Digital strategy has already transformed the pharma and healthcare industry in many ways such as greater levels of transparency, patient communication and drug development.
In addition, due to its unrivalled cost-effectiveness, digital strategy marketing strategies offer a variety of meaningful ways to connect and treat prospective clients and customers.
In this article, we explore the key trends and tactics that will help marketers in the pharma industry to use digital strategy marketing to promote, engage and grow.
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on content marketing
Whilst the pandemic is no doubt the major trend impacting the pharmaceuticals sector, it’s worth exploring how it has influenced marketing. The pandemic has forced many pharma operations to move online and provided new options to communicate with customers. This has given pharma brands an opportunity to create content for both healthcare professionals (HCP) and patients, and distribute this across different channels.
- The consumerization of healthcare
Pharmaceutical consumers want to have the same experience in healthcare that they have from other businesses. The presence of tech brands like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook has exposed us to new information and levels of service that weren’t present 10-15 years ago. This has influenced what we expect from other brands, meaning marketers must take a customer-first approach to their marketing planning.
- Enhancing consumer engagement
Competitiveness within the pharma sector and the consumerization of healthcare mean that engaging and retaining healthcare customers is crucial. This trend requires pharma companies to review and invest in platforms that they can use to create a consistent view of the customer across many touchpoints, including targeting, segmentation, and performance management:
Creating your marketing strategy using the Opportunity > Strategy > Action framework
Opportunity, Strategy, Action is a perfect starting point for pharmaceutical marketing leaders looking to audit and reinforce their marketing strategies. This simple 3-step approach empowers marketers to adapt and react to internal and external factors influencing their customers’ lifecycles.
To help bring this further to life, let’s look at each section of the OSA framework with some examples as to how it can be used to create an effective pharmaceutical marketing strategy.
Opportunity
This stage is about evaluating the current contribution of marketing channels by reviewing your data and setting future objectives.
The consumerization of healthcare will give you a macro view of the current situation and where to explore further. The trend of people influencing and controlling their medical and wellness care is here to stay and is only likely to grow:
The consumerization of healthcare means that there is an opportunity for providers to develop strategies and market offerings that fulfill customer needs and preferences while fully engaging them in an end-to-end customer experience.
Strategy
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve (objectives), you must define a strategy for how you will get there and which tactics you will use for customer acquisition (Reach), conversion (Act and Convert), and customer retention/loyalty (Engage).
The objective you’ve set in the first stage will help you shape your strategy. For example, if you are developing a new product offering, you may need to focus on Reach to build awareness of your brand and grow your audience. But if you are already established you may instead want to focus on Act to prompt interaction, subscribers, and leads.
Action
Finally, you will need to define how your team will execute the strategy and the methods you will use to measure and track success.
In this stage, you will take your objectives and strategy and translate them into an action plan. If your pharma strategy is going to take a very content-oriented approach to inform and engage consumers, for example, Smart Insights’ Content Marketing Blueprint provides a structure and workflow for planning a content marketing program:
Read my more blogs from here
