In today’s fast-moving market, pharma companies are putting more trust in pharmaceutical marketing companies. With a slow but steady move to digital, it’s necessary to seek a trusted partner on the path to influencing:
- KOLs;
- Physicians; and
- Patients.
However, not all pharmaceutical marketing companies are the same. If you place your trust in the wrong one, you could end up with a failed product launch. Even worse, you can risk leaving a poor impression on your target audience.
Here are some of the most common mistakes that pharmaceutical marketing companies make.
1# Putting too much faith in what the doctor says
Many pharmaceutical marketing company representatives will tell you that what guides their strategies is physicians’ statements. In reality, what physicians say and do are two completely different things. Physicians’ claims that they will prescribe a certain brand don’t mean that it will actually happen.
In an interesting research, AMA compared what actions doctors said they would take and what they actually did, including prescription behavior. Those doctors that were checked, fulfilled 75% of their intentions. Those doctors that weren’t observed only fulfilled 10% of their intentions and promises. In other words, doctors’ statements are a poor predictor of future behavior.
This is why great pharmaceutical marketing companies don’t rely on hearsay. Instead, they focus on detailed market research that can yield more accurate results.
2# Relying on awareness as a metric
In digital marketing, there is an expression called vanity metrics. Those are numbers that can easily be manipulated so that you are under the impression that a campaign is performing wonderfully. But in reality, it barely moved the needle and there are no visible results. Pharmaceutical marketing companies often use awareness as a vanity metric to confuse pharma brand managers.
Awareness means that a pharma marketing campaign made an effect on the target audience – it was memorable. However, what’s the result of the increased awareness? How does it translate to the number of prescriptions, rep calls, visits, and ultimately sales?
Once you analyze the investment into the campaign, if all it produces is awareness without making a direct impact on sales, it’s a missed opportunity.
3# Attributing all the success to themselves
Let’s say that you hired one of the better pharmaceutical marketing companies out there and they’ve run a fantastic campaign for your newest product. It’s made quite an impact and prescriptions and sales are soaring – the pharma company is patting itself on the back because of a great win.
However, what was it that drew the increase in prescriptions in sales?
There are many factors involved in a marketing campaign around a product. For example, many pharma companies use a range of channels to reach HCPs, including email, conferences, webinars, sales rep presentations, and websites…
Good pharmaceutical marketing companies don’t rely on guesswork. Instead, they focus on singling out the element that drives results so that they know what works and what doesn’t.
4# They bomb the physician with information
Many pharmaceutical companies have had little to no contact with physicians and don’t understand their pain points. One of the biggest is the fact that physicians are overloaded with information from all sources. Moreover, most of that information can be repetitive or useless to the physician.
In order to create campaigns that drive results, great pharmaceutical marketing companies distill the information which is relevant to HCPs and present it to them in a compelling way. The most frequent mistake is that marketing companies equate more data with better results.
In reality, physicians want only the basic facts – what does your product accomplish that makes it better than the competition and that improves patient outcomes? This is why the majority of physicians skip reading entire papers and just head straight to the abstract.
The alternative solution we’ve found is to change the approach and the format. With our clients, we use medical explainer videos that present the most important scientific data from publications. That way, physicians get the most important data immediately, in a format they can consume quickly and easily – and replay it afterward.
5# Not knowing the product
One of the biggest issues that physicians have with sales reps is that when they are interested in a certain product, they can’t get immediate data from the rep. Relating to the previous entry, most reps learn their data by heart. They never bother to go beyond the prepared scripts.
Physicians will ask questions if they’re genuinely interested. If the sales rep can’t answer on the spot, it’s a missed opportunity. By the time the research department gets back to physicians with the answer they need, they may no longer be interested. Perhaps the worst-case scenario is simply leaving a reprint for the physician to take a look at – in most cases, they won’t read it.
Are you looking for a pharmaceutical marketing company that makes no mistakes?
At BlueNovius, we know the value of trust that pharma companies put into marketing companies. With a decade of experience with more than 50 pharma companies globally, we’ve learned how to drive results to our clients, using video marketing as a solution to set you apart from the rest of the crowd.
If you’d like to find out what we can do for your pharma company as well, contact us because we’d love to show you how you can significantly improve your marketing results.
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