OREANDA-NEWS. October 11, 2016. “The implementation of digital technologies will have a great impact on the way pharma marketers engage with both patients and healthcare professionals,” writes PharmaVOICE. “The impact will be in terms of amplified time and efficiency, much better sales and marketing alignment, the ability to customize by audience, and of course deep, directional analytics.”

According to Bryan Hill, marketing automation platforms such as Marketo easily plug in to digital assets like websites to enable dynamic content experiences as well as connect to CRM systems, eliminating manual processes to publish content and consolidate data. In terms of accelerating transformation, provisioning cloud environments and services through intuitive user interfaces significantly reduces the complexity of initiating or scaling services as well as the time required to implement new campaigns, he says.

“Powered by the cloud, ecosystems, and open standards, the marketing technology stack being assembled today is enabling a new level of efficiency and innovation for the pharma marketer within the business as well as with external customers,” Hill says.

Automation and the broader digital spectrum should enable a meaningful experience at every touchpoint — one that both provides value to the customer as well as informs the next message or action from the brand, Hill says. However, there is also a risk that these technologies could provide a robo-experience that delivers more of a scripted monologue vs. a dialogue and is unable to adapt to changing customer preference, behavior, or situation.

The key to maximizing this connected technology backbone for pharma is to engage patients and healthcare professionals within their digital flow. “Connecting with patients or HCPs in this manner means doing so on their terms within their real-world digital environment,” Hill says. “For example, does the content on a consumer website adapt to a user’s search behavior or website navigation patterns to suggest relevant content and resources, similar to an Amazon.com experience? At the end of the day, well executed digital programs delivered in a familiar and timely manner enable a valued exchange with customers rather than noise and frustrating interruptions.”

Due to a shortage of qualified candidates in the workforce, another difficult issue is hiring the correct talent or finding qualified partners to handle new responsibilities from the digital transformation. Hill notes that recent job postings for Adobe talent, for example, showed more than 5,000 open positions.

“A key challenge for businesses is accessing the skills to not only manage the technology, but also understand the complexities of these platforms well enough to design programs that best leverage the capabilities to deliver on a campaign mission,” Hill says. “From consult to approval loops, businesses may need to rethink tools and procedures used to manage these processes as well as perhaps resetting the bar for risk tolerance in an environment wrought with inherent variability.”