In the running

Digital technologies and their importance in marketing strategies are advancing exponentially. At the same time HCP behaviours have become more complex and thus it is vital to apply a simple framework that can be applied at the marketing planning stage.

Developing a coherent impactful digital marketing strategy can be greatly improved by using quality frameworks to pull all the divergent elements together and work within your therapy area. This is especially important in large pharma companies where departments are often spread across a wide geographic regions and stakeholders.

In this series of articles, we will examine key marketing frameworks starting with the RACE framework, which can enable marketing and commercial teams to improve the planning process.

RACE – created by Smart Insights – consists of four steps: advancing awareness, encouraging your prospects to interact, agreeing a conversion metric and a long-term post purchase engagement, which optimises the repeat engagement.

Stages of the RACE

1. Reach represents the awareness stage of your branding campaign, often managed by medical affairs focusing activities that will drive reach and advance awareness to your target audience online and relevant traffic to your various website portals such as websites or microsites.
   
   Preparation should begin much earlier in the development process by incorporating market access perspectives, engaging a wider set of industry stakeholders and involving deeper cross-functional collaboration.
   
   
2. Next in the process is the ACT stage. This is where marketing planners need to encourage HCPs to interact with you or take an agreed action through one of touchpoints.
   
   We can apply measurement tool such as Google Analytics to measure the ACT stage and give us better understanding of which of the touchpoints our target audience is responding to most effectively.
   
   ACT represents the first pivotal stage of engagement before moving them to some longer-term conversation such as downloading some research or signing up to a webinar.
   
   
3. All our efforts need to result in a conversion. In thinking through the digital conversion play, planners need to consider factors such as treatment context, priority stakeholders, how stakeholders make decisions about using the product, how digital impacts this conversion, the most appropriate access options and the trade-offs that come with them.
   
   This signals the final goal in your conversion funnel and recognises the online contribution to the final commercial purchase.
   
   
4. The last stage of the RACE framework is planning a longer-term retention and engagement strategy, an often overlooked and undervalued area of pharma marketing strategy. This is the point in your planning cycle where you allocate resources to develop a long-term relationship with buyers to enable repeat business and long-term customer loyalty.
   
   We can support this stage by using customer satisfaction surveys to tell us how much our product or service is meeting or exceeding the customer’s expectation, so capturing this metric in our analytics is essential. 

David Reilly is founder of Let’s Learn Digital. Go to letslearndigital.com