How to make a strong pharma content marketing strategy

Looking at pharma marketing only a couple of years ago, we can see drastically different healthcare trends from what we have now. Patients used to go to the nearest pharmacy or visit their doctor for information about their medication or treatment. 

This meant that pharmacists, doctors, and other healthcare workers were the primary target audience for most pharma companies. 

Now, things are entirely different. Mainly because we’re Googling everything – even recommended doses and side effects of our medication. And just like that, patients became the forefront of pharmaceutical marketing.

Today, pharma companies in the US are spending $7.6 billion on direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing, up from $6.2 billion in 2017. 

To show you how your company can adjust to these changes and fully embrace new pharma content marketing strategies, I put together this comprehensive guide.

But first, let’s start with the basics. 

What is pharma content marketing?

Pharma content marketing is about creating and distributing relevant content to attract and engage patients or healthcare professionals. This involves using multiple channels to speak about health-related topics and demystify complex terms and concepts for patients.

This allows pharmaceutical companies to build more meaningful relationships with their target audience than they can get from traditional marketing approaches. 

Five specifics of pharma content marketing

Though pharma marketing has never been closer to the marketing any other commerce company does, there are still quite a few important differences to consider.

Here’s what sets pharmaceutical content marketing apart from other areas of marketing:

1. Strict regulations
2. Educational content formats
3. Personalized patient journey
4. Ethical considerations
5. Crisis management

1. Strict regulations

As all pharma marketers already know, pharma marketing activities come under strict regulatory scrutiny. Unlike other industries, pharma companies need to make sure all their content complies with regulatory bodies like the FDA in the US or EMA in Europe.

This means that your team can’t afford to simply publish a creative campaign without putting accuracy and patient safety first. Inaccurate content that hasn’t been approved by medical professionals can be a pricey and dangerous mistake for everyone.

2. Educational content formats

Medical terms and lingo can be difficult to grasp for anyone outside of the pharmaceutical industry. Yet, everyone wants to be in the loop when it comes to their health. That’s exactly why pharma content marketing can be a powerful strategy for your company.

Delivering educational blog articles, podcasts, ebooks, case studies, or any other form of content can help your audience better understand their condition and how it can be treated. 

You can also create infographics to simplify complex medical information and spread it across relevant social media channels. Whatever works for your audience! 

3. Personalized patient journey

In most cases, patients will use your treatment for an extended period. So, unlike users of some other products, you’ll need your patients engaged and informed throughout the whole treatment. That’s why one of the most popular pharma content marketing strategies is to offer personalized patient journeys. 

But what does that mean in practice? It means you can create personalized content for patients in different stages of their treatment and distribute it when needed. You can send text messages with reminders to take the next dose of their medicine. You can also develop an app to guide your patients through treatment, explaining different stages and the expected outcomes.

You can do this by creating a patient journey map and developing content for each stage of the patient journey – from awareness to post-treatment support.

4. Ethical considerations

Another thing that sets pharma content marketing apart from content marketing in other fields is its strong focus on ethics. 

Ethical considerations in pharma content marketing refer to a couple of things, including: 

• Clearly disclosing any conflicts of interest, sponsorships, and affiliations
• Always make sure that content respects patient privacy and confidentiality, following all relevant regulations

5. Crisis management

Crisis management is another element closely related to the pharma industry. Since the industry deals with the sensitive topic of people’s health, occasional crises are inevitable.  So, instead of pretending that your company isn’t going to face any crises, you should always make sure to be prepared. 

This means creating a content plan that allows you to swiftly and effectively address misinformation, product recalls, or negative publicity.

The ultimate 10-step pharma content marketing strategy 

Since the pharmaceutical world has some unique quirks compared to other industries, you’ll need to adjust your content marketing strategy accordingly.

Here’s a 10-step pharma content marketing strategy that will help your company stand out from the competition.

1. Define clear objectives

Every pharmaceutical content marketing strategy needs to start with the same thing – defining clear objectives. It’s simple: to make sure your strategy is working, you need clear goals and KPIs that you can measure along the way.

Implementation tips

You can start by identifying specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. The most common goals include brand awareness, lead generation, patient education, and patient engagement.

Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to establish key performance indicators to measure success. This can include website traffic, engagement rates, lead conversions, and ROI.

2. Understand your audience

You can’t create the same content for patients and healthcare workers. Just like you can’t write the same content for doctors and pharmacists. They all have different goals, challenges, and obstacles they’d like to overcome. 

That’s why it’s key to clearly understand your audience and their pain points. Only then can you tailor your marketing content to their needs and make sure it resonates with your potential customers.

Implementation tips

Getting a complete understanding of your audience can be a tricky task. 

Here are the three steps you can take to help yourself understand your audience better:

1. Segmenting your audience – Divide your audience into groups such as healthcare providers, patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders.
2. Conduct customer interviews – Once you identify different groups of customers, try conducting as many customer interviews as you can. This will give you more insight into their needs, challenges, and preferences.
3. Develop personas – Use all the information you gathered during your research to create detailed buyer personas. Include demographics, preferences, pain points, and even their habits when it comes to consuming content.

3. Conduct thorough research

Researching your audience isn’t the only research you’ll do as part of your pharma content marketing strategy. You also need to conduct thorough market research to understand the market landscape, including your competitors and current trends.

Your content marketing efforts are going to be better, more informed, and ultimately more successful if you know what your competitors are talking about.

Implementation tips

Here’s what you can do to fully grasp the market before kick-starting your pharma content marketing efforts: 

• Perform a thorough market analysis to understand the market landscape, competitors, and current trends
• Stay updated on regulatory guidelines and make sure your strategy complies with relevant regulations

4. Content planning and strategy

We finally arrive at the part where you can focus on the content! Based on the research you’ve conducted in the previous steps, you can create an informed content plan. Having a plan gives you and your team a good overview of when each type of content needs to be released. 

This not only makes your team more organized but also makes your strategy more concrete. Planning and timely execution are the only way for your team to know that they followed the strategy instead of randomly posting different types of content.

Implementation tips

When organizing your content, you’ll need two different plans:

• Content calendar – Develop a comprehensive content calendar that aligns with your product launches, medical conferences, awareness days, and any other relevant dates for your business.
• Content mix – Plan a mix of content types, including articles, infographics, videos, case studies, white papers, and social media posts. Make sure that each type is the optimal format for the content you want to share with your audience.

5. Create high-quality, valuable content

It’s time to get your creative juices flowing! Think about the content that will be helpful to your potential customers and turn it into an exciting and innovative piece. For example, if you’re writing a blog article covering all the positive and negative sides of a new drug that’s recently been released, make sure this content engages your customers. 

You can achieve this by conducting interviews with experts, inserting relevant statistics, or using infographics to complement your article. Whatever approach you choose, ask yourself the same question: “Why should my potential customer care about this piece of content?”

Implementation tips

Whatever format you choose for your content, always make sure it gives extra value to the person consuming it.

Here are a few tips for enriching your content:

• Engage your audience with interactive content like webinars, quizzes, or surveys
• Create short videos where you summarize a couple of main points you want to get across and share them on social media
• Engage in influencer marketing to build stronger relationships with your audience
• Create data-driven reports and provide your audience with exciting insights

6. Distribute your content through multiple channels

Did you know that 73% of consumers prefer buying through multiple channels? Plus, omnichannel customers spend, on average, 10% more in their online transactions and 4% more in-store compared to other customers.

I don’t know about you, but that’s more than enough proof that omni-channel marketing works for me!

Implementation tips

Here are all the types of media you should consider when implementing your omnichannel content marketing strategy:

• Owned media – write website content, blogs, and email newsletters 
• Earned media – gain exposure through PR, guest articles, and mentions in reputable medical journals
• Paid media – invest in PPC advertising, sponsored content, and social media ads to reach a wider audience

7. Personalize and segment content

When dealing with patients, it’s extremely important to provide a personalized experience for each of them. Patients are different from other customers. They’re in a more delicate state, and making them feel as comfortable and informed as possible throughout the treatment should be imperative.

There are numerous ways to do this. You can do it by providing more personalized communication through an app or email. Or you can create different pieces of educational content for patients with various conditions in different stages of treatment. 

Implementation tips

Here are the two different approaches you can take in personalizing your content:  

• Targeted messaging – create segments for different groups of patients and tailor your content to address the specific needs and preferences of each segment
• Mapping patient journey – map content to different stages of the patient journey, from awareness to post-treatment, and tailor your content to different stages

8. Engage with your audience

Whether you have patients or healthcare professionals as your audience, regularly engaging with them is equally important. By crafting meaningful content, you’ll be able to create a community with your audience. 

That’s why it’s important to write to your audience and give them a platform to turn your content marketing efforts into a two-way conversation. You can host webinars or podcasts, or engage in social media discussions. Or you can do all those things. 

As long as you engage with your audience, you’re on a good track toward building a long-lasting community of satisfied customers.

Implementation tips

Successfully engaging your audience is often easier said than done. 

Here are the two ways in which you can engage your audience:

• Build a community – Create online communication streams for patients and healthcare providers to share experiences and insights. You can develop an app with chat functionality, create dedicated social media groups or accounts, or even organize on-site events to move away from solely communicating online. 
• Create feedback mechanisms – Gathering customer feedback is a powerful tool for improving communication. Incorporate feedback forms, surveys, and direct communication to gain valuable insights about your audience’s needs and preferences.

9. Analyze and optimize

Once you publish your content, your job isn’t nearly done. Analyzing and optimizing your content once it goes live is just as important as producing and publishing it. 

If we go back to the first step in the strategy, we’ll see that you set up clear goals and objectives. And only by measuring the success of your content will you be able to tell if these goals are being met. Or if your content needs a little tweaking.

Plus, by tracking your content’s performance over a longer period of time, you’ll be able to adjust it to the evolving strategy. 

Implementation tips

Here are some of the metrics you can track as part of your pharma content marketing strategy:

• Content performance metrics – track open rates, click-through, time spent consuming the content
• User engagement metrics – track the number of comments, shares, or likes on your content
• ROI metrics – track the number of leads and paid customers that came as a result of a specific piece of content

10. Maintain compliance and ethics

Maintaining compliance with all regulations can be difficult, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Your content needs to be compliant to maintain patient safety and avoid legal consequences. Plus, it helps you keep public perceptions about your company positive.

Implementation tips

One of the most effective ways to ensure compliance across all your content is to implement a dedicated content review tool. A tool like Filestage allows you to invite all relevant stakeholders to review the content before it is published.  

You can even create separate review groups for the legal and compliance experts to review your marketing content. That’s right, you can say goodbye to sleepless nights fearing that any of your content might cause a backlash!

Final thoughts

Successful content creation that helps your company gain more satisfied customers is complex in any industry. With strict regulations and ethical considerations, pharmaceutical companies have an even bigger pill to swallow (no pun intended) when building an effective content marketing strategy.

Luckily, having a good strategy can help you go a long way. Plus, if you use powerful tools like Filestage to review and approve all your content marketing assets, you’re set for success.

If you wish to witness the power of Filestage firsthand, start your free trial today!