This special edition episode of B2B Brand180 provides five essential tips to create a successful pharmaceutical brand strategy. Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, discusses how to identify your niche audience, build a brand and messaging architecture, use content marketing to boost awareness, execute a push pull marketing strategy, and optimize your strategy with data.
Listen in to learn how to create a distinct brand that is authentic and relevant for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Linda Fanaras:
If you want to transform your B2B marketing into a powerhouse brand, then you may want to listen in, and if you like what you heard today, click like share or subscribe. Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, and I’m your host today, and I’m excited to bring you 5 tips for a successful pharma brand strategy. Let’s get to it. We have a lot to cover today. So, we all know that the pharmaceutical industry has undergone significant changes in evolutions in the last decade, but even more so in the last three years since the start of Covid-19. In 2023 alone, there was a 1.1 increase in the size of the US biotech market. The biotech industry is now $152.4 billion and demands for rapid innovation and groundbreaking solutions have been fueling the industry with no signs of stopping. Pharmaceutical brands are having to think outside the box in the lab and in the office to ensure that they are top of their market and with the widest influence. Biotech and pharma marketing has become incredibly competitive, and businesses can no longer rely on their products or solutions alone. In an industry where there is generic or dupe for everything, the biotech industry is no exception. Biotech brands are forced to get creative with their marketing and customer experience in order to compete. However, that is easier said than done. Whether you’re a small scaled biotech startup or a big name pharma industry leader, having a strong brand can make or break your success in the industry, and your customers are demanding more every single day. But are you prepared to give them just that? Crafting a well-constructed, unique, relevant pharmaceutical brand can be difficult, but not impossible. Positioning your brand cohesively and creatively will provide the right foundation for growth and success. So, let’s explore the keys to successful biotech and pharmaceutical brands. Number one, make sure you identify your niche audience. All industries have niches and the specific biotech market you serve is your niche. Do you create life science solutions for specific illness? Are you an innovator in lifesaving medication? Identifying your niche audience will help you correctly position your brand. Different brands have different audiences, and your audience will depend on who you are, what you do, and what value you bring to the table. The biotech industry is massive, and knowing exactly what space you occupy allows you to establish a brand that is accurate and engaging for the right audience. An ill-positioned brand will fall flat as it’s just not reaching the right niche. To get to the right engagement, you must make sure you are speaking their language. That is, their consumer language. What are their interests? What are their concerns? What’s their problem, and what are they hoping to solve with your pharma drug? Knowing the answers to these questions and more will help you successfully position your brand and can also be used later down the line when it comes to new product launches or brainstorming sessions. While patients may not be technical, your customers can be highly educated, whether they are healthcare professionals, wholesalers, hospitals, care centers or pharmacies. These customers work with highly sensitive conditions or illnesses and are looking for highly sensitive solutions. Pharmaceutical firms need to be able to understand their customers and their patients thoroughly in order to effectively position their brand. They’re looking for the right solution for complex, critical challenges. They’re not looking for the glitz and the glamor, but rather the key medical information and essential data. However, to catch their eye, there still needs to be a certain level of eye-catching engagement beyond medical data. Essentially, biotech and pharma branding must be creative yet tasteful, ensuring that the essential information and regulations do not get lost in the mix. Number two, build a brand and messaging architecture. Establishing a messaging architecture from the start will make doing business far easier and having a stable foundation to build upon will set you up to ensure every aspect of your biotech or pharmaceutical business is supported by concrete values, processes, and more. Your brand design includes visual elements such as your logo, photography, and color palettes, as well as more emotional messaging elements such as brand positioning, key messaging, differentiators, and content marketing. Data is also incredibly important to building your messaging architecture as it serves as the factual guidance and logic to your decision making. Create a brand that is relevant to your brand and your products and services, using the colors that are distinct and can be directly associated with your brand. This will allow your customers and their patients to immediately identify your brand generating familiarity and loyalty. Your core value should be the guiding light by which you operate, communicate, and do business. It shows your customers, employees, and stakeholders what you value and prioritize. As a biotech or pharmaceutical brand, you may value quality of life and transparency, but how are you going to convey that message? Your core values should be reflected in your messaging, imagery, and even new product launches. Showing your customers what you stand for allows them to connect with your brand on a more personal level. Instead of being a cold, faceless corporation, you are open and communicative. Always including your customers in the process. Having a strong messaging architecture will ensure that your brand is ready to go to market. Whether you exist in a highly saturated market or have just broken into a new sector, a strong messaging architecture will ensure you hit your market running. Number three, use content marketing to boost awareness. Content marketing is one of the best ways to reach new customers while also engaging current ones. Relevant content allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise while simultaneously providing your audience with useful data and information they are looking for. The biotech and pharma industries are highly technical, so your content marketing must be comprehensive and up to date. Publishing medical reports, white papers, case studies, and thought leadership articles that are relevant to your products and market is one way to successfully use content marketing, but there are also other ways in which your brand can benefit. For example, publishing your own content not only gives you a dedicated platform to demonstrate knowledge and expertise, but also serves as a tool you can use to add value in partnership. Having a designated platform for blogs, announcements and content on your website, not only allows you to publish your own work, but also that of others. You can partner with non-competing biotech and pharmaceutical brands and exchange guest blogs, podcast appearances, social media highlights and more. This drives their audience over to your website, introducing new potential customers that you may not have reached otherwise. And if you have a copywriter in-house, you may be able to use and create your own content internally. However, depending on who hosts your website, you may need to connect with a third-party service to publish your content. Hiring a marketing agency that offers both content and website development and management services can help you streamline the process and ensure success. There’s a lot more to content marketing than simply finding a topic and writing a thought piece, especially in biotech. Successful content marketing uses SEO, which has been crafted and outlined using reliable data and speaks on relevant topic. Biotech and pharmaceutical content marketing specifically must be very well organized and crafted to hold relevance. Content marketing can be a powerful tool in successfully marketing and branding your pharma business. Number four, execute a push/pull marketing strategy. Integrating a push/pull marketing strategy for your biotech or pharma brand will help you stay connected to your audience and their needs, your direct customers, HCPs, pharmacies, hospitals, insurance companies, and other related parties. However, that doesn’t mean that you should only be focusing on their needs and demands; a successful strategy will include the needs and demands of their patients. A push/pull strategy means your market to patients to ask them to directly ask for your products while also understanding the benefits that you bring to the market. This will boost your reputation as a biotech or pharma brand that is open and communicative, giving you a positive reputation amongst direct customers and patients. Number five. Optimizing your strategy with data analytics. Launching your brand may seem like the finish line, but a successful brand is never truly complete. A successful brand is always being optimized and adapted to keep up with the current market. A stagnant biotech brand will quickly get left behind. Your product, services and branding should always be moving forward. Data analytics provide insight in the productivity and success of your branding so that you can adjust as needed for optimal results. A successful biotech brand is well-known, adds value to customers, and stays up to date with the industry. Data analytics can help you create a brand that is authentic and relevant and can also help you monitor key performance indicators. If you have a high open rate on your emails, but low engagement with links or attachments, that could be an indication that your email content is falling short. On the other hand, if you publish a Google ad that is targeted toward lead generation, that results in high landing page traffic and click through rates, that could be an indication you executed a successful campaign. All data is useful, but it’s all about how you analyze it. Data analytics are particularly useful in biotech branding for understanding your own success, but also identifying opportunities, optimizing strategies, and getting to know the competition, and having the ability to foresee potential changes in your industry through data analytics can put you at an advantage. Being able to also gain insight in the competition’s success allows you to operate offensive and do better than them before they can anticipate it. Data analytics can help your pharmaceutical brand reach the top of your industry and stay there. There’s no doubt biotech branding is complex. Navigating the regulations and compliance issues with the biotech industry requires significant attention to detail. Establishing and maintaining a successful brand is possible. All businesses start somewhere. But what matters is how strong your foundation is. Taking the time to conduct research, establish clear processes, and create relevant, engaging content will secure your brand at the top of the market. And once you’ve established and launched your brand, you must be able to optimize your strategy to remain competitive. There are no stagnant markets, especially in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. As a highly technical team, branding may seem like the lowest priority. This can’t be further from the truth. Successful branding drives business. Hiring a niche branding agency that specializes in pharma or biotech branding and marketing can help take the strain off your internal teams, allowing you to focus on your life-saving medications and revolutionary solutions. Biotech and pharma branding is very specific and dedicated branding firms will have the knowledge and background needed to know how to successfully position you and engage the right audience for the best results. And what’s more important is that they can also optimize and manage your brand, ensuring you stay relevant in your market. Biotech branding is only as complex as you let it be, and a professional branding firm can help you make sure you do not get lost in translation. That wraps it up for today. Thank you so much for listening about how to brand your biotech firm. Thank you for listening in, and if you like what you heard, press the like, share, or subscribe button. Thank you.
