Audience segmentation: Using archetypes to create personalized omnichannel scientific engagement
Presented by: Gary Lyons, Fishawack Health
Could a Medical Affairs omnichannel be the key to delivering medical education that impacts behavior?
A tale as old as time...the discussion on audience segmentation highlighted an ambition that medical education and communications specialists have been striving to achieve for over 100 years. When we can impact audiences', attitudes and expectations, we have the potential for communications programs that change behavior.
“Medical education is not just a program for building knowledge and skills in its recipients...it is also an experience which creates attitudes and expectations…”
Abraham Flexner, 1910
In December 2021, an EPG Health survey confirmed that HCPs have a strong appetite for omnichannel communications. The HCP community are seeking bitesize, bookmarkable content that reflects their desire to learn.
Historically, the tools and infrastructure have not been available or optimized to make the learning experience more personalized, relevant, and motivating. Evidence-based communications could reach audiences but not always in ways to encourage them to take action.
In this session, we heard that it should be the user who defines how they enter the learning journey and that segmentation leveraging the behavioral archetypes could drive users to dive deeper into content.
The speaker acknowledged that defining behavioral segments in Medical Affairs could be difficult and pose governance challenges, but the opportunity to create greater impact should prompt medical communications specialists to explore these solutions, as every solution explored provides an opportunity to measure, track, and improve initiatives in the future.
Future-ready medical communications will be fueled by the recent omnichannel awakening within the Medical Affairs sector. The interest is there, but audience survey responses suggest that we are at the start of our omnichannel learning journey.
The presenter highlighted various archetypes that can be leveraged to drive segmentation strategy. Each comes with varying degrees of ease when defining as well as different levels of impact this for your communications.
Only 1% of the audience reported using behavioral archetypes (or personas) in their approach to segmentation, with 62% using functional segmentation. However, personas were being used in a variety of ways with the audience’s current approaches to their communications:
- To define learning needs in therapy area: 15%
- To identify content gaps in SciComms plans: 50%
- To enable bases for digital ecosystem: 18%
- To allow MSL teams to follow-up: 17%
Omnichannel is the latest buzz word but nearly 90% of ISMPP attendees reported that their teams were not fully prepared or did not have the skills to embrace future opportunities in the Medical Affairs space:
- Yes, prepared: 7%
- Prepared but with gaps: 43%
- Partially prepared: 46%
- No, we are not ready: 4%