Pharma companies need digital skills to communicate with healthcare professionals and consumers, personalize customer journeys, and increase their visibility. This includes specialized digital skills like data analysis, data visualization, and content marketing. Also important are project planning skills. These are essential for the pharmaceutical industry to effectively manage projects and meet deadlines.
Data Analysis
Data analysis is the process of transforming raw data into valuable business insights. It typically involves a series of steps that involve gathering structured data from internal and external sources, cleaning the data, and analysing it using business intelligence tools to find patterns and trends.
This can include time-series analysis (such as a local ice cream shop finding that sales increase in winter) and correlation analysis, which shows the strength of relationships between variables e.g. paid advertising campaigns and conversion rates.
A strong understanding of data analysis is necessary for digital marketers as they plan and execute marketing campaigns. This includes defining campaign goals, tracking performance, and maximizing ROI through data-driven tactics such as paid advertising, SEO, and marketing attribution.
Analytics
The ability to understand and interpret marketing campaign data is a fundamental skill for digital marketers. This includes understanding how metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, and customer feedback impact a business’s bottom line.
Having this skill allows marketing managers to make informed decisions about their strategy and content. It also enables them to fine-tune existing campaigns and take advantage of new trends and technologies.
Digital marketers with this skill are able to target ads directly to people who might be interested in their product or service. This is done through paid search ads on platforms such as Google.
Social Media Management
Digitalization has opened new opportunities for pharma companies to reach out and engage with their audience. They need to be proficient in performing performance marketing, such as paid advertising and marketing attribution, in order to achieve their business goals and maximize ROI.
Social media management requires a clear strategy and tone of voice that combines familiarity with authority. It also involves monitoring for safety and pharmacovigilance matters. In the case of pharma, mishaps can affect real human health. Therefore, it’s crucial for a team to be well-versed in digital upskilling to avoid mistakes and ensure adherence to regulatory compliance.
Content Creation
The ability to create content is the backbone of digital marketing. This includes writing articles, blogs, whitepapers, videos, slideshow presentations, infographics, and anything else that your buyer persona would enjoy consuming.
This content can be distributed across different channels, including social media (e.g., Instagram’s IGTV format or YouTube), websites, and even email. It is also important to know how to use search engine optimization (SEO) in order to increase visibility and drive traffic to your content.
Creating consistent, valuable content will build brand awareness and consumer trust over time. This can lead to increased revenue, customer retention, and new business opportunities.
Automation
Automation involves using technology to reduce human intervention in repetitive and/or monotonous tasks. It can be a streamlined process or it can replace humans altogether. In general, it can reduce costs and improve productivity and reliability.
Marketing automation is a form of software that automates repetitive marketing tasks, such as email campaigns and workflows, Salesforce updates, lead scoring, and sales-lead rotation. It can also be used to track campaign results and identify the most effective marketing touchpoints for conversion.
This skill requires a strong understanding of performance marketing, which includes paid advertising and marketing attribution. In addition to this, it also requires an understanding of digital marketing fundamentals, such as content creation and email automation.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a key part of many digital marketing campaigns. This skill involves using software to create and send email campaigns to a list of subscribers. It also includes using best practices for writing emails, designing visually appealing emails, and optimizing email deliverability.
Digital marketing is a metric-driven industry, and marketers must be able to understand and interpret these metrics in order to make informed decisions. This requires a strong understanding of basic data visualization techniques and statistical analysis.
Pharma businesses need to invest in digital upskilling and make this a core component of their culture. This can be achieved by implementing innovative technology, developing an experience-backed onboarding strategy, and creating a hub for innovation within the company.