Virtual? Hybrid? Seven lessons for standing out at tomorrow’s congress
Virtual? Hybrid? Seven lessons for standing out at tomorrow’s congress
By Delphine Dubois, M.D., Gregory Imber, Helen Morgan, Rayman Vaid, and Dimithri Wignarajah
Delphine Dubois, M.D. ([email protected]), is chief innovation officer, Gregory Imber is chief engagement officer, Rayman Vaid is director, technology and solutions, and Dimithri Wignarajah is communications strategist at Healthcare Consultancy Group (HCG). Helen Morgan is president of Chameleon London.
It’s already a cliché to say that COVID has transformed brand communications of any and every kind, and the communications between brands and HCPs at medical congresses are no exception. We at HCG have been engaging with HCPs at virtual congresses for quite a while now – we recently celebrated 100 virtual congresses – and every one of them has been a learning experience, an exercise in building an understanding of what HCPs want, need, and expect in virtual environments. The most fundamental lesson we’ve learned along the way is that the shift from traditional brick and mortar congresses to virtual or hybrid congresses requires a great deal more than tweaking tactics or repurposing materials; anyone who wishes to engage with HCPs at a congress in the post-COVID era is going to have to completely rethink their entire strategy. How so? We have a few suggestions.
Lesson One: A virtual booth is not a physical booth.
We’ve seen some brands try their best to replicate the experience of a physical booth as closely as possible in a virtual space and leave it at that. But that approach does a disservice to the opportunities that a virtual space offers. A brand’s task at any conference is to maximize meaningful connections with its target audience, and a virtual space offers exponentially greater opportunities to do that than any traditional physical space could. So for virtual spaces brands should be making multi-touch, multi-channel efforts, giving the audience as many different ways to touch and interact with and learn from the brand as possible. And the standard for retaining eyeballs is much different in a virtual space. We don’t have a captive audience any more stuck there for the duration; we have folks who can wander in and out and do as they please, given that they might be in pajamas, the TV is probably in the next room, and cat videos on YouTube are only a click away. We aren’t just competing with other booths any more. So we need to work harder to attract and retain attention.
One relatively simple tool that we’ve found to be surprisingly effective in the virtual context is gamification. A game in a virtual booth, even something as simple as a word search, can create a memorable experience for HCPs while improving information retention. In a virtual or online environment, dealing with users that have multiple tabs open and infinite potential distractions, a game offers an easy path to participation, can engage a user’s competitiveness (one of our recent games included a leaderboard so the HCPs could see how they were doing compared with their peers), and on top of all that provide education, even if by stealth. A critical key to success in any virtual space (in any any space, really) is engagement, and a well-crafted game offers a bit of challenge and intrigue that traditional booth tools can’t. Word searches, spot the difference in the MOA, guess the data, video game CME, diagnose from a virtual view; it doesn’t have to be rocket science or cost a fortune to develop, it just has to grab and hold the attention of your audience for a minute or two or three.
Lesson Two: The relationship doesn’t have to end – or start – when the congress does.
Or, put another way, don’t think of a congress as a single standalone activity, think of it as a moment, albeit an important one, in the continuum of your brand’s relationships with its audience. So everything that goes into that booth or virtual symposium ought to be able to live beyond the congress too, and in fact should be designed with that purpose in mind. For example, if you build a microsite to support communications across all your congresses and the relevant information and events in between, introduce it to your audience before the congress even starts and continue to fill it with up to date and engaging content year-round – give your audience a reason to keep returning to that microsite. Docs don’t stop thinking about, say, clinical oncology during the 360 days between ASCO congresses, so you – and your engagement tools – shouldn’t stop thinking about them.
Lesson Three: Be brief.
A corollary to the un-captive audience lesson is that congress participants aren’t much interested in “browsing” for hours, or even minutes, at a time. They want what they want now, they want it quickly, and then they want to move on. So build your content accordingly. Develop short, snackable presentations that are easy for your audience to consume, and make sure they are easy to find and consume on whatever platform an audience member might want – computer, tablet, smartphone, et cetera. If you’ve got something that’s long-form, break it down into chunks or chapters. Rather than being text-dense, use visuals, voice, and video. Tell a story visually rather than just displaying data. And if you’re producing some sort of live presentation, be sure to make it available afterwards on replay to be consumed at convenience, even a little at a time. One of our most successful recent symposia undertakings was a Twitter Livestream symposium that included a 15 minute live presentation each day for a week. We were thrilled to see that the five live presentations generated nearly 63,000 live views. But the most impressive metric was the number of replay views – nearly 1.8 million, or almost 30 times as many as the live views.
Lesson Four: The audience is bigger than you think it is.
The total number of ASCO mentions on Twitter during the event increased from 70,000 in 2020 to 81,000 in 2021. Those mentions were from more than 11,000 unique authors. It’s a pretty good guess that a large number had the conference feed open on one screen and Twitter on another. In another phenomenon that ought to be on the radar of every pharma congress content creator, many thousands of Twitter users discussing and commenting on the congress in real time were not formal attendees. That’s right, you won’t need congress-branded swag or an overpriced hotel room any more; plenty of HCPs are participating in congresses without even signing up, getting all their information through Twitter or other social media channels. So even if/when the world returns to in-person congresses, the social media component may be just as important as whatever you do in any physical space, because a large number of the de facto participants probably won’t even be in the physical space.
Lesson Five: Listen.
A corollary to lesson four. HCPs are talking about congresses before, during, and after on social media now. They’re telling each other what was interesting and what wasn’t, which presentations caught their eye and which didn’t, what they want and what they don’t. It’s as if the universe were presenting brands with a giant, terrifyingly detailed audience analysis free of charge. So listen. Before you even begin to engage, listen to what those HCPs are saying, what they want and don’t want – and then when you do start engaging, let them tell you what’s working and what isn’t. If you aren’t paying close attention to what your audiences are saying about their congress experiences on social media, you are throwing away an enormously valuable resource, not to mention one that is just as available to your competitors as it is to you.
Lesson Six: Content doesn’t matter if no one sees it.
It doesn’t matter how great your content is if no one is watching. So you have to be just as serious about promoting the content as you are about creating it. There are plenty of ways to do this, but perhaps the most critical is the digital opinion leader. We’ve discussed the DOL concept elsewhere (https://www.pharmalive.com/the-rise-of-the-digital-opinion-leader/), but the bottom line is that these are HCPs with organic social media followings with whom you as a brand have built a relationship. You should already be partnering with your DOLs to help develop content on their subject of expertise, and you should also be partnering with them to help promote that content before, during, and after relevant congresses; there’s no more powerful promotional tool than a real, authentic expert telling her real, authentic audience, “Go look at this!” So be aggressive in activating your DOLs to promote congress content.
Of course, DOLs aren’t the only path. Paid targeted tweets are another good way to get your content in front of the right people. The targeting and segmenting possibilities on Twitter (and social media in general) are getting so narrow and focused that an investment in hitting exactly the people you want probably won’t cost nearly as much as you think it will. And based on all that social media listening you’ve been doing (see lesson five), you should know exactly whom to target.
Lesson Seven: The future is coming. Be prepared.
Healthcare and pharma are rarely ahead of the curve, or even near the curve, when it comes to exploiting new technology for marketing and communications. But the fact is that real virtual reality is already being done, and done well, in other industries’ congresses and conferences. This past South by Southwest was chock full of it – presenters and attendees interacting and networking in virtual rooms; musicians performing virtually in a recreation of Notre Dame Cathedral; world premieres of 360-degree 3D content accessible by stepping into a movie poster in a virtual lobby. The metaverse is here, and sooner or later HCPs will expect real VR experiences at congresses as a matter of course. So VR had best be a tool in every brand’s toolbox, and if you don’t use it first, someone else surely will.
