To an average patient, physicians’ choice of drugs they’re prescribing is simple. They consider the diagnosis and patient’s history and prescribe a drug – easy. However, physicians’ choices are much more complex than that.
In reality, there is a range of factors influencing HCP decisions on which medication to prescribe at any given point in time. Fortunately, your pharma brand can influence many of these factors ahead of time. Here are some of the reasons why physicians aren’t prescribing your specific brand, and what you can do to prevent this from happening.
You haven’t worked on building trust enough
If you have spent no time, effort, and resources into promoting your brand in the past, you can hardly expect one drug to move mountains when it comes to the number of prescriptions. It takes years of hard effort to build up a brand’s reputation. Even more so, it’s about building trust in your brand.
As it turns out, physicians always remember well those brands that have worked well for their patients in the past. They will be more likely to prescribe new drugs from the same manufacturer in the future.
You haven’t engaged with KOLs enough
The road to putting your brand out there starts from the top down. Before influencing HCPs to prescribe your drugs, it’s necessary to start one step ahead – with key opinion leaders.
Building the right kind of engagement with KOLs is one of the most important strategies in getting physicians to prescribe your brand. The majority of physicians rely on KOLs’ opinions before trying out a new brand, as much as they do on patients’ feedback. Just as much as you rely on engaging with KOLs, it’s also necessary to share their message about your brand on all of your digital channels for maximum efficiency.
You’re not digital yet
Perhaps we haven’t stressed this enough so far – it’s absolutely imperative for pharma brands to make a transition to digital marketing channels. Instead of just transmitting your message, digital allows you to enter a two-way conversation. The primary reason – physicians prefer to interact with pharma brands online. Besides being a useful aid to sales reps, pharma websites can host plenty of useful information for HCPs. On the other hand, you can provide useful resources for patients.
Compared to traditional advertising, digital also offers lots of content formats to try out. You can try blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, videos, and webinars. Considering that pharma is just entering the realm of digital, you can pioneer a new type of content and become wildly successful.
Through repeated interactions with physicians, you’ll stay on top of physicians’ minds. Besides bringing lots of advantages to your brand presence, digital will increase your share of voice and physicians will be more likely to prescribe your brand, instead of competitors’.
Your timing is poor
Sometimes even having the best product on the market won’t ensure that physicians prescribe it. Timing is one of the most important factors in pushing out a new product, and if your competitors have presented something similar, you’re in for some hard times.
Albeit difficult, this situation is not impossible to solve. In order for HCPs to make an informed decision, it’s necessary to provide them with facts. Simply lay out hard figures, showing how your product stacks up against the competitors. Even if the timing is not right, they will be able to make a decision based on cold, hard facts and act upon it.
Get a head start in prescribing for your pharma brand
Are you looking for a reliable partner on your journey to digital pharma marketing excellence? At BlueNovius, we collaborate with more than 50 pharma brands across the world. Using our proven digital pharma marketing solutions such as PubExplainer, we help them increase their share of voice and build trust with physicians and patients. If you want to ensure your pharma brand stays relevant in the digital marketing age – contact us today and see how we can help you out.
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