Introduction to analytics based marketing
New or improved products are not the major driving force of more pharma revenue. As such, successful marketing should be the top priority for all major pharma companies, and they should spend more on marketing than they do on research and development. Branding is the only way to differentiate companies from each other.
Pharma companies have a tendency to focus their marketing efforts towards targeted physicians instead of the actual consumer. However, the key to growth is more closely associated with understanding and identifying customer needs, and finding solutions to meet these needs. Most pharma marketing deliverables are more or less the same so how do they stand out? The answer is – Analytics based marketing. Measuring data is now an important element for effective marketing. Marketing analytics metrics should include many factors including sales, costs and profits. Branding is important but data analytics are needed to measure success and analytical decision-making can save both time and money for pharma companies.
Two prong marketing: Doctors and Patients
Pharma marketers always target two audiences – patients and doctors. Doctors hold the key to consumer sales and establishing a relationship with them is a good way to reach and communicate with a much wider audience. Consumers will consult their local doctor before purchasing a pharma device or prescription of some kind. and are much more likely to buy after recommendation from their doctor. Therefore, marketing to doctors is beneficial and different strategies are needed to address both doctors and patients.
Marketing to patients
Most patients now use online search engines to find information or solutions and therefore, marketing to patients is about identifying individual needs and creating an experience that is efficient and valuable to meet their needs. Creating this patient experience relies heavily on strong search engine optimization and user experience. Companies that provide clear and efficient solutions to their search queries, will inevitably experience sales and revenue. For example, if a pharma company markets a drug or treatment for depression, they should directly target the end-user through search engine optimization and content marketing.
Marketing to doctors
Marketing to doctors requires identifying the professionals needs and providing well-researched solutions in a creative way through tactical media placement. This is not cheap since competition and investment is high. The three most important considerations for marketing to doctors are:
- Only specific, well researched and articulated content marketing will achieve good results.
- Tactical media placement within individual reach is important as doctors may be desensitized to traditional marketing strategies.
- Creativity is essential since doctors are desensitized to “savvy” marketing.
7 expertise pointers that led to this success case study
- Marketing a depression drug required robust content and marketing strategies that communicated directly with the person searching for a solution to their depression.
- Analyzes of existing search results and identification of commonly search keywords with low competition for depression medicine was done. Research was essential and choosing the right keywords, links and strategies are always just as important as any amount of implementation.
- We then created articles about depression or the depression drug and inserted selected keywords like the “best drug for depression” or “recommended drugs for depression” within this content.
- We then used specific keywords, added back-links, and used organic marketing strategies to position this content at the top of search results for various depression-related queries.
- We also published this content on websites that had high authority and traffic and even created back-links to these articles from other high authority websites.
- We continued to optimize our articles until Google and other search engines ranked our content on page one for the keywords identified.
- We also measured the effectiveness of this data and these efforts and kept making certain changes to improve and achieve the desired outcomes.
