Pharma brands seeking to get life-altering treatments to patients in a competitive marketplace can gain a critical edge over the competition with KOL engagement services. By designing a strategic engagement program that targets Key Opinion Leaders and ThoughtLeaders, life sciences companies can vastly improve their outreach efforts with healthcare providers (HCPs) and maximize profitability.
To succeed in this market and work towards a goal of improving patient outcomes, it’s crucial to begin the process of engaging KOLs and TLs at the earliest product development and marketing stages. Successful HCP engagement requires several steps and ongoing management, which KOL engagement services make more efficient.
By designing a labyrinth of strategic HCP touchpoints using KOL engagement services, pharma brands are able to amass the support of credible KOLs at strategic times throughout a treatment’s lifecycle. These KOLs can be powerful brand champions, impacting the opinions of their peers in targeted disease areas and spurring adoption.
When managing an array of marketing tasks to support new and existing treatments in the market, it’s helpful to use a software platform that merges multiple efforts to increase efficiencies. KOL engagement services are provided as a suite of software products that help companies manage strategic sales tactics such as:
We break each of them out for you here:
When sales teams understand the market of HCPs they need to engage, they’re able to develop more effective touchpoints that increase their chances of engaging the right HCPs at the right time. By using a robust search engine, such as MDOutlook’s Lumineer, brands can study the background, research and networks of KOLs, who tend to have limited time, to intelligently prepare for engagements.
Lumineer takes pharma teams far beyond the industry top-50 and top-100 KOL lists and provides granular filtration tools that present niche opportunities that add meaningfully to a treatment’s success. Companies can search by disease area and geographic influence, identifying global, national, regional and local KOLs. They can map out the types of institutions and treatment formularies KOLs influence and design engagement and marketing plans that maximize return on investment.
Ultimately, KOL engagement services bring efficiency and transparency to sales processes so that pharma brands can strategically activate KOLs.
Once a company has identified target KOLs, they can begin to engage them through a series of virtual and in-person touchpoints, which KOL engagement services can help to coordinate, host and disseminate information about.
Brands often choose to engage KOLs in multiple ways, from interactive digital or physical events to presentations, dinners and webinars.
Through MDOutlook’s Activeer, marketing teams build valuable activations that resonate with HCPs seeking networking and educational opportunities. To engage KOLs, teams use MDO’s KOL engagement services to schedule in-person peer-to-peer meetings between KOLs, institutional leaders and advisory boards.
Robust KOL engagement services are also able to power interactive digital engagement that might include video peer meetings and Q&As. When using MDO’s ClinicalXChange, pharma companies tap into a powerful educational platform that offers 30-minute lunchtime webinars that spur interaction between KOLs and the treaters responsible for deciding which treatments are ultimately prescribed to patients.
MDO’s KOL engagement services make it easy to widely disseminate the presentations and materials from these events to engage even more HCPs in a targeted network.
Another bellwether of a robust KOL engagement service are real-time market insights. By using MDO’s Pulse Research feature, brands can begin to understand the attitudes and usage behaviors of their treatments and those of direct competitors through precision insights that answer specific questions and address complex market studies.
Information from clinicians, such as whether or not they would recommend use of a treatment, will inform marketing strategies and brand messaging when designing KOL engagement strategies.
From Lumineer to Activeer, MDOutlook’s suite of KOL engagement services help brands get the most out of their sales tactics by intelligently mapping the landscape of HCPs and facilitating high-value connections with KOLs.
Learn more about how Lumineer can increase pharma profitability by contacting us today to schedule a free demo.
