Patient-centered Marketing

The pharmaceutical industry has felt a major shift in its approach to drug marketing. Brands have been aligning with healthcare providers to adopt a more patient-centered approach to medicine.

While it’s true that pharma brands develop products to address a health issue for a population, it is the individual patients that ultimately decide if they will consume a medication. And these are the days of the empowered consumer.

They have access to information, reviews, data, and more—right at their fingertips. So along with marketing to HCPs, P&T committees, payers, and the like, drug makers must be focused on the actual patients that make up the target population to make inroads today.

Pharmaceutical brands have been talking about patient engagement for several decades. But the industry as a whole has yet to catch up to the expectations that consumers have from others such as retail, automotive, and hospitality.

Challenges continue to exist in transforming to a fully patient-centered organization. Executive buy-in, for example, may be hard to achieve. As recently as 2019, 69% of brand leaders were still struggling with what and how to teach patient centricity to employees. 

But a patient-centered approach is unavoidable in these days of the empowered consumer. So let’s look at some of the key ways your pharma brand can succeed when it comes to marketing to patients.

Tips for Success

As patient-centered care has risen among care centers, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations, we’ve seen best practices evolve that pharma brands can incorporate in their marketing practices.

Meet them where they are

Messaging has to be timely and responsive. Patients – like the broader population – lead complex lives filled with daily distractions, emotional moments, a barrage of advertising messages, and shorter attention spans. So brand managers must connect with patients on their terms. A patient-centered approach should consider how to effectively meet them:

• In their journey. Patients will be at various points in customer journey. Are they pre-diagnosis or post? Are they seeking a medication change? Match messaging to the appropriate journey phase.
• In the moment. Mobile, multi-device consumers should be targeted by location, time of day, devices, and other criteria that individualizes their experience with your brand.
• On their channels. Patients seek answers to their health concerns through multiple sources. While providing information on your site is critical, ensure that your branding, data, customer stories, etc. are delivered via social, web search, review sites, forums, patient advocacy portals, and more.
• In their search behavior. Maximize opportunities for visibility by targeting relevant keywords. Search behavior can vary (e.g. voice search vs text entry) so you’ve got to ensure your marketing accommodates the unique ways patients discover pharmaceutical solutions.

Build emotional support

Only half of patients feel that they get encouragement while they are managing their condition. The need for emotional support drives decisions for many patients. Pharma brands that connect emotionally with patients have a better chance of establishing a relationship and generating lifetime value. Consider messaging that understands their lifestyles and emotional well-being in order to gain trust and build loyalty.

Go “beyond the pill”

Pharma brands are expected to deliver value beyond therapeutics and develop complementary support programs customized to help ensure patients have the best possible outcomes. Host programs that help patients and healthcare providers manage treatment by addressing affordability, matching patients with clinical trials, supporting coordinated care, and offering resources post-treatment. Doing so can help to overcome a lack of trust among consumers.

Partner with patient advocacy organizations

According to Accenture, patients prefer services from patient organizations over pharma companies. Moreover, 84% of patients think pharma companies should work more closely with patient organizations to create more cohesive patient experiences. Partnering can provide better patient access and raise brand credibility while establishing a shared information exchange.

Despite the changing landscape, pharma marketing must continue to build credibility while adapting to a patient-centered approach. By partnering with Elsevier pharma brands can connect, empower and educate both healthcare professionals and patients across all specialties.

Article Written by: Alex Brown