as we attempt to target those customers who are in the best position to utilize the brand. It’s crucial to focus on the right physicians as well as the extended care team that influences their decision-making. Consider factors such as the NP/PAs that support your physician targets, and even the office staff that will be involved in supporting their patients utilization. Leveraging both internal and trusted third-party data sources when analyzing targets will better inform these opportunities to activate the HCP office.

Efficient

Efficient promotions require an understanding of how and where spend can deliver the most value.Determining the optimal investment and potential return for each HCP target or segment provides clarity and agility when bringing a campaign to market.

Analyzing factors such as brand and category writing behavior allow you to assess where the most efficient opportunities exist. Identifying opportunities to amortize prior investments in strategy and assets can also help mitigate development costs and time to market.

Thoughtful

Thoughtful communication is at the core of establishing and maintaining productive customer relationships. Creating a relevant and beneficial user experience requires customized communications at the individual HCP level. Message mapping, for instance, allows you to build preferred messaging streams by customer segment. Understanding channel preference and mix ensures that you’re delivering these streams to the places they’re most likely to be engaged with. Tracking customer promotional behavior over time can provide a baseline expectation for response, which assists forecasting and optimization. Also, understand how your customers’ prescribing behavior is influenced by product access and affiliation. Even the best campaigns can have a less than desirable impact if targets are restricted by formulary status or other economic factors.

Personalized

Personalized communications are essential for breaking through the noise. Our HCP customers are busier than ever. The effects of COVID-19 have altered practice dynamics and loaded up their inboxes with unprecedented levels of non-personal promotion. Relevance and timeliness of messaging are usually the determining factors in what content they engage with. Taking a CRM-based approach, where customers are viewed as individuals and content can be optimized specifically for them, can help create a more personalized experience.

Understanding where a target resides in the product adoption curve, for instance, can inform the balance of disease state and clinical education with branded promotion. Ultimately, we’re serving the messages that each target requires in order to change or reinforce their behavior through those channels and drivers will be most effective in delivering the optimal user journey.

Non-personal promotion will continue to grow as brands strive to reach and influence their busy HCP customers. Take the time to dig into the data and find out what reaches and motivates your customer targets. Understand what they want from your brand and how they want to receive it. More of them, in turn, will reward your precision, efficiency, thoughtfulness, and personalization with engagement and action.