In an article published on September 16 2015 on LinkedIn, Ajit Shirodkar, a consultant on Sales Improvement in the pharmaceutical industry, explains how this business could gain from embracing new advertising and promotion strategies.

Health businesses are well-known to be conservative, rigid and overburdened by strict conventions. This heaviness slows down the implementation of new practices in the health business. As a result, innovations such as content marketing are ignored or misunderstood by pharmaceutical actors. However bleak the statistics collated below look, they demonstrate how profuse the opportunities for expansion are.

  • Healthcare marketers devote only 23% of their total marketing budget to content marketing initiatives, which is 8%  lower than what other marketers do.
  • Only 43% of healthcare marketers plan to make additional efforts towards content marketing, which is 11% lower than other industries.
  • Nearly three quarters of marketers (74 %) use blogs, while a comparatively timid 58% of health marketers do so.

Whenever the health and pharmaceutical businesses decide to take the plunge in the waters of content marketing – which they should speedily do for their own good -, here are five crucial points they would need to bear in mind to ensure substantial results.

Your customers are the priority, not you

Many brands often make the mistake of praising their products and services in the first place. They forget the first rule of content strategy, i.e.: it’s not about the brand, but rather about the consumers’ problems and the way your offer solves these. If you communicate time and again about your brand alone, nobody will care about you or your products. They won’t like nor share your content. As a result, your click-through rate and site traffic will tumble and so will your sales.

Think about quality before SEO

When you create new content, don’t bother about the way Google, Yahoo or Bing will consider it. Stay focused on what your audience will think about your post, how it’ll be useful, interesting, funny or inspiring. Users and consumers don’t reason like search engines, even the most powerful of them. Search engines think first about relevance, PR, net linking and authenticity. Readers require all of this, but request truth, humor, utility and up-to-date information before all. If you satisfy your audience, you’ll gain trust. Trust then brings reputation, traffic, conversion and sale.

Dismiss the sales stratagems

For prospects, good content means a product that really attends to their needs. Your audience will skip your site if you create and publish content that evidently serves your brand’s needs instead. As a marketing support, content must be useful for readers so they can trust your brand. People then will know your products, like them and lead them on the purchasing decision path. Don’t embarrass yourself with adding sales subterfuges in your post. These kinds of tricks should be saved for your paid announcement campaign.

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Set precise goals

Content marketing strategy built without any reason is not a good strategy, if it can be called so at all. Indeed, strategy means devising a set of well planned actions to reach a realistic purpose. This rule also concerns content marketing. Before moving down this road, make a list of all the goals you want to achieve. This could be the expansion of your audience, or an improvement of your click-through rate. Reinforcing your social media presence or enriching your clients and leads’ database can also be some worthwhile purposes. By defining clear and realistic goals, you’ll easily concentrate your effort on producing content that matches your action plan. Your partners and clients also could approve your decisions unhesitantly and even accept new investments into content marketing.

Be patient and constant in your communication

Even the best content marketing strategy doesn’t produce significant results immediately. So, do not expect a spectacular change in your click-through rate or traffic after a few days or weeks. Bear in mind that content marketing is a long-term affair. If you want to obtain an impressive outcome, stay focused on your goals, and maintain a consistent and regular editorial calendar. Don’t stop creating new content that brings engagement and visits.

[LinkedIn]

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