First published in Pharma Industry, September 2022. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.
Part one dealt with what you prepare before the broadcast. Part two moves to what happens in and around it: the voice, rehearsal, a plan for when the technology fails, promotion, interaction during the broadcast, the call to action, the follow-up and the recording. That is the ground the article covers, and it covers it as production craft, not as a report on the state of the market. Tips #8, #9, #10 and #13 name no platform and no date, and nothing in them rests on a figure the article would need to source, so this note passes over them. What follows names every other section, either because it is tied to the year the article was written or because it carries a claim the article does not source.
Tip #11 promotes the webinar on social media and is written under the platform practice and the privacy rules of 2022. It reports that LinkedIn had assured advertisers a few years earlier that filtering healthcare professionals on professional role fell within what counts as compliant for pharmaceutical companies; it recommends search engine optimisation of prescription-medicine pages that sit behind healthcare-professional verification; and it recommends placing a pixel, a Facebook pixel for example, on those pages so that visitors can be retargeted on social media, which the article says should be permitted. Check the platform position, the pixel and the retargeting against current Lif guidance and your own privacy review before acting on any of it. The passage quoted from Lif's document 1709 appears here in our own translation from the Swedish, and the Swedish wording is the one that binds. Tip #12 names Zoom, Mentimeter and Sli.do as the tools for polls and live interaction; those are the products of 2022 as the article found them, in the same way that Envato elements is in tip #02 of part one, and what each of them offers now is a separate question. Tip #14 recommends an evaluation form and a follow-up email after the broadcast, which means collecting answers and correspondence from named healthcare professionals, so where that data goes and on what basis you hold it belongs with your own data protection function. Tip #15 goes further than that: it treats a recording placed behind a conversion point as an exchange in which, in the article's own words, you get permission, consent, to keep communicating with the customer in other channels. Whether a value exchange behind a gate can carry consent to further marketing is the question to put to your own data protection function before the page is built, and this note does not say what the answer is. The bonus tip closes by hoping to see the reader at the Pharma customer engagement congress in London in 2023. It is written there as a hope, not as a plan, and the date it points to has passed.
Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you, and the first is a choice of method. The bonus tip builds its case on one congress. It says the point was raised again and again in London, and that a congress attended by some of the most senior executives at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies singles the step out. The conclusion the section reaches, that you in particular should take a helicopter view of what your own organisation is investing in, rests on that observation and on nothing else the article puts forward. What makes it worth naming is that the same paragraph sets a stricter standard for everyone else: no study would be approved on n=3, the basis has to be larger, and it has to be evaluated over time. The article does not reconcile the two, and a reader is entitled to hold the second standard up against the first. Tip #01 in part one rests on the same congress. Second, the article reports two claims about survey behaviour without naming a source for either: that a longer form has a considerably lower response rate than a shorter one, and that multiple-choice questions get more responses than free-text questions. They stand here as the article had them, not because this site has checked them.
Do you run webinars as part of the marketing mix for your medicines? Are you curious about ways to improve your broadcasts and make them more engaging for healthcare professionals? If so, this series is for you. Across two articles we will highlight fifteen aspects, fifteen tips, that will help you improve your webinars, develop your digital marketing of medicines and over time reach more people in healthcare. Here are the remaining 8 tips (plus a bonus tip).
In a physical meeting we use body language, facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice to complement what we say. A webinar is often narrowed to a presenter's face and shoulders, sometimes the upper body, which may bode well for much of our non-verbal communication still getting through. And sure enough, that is a common argument for why webinars are so good.
But from my own experience of lecturing over webinars, experience that grew considerably during the pandemic, I would say that without other people in the room your own body language becomes less expressive. I have noticed that I gesture and move less, which is fairly natural, but I would also argue that facial expression becomes more sparing.
For those reasons the voice becomes a more important instrument for holding the audience's attention.
It becomes especially important to speak with a clear voice and to avoid talking too fast, because that can make it hard for your audience to follow you. It is also important to use tone, and to use pauses as a way of making a point land.
Pausing gives not only you time to think, but also the audience time to notice, understand and take in what you say.
An earlier tip in this series dealt with the importance of writing a script for your presentation, and let us now assume the webinar goes live in a few days. You have planned everything and feel confident about what is coming. But there is one last step you should take before you go live, and that is to practise.
I tend to walk around at home mumbling my way through the script for my slides at least two, sometimes three, days before a bigger lecture. It has proved best if a couple of nights of sleep are included, so that the learning settles.
Starting to rehearse the presentation in good time opens up the chance to rearrange slides and arguments for a better flow through the presentation, and to write down cue words and notes on paper.
And if something then goes wrong, of the kind covered in the next tip, and you have rehearsed enough, the chances are better that your confidence holds and that you handle the situation well.
Give yourself the best chance of succeeding by practising, practising, practising.
You know who your target group is, the content is well supported, well worked through, visually appealing and aimed at your ideal customer, your Buyer persona.
There is a well-considered offer, every phase of your webinar is mapped, troughs are followed by peaks in the run sheet you have produced, and every slide has a script.
Every slide carries one main message, no more than that, and where needed it is supported by clear elements that do not stuff the slide full of information.
The slides are mixed with other formats to maximise engagement in the audience.
Everything is planned down to the last detail and you have done everything right. Even so, there is a chance that something goes wrong, and in a live broadcast there is almost always something that does not quite go to plan.
That is why it is important to have one more plan, the plan that describes in detail what you will do if something goes wrong.
Plenty can go wrong, of course, but some of the most common failures are that your computer crashes or freezes, or that the internet connection suddenly becomes insufficient or drops entirely.
In a physical meeting there are usually alternatives, such as drawing on a flip chart. In a webinar the technology matters more for conveying information and interacting with the audience.
So ask yourself: what would you want to tell them if everything except your ability to talk to the audience disappeared? Which are the most important messages in your presentation that still give them a valuable experience? It is often harder to rebook a webinar than it is to give the broad brushstrokes live and then follow up with a summary, or the whole presentation, in a video afterwards.
See your slides for what they are, a teaching aid that reinforces your messages, and do not rely on them completely.
Your audience is there, after all, to listen to what you have to say, not to look at your slides.
More and more pharmaceutical companies use LinkedIn today to promote events, both physical and digital. It is done by tailoring, by filtering out, the recipients based on things like region, professional role and workplace.
A few years ago LinkedIn came out and assured us that their algorithm was reliable enough that this kind of filtering on healthcare professionals falls within what is considered "compliant" for pharmaceutical companies.
So there is an opportunity there.
Another opportunity, one that takes a little more preparation and time, is the fact that in Sweden we can search engine optimise product websites for prescription medicines and so increase relevant traffic to the site.
Lif's guidance "Användande av digitala kanaler utifrån Läkemedelsbranschens etiska regelverk 1709" says the following about websites:
Web pages carrying information about prescription medicines directed at healthcare professionals can also be keyword optimised. Since the page is only reached through verification from a healthcare professional, the keyword optimisation does not contribute to the information reaching the general public.
The advantage here is that you can place one or more pixels, a Facebook pixel for example, on the pages of your website where you have made sure that your customers are the visitors. With that kind of pixel on the visitor's, the customer's, computer you can then run "retargeting" campaigns on social media. This should be permitted, because we are again blessed with the question where the visitor states that they are a healthcare professional every time they visit your website anew.
So this tip comes in two versions: the simple one where customers are filtered on their professional roles, and the somewhat more time-consuming, more advanced and more precise way with "retargeting" based on pixel-based campaigns.
Webinars are an excellent chance to interact with your audience and get feedback from them. During the webinar, make sure to ask the audience questions and to make your broadcast more interactive by taking and answering questions from the audience or running a live poll. That will help you gauge their level of engagement and understanding.
Most platforms, Zoom for example, offer the ability to create questions ("polls") that can be presented at selected phases during the presentation. There are also other platforms such as Mentimeter and Sli.do that can be built directly into your slides.
Multiple-choice questions asked either through the streaming platform or a third-party platform are often a safer way to get interaction going, since most people hesitate to open camera and microphone and so become part of the broadcast in order to interact and ask their question.
A webinar can only reach its full potential if it includes calls to action, CTAs, for some form of continued dialogue. One or more "next steps".
Conversely, if there is no CTA at all and you instead only inform during the broadcast, on the assumption that what follows is "business as usual" with the usual interactions that would probably have happened anyway, you miss an important opportunity.
In Tip #3 you worked out an offer for the audience.
Make sure, where it is appropriate, to include CTAs continuously during the broadcast and to close with one well-defined and clear CTA.
If you want to work with running calls to action, they can be mentioned by whoever is presenting, but they do not have to be, since they can be placed as a "news ticker" along the bottom of the screen when it suits.
That what you ask for is well worked through matters just as much as delivering the call, or the calls, at well-chosen points in the broadcast.
When the webinar is over, do not forget to follow the broadcast up with your audience. Thank them for taking part and share a link to an evaluation form, where it matters more to get answers to 3 or 4 well-chosen questions than to 7 to 10, questions that in one go give you the answers you would most like to have. A longer form often has a considerably lower response rate than a shorter one. Multiple-choice questions often get more responses than free-text questions.
You can also ask an open question directly in the email about whether the participant has a follow-up question they never got the chance to ask during the broadcast, or thought of afterwards.
The most important thing is to think of communication as separate streams, where the webinar was one stream, the email conversation suggested above another stream, the follow-up on the offer you promoted during the broadcast another stream, the follow-up from colleagues in the sales or medical department another stream, and so on.
The reason it matters to think in separate streams is to avoid missing the potential in any of them and, as far as possible, to keep the conversation with your audience going, so that they take more steps into your world.
As I have said for many years now: "The company that gets its customers to take the most steps into its world wins".
Even if people cannot attend your webinar live, they may still be interested in watching it at a later point. By providing a recording of the webinar you give your audience the chance to take in the knowledge at a time of their own choosing.
And if there is also a chance to use the recording as a conversion point, meaning a place in your digital world where an exchange of value happens, take that chance. You get permission (consent) to keep communicating with the customer in other channels, and the customer gets access to the value in the webinar.
When I wrote this series I had just come back from the Pharma customer engagement Europe 2022 congress. Customer engagement is red hot in the Swedish pharmaceutical industry and it is the new area many companies are trying to find their bearings in. At the congress, Personas, or Buyer personas, were named as the basis for all communication (see Tip #1), and after that the focus was on basing every plan, every discussion and every execution on data.
It is only through analysis of data, and the insights that follow, that you can evaluate whether your "tactics" worked or not. Your gut feeling, or one or two customers saying your initiative was good, is in short not worth very much. That does not mean that either the gut feeling or the handful of responses that came in are wrong. It only points out that the basis is far too thin. There is no study that would have been approved with n=3. The basis needs to be larger and it has to be evaluated over time.
This too was raised again and again during the congress in London.
So it would be close to negligence not to point out the thing that is often forgotten in the very busy reality we live in, and that is that you have to schedule time for evaluation.
It is so important that I will write it again.
You have to make room for a considered analysis and evaluation of your event already at the planning stage of the broadcast. Book the meeting early, well ahead of the broadcast, so that everyone knows it will happen and has the chance to prepare, so that the work you do in that meeting leads to real insights that are then used in planning the next initiative.
If you, like so many others working at Swedish pharmaceutical companies, do not take the time to take on the "evaluation" step thoroughly, then here too I will stick my neck out and say that your future career is at risk.
It is not for nothing that pharmaceutical companies invest such extraordinary sums in building platforms that assemble the data you have available and present it in graphical reports. It is not for nothing that a congress attended by some of the most senior executives at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies highlights this step as tremendously important. Something that must not be skipped.
So my bonus tip is not really that you should analyse data and evaluate your webinar, though of course it is that too. BUT... my tip is that you in particular should take a helicopter view to work out the clear investments being made in your own organisation, and make sure you build your own knowledge in that area.
Customer engagement is certainly one such area, and if you set out to learn more you will shine.
Perhaps, hopefully, we will see each other at "Pharma customer engagement" in London in 2023.
15 tips is a lot and we have had to split them across two articles, but if you have other tips for improving webinars or presentations in general, or if you have something to contribute on eHealth to the magazine, do comment by sending me an email. You can reach me at fredrik@dualia.se.
Until next time, I wish you all the best.
Fredrik Holmboe
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Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Related service: Content Engine Sprint.