5 Tips for Boosting Your Digital Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Sector
Thoughts on boosting digital marketing productivity in pharma.
Promoting products in healthcare is a tricky task. You need to cover numerous channels, stick to regulations, and ensure your ads reach their intended audience. For example, you need to communicate with followers and collaborate with influencers on social media and you should have an SEO-friendly website with the ability to find the required products through internal site search best practices.
More and more technologies emerge to streamline various tasks. One of the notable trends in recent years is the growing influence of the internet. People shop online. They work remotely. And, of course, they Google their symptoms, look for treatment and order medicine to their homes.
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How can you outperform competitors to encourage people to choose your brand? Legacy marketing methods may be irrelevant if people stay at home and rely on their gadgets. That’s where digital marketing is your helping hand. It unities online strategies to promote goods to the right people.
If done correctly, digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry is an effective way to connect with the audience. This article will show you how to sell more, increase customer satisfaction and improve digital marketing efficiency.
5 Digital Marketing Tips for the Pharma Industry
1. Collect Data from Various Sources
Any marketing campaign should begin with knowing your target market. Thanks to technological advances, it’s now possible with unparalleled accuracy.
The more we use the internet, the more information we leave behind. It’s useful for many spheres like eCommerce, SaaS and travel agencies. Pharmaceutical companies should also leverage user data to improve digital marketing.
Whom do you drive to the brand? What information can you utilize? People search for ailments and products on search engines and insert keywords for you to analyze. Social media users talk about their preferences, demographic data and interests. Don’t forget about geolocation to learn where your target audience resides.
The Internet of Things is another powerful source of information about customers’ health. Wearables like smartwatches, smartphones, and others are interconnected to exchange information with each other via Wi-Fi.
The company offers a sensor for inhalers. This sensor links to an app and collects data on inhaler usage, assisting patients in tracking the frequency of inhaler use and forecasting attacks based on this information. These findings also help medical professionals. They demonstrate whether a patient follows prescriptions.
People utilize apps to control their activities, rest, and medical parameters in real-time. This trend is so popular that even the term Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) appeared.
The end effect is that businesses now have access to a vast amount of data or Big Data. Your task is to gather and analyze it in a meaningful and wise manner. It can help you revamp operations and identify the target market. Note that the pharmaceutical industry is subject to strict regulations: security, personal information use, and privacy.
2. Personalise Messaging to Provide Tailored Content
After collecting customer data, the work begins. You need to process these details to segment the audience into groups with similar characteristics. To do this, employ a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM). Some examples include Kapture, StayinFront, Veeva, CRMNEXT, and others. These solutions also forecast sales, conduct competitor analysis, automate processes, and store scattered information in one place.
Why do you need to separate clients into smaller segments? The reason is personalization. When you know people’s needs and pain points, offering them the most needed solution is easier.
Personalization is a powerful solution for highly-competitive spheres. Research shows that 71% of customers dislike having an impersonal shopping experience. And the pharma industry isn’t an exception when it comes to targeted content.
A case in point is precision medicine or personalized medicine as another term. This approach revolves around taking into account people’s differences and providing them with appropriate treatment.
Sustain a one-to-one dialogue with clients. Treating people like individuals is one more way to improve your pharmaceutical digital marketing.
3. Engage with Augmented & Virtual Reality
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are technologies to create another environment for users. They ensure an immersive experience and remove the boundaries of the real world. That’s why you may have come across Extended Reality or XR, a term for AR and VR.
Let’s take eCommerce as an example. Online merchants often implement these technologies on their websites. As a result, visitors can try on products, apply them to their bodies, and see how they look before buying items. Another way is to do it on social media with special masks on Instagram and Snapchat.
How can you employ VR and AR in pharma? Apart from helping during manufacturing, you can implement them in sales, marketing, and advertising of pharmaceutical products. VR and AR can help you communicate effectively with healthcare practitioners to visualize the products’ advantages.
Clients can experience things through 3D, animated, and interactive presentations. For example, you can show the impact of your pills. These solutions may also persuade patients to buy goods thanks to the more profound insights into how products operate.
Professionals can use it to “test-drive” large medical equipment without physically delivering it. It benefits both manufacturers and medical staff. How? Businesses reduce shipping costs and streamline training. Medical professionals can have a better hands-on experience with the product before purchasing.
A case in point is Novartis, a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. The company partnered with ARworks to develop several immersive solutions. One of them imitates travelling through a human body in a submarine. So users can observe the affected area, the drug molecule, and the healing process with the help of Novartis.
4. Introduce Chatbots to Be Available 24/7
Another way to improve the customer experience is to leverage chatbots. These are virtual assistants answering prospects’ questions and providing benefits to organizations, such as:
Working without breaks and holidays
Extending assistance beyond business hours
Resolving issues without human involvement
Reducing the waiting time
Enhancing employee productivity
Providing information about users to personalize interactions.
Unfortunately, legacy chatbots left a negative impression on users and businesses. They rely on predefined scripts, so you have to program all possible scenarios. If not, chatbots fail to return relevant responses or display the “I don’t understand” phrase. That isn’t very pleasant.
Modern chatbots are AI-powered. They also use machine learning (ML) to develop automatically with time. It means humans don’t need to intervene to update them and focus on more complex tasks. No wonder chatbots win their place in different industries, including pharma.
Check the example from Cornerstones4Care above. It’s a diabetes portal from Novo Nordisk with the chatbot Sophia. Patients with diabetes can access this chatbot to find answers about nutrition, the disease, and a healthy lifestyle.
Websites aren’t the only way to interact with chatbots. You can introduce this technology on social media, such as Facebook, or messengers like WhatsApp. That’s what Johnson & Johnson Vision did. The company enabled a chatbot called Andy on the Facebook Messenger app. It helps clients choose lenses, provides intuitive coaching and resolves issues with contact lenses.
5. Employ Blockchain to Secure Data
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is associated with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, it presents more opportunities apart from transactions. It’s a chain of connected blocks to log data. The sequence of blocks continues when the number of operations increases.
Blockchain is usually compared to a ledger with all information available to participants. When something changes, everyone sees it. You can’t change, replace, or delete elements or tweak their order. Every attempt to do it will result in rejection.
How can these facts benefit the pharma industry? Blockchain bears the potential in the following activities:
Sharing authenticated information across organizations
Providing visibility to the supply chain from manufacturers to pharmacies and patients
Reducing paperwork during contract creation
Sharing only the needed information to perform operations while hiding internal systems or confidential details.
Conclusion
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the rapidly growing spheres. As the pandemic has shown, it needs to adapt quickly to the changes. While many industries came to a standstill, hospitals worked several times more. At the same time, people migrated to the Internet to resolve their issues. The number of online deals is growing exponentially and shows no signs of slowing down.
Many companies from various spheres focus on digital marketing to promote their goods. Pharmaceutical businesses with effective digital marketing strategies have a chance to outperform competitors that still rely on legacy promotional methods. Now it is crucial to adopt technologies, including:
Big data analytics
Personalization based on prospects’ traces left on numerous touchpoints
AR/VR to present products and their effects, educate clients, and save on delivery costs
Intelligent chatbots helping customers 24/7
Blockchain to provide transparency and security to transactions.
For more on digital marketing in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help, visit our section on web.
Guest contributor: Kate Parish, chief marketing officer at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Digital Marketing and website promotion. Kate always strives to stay on pace with the ever-advancing online world and the sphere of Magento PWA development. Her expertise includes in-depth knowledge of SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, and the field of online sales in general.
