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In this series, we’re exploring the most common mistakes that can cripple your company’s success at getting and retaining pharma clients. Our last post focused on messaging mistakes and how to overcome the obstacles that are preventing you from reaching your target audience.
Another common type of mistake we’ve seen companies make when selling to pharma is marketing, whether choosing the wrong channel, developing the wrong material, or adopting the wrong strategy.
Marketing: The Best Strategies for Attracting New Clients
Marketing mistakes result in wasted effort, time, and resources. But, by planning ahead and devoting resources to the right areas, your company can avoid costly mistakes and optimize your marketing efforts.
Marketing Mistake #1: Not investing in inbound marketing
Inbound marketing, or, focusing on attracting prospects rather than pushing ads and other “noise” out to them, is now a necessity for nearly any company that wants to do business with pharma. A robust inbound marketing strategy includes content that generates awareness of your brand, educates your prospects on the problems they are or will soon be facing, and articulates the value of working with you.
Inbound also drives organic traffic to your website. Even in highly specialized niches, ranking well for the right keywords can yield a significant ROI, especially if your competition hasn’t put effort into the right content.
We learned this when one of our clients won a large project from a well-known pharmaceutical company. The company found our client through content we developed on their behalf less than 6 months after publication. This one engagement more than doubled their ROI on content and continues to drive prospects to their front door long after each piece was published.
“Content marketing is about education, not sales. It’s about building trust, about offering additional value to your customers, about giving prospects a reason to click on your site as opposed to a competitor’s. What’s more, it costs less and sells more,” writes John Waldon.
Learn more about leveraging content marketing to win clients within the pharmaceutical industry.
Marketing Mistake #2: Not developing enticing content for multiple buyer personas
Building a successful marketing strategy for pharma in the digital age requires understanding who is interested in your solution and why. Creating persona-based content allows you to articulate your unique value proposition and differentiate yourself from competing brands.
“By clearly defining the buyer and user personas for your product -- and laser-focusing your marketing efforts so that your message reaches people who are already looking for a solution like yours -- you will be setting yourself up to uncover higher quality leads, and ultimately an accelerated sales process,” writes Renee Yeager, Forbes.
Matching content to personas may support your marketing efforts to pharma better than a linear approach to winning new business (often seen in funnel-based marketing strategies). While moving buyers along a pre-established journey toward conversion may work in some contexts, within the pharma industry where multiple people have input on purchases, this approach often falls flat.
Instead, developing meaningful content for each of the personas who can impact buying decisions within your target market offers a proven, cost-effective method for gaining organizational buy-in and, ultimately, closing more sales.
Knowing your audience plays a crucial role in understanding what content will resonate with what persona. Market research, keyword optimization, and competitive analysis are some tools available to help you shape content and ensure it reaches the right people.
And, once you’ve attracted a client through persona-based marketing, you’re more likely to keep them as a client because you’ve established channels to communicate valuable information and you already know they’re interested in your work.
Marketing Mistake #3: Not measuring the impact of marketing efforts and pivoting accordingly
One of the most common mistakes we routinely see marketers making is pushing out content, ads, and other material without taking the time to understand their impact. With today’s access to staggering amounts of data, companies who fail to measure the results of their marketing strategies are missing a significant opportunity to reach the right people.
Part of the magic behind content marketing is the data it produces; data that, properly understood and acted upon, can boost ROI and increase profits.
For instance, the variety of topics we’ve written about for the pharma B2B space has generated actionable information on what keywords people use to find us through Google, how many times our content appeared in search results, the ranking for our keywords, and more. This data has fueled our focus on increasing our position within Google’s results for several highly valued keywords, and, as a result, we have seen a steady increase in our ranking. These keywords continue to drive qualified leads to our website because we analyzed data and adjusted accordingly.
At the start of any new marketing endeavor, establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will demonstrate how successful your strategy is. Then, be sure to monitor those KPIs and modify your strategy as needed.
Another important aspect of understanding your marketing’s impact is knowing what success looks like. By determining at the outset what success looks like, you’ll know right away if a new tactic is working. You can more easily pivot away from failing tactics or pursue winning ones when you know where you stand in relation to your goal.
Marketing Mistake #4: Failing to cultivate champions within companies who will take up your cause
A powerful marketing tool available to B2B companies is brand evangelism. “A brand evangelist is a person who believes in your product or service so fervently that he or she aggressively promotes it to others,” writes Neil Patel, Forbes.
This form of marketing ultimately is word-of-mouth, but on steroids. “Brand evangelists infuse their marketing message with passion. They are more powerful than any viral video, longform content, or brilliant Twitter campaign. Why? Because they possess the power of the personal touch and genuine human conviction.”
Businesses that can cultivate brand evangelists within their pharma prospects will have an advantage over competitors, especially if one of these evangelists has a say in purchasing.
Another term for brand evangelist, coined by The Challenger Sale author Brent Adamson, is mobilizer. A mobilizer is someone within a company that has the authority and desire to work with your business. Mobilizers “are motivated to improve their organization; are passionate about sharing their insights with colleagues; ask smart, probing questions; and have the organizational clout and connections to bring decision makers together.”
Finding the right mobilizer within a prospective client’s company can help you build consensus across purchasers that the problem you’re solving is urgent enough to warrant speedy action and that you’re the right business for the job. By fostering agreement across multiple departments, you overcome a significant barrier to selling to pharma.
According to Adamson’s research, B2B buyers have the most difficulty agreeing on a solution. “Most suppliers are focusing on the wrong stage of the buying process, falling all over themselves to persuade customers to choose them, rather than helping customers settle on a solution.”
By guiding your prospective client to an agreement on the right solution for them, you position yourself as the logical choice for the provider of that solution. “The best way to build customer consensus isn’t to do a better job of connecting individual customer stakeholders to the supplier but to more effectively connect customer stakeholders to one another.”
The right approach to content marketing can help you unearth and engage mobilizers within target companies. By educating mobilizers about their need for a solution, rather than promoting your particular solution, you can overcome the biggest obstacle to winning clients with team-based purchasing processes.
Marketing Mistake #5: Not having a good sales story
People are drawn in by compelling stories. Whenever you present your company to a prospect, you are telling them a story. Whether that story resonates with your target audience or not is another matter. In order for your story to have impact, it must interest and engage your audience.
One way to do that is to make your story about your value-add to clients. Perhaps you’ve developed groundbreaking software for pharma companies. Instead of making your company’s story about the process behind your software or the steps you took to form your company, discuss the challenges you’re overcoming and the problems you’re solving. Highlight the benefits of working with your company and the results other clients have seen.
A strategy for grabbing your audience’s attention is to be specific. Instead of touting your ability to generate income, put a figure on it. Which is more powerful to you?
(1) We help our clients increase profitability on generics.
(2) We’ve generated over $10m in revenue on generic products.
Another way to interest your audience is to make them the hero of the story. A company that understands good sales storytelling knows that “they are entering a preexisting story as a supporting character who is there to help the hero — the client — achieve his or her goal,” writes Cathy Salit, Salesforce. “As a supporting character, they are more likely to engage the client in meaningful conversations by asking questions, rather than going on about how great their brand is.”
Salit recommends breaking down your company’s sales story into three acts:
Act 1: A compelling opening that portrays the world in its current state, featuring the client as the hero who faces great challenges.
Act 2: A clear picture of the world as it could be, changed by the brand. Important facts and actions describe how working with the brand conquers obstacles, reduces pain, and increases success.
Act 3: A powerful close with a clear call to action. This is the ask that reiterates the world as it could be in partnership with the company brand, featuring the client as a hero equipped to conquer the challenges he or she faces.
The Power of Effective Marketing
When your business combines purposeful inbound tactics with great storytelling, then measures the impact and adjusts, you have the power to reach your prospective clients with the messages that matter most to them. This translates into more qualified prospects visiting your website and interacting with your brand which ultimately leads to more clients.
Crafting effective marketing strategies depends on your target audience, your existing library of resources (if any), the quality of your website, and other factors. We specialize in helping businesses reach pharma companies. Contact us for an evaluation of your marketing strategies and plan for supporting business growth.
