For years all pharmaceutical marketing took place in person and face-to-face. Fast forward to today where according to Accenture, about a quarter of all prescriber interactions take place online. If you look ahead two more years, that number is expected to grow to nearly 50%. Pharma Marketing 3.0 has arrived and it’s beginning to look more and more similar to traditional B to C marketing. Oracle Eloqua recently outlined some of the trends in modern pharmaceutical marketing. We were able to come up with a short litmus test for fluency in Pharma Marketing 3.0.
Are you cutting Costs? And where?
In the pharma industry, a number of name-brand giants are quickly coming up on the expiration of their patent protection. According to Bloomberg, Pfizer has roughly $5 billion worth of drugs sales that are losing patent protection this year while Novartis is looking at about $8 billion in that category. This is putting these companies in direct competition with generic brands and forcing them to take a leaner approach. As a result, 83% of sales and marketing executives in the pharmaceutical industries are cutting costs.
How far along is your digital strategy?
There’s an arms race of sorts in the field of digital pharma marketing. We mentioned that by 2016 it’s projected about half of prescriber interactions will take place digitally. At the same time, according to Accenture, 60% of pharmaceutical companies indicated they have their sights set on improving their digital effectiveness. Digital strategies are at the top of everyone’s list in this space and companies are going to be forced to invest in this area out of necessity.
How are you leveraging data?
“Big data” and analytics are talked about ad nauseam and it’s not taking anyone by surprise in today’s marketing climate. That said, it remains one of the highly regarded tools going forward in the field of digital pharma. 87% of these companies acknowledged wanting to increase their use of analytics to better target sales and marketing spend going forward.
Doctors have less time. Are you making the most of that time you do get?
Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, more than 30 million Americans are expected to enter the system. The chain reaction is increasing doctor’s workloads leaving them with less time. Fewer face-to-face meetings put an even higher premium on them. That said, pharmaceutical companies need to continue to look outside of traditional channels in order to get their message across.
You can check out the full report from Oracle Eloque here.
(Originally published on April 1, 2014)