Managing a multi-product marketing plan for Big Pharma

In 2018 consumer loyalty is more important than ever. With more and more emerging competitors entering the market globally, and a prejudice toward Pharma in general, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies can no longer afford to have a purely transactional relationship with their consumers. Instead, pharma is headed in the direction of building loyalty in pursuit of remaining relevant, competitive and profitable.

Loyalty is a relationship based on trust, and it implies that your customers willingly interact with your brand communications and perceive value. In an omni-channel marketing approach, pharma marketers create an ongoing dialog with the consumer, where the consumer is having a seamless experience interacting with the brand at all points of his journey. Loyalty-based relationships can be successfully leveraged over a longer period of time.

An omni-channel strategy for pharma means much more than connecting with patients, providers, manufacturers, retailers, payers etc. via different media channels and platforms; an omni-channel pharma marketing strategy it is a two-way conversation that should embrace sourcing data from social media listening, search questions and comments, niche forum threads, prescriptions filled, clinical trials data, industry meetups and events, and other sources that can help understand where in the buying cycle is your target as well as to know what type of information they need at a given point in time.

Why is pharma struggling with omni-channel marketing?

There is a number of reasons why pharma is facing major challenges when it comes to employing an omni-channel marketing strategy:

● The pharmaceutical industry is more conservative and therefore, resistant to change;

● Pharma is very business-oriented and for-profit vs. customer – focused and having a true understanding of all the needs and opinions of its consumers regardless if the consumers are patients, clinical trials, employees, HCP, FDA, doctors, pharmacies, manufacturers, insurers, brand advocates etc.

● Pharma is heavily regulated;

● A Big One: the pharmaceutical industry is very corporate, decentralized, as the result, has siloed marketing operations where the teams or managing groups do not share information, strategies, and processes with other divisions thus impacting the business operations as a whole and stalling – up the growth.

By bringing all the marketing efforts together, pharma marketing managers can ensure the right information gets in the right hands at the right time using the preferred (by a specific target) marketing communications channels. This is what pharma marketers can control – a holistic and centralized approach to their omni-channel marketing operations.

Why is a holistic approach to omni-channel marketing important?

Ensuring the presence at all points of those very individual user journeys can help pharma marketers build trust, turn it into loyalty, and then turn those loyal customers into brand advocates who will encourage brand awareness and brand acceptance across all target segments from patients to healthcare professionals.

What can help pharma marketers build an omni-channel marketing strategy or a plan?

If you are a pharma marketer who is looking to create your multi-channel or omni-channel marketing plan that involves various stakeholders as well as many of your internal local and global marketing and PR teams, then a proper marketing calendar and planning tool can help you keep all the efforts together, have a 360′ visibility to it at all times, and most importantly, align your business objectives with marketing activities, and have them running smooth and executed as planned.

A solid marketing plan with well-defined KPIs and properly planned and outlined marketing initiatives can help healthcare marketers overcome the existing marketing challenges and become truly omni-channel.

How Can Pharma Marketers Benefit from Marketing Calendar Software?

There are many spreadsheet – based templates and applications that pose as a solution for the larger companies and brands’ marketing departments. Those tools claim that through adapting their software marketing teams can connect their efforts and stay on track of their marketing initiatives.

All of these tools fail to understand one thing: the specificity and uniqueness of the pharmaceutical industry itself as well as its business processes and operations.

Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies experience vertical expansion through growing a number of teams, departments, divisions and adding more managerial layers to the already-complex business structure thus creating departmental silos that are affecting the decision-making process across the board.

What pharma marketers need is a solid marketing calendar that can be adapted to their unique business structure and not the other way around!

When you have marketing teams scattered across the country or globally, it’s important to bridge those informational gaps, consolidate the efforts across the board and bring visibility to the way the omni-channel marketing communications are executed.

The best marketing planning and calendar software for a pharma marketing department will help create that holistic approach to its marketing planning campaigns and keep all responsible parties on track.

How to choose the right marketing calendar tool for a pharma marketing team?

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to Marketing Calendar & Planning Software Features to help marketers, especially in such a corporate and siloed industries as pharma, learn about the different features available on the market as well as understand which features can be the most beneficial to their very specific business’ needs.

Learn how CrossCap’s Marketing Calendar Software can help you consolidate, manage and execute your content marketing programs, align sales and marketing teams, and streamline your marketing operations across the board – request your free consultation and a live demo.