In this interview, George Griffith, Executive Vice President of Omnichannel Strategy at Relevate Health and founder of ConneXion360 (acquired by Relevate Health), emphasizes his commitment to educating and engaging healthcare professionals.
George discusses the most exciting opportunities in pharma marketing today, highlighting the shift from multichannel to omnichannel healthcare professional (HCP) activation. He explains that multichannel marketing often results in fragmented communication, while omnichannel seeks to unify messaging. The key is data integration, bringing together information on HCP preferences and behaviors. This data-driven approach enables more coordinated and personalized marketing efforts, fostering brand loyalty.
There are three key steps to implementing an HCP omnichannel activation strategy including gathering comprehensive information on the target HCPs, understanding what to teach and how to reach them, and establishing data use agreements with suppliers to leverage valuable insights. This data-driven approach can be applied to create a unified brand experience that is both precise and personalized.
Listen to the full interview or read the transcript to learn more.
Michelle Benz: Hi, my name's Michelle Benz, content director at Fierce Pharma. I'm joined here with George Griffith of Relevate Health Group. Thank you for joining me. Would you like to introduce yourself today?
George Griffith: I would love to. So, I am George Griffith, I’m with Relevate Health. My title is Executive Vice President of Omnichannel Strategy. I founded a company named ConneXion360 which Relevate Health purchased last March. I’ve been in the digital new media, whatever it’s been called, space for a long time, and my commitment is all about how to properly educate and ultimately activate healthcare professionals to change their behavior. So, thanks for having me today.
Michelle Benz: Thank you so much.
George Griffith: Absolutely.
Michelle Benz: What are the most exciting opportunities for enhancement in pharma marketing today?
George Griffith: Well, I think our biggest opportunity is the movements away from multichannel HCP activation to omnichannel HCP activation. Now, let me bring that to life because everybody hears those buzzwords and goes, "Well, what does that mean?" So multichannel, think about everybody's working in these silos at a pharmaceutical company. You have the peer-to-peer brand team that works in its own private Idaho. You have the non-personal to the media team that works over here, and then you have the sales force, and then you might have somebody who's even working on personal communications. Four groups that have individually recognized great job, but again, they're working in these silos so they're not communicating to each other. So what you end up with is this kind of message bombardment in an un-unified way to healthcare professionals where they're just like, gosh, is anybody talking to each other? So the real opportunity is to move towards omni.
So what does that mean and how would you do it? If I were listening to this, I might want to know that. So the first thing you do is find a partner that can really help you wrangle your data together. And by that I mean you're sitting on a ton of data as a pharmaceutical company on what your healthcare professionals that you're targeting are doing. What time do they like to open email, what is are their preferences around things they like to look at? Then you buy data and then you might work with a partner. So somebody needs to come in and put all that together so you can really have a 360 degree view of that healthcare professional you're targeting. Then you want to lay everything out on the kitchen table, all of the initiatives you're doing. Remember those four silos I was talking about?
You need to get all those people together for a therapy session and say, "Let's put everything on the table that we're all doing." And then you start going, oh my gosh, we're sending out these communications on Wednesday too. And then you want to start finding where you're duplicating information and then start figuring out how to sequence things together in a more orchestrated, unified way. Then you want to find out what is the data that comes out of those communications? Like do I get physician level data? If we sent them out a video on demand, can I see what video they watched or didn't like? All of that information is then used to sequence intelligent next best actions.
So in short, I'm most excited again about the opportunity to create, in my opinion, what'll lead to more brand loyalty. If you think about any of us as consumers, when we get bombarded by any new brand, we're like, is anybody talking to each other at this place? That's the way pharma feels about us. So by orchestrating a more unified brand experience that is driven by data, I think that's the most exciting thing for marketers.
Michelle Benz: In what ways are digital capabilities enabling pharma companies to personalize and impact the customer experience?
George Griffith: All right, so precision and personalized HCP activation should be every marketer's north star, and this goes right in line with omnichannel. In my opinion omnichannel, again, is all about data and orchestrating an experience that is precision and personalized. Again, as consumers, we all want to feel like we're the most important thing. It's the way doctors want to feel, but how can you do that? So let me give you some practical ways. So When we send out any communications, we can personalize things by market. So think about as a marketer, you might have some parts of the country that have a high market share and some that have a low market share, but we don't change the message, we send the same message. You might have some places you're on formulary and some places you're not on formulary, but we don't change the message. So we want to begin by thinking, should we change our storyline in these places where we have a high share and low share?
You bet we should. That means all the difference. Should we maybe not go after markets that we're not on formulary and we're not going to be there anytime soon and refocus our dollars? So personalized by markets, personalized by the fault thought leaders that deliver messages to those markets. We know certainly the national KOLs can be a prominent influence, but we also want to make sure we go, well, know who are these local influencers and how might we plug them in?
You can personalize things by looking at behavior-based triggers. You can buy information around the prescribing, what ICD-10 codes, what diagnostics codes, what are the competitors they're writing for? Take that information and then trigger information to physicians based upon those diagnosis codes and those other codes. That certainly makes the information more precision and personalized. You can do things by from your reps. So right now, reps are sending out these rep triggered emails. They're just dullsville.
Imagine having the ability to have your rep send a personalized video of themselves saying, "Hi, Dr. Jones, I'm your rep. We haven't seen each other in a long time, but I'd love the chance..." And then have them personalize a video that they attach to that or personalize it by sending the latest clinical reprint. Personalize by search intent, you know when you're looking for a new pair of running shoes online and then all of a sudden you start getting all these good ideas, then personalize messaging that way. So everything we should be doing in pharma should be, again, thoughtful around a more precision personalized experience, and by doing that, you'll create more brand loyalty and that's going to help increase your market share. So that's a huge opportunity for us.
Michelle Benz: If a brand wanted to start implementing an HCP omnichannel activation strategy tomorrow, do you have a roadmap that they could follow?
George Griffith: You know I do. So there are really three practical steps that every marketer should be able to follow, and I think omnichannel becomes this word we hear, and it's almost intimidating. What does it even mean? And in real simple terms for the audience out there, it's really just using data. It's a data-driven approach. What do we know? And then it's ultimately creating a unified brand experience by ultimately thinking how can all of the things we send out be more precision and personalized? So how do you do that? So step one, we need to find out as much information about that HCP as we can. So do we have their NPIs of who we're targeting? Do we have an account list? If they are practicing at key accounts, have we segmented them by persona? Do we know that information? Are they progressive pace sitters, fence sitters, early adopters?
Then we want to take all of the touchpoints that we're doing and lay everything out on the kitchen table and figure out how we're ultimately communicating with these HCPs. Are we duplicating touchpoints? Are we bombarding them? Lay everything out so we can sequence these touch points in a non-duplicative manner. Now, once we have that, then it's what are we trying to teach and how are we trying to reach them? So when it comes to teaching, we want to use some of those insights to figure out what's the best channel that we can deploy to that HCP You might like receiving things... I love, honestly, if I'm searching for something new, I love getting things at Facebook or suggestions, I'll go, "Oh my gosh, I didn't even know that shoe company existed." So to me, that's great and that helps me. You might have another preference.
So we should be aware as marketers, what those preferences are and use that data. Then when it also comes to teaching, what are we trying to do? Or is it an awareness play? If it's an awareness play, maybe we don't need video, maybe it's just a reminder of. But if it's a procedural thing, we're really trying to teach something new, maybe we do create video. So again, figure out then what's to teach and what's the reach? And then the last thing and the most important thing, and it's almost you could be begin with the end in mind here, and that's creating a data use agreement.
One of the great things about omnichannel is figuring out from all of those communications, what data is coming out of it. Do we get physician level data? If we're sending out an interactive quiz, can we get the answers that the doctors gave to the interactive quiz so that we know their behavior gap and can re-target them with another personalized and precision piece of information?
So get that data use agreement with any supplier you're going to work with, so that way you're not disappointed and you go, "Oh my gosh, I thought I was getting physician level data weekly." You don't want to find that out after the fact. Lock that information in. Again, gather as much... I'll go through the three steps, gather as much information on the doctors you're trying to target, figure out what you're trying to teach, how you're going to reach, and then put a data use agreement in place. It really just can begin with that easy journey. So thank you for asking that.
George Griffith: Oh, I appreciated the opportunity to be here. It was a real pleasure and thanks for your good questions.