Three Ways to Provide Patient-Centered Pharma Marketing

The patient experience has grown increasingly vital in pharma marketing to healthcare professionals (HCP). Typically, the relationship between pharma and patients was secondary to pharma’s relationship with HCPs, however, both providers and consumers now expect pharma companies to include the patient experience in your outreach.

As healthcare organizations and payers become patient centric as a part of care delivery, they expect pharma companies to do the same. So, as a pharma brand manager, you now must make a concerted effort to incorporate patient experiences with your products.

We’ve got three ways you can provide patient-centered pharma marketing.

1. Understand Your Patient’s Journey

To create a patient-centric marketing strategy, you must first understand their patient journey. Beginning with pre-diagnosis, consider their anticipation and emotional swings on their way to uncovering the issue.

When patients receive their diagnosis, they may experience a wide range of emotions – from anger to fear to stress. So consider the common responses patients will have as they get their diagnoses. This is a point in time where your messaging can play a critical role in prescribing your products.

Once you understand the patient journey, think about how you can communicate that journey to your HCP audience. Taking your customers through the range of patient emotions and responses can help convince your audience of the impact your product will have.

2. Create Understandable Content

For a long time, pharma marketers have focused their content-creation efforts on HCPs, focusing messages around their knowledge levels. Messaging was detailed and technical, requiring expertise to understand. Today, as more patients are involved in healthcare decisions, your marketing content should be created with a patient’s level of understanding in mind.

It can be challenging to deliver appropriate content for HCPs to consider when a patient’s need for information and associated understanding of it is so different. For example, you may need to create messaging that reads at an 8th-grade reading level. Such messaging may be too simplistic to appeal to experienced physicians.

The key is to strike a balance between the essential information that doctors need to make decisions and the positive outcome-driven messaging patients want to make them feel confident about your products.

3. Offer Patient-related Resources

Medical conditions impact almost every aspect of the patient’s life. Many patients are deeply affected by their symptoms and treatments, from work habits to mental health to finances to relationships. You can support HCP buyers by providing valuable content that can help patients address related issues while going through treatment.

For example, content that includes patient success stories or unique ways to cope can build trust and help make it easier for doctors to prescribe your drugs.

Put the Patient First

Patient-centered care has transformed the way that healthcare is delivered. To fit within the new paradigm, you’ll need to consider how patients progress through their journeys and find ways to provide them with valuable, relevant, and easy-to-consume information that considers their feelings and needs. So take a patient-centered approach to your pharma marketing and help your HCPs enable patients to make the best decision for treatment.

Article Written by Alex Brown