NON PERSONAL PROMOTION

First of all, let us define what promotional activities are:

"Promotional activities aim to promote information exchange between professionals and interactions to acquire or provide scientific information".

These, in their frontal, person-to-person (PtoP) sense, have been the bastion of pharmaceutical companies until a few years ago. 

What has changed? Everything.

If the digital evolution (which was already making its way) or the ever-shrinking time of the doctor at the pharmaceutical representative's disposal had not been enough, the COVID-19 pandemic delivered the coup de grace: thousands of medical representatives found themselves at home, unable to do their job "face to face" with the doctor. 

So, even for companies that had not yet embraced digital marketing, there is a need to find new approaches to maintaining relationships with healthcare professionals. 

Non-personal promotion (NPP) is based on just that: offering new promotional strategies for doctors, no longer with PtoP information, but with email and other digital marketing channels cleverly combined with print products. 

Not personal does not mean impersonal

One of the most popular misconceptions when it comes to non-personal promotion is to confuse that "non-personal" with "impersonal", and consequently with a frosty and ineffective approach to that single activity.

It is exactly the opposite. Non-personal simply means 'not in person'.

What would be the point of emailing every known doctor about an anti-hypertensive drug? What would the paediatrician or the ENT doctor do with it? 

Personalisation remains one of the cornerstones of the marketing strategy, even in this case. 

"Limited resources and the complexity of the market are forcing increasingly targeted, brief and qualified communications which will prevent pharmaceutical information from being as generalised as before. The selection of the doctor, therefore, becomes the new priority. And above all, the choice of the channel through which the doctor wants information is the new priority. The doctor today no longer wants to be "one of many" but wants communication targeted at his needs."

Content is the key to success.

Doctors are increasingly busy, inundated with calls, WhatsApp messages and visits, so capturing their attention is essential. Not only with short messages but above all with tailored, intriguing, engaging content. 

Want to improve your business? No more visual aids for their own sake. Let's evolve and head towards multichannel pharma marketing.

What if personalisation was not just about the newsletter? What if it also involved a journal that arrived straight in the letterbox to be read comfortably, without a computer or without scheduling a phone appointment? If the doctor were free to choose this option as well, in addition to the purely digital one, could this be a plus point for the product?

The costs of a frontal pharmaceutical sales representative campaign are high, especially if the area to be covered by the ISF is very large. The PLR cuts these costs by reducing the number of visits per week. This is good for the doctor's schedule, who can optimise his day in the office and decide when to devote himself to this activity, and for the company's costs. Thus,

"Less cost for the company and a greater result in terms of the doctor's response, simply by implementing a dynamic reorientation based on the response to the stimuli proposed"

Data are both process data - such as activities performed - and outcome data - such as dwell time - and need to be correlated.

How can we detect the effectiveness of the NPP strategy when it invests in e-detailing, web-marketing, print formats, etc.? How to put together a large amount of data? How to be effective in pharmaceutical marketing?

Engaging the physician is the real KPI (key performance indicators) of the web initiative: how many readers, how much material, how many returns on the same area, how much stay (in terms of minutes) in the sponsored area, interactions, call to action, subscriptions, etc. These indicators are certainly more important than the number of pages read, which is perhaps the least significant parameter.

Non-personal promotion can be an excellent ally of your pharmaceutical company, together with front and remote pharmaceutical sales rep. In simple terms?  Multichannel Pharma Marketing in Italy.