B2B Pharmaceutical Marketing Tips for 2021

November 25, 2020 Chris Lawson

As we prepare for a new year, consider these 17 B2B pharmaceutical marketing tips for your 2021 marketing plan.

Let’s face it, we know we can do things better. Be more effective with our marketing. Review, optimise. But do we ever really focus on this task at hand? I’m not so sure…

As we approach the festive period, a period where things are generally a bit quieter and with the new year (and new marketing plan) approaching, we can sit back and review current marketing activities with the view of doing things better and introducing some new marketing tactics to the plan. This post will help B2B pharmaceutical and life science marketing teams and departments do just that.

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17 B2B PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING TIPS AND IDEAS

Seventeen B2B pharmaceutical marketing tips for your next campaign and plan:

1. REVIEW YOUR DIGITAL ASSETS: STRIVE FOR BRANDING CONSISTENCY

This year, you will have focussed more on creating digital campaigns and assets to counter the lack of face-to-face and event-based activity due to show cancellations. chances are that those digital assets were put together quickly, and now you may be able to see inconsistencies between those digital assets.

Reviewing those assets - bring all of the assets from various departments together and assess for consistency of message, tone and look and feel - will identify those which are on-brand and those which are not up to date accordingly. You may feel that all of those materials fall short where a brand overhaul is required. Catch them now before we get to 2021 and before we lose sight of this important first task.

2. THEN, REVIEW YOUR MARKETING MESSAGE - IS THE USP & CTA CLEAR?

Similarly, reviewing the marketing and communications message of those branded materials is also important. Possibly more important because it is this message that is often the driver for those marketing and digital assets working and providing a return. So, whilst the consistency of the brand is important, the effect that we have on our audiences (often determined by what we ask them to do next) is possibly more important. Conversion might be the metric in question here.

Therefore, review the core unique selling proposition related to those assets as well as the call-to-action - are people taking the action which you are presenting? A review of the message might uncover some weaknesses of your assets and addressing them now means that those assets will perform better for you in 2021. This is important in B2B pharma as you are likely facing stiff competition, meaning you ought to make the most of each message your target audience sees.

3. REVIEW ALL CURRENT CONTENT AND REPURPOSE

Content marketing in B2B pharma is challenging due to the many layers a piece of content must go through to get published. The content creation process, however, can include the highly productive exercise of getting more out of each piece of content you have created. I think this is really where you can see the results of your content strategy come through, without too much creative effort.

If you see these thought leadership articles building up, you could take 8 of them - where the topics complement each other - and create a downloadable e-book to promote via LinkedIn or via a specific publisher in the pharma space. Whitepapers are huge investments for any organisation, not only in pharma, so why not review the paper and pinpoint all of the various content pieces you can source from it to use elsewhere? Rest assured, this isn’t a case of old pills in new bottles.

4. START A NEW CONTENT-FOCUSED SERIES

Every publisher and creator of content will know that one of the sure-fire methods of building an audience is to post topical content consistently. Doing so will motivate your audience to come back again to read, watch or listen to similar content. Creating such programmes, often within a series, is the most important element for building audiences; without it, your audience has nothing to engage with or come back to engage with again.

This is often a major hurdle for B2B pharmaceutical organisations, especially after the content programme has started where the organisation always has a deadline for content looming. Ensure you have a structured content production programme that can consistently deliver the content you require to reach your audience, at regular fixed intervals. Keeping the format the same - the content type as well as the structure - will provide your audience with content they feel comfortable with, which they can also anticipate and subscribe to.

5. GET PERSONAL WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

There is a gap for personalisation in the B2B pharmaceutical sectors. In big pharma, patients are always asking Google to find out what is wrong with them by looking for answers to symptoms and there is no better opportunity for web personalisation through websites to get to know these patients. Getting to know web visitors need not be limited to the B2C sectors and is a trend across the board. Making B2B content personal to audiences will make the information captivating and compelling.

At the very least, use personal language, make the reader feel as though you are talking directly to them and trying to persuade them you know exactly what you are talking about. This way your audience feels appreciated and as though you have thought about them but with an increased focus on privacy and data protection, marketers have to find the right balance between meeting privacy requirements and delivering on customer expectations to achieve a more personal relationship with an audience.

6. ADOPT A SCORING SYSTEM FOR YOUR LEADS

Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Doing it this way, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the cold-to-warm scale. The criteria for these actions is completely up to the pharma organisation or the salesperson, but it must be consistent across your marketing and sales departments. Often, such processes are absent meaning that B2B pharma organisations can do much more with the CRM and contacts within.

A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve shared, their level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team determines. Aim to determine what constitutes a warm lead based on the actions taken, and look to engage those cold leads with the view of having them take the same actions. Go into 2021 with a lead scoring criteria in the CRM and make engaging with current CRM contacts a priority within your marketing plan.

7. SPEND MORE TIME WITH CLIENTS

Often, having marketers meet clients is considered inconvenient and unnecessary. But involving marketing (especially new marketing managers) in site visits and client calls can help bring the marketer up to speed with the target customer/audience, which will also provide valuable insights about behaviours. Doing this will certainly help the long-term performance of the marketing functions within B2B pharma.

8. ALSO, GET PERSONAL WITH THE SALES DEPARTMENT

Just over half of marketers report a divide between themselves and sales departments, meaning a lot of waste and missed opportunities. By developing a single vision for sales and marketing, pharma organisations can experience a range of benefits such as decreased costs, enhance the effectiveness and of sales and marketing tactics and measure performance. Perhaps more importantly, they can become more efficient during uncertain times.

2021 is the time for you, the marketer or salesperson, to lead the collaboration between your sister department and show your boss the inevitable increase in marketing and sales performance for doing so. Regular meetings, shared buyer personas, closed-loop marketing and a sole CRM system can all help bring departments together and working more efficiently.

9. HOST YOUR OWN (DIGITAL) EVENT

For many of us, our (traditional) marketing plans have been turned upside down. But we are now heading in a new direction dictated by digital and digital technologies and it is these technologies that hold the key for hosting and running our own events. Virtual events had grown in popularity during 2020 as the world continues to deal with the effects of COVID-19 - and even as a vaccine nears, the virtual events will still have a role to play for B2B pharma marketers in 2021. Organisations can use digital to host their own events, from open days to workshops to educational keynotes, and bring prospects closer to their people and product offering. If you’d like more leads, hosting your own event is the way to go.

10. MAP OUT YOUR WEBSITE USER JOURNEYS AND IMPROVE THEM

Later on, we will look at systems within your technology stack, but it is always a good idea to review the performance of your website from time to time. Do webpages load quickly? Is the content presented clearly? Is your mobile website also up to scratch? Look at how people are finding your website via and most common landing pages, and look at the journeys that are created thereafter (using Google Analytics). Identify the pages with high bounce rates and low dwell times and review the content and CTAs on each. Reviewing these user journeys will likely what you’re doing well, and what you’re not, so you can improve them and help your website visitors browse your website more efficiently.

Conduct user experience and usability/accessibility studies on your website if the above sounds new. Things need to be simple and obvious for users. You should also be looking to redesign (or refreshing your website every 3-4 years).

11. ALIGN YOUR BRAND WITH A GOOD CAUSE/SUPPORT A CHARITY

In addition to throwing your events, sponsor the activities of organisations and causes you can get behind. For example, if you committed to being a green company, then sponsor a green energy initiative conference. Filtergrade identifies that sponsors typically receive recognition in event materials and on a banner at the event. Every business that attends and is interested in your type of service or product knows you support green efforts. There is an instant connection, so when they hear your brand name again, they’re more likely to become a lead. Sponsoring events is a slow lead-growth method but still useful.

12. CONSIDER JOINT VENTURE, INFLUENCER AND REFERRAL PROGRAMMES

Referral marketing - having others spread the word about organisations and products - is particularly strong as people generally trust the words of others. A word-of-mouth initiative as such can be designed by an organisation to incentivise influences and prominent industry figures to generate new leads and customers through their own networks. There are a number of tactics that you can adopt here, such as JV programs and influencer marketing, where a structured programme is created to encourage referrals to your organisation. Let 2021 be the year which you make this happen - you’ll quickly see the benefits of doing so with little effort on your part.

13. CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH AND THEN PUBLISH WITHIN THE SECTOR

In the pharmaceutical industry, a whitepaper, e-book or report is commonly published following a study or some research into a particular hypothesis, with the paper itself as a vehicle for publishing the results, as well as the other implications of the research. Such a document offers a comprehensive overview of specific periods, events, occurrences or subjects and is considered highly formal to communicate information which has been compiled as a result of research and analysis of data.

Pharma professionals are always looking to access new information that might be relevant to their roles, specialist sectors and organisations, and if you can provide this and publish it within the industry, you will likely gain a new audience. Not only will you achieve recognition and positioning, but you can also generate new leads and subscribers should this research piece sit behind a gated landing page/form.

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14. CREATE SOME BRANDED ITEMS (TO BE SENT TO HOME ADDRESSES)

Our colleagues and prospects are likely to be working remotely (albeit at least for parts of the working week) and sending some physical mail to a home address can be seen as friendly touch. Of course, you will need to request this address and you will likely need to make your privacy policy known. And once you have this data you shouldn’t mail that person at this address anytime soon after. But if you can select a branded item(s) which you can send that the prospect may find useful - some item ideas can be taken from our CPhI Survival Pack or from general COVID-19 protective and hygiene products - in their temporary home offices.

Quartz at Work discusses the importance of branded items for employee culture, but I think the same can be said for doing so for prospects. They suggest getting personal, familiar, physical, festive, functional and real. Not many organisations will think this way, so you may have an uncontested channel to reach your audiences in a way which will be remembered.

15. FOCUS YOUR MEDIA SPEND

Having a media budget is great as it means you can advertise and promote your organisation within third-party publications and websites. Appearing within trusted titles as such is hugely important as it builds trust with the reader/visitor. Getting it right - to generate brand awareness and qualified leads - is business-critical. With hundreds of B2B pharmaceutical titles out there, it is, therefore, necessary to hand-pick the titles that are most suited for your product/service and focus your budget so that the message is received.

Any media plan we create for our clients will have a similar focus to cut through the noise, and often when you focus on titles and increase your spend with a publisher, other options and opportunities arise on top of the extended rapport you will build with the reader.

16. LOOK AT THE DATA TO IDENTIFY THE MARKETING WASTE

In the busy B2B marketplace that pharma marketers operate within, there is rarely downtime at all - especially downtime to be spent looking through data on how past and current campaigns are performing. But this is a hugely valuable exercise to identify the marketing waste. Looking at samples of data - from paid insertions to email and email clicks - will uncover the marketing activity that is effective and works well for you, as well as those that need optimising or abandoned in its entirety.

Our friends over at Altitude Marketing suggest that if you’re making decisions based on samples under 10,000 anything, you’re doing it wrong: “10,000 is the magic number. When you have data based on 10,000 users, sessions or impressions, you can usually feel decently confident that it’s pointing somewhere.”

17. UTILISE ONE OF YOUR MARKETING AUTOMATION SYSTEM’S FEATURES TO ITS FULLEST, AND DO IT WELL

Inbound/marketing automation systems such as SharpSpring, HubSpot and Marketo have a large range of features. SEO, Email marketing, live chat, social media, lead scoring, sales and automation are just some of them. And whilst the features of the systems are often rich, the level of adoption often isn’t - B2B marketers in pharma do not use such features to their fullest (and to their advantage).

Often, not all of the features need to be used - our inbound marketing team will never suggest using the features for the sake of it. But we will always handpick a few focussed tactics and do them well. Should you be reviewing your marketing stack going into 2021, with your automation system being scrutinised, review what you’re currently doing to do it better as well as focus on a new feature to adopt. Email marketing jobs can always increase as you create new automations based on user behaviour, for example. Rarely do we see pharmaceutical organisations utilise their marketing technology to its fullest and automating email marketing is one of the first places we suggest B2B pharmaceutical marketing teams consider.

B2B PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING FOR 2021

The message that accompanies the seventeen marketing tips in this article is to be strategic. Looking at what you already have is a great place to start - your content, website and systems, and then improving performance. The goal is to remove the waste, do the things you currently do better and then scale. Start 2021 with a new outlook, as well as a new marketing plan.

For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on strategy.

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