The Top 5 Medical Marketing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

Carry on doing what you’ve always done

Medical marketing has changed dramatically in recent years, along with the rapid evolution of the marketplace in which pharmaceutical and healthcare companies are operating. Regulators are becoming more risk averse, there is a greater focus on prevention rather than treatment, healthcare policy-makers are increasingly determining what doctors can prescribe and chronic disease is becoming more prevalent, to name but a few of the environmental factors that are evolving. 

To stay relevant and successful, pharmaceutical companies need to change from the product-centric model that has dominated in past decades and build marketing and sales strategies that are fit for the future.

Ignore your data

Data is a pharmaceutical marketer’s greatest asset. Data is what drives the digital channels that the industry is moving towards as well as improving the effectiveness of traditional channels such as direct mail.

Data needs to be captured accurately and consistently. It needs to be kept clean, up-to-date and complete and must be stored and used securely. Only when this is the case can it be effective in allowing marketers to segment and personalise effectively to develop conversations to engage their audiences.

Data security is a huge problem in the private healthcare sector. While any organisation holding customer data is at risk, private health service providers are the sector suffering the most breaches, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Cyber attack, human error and system error are the three most common causes of data security breaches for Australian businesses. Keeping data secure is becoming an increasing concern for any organisation entrusted with people’s personal information, but of course healthcare involves the kind of truly personal data that makes this an especially sensitive area. Organisations need to ensure employees are on their guard against common tricks used by cyber criminals as they steal usernames and passwords.When data is used for marketing or service communications, it is important to ensure the company managing your data has the right data security credentials to help manage your risks.

Don’t segment or personalise

Segmentation and personalisation can be time-consuming and it is easy to question whether or not it is worthwhile segmenting your customers to the nth degree when you feel you only have one message to convey. However, research shows time and time again that only communications that are relevant will properly engage audiences and the way to make them relevant is to understand who your customers are, where they are, their context and how they interact with your brand. Pharmaceutical marketers need to have the ability to answer these questions across a variety of platforms and at the various stages of the customer journey, as much as in any other industry, bringing sales teams closer to customers with segmentation, personalisation and automation.

Automating product marketing, sales or service communications with personalised, dynamic content will help you make sure that the messages from your sales team are always relevant and consistent with your marketing strategy.

Work with a marketing company that does not specialise in medical and pharmaceutical marketing

On one level, pharmaceutical marketing has much in common with marketers in other sectors, such as the need to be customer-centric, data-centric and to develop relevant conversations through segmentation and personalisation. However, pharmaceutical and healthcare marketers face a unique set of circumstances and challenges that can be managed effectively by a company that specialises in this area. Does your managed services provider fully understand what it takes to develop successful Patient Support Programs (PSPs) and Product Familiarisation Programs (PFPs)? Does your agency have the ability to manage sampling or multi-channel product recalls in house? Are they NSW Health approved and can they provide climate controlled storage and simplify the processes with a web-based app? Answering these questions should lead you to a company who can specialise in the processes you need.

Run a digital only marketing strategy

While it’s essential to embrace change as we have already seen, it is also important to retain any traditional channels that are effective. Direct mail is of fundamental importance to pharmaceutical, medical and healthcare marketers. It would be very challenging to manage a sampling campaign without it.

Today’s direct mail allows you to fine-tune campaign targeting, improving results. Using data and the latest digital print technologies, mail campaigns can be highly personalised and incorporate higher-end creative to make an impact on their audience.

Mail is still the channel with the highest cut-through rate with research by Australia Post showing that more than 90 per cent of Australians read their mail, 60 per cent read it thoroughly and 54 per cent store it for later reference.

Today’s mail provides the same valuable benefits as digital channels from specific targeting to testing, measurability and a proven ROI. In addition, we see that the overall response is greater when mail is coupled with other channels.