The pharmaceutical industry is characterized by a fiercely competitive market, where new products can have difficulty garnering interest without the right go-to-market strategy to back them up.
While the exact decision-making journey may vary depending on the country or based on the product itself, some fundamentals remain the same regardless of the specifics.
Let’s explore the basic principles of go-to-market strategy in Pharma.
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Go-to-Market Strategy: Why It Matters In The Pharmaceutical Industry
In the pharmaceutical industry, the stakeholders’ needs and wants are often difficult to pinpoint, which makes devising an effective go-to-market strategy a challenging endeavor.
Measuring the success of a campaign is similarly complex, as the stakeholders’ value can rarely be expressed in strictly quantifiable terms, making sales numbers an uncertain way to evaluate success.
The data collection process requires a dedicated approach. Alcimed has been supporting players in the pharmaceutical industry for over 30 years.
Whether you are preparing to launch a new product, looking to rethink your models, redesigning your business model, or wanting to transform your customer engagement strategy, working alongside experts specialized in Pharma Consulting can help you achieve your goals.
What Are The Key Stages Of A Successful Go-to-Market Plan?
Creating a go-to-market strategy requires building a thorough, data-backed understanding of your target consumers and devising a method to reach them and show them the value of your product or service.
1. Identifying Your Target Market and Personas
Knowing who may be interested in your brand, products, or services is crucial to building a successful go-to-market strategy.
Conducting a market study remains the most effective way to gather relevant data on your target consumers and their particular pain points.
You could focus on typical stakeholders – physicians, nurses, and patients – and non-typical stakeholders, including more specialized healthcare providers and players not directly connected to the pharmaceutical industry.
You could target social media influencers or other impactful organizations and individuals, depending on your angle.
For example, a new drug will not be relevant to the same market as a software solution to assist chemists with drug development.
Create clear personas for each stakeholder, highlighting their pain points and interests.
2. Defining Your Value Proposition
This step goes hand-in-hand with the first. It involves determining how your product or service addresses your targets’ specific pain points, emphasizing ways to create a differentiating experience. This lays the foundation for your core message, establishing key must-win moments.
For instance, your target could be doctors whose busy schedule doesn’t allow them to follow up on treatment with each patient.
If you sell access to a platform that leverages the power of automation to allow doctors to share treatment-related information with their patients with limited time input on their part, you provide a solution to that pain point: a “win”.
3. Devising Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Not all targets have similar responses to the same communication channels. Some long-established organizations or doctors may still have a traditionalist outlook, preferring in-person interactions to digital channels.
More tech-savvy personas, on the other hand, would find this approach tedious and a waste of time, favoring digital communication instead.
There is no right or wrong, so long as your marketing strategy aligns with your targets and the nature of your offering.
From digital-only marketing campaigns to hybrid approaches, it’s all about creating a positive experience.
4. Measuring Your KPIs
Once you have built your omnichannel strategy and deployed it through well-thought-out promotional content, email campaigns, informative publications, and more, you need to assess the success of your efforts.
Engagement, activity, click-through rate, sales… Identify the KPIs that best reflect the outcome of your campaign.
Here again, there are no strict rules, only subjectively relevant approaches. By observing the right metrics, you will be able to determine what worked and what didn’t while identifying areas of improvement.
Building an effective go-to-market strategy can be a complex task. Yet, by following a few fundamental rules, you can find answers to your strategic questions and devise a tailored approach to help you achieve your goals.
