How Pharma Brands Can Be Built Digitally Through Content

The pharma and healthcare industry is complex, with various stakeholders and functions. But at the core of their operations is a single-minded focus on extending care to patients by putting them at the centre of attention. This caregiving attitude defines the industry and therefore, all content marketing activities must extend the same feeling of care.

The Caregiver

The role of the Caregiver is to nurture and serve others with compassion, generosity and self-sacrifice. They strive to meet the needs of the people and make sure everyone feels safe and supported.

Psychographic segmentation identifies groups of people according to their motivations, priorities and communication preferences. This type of research can help determine why an individual consumer might choose one option over the other.

In the pharma and healthcare industry, psychographic segmentation allows for a better understanding of your consumers and helps in enhancing patient engagement while improving both healthcare and business outcomes.

Content marketing holds tremendous potential in creatively connecting with your consumers in impactful and measurable ways. Advancements in technology in Pharma have created never-before-imagined engagement possibilities for Rx content marketers. The wide acceptance of digital platforms by consumers has opened up opportunities to reach them through various media with customized marketing communication.

Patients today research their problems online before getting in touch with doctors. So, it’s important to reach them throughout their research cycle. By identifying high-volume, therapy-based searches, you can reach more and more potential customers and direct them to your portal. Your content should educate them on their needs, not sound sales-y. In return, you gain their trust and attention.

Let’s say an asthma patient searches for “how to manage asthma better?” This creates an opportunity for you to show up in their search results and give them relevant and helpful information through your content portal.

The next step is to create helpful content around their problems, interests and preferences. As we saw earlier, each consumer persona has different triggers of communication. Personalization through content segregation leads to better consumer engagement and easy accessibility of relevant content. Your content portal and other communication through emailers, infographics, videos, etc. should cater to each of these categories with personalized content buckets.

In the case of asthma or any other therapy area, one example of creating content buckets would be to segregate them as follows: Asthma awareness, Living with Asthma, Managing Asthma, Asthma medications, Tips on Asthma Care, etc.

Engagement acts as an emotional motivator driving consumer behaviour. And what better way to do this than communicate with them personally with the information they have been seeking, right on the device of their choice. This will help build relationships and get them to consider you when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

For example, encouraging conversations and interactions via quizzes, social media channels, influencer interventions or contests boost audience engagement significantly. Emailers help create personalized communication and is still a great medium to keep your audience engaged.

When you genuinely bond with your audiences, you not only evoke trust and credibility but also build an engaged community of users. By integrating user stories, encouraging conversations and providing support with doctor consultation and even scheduling appointments will give your users a greater sense of belonging. Advice coming from knowledgeable and trained sources boosts the credibility and trustworthiness of your brand.

You can drive doctor engagement with webinars, provide assisted recommendations, create forums for discussions and also hold community events to provide support and boost community involvement.

Personalized content works as long as you effectively track and use the insights across all touchpoints. It is important to have a structured mechanism in place to continuously monitor and refine the strategy. And this is where technology solutions come in.

With the right technology platforms and analytics complementing your content strategy, workflows can be adjusted to patient preferences and enhance the likelihood of response. So you can not only customize what is communicated but also how and when it’s communicated. Quality measurement is a stepping-stone for future success.

Patients differ on how they like to be engaged—whether it’s interactive voice response, chatbot integration, text or email - different channels could be used by caregivers. Smart device and IoT integrations, mobile apps or popular health app/e-pharmacy partnerships hold a lot of promise in creating the tech-enabled future of healthcare. And all of that is being leveraged now!