Hot property

The continuing growth of online marketing is a welcome ray of sunshine in today's bleak economic climate. But although pharma companies continue to shift budgets online, many are now struggling to find experienced digital marketers to drive these new marketing campaigns.

Because of the requirement to combine marketing with specialist industry and regulatory knowledge, traditionally there has been only a small, clearly defined, pool of talent from which the pharma industry has been able to draw its marketers. The small size of this talent pool means that, for pharma, the digital shortage is even more acute than in other sectors and the lack of digital skills among traditional marketers is now beginning to have an adverse impact on sales figures and future growth.

The digital drought
As far back as three years ago, people had already identified the shortage of digital skills as a barrier to business growth: some 57 per cent of respondents to a 2007 survey conducted by ABI Research reported that the digital skills shortage impeded the growth of their business. Even today, the industry remains heavily reliant on digital and PR agencies rather than using in-house expertise to implement the digital elements of their marketing campaigns.

This situation demonstrates how dramatically industry capabilities are lagging behind real world needs.The problem is exacerbated because consumers are now more advanced, in terms of their online behaviour, than can be catered for by advertisers. The pace of change and consumer adoption of digital channels as a standard part of everyday life is outstripping today's professional marketers' knowledge. User-generated content, social media and the blogosphere are in the hands of real people, and brands have often trampled into this territory at their peril. Social media resources are certainly not fully understood by pharma marketers, and in some cases are not even on their radar.

The lack of digital skills in our sector also impacts on the services we are able to offer our customers, the physicians. Physicians appreciate having support that helps them stay more than one step ahead of their digitally sophisticated, information-seeking patients. Therefore, the importance of recognising and addressing physician needs and offering insight, advice, patient support services and education must not be underestimated.

Increasingly faster and smarter technologies, combined with a new breed of vocal and proactive online consumers, will continue to drive changes in regulatory guidelines and legislation.

This explosion of digital, and the consequent steep learning curve it necessitates, shows no sign of slowing pace.

What can pharma do?
As digital is now at the heart of so many integrated campaigns, we need digitally literate marketers to implement them. While universities are producing an ample supply of the digitally literate, few of these graduates have the corresponding marketing skills that would provide the skill-set pharma needs. This skills shortage is by no means insurmountable but it will take time for the new breed of hybrid marketer, who is both brand- and digitally literate, to lead communications at the board level.

As an interim solution we at Digitas Health, like other specialist digital agencies, have started to run bespoke client workshops to deliver knowledge and digital insights.

From our training courses, we have discovered the key areas where knowledge remains scant are:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programmes: specifically, how digital technologies can build relationships between brand and consumer
Listening to consumers: this is an essential tool in pharma, which, although it has barely been utilised, is now critical in the age of social media
Combining expertise to optimise the delivery of top physician insights in a digital environment
Brand building: consumers have a different relationship with brands nowadays, which has largely been shaped by online interactions
Continuous access: as people seek medical advice around the clock, it is essential that your brand is available when called upon.

Building skills
One way of tackling the digital shortage is to train existing marketers in digital skills. Key areas to be addressed include search, mobile media, data analysis and social media.

These different channels have different degrees of utility to today's pharma marketer. Understanding of mobile marketing, for instance, is still in its infancy: there is uncertainty about where mobile fits into the marketing plan and, to date, there are little data to indicate that it would be sensible to start allocating bigger budgets to mobile. However, search is an area of under-explored potential.

At the moment search training is very much supplier-focused and dictated by the way we use Google AdWords so there is a need to consider it from a broader marketing perspective. Social media, on the other hand, is generally recognised as a key metric, as one of the first mass market channels to be owned by the people, not brands. Understanding social media is as much about understanding the art of communication as the technology, but to really understand it, you need to be in it.

Data analysis is also crucial, as it is fundamental to discovering how to generate the biggest impact in social media.

How we use these and other marketing tools, as well as share knowledge and build a new regulatory framework in collaboration with pharma associations, will increasingly define the success or failure of marketing campaigns.

Changing the mind-set
In its infancy, digital marketing was seen by many senior marketers as threatening. This led them to hinder and, in some cases, even block change. The reason for the shortage does not lie solely with pharma, however. There has also been reluctance for some digital agency staff to move into pharma. To compound the issue, many pharma marketers are moving out of the industry to work in FMCG agencies, where they will be able to learn more about digital disciplines.

A cursory glance of the account director-level CVs around at the moment shows that digital expertise is 25 per cent more common among those in the FMCG sector compared with those in the pharma industry. The lack of digital skills in pharma is particularly noticeable among mid-level brand managers, promoted beyond their digital capability because of a dearth of people with the right digital experience.

Consequently, healthcare marketers with five or more years of digital experience now form a very small pool of highly sought after individuals, making it difficult for pharma companies to attract and retain good talent. As well as the difficulty in securing qualified digital marketers, inevitably a certain proportion will also choose to leave the workforce because of maternity/paternity and other lifestyle choices. While pharma can make use of former employees in a freelance capacity, a good digital specialist is not a resource you want to lose.

Overcoming the talent drain
The dearth of digital skills will therefore lead to problems, especially in companies where there is no training in place. However, a review of freelance policy, in terms of training and investment, may allow companies to ring-fence its former talent. It is easier to update digital marketing skills after a period of absence than to than lose years of healthcare experience and knowledge.

In terms of in-house training, you can't beat working at the coal face with an expert. For the many that don't have this luxury, education is vital to nurture the best talent. You can teach someone a set of skills but he or she also needs to have a passion that drives him/her to learn more every day, because the digital landscape changes every day.

Tomorrow's digital marketer will be working in a world of cloud technologies and service oriented architectures, requiring an emphasis on the ability to think fluidly and adapt to new ideas.

If we don't invest in talent the lack of experienced specialists will stunt healthcare's prodigious digital growth.

But let's not panic. Brands are still managing to run successful campaigns and deliver results. The challenge we will face in the future is how to use digital skills to make these campaigns more effective and cost efficient.

According to Alice Weightman, a director at Hanson Search, sourcing good staff will become tougher in the next six months.

Alice maintains that this is because: "so many in the pharma industry remain cautious about hiring they will lose out, with the good people being snapped up quickly."

This means that if companies are looking to hire digital talent, they need to act quickly.

"The law of supply and demand means that for the next six months we are likely to witness a rise in attractive counter-offers as companies fight to retain their senior digital staff, inflating salaries, and a return to the 2006 days where companies were offering 'golden hellos', or generous 'handcuffs' in a struggle to differentiate their opportunity against their competitors," said Alice.

Hanson Search expects the situation to level out within 12–18 months as more people are trained in digital skills and junior staff filter up the ranks.

While this is good news, it will remain crucial to focus on recognising digital for what it really is: not just the hot medium of the moment, but the hot medium of the future.

The Author
June Dawson is managing director of Digitas Health

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