In the AI era, traditional marketing methods can no longer meet pharmaceutical companies' current needs. Companies must move toward data-driven intelligent marketing. But how should AI be implemented in marketing?
At the 12th CIAPH Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industry Digitalization Summit on March 22, 2024, MeDomino partner Guo Wenping shared a real-world case around this topic: Innovative AI Sets a New Direction for Compliant Enterprise Marketing. From MeDomino's perspective, she discussed how pharmaceutical companies can use AI to create business value.
*This article is excerpted from Ms. Guo Wenping's live speech.
Against the backdrop of anti-corruption efforts, traditional marketing can no longer continue as before. Many pharmaceutical companies are turning to compliant data-driven intelligent marketing and gradually entering the stage of collecting and integrating data.
Let me share a real case. Because one client had not accumulated and integrated data well, situations often occurred such as: "A customer (HCP) had just attended a meeting and thought it was good. Then a sales representative presented the same set of slides again, and afterward the customer received an identical post." This created a poor customer experience.
When we discussed how to build precise and compliant data-driven marketing, MeDomino's thinking was similar to the client's. It is like the 5C model we shared before (read: In the AIGC Era, What Are We Really Talking About When We Talk About Tags?): find the right person, the right channel, the right content, and the right collaboration model.
Based on this thinking, we co-created an integrated interactive product with the client: NICE, a next-generation intelligent customer experience upgrade.
It includes several major modules:
- The first module covers the various analysis reports that enterprises often create internally, such as HCP profiles and HCP engagement status.
- The second module is an intelligent platform that solves how to select the corresponding physicians and audience packages after customer data has been integrated. In other words, in the past, a touchpoint strategy provided by marketing to sales might have been only one sentence. Now we need to turn that sentence into a specific audience group.
- The third module is the content platform, which is also the foundation of AIGC. We centrally manage enterprise knowledge. Only after this foundation is built can AI effectively support content generation, intelligent content Q&A, and more.
- With these capabilities, marketing and medical teams can implement strategy: select physicians, match them with suitable content, and push it directly to frontline representatives, telling them, "This is how you should execute."
- Finally, we also provide frontline staff with a terminal, ACE, enabling integration across enterprise data, strategy, execution, and feedback.
01 No Matter How Much We Say, the First Step Is Still Data
Returning to the first step, pharmaceutical companies have a great deal of data, including master data, engagement data, meeting data, and more. But many companies only have internal data. What are competitors doing? What do physicians say when they actually face patients? What do physicians talk about at public conferences? Enterprises often do not have this external data.
Some companies even say their internal master data has never been cleaned, so the data may not even be correct. In that case, even if AI is introduced, it can only output incorrect results. This is exactly where MeDomino is strong. Since 2016, MeDomino has been building physician profiles. With a database of 4 million physicians and intelligent matching capabilities, we can help pharmaceutical companies clean master data more efficiently and build a solid foundation for AI and precision marketing. Then, on top of internal data, we provide more external profile data and combine it with enterprise internal data to understand physicians' views.
Here is a real scenario. The client's marketing department said, "We want to find physicians who are willing to try our product." Even the word "try" requires data support. Who exactly is willing to try it? They could not answer.
With this platform, the word "try" becomes a set of selectable criteria. We can quickly identify which characteristics indicate physicians who are willing to try.
02 Strategy Corresponds to Mindset. How Does Data Become Mindset?
Some pharmaceutical companies may say they can let sales representatives ask directly, use questionnaires for reps to collect information, or gather feedback after meetings.
Some companies go one step further by capturing behavioral interaction data. For example: which HCPs read our posts, how long did they stay, did they participate in our meetings, how many times did they participate, and what key messages were discussed in those meetings? These behavioral data points can be used to infer the stage of physicians' mindsets.
As mentioned earlier, the external data provided by MeDomino can reveal physicians' mindsets. This is not meant to replace internal data, but to complement it, because internal data may not always be truly objective.
For example, a physician may tell a sales representative that they strongly recognize the product, but when facing patients in practice, they may recommend a competitor's product. With external data as a supplement, we can understand whether different physicians show different mindsets in different situations and scenarios, and then analyze which stage of the mindset ladder they are in. Even across a timeline, we can see which physicians moved from unawareness to advanced understanding and ultimately reached a certain mindset state. All mindset judgments are supported by data.
Going one step further, we may know the mindsets of some physicians but not all physicians. That is fine. We can use physicians' external collaboration network data. We only need to identify important physician nodes in the network and use their circles, allowing key physicians to help transmit product effects and drive mindset advancement within the circle.
03 The Arsenal of Digital Intelligent Marketing: The Content Center
We have been discussing data, but another line of digital intelligent marketing is content.
In a project with another leading multinational pharmaceutical company, they brought everyone across the company into the content management platform, including procurement, external creative vendors, internal marketing teams, and frontline staff. Multiple departments collaborate on the platform to achieve integrated content retrieval, content generation, and content approval.
Content retrieval has a major prerequisite: tagging. Whether your content is a poster, a video, or an article with images and text, MeDomino's platform can automatically apply content tags and also support intelligent Q&A and key information extraction, which I have shared before.
Content generation brings us to today's highly discussed AIGC. For the pharmaceutical industry, medical content generated purely by AI is still far from ready for direct use. The AIGC we provide uses AI to assist pharmaceutical companies in efficiently reusing content intelligently.
For example, suppose we need to create content interpretations for the latest literature. We can first retrieve the required papers, then use the platform's AIGC capability to generate a PPT with one click. Incidentally, the platform can also intelligently adapt to enterprise PPT templates, making it very user-friendly. Because an AI-generated PPT still cannot be used directly, professional medical colleagues then need to optimize it and adjust it to be fuller and more professional. This entire process happens directly inside the platform.
Finally comes content approval. Because compliance supervision for pharmaceutical content is very strict, regular approval processes are often complex and time-consuming. Now that we have this integrated content platform, approval has also become intelligent.
For the literature-interpretation PPT just mentioned, reviewers can quickly obtain information from the platform: "Page 6 reuses approved content, page 8 is newly added, and pages 2 to 5 cite XX literature." This directly accelerates the content approval process.
04 The End Point of AI Is Business Value
The final step is what we call integrated precision marketing and strategy execution. We classify physicians into different mindset levels and tag content accordingly. Is that already precision marketing? Not entirely. We still need to use AI technology on a unified platform for rule matching and LLM orchestration.
This brings us back to the opening case. Once integrated strategy execution is implemented, sales staff can directly see on their terminal: "Because Dr. A read a certain post one week ago, XX content should be pushed to them tomorrow," or "Dr. B does not like long image-text articles and prefers academic content," and so on.
As for the business value everyone cares about, after this project was implemented, the client achieved a major improvement: Previously, the open rate for content pushed by sales representatives to physicians was basically between 2% and 3%. After the platform went live and was put into use, the content open rate jumped directly to around 40%.
Looking back now, we would say that AI is only a tool. The ultimate goal is still to achieve data-driven intelligent marketing. What MeDomino is doing is maximizing the use of AI to help pharmaceutical companies create business value and build compliant, precise, data-driven marketing.
Many pharmaceutical companies are already implementing this step by step. Are you ready to AI together? Contact us.
