3 Life Sciences Marketing Trends for 2022

• Blog post summary

  • Life Science companies can realize cross-channel engagements by implementing digital lead generation tactics.

  • Personalized engagement is what HCPs desire. Collect data across the customer journey, and set up sophisticated, customer-centric tools.

  • Going omnichannel requires a shift in the mindset and technology. From siloed responsibilities and limited collaboration to an ‘all hands on deck’ approach.

If you’re a healthcare provider (HCP), you’re probably familiar with the scenario where your local sales rep comes to visit you to present you with a new or improved product to help solve the needs of your patients.

For decades, companies in the Life Sciences industry have promoted their brands and products using a few simple tools and channels:

KOL programs, trade shows, and impressive research studies.

And last but not least: Their trained sales force driving across the country to conduct F2F meetings.

These were – and still are – all great marketing tactics.

The problem?

All very traditional methods of marketing that work like crop dusting, spreading the same message across a large audience.

Sure, they may have worked in the past, maybe even for you. But today, they are unnecessarily expensive, and they may not work as effectively as they used to.

Why? Like most other buyers, HCPs and nurses increasingly do their own research to solve their needs online before they talk to a sales rep.

To understand how much digital marketing is growing, McKinsey conducted a study that showed the change in budget allocation from traditional to digital channels across a selection of MedTech companies.

Just five years ago, most of these industry players spent no more than 20% of their marketing budget on digital marketing.

By 2020, more than 70% of the companies surveyed had shifted more funding to digital marketing.

Most medtech companies are dedicating more of their budgets to digital marketing

So just very recently, Life Science companies started realizing the need for using digital channels as a key way of engaging with their audiences in combination with more traditional tactics.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. Fairs and events shut down world wide. Opportunities for face-to-face meetings with HCPs completely shattered.

As in all other industries, everyone across the Life Science industries had to face reality and move out of the meeting rooms into the Zoom room.

All of a sudden, digital marketing and sales is no longer a nice to have but a need to have.

Only companies that can master such rapid transformation of internal processes and deploy completely new technology, content and tools in record time to engage HCPs in such new reality has a real opportunity to realize competitive advantages.

Undergoing such big and fundamental changes to the traditional way of doing business not just comes with opportunities and benefits. Rapid changes often make companies prone to risk and failure.

Getting it right, and getting it right the first time, is critical.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the trends predicted for the Life Science industry and explore how companies can use different tools to manage risk and reap opportunities:

• Life Science industry trends and tools to use

  • From face-to-face meetings to virtual selling and lead generation

  • From one-size-fits-all messaging to personalized HCP experiences

  • From an increase in digital spending to omnichannel success

Focused lead generation and virtual selling

The increase in digital use means many Life Science companies have ramped up their digital marketing capabilities to serve their audiences.

Hiring specialists to handle search engine optimization and adopt digital marketing and CRM tools.

Through digital channels, Life Science companies gain a better understanding of what drives interest and the ability to serve educational and relevant content at the right time. To nurture interest over time and turn prospects into sales-qualified leads.

Targeted social media campaigns, content-driven landing pages, and email follow-ups have become crucial for bringing marketing and sales closer together and improving outcomes.

Beyond supporting engagement with their direct target audience, digital channels are also a key enabler for direct-to-consumer (D2C) communications in the Life Sciences industry. Previously, these companies relied on HCPs to promote and prescribe their products.

Instead, D2C encourages consumers to educate themselves on their condition and possible solutions to discuss with their nurses or HCPs. That way, it creates a pull effect from the patient back to you.

This not only drives up the number of potential new customers, but it also increases buying power as you create a product preference in the market.

With digital channels, Life Science companies can drive targeted lead generation campaigns, but they are also key in increasing engagement in sales meetings.

Virtual meetings are great for showcasing features or personalized online app experiences. And beyond driving engagement, it also frees up costs and time spent driving from door to door.

The benefits from implementing digital lead generation tactics are vast, and we foresee many more Life Science companies joining the journey.

But pursuing a lead generation strategy is not done with just a snap of your fingers. To capture the interest of your audience and continuously serve them with relevant information to drive consideration, content is king.

Often, you’ll need a mix of assets including research papers, testimonials, infographics, videos and product demonstrations.

Creating, curating and distributing a wide range of different assets is tricky, especially in a highly regulated industry. Teams will have to manage the production of more – and more complex – assets which is likely to decrease overall productivity.

Without the proper technology for managing assets, you are prone to see operational costs skyrocketing as productivity goes down.

In fact, creating and managing content accounts for the second-highest area of marketing spend, according to Gartner. So creating, managing and distributing personalized and rich content at scale is one of the most pressing challenges for marketers today.

Beyond wasted investments and decreased productivity, a broken content engine may also result in longer time-to-market and risk of violating regulations across markets.

Enter: a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform to control and manage all processes around the content supply chain.

With Digizuite’s Digital Asset Management solution, you can govern the entire content lifecycle – from production and approval to distribution and reuse.

Such features decrease the need for costly reviewing processes going back and forth in the organization. It also elimates the need for creating duplicate content to improve overall efficiency and productivity of your team.

Lead generation is definitely growing within the Life Science industry, and there’s many great opportunities to take advantage of.

When planning your lead generation strategy, remember to also have the right technology in place to truly activate your efforts and maximize impact.

Customer-centric, personalized messaging for increased customer lifetime value

As Life Science companies increasingly go digital, it means that more, richer data is collected, providing transparency into the behavior and needs of their audiences. 

Such data and analytics can help increase the coherence across channels and messages to increase the relevance of the content offered.

Think of a puzzle.

It can be difficult to convey the entire picture in short, snackable messages, as is known as best practice across most social media platforms.

So you serve your messages piece by piece.

By understanding exactly what piece captures the interest of the audience, you can better serve the next, most relevant piece until the audience have understood all the different components of your message and is ready to convert.

Beyond enabling channel and message alignment and increased relevancy, analytics supports collaboration across marketing and sales as well as increase customer satisfaction.

“According to McKinsey’s insights, some MedTech companies have already started building integrated data pipelines and dashboards to help sales reps segment and focus on each account to inform how and when to engage the HCP to meet their needs.”

Most often, sales reps have limited time at their hands. Expecting them to follow up on everything can lead to missed opportunities for closing deals.

Instead, analytics helps inform and execute campaigns targeting different customers based on previous behavior and purchases. This could include other product solutions to complement their current purchases and create more value for the HCP or their patients.

According to Big Buzz Inc., proper tracking across the customer journey may also increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value.

The reason being that analytics may show if a customer is unhappy, enabling the sales force to reach out more proactively than any human ever could.

Therefore, insights into asset performance is critical to your decision-making process. Knowing exactly what resonates and what doesn’t is key to continuously optimizing performance across campaigns and programs.

Managing and distributing content from a single source of truth is therefore a crucial element when taking a customer-centric approach.

This way, all data is stored in a single place providing you with the insights you need to make qualified decisions.

Without it, your investments are made blindfolded and the process of learning and improving content is broken leading to suboptimal go-to-market impact.

Instead, investing in proper tools and technology such as a DAM can help you optimize your investments while increasing customer lifetime value.

As more Life Science companies start collecting data and analytics across the content and customer journey, we foresee more sophisticated, customer-centric tools being established across sales and marketing functions to drive personalized customer engagement.

Omnichannel campaigns executed with faster time-to-market

Companies acoss the Life Science industry have already begun adding digital channels to its marketing strategies.

And we’re seeing more and more companies starting to launch omnichannel campaigns as well.

To complement their sales and marketing tactics, companies have started focusing on paid search activities, launching new social media campaigns, and optimizing content across the website.

As trade shows shut down due to the pandemic, companies started hosted webinars to promote new products – using digital-first content.

Not only was it less expensive, it is also much faster to arrange and execute and could be a crucial tactic to include for product launches in the future.

By using a coordinated, omnichannel approach to marketing campaigns, MedTech companies can engage HCPs at the right time with the right message in a suitable format.

Through digital, timely messaging, companies can broadcast their messages faster to increase overall competitiveness. 

With the changed go-to-market strategy, including more channels, messages, and tactics, Life Science companies are predicted to embrace an omnichannel approach to engage with HCPs and consumers.

This means executing content across a mix of coordinated online and offline channels.

To succeed with this change requires a significant shift in the mindset across organizations.

According to Accenture, it requires a transformation from siloed responsibilities and limited cross-functional collaboration to an ‘all hands on deck’ approach.

Executing content across many channels is difficult, especially in regulated industries, and only a team effort will lead to success.

To empower your team for omnichannel success, transparency into the content life cycle of all organizational assets is a must-have.

With a proper DAM, you are always in control of where and when digital assets are used, and you can even replace, withdraw or expire assets once they’ve served their purpose.

So how do you address the trends predicted for MedTech marketing in 2022?

Suppose you are part of a marketing or sales team in a Life Science company, and you have a good idea of the core needs of your audience.

In that case, you are ready to take the step for addressing some of the key trends predicted for your industry in the coming year.

But what do you need to consider to get started?

Taking on a customer-centric, data-driven omnichannel activation is not easy.

In most cases, it requires a transformation of existing marketing and sales functions to build the muscle needed to empower different channels.

Marketing teams will need to develop high-quality content that tells a story and guides customers on a journey to bring in high-quality leads.

Amid such a regulated industry, this may involve lengthy processes involving industry codes and local regulations.

To drive competitiveness, it becomes critical for life science organizations to execute marketing content and campaigns from the get-go and distribute it without delays.

To get started, follow the below advice to ensure you set yourself up for success:

1. Pilot first – then scale: As the great advice from Accenture reads, before going live with a huge global omnichannel program, consider piloting your activities in a limited number of markets. Ensure you can collect data from your efforts and use it to scale while building capabilities from a team, technology, and business perspective.

2. Ensure organizational buy-in and commitment: Realizing optimal results and outcomes from extensive efforts is difficult without ensuring organizational buy-in and proper governance.

3. Ensure the right technology stack to improve transparency and governance: Ensuring that content for all channels is up-to-date is critical when pursuing an omnichannel program. Proper technologies should be in place to ensure everything is monitored and validated as content is developed.

When embarking on an omnichannel journey, there is loads of software and solutions which can help you across different dimensions. It might seem a little overwhelming at first, so try to establish the right foundation and build from there.

At KeyShot, we believe that of the first things to get in place is a central repository to create, manage and distribute all your content such as a DAM.

Digital Asset Management solutions tend to be overlooked as the MarTech stack is being built, but that’s a huge mistake. Ensuring proper content review and approval processes is invaluable in an industry where false claims, off-labeling marketing, and recalls impact your company’s reputation.

That’s why Digizuite’s DAM solution is trusted by life science companies across the globe.

An effective DAM solution allows you to use, manage and repurpose content across channels, improving efficiency and productivity.

Assets are shared amongst teams globally, empowering you to get ready for a global omnichannel program.

Want to get specific?

Learn how Lonza, the international provider of integrated healthcare solutions, achieves sales targets and empowers marketers with the Digizuite DAM.

As you suit up for 2022, get ready to take your Life Science marketing efforts to the next level.

Hopefully, following the advice outlined in the post will get you part of the way.

Suppose you are still eager to learn more.

In that case, you can contact us today or check out our on-demand webinar and learn how organizations in the life sciences industry manage all forms of marketing content in a regulated industry.