Challenges of Marketing a New Pharmaceutical

Introducing a new pharmaceutical product into the market can be a daunting task. For healthcare professionals and institutions, effective marketing strategies are crucial for generating awareness, building credibility, and navigating the complex landscape of healthcare purchasing. 

Here are some of the biggest challenges you might face when marketing new pharmaceuticals, and methods to overcome them to better position yourself for long-term success in the competitive healthcare market.

Targeting and Reaching the Best HCPs for Your Campaigns

Marketing to healthcare providers is all about recognizing their needs and providing solutions to help their patients. When identifying what HCPs you should be focusing your efforts on, it’s important to research your product and identify ideal customers based on factors such as speciality, location, patient type, prescribing habits, and more.

Doing so is only one piece of the equation, however. You must reach them in a way that stands out above the noise. Physicians and other healthcare providers are a notoriously busy and highly discerning demographic—making them fairly difficult to connect with. 

Additionally, pharma companies have had to adjust their strategies to phase out traditional face-to-face interactions with healthcare representatives, in favor of direct mail and email marketing campaigns. 

Healthcare marketing typically involves complex and lengthy purchasing processes and sales cycles that can often take up to a year or more. It’s important to build strong relationships with key stakeholders and decision-makers to help establish credibility and increase acceptance among your target audiences. 

Producing targeted content for your different audiences, such as HCPs, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and healthcare organizations, is also a vital step for successful product adoption. 

Keeping Your Audience Informed About Your Product

Developing new pharmaceutical products and medications is an extremely expensive endeavor, with production, market approval, research and development, and more costing drug makers billions of dollars. It’s essential, especially when getting a new product off the ground, to grab your audience’s attention and inform them of the benefits.

When marketing to those in the healthcare field, it’s important to utilize specific, data-driven, and conveniently accessible content. Transparency is the name of the game here. 

Generally, healthcare providers are comfortable with data and statistics, so you don’t have to fear getting too granular with the details, but the way in which you choose to display this information can make a huge difference. 

Creating informative content such as white papers, webinars, and educational materials helps bridge knowledge gaps and supports informed decision-making. Additionally, offering training programs and resources that focus on effective product utilization enhances user experiences, encourages trust, and helps boost sales.

Building Brand Recognition and Trust 

Providing well-researched solutions for healthcare professionals creatively can go a long way toward holding their attention and establishing a relationship with your brand—especially where new market products are concerned. 

Ultimately, the best way to increase the reach and impact of your marketing efforts is to deploy coordinated, well-timed, and targeted campaigns across multiple engagement channels. 

Using multiple channels to stay in contact with your audience also enables marketers to leverage the creative opportunities such platforms present. Be sure to optimize your content and utilize creative and memorable elements to increase engagement and conversions. 

Implementing personalized email campaigns or utilizing unique designs that take advantage of the tactile experience of direct mail can help your messaging stand out above the competition, while leaving a more lasting impression on your audience.

The end goal is to have the right HCPs for your campaigns associate your products and brand with solutions they know they can trust. 

Adhering to Stringent Healthcare Marketing Regulations 

It’s no surprise that pharmaceutical products undergo an exhaustive amount of testing and approvals, and just as there are rules for what medications are allowed on the market, there are also regulations regarding how you market these products.

It’s imperative that you fully comprehend and adhere to the specific rules and regulations related to how you promote pharmaceuticals. These mandates may differ based on a number of factors, such as where you’re based, the regions you’re marketing to, and the healthcare sector you’re providing for. 

If your marketing campaign’s targets are based in the United States, for example, your content must be consistent with FDA regulations regarding prescribing information, which dictates it must be truthful and non-misleading, contain a fair balance of product benefits and risks, and include material information.

These factors will have a major impact on the content you produce and help inform your overall marketing approach.

Tracking Your Progress and Adapting Your Approach

In addition to executing campaigns, pharmaceutical marketers have to be able to track and measure the progress of their efforts at every stage of the rollout process to effectively reinforce strategies that work and pivot strategies that don’t. Monitoring your marketing results is important in helping you determine if you’re not only using the right tactics, but executing them as best as possible.

When marketing to those in the healthcare field, it’s important to utilize specific, data-driven, and conveniently accessible content.

Keeping an eye on your analytics and regularly measuring the results of your campaigns can help you better understand how effective they are, both individually, and in conjunction with your other marketing efforts. While there are potentially dozens of different metrics you could measure, focusing on the few key performance indicators most important or impactful for your effort—such as open rates, marketing qualified leads, and conversion rates—can give you a better picture of where your strategies stand.  

In short, collecting and analyzing the most pertinent data points based on the criteria you set is essential in keeping your marketing strategy effective and adaptable.

Work With PDQ Communications to Market Your New Products

When it comes to getting new pharmaceutical products in the hands of healthcare providers, you need a dedicated marketing partner that knows the healthcare industry inside and out, and can help you implement the most effective strategies for your long-term success. 

PDQ Communications understands how to connect with healthcare providers and has an extensive and well-maintained list of HCPs that can help expand your reach. We take an omni-channel approach utilizing direct mail and email campaigns together, so you can be sure you’re reaching the right audience, with the right messaging, wherever they are. 

If you’re ready to launch a new product campaign, PDQ Communications is ready to assist you. Contact us today and learn more about what we can do for you.