Webinars are highly regarded by professionals within the healthcare industry. They are recognised as a place where an exchange of ideas can take place, facilitating active learning to improve clinical practice. With research indicating that at least half of doctors intend to engage with pharmaceutical companies online the majority of the time, it comes as no surprise that around 40% of doctors state that webinars are their preferred learning format.
The imperative for a unified marketing approach
The benefits of webinars are often reciprocal; HCPs can question and learn from a thought leader during a live season, whilst pharmaceutical companies can develop ‘hero content’ that can be repurposed across their omnichannel strategy with multiple touchpoints and formats.
While webinars in healthcare are a powerful vehicle for information, education and knowledge transfer, they still present some notable challenges. Given the hectic schedules of HCPs in clinical settings, live attendance is often a problem and typically results in lower-than-expected turnout. What’s more, individual learning styles vary greatly, and what suits one doctor won’t necessarily suit another. When viewed through this lens, it can seem difficult to justify the time, effort and costs involved in creating webinars, particularly when multiple agencies or suppliers are required to optimise its delivery.
So how can pharmaceutical companies harness the power and value of webinars, without the headache?
The benefits of a strategic webinar partner
Having the right strategic end-to-end partner is essential for maximising the benefits of a webinar strategy; it ensures that the entire process is fully mapped out from set-up, to live streaming, to on-demand hosting. In many cases, this knowledge and experience isn’t something pharma teams possess in-house, making outsourcing to a specialist the most cost-effective, time-efficient and strategically-sound option. A webinar partner with decades of experience collaborating with doctors can also help to identify and recruit suitable KOLs, and support them in the preparation phase to get the very best out of their delivery.
As with most content-rich outputs, the full value of a webinar is delivered long after the live event takes place and is typically achieved through the optimisation of that content across multiple formats and touchpoints. A strategic webinar partner should be able to advise and implement this optimisation with, or on behalf of, the pharma company.
Like any initiative that involves professional communities, the proof is in the results. Investing in webinars becomes a much more appealing marketing strategy when engagement is guaranteed, something that the right strategic webinar partner will be able to offer. The willingness and ability of a webinar partner to provide detailed analytics and reporting will be essential to evaluating the ROI of a webinar programme, and determining whether to integrate it into future campaign strategies.
The future of webinars
With so many HCPs stating a preference for webinars, it is a means of communication that pharma cannot ignore. With the right partner in place to assist in the creation and delivery, the benefits far outweigh the challenges. What’s more, it’s an exciting area that will continue to expand and develop in the years to come. Webinars are already evolving in the following ways to better serve the needs of both the pharma industry and the medical community:
- Interactivity – the ability to submit questions during a Q&A session is not a new concept, but now it’s possible to film ‘pseudo-live’ webinars with integrated multiple-choice and poll questions within the webinar delivery itself for live feedback, and to develop talking points in ‘real time’ for the speaker during their Q&A session. This provides a richer, more engaging user experience, whilst also providing crucial live feedback on how pharma campaign messages or topics are resonating with the audience.
- Optimisation – the days of posting a link to a webinar and hoping attendees will come is long gone. Webinars can now be optimised across multiple marketing channels, including filming teaser videos for promotional emails post-event and case study examples to allow pharma reps to follow-up with users.
- Hyper-Personalisation – webinars typically adopted a ‘catch-all’ approach whereby attendees were connected by a single topic of interest, but their personal experiences could be markedly different. A webinar partner with a deep understanding of the HCP community will be able to adapt content and deliver the information HCPs require directly to them in unique user journeys that best match their needs and learning preferences, providing a hyper-personalised experience.
Choosing the right strategic webinar partner can transform your webinar strategy from mediocre to mesmerising and help you deliver real brand value, gain essential industry insight and foster deeper, more meaningful relationships with HCPs across the globe.
M3’s webinar packages
M3 provides a full-service solution to support webinar set-up, live streaming, and post-event on-demand promotion for pharma companies developing their webinar programmes.
Through market research and experience, M3 can help to identify relevant and engaging webinar topics, whilst also supporting slide development, the creation of marketing materials for pre-event awareness, the high-quality filming of the presentation, and the editing of the videos post-production. To maximise post-event engagement, M3 will also host and drive traffic to the webinar, so that key content is accessible to HCPs who can’t make the live event.
With four different webinar packages and guaranteed engagement, pharma companies can use M3 to reach a wider audience of HCPs than ever before. Find out more
