Omnichannel marketing is a strategic approach to reaching your target audience that ensures seamless and consistent communication with customers, regardless of the channel or device used.
Making the most of an omnichannel strategy not only improves your visibility and establishes your authority, it can serve as a catalyst for major business growth when done well.
In this article, we’ll cover how to implement a successful omnichannel marketing to expand your client base.
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An omnichannel marketing plan uses multiple channels to help you increase your reach. This makes the customer experience as seamless and personalized as possible.
An Overview of Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is a way to solve the challenge of reaching prospective clients across multiple meaning channels, instead of focusing on a select few.
Unlike other forms of marketing marketing, which focus on a single channel or don’t have a cohesive approach across channels, omnichannel marketing presents an integrated approach that uses a cohesive strategy to present information, educate your audience, and nurture conversions.
This approach helps unify your messaging, tone, and engagement while tailoring to the specific needs of your audience throughout their purchasing path.
Omnichannel marketing can play a pivotal role for businesses that serve pharma companies by engaging your audience and positioning your business as a vital ally in enhancing their outreach.
Keep reading to learn more about how to create and implement a successful omnichannel strategy.
Implementing an Effective Omnichannel Marketing Plan
From creating content that aligns with the specific interests of key decision-makers to employing best practices around message consistency across platforms, every step of an omnichannel marketing plan must be executed with precision and care.
This section will guide you through the process of building and implementing a strategy that meets the needs of your audience, driving engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, success in your marketing endeavors.
Understanding Your Audience
To effectively engage with your audience, especially when selling services to pharma companies, a profound understanding of who they are is essential.
This means diving deep into their interests, pain points, preferred channels of communication, and the types of resources that will be most beneficial to them. These insights are crucial for developing a nuanced omnichannel strategy that resonates with this specialized audience.
The stakeholders you need to reach at pharmaceutical companies are accustomed to navigating a complex landscape characterized by stringent regulations, high stakes in innovation and product development, and an ever-present need for operational efficiency.
They are on the lookout for solutions that can streamline processes, ensure compliance, and foster innovation. Your marketing strategy should address these specific needs and challenges.
One way to address those needs is to build ideal buyer personas. Understanding the characteristics, desires, and proclivities of your ideal client makes it easier to develop content that will be effective in reaching them.
For example, a Vice President of Business Development may be interested in improving business systems, identifying mergers and acquisitions, or developing strategy partnerships to access new technologies.
A Head of New Product Management is more likely to care about research and development innovation, commercialization strategies, and operational sustainability.
Each of these stakeholders may need to approve new business arrangements but will likely need different content types and topics that engages and educates them.
One way to do that is to create content clusters that are mapped to each persona and published on channels they’re likely to frequent.
By delivering content that resonates on platforms your persona visits, you empower your brand to reach the right person with the right message.
Personalizing Your Content
According to Forbes, 71% of customers today expect personalization, and 76% feel frustrated when they don’t get it in a business.
Once you’ve segmented your audience into different buyer personas, you can begin developing personalized content for them. This strategy is so powerful that HubSpot cites an average 20% increase in sales when brands deploy personalized web content.
But, how can you harness personalization to reach your prospective clients?
The first step is to analyze any existing data you have around your current clients’ behaviors and preferences.
Was any specific asset or content instrumental in reaching them? How do they interact with your website, email, and social content?
Understanding how you’ve effectively used content to acquire clients in the past makes it easier to recreate the process and outcome today.
Another way to inform your personalization efforts is to research what your competitors are doing. These may be businesses that offer services similar to yours in the same industry or companies that target the same stakeholders in adjacent industries.
Exploring their website content, especially articles, white papers, case studies, and resources, will give you an idea of what their differentiators and value proposition are. Social media posts and emails your competition develops are also important to look into since these are easy to segment by target persona.
Here are some questions to consider when evaluating your competitors’ content:
What topics are they covering that you are not?
How are they personalizing content? Is it clear what content is tailored to what persona?
Which channels are they most effectively using? How effective are your efforts in comparison?
What types of content are they producing? What types of content are you not producing that you should?
How are they integrating their content across channels?
What gaps can you identify in their content strategy? How can you fill those gaps?
How frequently are they publishing and updating their content?
What calls-to-action (CTA) are they using? How can you update your CTAs accordingly?
These questions can help you dissect your competition's content strategy and uncover insights that can refine your own approach to engaging prospective pharma clients effectively.
Developing a Cohesive Plan Across Channels
Developing a cohesive plan for publishing content across channels provides a holistic and integrated approach to engaging with your customers.
According to Forbes, customers expect a seamless experience when they engage with brands through different channels and devices.
Below are the steps to follow when creating a cohesive, omnichannel marketing plan.
Step 1: Develop Core Topics
The foundation of an effective omnichannel strategy is understanding your audience deeply and developing core topics that resonate with them.
By conducting thorough customer research, both around your existing customer base and how your competitors are reaching their customers, you can identify the channels your customers use most, their preferences, and expectations.
These insights allow you to identify what topics are most likely to engage your audience, offer them value, and move them closer toward taking meaningful action.
Step 2: Create Seed Content
Use the topics you’ve identified to guide your content creation efforts. Break down big topics into smaller subtopics that you can write or talk about with ease.
Once you’ve determined your topics and subtopics, create one core piece of longform content that delves into all the elements of the subtopic you can think of. The goal is to provide a comprehensive resource to help your prospective audience with strategies, objections, challenges, and insights.
Often long-form content will take the shape of an in-depth article, video training, research, or white paper/ebook. Develop the content using the medium that’s easiest for you and your team.
Investing the time to create longform material, which we call seed content, makes it easier to break into smaller pieces that can be used across multiple channels and media types.
Step 3: Repurpose Seed Content across Channels
Once you’ve developed seed content, you’ll benefit from a robust strategy for repurposing it across channels and media types.
Long-form website content is well-suited for a variety of uses.
For starters, you can turn a white paper, ebook, study, or other data-driven piece into other forms of website content like blog posts, news stories, and expert interviews.
You can also turn existing written material into one or more emails to engage your list and stay top-of-mind. Newsletters, roundups, and general updates are all types of emails you can more easily build once you’ve got seed content.
Text-based social media platforms like LinkedIn and X are both solid choices for further repurposing seed content. On LinkedIn, you can create several articles, posts, opinions, and visual guides from one long-form piece of seed content.
X allows you to create dozens of short-form tweets each covering a micro-angle from your seed content. You can devote a single tweet to a challenge you uncover, an insight you develop, or a solution you’re offering.
Video and audio content can also be easier to create from seed content since you’ve already identified the main points. You can use a separate video covering the challenges, solutions, innovations, and insights you developed, resulting in four or more videos per piece seed content.
Audio is relatively straightforward to record as well when you’ve fleshed out the bullet points you want to explain.
The bottom line is that by investing the time and resources into developing long-form content, you can expand your reach exponentially much easier by repurposing across channels.
Step 4: Analyze Results to Improve Ongoing Efforts
The last step in deploying a cohesive content strategy across channels is to track and analyze your efforts.
It’s critical to know common website metrics for each page or post you publish, including:
Clicks
Time spent on your webpage
Pages visited per session
Bounce rate
Conversions
Metrics for email include open and click-through rates, enabling you a view into what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t.
On social media, you’re looking for likes, shares, and comments as the primary forms of engagements. Of course, direct messages are also critical and can give you an idea of how well your content serves its ultimate purpose of driving conversions.
Regularly checking your metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not will allow you not only to refine your efforts over time, but to connect with your audience in new and deeper ways.
Facilitating Effective Omnichannel Marketing
Done right, omnichannel marketing can be an effective way to reach prospective clients across channels. Generating multiple touchpoints with engaging, personalized content not only establishes you an authority, but delivers the experience your audience craves.
The key to unlocking the benefits of omnichannel marketing is the quality of the content you publish and how well it’s tailored to your target audience.
Not sure where to begin?
We’ve helped other brands that serve pharma companies develop and implement the right marketing plan for their needs. We’re ready to do the same for you!
Contact us today to explore how omnichannel marketing can boost your success.