6 ways pharma companies can stand out with personalized video
When it comes to the advertising industry, pharmaceuticals and healthcare is one of the most complicated sectors. Not only is there a lot of regulation governing how drugs or vaccines can be advertised, but marketing efforts often target a very tight audience of medical professionals who have their own ways of operating.
But what if there was a way of improving awareness about your product? What if you could also improve sales? And if you were leading the market in using that technology? That’s where personalization comes in.
Ninety-four percent of marketers agree that personalization is crucial to the future success of businesses. But only a handful of pharmaceuticals companies are using it
The trend towards personalized marketing, and personalized video marketing, is taking other industries like banking and insurance by storm, since it has been proven to deliver a significant boost in engagement (up to 3,100% in the case of our technology). But the healthcare industry is slow to catch up with this trend.
That represents a huge opportunity for pharmaceuticals companies today to leapfrog their competitors and differentiate themselves by providing the personalized content that audiences want, but competitors aren’t yet providing.
So here are 6 examples of how personalized video campaigns can be used by your company to boost engagement, awareness and sales.
1. Introduce new products to medical professionals
Let’s say you’ve developed a brand-new drug that you want medical professionals to hear about. You want to tell them how your new medicine works, how it improves on existing options, and why they should consider purchasing or proscribing it. How are you going to communicate all of those things?
A boring print ad in a medical journal? An email that will go straight into the spam folder and nobody will read? Why not a personalized video that addresses the doctor, hospital or medical practice by name, demonstrates an understanding of what drugs they have purchased in the past, and can explain your new offering in a concise and engaging way?
Many pharma companies operate by sending out a sales representative with a detail to talk to medical professionals about new products. But with personalized video, you can automate part of that process, by sending videos in advance explaining those products. Video is an ideal way of communicating how drugs work and how they target the correct parts of the body,
You can include a call to action at the end of a personalized video to encourage professionals to order the drug or to find out more information.
But why use a personalized video? Because our brains process video 60,000 times faster than text. It’s an incredibly powerful communications tool.
2. Care for your customers
Pharmaceuticals companies release many different types of products, and not all of them are drugs. In most cases, pharma companies don’t have detailed information about the end customer, but there are exceptions. In those cases, personalized video is a powerful tool for improving customer experience.
We recently worked with a pharmaceuticals company that provided customers with a glucose monitor alongside diabetes medication. They wanted to get feedback on how customers were using the monitors and whether they had any feedback. They used a personalized and interactive video to encourage users to select their precise model of glucose monitor and provide feedback on it.
In this video, roughly 80% of those who watched the video to the end, filled out the form requesting further personal information. That information could then be used to develop deeper personalized experiences in the future.
3. Tell the world about your research
As a leading pharmaceuticals company you’re constantly developing your expertise and producing research that is pushing your industry forward. But what’s the use of that research if no-one hears about it? You can use personalized video to tell your audience about your research and explain its relevance in a clear and concise way. At the end of a personalized video, you can link to your research using an interactive button.
What’s more, you can use that personalized to also tell medical professionals about new drugs you have developed in relation to your research and encourage them to learn more or purchase them.
Personalized video provides a powerful way of boosting engagement and making the findings of complex research digestible. That means more people understand your message, and more people are likely to click through to the full research paper.
4. Raise awareness about public health issues
With personalized video, many different elements of a video can be customised for the individual user, including their name, how long they have been your customer, what their purchasing history is, what their interests are, and their location.
It is possible to use this technology to provide public health campaigns that have a chance of converting back into sales at a later date. Take as an example the annual flu jab. Personalized video can be used to target individuals in the public by saying, for example “Hey Jonathan, did you know that 23,415 people in your area took the flu vaccine last year? Winter is coming and it’s time to think about getting yours this year? Click here to find out where you can get the vaccination”. This is strategy can be very effective if you are the market leader for a certain pharma product.
Such a campaign spreads public awareness about the risk of illness over winter and is designed to increase the number of people who get the vaccine, and therefore the amount of vaccine the pharmaceutical company sells.
5. Spread the word about your CSR work
Corporate social responsibility plays an important role in all pharmaceuticals business. Personalized video can be used to communicate your ideas or encourage people to get involved with the initiatives you are running. It can raise awareness of your brand and the partnerships you have made with other organisations or public health bodies.
Such videos can be distributed to databases of users in specific geographies using their language or according to specific demographics and feature a clear call to action at the end to find out more or to get involved in the initiative. We found during A/B testing that 90% of people watch our personalized and interactive videos to the end, compared to just 43% with a standard video marketing campaign.
That gives you a great opportunity to engage your audience in a way that few other businesses are doing at the moment. It’s all about giving yourself that competitive edge and creating a reason for people to engage with you.
6. Learn about your audience
Let’s say you are launching a new product or launching new research and you want to understand what your audience thinks about that research of product. Personalized video technology allows us to also create interactive videos that you can use to mine data and analysis about the needs and desires of your customer base.
In one campaign for a large pharmaceuticals company, we created an interactive video that presented a new product and asked medical professionals what product they were currently using to treat the condition in question. We were then able to feed that data back to the pharmaceuticals business, and it informed how they rolled out the product elsewhere and gave them important insights about the market.
Interactive video is a far more engaging way to get your customer’s attention. Nobody wants to read through pages of details of a new product and then fill out an online form. But if that form is embedded in a short video and there is dynamic content to bring it to life, more people will engage.
Why take personalization seriously?
There are many reasons why it’s time for businesses to take personalization seriously, but in pharmaceuticals there is an even better opportunity to truly leapfrog competitors, providing an experience that demands engagement. Only a handful of businesses in the industry are currently using personalized and interactive video as part of their marketing and customer experience initiatives. But that’s only going to grow. Many other industries are thinking seriously about digital transformation, and pharma businesses should be doing the same.
The key goal of personalization is to increase engagement, increase the relevance of content to your end user, and to communicate in the simplest possible way about complex issues.
When it comes to engagement with medical professionals, they are bombarded by marketing materials for new products, so personalized video helps you to stand out from the crowd. The public, on the other hand, only care about pharmaceuticals when they are sick, so personalized video provides an excellent opportunity to create campaigns that raise awareness about public health issues and encourage them to take preventive measures before they get sick.
The power of personalized video has been proven in many other industries, including financial services, telecoms and insurance. Is pharmaceuticals next?
