How Digital Marketing Can Help Generic Pharma Companies Compete

How Digital Marketing Can Help Generic Pharma Companies Compete

Your Competitors Are Stealing Your Leads

A Marketing Reality Check: In the good old days of B2B marketing, it was enough to have a sales team, printed collateral, advertising in trade publications and presence at tradeshows. Fast forward to today for the new reality: B2B buyers are starting their research online and downloading product information to choose a vendor. If you are not present online, you may not be considered. But you have to use the right strategy to properly position your company for lead generation success. On today’s web, you need to:

• Be found in search for the problems you solve as much as for the solutions you offer
• Connect with influencers to benefit from their networks and reach
• Leverage systems and optimized content to generate and nurture sales leads toward conversion

Five Digital Marketing Insights That Will Change How You Generate Leads

#1: Customers are in control

Today’s customers are in control of how and when they research a company and engage with it. If a prospect isn’t familiar with your organization, they will look for you via search engines, find you through social media, or look for your content across the web. In fact, research tells us that 85% of B2B buyers research their options online and their purchase process is nearly 60% complete before they contact a vendor. Your customers are forming opinions, learning technical specifications, and narrowing down options with minimal influence from you.

If you fail to show up strong in search and online, then you are losing potential customers, and ultimately, sales. Investing in a web presence and an optimized content strategy is a priority to compete in today’s generic pharma and pharmaceutical contract manufacturing marketplace. Let’s dive into this further in insight #2.

#2: It’s all about integration: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

With so much of your buyer’s decision being made before an actual connection, it is a must for your organization to be where your customer is searching online with a properly executed, integrated web presence strategy.

But it’s not enough to just rely on search engine optimization (SEO) alone. An integrated strategy goes beyond keywords, and ensures lead generation through top visibility and promotion of your total online presence to prospects. That is content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Here’s just few tactics that can be used to find the optimized web presence sweet spot:

-          Blog writing

-          Email marketing

-          Infographics

-          Gifts

-          Animation

-          Video

-          White Papers

-          Pay-per-click advertising

#3: Quality content reigns supreme

It’s not enough to just publish content—it has to be quality content that tells your prospect something they didn’t know. You need to educate them on your solutions, not your products. You must be seen as an authority, creating informative and engaging content that solves their pain points. The key to this is to understand your audience and their potential questions at each stage of the buying process. Use those questions to develop your content plan, and to identify keyword themes for research and targeting. That is what will drive them to share your content and make a connection.

#4: Digital marketing is agile

The science behind digital marketing is unlike the old school way. Gone are the days when you’d have to suffer with a poor print ad campaign or paper-based sales collateral. Digital marketing is highly measurable, which means you can check its performance daily. If something isn’t working, a few tweaks will typically kick-start the strategy….and if that doesn’t work, you keep testing and trying. That’s the beauty of digital marketing. As you analyze your campaign’s success, it is nimble and agile, ready to adapt to maximize lead generation.

#5: Cost effective lead generation

Today, you don’t need a huge advertising budget and sales team to compete with the big players. Digital marketing is incredibly cost effective. If you can write great content, you can rival the blog of any competitor. If you can connect with your audience through social media, you will further elevate your influence and searchability. And if you’ve done it all by providing insightful and educational content that positions your company as a credible subject matter authority, the results will speak for themselves.

(Abstract from the source: DIGITAL GIANTS – www.begdigitalgiants.com)