With the VBP and Two-Invoice Policy, drug and medical device prices continue to fall. Pharmaceutical companies are in dire need of cost control, and this has led to a rise in demand for cost-effective marketing tools such as precision digital marketing.
Under the influence of multiple factors such as digital marketing technology and changes in the market environment, pharmaceutical digital marketing has seen a golden growth period. According to VCBeat Research 2022 Pharmaceutical Digital Marketing Industry Research Report, “Endgame Transformation Goal – Digital Intelligence-Driven Marketing,” the pharmaceutical digital marketing market size is expected to grow further to reach RMB 111 billion and RMB 356.8 billion by 2025 and 2030, respectively. The market size of pharmaceutical digital marketing is expected to grow further to reach RMB 111 billion and RMB 356.8 billion in 2025 and 2030, respectively, with a CAGR of 33.9% from 2025 to 2030.
A large number of industry head digital marketing companies have made many attempts to better assist pharmaceutical marketing. Focusing on the four major players, namely pharmaceutical enterprises, medical representatives, doctors and patients, we can broadly classify them into three categories of marketing service providers, namely technical service type, platform service type and retail terminal type, based on the different products and services they provide. Among them, the technical service-oriented enterprises mainly help pharmaceutical enterprises to build internal management system and private domain traffic cloud platform to help pharmaceutical enterprises marketing; platform service-oriented enterprises converge huge doctor and patient resource information to help pharmaceutical enterprises to reach the target users; retail terminal-type including retail pharmacies, pharmaceutical e-commerce and other platforms, the main control of drugs into the hands of the patient terminal channels.
It is undeniable that the exploration of the head of the digital marketing service providers has brought about the improvement of the communication efficiency of pharmaceutical enterprises. And in this process, pharmaceutical enterprises have higher and higher expectations for the efficiency of digital marketing, is there any way to further realize the precision and efficiency?
At the 2023 ESF DXY Medical Eco-Partner Conference held on July 18, DXY released the pharmaceutical digital precision marketing solution, which provides a new idea: on the basis of reaching professional doctors’ target users, it aims at the doctors’ active behaviors and cognitive needs in the precise scenarios, and outputs the “information they want most at this moment! “to further realize the improvement of marketing efficiency.
The life cycle of drug promotion is shortening, and efficient marketing tools are being emphasized. According to VCBeat Research, under the background of “VBP”, the price of generic drugs has been reduced significantly, and seeking innovation has become the method chosen by some pharmaceutical companies to maintain growth, and the growth rate of the market share of innovative drugs is accelerating significantly. 2016-2021, a total of 373 innovative drug products will be listed in China. From 2016 to 2021, China will list 373 innovative drug products, of which 234, 114 and 25 will be chemical drugs, biological drugs and traditional Chinese medicines respectively. Then it follows that after a large number of innovative drugs are listed, they face a blank market, so it is very important to preempt market education.
In this context, the use of digital marketing tools by pharmaceutical companies has become normalized. In this process, digital marketing is also presenting its unique advantages: for example, the target users have a wider coverage, the platform has a stronger attraction to retain doctors and can accurately locate the target doctor users through labeling. However, some pharmaceutical companies still have higher expectations for efficiency, and expect to realize the target user’s reach in addition to improve the effectiveness of “information” communication, which needs to solve the current two problems.
First, to enhance the active willingness of target users to pay attention to “information”. In recent years, from the department, grade and other labels to locate doctors, targeted customized content output, coupled with the drug company’s offline representatives of the way to visit, indeed, to a certain extent, improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical marketing. However, communicating information in different scenarios, the degree of interest of doctors is completely different, and outputting information in scenarios where doctors have active needs is obviously more efficient than other scenarios.
The second is to shorten the time spent on reaching the target user group as much as possible. Attracting doctors through the output of academic content is certainly effective, but it is difficult to precipitate doctors’ resources by extending the “front”, for example, digital marketing projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars often take a year to organize 3-5 academic activities to reach doctors. The long process will gradually disperse or even lose physician resources, reducing marketing efficiency.
How to better solve the above pain points and improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical digital marketing has become an urgent concern for both pharmaceutical companies and platform service providers, and DXY has developed a prescription that focuses on “precise scenarios”.
“We need to find the ‘field’ in a specific group of doctors who are most interested in this matter, and then output information to them. It is not only limited to precisely focusing on a certain type of people and outputting precise content, but also focusing more precisely on people’s active demand scenarios. This is a new path that DXY has found to improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical digital marketing,” said DXY Vice President Chu Yang.
In the “2023 China Doctor Insight Report” released by DXY at the ESF conference, it is mentioned that doctors still spend 11.7 hours a day on online medical behavior in the past year. Among them, “active learning” accounted for 34% of the total time spent on online medical behaviors.
DXY’s further insights identified two precise scenarios of active physician needs. Firstly, it is the scenario of searching for medication before clinical decision-making, DXY found that daily study, medical advice in wards and outpatient prescription are the high-frequency scenarios in the use of medication manuals, and 60% of medication searches occur before doctors’ clinical prescription, of which 56% of them believe that valuable content can provide effective assistance to their prescription behavior. Second, systematic learning scenarios. Doctors’ common pain points are fragmentation, lack of depth and lack of systematic learning content when acquiring information. According to the 2023 China Doctor Insight Report, more than 90% of doctors agree with the value of systematic learning, and hope to increase the time investment in systematic learning courses in order to improve their diagnosis and treatment ability.
Adopting digital marketing measures in the core scenarios where doctors have active needs can undoubtedly improve the communication efficiency between pharmaceutical companies and doctors and achieve twice the result with half the effort. It is worth mentioning that DXY’s in-depth insight into the core needs of doctors and its ability to enhance the efficiency of pharmaceutical marketing is related to its long-term cultivation of the medical industry.
On the one hand, DXY is deeply engaged in the industry and has conducted in-depth research and analysis on the behavior of doctors’ groups, such as releasing the “China Doctors Insight Report” for 11 consecutive years. Based on the grasp of the core active needs of doctors, and then to explore the pharmaceutical digital precision marketing scenarios, it is undoubtedly more real, objective and effective.
On the other hand, DXY itself is far ahead in the industry in terms of the number of professional doctors covered. According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ 2022 National Economic and Social Development Statistics Bulletin, by the end of 2022, the number of health technicians nationwide reached 11.55 million. And the number of registered professional users of DXY has reached 900W+, accounting for about 80% of the nation’s health technicians. In addition, DXY’s ability to gain insight into the active behavioral needs of doctors in searching for clinical medication also stems from its “medication assistant app”, which has been cultivated by DXY for 11 years and has an installed base of more than 12 million. In 2022 alone, the medication assistant app provided 500 million medical data queries for 3 million healthcare professionals.
Based on this, DXY has created pharmaceutical digital precision marketing solutions, including “Clove Point”, a one-stop precision marketing solution that strengthens doctors’ “active” behavior based on their active searching scenarios, and “Learning Acceleration Camp”, a precision marketing solution for doctors’ systematic learning scenarios. Learning Acceleration Camp”. The whole set of solutions, by providing target doctors with academic content under their active demand scenarios, realizes the recognition of high-quality content and facilitates the acceleration of the process of doctors’ ‘from ignorance to knowledge to recognition’ of the products.
From the perspective of Clove Medicine Point, it is mainly oriented to the scenario of inquiring about medicines before doctors’ clinical decision-making, relying on big data to analyze doctors’ past preferences and accurately labeling doctors in the target departments, providing cases and guideline interpretations, etc., and integrating all-channel reach (online + offline, in-hospital + out-of-hospital, and in-region + out-of-region) of precisely customized content to continue to reach out to doctors with their knowledge throughout the entire cycle of medicines and to assist them with their clinical medication decisions. Clinical medication decision-making.
From the perspective of Learning Acceleration Camp, DXY has set up in-depth learning scenarios and academic socialization scenarios, screened out target groups of highly willing doctors who “hope that the content can be more focused on checking the gaps and filling the gaps in their clinical knowledge” and “exchange academic and clinical experiences with peers”, and set up a “theme-based” “socialization” program for doctors. We establish a “theme-based”, “systematized” and “companion” learning model for doctors, build efficient learning venues, plan in-depth content learning, and provide thematic activities and clinical scenarios for practical exercises within 14-30 days. Through theme-oriented activities and practical exercises in clinical scenarios, in-depth cognition is established within 14-30 days. After high-frequency contact with users, it strengthens their memories, realizes effective cognitive enhancement of a theme in a short period of time, and realizes short-term and long-term accurate contact based on accompanying experience, which helps pharmaceutical enterprises to realize “comprehensive acceleration” of marketing cycle, promotion effect, and user relationship.
They also correspond to the solution of the two major problems faced by pharmaceutical enterprises in the marketing process, namely, enhancing doctors’ willingness to pay attention to and agree with the information and shortening the reach process. In the end, DXY helps pharmaceutical companies to further improve their communication efficiency through precise marketing based on doctors’ active demand scenarios.
Deep insight into doctors’ active demand scenarios is a new path for DXY to find a way to improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical digital marketing, which has a positive value for doctors, pharmaceutical companies and the industry: first of all, for doctors, it can meet the active behavioral needs of doctors to inquire about medicines prior to clinical decision-making in a higher quality, and satisfy the active cognitive needs of doctors for systematic learning, so as to enhance the level of doctors’ own professional and technical capabilities and to benefit patients. benefit patients. Secondly, for pharmaceutical companies, marketing efficiency can be improved through precise scenarios, which can make up for doctors with strong willingness not covered by virtual or offline representatives in broad markets; and improve the communication efficiency of doctors’ cognition in core markets, thus realizing the improvement of overall marketing efficiency.
After exploring the new path, DXY did not stop. At the ESF conference, the DXY Digital Innovation Research Alliance was established. The alliance will further integrate DXY’s resource capabilities, Microsoft’s technology innovation capabilities, and the actual needs of medical academic associations of pharmaceutical companies to explore precise + intelligent marketing methods, and help eco-partners realize the digital transformation of medical education, branding, patient communication, and business development, so as to better serve the industry.