Digital Marketing for Pharmaceutical Companies
Health marketing strategies!
Leading pharmaceutical marketing initiatives is challenging. The industry operates under intense regulation, making it vital that your pharma marketing strategies (and advertising campaigns) meet industry rules and regulations.
Pharmaceutical digital marketing, however, offers immense opportunity for your organization to promote its brand and products to the right audience, from doctors to patients. You can use multiple channels and techniques to build a competitive and legal pharma marketing strategy.
Which are the best marketing strategies for pharmaceutical companies today, though?
From content marketing to reputation management, multiple strategies can benefit your organization. Keep reading to learn more about them and how you can incorporate them into your pharmaceutical company’s digital marketing strategy!
If you’d like to speak with a strategist about building a professional online marketing strategy for your organization, contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to learn more about our custom strategies and client-first approach.
5 pharmaceutical marketing strategies
Improve your marketing strategy for your pharmaceutical products with these five pharmaceutical marketing strategies:
1. Use SEO to get noticed on Google
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the cornerstone of any Internet marketing strategy. It makes your website (and individual pages) show up in Google search results so consumers and doctors can find you when they want information about your products.
SEO is the most important part of any pharma digital marketing strategy because it brings traffic to your website. And when visitors come to your website, you can be sure they’re consuming the accurate, important information that you publish.
This also helps you stay competitive with other pharmaceutical companies online. If you want to promote your brands over a competitor’s, your website needs to be streamlined and optimized to beat everyone else in your industry.
That’s a full-time job all on its own, especially since pharmaceutical companies are so large. Even small pharmacies fight an uphill battle against their local competitors.
To rank well in search engines, your site needs:
- Optimized title tags
- Eye-catching meta descriptions
- Helpful, informative content
- Multimedia
These four qualities turn every page on your site into a lean, perfected product.
Then, when someone searches for a keyword related to one of your pages, it will show up above your competitors.
That means more clicks to your website, more people reading your content, and more of your information getting out into the public. This makes it a passive way for you to promote your brand 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So no matter how you look at it, SEO is an extremely valuable marketing strategy for pharmaceutical companies.
2. Educate audiences with content marketing
Content marketing is the practice of writing, designing, and publishing information online.
“Content” typically refers to text on a page, although it can also include accompanying images, videos, interactive elements, and more.
As a pharmaceutical company, you can use several forms of specialized content, like:
- MSDS documents
- Consumer guides
- Physician manuals for how to prescribe certain products
These three forms of content are hyper-targeted to the pharmaceutical industry, and they’re perfect complements to your other Internet marketing strategies.
On top of those three types of content, you can also use your website to publish:
- Blogs
- Articles
- Statistics
- Shareholder reports
- Transparency reports
These five additional kinds of content are more typical for corporate websites.
Blogs let you write about industry events, changes to your company, and other timely news or information
Articles are the perfect way to target new keywords with high-quality, informative content that teaches your website’s visitors something new.
Statistics are excellent for stealthily promoting your brand. By publishing statistics about your products, you encourage data analysts and designers to use that information in their own publications, which will help build links to your site.
Shareholder reports are ideal for quarterly reports you have to make to stock owners. You can publish them on your site for everyone to see as well, which makes your business appear more transparent.
And speaking of transparency, you can also go out of your way to publish full transparency reports that discuss your non-classified methods, mission statements, and other ideas behind your business.
Transparency reports are difficult to create for pharmaceutical providers since you (and your competitors) probably have a lot of trade secret protections. But any extra glimpse into the inner-workings of your pharma business will help your reputation.
And speaking of reputation, that brings us to another proven pharmaceutical marketing strategy.
3. Build a trustworthy brand with reputation management
Reputation management is the practice of shaping your online image by influencing or publishing positive content online.
One of the most common and powerful forms of reputation management is search saturation. Search saturation means finding a keyword that shows negative results about your pharma brand(s), creating new content based on that keyword, and publishing it online.
Then, when people search for those terms, they’ll only see the positive content that you published while the negative results are pushed off the first page.
Pharmaceutical companies have a lot of critics in the public, especially niche subgroups like anti-vaxxers and new age medicine disciples.
That means you’ll have your work cut out for you when it comes to refining your online image. But on the plus side, the organization of activist groups level the playing field in Google search results by publishing trustworthy, researched information that tells the public the truth about your company’s products.
Even if you’re a distributor, you can benefit from this pharmaceutical marketing strategy. Eventually, you can dominate the search results of a keyword to make sure the public gets information straight from the source — you.
4. Interact with audiences using social media
Social media marketing is the method of reaching out to your customer base and product users through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.
The goal of this pharmaceutical marketing strategy is to bridge the informational and sentimental gaps that naturally lie between you and the public. Most companies in other industries also use social media marketing to sell their products.
But as a pharmaceutical company, you can’t do that.
Instead, you can use social media as a way to promote new research, upcoming products, higher-ups in your staff, and more. You may not actually generate sales from your Twitter account — but you can at least help people feel more comfortable with your products.
When you post on social media as a part of your pharmaceutical company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to be concise and use multimedia. Photos are especially good additions to networks like Twitter and Facebook, and videos work surprisingly well, too.
It’s also important to know that no matter what you do on social media, you may experience some kickback.
Like we said earlier on this page, pharmaceutical companies have a lot of critics — and even pharmacies get their fair share of criticism.
That means people may respond to your posts harshly, and many of them will probably be unfair. Still others might just be trying to promote themselves by criticizing a bigger entity than themselves.
Regardless, it’s essential that your company (and your social media team) roll with the punches. For every one person who critiques you, there are 10 more out there who are genuinely interested in what you post.
The downside is that since they like it, you probably won’t hear from them as much as you hear from your detractors.
5. Increase feedback value with review management
Pharmaceutical companies are subject to lots of online reviews. Those reviews can be product reviews for medicines, occupational reviews for jobs, and ethical reviews for business practices.
While you don’t have direct control over what people say about you in public, you can at least Google your company’s products every once in a while to gauge public sentiment.
If any review is unfairly negative, you can always contact the review outlet (like Yelp) and explain the situation to get the review changed or removed.
You can also supplement some reviews with information on your products so readers can more accurately judge your medicines for themselves.
It’s possible for you to ignore online reviews since you probably don’t sell your products straight to consumers — they need a doctor’s prescription first.
But that’s actually not a good idea.
Even with the buffer of a doctor’s prescription, it’s still ultimately up to the consumer to buy it.
So if someone’s only heard bad things about your brand(s), they may not get that prescription filled.
That may sound unlikely, but it’s still lost profit every time someone stubbornly refuses (or forgetfully neglects) to get a prescription filled.
If you want to avoid that possibility and maximize your profit potential, you need a firm grasp on your online reviews, which is why review management is so critical to pharma marketing strategies.
Want to speak with an expert? Call us at 888-601-5359
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Get started with pharmaceutical digital marketing
If you’re ready to start using digital marketing for your pharmaceutical company, WebFX is here to help! Our internal team has some of the best Internet marketing experts in the industry, and we know the best ways to get new clients for you through pharma digital marketing strategies.
Contact us today to get your pharmaceuticals in the hands of the people who need them!
