How To Promote A Pharmaceutical Business

Intense competitive market with the emergence of a number of pharmaceutical Indian companies with new and innovative business models are forced to enter the struggle, causing market disruption and increasing competition. Pharma is a big business and one of the most in-demand and profitable industries in the world. Then the question of how to stand out or gain attention with so much competition or being able to stand out from the crowd is really challenging.

Building a successful pharmaceutical company is not possible overnight and it requires a complete understanding of the consumers, distributors along with their geographical areas they wanted to work. With massive competition, marketing in the pharma industry is now tougher than ever.

The proper and effective means of promoting and marketing your pharmaceutical company is essential to maximize both your domestic and online reach while sharing the benefits of medications, treatments or services. Minor modifications in the marketing approach along with the proper usage of technology can have a huge impact on company’s business growth and performance.

Understanding the consumers need is the key factor of growth in the pharma business than to focus on creating or improving products. Pharma companies should bet bigger on their sales and marketing teams. Marketing enables pharma companies to get themselves identified, anticipated along with providing solutions for customer requirements.

However, in this tough scenario of increasing pharma regulations and consumer brand choices, pharma companies are going all out with their innovative marketing ideas to get their products outperform in front of healthcare professionals and patients. There are many different pharmaceutical marketing strategies that we can choose from; we are discussing some of these strategies here-

The most common strategies that target the markets are

• By increasing sales of an existing product in existing markets
• By launching an existing product in a new market
• By introducing an existing product into a new market
• By introducing a new product into a new market

Most pharmaceutical companies face many challenges to market their products as they have to market it rigorously. Their marketing strategies should focus mainly on customer acquisition and customer retention theory.

A customer acquisition strategy is a strategy of adding new customers by targeting them and reaching them through online and offline mode by the proper usage of media and engagement tools, for example, lead generation and providing various offers. This strategy involves the focus of generating new business leads and customers, often in the form of inbound sales-related enquiries.

A customer retention strategy focuses more on keeping current working partners or customers whom we have already invested in and earned from and are happy and satisfied from us. This focuses less on generating new customers. This might include delivering service that’s consistent with our customer value and brand from existing customers and developing programmes that increases our customer loyalty.

• Simple and Value-added Logo for the Company

A logo is a visual presentation used to identify a company. It is an essential component for all organisations. The gradual branding of the logo helps in the establishment of logos and pharmaceutical brand in the doctor’s mind. This would help the brand to be at the top-of-mind when it comes to recommendations for patients. Logos expresses about the company’s values, create brand and give company a more professional appearance. Some company logos convey a message with no explanation required, such as H & Care Incorp whose logo itself explains that it is a company related to health and its care soughting out it to be a pharma franchise company in India.

•  Promoting Brand and Marketing

Direct marketing methods used by pharma marketers include marketing to patients and doctors that require distinct strategies. In this approach, the pharma representative usually visits the doctors to pitch their pharmaceutical products. There is also a limited time to monetize the new drug before generics flood the markets. Technically, detailing also involves providing gifts to doctors such as stationery, medical textbooks or even taking them out. The promotional inputs should be such that it is useable and symbolizes your company in the doctor’s office so that it can also feature in doctor-patient conversations. Usually it spends a lot more on marketing to doctors than marketing direct to consumers. They also have to convince doctors by talking about the efficacy of the drugs they are marketing. A regular supply of these branded items to doctors helps to establish that pharmaceutical brand in the doctor’s mind. This helps the brand to grow and be successful.

Companies must maintain launching of brands, high reputation, goodwill, a good rapport with the doctor and above all the quality of the drug, which significantly influence the prescription behavior.

Branding expresses how the companies are perceived in the minds of the consumers. They can differentiate themselves from the competition with a brand strategy. More than simply a name, design or a symbol, a brand is the recognition of a product which in turn evokes business. Analyze how a brand is currently perceived in the market and then proceed to plan to achieve its objectives.

• Digital Marketing or Social Media Presence

Digital marketing for the pharma industry is as important as for any other industry. Pharma marketing companies are quickly realizing that a whole world of opportunity exists away from traditional methods and digital marketing being one of the key avenues in this sector. The technology is pushing healthcare consumerism to the next level. The impact of social media is huge, which can re-design the whole pharmaceutical industry. It has a greater target audience and easily helps in brand awareness. Consumers use online presence to cater to information regarding health conditions, ailments and find relevant details about drugs. So, enhancing social media platforms in every form is beneficial. Many doctors use social media to market their practices, there is a higher chance of checking social media. 

Not all pharmaceutical companies target the same consumers. Some pharmaceutical brands focus on reaching parents while others provide medicines for the children. 

Complete understanding of the consumers you want to reach is one of the most important elements to keep in mind when building a pharmaceutical brand.

Use social media to build trust and loyalty with consumers who have a genuine interest in learning more about the services and medications you offer. Share updates that encourage engagement and commenting, allowing followers to share their opinions and thoughts on your blogs, newly-released products you provide. Allow followers to comment with their opinions while asking questions or submitting inquiries. Online advertising techniques and platforms provides the opportunity to boost your pharma franchise business with activities which help them make sales, informs about which pharma market segment to be targeted and with which propositions, above all how can we differ from our competitors.

• Build a Professional Website

Use a responsive and mobile-friendly website layout to provide platform for users who browse the internet with their mobile smartphones or tablet devices. Your website design should be easy to navigate and should also have a place for capturing a person’s email address. Simple website designs, like hcareindia.com, that load quickly are always good and will almost always translate well on mobile. The website is the primary customer communication tool for the drug, so it should be a good landing page for customers.

Pharma is a crowded space, but if your website is appearing on the first page for each of these searches for your product or service, you are likely to generate more organic visitors. Pharma marketing can gradually work on their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts to increase the number of organic visitors to the website over time. SEO associated benefits include generating more traffic, converting more visitors by attracting more relevant traffic, boosting awareness of the brand and products to drive sales offline and online.

SEO strategy increases visibility on search engines to increase the number of visitors arriving at a website and its web pages. It is indeed a strategic approach that takes time, but the results that manifest over this time are often long-term and can achieve an objective of becoming more visible. More and more pharmaceutical organizations are adopting more digital strategies to increase their visibility. Content marketing is the process of writing and publishing content to educate potential customers about products and services or solutions to target consumers. It is an effective strategy to engage with consumers. To enter new markets, content marketing can help with the positioning of a new product, generate awareness and generate new leads.

• Building Relationship with Doctors

At the end of the day, doctors get lots of samples, heaps of medical journals and their mailboxes are bursting with mails from companies. They have no ears for pitches and they just want facts, numbers and rationalized marketing. Doctors don’t spend countless hours browsing social media feed, reading entertainment magazines, using mobile apps and other screens like the rest of us. That means the chances of pharma marketing companies catching doctors’ attention is bleak or none. So here plays the role of building wise relationships with doctors so that they know your brand well and trust your products. This can help in their product prescription behavior.

As always, the key to a successful pharmaceutical marketing campaign is being consistent in your brand and image. With consistency, you will be able to achieve more with your brand. In order to thrive for pharmaceutical companies, they need to engage with patients, who are becoming more aware of their health and are more focused on holistic health outcomes.