Why pharmaceutical businesses need digital marketing in 2020?
Over decades, pharma companies were competing over who can
maintain a better relationship with physicians to get their medical products prescribed more
often to patients. A lot of marketing and sales activities were planned. A lot of money had been
spent on events, conferences, giveaways and free samples. But were the results satisfying
enough? Apparently it worked just fine before the digital content started to hit the pharma
world.
Healthcare consumers, recently, started to engage with their medications differently. The
availability of digital content out there profoundly shifted their relationship with pharma
brands. The belief of healthcare providers being the only channel that present the identity of a
pharma company to consumers is not quite true anymore. Digital marketing gives a new
opportunities for companies to be directly connected to their consumers. As a pharma company,
you have to connect the dots here and start to reconsider the marketing process, its approach
and the role it plays these days.
Targeting patients in your marketing activities, in fact, is a tricky
game. Some companies focus
on delivering the value of the product. Their message depends mainly on how the product
addresses the diseases and eliminates the pain. This can be seen clearly with one of GSK
products: Panadol. Their Facebook page, @PanadolEG, has multiple campaigns that tell
relatable
stories with a message of how their product can beat headache in only 5 mins. Consumers’
engagement with the product shows kind of a relationship has been established with the
product,
and definitely this plays a role in raising the positioning of the company itself.
On the other hand, some other companies play it differently. Meeting a patient after the
diagnosing phase feels pretty awkward as it is not a joyful moment for him. That’s why it is
more convenient to create a pre-diagnosis relationship with the consumers. Sanofi Egypt was
one
of the companies who used this approach already. Their page “اتحكم فى السكر قبل ما يتحكم
فيك”
showed how a brand can connect emotionally. It reveals the societal responsibility the
company
feels toward its consumers and definitely boosts its trust with them.
Using digital marketing is bidding
These two approaches have one significant common: They build a strong digital presence for a brand. It doesn’t matter what approach you may prefer as long as it delivers the right message to the right consumer. Indeed, the digital marketing became a new barrier in the pharma industry which can be used by companies to have a new competitive advantage in the market or it can be ignored and a company may lose a legitimate opportunity reaching the consumer and have a better positioning for their brands.