Estimated reading time: 6 mins

“Effective blogging is the foundation of online visibility.”

- Ashish Patel, ExpressText

Content marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways for reaching prospective pharma clients and securing new deals. While outbound marketing efforts like paid ads can still reach your target audience, content marketing provides much better value in the long run.

In this article, we break down why content marketing is more valuable over time for reaching pharmaceutical companies than other forms of marketing.

The ROI of Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Before we delve into the benefits of content marketing, let’s look at inbound versus outbound marketing in general.

Outbound methods like pop up ads, calls for introductory meetings, and other “push” tactics are aimed at interrupting the target’s current activities and getting their attention. The goal is to be noisier than your competition.

In contrast, inbound marketing methods (like content) attract prospective clients by offering them value. Instead of disruption, inbound strategies focus on building connections and solving problems.

While each marketing strategy has its pros and cons, the team at Pharma Acumen has found that inbound tactics work better to reach prospective clients in the pharmaceutical industry than pushier methods.

Why?

For starters, inbound is much more cost-effective in the long term than outbound.

Let’s look at one example. Paid search, which enables you to place your website at the top of Google search engine results, offers quick results but only works as long as you pay for it.

While “paying to play” can be effective in the short term, pivoting away from paid acquisition to more long-term, scalable strategies offers a lower-cost way to reach prospective pharma clients.

In nearly every case, the cost of acquiring visits through paid options will increase over time as you exhaust pharma audiences that are most likely to engage your brand. Additionally, new competition will enter the market, resulting in more bids for the same paid placement.

Publishing content on the other hand usually takes a minimum of 6 months to bear fruit for search engine rankings, but the results build exponentially over time. Once your content gains momentum, ranking organically within Google’s search engine results is significantly more cost effective than paid efforts.

This example from Neil Patel shows the results of focusing on evergreen, or high-value, authoritative, content. The website went from fewer than 400 visitors per week to over 8,000 in the span of 14 months. That’s an increase of over 1,800%. All due to content marketing.

Another way to understand the power of content to drive results over time is to think about it in terms of compounding interest.

“Like a bank account that starts out small and earns incremental gains, but over time becomes quite large, content marketing efforts require consistent investment but ultimately can yield enormous results,” writes Tomasz Tunguz.

A Data-Driven Example: Paid Search vs Organic Traffic

Let’s say you offer data analytics services for pharmaceutical companies.

Investing $2,500 in paid search ads on Google for the keyword “pharma data analytics” will generate about 200 clicks total. (And you’ll need to send traffic to a website page with relevant content for best ad placement and costs.)

Investing $2,500 into one evergreen article for pharma data analytics results in an asset that will gain traction the longer it’s on your website. Assuming a modest increase in visibility on Google, within 6 months to a year, this same investment will send as many as 2,400 people per year to your website.

The downside of content marketing is that it takes time for your efforts to move the needle.  But, if you put in place a long-term strategy, content creates assets that drive results and steadily overcome the immediate benefits of paid advertising in as little as a few months.

With the right strategy, content marketing is a consistent and cost-effective method to acquire new potential pharma clients while also allowing your business to create a significant online presence and greater visibility within the pharma industry.

Additionally, most content pieces can be further repurposed and reused with the right approach, driving down the total cost of production and increasing your ROI.

The long-term value of content marketing for businesses serving pharma

There are significant long-term benefits to using content marketing beyond its cost effectiveness, especially for companies targeting prospective pharma clients.

Here are a few examples.

Recommended Reading: The Benefits of Content Marketing for Pharma Audiences

Educating Prospective Customers

One of the most important benefits of establishing a robust content marketing strategy is the opportunity to educate your prospective customers.

This doesn’t mean that you should inundate them with information about the features of your product or service.

Instead, educating your prospective customers involves helping them understand their current and emerging problems, then offering guidance on available solutions.

“The best companies don’t win through the quality of the products they sell, but through the quality of the insight they deliver as part of the sale itself,” write Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, authors of The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.

Education “is all about offering customers unique perspectives on their business and communicating those perspectives with passion and precision in a way that draws the customer into the conversation. These new perspectives apply not to your products and solutions, but to how the customer can compete more effectively in their market. It’s insight they can use to free up operating expenses, penetrate new markets, or reduce risk.”

Educating your audience creates demand for your offerings and instils loyalty. By helping your prospective customer understand their business challenges better, you position yourself as the obvious resource for the solution they need.

Build Authority

Another benefit is increased credibility, authority, and visibility within your industry when you establish thought leadership through expertly created content.

Take, for example, this article from the Content Marketing Institute on 7 Free Ways to Get Original Data for Your Content.

This piece surveys some creative ways to find and reshape data in meaningful ways for your target audience. While adding significant value to CMI’s audience, this resource also signals authority and expertise in content marketing strategies.

Another great example comes from Search Engine Journal.

Here the website builds trust by offering valuable insights into the differences between content marketing and content strategy. By explaining strategy as a roadmap and content as the journey, Search Engine Journal helps its readers better understand how to use content to grow their companies while establishing its expertise and positioning itself as a go-to resource for marketers.

Understand Your Audience

Another benefit of content marketing over outbound methods is that through visitor interaction with your content, you can better understand your target audience and identify their pain points.

By tracking what content receives the most organic engagement (like visits, time spent on page, click-throughs, and conversions), you can decipher what your readers value and ensure that any content you produce aligns with their needs.

“Your audience decides what content it will consume, when it wants to consume it, and where. Your brand should be ready for them with the right content at the right time and in the right place,” writes Carlijn Postma, Content Marketing Institute.

Making sure you monitor your audience’s interactions with your content and reshaping your content marketing strategy to fit those behaviors ultimately generates more leads and boosts conversions.

Reuse Internal Resources

Not only does content marketing have lower long-term costs than paid advertising, it also enables you to turn already-created internal resources into assets that can drive business to your front door.

For example, as we were planning a content marketing strategy for one of our clients, we learned that they had mountains of internal resources like sales decks, reports, client deliverables, tools and frameworks to support their capabilities, and a wealth of knowledge among their leadership team.

We synthesized related pieces of material and translated them into actionable content that secured a 6-figure project with a top-10 pharma company. You can read the full case study here.

Determining if Content Marketing is Right for Your Business

In most cases, content marketing can drive exceptional results for businesses serving pharma companies. But, deciding to invest in content requires careful thought.

To understand if content marketing is right for your brand, consider the following questions:

1. Do you have underutilized studies, research, documentation, and other information readily available?

2. Does your business have little visibility within the pharma industry?

3. Do you struggle with acquiring prospective pharma clients?

4. Does your business need more growth from new contacts?

If the answer is “yes” to even one of these questions, your business could benefit significantly from content marketing.

Can you implement content marketing on your own?

Content marketing, much like paid advertising or any other type of marketing, requires experience to create and implement the best strategy to fit within your existing outreach efforts and to attract the right audience.

This is particularly true in the pharmaceutical industry where buy-in from multiple stakeholders is often required before working with third-party brands.

Inadequate or inconsistent content marketing efforts can fall flat while also damaging your credibility with prospective clients. Whereas precise and effectively delivered content can generate warm leads that often convert into clients.

Pharma Acumen has decades of experience helping businesses that target pharma companies, generating over 8 figures in new contracts. We can help you create the best content marketing strategy then implement, monitor, and reiterate to help your business rapidly secure a prominent foothold in the pharma industry.

Contact Brian to learn more or check out our library of content marketing resources geared toward businesses who serve pharma companies.