One strategy that has proven to be particularly relevant and powerful today is growth marketing. Due to its great impact, it is essential today to know its importance in the pharmaceutical sector, and thus understand how it can boost the progress of companies in the industry.
What is Growth Marketing?
Growth marketing is defined as a marketing strategy focused on business development through innovative tactics and techniques. Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on generating brand awareness and customer acquisition, growth marketing focuses on maximizing customer lifetime value, retaining existing customers and using experimentation and data analysis to optimize results.
In other words, growth marketing is focused on identifying growth opportunities through innovative marketing tactics, which allows generating new channels and specific spaces to improve results.
“According to IQVIA reference 2022, when a brand uses only two communication channels, the engagement level is below 32%.”
This implies that being limited to two or fewer communication channels can negatively affect audience interaction and participation.
Growth Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry
In the pharmaceutical sector, growth marketing plays a key role in addressing the specific challenges presented by the industry. Increased competition, strict regulations and volatile consumer expectations make it crucial for pharmaceutical brands to stand out through innovative techniques that separate them from the traditional market.
This is where growth marketing comes into its own, offering diverse strategies and approaches that are tailored to these unique needs and specific audiences, and this is reflected by:
- Customization and Segmentation: Pharmaceutical marketing requires a highly personalized approach, as medical products and treatments are targeted to different segments of patients and healthcare professionals. Growth marketing uses data analytics and segmentation techniques to deliver highly relevant and tailored messages and experiences to each target audience.
- Acquisition of Digital Channels: By regulation, pharmaceutical brands cannot directly leverage traditional channels such as social networks, online content, digital advertising and ATL media, therefore growth marketing appears as a highly effective alternative, through the generation of their own specific channels that can be articulated with the objective of increasing visibility, reaching new healthcare professionals, and building strong relationships with them.
- Experimentation and Ongoing Optimization: Through this practice, brands can test and analyze results to constantly improve marketing strategies and conversion funnels. This allows them to discover which approaches work best, which messages transcend the most, and above all, which marketing channels deliver the best results.
In this context, growth marketing has become an essential approach to drive development in the pharmaceutical industry, since working with a multichannel approach allows for more efficient processes, bringing scientific communication to each audience through the appropriate channels and with a higher level of engagement.
Opportunities for Pharmaceutical Growth Marketing
As a relatively new and innovative strategy in the market, growth marketing presents a number of challenges as well as opportunities, with the greatest being the competitive advantages this model can offer when properly developed.
Some notable opportunities include:
- Tailoring messages for healthcare professionals and patients, segmenting the audience and adapting messages to their specific needs. By offering relevant and personalized information, brands can establish a stronger connection with their audience and increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.
- Effective use of digital channels to reach a broad audience, share relevant information and generate effective results. The generation of digital channels offers the opportunity to establish a strong online presence and generate optimal results with the audience.
- Use of data analytics that can be leveraged to collect and analyze data on customer behavior, market trends and marketing campaign results to make informed decisions, optimize strategies and maximize ROI.
- Improving the patient experience, this involves understanding patients’ needs and concerns, providing relevant support and education, and establishing a long-term relationship. By prioritizing this, pharmacists can strengthen patient loyalty and trust, as well as generate positive recommendations and referrals.
- Creation of new academic spaces, seeking to bring CME (continuing medical education) to health professionals in a direct and immersive way, through the generation of valuable content that can help them enhance their professional practice.
“Through growth marketing, challenge can be turned into opportunity.”
Challenges are often the starting point for new opportunities, which is why growth marketing focuses on promoting constant adaptation, allowing the discovery of new skills, channels and approaches, providing the opportunity to expand those limits that are seen as challenges and thus explore new paths.
It has been proven that by taking advantage of these opportunities, pharmaceutical companies can stand out in a competitive market, establish strong relationships with healthcare professionals and patients, and thus succeed in the industry.
Also read: What is pharmaceutical marketing?
Future of Pharmaceutical Growth Marketing
The projection of growth marketing in the pharmaceutical sector into the future is promising. As technology advances and consumer preferences change, growth marketing will continue to evolve to meet the needs of the industry.
The future of growth marketing is based on several key trends, through these we expect an increased focus on personalization, offering messages and experiences relevant to each individual. In addition, emerging technologies such as virtual reality and telemedicine will be used to enhance education and user experience. Channel integration and an omnichannel strategy will be important to deliver an effective experience.
Finally, transparency and trust building will be pursued to establish strong relationships with healthcare professionals and patients. These trends will enable pharmaceutical companies to adapt and be relevant in an ever-changing market.
In conclusion, growth marketing has become a crucial strategy in the pharmaceutical sector, enabling brands to face challenges and seize opportunities in a highly competitive market. By adopting personalized approaches, using and generating effective digital channels and developing constant testing, companies in the pharmaceutical industry can achieve excellent results and in turn have the potential to improve people’s quality of life.
In this sense, it is important to highlight how pharmaceutical laboratories can leverage growth marketing to position themselves in the sector, through a customer-centric approach, message personalization and multichannel, it is possible to increase visibility, acquire and retain customers, and expand market presence.
This exemplifies how growth marketing can be an extremely powerful tool that is essential to consider in order to develop new strategic channels and effectively optimize corporate results.
Luis Alfonso Ruíz
Igloolab– CEO
