Why pharma manufacturers should boost physician marketing efforts

The pharmaceutical industry resides in a highly competitive landscape. Organizations wishing to reach a specific physician readership must assess their media planning goals strategically.

Drug discovery costs on the rise

Everyone knows that new pharmaceutical products are expensive to discover and develop, but there's been a lot of debate over just how much the average drug costs. In October 2017, Forbes magazine reported on a heated argument between researchers at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development and the authors of an article published in JAMA. While Tufts asserts that the average cost of a new drug is approximately $2.7 billion, the two researchers from Oregon Health and Science University arrived at a much lower figure: $648 million.

According to Forbes, when pharmaceutical companies account for failed drugs that either never make it past initial testing phases or which fail to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, actual costs trend closer to Tuft's multi-billion dollar estimate.

With R&D costs so high, pharma manufacturers cannot afford to push their product out the door without a strong marketing campaign to provide momentum. Failure to give a new product the promotion it deserves could put the entire investment in jeopardy. However, simply tossing more money into the marketing budget isn't likely the best answer to this challenge. Rather, a strategic approach that educates physicians may be a more suitable option.

The heavy investment of drug discovery must be supported by a strategic awareness campaign.

AI a new player in the pharma space

The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions may be able to benefit the pharma sector in a number of ways. AI applications could up the drug discovery process, thus reducing the time it takes to move into the clinical trial phase. From a marketing perspective, machine learning and big data could make it more efficient to find leads and spread awareness of new products.

According to Synced, pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer already leverage cloud-based AI solutions to read millions of medical journals and articles in the time it would take a human to peruse a single document. As this type of technology improves, it's also likely to become more affordable, allowing small and mid-tier organizations to compete at the same level.

Google has reported that AI can have similar benefits for the marketing department. Machine learning solutions can give advertisers the ability to fully personalize content and direct it to a highly specific audience, at scale. Though such practices are already in use on a smaller scale, the industry as a whole is likely still several years away from widespread AI-powered marketing.

Physicians buried in drug data

Another piece of the puzzle is physicians. Busy schedules allow little time for researching and weighing the benefits of new drug products. A 2012 report published by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found few physicians are able to stay on top of relevant drug releases, to the detriment of their practices. A doctor who is too busy to read every article pertaining to his or her specialty could miss out on opportunities to help patients.

As technological advances push the boundaries of digital advertising, and hyper-targeted print campaigns continue to make it easier to for marketers to directly communicate with their target audience, it is without question that a strong investment in multi-channel marketing tactics will benefit the much larger investment of drug development. To that end, pharma marketers can leverage peer-reviewed journals and expert-curated websites to reach a targeted physician audience.

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