Marketing Checklist for Pharmaceutical and Medical Brands

Marketing to healthcare professionals (HCPs) gets more challenging each year. As you plan your marketing campaigns to HCPs, we’ve got a quick list of six key considerations that will help inform your approach. 

1. Review your marketing plan

This is a big one. The key to sustained successful marketing is maintaining the vision your brand has for its marketing team and its products. As you plan, review your goals, mission, overall strategy, and audience to determine if anything has changed or is expected to change in the future. Reflect on what worked in 2019 and what needs to change for 2020 and beyond.

Consider how your audience may have grown and/or shifted since the last time you planned your messaging and campaigns. Audience focus is more important than ever. With the constant evolving landscape in medicine, you should expect your audience not to remain static. What new challenges have evolved? What new technologies or social networks are they using? Do new or lookalike audiences exist for your products? Ask yourself and/or your team a lot of questions and adjust your plan as necessary.

2. Think mobile-first

Google has made its mobile-first index the new rule. Therefore, it’s hugely important to optimize your website for a mobile audience. Failing to do this is likely killing your website ranking, resulting in heavy penalties that ruin your chances of being found on top SERPs.  In addition, you’ll want to ensure all your content is optimized for the hyper-busy, mobile HCP audience.

3. Re-examine your content marketing

​Look at your 2019 content creation and distribution activity. Will your content need to change? Make sure it will be aligned with new or future FDA regulation. Continue to focus on your audience as you plan new campaigns. Give your healthcare professional audience the data, citations, and other information they need to help patients.

4. Focus on SEO

​Building traffic to your content via Google and other search engines is a long-term process, but it should be a vital aspect of your 2020 marketing plan. With an audience focus in mind, you must optimize your content specifically for HCP prospects who are searching for answers. This will require a keyword focus on long-tail phrases as well as the most popular terms (though targeting the highest volume keywords can become costly and unproductive).

5. Leverage video

​At times HCPs need content they can digest quickly. Embed video in your email, product pages, and landing pages. Anywhere you’re trying to convey a message to HCPs, you may see as much success with a short video message as you might with a page of text. Videos should be linked to additional resources so your audience can explore your products deeper with ease. In addition to producing your own video, webinar sponsorship has and should continue to be a proven channel for video marketing through 2020.

6. Use paid social ads

​Don’t rely on organic social posts to drive awareness. Unless you post in groups, your messaging could be lost. Organic reach has been steadily declining compared to advertising reach on Facebook and other social platforms. So, your 2020 plan should consider shifting focus to paid social advertising. For example, Facebook offers a wide range of ad types, including story and carousel ads. Add to your social ad spend with a set of targeted campaigns and your results should improve in 2020.

Good luck in your next healthcare brand marketing!

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Article written by: Alex Brown