Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’re well aware there has been a digital transformation in pharma.
How fast has it been going? Simply put, what was cutting-edge during the COVID-19 pandemic is the bare minimum today.
The companies that ride the waves of trends and stay on top, no matter how things change, have high digital marketing maturity. They keep moving forward because they understand that even if they’re at the top of their game with email marketing today, they’ll be falling behind tomorrow if they don’t keep going.
So, how mature is your marketing strategy? Can you ride the waves? And how can you reach digital marketing excellence… and maintain it? This article will help you figure this out by defining digital maturity stages.
These stages come from the internal categorization tool we’ve developed, called the Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment Tool (DMMI). It gives pharma companies a digital marketing maturity score for their omnichannel advancements. With this tool, you can understand where you are, where you want to go, and how you’re going to get there.
This article shows a simplified, aggregated version of the DMMI. Ideally, every element of your digital marketing (e.g. email strategy, social media marketing, etc.) should be evaluated separately as your level of maturity is probably different from one element to another. For example, you can be in the “run” stage with your email strategy, but in the “crawl” stage with your processes. To evaluate every element separately, start your assessment with phamax Digital.
Take the assessmentIn a nutshell
CRAWL 🧎♂️➡️
At the crawl stage, you’re focusing on proven, traditional channels. Face-to-face interactions with reps, print media, and phone calls are your primary methods to reach and engage with the target audience.
At this stage, there’s limited use of digital channels. You’re only utilizing external data and you’re not tracking the complete user journey.
Your primary challenges may include:
- A lack of digital marketing expertise.
- Trouble tracking the customer journey and measuring ROI.
- Limited reach and engagement.
Pharma companies stuck in the crawl stage are held back by internal conflicts. Stakeholders and team members might be reluctant to adopt new digital tools, and you may lack a reasonable budget for digital initiatives.
How to take the first steps
Here are four steps you can take to transition from crawling to walking:
- Stakeholder Engagement: Start by educating stakeholders about the benefits of digital marketing. We find that workshops and case studies from competitors usually get them on-board.
- Skill Development: Hire digital marketing experts to guide your team with the initial steps. It’s not just about learning but bringing everyone onto the same page.
- Expand Your Digital Footprint: Start experimenting with digital channels like social media and online ads.
- Basic Data Utilization and Tracking: Begin collecting and utilizing first-party data from new digital channels. Set up Google Analytics to better understand user behavior.
WALK 🚶♂️➡️
At the walk stage, you use a mix of digital and traditional channels, but they’re still siloed. This means that while you might use online ads, a website and social media platforms, they’re unconnected.
You’ll likely face challenges with ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance. You might also be frustrated that digital channels provide a sub-par user experience, or don’t integrate with traditional systems.
It’s the siloed approach that’s the core of most challenges. You may:
- Struggle to manage and maintain consistency across channels.
- Have no unified view of customer interactions.
- Measure the effectiveness of channels individually.
How to pick up the pace
To start running, develop your teams’ omnichannel marketing skills (a common theme across all stages!) and work on:
- Clear Compliance and Privacy: Establish clear policies and guidelines for data privacy and regulatory compliance.
- Enhanced User Experience: Learn from your initial use of digital channels to create a better user experience.
- Break Down Silos: Develop a strategy for breaking down data silos and integrating data sources. Use a CRM for centralizing customer data.
- Performance Measurement: Set up KPIs to measure effectiveness. Use this to improve marketing strategies and personalize customer interactions.
RUN 🏃♂️➡️
At the run stage, you use all available channels and actively monitor audience preferences and engagement. Your channels work together to deliver effective messaging and you’re utilizing a CRM and CDP for accurate monitoring.
You might be using diverse data sets and automation to track ROI, but it’s limited to a few connected channels.
At this stage, your budget might be an issue. Advanced CRM and automation tools have a high initial cost, and you’ll need to continuously update and maintain the digital infrastructure.
Education is another key challenge. You might face:
- Untrained staff who can’t effectively use new tech and interpret data.
- Superficial use of channels.
- Trouble integrating diverse data sets and ensuring data quality.
It’s time for take-off
To spread your wings and fly, focus on skill development for staff with ongoing training. Continuously review strategies to align with market changes and opportunities. We also recommend:
- Advanced Data Integration: Use advanced tools for accurate real-time data integration and analysis, leading back to an enhanced CRM. Use these insights to improve personalization.
- Increased Automation: Expand automation to cover the customer journey, improving efficiency and consistency. Create a unified customer experience across all touchpoints.
- ROI Demonstration: Develop methods for tracking and demonstrating ROI. Use these insights to secure investment and support.
FLY 🚀
Flying is about taking a holistic approach. All channels are interconnected and feed into an informed strategy with a high level of personalization. With your channels informing each other, you can deliver the right message, on the right channel, at the right stage of the customer journey.
We find that pharma brands at this stage are skilled at analyzing ROI correlations, but they still face some challenges. It’s all about keeping up. You may have trouble with:
- Balancing personalization and customer privacy.
- Managing real-time data integration.
- Demonstrating ROI and justifying ongoing investments.
- Staying updated with:
- Data security,
- Evolving compliance regulations,
- Technological advancements,
- Market changes.
Where next?
If you stop moving, your digital maturity score will fall backwards to previous stages. So, we recommend focusing on:
- Adaptation and Agility: Foster continuous learning. Quickly adapt to new technologies, market conditions and regulatory changes. Continuously monitoring and improving data security will help.
- Sustaining ROI: Regularly report on digital initiatives and use insights for strategic planning. Focus on customer experience feedback for guidance.
- Future Technology: Utilize AI and machine learning to enhance real-time data management, decision-making, and personalized marketing that builds trust (don’t forget to balance this with customer privacy for ethical and transparent data use).
Maturity Means Movement for Pharmaceutical Companies
A digital maturity assessment tool is the first step to understanding your maturity, but if you take anything from this article, make sure it’s this:
The companies that reach digital pharma excellence don’t stop moving.
What is the pinnacle of the flying stage today may become the basic steps to crawl in a few years time. Achieving digital maturity starts with understanding digital marketing maturity stages and moving forward, step by step.
David’s post on LinkedIn (CDO at phamax Digital) is the perfect example to illustrate this statement. He uses the four digital maturity stages introduced in this article to compare email capabilities during COVID to those of today (mid-2024), and the results speak for themselves! What was once cutting-edge (the ‘flying’ stage) in email marketing a few years ago is now considered ‘walking’ or ‘running’ at best.
