Healthcare stakeholders are online and marketers must develop new skills to keep up. Online detailing is demonstrating high ROI in Europe and managing and measuring online share of voice is a key success factor. Yet few companies have seriously experimented with alternatives to the traditional salesforce model.
To maximise ROI investment, the use of the internet should be integrated across all promotional areas. Sales reps should use their visits to introduce doctors to websites and online resources and e-detailing should be linked in an electronic platform. Closed-loop marketing needs to be employed to monitor individual physician behaviour online.
Including the internet channel in the communications mix could create profitable opportunities to access hard-to-visit physicians or those with low sales potential, for whom traditional detailing may no longer be appropriate.
The internet will open up strategic alternatives to the business model. These are based mainly on four key dimensions, defined by the ‘Business model mixer’. Pharma companies can:
• Better exploit synergies between products across their portfolio for specific customer groups
• Leverage the internet to provide healthcare solutions based on their products – ideally charging for these services
• Directly address patients and their relatives, within the strictly regulated environment, and reach out beyond traditional prescribers
• Tailor new segment-specific strategies that rely less on sales-driven channels and more on the internet, as appropriate.
In the long term, medical and technical progress will provide more opportunities for moving to high-tech and personalised healthcare. In depth information can be generated about each patient. Interventions may be tailored to the individual.
Developments in online technology are already beginning to transform the healthcare sector. It will be interesting to see how pharma marketers continue to develop the business model in the light of ongoing market access pressures and tightening regulations. They will have to determine the best possible use of Web 2.0 for each particular product/brand opportunity within their markets.
