Single-Channel vs Multi-Channel vs Omni-Channel

Mastering Demand Creation in the Healthcare Attention Economy

Let me start with some context. I was once a marketing manager in a healthcare role, thinking exactly what some of you might be thinking right now: 'HCPs don't engage online' and 'digital leads are poor quality.'

Now I think the opposite - not because I've abandoned the fundamentals, but because I've witnessed the healthcare attention economy developing over twenty years across five continents. Of course, nothing replaces face-to-face interaction. The sales process remains pivotal and at the centre of everything we do. But we need a new 'beginning' to that process.

Your HCPs are online right now. They're checking emails at 6 AM before rounds, scrolling LinkedIn during lunch breaks, and researching clinical updates at 11 PM when they finally have a quiet moment. The difference is whether your demand creation is there when they're looking, or whether you're missing these moments entirely.

Done properly, demand creation works in perfect harmony with your sales process. It's not competing with your sales team - it's working the night shift, the weekend shift, and the moments between patient consultations when HCPs have 3 minutes to research that problem they've been meaning to address.

Your sales team gets better conversations because prospects arrive pre-educated rather than starting from zero. They're not explaining basic concepts - they're having strategic discussions with people who already understand the value.

The Strategic Bridge You're Missing

Healthcare companies excel at sales processes. You've invested heavily in CRM systems, sales training, and territory management. The challenge isn't what happens once prospects are in your pipeline - it's creating the demand that feeds that pipeline with qualified, engaged prospects ready for those conversations.

I like to think of the question of how can we help the sales team create more demand for our products and services by using other touchpoints to get the attention of the HCPs and patients we want to speak to the most.

And while omnichannel dominates healthcare conversations right now, let's be clear - it's often misunderstood as either a buzzword or some ultimate destination you should automatically aspire to.

Omnichannel is one strategy among many. Your strategy selection should come from carefully understanding your audience and the customer journey you want to take them on, while honestly assessing your own capabilities, budgets, and timescales. Sometimes single touchpoint is exactly right. Sometimes multi-touchpoint is ideal. Sometimes omnichannel makes strategic sense.

Other effective demand creation strategies include thought leadership positioning, strategic partnership programs, referral system development, targeted event strategies, and account-based demand creation.

Three Strategic Levels

The path to demand creation mastery follows three levels of increasing sophistication.

Level 1: Single Touchpoint Foundation

Strategic focus on one primary touchpoint - sales force or telesales. Limited reach, but it lets you perfect messaging and compliance before expansion. Your sales team probably operates here already.

Most single touchpoint approaches are supported by internal communications campaigns around product updates and sometimes online training to ensure consistent messaging and knowledge transfer.

Level 2: Multi-Touchpoint Demand Creation

Here's where you should be operating if your audience research supports it.

Real-World Success: From Product Features to Pain Points

I worked with a pharmaceutical supplier who was struggling to move beyond basic product conversations. Their pain management solutions were clinically excellent, but sales discussions kept getting stuck on features and specifications rather than the real problems their prospects faced daily.

We started by redefining their approach entirely. Instead of targeting "pain management professionals" broadly, we focused on secondary care environments - specifically teaching hospitals where multiple job roles intersect around getting pain under control. The key insight wasn't about their product at all. It was about second victim syndrome - the emotional and professional impact on healthcare teams when pain management fails.

The transformation happened across multiple touchpoints simultaneously. Sales teams received new conversation frameworks that moved discussions away from product specifications toward trending challenges in pain management. We placed advertorials in publications that anaesthetists actually read during their limited downtime. Online advertisements in medical journals didn't promote products directly - they guided readers to a dedicated resource site addressing the daily realities of pain management failures.

Even hospital environments became part of the strategy. Targeted posters in areas where pain management teams gathered generated awareness about the broader challenges, not just solutions.

The results spoke volumes. Quality leads increased significantly, but more importantly, the nature of sales conversations changed completely. Prospects arrived at meetings already engaged with the challenges rather than needing education about why these problems mattered. Sales cycles shortened because trust was established before the first formal conversation.

As traffic patterns emerged, we evolved the website to include conversion tracking that informed the CRM system. When leads revisited the site multiple times, sales team members received notifications with enhanced prospect intelligence before their calls. This natural progression from multi-touchpoint to more sophisticated demand creation happened organically as results supported increased complexity.

Level 3: Omnichannel Demand Creation

True sophistication through signals and triggers - but only when your customer journey and capabilities support this complexity.

Advanced Integration: Closing the Intelligence Loop

The highest level of demand creation sophistication came alive in a patient marketing campaign that demonstrates true omnichannel thinking. The challenge was connecting patient interest with clinic engagement while providing sales teams with meaningful intelligence for their conversations.

We targeted the general public, but with precision - focusing on 40-60 year olds in the UK and Germany who had previously researched keywords related to knee pain or surgery. Simultaneously, we engaged clinic practice managers who would receive these patient inquiries.

The content strategy avoided clinical features entirely. Instead, we focused on people getting back to being 'themselves' - embodying joy and activity through movement. AI-generated videos showed rediscovered mobility, addressing the emotional outcome patients actually wanted rather than the medical procedure they needed.

The omnichannel sophistication emerged through interconnected touchpoints working together. Google, Meta, and email marketing drove traffic to a clinic finder map, but with multiple conversion paths available - form submission, direct calls, or clinic website visits. Each interaction generated signals about patient interest and clinic engagement patterns.

The real sophistication came through the closed-loop intelligence system. Conversion metrics by clinic type were tracked and ranked in performance tables. Monthly forms went to participating clinics requesting anonymised follow-up data on patient-led outcomes. This wasn't just data collection - it was intelligence generation.

The anonymised outcome data was distributed monthly to the entire customer base through email campaigns. Sales teams received the same intelligence, enabling them to follow up in person with clinics about treatment awareness campaign success while gathering additional outcome data.

The results created a self-reinforcing system: patient interest generated measurable clinic engagement, anonymised clinic data enriched sales conversations, and sales insights improved future patient targeting. Sales teams gained enriched intelligence and natural conversation starters while maintaining full compliance requirements.

This level of sophistication required signals (conversion metrics) and triggers (monthly follow-up requests) that created measurable value at every touchpoint while feeding intelligence back into the system for continuous improvement.

What You Actually Need

You can't execute multi-touchpoint or omnichannel demand creation without strategic foundation. Whatever level you choose, ensure your approach is SAFE:

Strategic Alignment with Company Objectives - This isn't a 'side project,' or it will become an expensive one. Resource-wise, this will be costly if it isn't aligned with top-level objectives because by proxy it takes resource - time, money, and thinking - away from strategic goals. This needs to be embedded in top-level strategy or you aren't ready to begin.

Aligned with Regulation and Compliance - Alignment with regulatory requirements, compliance, and stakeholders comes from having the right documentation and processes in place at the very beginning of the project. Product claims matrix, messaging frameworks, and stakeholder approval processes must be established before you start, not retrofitted later.

Focused on Customer Centricity - Develop a refined ideal customer profile and creative approaches to ensure campaigns resonate with them. The more customer-centric your approach, the better your campaign returns. You're testing whether specific audiences have the problems you solve - generic targeting is expensive and ineffective.

Efficient Through Planning - Speed comes from good planning. Get your content strategy, touchpoint strategy, content plan, communications plan, and asset plan in place before execution. Planning is king - failure to do so could cost you months in amendments, reworks, and frustration.

Without these foundational capabilities in place through the SAFE framework, multi-disciplinary expertise across strategy, creative, copywriting, design, touchpoint management, analytics, CRM integration, project management, and compliance review becomes fragmented rather than focused.

The Reality

In the current attention economy, multi-touchpoint approaches are becoming essential for healthcare demand creation. The challenge isn't just regulatory compliance - it's maintaining campaign velocity while ensuring every touchpoint meets regulatory standards.

You can set yourself up for long-term success by building these foundational capabilities first. Without them, the only consistency you'll experience is frustration, failed campaigns, and products that never get the recognition they deserve - regardless of how innovative they are.

The question isn't whether you should advance your demand creation capabilities.

The question is: which level matches your current market reality, and what capabilities do you need to build to get there?

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