Estimated reading time: 4 mins
Educating your market is the key to marketing to pharma but it requires a system for determining what and how to deliver. We’ve developed a 4-step process for creating messages that resonate with your target audience and encourage them to partner with you.
This system is based on our philosophy that when you invest the time and resources into educating your target audience, they’re more likely to turn to you when the time comes to partner with someone who has your expertise.
Step #1: Educate (Rather than Sell to) your Audience
Educating (rather than selling to) your audience is one of the best ways of positioning your brand for sustained growth.
Your target audience will filter out content that doesn’t immediately catch their attention or help solve their problems. To craft a message that hits home with your audience, you must first understand what their pain points are, then work toward dissecting those pain points and the root causes behind them.
This essentially boils down to educating your audience on what you see as unsolved or emerging problems and why your audience must act. You’re not so much offering to solve your audience’s problems as you are educating them about problems they didn’t know existed and working to solve those problems.
Often, this entails getting at the problem behind the problem. Your customer may be aware of the problems or pain points, but they often need expert help in identifying deeper problems.
“The Challenger sales method relies on delivering insight about an unknown problem or opportunity in the customer’s business that the supplier is uniquely positioned to solve,” write Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson in The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.
That being said, it’s always important to position what you offer as a secondary message for what your target audience needs. It’s less about making a sale and more about educating your prospects into making one.
“Challengers are most effective at selling in the complex world of buying today and tomorrow because they take control of the purchase conversation in a way that leads customers back to the unique strengths of their organization."
This approach is more effective than bombarding prospective clients with your solutions. Your audience already has a slew of options to consider. To stand out, you must offer something different. You must be willing to challenge their beliefs and guide them to a new way of thinking about their problems.
“Rather than feeling confident in their purchase path forward, buyers are becoming overwhelmed by the seemingly endless good choices and need help making a decision. If they reach out to a sales rep, they are most interested in their purchase experience and the answer to ‘why’ they should buy—rather than ‘what’ they should buy.”
When you provide guidance through education, it also solves the problem of ‘“choice” while also building up your brand's credibility with your audience.
Step #2: Leverage Proven Communication Strategies to Build Your Audience
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when developing a communications plan. Instead, investigate what others within your industry are saying and doing and plan your own outreach accordingly.
“Brands can learn about their competitor’s content strategy by looking at their best-performing content. Social shares are the best metric to evaluate this content when no other metrics are available,” writes Albizu Garcia, Entrepreneur.
Understanding multiple aspects of your competitor’s content will help you pick the right direction for your own marketing efforts.
“Monitor a competitor’s activities by following or turning on notifications for any updates. Brands can observe the tone of their posts, the images they use, and the effectiveness of their overall social media strategy. If a particular type of content a competitor shares receives high levels of engagement, then brands may want to consider using a similar approach,” continues Garcia.
But, keep in mind that not every approach in brand messaging is effective or replicable, particularly in the pharma industry.
Once you’ve developed a solid strategy and begun to build your own communication library, make it an on-going process to delve deeper into the specifics and further refine your content.
And make sure to routinely keep abreast of your competitors’ successes. “[Brands] should monitor a competitor’s website or blog for any significant changes in design or messaging. For instance, marketers will need to know if a competitor launches a new product or service, and how their own site’s copy and messaging strategy,” concludes Garcia.
When that happens, the same reasoning as before applies - imitate only what works. Not every change in your competitor’s brand messaging will be effective. It’s up to you to pick up on what works and what doesn’t.
Step #3: Choose the Right Client Acquisition Method
For businesses that serve pharmaceutical companies, there are two effective digital approaches that build traffic and generate prospective clients: paid advertising and content marketing.
While there’s no clear-cut winner between the two, we’ve found that content marketing tends to deliver better long-term results while paid advertising is a good choice for getting your message in front of potential clients the quickest.
Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons to each method.
The best approach is to choose the acquisition strategy that fits your brand’s timeframe, budget, and reach needs.
If you need quick insights to break into the market, then paid advertising might be a good option. If you need to establish a solid foundation within your industry, content marketing may be the right strategy.
Often, an approach that combines both digital strategies produces the best results.
Step #4: Understanding what works and what doesn’t
Reviewing and implementing your analytics data is easily one of the most important ways to keep your messaging on target and determine what’s working and what’s not. It helps you to understand your audience better, pinpoint their problems, and offer more effective solutions.
Data analysis must be an ongoing effort to bear fruit - taking a look at your performance numbers once a year won’t help you identify new areas of business or improve your reach to prospective clients.
It’s also important to keep in mind that data analysis is a long-term effort that requires some to deliver results.
“Some tactics need time to mature. Google Search Ads, for example, won’t necessarily work perfectly right out of the gate — you’ll probably have to adjust keywords and landing pages, and you’ll definitely have to wait for Google’s algorithms to determine what ad copy converts the best,” writes Scott Beckman, Medium.
The key is to continuously use data to refine your marketing efforts and drive growth.
“The goal should always be to generate insights that can help you better understand your customer, their thought processes, and how you can better align to their wants and needs,” writes Shawn Schwegman, Demand Jump.
You should watch for patterns, pinpoint key learnings, and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Once you have enough data, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of who your real audience is. You’ll gradually learn more about their habits, patterns, effective ways to get them to take action, and what channels they prefer.
“Content marketing is driven by consumers. Dive in and research. What channels are they using the most? Pay attention to how they behave on each channel, how they interact with content and what they find valuable. Your strategy should revolve around the customer, not the channel,” writes Cesar Gomez, Hanson Dodge.
But regardless of the channel, your audience is always the focus. It’s not where they’re going, but why they go there and how you can shape your efforts to be a part of their journey.
Partnering for Success
Having an outside partner that has the experience and skills to augment your current team is important. We’ve seen many companies who knew what they wanted to accomplish but couldn’t carve out the time to execute. Frequently current staff doesn’t prioritize the communications effort so adding writing resources with knowledge of how to leverage keywords exponentially adds to their investment in time.
If you are interested in how Pharma Acumen can develop an education plan for your future clients, investigate your competitors effectiveness to leverage your own success, evaluate paid vs earned marketing and evaluate the impact of your communications contact us.