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Pharmaceutical marketing faces the challenge of being part of the most regulated sectors. This scenario significantly complicates its room for maneuver, similar to what is experienced by sectors such as banking, energy companies and others that must deal with regulations imposed by administrations.
Despite these constraints, pharmaceutical companies, which are not only in the business of manufacturing prescription drugs, have promotional needs like any other business. How do they strengthen their brand in this context? How do they communicate new product launches? How do they manage reputational crises? What strategies can they implement to stand out in the industry?
Importance of marketing in the pharmaceutical sector
The field of pharmaceutical marketing is a specialized branch within general marketing, focused on the task of ensuring that pharmaceutical products not only reach the patients who need them, but also the doctors’ offices, health centers, hospitals and various establishments that offer health services and products.
Similar to other marketing approaches oriented to specific markets, such as education, fashion or sports, pharmaceutical marketing plays an essential role in the commercialization of products (not all of its products are drugs) in a highly competitive market, where manufacturers compete to position themselves as the most prescribed by healthcare professionals.
In this context, marketing in the pharmaceutical sector must establish an effective connection with various types of customers and design strategies to create distribution networks at the regional level. The marketing plan must also address and encourage the implementation of strategies that enable pharmaceutical manufacturers to raise awareness and promote their products among healthcare professionals.
How to develop a pharmaceutical marketing strategy?
The design of an effective pharmaceutical marketing strategy requires a comprehensive approach adapted to the particularities of the sector. :
- Know your audience: A thorough understanding of your potential customers and healthcare professionals is essential. Define your ideal customer profile and analyze the specific needs and preferences of your audience.
- Optimize product or service information: High light the key features and benefits of your pharmaceutical products. Provide clear and accurate information on efficacy, safety and any other relevant aspect for your audience.
- Structure the right message: Define messages that highlight the values and quality of your products. Be sure to effectively communicate how your products address the needs and concerns of patients and healthcare professionals.
- Harness the power of visuals: Use high-quality images and graphics to support your message. Striking visual representations can improve comprehension and retention of content.
- Promote technology upgrades and pharmaceutical digital marketing: Keep abreast of the latest technological and digital trends in the pharmaceutical field. Leverage digital platforms to reach a wider audience and promote your products effectively.
- Open new avenues for product distribution: Explore different distribution channels that align with your audience’s needs. Consider strategic partnerships and innovative methods to reach customers efficiently.
By following these steps and adapting them to the unique characteristics of pharmaceutical marketing, you will be able to develop a solid strategy that will make your products stand out in a highly regulated and competitive market.
Types of pharmaceutical marketing strategies
Once you know in detail the environment and also all the characteristics of the business, you will be able to build a strategy that makes sense and is in line with the objectives you want to achieve for your company.
The choice of strategy will be determined not only by the objectives, but also by the target and the stage of the decision-making process at which the potential customer is at.
Email marketing
Your company probably already has a database. And if not, it is never too late to start generating it! Whatever the case may be, remember that email marketing is one of the essential communication channels today to keep your contacts informed about your activity and up to date with your news.
Collect valuable information about your database to define the mailings you are going to send: what their interests are, what they expect from your brand, their age, their language, their gender… All this will help you segment your mailings so that each contact receives in their inbox what really interests them about your brand, your services and your products.
It is important that you decide which tool you will use to send your mailings, where you will store your contacts, how you will segment your audiences, how to subscribe to your list, the frequency of your mailings and the content you can generate.
Thanks to email marketing you will be able to maintain a lasting and quality relationship with your contacts, improve your engagement, drive traffic to your website and social networks, promote your products, etc. Platforms like Mailchimp make it very easy for you, and we know this because we have been working with them for more than 10 years, we are their Official Partner and we have their certification for agencies.
Boost your email marketing with us!
Social networks
If you are looking for a close and almost constant contact with your audience, do not hesitate to use social networks. The first thing is to know your audience well to know in which social network you should invest more effort.
If you are a B2B company, LinkedIn will be essential in your strategy. If your audience is young and at the same time you can create quality visual content that helps you at a branding level, you will find a niche on Instagram. Looking to increase your engagement and your audience is adult? Facebook offers you numerous options.
Social networks are information channels to which your audience will come looking to know more about you, so don’t be afraid to put yourself at the center. Talk about your product and publish links to your website, inform about your news, advertise your values… Information from third parties is welcome, but always of quality and complementary to your messages.
Define a tone, how often you will publish, and if you will give any other use to these networks, such as answering questions through private messages. They will help you with your web traffic, to generate contacts and potential clients, to build loyalty among those who already know you, and to spread your brand.
Webinars
Quality knowledge from a reliable source is very attractive to the general public. If you have experts on topics related to your services or products, organize webinars or webinars. There are numerous platforms with which you can have a page from which interested parties can sign up and you can broadcast the presentation live on the day and at the time you decide: Zoom, Go To Webinar, etc.
Ideally, they should not be too commercial because then you will scare off interested parties. Let yourself be known and share what you know. Those truly interested will come back to you to learn more. And you can always move on to selling yourself in subsequent communications.
Webinars will help you to generate a database, new valuable contacts and to spread the word about your brand.
Pharmaceutical content marketing
That same knowledge we talked about in the section on webinars can be turned into articles of interest to your audience. You can open a blog in which you give health tips related to your product, or in which you share success stories.
Take the opportunity to touch on topics related to your business and also to give a boost to your SEO positioning, elaborating texts with interesting keywords for you in terms of searches.
You will gradually become a reliable source of information, which adds value to the company. In addition, content marketing will help you generate content that you can use in your email marketing, social media and SEO, and you will capture the interest of potential customers.
Search engine advertising
To carry out an advertising strategy in search engines or social networks does not require a high initial investment.
In the case of search engine advertising (SEM), first define the keywords for which you want to appear and for which you want to pay. Of course, it is essential that they are related to the pharmaceutical sector, your services and your products. It will be very important that you keep an eye on your budget on a daily basis so that your investment does not skyrocket. Define also which objectives it helps you to achieve: visits to your website, your blog, subscriptions, sales, etc.
By employing SEO tactics, one seeks not only to maintain, but also to boost a website ‘s visibility in search results. This strategic approach involves optimizing content, improving site structure and using relevant keywords. Although SEO results may take longer to materialize, the long-term investment translates into a sustainable increase in visibility, improving position in search results and generating quality traffic more organically.
The combination of both strategies, SEM and SEO, offers a comprehensive approach to meet the demands of a competitive and constantly evolving digital environment. The SEO strategy, being a free component, becomes a fundamental pillar to ensure a lasting and effective presence in search results over time.
As for advertising on social networks, take the opportunity to advertise those posts that already have a good organic engagement data (clicks, likes, comments…) so that they reach even more people. Go for eye-catching visual formats.
It will be important that you define different types of advertising depending on the state in which your followers are:
- Thanks to advertising on social networks you can make those who are already loyal customers, who know your brand and have purchased on previous occasions, to buy again. We achieve this with an ad for a complementary product, for example.
- If we want to activate the followers we have but have not yet made a purchase, we can make an advertisement for a discounted product.
- And if we are looking for more followers, people who don’t know us yet, we can do a sweepstakes or create a quiz related to our brand and/or product to attract them.
You can increase your followers, web visits, sales, subscriptions and improve the reputation of your brand and its profiles. The next step will be to define the specific actions of each strategy with dates, budget, tools and which team members will execute it.
Tools to implement the pharmaceutical marketing strategy
En la actualidad, existen diversas aplicaciones que facilitan la creación de un plan de marketing y la medición de los objetivos establecidos. En Reinicia, optamos por las variadas herramientas proporcionadas por la plataforma de Zoho debido a su flexibilidad en la elección de planes y precios, su sólido soporte, una amplia gama de funciones y recursos, así como la capacidad de integración con otras aplicaciones y la automatización de tareas.
Here are some of the Zoho tools that are very useful in planning objectives and measuring marketing actions:
- Zoho Analytics: Understanding data is essential for effective goal setting. Zoho Analytics allows you to collect and analyze data from various sources in one place. With the ability to create custom reports and dashboards, you can measure the performance of your marketing campaigns and evaluate how well you are meeting your goals.
- Zoho CRM: Esta herramienta permite la gestión eficiente de contactos, clientes y ventas. Es útil para establecer metas de ventas, dar seguimiento a oportunidades y evaluar el rendimiento del equipo de ventas. La función de informes proporciona una visión detallada de las métricas clave, facilitando la evaluación de objetivos y el seguimiento del progreso.
- Zoho Social: Social media management is fundamental in today’s marketing. Zoho Social allows you to set goals for your social media profiles and offers detailed analytics to evaluate performance and fulfillment of your goals.
- Zoho Survey: Customer feedback is crucial to measuring the success of marketing strategies. Zoho Survey allows you to collect customer feedback and data, helping you evaluate whether your customer satisfaction goals are being met.
- Zoho Campaigns: Ideal for managing email and marketing campaigns, this tool helps you measure the success of your campaigns and adjust strategies to achieve key email marketing KPIs.
Tanto Zoho Campaigns como Mailchimp se han diseñado para simplificar la creación y gestión de tus campañas de email marketing, brindándote la capacidad de optimizar tus KPIs y mantener una conexión sólida con tu audiencia a través de estas estrategias.
These platforms share key features including:
- Intuitive Interface: Facilitate the design of attractive mailings without the need for advanced technical skills.
- Precise segmentation: They allow you to personalize messages according to the individual preferences of your customers, improving the relevance of your campaigns.
- Automation: They save time by giving you the option to schedule your email marketing campaigns, providing efficiency in your processes.
- Real-time analysis: Both tools offer the ability to analyze in real time the key KPIs of your campaigns, providing you with valuable insights.
The integration of these tools not only optimizes your email marketing campaigns but also enriches your CRM system with valuable data, facilitating more effective management and a complete understanding of your customers. This translates into a more cohesive marketing strategy and more efficient, user-centric customer relationship management.
Keys to an effective pharmaceutical marketing strategy
The combination of these keys not only maintains, but also enhances demand and relevance in the competitive pharmaceutical sector. These strategic actions contribute to the effective positioning and fulfillment of the constantly evolving market expectations.
Building a network of relationships
The key to an effective pharmaceutical marketing strategy lies in establishing and maintaining long-term demand for products and services. This is achieved through close collaboration with pharmaceutical professionals, physicians and patients. Building a strong network of relationships, leveraging all available resources, becomes the essential foundation of this pharmaceutical-specific strategy.
In-depth knowledge of the audience
In implementing an effective strategy, it is crucial to acquire a thorough understanding of the audience and to profile the ideal customer. Optimization of the information provided on pharmaceutical products or services, together with investment in structuring the right message, plays a key role in the success of the strategy.
Enhancing the visual element and technological updating
Harnessing the power of visuals and promoting technology upgrades are essential to stand out in the pharmaceutical market. The adoption of digital marketing in this area presents itself as a key opportunity to meet the changing needs of consumers in the healthcare sector.
Opening of new distribution channels
Opening new product distribution channels is a fundamental strategy for strengthening our presence in the pharmaceutical market. These actions help to position the brand effectively and to meet the dynamic needs of consumers in the health sector.
Como partners de Zoho, proporcionamos servicios que abarcan desde consultoría estratégica y configuración personalizada hasta la gestión de campañas y análisis de datos. ¿No sabes por dónde empezar? Nosotros te guiamos para elaborar con tu estrategia de marketing farmacéutico. ¡Escríbenos!
