Learnings from NEXT Pharma 2022

Our team recently returned from a very exciting week attending the NEXT Pharma conference in Dubrovnik. We found it incredibly insightful to be at the very core of the conversation around the digital journey, for both established and new pharma companies.

Hundreds of experts in digital health, pharma innovation, patient centricity and medical affairs came together and we had some amazing conversations with them. It became clear that the life science community as a whole is coming together to tackle the same challenges in the digital innovation journey.

The biggest learnings from these conversations were:

Focusing on bespoke modular content

Understanding modular content and focusing efforts towards personalised deliverables should be a priority. For instance, a great HCP summary report won't be mass-emailed to an entire attendee list - HCPs will receive snippets of the full report which are most relevant to them.

Focusing on taxonomy is pivotal to maximise value derived from all your activities - tagging content appropriately helps you organise your content, and helps your client understand your key messages. A speaker suggested using the "5 second test": would a naïve reader understand your content in 5 seconds or less? 

This is easily achieved by maximising the potential of audience segmentation. It's the best tool to allow your customers to remain engaged, and gain the most value from your communication. Contact us to develop your own modular content plan!

Speeding up the transition to digital 

The main challenge companies are facing is transformation fatigue. Most pharma teams feel that adding digital products on top of an existing, wide ranging traditional portfolio would be unmanageable. We couldn't agree more!

Duplicating efforts and materials would be extremely ineffective, and cause a loss in engagement from clients. Instead, existing products should be adapted and converted to high quality digital deliverables, segmenting your transformation plans into manageable steps.

Starting with customer facing roles is crucial as it serves multiple functions: firstly, it allows clients and prospective stakeholders to come into contact with the most cutting-edge version of your company portfolio. Secondly, a digital consumer-facing experience facilitates communication with third parties and reduces your team's workload.

It can be valuable to look at other industries who are further ahead in their digital journey. The banking industry is a clear example of how an industry as a whole was able to entirely overhaul their content plan and put their customers first. The introduction of home banking, remote appointments and online applications have revolutionised the industry and allowed banks and customers to work seamlessly.

Your company's partnerships and outreach efforts should drive the digital transformation and bring you closer to your digital objectives. At medDigital, we champion effective and strategic digital scientific communications in everything we do - it's our ethos and our specialty as a life science company. Contact us to find out how we can help!

Understanding your customer

The third but equally pivotal component of the conversation is the need to familiarise yourself with your ideal customer. Customer segmentation can help, but there's more to truly understanding the people you'll be working with.

A deceptively simple way to speak to customers is adding a chat bot on your website - quite literally asking your audience what they need. Chat bots should be built around the true needs of your customers, and provide quick solutions to their queries.

Medical affairs teams also hold a wealth of data and insights about your ideal customers. They will be able to share the most valuable insights to other teams in the company, and develop action points from these. Our Scientific Insight team at medDigital specialises in just this - they can help you discover the best insights from your KEEs, analyse them and draw out actions and learnings.

Another avenue to understanding your customer is social listening. This will allow you to gather extremely wide ranging insights from all HCPs in your target markets. Running social listening activities around conferences can be a great way to understand the key conversation topics surrounding the event, or analysing a therapy area over an extended period of time can give you an inside look into what HCPs are thinking and how their perspective evolves over time. 

Did you find this useful? Share this with your network or let us know your thoughts in the comments.

See you at NEXT Pharma 2023!