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Build a multichannel marketing strategy for an omnichannel experience. Ep 2.

Multichannel marketing

Posted by Hexagone team |

July 27, 2020

Build a multichannel marketing strategy for an omnichannel experience. Ep 2.

The Customer Experience Map.

The visualization of the whole omnichannel experience delivered to an HCP.

Planning the multichannel marketing strategy for an omnichannel experience...
In the first article of the omnichannel experience series, we started to explain how to define which omnichannel experience to deliver to a category of segment of HCPs by analyzing the segments worthy of investment thanks to a simple tool: the Segment/Potential Matrix.

We ended up with an exemple of 4 omnichannel experiences for which we defined a channel mix strategy that respectively reflect the investment efforts put for each group of segments of HCPs:

1. First class Omnichannel experience strategy ($$$$)
2. Business class Omnichannel experience strategy ($$$)
3. Premium economy Omnichannel experience strategy ($$)
4. Economy Omnichannel experience strategy ($)

Example of a matrix reflecting a defensive strategy.


That being done we will show you how to plan your multichannel strategy to deliver an omnichannel experience to each of the HCP.

What is a customer (omnichannel) experience map?
A customer experience map is a journey designed to engage a given persona and affect behavior change in a customized and timely manner, delivering relevant messages and services through various touchpoints. It can be used to move the customer from a stage to another. Multiple stages can be defined under specific purposes: awareness, adoption and loyalty or reach, engage, and retain.

The customer experience map visualizes your persona’s omnichannel experience as a sequence of steps.

Each of the journey steps are potentially a point of contact (touch point) with the HCP creating a HCP’s response to the brand.

The customer experience map helps a brand team to:

Understand HCP experiences and all the interactions with the brand (360°)
Identify issues/weaknesses and activate opportunities
Identify key points of contact and prioritize improvement points
Collaborate lively and brainstorm easily on next steps to take, adapting and adding to their brand communication strategy

Nonetheless, the customer experience mapping process can be seen as quite challenging.

Why?

First because most of the time we think the customer (HCP) experience map as a one-time effort with an all-in-one mapping, when actually evolution is key. A journey involves change, transformation, progression etc. as we move forward.

As the world goes on, any planned journey can shift, or be changed along the way which provide the opportunity to fine tune, improve, implement and test new ways. Lately we had to shift towards remote work so did the communication towards HCPs.

There are no wrong journeys as long as they answer to a persona’s needs, preferences and potential.

Secondly, most customer experience maps are marketing team-centric in the sense that they look at touchpoints and content based on the marketing team’s perception of where the HCPs should be (as opposed to where HCPs are actually at).

However, as we previously said, a customer journey is the place where the marketing campaign acts on HCPs’ needs, concerns, and preferences not the other way around. Eventually HCPs will respond and then the brand would react accordingly to their responses.

Thirdly, a customer experience map should be specific to a persona, actionable, measurable, and dynamic. This allows you to ensure its effectiveness. Without metrics, there is no room for improvement or change.

A smooth and consistent customer experience map aligns customer needs and expectations in all type of touchpoints with the brand to support the business objectives and goals for acquisition, retention, etc.

How to think about it?

- Define the most relevant scenario adapted to your personas presenting the different touch points using the relevant channels of communication that the HCP will encounter during a defined period of time.

- Do not only promote the drug but understand HCPs’ needs, provide educational materials or events and solutions to help them help their patients along their journeys.

- Set the stage for the HCP to be willing to interact with pharmaceutical brand.


BE THE ORCHESTRA LEADER. It’s like creating a harmonious melody made of several rhythms (frequency) and connected instruments (channels).
Leveraging the benefits of each channel supporting each other’s to drive consistent messaging along with the marketing campaign.
Using synergies between channels to drive the customer to action.
Ensuring consistency of marketing initiatives across multiple channels, therefore multiple touch points.
Optimizing the rhythm which represent the frequency, (there are a multitude of rhythms in different frequency ranges)

Focusing on engaging the audience with the melody.

How do they respond to your melody? That is the part you don’t control. Harmonies should progress until you find that functional harmony that works, provide results. Change the dynamics.

Bearing in mind that customer journeys should not become overly complex as they will be difficult to manage.

The customer experience mapping: in practice
Let’s do the exercise.

START.

THE PERIOD OF TIME: define the time during which the customer journey will take place – let’s say 6 months (this may depend on your marketing cycles for instance).

Trace a horizontal axis on top of your page mentioning months or any time data according to your schedule.


Then, we will define different range of cards that will be filled and placed on your map.

CARD #1 – THE PERSONA

It is the representative portrait of a defined audience based on your segmentation.

CARD #2 – THE OBJECTIVE

The marketing or business objective is based on the brand’s defined goals to drive an organization’s business plans.


CARDS #3 – THE CHANNELS

The channels are the one selected in the channel mix based on customer potential we defined in one of our article.

Place each channel from your defined channel mix in a separate line along a vertical axis.


CARDS #4 – THE KEY MESSAGES

A key brand message defined according to the marketing objective which will be following a schedule to ensure message retention along the journey.


Here we have all the key components to start mapping our journey.

Before moving to the content, touch points and interactions, we need to go through 2 steps:

1. Identify and position the paid key events (e.g. Hypertension & CVD conference)
2. Identify and position your owned key events (e.g. launch of brand website or a mobile app, Continuous Medical Education etc.)

The events need to be thought upfront and placed first within the map because they will generate interactions with other channels in order to promote them and leverage them to drive more engagement from HCPs.

Let’s say we have here medical conference on beginning of February and a CME (continuous medical education) planned end of March.

3. Place the touch points led by the sales reps during calls (F2F: face to face detailing or ReD: remote detailing) according to the number of contacts defined in the channel mix for these 2 channels of communication.

In our business class omnichannel experience we decided to invest into 4 face to face detailing contacts / year and 8 remote detailing contacts / year. This will allow us to have 2 F2F contacts and 4 ReD contacts according to our timeline (6 months) that we scheduled as follow.


Back to our final cards…

CARD #5 – THE CONTENT

Each content is defined during your content strategy to address a key message. We provide the customer with content or services that will help to reinforce the message or to educate them toward that message.

A question that comes across will be which channels from the channel mix will you consider to deliver your content.

Every provided content will be delivered through one or several channels in different formats if possible (e.g. a sales rep provide insights about a medical study during a remote detailing call and a day after the study is sent to the HCP upon his request by email).


CARD #6 – THE HCP DECISION

Decision symbol


On receipt of any communication, the customer has a choice whether to engage or not, or sometimes how to engage. Each of the nodes in the map will link with one or more others defining the ways the customer can progress.

Add notes to describe what is happening as we move from one node to the next on the map, it might be an action or a duration.

(e.g. invitation to an event sent to the HCP by email – which leads to the website from which they can check the program event and he might respond to the invitation or do not respond at all, in that first case scenario a reminder email can be sent with the venue details and contacts.


Last but not least, KPIs must be measured for each channel of communication in order to be able to measure the success of your marketing initiative along the journey.

Few KPIs example for emails: open rate, CTR (click-through rate), conversion rate etc.

Define what needs to be improved to reach the initial marketing objective:

1.The positive and the negative?
2. Draw a corrective plan of actions
3. For the following 3 months, do I have to amend my customer journey map initially planned?

Finally, you will put it all together thanks to effective project management that will successfully guide the project team to coordinate the multichannel strategy for the best omnichannel experience you could deliver to HCPs.

In our next article of this series we will provide a step by step project management guide to execute a multichannel strategy.

Stay tuned!

If you’d like to learn more about  multichannel marketing management in Pharma, feel free to reach out to us at contact[at]hexagone.life.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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