- The pharmaceutical industry is evolving quickly, so you need to know how to stay competitive
The pharmaceutical market has witnessed substantial growth over the past 20 years, resulting in worldwide pharma revenues reaching a staggering $1.25 trillion in 2019. Pfizer, one of the world leading pharma companies, saw its revenues reach an impressive $51.7 million.
Despite the ability of government regulations to potentially negatively impact on sales, the pharma industry looks set for a continued growth in revenues. Affordability of drugs and disease prevalence continue to be the main driver, coupled with a growing population and booming emerging markets. It is also helping transform the rest of the healthcare, which has helped the industry gain more allies from other healthcare companies.
Naturally, such a lucrative market attracts a high level of competition as every company seeks an edge to enhance their sales. So how do you companies stand out from the crowd?
Top Tips to Stand Out in The Pharmaceutical Market
- Implement smart technology to track business intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) powered business intelligence (BI) platforms provide life sciences companies with game-changing capabilities. This smart technology provides cognitive insights based on billions of records in a matter of seconds, unlike traditional pharmaceutical BI that fails to deliver.
With AI-powered cognitive insight platforms, life science companies can provide easy access to the information their commercial teams need the most. Not only that, they allow any employee in a complex organisation the ability to access information wherever and whenever they need it.
The benefits of AI in healthcare are clear:
- Cognitive insights platforms increase productivity by 5x
- Increase user adoption to 100%
- Reduce dependency on IT by 40%
- Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership by 50%
- Reduce the time from insight-to-action for everyone
- Build an insight driven enterprise of the future
- Provides a single version of truth to all the stakeholders
- Creates analytics in seconds, without the need for predefined dashboards or reports
Timely business insights are vital for pharma companies to successfully compete in today’s digital world. These leading-edge AI-powered tools, give life sciences companies the edge they need to stay ahead in a crowded, competitive market.
- Understand your audience and build buyer personas
No matter how incredible your product may be, it is crucial to know exactly who you’re trying to sell it to. In order to engage this target audience and create sales, you must first create a buyer persona.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional profile that best represents your ideal customer. By creating buyer personas, companies can tailor their marketing efforts to connect with their target audience and solve their problems.
Markets consist of a variety of demographic characteristics, needs and behaviours, meaning not all product messages will relate to all of these people. Therefore, strategic segmentation provides an opportunity to target specific messages at specific audiences.
Carry out market research
To get an idea of who your customers are, what they want, and what they’re looking for, you must conduct some market research. Common types of research involve:
- Feedback from customers
- Feedback from Sales Reps and customer facing employees
- Analysis of competitors
- Analysis of sales
This information will help companies gain a better understanding of exactly who they are trying to reach with their products. Statistics show that personalised campaigns drive significantly better results than a ‘one size fits all’ strategy.
- SWOT Analysis
It may have been around since the 1960’s, but there’s a reason SWOT analysis is still used today. It has proved to be an effective tool in analysing a company from both an internal and external perspective.
Crucially, a SWOT analysis helps companies identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. All four of these areas are vital to understand when it comes to accurate and organised business planning.
- Strengths relate to characteristics of the company that give it an advantage over others in the sector.
- Weaknesses relate to the characteristics of the company that place it at a disadvantage relative to others.
- Opportunities identify the elements in the environment that the business could exploit to its advantage
- Threats identify the elements in the company’s external environment that could create trouble for the business or more specifically the product.
The SWOT analysis enables companies to better understand and respond to their customers, competitors, intermediaries, as well as worldwide regulatory bodies.
The future of the pharmaceutical market
Looking forward, emerging markets continue to offer huge opportunities for pharma companies to grow. However, they will need to understand the intricacies of individual markets and adapt their commercial models and approaches to meet their specific needs.
Using the tips provided above and embracing the use of smart technology, there appears to be no limit to what they can achieve.