How Do You Market A Drug In 7 Simple Steps

Pharma is a very competitive industry. With lots of regulation and consumer attrition, companies are required to do all they can to get their products in the hands of their patients.

Sales and marketing are playing a much bigger role in this industry like never before. With the right strategies, patients are going to find your brand, learn and buy your products to solve their problems.

For companies looking to market a drug, content marketing is one of the most effective ways to educate your patients, drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.

It’s also one of the cheapest forms of marketing so for startups or businesses that don’t have a large budget, it’s a must.

Here are 7 simple steps to market a drug.

Step 1: Set Marketing Goals

Before taking any action, you must define what you want to achieve from your pharma marketing efforts. 

All goals start out with a mission statement. This keeps the whole marketing team working to achieve the same objective. Mission statements must specify the target audience and address how a customer would benefit by taking the drug.

From here, ideas for content can be created to meet the mission statement. These can be anything from ranking on page one for a certain keyword in Google or improving sales by x% by producing high-quality content.

As the business grows, the marketing goals can evolve with it. 

Step 2: Know Your Audience

Content can be titled accordingly to target a certain audience but they will not be the only people that see it. Therefore, you need to know the types of people that are viewing your content.

So, firstly, you must define your ideal target audience. The most important thing to know about a customer is how they behave and interact with your brand. This will determine the type of content you create.

For example, if you see that patients watch videos more than they read your blog posts, you should focus efforts on creating high-quality videos.

Step 3: Create Or Update Your Website

Next, you must create a website that looks attractive and invites potential patients in. It’s also important to optimize the product page to increase the chances a customer purchases your drug.

Key features of the website include being mobile friendly, fast loading times and providing a smooth customer experience, such as being easy to navigate through different menus.

Ultimately, this step is to ensure that patients remain on the website and interact with your brand.

Step 4: Determine Where To Post Content 

Along with your own website, there are many channels to post content. In order to reach as many people from your target audience as possible, you need to be posting where they hang out online.

So, for example, if you know that your audience prefers watching videos, it would be logical to post on YouTube.

Social media is also a great way to share your content so research the best platform to connect with your audience.

Step 5: Create And Curate High-Quality Content

Now that you have covered all the bases, it’s time to start creating high-quality content. This is the core of every content marketing strategy.

The first thing to do is to see what’s working in the marketplace. Use tools like Ahrefs to see which competitor pages are getting a lot of traffic and find out why. Also use Google Keyword Planner to see search volume for certain terms and phrases.

These will form the base of your content.

Now for the creation.

You must create a title for your content that interests your target audience. From here, the rest of the content should be relevant to the title. Since you’re marketing a drug, content should be centred around the drug itself.

Ensure that the tone and style of the content are in line with your brand and the overall market. Your content must be authentic and feels like it was created by a human and someone that cares.

Step 6: Simple SEO

This is the step that will help you market a drug like a pro. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is used by marketers all over the world to help increase rankings in search engines like Google and generate more traffic.

Google is the number one search engine in the world so focus your efforts on ranking here before anywhere else. 

To get new patients, you need to get to page one on Google as quickly as possible. Here are a few techniques that can help.

Firstly comes keyword research. Keywords are how patients are going to find your drug and content in search engines. Ask yourself “What are most patients using my drug looking for?”

Once you know their search intent, you must include those searched-for keywords in your content. For example, if your drug was to help people with diabetes, patients would search for terms like ‘diabetes’, ‘diabetes treatment’, ‘diabetes medicine’ and ‘symptoms of diabetes’.

Secondly, ensure that the content is structured correctly for search engines. Include your target keywords in your page’s title, write your own meta description with keywords and ensure that paragraphs are broken up with the appropriate heading tags.

Finally, ensure that any images or videos are optimized. Each image or video requires a title and a description.

Step 7: Improvements

Once the pages are live, you need to make ongoing improvements to improve customer experience and increase conversions.

Use tools like Google Analytics to find which content is working gaining the most traffic from social media channels or those that are getting the highest bounce rates.

Once you have this information, you can create a plan to fix these issues. 

Conclusion

These 7 simple steps will help you to market your drug in this very competitive industry. While they may not be hard to implement, they are very effective. Make sure you set your goals, know what you want to achieve from your campaign and create high-quality content that patients are looking for.