Pharma marketers worldwide are slowly making a shift toward digital marketing. However, not everyone is having an easy time with digitization.
To make it easier for you, you should not ask what digital marketing can do for you. Instead, you should ask what you want digital marketing to do for your brand.
In fact, figuring out a digital marketing plan comes into the picture only after you put down your brand’s goals and expectations, and formulate a concrete strategy on how you intend on standing apart in an already crowded digital landscape.
When you’re kicking off it’s important to know your brand’s integrated marketing goal.
So, it might not be easy as it sounds.
After all, it’s not possible to have it all figured out right from the start. But, then, the right answers come when you start asking the right questions.
In this blog post, I’m going to put down five questions that you should be asking yourself before you lay out your digital marketing plan.
First, have a clear and well-defined answer to each of the questions below. Then, there’s no looking back. You can kick off your digital marketing campaign right away. However, make sure your answers are honest and realistic and considered from a holistic point of view.
So, do you want to know what those five important questions really are?
1. What’s your Organization’s Goal?
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you’re not going to stay where you are.” – J.P.Morgan
Do you want to improve interactions with healthcare professionals and increase their engagement? Do you want to improve your CLM campaign through digital channels? Do you want to improve your brand’s online presence?
Where do you want to drive your pharma brand with the digital train?
Most pharma brands focus on achieving two goals with their digital marketing campaign– Access and Attention.
Access: Use the power of digital channels to make your product and services more accessible to your target audience.
Attention: To leverage the power of digital space for improving the engagement and quality of interactions with patients and healthcare professionals.
So, ask yourself – do you have a well-defined goal for your pharma brand? If yes, try to put that goal in one word, and write it down on a piece of paper.
2. How well do you understand your audience?
“The only way to win digital marketing is to create experiences that make your target audience feel like they were specifically designed for them.”
The Pharma industry is slowly moving from segmentation to personalization. So, now it is time to create personalized and tailored experiences.
That’s the only way to maintain the level of engagement and improve the quality of interactions.
Unlike traditional marketing where it’s very difficult to measure your audience’s engagement levels, with digital marketing, you can leverage the power of analytics to understand your user’s behavioral patterns and design content that suits their individualistic preferences.
So, stop and ask yourself– do you really know your target audience? Do you know their pain points? Do you know their interests and preferences? If yes, then that’s a good start.
3. How much effort can you put in?
“Sometimes, it’s your small wins that pile up over time to create a BIG win.”
Digital marketing is not a one-time campaign; it’s a commitment. Perse, it’s about staying consistent with your efforts, day-in-day-out.
In my years of experience with digital marketing, I have learned that there’s no magic formula to success. It’s all about maintaining the momentum and capitalizing on it. Everything else just fits into the puzzle.
I have seen many pharma brands kicking off their digital marketing campaign with great enthusiasm, but eventually failing to sustain it.
That’s the reason I always ask pharma marketers to assess their commitment to the campaign in advance and to be realistic about their consistency.
After all, if you want to really improve your brand’s engagement and presence through digital channels, you need to keep up the momentum.
How much effort can you actually put in? Are you open to going up on the learning curve to provide relevant and engaging content? Are you committed to delivering a better and more personalized experience to your target audience?
4. What’s your definition of Success?
It’s very difficult to define success when it comes to digital marketing because I like to see digital marketing as a road, and not as a destination.
For me, digital marketing success is harnessing that consistent ability to co-create engaging and relevant content that’s worth sharing, linking, or talking about.
It’s no longer about putting contextual information around a product. It’s more about putting the product in the right context.
So, think about your definition of success. Do you want to increase your ROI? Do you want to improve interactions with HCPs and patients? Do you want to create simple and dynamic interfaces that are cost-effective and save marketing efforts and time?
Think about your takeaway from the campaign.
5. Do you have a Plan?
If you don’t have a plan of action to achieve your goal, you’re missing out on all the action.
Now, I’m not saying that you should have a digital marketing plan in your mind and have it all figured out. I know that’s not possible.
But, have you thought about how you’re going to move towards your goals? Have you defined the steps of action that you’re going to take to get where you want?
How about putting down your value proposition, goals, and objectives on paper and working out a way to make them coincide? How about creating a schedule? How about setting deadlines for your goals?
Thus, by having a plan, you have prepared an action sheet for your goals.
I hope this post helped you in getting a little introspection, and hopefully cleared your head about catching the digital train.
While it’s okay not to know all the answers from the start, it’s important to keep asking these questions, so that you can constantly refine and optimize your marketing strategy.
