Pharmaceutical Marketing Plan Process
How to create a pharmaceutical marketing plan in six logical steps.
Marketing planning isn’t an easy task.
The pressures exerted onto marketing teams by external demands and other internal departments encourage marketing teams and team members to jump right in and start promoting the organisation. Sometimes in ways that might not always be effective.
Often, our activities are determined by what we’ve always done in the past without knowing if what we are doing is making a difference and often we act on dated assumptions that drive the work we are conducting. Again, we could be more effective by doing things more strategically with some planning.
Subscribe for marketing insights via email
The pharmaceutical marketing plan includes the budgets, channels and the ideas which will take the pharmaceutical organisation, and its products and services, forward in the current landscape. But do you think your plan could be better and could be driven by insight? Do you think the plan has been put together hurriedly with parts missing? Or, do you think it can be improved with better structure and direction?
Here is a proven six-stage marketing plan template to determine your next pharmaceutical marketing plan or tweak your current plan.
THE PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING PLAN PROCESS USING THE SOSTAC FRAMEWORK
SOSTAC is a strategic marketing planning model that looks at six stages of the marketing plan: Situation analysis, objectives, strategy, tactics, actions and control.
There is a range of marketing planning templates and frameworks available to adopt, however, the SOSTAC model has emerged as one of the leading plan models due to its simplicity and practicality. Where marketers can move between stages and cross-reference whether the assertions and decisions made within each achieves the direction set out in the previous stage.
The plan’s stages, expressed in a circular and on-going process, can be visualised below in what is deemed as a “multi-channel marketing growth wheel.”
Whether you’re embarking on a marketing campaign or looking to plan your annual or even 3-5 month plan, SOSTAC can be used to determine whether your plan is likely to succeed as well as keep you on track during the execution of the plan.
We will go over all six elements of the plan in the context of a pharmaceutical organisation’s marketing plan.
1. SITUATION ANALYSIS: EVALUATE CURRENT ACTIVITY AND PREVIOUS MARKETING PLANS (WHERE ARE YOU NOW?)
The first stage of the marketing planning process is a review of the current situation, and from a marketing perspective, an examination of the current (or previous) marketing plan and activities. Researching internal and external elements will give you an overview of the direction you can take your marketing plan within the current landscape.
This is perhaps the most important stage (that can take up to 50% of the planning process time), and some of the work carried out will not actually make it into the physical plan, rather inform the decisions made for the marketing plan. The choices you will make, specifically in terms of strategy and action planning, will be better (and often more effective) as you are more realistic with your expectations in your current market position. Devoting time to this stage of the pharmaceutical marketing plan will help make more informed decisions throughout the rest of the plan.
There are a range of questions to ask yourself, and as part of your situation analysis (SWOT), ask yourself or your marketing team:
What do our customers want?
What opportunities and threats currently exist within the marketplace and the wider pharmaceutical industry?
What are our competitors doing that we can do better or counter?
2. OBJECTIVE SETTING: DETERMINE THE SPECIFIC GOALS OF THE MARKETING PLAN (WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE?)
Once the current position is defined, it is then appropriate to determine the desired marketing position you wish to achieve for your pharmaceutical organisation. Setting such objectives gives you perspective and a target so that your marketing activities are focused and contribute towards the overall marketing and organisational objectives.
This stage will likely involve all of your marketing team, even board members and those responsible for allocating marketing budgets, where the aims of the entire marketing plan are set. The previous stage will determine what you are capable of achieving and good objectives are quantified with timescales.
During this stage, you are looking to set the following:
Align the marketing objectives with organisational objectives
Select KPIs.
3. DETERMINE STRATEGY: SELECT THE PARTICULAR APPROACH TO THE MARKETING PROBLEM (HOW DO YOU GET THERE?)
The strategic planning stage determines direction, and within the marketing plan, summarises how the objectives set in stage two are fulfilled. A hugely important process of the marketing plan that takes into account the two previous sections as it dictates how the organisation is going to shift its position.
Here, trends are responded to where a subsequent position within the market is determined, and subsequently, what marketing and communication strategies are adopted to support customer acquisition, conversion and retention.
In a nutshell, at least from a B2B pharmaceutical marketing perspective, how will leads or sales be delivered? Should your pharmaceutical organisation wish to expand into new territories, your marketing strategy should reflect this (perhaps consider the Ansoff Matrix for ideas here).
Set up an internal marketing strategy meeting with all of the key stakeholders and discuss the following:
Are we targeting a particular market segment?
How will we position ourselves the market/market segment?
What is our communications/content strategy?
4. TACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: SET OUT THE DETAILS OF THE PLAN, AND HOW TO ACHIEVE THE STRATEGY (HOW EXACTLY WILL WE GET THERE?)
The tactical stage of the planning process will show exactly how to implement the strategy determined in the previous section, which is generally more detailed than either of the other stages from a documentation perspective. Each touchpoint, from an initial advert to a landing page to email marketing workflows, to CRM management to supporting news articles and social media content, as well as print advertising for awareness purposes, for example, will be listed in this section.
This might support a content marketing strategy designed to educate a sub-section of a pharmaceutical vertical about solution alternatives, that positions your organisation as the cheaper, yet friendlier alternative to the market leader.
Often, to determine the tactical direction, marketing teams (this perhaps means more senior members) will need to lock themselves in a room, look at all of the available channels and tactics within the communications mix, and decide which to focus on that are more likely to achieve the strategy. Be ready to spend time scribbling on whiteboards…
In the end, the following will be required:
A roadmap of tactics and touchpoints
A review of your media plan and schedule
A detailed Gantt chart of all the channels you plan to use.
5. ACTION PLANNING: ENSURE THAT THE MARKETING PLAN CAN BE EXECUTED (WHO DOES WHAT AND WHEN?)
A marketing plan was always going to feature a section which would determine and state the details of the plan, specifically what exactly are marketing team members doing with their working hours and when? This will happen in the action planning section, which features the detailed working out of the tactics.
Each tactical channel, activity or medium is a mini-plan that needs to be managed, with the frequency of posting and specific actions of each channel taken into consideration. What actions need to be taken (daily, weekly, monthly)? What processes are required to make the tactics happen? What marketing tools are required?
Reading about this stage you are no doubt beginning to lose enthusiasm for your marketing plan, which would suggest why this part of the planning process is often the weakest for organisations. It often goes missed entirely. Always remember to allocate time and resources to your plan and conduct internal marketing to team members so that they are aware of the actions required of them to bring the plan to life:
Remember to:
Allocate resources to specific individuals
Create a marketing/content calendar with specified dates
Conduct ongoing internal marketing and one-to-ones for motivation.
6. CONTROL: DECIDE ON THE APPROPRIATE METHODS TO EVALUATE THE PLAN AND PROCESS (HOW AND WHAT DO WE MONITOR?)
Finally, and to go full circle on the plan, is the control stage. The control stage identifies what you need to measure and how often, and what needs to happen should you identify that the plan isn’t working or if you are not on track to meet the KPIs set out in stage two of the plan.
A key benefit of such reporting is to identify whether you are succeeding or not before its too late, as well as arming you with the knowledge for next year’s pharmaceutical marketing/campaign plan.
The majority of this process will look at your marketing metrics - such as website visitors, conversions and number of leads/sales generated - but it will also include reviewing internal workflows and how the team is performing as a unit. Each tactical element from stage four will need its own reporting system, as well as how each team member is performing.
Controlling the plan is essential, and like the previous section, this should not be ignored. Three key areas to plan:
Reporting on KPIs
Regular process reviews
Gathering team feedback.
PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING PLANNING
Creating a pharmaceutical marketing plan is made easier when the structure has presented itself to you. The above template is based on the SOSTAC marketing model developed by marketing strategist PR Smith and is considered one of the best models to follow for marketing planning in a number of situations. It is what we follow for our pharmaceutical-based clients.
The structure is simple and logical that derives from the situation analysis, which by its very definition, is the most important aspect (even if the majority of the findings are not required within the documentation of the marketing plan itself) that can inform accurate decision-making in terms of internal capability and external opportunities and threats.
Follow its structure for your next pharmaceutical marketing plan. Because it’s easier to reach a destination when you are informed about the road you need to take.
