The global market for pharmaceuticals worth $900 billion and this figure is fully expected to exceed $1,1 trillion in the next few years. In fact, recent studies show the industry is growing at a rate of 5%.
With Jordanians spending of 569 million JOD on drugs a year, marketing is a top priority for the major players in the pharmaceutical industry. With so much spending involved, most companies understand the great role and importance of marketing in pharma.
Pharma marketing refers to the marketing of drugs and medical devices by private and public organizations to doctors, clinicians, and consumers. It is now the key driving force behind shareholder value. More specifically, marketing enables pharma companies to identify, anticipate and provide solutions for customer requirements.
While many people continue to view pharmaceuticals as commodities, marketers know that branding is the only way to help differentiate these companies from each other.
Studies show that most pharma CEOs believe new products to be the driving force of revenue, professional marketers think otherwise.
The truth is experts know that pharma marketing is more and more important as the differentiation between existing products becomes smaller. In fact, the key to growth in the pharma space is more strongly associated with understanding consumer needs as opposed to creating or improving products.
Pharma marketers will place emphasis on identifying customer needs and finding solutions to meet these needs. Meanwhile, CEOs can focus on deploying their time and effort elsewhere, while knowing their pharma marketers can implement effective strategies for success.
But how do you stand out of the crowd in pharma marketing?
The answer is simple – Analytics based marketing.
Rather than use the same “differentiators” as everyone else, savvy markets use certain drivers such as efficacy to stand out.
When changing to analytics-driven methods, most marketers find the results are far more impressive than with taking a conventional approach. In short, data is now an important element for effective marketing and measuring these results is just as important. Marketers can use analytics to measure effective marketing strategies and to eliminate the risk of spontaneous decision-making that might not produce a decent return on investment. In short, analytical decision-making can save both time and money for pharma companies.
Marketers must be able to prove that these methods are working and make changes to improve the bottom line. As a rule, marketing analytics metrics should include many factors including sales, costs, and profits.
Moral of the story: Branding is important, but data analytics are needed to measure success. Also, marketing and revenue should be tied to produce the most desirable results.
