Digital Marketing for Pharmaceutical Companies

5 pharmaceutical marketing strategies

Improve your marketing strategy for your pharmaceutical products with these five pharmaceutical marketing strategies:

1. Use SEO to get noticed on Google

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the cornerstone of any Internet marketing strategy. It makes your website (and individual pages) show up in Google search results so consumers and doctors can find you when they want information about your products.

SEO is the most important part of any pharma digital marketing strategy because it brings traffic to your website. And when visitors come to your website, you can be sure they’re consuming the accurate, important information that you publish.

This also helps you stay competitive with other pharmaceutical companies online. If you want to promote your brands over a competitor’s, your website needs to be streamlined and optimized to beat everyone else in your industry.

That’s a full-time job all on its own, especially since pharmaceutical companies are so large. Even small pharmacies fight an uphill battle against their local competitors.

To rank well in search engines, your site needs:

• Optimized title tags
• Eye-catching meta descriptions
• Helpful, informative content
• Multimedia

These four qualities turn every page on your site into a lean, perfected product.

Then, when someone searches for a keyword related to one of your pages, it will show up above your competitors.

That means more clicks to your website, more people reading your content, and more of your information getting out into the public. This makes it a passive way for you to promote your brand 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So no matter how you look at it, SEO is an extremely valuable marketing strategy for pharmaceutical companies.

2. Educate audiences with content marketing

Content marketing is the practice of writing, designing, and publishing information online.

“Content” typically refers to text on a page, although it can also include accompanying images, videos, interactive elements, and more.

As a pharmaceutical company, you can use several forms of specialized content, like:

1. MSDS documents
2. Consumer guides
3. Physician manuals for how to prescribe certain products

These three forms of content are hyper-targeted to the pharmaceutical industry, and they’re perfect complements to your other Internet marketing strategies.

On top of those three types of content, you can also use your website to publish:

1. Blogs
2. Articles
3. Statistics
4. Shareholder reports
5. Transparency reports

3. Build a trustworthy brand with reputation management

Reputation management is the practice of shaping your online image by influencing or publishing positive content online.

One of the most common and powerful forms of reputation management is search saturation. Search saturation means finding a keyword that shows negative results about your pharma brand(s), creating new content based on that keyword, and publishing it online.

Then, when people search for those terms, they’ll only see the positive content that you published while the negative results are pushed off the first page.

4. Interact with audiences using social media

Social media marketing is the method of reaching out to your customer base and product users through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

The goal of this pharmaceutical marketing strategy is to bridge the informational and sentimental gaps that naturally lie between you and the public. Most companies in other industries also use social media marketing to sell their products.

But as a pharmaceutical company, you can’t do that.

Instead, you can use social media as a way to promote new research, upcoming products, higher-ups in your staff, and more. You may not actually generate sales from your Twitter account — but you can at least help people feel more comfortable with your products.

5. Increase feedback value with review management

Pharmaceutical companies are subject to lots of online reviews. Those reviews can be product reviews for medicines, occupational reviews for jobs, and ethical reviews for business practices.

While you don’t have direct control over what people say about you in public, you can at least Google your company’s products every once in a while to gauge public sentiment.

If any review is unfairly negative, you can always contact the review outlet (like Yelp) and explain the situation to get the review changed or removed.

You can also supplement some reviews with information on your products so readers can more accurately judge your medicines for themselves.

It’s possible for you to ignore online reviews since you probably don’t sell your products straight to consumers — they need a doctor’s prescription first.

But that’s actually not a good idea.

Even with the buffer of a doctor’s prescription, it’s still ultimately up to the consumer to buy it.

So if someone’s only heard bad things about your brand(s), they may not get that prescription filled.

That may sound unlikely, but it’s still lost profit every time someone stubbornly refuses (or forgetfully neglects) to get a prescription filled.

If you want to avoid that possibility and maximize your profit potential, you need a firm grasp on your online reviews, which is why review management is so critical to pharma marketing strategies.