Tag: pharma marketing

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

Omnichannel vs Traditional Healthcare Marketing: Key Differences Explained 2025

FAQ #2: How Does Omnichannel Marketing Differ from Traditional Marketing in Healthcare?

The fundamental difference between omnichannel and traditional healthcare marketing lies in customer-centricity versus channel-centricity. Traditional marketing approaches often prioritize product promotion through isolated channels, while omnichannel marketing focuses on creating integrated customer journeys that provide value at every touchpoint.1

Traditional Healthcare Marketing Characteristics:

  • Channel silos operating independently with minimal integration
  • One-size-fits-all messaging across different platforms
  • Product-focused communication rather than customer needs
  • Limited data sharing between different marketing activities
  • Reactive approach to customer interactions

Omnichannel Healthcare Marketing Characteristics:

  • Integrated channels that share data and insights
  • Personalized messaging tailored to individual customer profiles
  • Customer journey focus addressing specific needs at each stage
  • Real-time data utilization across all touchpoints
  • Proactive engagement based on predictive analytics

The shift represents moving from “spray and pray” tactics to precision targeting. For example, instead of sending identical product information to all cardiologists, an omnichannel approach would deliver personalized content based on each physician’s specialty focus, previous interactions, and current patient demographics.2

Healthcare professionals increasingly expect digital-first interactions. The pandemic accelerated this transformation, with HCPs now demanding timely, appropriate, and digitally-led communication. Research shows that 65% of HCPs complain about pharma “spam” where products are pushed repeatedly, highlighting the need for more sophisticated, value-driven engagement strategies.3

The customer experience benefits are significant:

  • 6x to 8x better response rates when personalized emails precede face-to-face meetings1
  • 88% of HCPs say they’d be twice as likely to meet with representatives after positive digital interactions3
  • 23% increase in campaign effectiveness when sales and marketing are synchronized1

This transformation requires pharmaceutical and medical device companies to break down traditional silos between sales, marketing, medical affairs, and market access teams. The result is a more coordinated, customer-centric approach that drives better outcomes for both companies and healthcare providers.4

This is a part of The Complete Guide to Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma and Medtech series.

This content has been enhanced with GenAI tools.

Read other series:

Scaling MedTech: From Product to Market

SaMD Europe Launch Guide

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

What is Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma & Medtech? Complete Definition Guide 2025

FAQ #1: What is Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma and Medtech?

Omnichannel marketing in pharmaceutical and medical device industries is a customer-centric approach that integrates multiple communication channels to create seamless, personalized experiences for healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients, and other stakeholders. Unlike traditional multichannel marketing where channels operate independently, omnichannel marketing connects digital and physical touchpoints into a unified ecosystem that recognizes users across their entire healthcare journey.1

The core principle involves using interconnected channels that work together to enhance customer experience and engagement. Each channel is optimized and working in harmony to provide consistent messaging while allowing for channel-specific customization. This includes everything from email marketing and social media to in-person sales visits, webinars, and mobile applications.2

Key characteristics that distinguish omnichannel from multichannel approaches include:

  • Unified customer data across all touchpoints
  • Consistent brand messaging with channel-appropriate customization
  • Seamless transitions between different interaction points
  • Personalized content based on individual customer profiles
  • Cross-channel insights that inform future interactions

For medical device companies, this means creating cohesive messaging across various platforms to boost engagement and conversions. The approach enables companies to reach healthcare professionals wherever they are, regardless of their preferred communication channel, while maintaining consistency in brand experience.3

Studies show that omnichannel personalization can halve acquisition costs, increase marketing budget efficiency by 10% to 30%, and increase revenue by 5% to 15%. This significant impact explains why 98% of pharmaceutical executives emphasize the importance of implementing an omnichannel strategy for their organizations.4,5,6

This is a part of The Complete Guide to Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma and Medtech series.

This content has been enhanced with GenAI tools.

Read other series:

Scaling MedTech: From Product to Market

SaMD Europe Launch Guide

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

Navigating MLR with AI

What is MLR and why does it matter in pharma and MedTech marketing?

MLR stands for Medical, Legal and Regulatory review. It is a mandatory, cross-functional process that ensures that all promotional, educational and informational materials are:

  • accurate and balanced
  • scientifically substantiated
  • compliant with global and local regulations

In highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and MedTech, MLR approval is a critical checkpoint before any HCP-facing or public content goes live. Failure to follow MLR requirements can result in:

  • Regulatory penalties
  • Product delistings
  • Legal liabilities
  • Damaged reputation

As content volume increases with the rise of omnichannel and AI-generated materials traditional MLR workflows can become a bottleneck unless modernized.

How can AI improve MLR workflows?

AI supports MLR processes in three major ways:

1. Content Pre-Screening

AI tools can scan drafts to:

  • Flag non-compliant language
  • Identify missing references or claims
  • Highlight risky phrasing (e.g., off-label implications)

This allows compliance teams to focus human review where it’s most needed, accelerating the overall review cycle.

2. Co-Pilots for MLR Teams

AI-powered assistants can:

  • Suggest alternative compliant language
  • Autofill references from approved claim libraries
  • Surface similar approved content as templates

These tools significantly reduce manual effort, especially during content revisions.

3. Approval of Modular Content

The modular content model breaks content into pre-approved blocks. AI can then:

  • Assemble high-volume personalized content on demand
  • Guarantee compliance by combining only validated modules
  • Eliminate hallucination risk (a common issue with generative AI)

This method not only accelerates content production but also reduces MLR review time by up to 60%.

How does AI integrate into the MLR approval chain?

Phase AI Role Benefit

PhaseAI RoleBenefit
Pre-MLRDrafting, tone adjustment, auto-translationFaster initial content creation
MLR ReviewPre-screening, red-flagging issues, checking against literature referencesPrioritizes human review efficiently
Post-MLR DeploymentMatching with HCP profiles, tagging usageTracks content reuse & optimization

The AI’s involvement must be transparent, traceable, and auditable, ensuring compliance with internal SOPs and external guidelines.

What are the risks and limitations of AI in MLR?

While AI accelerates MLR processes, there are important caveats:

  • Hallucinations: Generative AI may invent plausible-sounding but false claims. Limiting AI to assembly of approved blocks solves this.
  • Regulatory uncertainty: Global health authorities (e.g., FDA, EMA) have not yet fully defined how AI-assisted content creation fits within promotional regulations.
  • Tool validation: Any AI tool used must undergo proper validation, risk assessment, and documentation — especially in GxP environments.

Best practices for AI-driven MLR transformation

  • Separate AI use by stage
    • Use generative AI only before MLR to assist with content ideation or rephrasing.
    • Use only pre-approved content for AI assembly after MLR.
  •  Invest in modular content strategy
    • Pre-approve reusable content blocks to scale faster without repeated review cycles.
  •  Enable “compliance by design”
    • Integrate claim libraries, brand guardrails, and reference checkers directly into content tools.
  • Improve the supply chain, not just speed
    • Faster content creation is meaningless without scalable MLR capacity.
  •  Partner with experienced vendors
    • Choose platforms and agencies that specialize in life sciences compliance and can demonstrate audit readiness.

Summary

Modern MLR is no longer just a gatekeeper. MLR process is a strategic enabler of fast, scalable, and compliant pharma marketing. When powered responsibly by AI, it can cut approval cycles from weeks to days, support omnichannel campaigns, and free up expert reviewers for higher-value tasks.

The future of compliant content in life sciences is modular, AI-assisted, and human-supervised — and it’s already underway.

This text has been enganced with GenAI tools.

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

Top Use Cases of AI in Pharma & MedTech

What are the main forms of generative AI being leveraged in pharma marketing?

Generative AI can be categorized into three general uses:

  • Content Generators: These produce texts, images, and video rapidly, and can also refine content by changing tone, simplifying information, or fine-tuning messages for specific audience segments.
  • Answer Engines: These are new forms of ‘search’ that generate direct answers (text, images, video) rather than just providing links. They can be used to extract insights from market research reports or summarize clinical studies.
  • Agents (Large Action Models – LAMs): These forms of AI act to achieve specific goals without specific instructions or human oversight. For example, an AI agent could review keynote Q&As and social media reactions to assess the medical community’s response to a drug launch. These are considered the most controversial due to their autonomous nature.

What are the primary use cases for AI in pharma and MedTech marketing?

There are four broad categories of AI use cases in pharma and MedTech marketing:

  1. Strategic Insights Generation: AI can analyze vast amounts of both structured (e.g., CRM data) and unstructured data (e.g., government policy documents, articles on HCP preferences) to generate actionable insights and trends. This can improve understanding by up to 30%. However, caution is advised as AI can produce plausible but incorrect results (“AI hallucination”).
  2. Marketing Content Generation: AI is crucial for omnichannel strategies that require high content volume for personalization. It can rapidly generate various content formats (texts, images, video, audio) and reduce content creation costs by 30-50%.
  3. MLR Acceleration (Medical, Legal, Regulatory Review): AI can modernize labor-intensive MLR processes, which typically take 21 to 56 days for approval. AI tools can pre-screen materials, flagging problematic content for detailed review and fast-tracking compliant assets. AI co-pilots can also assist MLR staff with referencing claims and rephrasing options, potentially accelerating content approvals two to three times.
  4. Field Force Enablement: AI benefits customer-facing staff like sales teams and Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) by improving training, account planning, and content delivery. AI can provide immediate access to drug information, offer coaching for specific situations, and integrate with CRM to help reps prioritize accounts and personalize HCP engagements based on “next best” message or format recommendations.
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Pharma Marketing

Understanding AI in Pharma Marketing

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a pharma commercial context?

In a pharma commercial context, AI primarily refers to generative AI, which differs from traditional “classical AI” or machine learning.

  • Classical AI / Machine Learning models perform specific tasks, like analyzing data for predictions or identifying patient groups, using very specific datasets.
  • Generative AI works with a foundational, large language model (LLM) trained on vast amounts of data, enabling it to be applied to many different problems. Its key characteristics include:
    •   Basic competences applicable to various problems.
    •   Ability to learn from structured and unstructured data.
    •   Generation of multiple outputs such as texts, images, speech, video, and designs.
    •     An intuitive, conversational user interface.

In pharma, generative AI is used for activities like writing marketing materials, generating webinars, building image and video libraries, spotting segmentation opportunities, and speeding up marketing processes. It is projected to grow faster in healthcare than any other industry, potentially generating between $60 billion and $110 billion a year in economic value for the pharma and MedTech industries, with most value going to commercial operations.

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

Multichannel vs Omnichannel in Pharma Marketing

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing in pharma and MedTech?

Multichannel marketing uses multiple independent channels (like television, social media, email, websites) to communicate with customers. In this approach, channels often operate as silos, repeating the same message, with the focus remaining on the product rather than the user. It lacks a connecting node between channels.


Omnichannel marketing also engages multiple channels, but they are all integrated and coordinated to provide a unified, seamless, and personalized experience for the customer, who is placed at the center of the marketing funnel. This approach ensures that information is available precisely when needed, encourages deeper content exploration, and reinforces messages across touchpoints, ultimately improving engagement and fostering trust.

According to McKinsey, correctly implemented omnichannel models can lead to 5-10% revenue growth and 10-20% marketing efficiencies and cost savings for pharma companies.

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MedTech Pharma Marketing

Digital marketing in MedTech and Pharma

Is digital marketing in MedTech and Pharma similar? Understanding the specifics of MedTech and Digital Health digital marketing is essential to success.

MedTech digital marketing

The four main components of digital marketing in the medical devices industry are digital strategy consulting, digital content creation and management, digital campaign execution, and analytics.

  • Digital Marketing Consulting involves helping MedTech companies assess their priorities and strengths, optimize their operations and innovation, and develop effective go-to-market strategies.
  • Digital content creation and management involves producing engaging and informative content for various channels such as email, social media, blogs, webinars, etc. that showcase medical devices’ value proposition and benefits.
  • Digital campaign execution involves designing and implementing marketing campaigns that target specific segments of healthcare professionals (HCPs) or patients using digital tools such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, SEO/SEM techniques, etc.
  • Digital analytics involves measuring and evaluating the performance and impact of digital marketing activities using data-driven methods such as web analytics, customer feedback surveys, ROI calculations, etc.

Digital consulting is a vital component of digital marketing for medical devices and should be a first step. It helps MedTech companies to:

  • Define their vision and goals for digital transformation
  • Assess their current capabilities and gaps
  • Develop a roadmap and action plan for implementing digital solutions
  • Align their organization and culture with digital best practices

Digital marketing of medical devices in comparison to pharmaceuticals

Digital marketing for Medical Devices in many aspects is similar to the pharmaceutical industry, however, there are significant differences.

What are the similarities between MedTech and Pharma digital marketing?

  • Both Pharma and MedTech use digital tools to inform and influence HCPs and patients about their products and services.
  • Both industries rely on data and analytics to measure and optimize their digital marketing activities.
  • Medical Devices face regulatory challenges and compliance issues when engaging with their audiences online that are similar to those in pharmaceuticals.

The key differences between Pharma and Medical Devices digital marketing are that:

  • Medtech companies tend to have more complex products that require more technical expertise and demonstration than pharma companies.
  • Medtech companies have a wider range of stakeholders to consider, such as hospital administrators, payers, distributors, etc. than pharma companies.
  • Medtech companies have more opportunities to leverage digital health and digital therapeutics (DTx), such as connected devices, apps, sensors, etc. that can enhance their value proposition and customer experience than pharma companies

Outsourcing digital marketing services in the MedTech industry

Medical device companies may look for different services or support when deciding to outsource digital marketing, depending on their needs and goals.

Some possible services or support are:

  • Quality assurance: ensuring that the digital marketing activities comply with regulatory standards and best practices.
  • Content production and management: producing digital content or products such as websites, apps, videos, etc. that showcase the features and benefits of medical devices.
  • E-commerce: setting up and managing online platforms that allow customers to order and purchase medical devices easily and securely.
  • Virtual sales channels: creating and maintaining digital tools that enable sales reps to communicate and demonstrate medical devices to HCPs remotely.
  • Data analytics: collecting and analyzing data from digital marketing activities to measure performance, optimize campaigns, and generate insights

Generally, smaller MedTech companies may need more comprehensive and flexible services and support than larger companies, as they may have less experience and capacity for digital marketing. Larger companies may need more specialized and customized support than smaller companies, as they may have more complex and diverse needs for digital marketing.

Some possible factors that influence digital marketing service requirements are:

  • The type and complexity of medical devices that the company produces or sells.
  • The level of expertise and resources that the company has internally for digital marketing.
  • The scope and scale of digital marketing activities that the company wants to undertake.
  • The budget and timeline that the company has for digital marketing outsourcing.

The skillset of MedTech digital marketer

Some of the skills of a digital marketing expert from pharma are transferrable to provide medical device digital marketing services too. For example, both sectors require:

  • Knowledge of regulatory requirements and compliance standards.
  • Ability to create engaging and informative content for different audiences and channels.
  • Proficiency in using various digital tools and platforms to design, execute, and measure campaigns.

However, there are also some differences between pharma and medical device digital marketing that may require additional skills or adaptation. The key differences are that:

  • Medical device customers have different expectations and needs than pharma customers. They may be more interested in product features, benefits, demonstrations, or testimonials than in disease mechanisms or outcomes.
  • Medical devices are more diverse and complex than drugs. They can range from tissue grafts to prostheses to digital devices and apps. They may also have different modes of action, indications, or usage scenarios.
  • Medical devices may have shorter product life cycles than drugs. They may face more competition or innovation from other players in the market. They may also require more frequent updates or upgrades.

Therefore, a digital marketing expert to excel in the Medical Devices industry may need to understand the nuances of device marketing and how to tailor their strategies accordingly. MedTech digital marketing specialist has to learn about the specific types of devices they are marketing and how they work, who they serve, and what value they offer. Finally, digital marketer in MedTech industry has to be flexible and agile in responding to changing market conditions and customer feedback.

Regulatory requirements for medical device digital marketing

Regulatory requirements for medical device digital marketing vary depending on the type of device, the market, and the channel. Some of the general requirements are:

  • Medical device digital marketing must be truthful, accurate, and not misleading.
  • Medical device digital marketing must comply with the relevant laws and regulations of each country or region where they operate.
  • Medical device digital marketing must respect the data privacy and security of customers and users.

Some examples of specific regulatory requirements for medical device digital marketing are:

  • The Medical Devices Regulation (MDR) applies since 26 May 2021 in the European Union. It sets out new rules for placing medical devices on the market, including requirements for clinical evidence, post-market surveillance, labeling, and advertising.
  • The In Vitro Diagnostic Devices Regulation (IVDR) applies since 26 May 2022 in the European Union. It replaces Directive 98/79/EC and introduces new classification rules, conformity assessment procedures, performance evaluation requirements, etc. for in vitro diagnostic devices.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provides guidance documents with digital health content for medical device manufacturers in the United States. They cover topics such as software as a medical device, mobile medical applications, clinical decision support software, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence/machine learning, etc.

Read our Expert Guide for 2025: Medical Device Digital Marketing

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Digital Health MedTech Pharma Marketing

MoovCare – a clinically proven mHealth app in lung cancer treatment

MoovCare, a mHealth app to help patients with lung cancer presented at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.

moovcare on tablet
MoovCare tablet interface

An Israeli company Sivan Innovation and the Cancer Institute of Western France are behind MoovCare – a mHealth application presented at the ASCO annual meeting in Chicago.


MoovCare claims to be the first application of its kind. It allows controlling lung cancer treatment based on reports on outcomes submitted by patients via web or mobile-connected devices. It enables the early identification of relapse or complications requiring rapid and specific care.
According to the clinical data from the III phase randomized study on 300 patients as presented at ASCO, this mHealth application provides direct benefit in terms of prolonged survival.


The main advantage of using the app in lung cancer therapy is early detection of relapse, which is symptomatic and typical for lung cancer. This allows optimal treatment and in turn increases of survival rate among patients.


An additional effect of the app is improved treatment compliance (observance of scheduled visits, lower number of inopportune phone calls, lower number of imaging). All this at a comparatively very low cost of less than 10 000 USD versus 265 000 USD per one CT-scan for Lung Cancer.

How does MoovCare work?

MoovCare mHealth app lung cancer Mode of Action – Sivan Innovation
MoovCare mHealth app lung cancer Mode of Action – Sivan Innovation


MoovCare is being “prescribed” to ambulatory patients. Patients are asked to fill in the web-based form each week, self-assessing 12 clinical parameters and having a free text field to enter any information they consider of importance. Data are securely passed and processed within the application. An algorithm behind MoovCare analyses the data provided and in case of any anomaly detected reports it to the oncologist and hospital dashboard. Based on the alert from Moovcare healthcare providers can contact patients and take any necessary action.
Company and research behind MoovCare.


MoovCare is a product of Sivan Innovation. Founded in 2014 in Jerusalem by Daniel Israel, Sivan Innovation is an Israeli E-health start-up and R&D company.
The research presented at ASCO has been conducted by Dr. Fabrice Denis at the Cancer Institute of Western France


MoovCare is a perfect example of how digital innovation, mHealth, and IoT trends are positively impacting healthcare and patient outcomes. We look forward to seeing more of such innovations coming not only from startups such as Sivan innovation but also from Big Pharma companies with their vast R&D resources.
 

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Pharma Marketing

Pharma digital marketing in the U.S. Spending more and wrong.

The US Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industry 2014: Digital Ad Spending Forecast and Trends, a new report from eMarketer shows that Pharma Marketing spending on digital remains on steady 3.0% of the total digital ad spending level. Unfortunately half of it is spent wrong.
This has been a common joke of marketers and advertisers for a long time: If I only knew which half I spend on wrong tactics I would make myself and my company rich. However, jokes aside, at K-message we can clearly see which quarter of this budget is going wrong way. We talk serious money here, healthcare and pharma ad spending is now at USD 1.41 bn level, and by 2017 we will pass the threshold of two billions.

US Healthcare and Pharma Industry Digital Ad Spending 2012-2018. Source: eMarketer.com
US Healthcare and Pharma Industry Digital Ad Spending 2012-2018. Source: eMarketer.com

eMarketer takes into account all healthcare and pharmaceutical digital marketing spending in the United States. It includes prescribed (Rx) and over the counter (OTC) products, specific products and services addressed to healthcare professionals, as well as direct to consumer advertising of products, services, hospitals, health insurers etc.
More than half of this budget (56%) goes for direct response advertisement. The remainder of 44% is spent on branding campaigns. This is an artificial segmentations, as the objective of campaign usually is not so clear in the American, DTC driven market. Every branding effort may bring direct response.
What is more striking in eMarketer’s report is the share of spending on healthcare and pharma digital marketing by channel. It seems that mobile is still an ugly duckling for pharma marketers, who dedicate only 26.5% of their budget to mobile formats.
It is incredible if you look at this from the perspective. The same crowd that claims “we want more direct response and we spend more than half of our budget for it” in the same time neglects the channel that is the best to accomplish this objective.
Healthcare and pharma marketing is the single industry that spends on mobile the smallest chunk of its budget. Even PC makers spend 33% of their budget on mobile, but we in Pharma remain connected to the desktop. If we go mobile, pharma marketing focus mostly on mobile search advertisement.
US Digital Ad Spending by Industry and Channel 2014, Source: eMarketer.com
US Digital Ad Spending by Industry and Channel 2014, Source: eMarketer.com

We can try to persuade ourselves, that there is some logical reasoning behind this inefficient budget allocation. However, at K-message we tend to believe that the only reason to avoid mobile advertising in pharma is simply change-aversion. Mobile advertisement is well regulated, rules are clear, and results are easily measurable. It allows better interaction than PC in many dimensions: it can be geo-located, instant, personalized. The only disadvantage over display ad on PC screen? It requires additional work.
Digital marketing is not a rocket science that Pharma R&D are performing. You can start simply with text messaging in your next multichannel campaign. Make sure that your next edetailing is part of the CLM. Give your audience some thrill with elements of gaming. Do not fly everyone to the remote conference site, use virtual one instead. This is pharma digital marketing, not putting banners every here and there.
We really hope that pharma marketers will surprise eMarketer by proving they know how to use digital marketing tactics efficiently. Fingers crossed!

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Pharma Marketing

Top 3 Key Lessons on Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry

On 22nd and 23rd of January in London I was honored to be a speaker at the Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry conference. Now back in Swiss Pharma capital city – Basel, let me summarize the key lessons on the social media in pharma industry I took back from the United Kingdom.

Social Network Analysis book cover [social media in pharmaceutical industry]
Social Network Analysis book cover (Photo credit: Matthew Burpee)
First of all, the event itself was really worth to attend. If you heard alarm bells buzzing on the bullshit bingo sequence of social media in pharma, this time it would be a false alarm. Not because of my humble presence, but because of the other participants and the content of their presentations. The chairwoman of the event, my ex-colleague at Roche, now enjoying freedoms of the external consultant, Alexandra Fulford (@pharmaguapa) made sure that we were not lost on the way. Having said that, let us digest the content of the conference.

Social Media in Pharmaceutical Industry Key Learning #1: Social Media is not a marketer’s toy, but a source of powerful intelligence data. A Big Data!

A diagram of a social network [social media in pharmaceutical industry]
A diagram of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My senior colleague from Roche, Dr. Alfred R. Steinhardt now in the hat of PA Consulting Group and his own Alfred Steinhardt Consulting, showed us an incredible power of the Social Media used not for standard “what they said about us”. Dr. Steinhardt provided example of social media used by pharmaceutical industry for recruitment to clinical trials (social patient). We could also see social media as a tool to identify and engage with Key Opinion Leaders (in this new world, aren’t they rather Influencers?) who do not necessarily recruit from academia as in the past. Maybe most striking, even if not the most common usage of Social Media was tracking origin of counterfeit drugs sold online.
As we discussed after the presentation, Social Media is not such a big revolution as some pundits say and it will not replace scientific method with statistical analysis of huge amounts of data. Still it is an extremely useful tool that should be looked at out of plain pharma marketing perspective. Which was further confirmed by Dr. Sherri Matis-Mitchell, an Associate Principal Information Scientist R&D Information at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Matis showed us how Social Media, when properly used, can provide important answers to R&D teams in pharma industry and help identify unmet needs of patients.

Social Media in Pharmaceutical Industry Key Learning #2: Legal Team is not a threat (and can be a savior) for social media in pharma.

Let's Make It Legal [social media in pharmaceutical industry]
Let’s Make It Legal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
An eye opening presentation of Audrey Hagege, a Legal Manager and Todd Kolm (@toddkolm), VP and Head of Global Digital Strategy from Sanofi showed us not only what Legal Teams think about Social Media. Even more important was how distorted is an image of legal teams in the eyes of us, digital marketers working on social media in pharma. At the end it is easy – just let your legal or compliance officer know what you are going to do. They are in the organization to help and protect, and not to stop any activities.
On the other hand, while social media in pharma is becoming more and more regulated, I had an impression that some of our colleagues are going dangerously close to the line. Ms. Müge Gizem Bıçakçı Akalın (@MGizemBA), a New Promotional Models Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim’s Turkish affiliate shared with us plans to promote a Facebook page of a feminine avatar with a name very closely resembling a brand of prescribed drug for menstrual pains. Is it already promotion and communication DTC, or still just a disease awareness campaign? Let’s hope Gizem has very good friends in her legal team and they are crystal clear about their legal framework.

Social Media in Pharmaceutical Industry Key Learning #3: Social media in pharma can be measured and data driven (but not always is).

Gary Monk (@Garymonk) from Havas Lynx and John Pugh (@JohnPugh) from BI shared similar thoughts on how to measure efficiency of pharma activities in social media. As we were sitting in the UK, for obvious reasons there were not much about direct impact on sales. However, we could see important metrics on the engagement. Both speakers provided some hints on what can be improved in Facebook and Twitter presence of the analysed brands, but it is not what is the most interesting from my point of view.  
What is more important is just an attempt to step back and look at those activities and try to measure them against each other. Then track what works and what is not. How your facebook page welcomes user? How fast do you respond (do you)? How often do you tweet? Do you follow others and do you retweet or share their posts? What makes Eli Lilly or Boehringer more successful in Social Media than in the market? We can find those answers, and we should as we are no longer pioneers in the social media. It is time to treat it as a serious communication channel with real budget and real targets to meet.
The lessons on social media in pharma listed above are not a comprehensive list. I have learnt much more, and I am going to share those lessons soon on K-message in other posts. There were great examples of social media and digital in action. Mobile app helping patients to fight against depression (Claire Perrin), Catz against Asthma (Ben Furber @BenFurber), Knowledge database available online to HCPs thanks to Merck and their Univadis (Thibaud Guymard @thibaudguymard), I will not be able to mention them all now. But I can now say thank you to all participants, speakers, and SMi for making this event so inspiring. Thank you!