Multichannel Marketing Business Case Report 2014
Understand how to keep up your multichannel marketing strategy with the dynamic stakeholders.
Implementing a Winning MCM Strategy: Insight from Industry Leaders
We've come a long way on the MCM adoption curve but what is stalling adoption progress? We look at who’s forging ahead, and what are the critical success factors defining MCM projects.
The pharma industry is at a very important juncture in its adoption of new sales and marketing approaches. Although most companies have espoused the MCM concept, the industry still presents considerable scope for developing and optimizing the promotional mix. Pharma has strongly embraced this key element, but must still successfully integrate new methods to make MCM a “business-as-usual” activity.
The ROI Challenge
According to eyeforpharma’s “Multichannel Marketing Business Case Report, 2014”, proving ROI was the main challenge to 28% of pharma executives in 2014. While last year’s list was topped by concerns over channel integration, this change reflects the maturing nature of MCM within the industry and the need to prove value to senior figures allocating budgets to such initiatives. According to Accenture, 83% of pharma sales and marketing executives intend to increase digital and multichannel interactions, stepping up to the challenge as a way to structure customer communications and improve marketing efficiency.
MCM’s relatively slow adoption within the pharma sector is due to multiple factors. One common challenge appears to be justifying the cost of digital marketing projects. ROI measurement is not only expensive and time-consuming, but is also not always relevant in smaller projects, where the cost of measurement is similar to the cost of the project. Such an issue confuses those not involved in digital marketing, especially in an industry where all costs need to be justified. Meanwhile, companies must consult with legal and regulatory teams to ensure compliance in their marketing communications. These legal issues add to overhead costs and hinder a company’s ability to be agile - the foundation of digital innovation.
MCM Mavericks
Pharma companies that have adopted a structured approach to MCM (such as Merck, GSK, Astellas and Eli Lilly) have matured to the level at which they can recognize what ‘good’ looks like. This is an important element of the MCM framework.
Case studies from the eyeforpharma report highlight individual companies’ MCM achievements and their specific approaches and innovations within their strategies. One such case study is from Astellas.
Case Study: Astellas— Overactive bladder (OA B), patient and physician disease awareness
Astellas, a Japanese pharma company, specializes infour therapeutic areas: infections disease, neuroscience, oncology and urology. The company sought to increase patient awareness and subsequent treatment levels and diagnosis levels of overactive bladder.
To provide its target audience (patients) with a comprehensive range of information regarding OAB, Astellas needed to adopt a multichannel approach.
Key challenges:
- To increase awareness for the overactive bladder (OAB)
- To find a cost-efficient way of reaching doctors
- To grow the market share of the available Astellas products within the treatment area
- To maximize the ROI through channel integration
Campaign elements:
- Online website within the disease area
- Online training
- SEO
- Print materials
- Outdoor print
- Social media
- Events
Results:
- A well-integrated campaign in which each channel added value to other channels
- A consumer journey in which patients naturally progressed through the campaign to understand the identification and treatment of OAB
- Significant growth in Astellas’ product market share
Critical Success Factors
Pharma needs three things to change to an effective MCM approach:
- Strategy (vision) to take the journey
- Skills and understanding to support the way forward
- Integrated platforms that allow digital elements to be orchestrated together and share insights and data (intelligent analytics)
Justifying investments in MCM strategies is a hurdle to full adoption. “Return on investment is not always possible on a financial basis,” said an EU MCM Manager. Often ROI needs to be measured in other ways such as reach, engagement and outcome.
Several other elements are essential to preventing the failure of an MCM strategy:
- Senior sponsorship
- Alignment to business objectives
- Effective planning and a structured approach toMCM (including insight) and an agile adjustment loop to correct campaigns mid-flight.
What does the future hold?
The report also flagged that the sales force is still a key component of a multichannel strategy. This channel continues to mature and has placed more emphasis on selling via a key account management (KAM) approach, which is more integrated and aligns better with an MCM structure. The industry appears to be sold on the concept of MCM, but now needs to decide on how best to execute a strategy. No pharma company has as yet achieved MCM maturity but as with other industries, the mavericks will blaze a trail, showing the rest how it’s done.
To download an extract from the report, click here.