How Does Content Marketing Influence the Strategy of Pharmaceutical Companies?

Content marketing has already proven its effectiveness as a promotional channel for businesses. Basically, it offers content to a target audience in various forms: text, video, audio or a mix of these. The purpose of the content is to engage prospects and become a useful resource of insights.

This development is encouraging for many industries; however pharmaceutical companies and marketers are slightly lagging behind others. With an overwhelming number of marketing channels to choose from, companies might struggle to identify the best ones.

One of the biggest challenges with pharmaceutical marketers is in shifting previous marketing habits. Previously, marketing channels for pharmaceutical companies were vastly different. In direct-to-consumer advertising, print and TV ads have generally been short in their size and space. Advertising to healthcare professionals, companies mostly used prints, e-mails and sales rep calls. In both of these cases, the time to capture the attention of the prospect was always short. Hence, marketers cramped only the most essential information in a few lines of text or seconds of video.

Now, with content marketing, pharmaceutical companies have a huge canvas to work with to deliver a message. While this is encouraging, many pharmaceutical companies make the mistake of delivering the same short message only in a large format like blogs, e-books or videos. As a result, the message will often get lost.

Content Marketing Formats

An industry like pharmaceuticals has its specific challenges, but it also has many opportunities to provide content to target patients or healthcare patients. One of the more popular tools, even in pharmaceuticals will prove to be blog posts. These can become a huge knowledge resource for the target audience and a great source of website visitors for the company.

After getting accustomed with publishing informative blog posts, you can scale into long-form content. Long form content like e-books, whitepapers or extra-long articles can deliver in-depth insights to developments within the industry or the company. Whether you put them on your site or put them up for download, they are a great asset for your brand.

Case studies are another format that hasn’t been fully exploited, but has effective results in the healthcare industry. Maybe you have a drug that helped with an incredibly difficult to deal with healthcare issue. Do you have a beyond-the-pill solution that made patients’ lives easier? A case study is the ideal format to highlight the advantages you provide to patients. They don’t have to be too long — just make sure to lay out the key information.

Finally, video has also proven to be one of the most effective in content marketing strategy. Videos are a great viewer magnet, being relatively short, containing a lot of information and are easy to share on social media.