5 Bad Marketing Decisions from Pharma Marketers

Pharmaceutical and device brand marketers are competing today in a changing environment. This can make it challenging to come up with effective strategies that promote new sales growth. Even with the changing market, there are a few marketing blunders that should be avoided.

Here are some of the most common – yet easily preventable – mistakes healthcare marketers make in their outreach to physicians and other healthcare professionals.

 

Bad Decision #1: Providing Too Much Information

Over the past year and a half, physician engagement has been at a distance. In response, drug marketers have overloaded doctors with information, hoping to compete in the changing landscape. But this has led to doctors feeling overwhelmed and challenged to make swift prescribing decisions.

More data doesn’t necessarily equate to better engagement, and often the information being distributed can be repetitive and even irritating to a busy physician. To build campaigns that drive results, marketers must distill relevant information into a suitable compelling story that highlights key facts. From there, you can point to additional supporting data.

 

Bad Decision #2: Basking in the Glow of Awards

Industry recognition makes for bad campaign analysis. For many brand managers, winning awards is recognition of a job well done (i.e., “our advertising earned several awards, so it must be good”).

However, awards don’t always translate to higher sales or product loyalty. Advertising groups may offer awards for best visuals, best copy, or most original content, but the bottom line for drug makers is “did our ad grow sales or even drive brand awareness?”

True performance should be measured with data and analytics. And that is where pharma marketers should be focused – measuring prescribing activity, sample requests, total sales, and other metrics.

 

Bad Decision #3: Using Awareness as a Primary Metric

Building awareness is not the same as creating sales. Just because your physician pool knows about your product doesn’t mean they will prescribe it. While market awareness is an important metric, when you actually measure success, pharma brands want to see their marketing efforts turn into sales.

Product awareness is often generated with memorable ads. This is a good first step, but marketers must then build interest with supporting campaigns meant to educate physicians. Pushing beyond awareness is “where the rubber meets the road”. What activity did your ad incite? The important point here is that campaign performance must have multiple measurement points to effectively determine success or failure.

 

Bad Decision #4: Failure to Attribute Performance Accurately

If a campaign produces measurable downstream results, it’s important to analyze which touchpoints led to increased activity. Although attributing a volume of sales to a specific advertisement or campaign can be tricky work, it doesn’t mean pharma marketers should rely on guesswork or gut instinct to match sales to their activities.

Effective pharma brand managers focus on attribution to determine where and when their efforts drove actions. There are many factors that influence the success of marketing campaigns – such as emails, sponsored events, or rep presentations – so marketers should look to common attribution models to reveal what works and what doesn’t.

 

Bad Decision #5: Viewing Physicians as Targets, not Partners

In an increasingly competitive pharma environment, brand managers are pushed to increase revenues, no matter what. This puts emphasis on product sales versus partnership building. And this is not an effective long-term strategy.

Prescriber lifetime value isn’t created quickly. Reliance on incentives, for example, turns the pharma-physician dynamic into a transactional relationship. Those types of relationships can be unsteady as a doctor could change prescribing behavior to suit a competitor.

In order to have meaningful collaboration with the medical community, pharma marketers should view their physician relationships as two parties equally contributing to the improvement of healthcare outcomes. As such, marketing campaigns should be structured to drive that collaboration with closed-loop feedback and binary sharing of information.

 

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Article Written by: Alex Brown