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With the costs of drug research and development plummeting, HCP engagement ever so low and new industry players disrupting markets, pharma companies find it hard to continue relying on traditional marketing techniques to generate revenues. In the digital world, patients and HCPs alike expect easy and immediate access to information along with highly personalized messaging. The necessity to build efficient digital marketing for pharma companies is more evident than ever.
This guide will help you understand the key strategies, best practices, and solutions to make the most of your marketing efforts. You will also find several use cases and learn how to stay compliant.
The Importance of Digital Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The Deloitte report published in late 2024 outlined the complex landscape of the pharma industry with its long R&D timelines & costs, step therapy, and aging population. Indeed, the mean cost of drug development is reported to be anywhere between $950M and $2.8B and duration 10 to 20 years.
This complex environment puts additional stress on pharma marketing teams to achieve their goals, i.e., generate awareness, boost engagement, and drive conversions. Digital Pharma Marketing can offer efficient solutions to attain the said goals offering marketers the necessary tool to navigate the new normal of the world highly dependent on digital technology.
Research comparing the impact of traditional vs digital marketing in the pharma industry has demonstrated that while both are efficient in building awareness about the drug, digital marketing has more influence on prescription decisions compared to the digital one. With more companies planning to increase their spend on digital marketing campaigns, we can safely say that they will play a critical role in determining which companies will be able to grow revenues in the near future.
Key Digital Marketing Strategies for Pharma Companies
There are several strategies that work best for digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry.
- SEO
- Content
- SMM
- PPC
- KOL
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Pharma Websites
When your patient or HCP is looking for your company or your treatments, it’s essential that they find your company website at the top of the search engine ranking page (SERP). To dominate the SERP, you need a comprehensive SEO strategy that encompasses several areas:
- Keyword Research - to pick the right keywords for your pages.
- Content strategy & On Page SEO - to signal search engine about your expertise in the subject and get high rankings for the picked keywords.
- Technical SEO to ensure that your website delivers a seamless user experience to the visitors and avoid being “down-ranked” by Google for things like download speed.
- Link building to boost your domain authority and help your pages move up the search results.
- Local SEO to establish your online presence in different regions of the world.
Summing up, SEO is an essential digital marketing strategy for pharmaceutical companies that want to deliver clear and correct information about their treatments to the patients and HCPs.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential for two reasons. First, it helps your website pages to get to the top of the SERP. Second, it’s essential to earn trust of both HCPs and patients by providing information essential for their informed decision about their health.
Like any scientific content, it must meet several criteria to perform well in pharma marketing. Your copy should:
- Educate. You need to provide scientifically correct information about your treatment, its use, prescription guidelines, its side effects, etc.
- Engage. You need to make your content easy to read and interesting. The content should cater to the needs of your target audience.
- Convert. You need to provide clear call-to-action and guide your target audience from one funnel stage to the next.
Pharma companies often struggle to create engaging content for their audience while generalistic marketing agencies often fail to deliver scientifically-correct copy. That’s why the best course of action is to hire medical writers who understand the specifics of scientific content. Another good solution is to partner with a pharma marketing agency that has expertise and experience in driving engagement and conversions in this industry.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms provide valuable tools to drive your overall pharmaceutical digital marketing strategy. There are three ways you can use SMM for achieving your goals:
- Use social networks to direct your target audience to your website, providing valuable links, traffic, and potential leads.
- Build a two-way communication channel with HCPs and patients, gathering feedback and building meaningful relations with your brand.
- Raise awareness about your products and educate your target audience about the best treatment course.
- Use it in tandem with Key Opinion Leader Marketing.
Email Marketing for Pharma
Pharma email marketing remains one of the most efficient tools for outreach in pharma marketing, if done properly. Good practices for this strategy include:
- Using HCPs' data to personalise emails.
- Understanding industry regulations to stay compliant in your outreach.
- Create messaging that resonates with your target audience and drives engagement.
This marketing strategy is often used to build brand awareness, nurture relations with HCPs and drive retention through smartly crafted email sequences. It is also great to drive traffic to your website and invite HCPs to your events and webinars.
Paid Advertising (PPC)
PPC advertising is a marketing strategy with one of the highest ROI. While you only pay for clicks, PPC also generates impressions (views) helping you build awareness for your brand and individual treatments. Apart from achieving its direct goals, e.g., conversions, it is also a great tool to drive traffic to your website, and support other marketing initiatives like influencer marketing campaigns.
Pharma digital advertising is mostly aimed at HCPs due to its ability to reach niche audience and in some cases on patients if local regulations permit it. This type of marketing heavily depends on the ability of your team to craft precise short messaging that resonates with your target audience. If you are making outreach to HCPs you need to carefully configure it to reach the right people.
Influencer and KOL Marketing
Key Opinion Leaders are experts who are considered authority in their field and are trusted by the majority of other professionals. Some KOLs have accumulated significant followership to the extent that they are known by patients and their content is widely shared in patients’ communities. Usually it’s the case with chronic conditions that have a significant impact on a patient’s life like ASD.
Identifying such people in your particular niche, building relations with them, engaging them as your champion, and conducting joint campaigns to spread awareness in your target audience is what KOL marketing does.
Best Practices of Digital Marketing in Pharma
In this section, we shortly discuss the best practices in digital pharmaceutical marketing.
Personalisation
Today, people are constantly bombarded by brands with messages. Emails, banner ads, pop-ups, push notifications, and SMS create a constant background noise of human life. It’s hard to stand out, especially when your offer doesn’t meet the needs of the receiver. That’s why personalisation is an established practice in many industries, retail taking the lead.
Pharmaceutical companies that apply this practice will win the race as they reach out to probably the most busy and overwhelmed audience - healthcare practitioners. One of a great tools that can be used in personalisation is e-detailing. Similar to traditional detailing, it provides all the necessary information about your treatments to the HCPs. What’s different is that you can easily build it using modular content to meet the needs of an individual HCP and also enable them to build their learning journey the way they see fit choosing the content that resonates with them the most.
Analytics
One of the most powerful capabilities that digital marketing can provide to pharma companies is data. Using tracking tools can provide you with critical insights into your target audience preferences and behaviour. From your website positions in SERP to heatmaps in your application, you can see every aspect of your Pharmaceutical digital marketing in great detail and take timely action.
Don’t just let all this data sit unused. Modern market offers many analytic tools, including those based on AI, that can find hidden trends and make predictions based on available and historical data.
Using Multiple Channels
Building your outreach across multiple channels is arguably one of the best practices in digital pharma marketing. Your target audience can span several generations each having their preferred communication method. Being able to meet them where they are (and not where you want them to be) is a smart tactic.
There are two main approaches: multichannel and omnichannel marketing. While both apply several channels for outreach, they differ in terms of strategic alignment and messaging consistency. Omnichannel paves a road where each touchpoint is a step, while, in multichannel, messages do not provide a consistent journey. Usually companies transition from traditional to multichannel and then to omnichannel outreach.
Learn more in our guide on omnichannel marketing.
Leveraging Technology for Pharma Digital Marketing Success
Successful digital marketing requires a toolkit that can efficiently support your campaigns.
General Marketing Tools
General marketing tools are the tools that are used by most marketers and aren’t industry-specific. They include:
- CMS - streamline content publishing process and reduce the necessity to engage web developers every time you want your blog to go live. Example: Wordpress.
- Email Marketing Software - helps you automate your email outreach while keeping your messaging personalized and engaging. Example: Mailchimp.
- SMM Platforms help you retain consistency across multiple platforms and communicate with your audience. Example: Hootsuite.
- Data Analytics & SEO tools are used for keyword research and to track essential metrics like domain health, traffic, visitors, backlinks, etc. Example: Google Analytics.
- Tracking tools enable you to understand how the visitors engage with your digital assets (like websites or apps) and where they experience problems. Example: Hotjar
- Marketing Automation Tools are necessary to create and manage marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Example: Hubspot.
- CRM platforms are essential to build communications with HCPs, if managed properly they are your biggest source of data about your audience. Example: Salesforce.
- Design & Video Editing software is essential to create visuals to engage and educate your target audience. Example: Figma.
- AI and Machine Learning has a variety of uses in marketing from analytics and predictions to helping you in content generation. Example: ChatGPT.
Compliance Monitoring
These tools are specific to digital marketing in pharma as they assist you in navigating the regulatory landscape across multiple legislations while delivering high-quality content to your target audience.
Technology for E-detailing
These are platforms that help pharma companies streamline the creation of e-detailing for HCPs. The capabilities include:
- Remote e-detailing when an HCP access the platform from their computer or mobile device. These usually include the guidance from a sales rep who helps HCP find necessary information and learn more about the product.
- Self-guided e-detailing is a type of remote e-detailing where HCP builds their learning journey without reps guidance but can still ask the rep for their assistance.
Telehealth Platforms
After pandemics telehealth platforms have raised in popularity as they provide quick access to the doctor without the necessity to visit them in the office. Biggest pharma players quickly realised the opportunity such platforms provide:
- Patient experience is better which creates higher loyalty to the product;
- People search for their condition online and find platforms that offer alternatives to the solutions that were prescribed by their physicians and didn’t work;
- Platforms feed pharma with data about patients.
Regulatory Compliance and Challenges
Compliance across multiple legislations is one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing for pharma companies. These regulations are set to ensure patient safety. They also help pharmaceutical companies to build and support their reputation as well as earn trust of both HCPs and patients. Regulations enforce ethical standards helping industry maintain transparency and fairness and prevent misleading practices like false promises. Finally they strictly forbid off-label promotion to ensure correct prescriptions and use of the product.
Risks related to non-compliance include:
- Financial losses
- Legal implications like fines, loss of licenses and lawsuits
- Reputational damages
- Termination of business
- Proliferation of unethical conduct across company.
Pharma Digital Marketing Use Cases
A pharma company wanted to launch a new product on the market. They decided to use a multichannel approach and picked several channels for their promotion, including email outreach to HCPs, Key Opinion Leader Marketing, banner ad, webinar, e-detailing, and SEO.
The company started by creating a landing page dedicated to a new drug and researching Key opinion leaders in the region for the condition their drug treated. They chose to create reusable content that can be shared across several channels. They reached out to the KOLs sharing the drug research and inviting them to conduct a series of webinars for HCPs dedicated to the treatment of the condition and offering the new product as an efficient drug to address the condition.
Next they launched the email outreach campaign to their database of HCPs, inviting them to the upcoming webinars. They also launched banner ad campaigns targeting HCPs and inviting them to the webinars. At the webinars they invited HCPs to sign up to remote e-detailing, where HCPs could learn more about the product guided by sales reps.
Building Digital Pharma Marketing with NANOBOT
Digital Pharma marketing can be tricky if you don’t have experience and expertise. Building an in-house team is resource intensive in terms of both budget and time. Hiring a single professional with the necessary skill set can take months, as a result many pharma companies experience a talent gap that prevents them from efficiently planning and implementing marketing campaigns.
Partnering with an agency that provides pharma marketing services is an efficient solution to these challenges. Pharma marketing agencies like NANOBOT have a necessary talent pool, experience in running campaigns for other pharmaceutical companies, and profound understanding of the industry-specific compliance challenges.
NANOBOT can help you with individual channels like building a website, writing scientific content or partnering with key opinion leaders. Our team can also create and implement the campaign that spans multiple channels as well as orchestrate full-fledged omnichannel marketing strategy.
Ready to build your digital pharma marketing?
