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In a world facing unprecedented environmental challenges, the urgency to protect our planet has never been more evident. We are standing at a crossroads, where the decisions we make today will shape the lives of future generations. This demands a firm stance from individuals and businesses alike, and we must collectively seize the opportunity to make a positive impact.

The pharmaceutical industry has made some progress in reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions (i.e., direct emissions and indirect emissions from purchased energy); however, the journey towards a greener tomorrow doesn’t end there. The real test lies in confronting Scope 3 emissions – the indirect environmental impacts embedded within the supply chain, including those associated with medical communications and particularly face-to-face education events.

Although they contribute to the improvement of health outcomes, such events also contribute hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emissions,¹ from flights, hotel stays, materials, etc. It’s tempting to suggest a blanket solution of running all medical events online, but we believe that the benefits of face-to-face interactions cannot be ignored, and it is possible to strike a balance between maximizing educational benefit and minimizing emissions. By implementing a climate-friendlier approach, the pharma industry can maintain their events’ educational value while simultaneously saving money, enhancing brand engagement, and demonstrating their corporate commitment to protecting the environment.²

As experts in hosting climate-friendlier medical education events, we have developed a charter, which you can find below, that outlines the various ways we assess and adjust medical education events to minimize their environmental impact. We hope that this list will inspire a new norm of climate-friendlier medical education events, because the challenge our planet faces can only be combatted through mass movement.

By making small changes to the way medical events are planned and executed, we can help to forge a brighter future for our planet. If you require expertise in planet-friendly medical education, please don’t hesitate to contact our Business Development Manager, Alejandro Potes at alejandro.potes@remedica.com.

References

1. Zotova O, et al. The Lancet: Planetary Health. 2020;4(2):E48–E50.
2. Do customers really care about your environmental impact? Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnycouncil/2018/11/21/do-customers-really-care-about-your-environmental-impact/?sh=1e0aedce240d. Last accessed July 2023.
   
   

In recent years, the terms ‘multichannel’ and ‘omnichannel’ have cropped up again and again in Pharma. And now ‘optichannel’ has been added to the mix. These buzzwords describe marketing strategies that enable you to communicate and engage HCPs – so what’s the difference and how do they influence marketing strategy?

Brand-focused vs HCP-focused marketing

Multichannel marketing revolves around your Brand. It’s designed to engage your customers across multiple channels (such as a website, a video, an advertisement, or an eBlast) by delivering the same message. The aim of the multichannel approach is to maximize reach and touchpoints to promote engagement – casting your net as wide as possible to catch the attention of more HCPs.

Omnichannel marketing puts your customers at the centre of your engagement strategy and is designed to ‘meet your customers where they are’. It uses more than one channel to communicate, but it takes an integrated approach. All content and messaging are designed to connect and work together so that content in one channel relates to content in another, providing a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.

The aim of an omnichannel approach is to make the customer journey as seamless as possible, allowing them to move from channel to channel easily, without encountering the same information and providing them with information that they want, where they want it. Each experience provides real value and builds on the last, enabling HCPs to continue to develop their knowledge on a topic.

Optichannel marketing: ‘the next big thing’

To further enhance the customer experience and the effectiveness of the omnichannel strategy, you can gather customer data and insights to segment your audience, building different customer profiles. For example,

• Profile A – prefers video and email content
• Profile B – doesn’t engage with video, but likes live webinars and infographics
• Profile C – prefers videos, f2f meetings and remote detailing

With these profiles you can tailor content, building more relevant communications to optimize engagement – this is known as optichannel marketing.

Optichannel marketing focuses on real-time interactions with HCPs to provide the right information, at the right time, via the right channel. It uses data analytics and AI to interpret current HCP interactions and behaviours to then predict the best time and channel for engagement.

Optichannel marketing recognizes that each channel has unique strengths and limitations. Applying an optichannel approach allows companies to focus and tailor content to maximize the impact of a particular channel rather than engaging in a ‘war of the channels’. The result is a more personalized experience for the HCP and a more streamlined and efficient communication process compared with omnichannel marketing.

Implementing an omnichannel or optichannel marketing strategy

Providing a tailored communication approach for HCPs can be met with certain challenges. To ensure success, you need to be able to track a HCP's interaction across various channels, and that's a topic for another blog!

Whichever strategy you choose, consider creating a campaign that utilizes ‘modular content’. Modular content involves breaking your brand messages down into pre-approved blocks of content that contain all the information necessary to support a message (claims, references, graphics). Each module can then be assembled with other modules and repurposed across different channels and platforms to create tailored content, efficiently.

If you’re interested in multi-, omni-, or optichannel marketing, or if you want to work with a communications agency with experience in developing communication strategies using global modular content, get in touch.

Contact Alejandro.Potes@asandk.com today to find out how we can improve your brand’s reach.

As symposia season begins, here are 5 areas that are often overlooked and may be holding your symposium back from achieving its full potential.

So, you obviously need a well-known and respected speaker, yes? Someone to lend credibility to the symposium, to draw in the crowd. All your competitors are doing this, so it must be the right approach.

Except, sometimes it’s not. Not least because often your competitors aren’t just using the same approach, they're using the same speaker!

Take a step back. Start with what you're trying to achieve - your strategy, your messaging, what change you're trying to bring about - and then see whether contracting one of the usual suspects really is the way to go. Maybe you need someone at the frontline of healthcare provision, someone who understands the challenges that you’re addressing on a practical level, who can make the data relevant. Or perhaps engaging early with a rising star better suits your long-term strategy.

 "We want something different – innovative, never been done before… proven to work…" OK. Different can be good, but it can also be a distraction and a money pit. The right format needs to factor in what you're trying to communicate, your chosen faculty, and what you want people to leave with.

A townhall format with several KOLs may suit a new brand finding its place in the treatment algorithm; incorporating case studies can shift the focus to clinical practice challenges; using an experienced chair can help bring out the best in an up-and-coming KOL; while a TED-style talk plays into the hands of a seasoned pro.

Then there’s interactivity. Interactivity is the new baseline - everything needs to be 'interactive'. But if the interactivity doesn't engage, doesn't help achieve your objectives, then it really is just a gimmick and a waste of money. Where many symposia are often let down is when the technology doesn’t integrate easily, disrupting the flow or not allowing enough time to review the results for interpretation to be useful. Interactivity should add value, be guided by adult learning principles, support your strategy, and reinforce outcomes. And importantly, the results should be measurable.

Be wary of the KOL who says “I’ve done hundreds of these things. I don’t need a rehearsal.” Aside from the fact that that doesn't instil confidence about your speaker's engagement, planning and preparation is everything for a symposium. Good preparation can ensure speakers are comfortable with their slides and the key messages to get across, the technological setup, and the interactivity. Good preparation can help drive meaningful Q&A with pre-prepared questions between the chair and the speaker that further builds on the presentation and enhances learning.

What is often overlooked by clients is that their audience will likely include competitor companies, who will not only be looking at the content presented, but also the way the data are presented, the audience number, and the level of engagement. Make sure the content looks good, can be substantiated, and any image permissions have been obtained.

4. Get creative with your materials

An easy way to stand out from the crowd is to engage with an agency backed by a strong creative team. They can help develop eye-catching materials that spark initial engagement and pique interest, and even produce artwork that lives on after the symposium has finished.

Sponsored symposia can be difficult to attract audience numbers, with companies often pairing a presentation with a breakfast or lunch as a way of enticement. Our creative team once designed such an enticing program handout for a sponsored ECTRIMS symposium that we quickly ran out of copies, with many doctors taking multiple flyers for their colleagues. The result was a packed-out symposium with standing-room only.

Engaging with social media can help to expand your digital reach. Social media campaigns can drive interest and registrations to your symposium, while engaging with digital opinion leaders (DOLs) offers additional channels for your data and has the potential to continue the conversation after the symposium has finished.

In a healthcare environment, industry regulators are working to provide clear guidance around the use of social media. While the recent PMPCA Social Media Guidance has provided some structure, social media engagement requires careful navigation and working with an experienced agency can help ensure a successful and compliant campaign.

Discover how we can help your symposium stand out from the crowd. If you’re thinking of running a symposium for your brand, we’d love to hear from you. Our Account Management Team are seasoned pros in planning and execution, our content team have the knowledge and expertise to get to the heart of your data, and we’re backed by an in-house creative and production team who will ensure that your symposium is unforgettable.