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How Pharma Brands Can Be Built Digitally Through Content

Category : Pharma Marketing Author : Vikram Kotnis Date Created: 29 Jul 2020

The Indian generic medicines market, being one of the largest in the world, has a lot of different brands marketing the same molecular design. While doctors constitute a strong distribution channel for pharma marketers, the biggest question is how to create customer loyalty.

Patients today are more involved in their healthcare decisions. From researching symptoms and effects of health problems online before getting in touch with doctors to conducting due diligence on prescribed medications, modern patients have a bigger role to play in the whole system.

So while marketing to doctors is important, it’s also crucial to add value to the lives of patients as well. By answering their questions and being their guide through the research cycle, patient engagement can be drastically improved.

But in such a competitive marketplace, pharma brands need to differentiate themselves and rise against the challenge of attracting and retaining the attention of the right audience at the right moment. Add to that the complexity of cultivating a nurturing tone while caring for people with illnesses or injuries and helping them with life-saving therapies and technologies.

The overarching objective of the industry is to care about the people in need. Precise, credible content weaved together to form meaningful and useful stories helps create a highly-personalized engagement experience for patients. Content marketers need to exercise greater sensitivity when it comes to finding the right stories and to tell them in the right way.

Topics

  • CAREGIVING: Role Of The Pharma Industry
  • Understanding Consumer Psychographics
  • Content Strategy For Rx Marketing
    1. Know What Consumers Are Searching
    2. Create Rich, Credible & Segmented Content
    3. Give Them Reasons To Stay Engaged
    4. Build An Engaged Community
  • Adaptive Technology Solutions
  • Rx Content Marketing In Action

CAREGIVING: Role Of The Pharma Industry

The pharma and healthcare industry is complex, with various stakeholders and functions. But at the core of their operations is a single-minded focus on extending care to patients by putting them at the centre of attention. This caregiving attitude defines the industry and therefore, all content marketing activities must extend the same feeling of care.

The Caregiver

The role of the Caregiver is to nurture and serve others with compassion, generosity and self-sacrifice. They strive to meet the needs of the people and make sure everyone feels safe and supported.

The Caregiver

Caregiver Mission

Protecting people and helping them

Caregiver Traits

Altruistic, Selfless, Nurturing, Compassionate, Empathetic

Caregiver Message

Everyone deserves care and we must all strive to bestow service upon one another

Caregiver Voice

Caring, Reassuring, Educating, Supporting, Understanding

Understanding Consumer Psychographics

Psychographic segmentation identifies groups of people according to their motivations, priorities and communication preferences. This type of research can help determine why an individual consumer might choose one option over the other.

In the pharma and healthcare industry, psychographic segmentation allows for a better understanding of your consumers and helps in enhancing patient engagement while improving both healthcare and business outcomes.

     
Self Achievers The most proactive when it comes to their wellness
  • Provide goals, progress measures
  • Highlight credentials, expertise
  • Frame desired behaviours in terms of achievement, overcoming challenges
Balance Seekers Generally proactive, but are open to many ideas, sources of information, and treatment options when it comes to their health
  • Provide context for suggestions
  • Offer choices, options
  • Provide data, reasons and the "why" behind a recommendation
  • Give interesting and unique information/education
Priority Jugglers Are busy; they are proactive in their families’ health, but maybe reactive when it comes to taking care of themselves
  • Appeal to their sense of duty and commitment
  • Acknowledge how busy they are
  • Offer group or peer learning opportunities
  • Connect them with other priority jugglers
Direction Takers Look to healthcare professionals for direction and guidance. They trust credentialed experts to make the right decision for them
  • Tell them what they need to do
  • Credentials and authority are important
  • Discuss how to fit recommendations into their daily routine
  • Be specific about directions
Willful Endurers Struggle with changing habits, and don’t necessarily prioritize their health
  • Target their living in the moment ideology
  • Tell/show how they will benefit from recommendations
  • Get the commitment to the first step versus a whole care plan
  • Validate their efforts to-date

Content Strategy For Rx Marketing

Content marketing holds tremendous potential in creatively connecting with your consumers in impactful and measurable ways. Advancements in technology in Pharma have created never-before-imagined engagement possibilities for Rx content marketers. The wide acceptance of digital platforms by consumers has opened up opportunities to reach them through various media with customized marketing communication.

Know What Consumers Are Searching

Patients today research their problems online before getting in touch with doctors. So, it’s important to reach them throughout their research cycle. By identifying high-volume, therapy-based searches, you can reach more and more potential customers and direct them to your portal. Your content should educate them on their needs, not sound sales-y. In return, you gain their trust and attention.

Let’s say an asthma patient searches for “how to manage asthma better?” This creates an opportunity for you to show up in their search results and give them relevant and helpful information through your content portal.

Create Rich, Credible & Segmented Content

The next step is to create helpful content around their problems, interests and preferences. As we saw earlier, each consumer persona has different triggers of communication. Personalization through content segregation leads to better consumer engagement and easy accessibility of relevant content. Your content portal and other communication through emailers, infographics, videos, etc. should cater to each of these categories with personalized content buckets.

In the case of asthma or any other therapy area, one example of creating content buckets would be to segregate them as follows: Asthma awareness, Living with Asthma, Managing Asthma, Asthma medications, Tips on Asthma Care, etc.

Give Them Reasons To Stay Engaged

Engagement acts as an emotional motivator driving consumer behaviour. And what better way to do this than communicate with them personally with the information they have been seeking, right on the device of their choice. This will help build relationships and get them to consider you when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

For example, encouraging conversations and interactions via quizzes, social media channels, influencer interventions or contests boost audience engagement significantly. Emailers help create personalized communication and is still a great medium to keep your audience engaged.

Build An Engaged Community

When you genuinely bond with your audiences, you not only evoke trust and credibility but also build an engaged community of users. By integrating user stories, encouraging conversations and providing support with doctor consultation and even scheduling appointments will give your users a greater sense of belonging. Advice coming from knowledgeable and trained sources boosts the credibility and trustworthiness of your brand.

You can drive doctor engagement with webinars, provide assisted recommendations, create forums for discussions and also hold community events to provide support and boost community involvement.

Adaptive Technology Solutions

Personalized content works as long as you effectively track and use the insights across all touchpoints. It is important to have a structured mechanism in place to continuously monitor and refine the strategy. And this is where technology solutions come in.

With the right technology platforms and analytics complementing your content strategy, workflows can be adjusted to patient preferences and enhance the likelihood of response. So you can not only customize what is communicated but also how and when it’s communicated. Quality measurement is a stepping-stone for future success.

Patients differ on how they like to be engaged—whether it’s interactive voice response, chatbot integration, text or email - different channels could be used by caregivers. Smart device and IoT integrations, mobile apps or popular health app/e-pharmacy partnerships hold a lot of promise in creating the tech-enabled future of healthcare. And all of that is being leveraged now!

Rx Content Marketing In Action

We created a content marketing portal for a leading Indian pharmaceutical company to establish them as a thought leader in hypertension care. This portal became the one-stop community for cardiovascular wellness among patients and doctors.

Following the same strategy of psychographic segmentation, we created content buckets for each persona with relevant information. We crafted the content in various formats understanding online content consumption behaviour. Right from symptoms of hypertension to self-care tips, we covered everything that was needed to know about hypertension. Using effective SEO strategies and digital ads on social media we attracted the right visitors and also kept them engaged with various forms of nurturing. Thus the portal became the go-to source for credible content on hypertension information.

The portal is currently helping patients, doctors and caregivers by spreading awareness about hypertension, connecting people with cardiologists and nutritionists and helping existing patients lead a better life.

Effective Marketing = Customer Affinity

So even in this highly-restrictive marketing environment, having an involved community of brand sympathizers allows you to create a space for yourself in the consumers’ minds. You can keep them engaged with the power of hyper-personalized, evolving content experience while creating connected communities and opportunities for all stakeholders involved.

At Amura, we have helped big pharma companies achieve this through content marketing. Our Growth Marketing approach, aided by a complete stack of technology solutions, helps build an engaged community of patients and doctors that focuses on adding value to all stakeholders.

If you want to discuss content marketing strategies for your pharma brand, feel free to get in touch.

To get in touch,
email at vikram@amuratech.com

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Comments (19)

  Susy R posted over 4 years ago

We can identify trends and behavior patterns of customers when browsing content on the website. By creating high-quality content, you can be sure that you will succeed in making a successful business with digital marketing.

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  Bassey posted over 4 years ago

These marketing tips are really practicable. I hope a lot of people that needs this will get to see it.

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  David Tjoe posted over 4 years ago

Well, don't look at the digital age as just a platform for selling products to increase marketing volume. It is more important how far to create content that is able to build brands effectively and efficiently!

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  Oyeyipo Oladele posted over 4 years ago

All fellows in the pharma industry should grab this informative post. Thanks for this article.

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  Danielle M posted over 4 years ago

It's good to know that Phramaceutical industry is including the patients as an important part of the marketing strategy. Personally, I'm more interested to be loyal with a brand that genuily can prove that cares for the patiens and their needs.

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  Wilson Jake posted over 4 years ago

I thought I knew content marketing but it looks really bigger than what I thought. Lovely piece and educative. Thanks for sharing

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  Gillian posted over 4 years ago

Nice read. Pharma brand has a good content going around.

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  conrad pranze villas posted over 4 years ago

Businesses need to adapt in this kind of times. We need to adjust and be able to cope up with the things that is happening in our lives.

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  mary posted over 4 years ago

All users need a brand with a good content. This is where a user can get the insight he or she needs about the brand.

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  Alex posted over 4 years ago

Adaptive Tech is the name of the game right now. Almost everything is online it means everything has to be digital. Whether we like to or not.

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  Ramesh Singh posted over 4 years ago

Amura is reputed to have assisted large firms accomplish success. They did it by content marketing.

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  Raven Maben posted over 4 years ago

Interesting. While creating content for personalisation based on personas, how and at what stage do we differentiate between the users?

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  Mahendra posted over 4 years ago

It's really worth to read and a masterpiece article. I'm just curious to know if there are any other marketing strategies except content marketing which can help me to build my Pharma Brand?

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  Niharika Pandit posted over 4 years ago

Nice article! It’s crucial for pharma industry to build new link between their brand and audience. What kind of content strategy will win in Pharma industry?

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  Akshay Lad posted over 4 years ago

It was a great read. Just want to know which would be the best platform for pharma industry to build a community and improve customer engagement?

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  Shubhang posted over 4 years ago

That's a really interesting take. How do you suggest one measures the impact of such content marketing efforts?

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  Hrutuja Deshpande posted over 4 years ago

Very informative blog. The importance of content marketing has explained in detail. Can you suggest to me how can I attract the right visitors and also keep them engaged?

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  Neha posted over 4 years ago

Can I focus on content marketing?

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  Kavya Mishra posted over 4 years ago

Good read! At last content is the King.

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