In the competitive pharma market, product quality and price are not the only decisive factors for healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients. The experiences they have with a company oftentimes carry the same weight. With the rise of technology and increased access to content, customers crave more personalized, real-time, and engaging connections.

71% of customers expect businesses to offer personalized experiences, while a staggering 76% are annoyed when they are handed generic content.

McKinsey and Company

Having said that, intelligent marketing is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity for modern pharmaceutical businesses. When implemented effectively, it enables companies to win the competition by acquiring new customers more easily while improving retention and loyalty.

Is hyper-personalization a real benefit or just a buzzword?

Before we start delving into the benefits of having hyper-personalization in place, let’s draw a clear line between this approach and personalization. While personalization leverages data to target the entire customer segment, hyper-personalization takes it a notch further. It uses AI algorithms to generate highly customized experiences aligned with each customer’s needs, behaviors, and preferences.

Today, people don’t simply prefer having personalized services, they demand it.

Nearly half of customers are less likely to deal with a business after having impersonalized experience at least once.

Twilio Segment

So, why does the need for hyper-personalization rise exponentially? Here are some major benefits:

• Improved customer engagement – With hyper-personalization, life sciences (LS) companies can produce more engaging and relevant experiences for each customer, empowering a deeper connection with a business. When an HCP finds content, messaging, or services tailored to their unique needs and interests, they feel greater affection for a brand and tend to return for further collaboration.
• Increased customer satisfaction – Most customers report higher satisfaction after receiving hyper-personalized services. According to the Deloitte report, a whopping 90% of customers find this approach appealing, and there’s a good reason for it. With hyper-personalization, they do not have to waste their precious time scrolling through pages to find what they need. Pharma companies using intelligent marketing can easily recognize what customers are looking for and offer the right service at the right time.
• Higher conversion rates – By offering content based on HCP’s current needs, hyper-personalization can boost conversion rates and promote bigger sales. Customers are more likely to cooperate with a LS company if presented with a solution to their unique challenges or biggest pain points. The Accenture survey suggests that 90% of customers prioritize companies that offer personalized experiences. Hyper-personalization helps to create a sense of value, making customers more willing to hand over their hard-earned money on the brand’s services.
• Enhanced customer loyalty – Customer loyalty is not about making recurring purchases. It’s about customers establishing a strong emotional bond with a brand and choosing it over competitors. Even when prices are stubbornly rising and convenience factors are getting in the way, loyal customers are steadfast in their commitment to their favorite brand. AI-enabled hyper-personalization assists pharma companies in delivering engaging and highly personalized experience, which is too attractive to let go. It shows HCPs and patients that they are valued and understood, encouraging customer loyalty and long-term cooperation.

How do pharma brands use intelligent marketing to win competition?

Leading pharmaceutical companies are trying to stand apart from their competitors by customizing their digital content and crafting marketing strategies to meet the needs of customers in their environment. Let’s see how they are approaching it.

Delivering personalized content

Today’s LS companies are no strangers to using AI algorithms to adapt their educational materials, marketing messages, or clinical trial information to a specific audience. This technology provides a means to better understand how HCPs and patients feel. What needs are they looking to meet? What are their biggest emotional triggers? Just imagine sending hyper-personalized emails that make each potential customer feel like a company is speaking directly to them, offering content that solves their unique problems. With the AI’s capacity to process massive amounts of data, pharma brands can generate useful, engaging, and compelling content at scale, driving increased sales and boosting customer loyalty.

To achieve this level of content personalization, a company will either need to invest in custom development or make use of platforms offered by third-party marketing services providers. If a pharma brand needs to have more control over features and data management, investing in web or mobile app development can be a smart move. In case a company is not ready to pour substantial resources into development, it can turn to a competent MarTech agency to produce highly personalized content, which would resonate with the target audience.

Targeting customers in their environment

Pharmaceutical brands use AI to tailor their messaging to the customer’s current environment. To put it simply, businesses consider factors such as the customer’s time of day or location when creating their digital content. This strategy ensures that pharma companies reach their customers at times when they are receptive to their messages. It’s about delivering hyper-personalized customer experience, rather than just pushing out messages on LinkedIn at 12 p.m. when HCP are unlikely to read them anyway.

Many pharma brands shifted their focus from face-to-face visits to the omnichannel approach to better target providers and patients. The beauty of this approach is that it puts a customer at the center of attention, not a service or a product. People want to decide how they want to consume their content and pharma companies should recognize this need to succeed.

AI-enabled hyper-personalization helps generate platform-centric content and reach customers based on the devices and platforms they use when receiving messages. AI coupled with the omnichannel approach, allows LS companies to see what their customers are doing in real-time and determine optimal digital channel mix, send-time, frequency, key performance indicators (KPIs), and similar.

Furthermore, having real-time data lets these businesses quickly respond to marketing campaigns that are not working only after several days instead of months. So, they can timely pump their resources into the channels that are driving them towards business goals.

As an illustration, one of our clients, a pharmaceutical enterprise from Spain, approached us for assistance in boosting cardiologists’ subscriptions to their revamped website. We helped them develop a customer journey and create captivating hyper-personalized content for HCPs. By using AI, we identified that email and SMS were the most effective channels to reach cardiologists and pique their interest in the website’s new section. The outcomes were astounding – within just one month, the company witnessed 196 new registrations, a threefold rise compared to the pre-hyper-personalization period.

Putting the pieces together

With intelligent marketing, pharmaceutical companies can create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with customers right where they are. We must admit that AI-driven hyper-personalization is the key to distinguishing LS brands and delivering genuine value to both HCPs and their patients. By using compelling content and effective methods to reach the target audience, marketers can transform the pharma industry from a commercial attitude to a more value-driven mindset.