Inbound marketing continues to be an untapped opportunity not only for reaching pharma companies but turning them into clients. By creating content that attracts customers, you can avoid expensive, labor-intensive outbound tactics like advertising and cold emails.
In this article, we'll explore the best inbound marketing strategies for your business and how you can immediately begin to implement them into your marketing efforts.
Need support in developing and executing the best inbound strategies for reaching your target clients? Contact us to learn more about how we can help you develop the right content for your audience.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing in pharma uses strategies and technologies to promote products to the right audiences across digital channels. It allows pharma companies to leverage cost-effective digital marketing strategies to connect with both consumers and healthcare providers.
By creating content and experiences that attract potential clients to your business, inbound marketing significantly expands your potential reach.
The types of inbound marketing we’ll focus on in this article include website content creation with support from SEO, social media, and email campaigns. The goal is to draw in visitors who are interested in what you have to offer and convert them into clients.
We've successfully implemented these methods in various companies that cater to brand marketers within the pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, commercial operations teams are also reacting to content that specifically addresses the challenges they encounter.
Companies to Target with Inbound Marketing
Research Firms
Life Sciences Consultancies
Pharma Marketing Agencies
Healthcare Data Analytics Companies
Biotechnology Companies
Clinical Trial Organizations
Medical Device Manufacturers
Pharmaceutical Distribution Companies
Healthcare Consultancies
Pharmacovigilance & Drug Safety Companies
Regulatory Affairs Consultancies
Contract Research Organizations (CROs)
But, while inbound is a strong, sustainable method for reaching your target audience, it’s important to determine the best inbound strategy for your organization and niche.
Through our collaboration with organizations in life sciences marketing, analytics, and research—those providing services to pharmaceutical companies—we've observed that content aimed at resolving significant challenges tends to be highly effective.
How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
Offering value to your target audience enables you to reach them in ways traditional marketing cannot. Instead of expending effort to be the noisiest or most noticeable company in your niche, consider creating material that attracts your audience. This type of self-selection makes it easier for those visitors to trust you and, ultimately, work with you.
Below are the steps to take when developing an effective inbound marketing strategy for maximizing your online presence and attracting prospective pharmaceutical clients.
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
To get started, you must define your target audience and understand their needs and interests. For pharma companies, dialing into areas like reaching patients, prolonging a drug’s patent, or facilitating clinical trials can help you reach them on a deeper level.
Often the output of this type of analysis is a buyer persona that equips you with the information you need to effectively target the best person for your campaign. This may be a key decision maker, C-suite executive, or other company stakeholder.
By tailoring your marketing to your buyer persona’s needs, you can more effectively develop content that resonates with them and addresses their pain points.
Once you have a clear picture of whom you’re targeting, it’s time to create a strategy for developing content that’s likely to engage and convert them.
Step 2: Determine the Best Types of Content for Reaching Your Audience
Whether it’s articles, videos, or social posts, serving your audience the type of content that they’re likely to consume on the channels where they spend time is the best way to get in front of them.
One extremely effective tool for deciding what content will help you reach your goals and target the best audience is the buyer’s journey. When visualized as a funnel, this can help you decide what content is best for each stage in your prospective buyer’s journey.
Top-of-the-funnel content when your buyer is in the awareness phase helps attracts your audience and introduces them to your company. The goal here is to create wide-reaching content that results in higher volumes of traffic. Long-form content like pillar pages, ebooks, and white papers are great tools for attracting the most people to your site.
Middle-of-the-funnel content, also called the consideration phase, helps turn visitors into leads. In this part of the buyer’s journey, you can educate and nurture your audience. Content like guides, downloads, and other resources builds trust and demonstrates your expertise.
Bottom-of-the-funnel content is geared toward converting your lead into a client. By providing content around your wins, client successes, and what you’ve done to help others with similar pain points, you can encourage leads to reach out to you for help. Case studies, customer profiles, and other content that highlights your results can help move your audience toward conversion.
Later in this article, we’ll dig deeper into the types of content that are most effective to use for attracting prospective pharma clients and where to publish them, but for now, the important thing to understand is the importance of content for developing an effective inbound plan.
Step 3: Optimize Your Website for Conversions
Unless your website is well-optimized for conversions, you’ll miss out on potential business from visitors to your site.
Conversion optimization involves pinpointing your conversion goals (email signup, contact form, phone call, etc.) and making it easy for visitors to complete those goals.
In the screenshot above of the Pharma Acumen homepage, you can see that it’s easy for visitors to find the call-to-action (i.e. conversion) and take action.
Even better, our website is optimized for both desktop and mobile use, ensuring that visitors on any device can easily access and consume content.
A screenshot of the Pharma Acumen website on a mobile device. Easy-to-read text, a hamburger menu, and a clear call-to-action make this page well-optimized for mobile devices.
This is especially important if you plan on using your website to attract visitors via search. Since September 2020, Google has prioritized mobile versions of websites over desktop versions. That means if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you will lose traffic to websites that are.
Step 4: Include Search Engine Optimization in Your Strategy
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a powerful tool for reaching your ideal clients. When you understand how your target audience is looking for information on Google and can serve relevant, meaningful content that satisfies their search queries, you’ll get people to your site who are already engaged.
Take, for example, the search term “pharma content marketing” where we are appearing number one within Google’s organic search engine results. This keyword and its variations have driven thousands of visitors to our site since we published this article a few years ago.
Search engine results pages (SERP) for the keyword “pharma content marketing.”
By identifying a keyword that captures what we do and why it’s valuable for our audience, we’ve developed one piece of content that’s done the heavy lifting in the long term for getting visitors to our site.
Your brand can do the same with the right keywords deployed across the right content.
Step 5: Amplify Your Content Across Channels
While articles and SEO can drive significant traffic to your site, you’ll miss a huge opportunity to share your content where your prospective clients spend time if you don’t amplify your efforts across multiple channels.
For B2B content, LinkedIn is by far the best place to repurpose your website content. Not only is it the platform known for fostering professional connections, but using the right hashtags can boost your post’s reach beyond your existing network.
The key to posting on LinkedIn is not to copy and paste your website content or share the published link but to break your content into multiple posts, each targeting one main point from your article.
That way you produce fresh content on a regular basis that keeps you top of mind within your network extends beyond your connections and revs up LinkedIn’s algorithm in your favor.
Step 6: Build and Use Your Email List
Without capturing the visitors that come to your website, you’re missing a huge opportunity to create multiple, ongoing touchpoints with a warm audience. One of the best ways to do that, even in 2023, is by getting your visitors’ email addresses.
When you have someone’s email address, you can send useful, thoughtful, and engaging content meant to nurture conversions and stay top-of-mind. According to HubSpot, “64% of B2B marketers say their email marketing strategy was effective for meeting business goals in 2021.”
One of the reasons email is so powerful is that you can personalize messages, segment audiences based on behavior, and track performance in real time. Based on your open rate, number of unsubscribes, and click-through rates, you can pinpoint which emails resonated with your audience and which did not.
Incorporating email outreach into your inbound strategies is one way to help improve your digital marketing efficacy.
The Best Website Content for Inbound Marketing
Now that we’ve looked at the steps to getting your inbound marketing machine up and running, let’s turn to content. Content is the cornerstone of any successful inbound marketing strategy. It attracts potential customers to your website and helps them understand why they should choose you over competitors.
Several types of website content are ideal for engaging customers and driving conversions. Below is a short list, but you can view our guide to the best types of content for reaching prospective pharma and life sciences clients here.
#1: Articles/Blog Posts
Blog posts are a great way to provide valuable information about your company or industry while also showcasing your expertise.
Topics can span new product launches, industry trends, expert analysis, case studies, roundups, or even forecasting.
In addition to providing your audience with help around the pain points you help solve, blog posts can be optimized for search engines by including relevant keywords and meaningful content around those keywords.
As an example, our article “Pharmaceutical Content Marketing: The Best Types of Content for Reaching Prospective Pharma Clients” has attracted just under 8,500 visitors and consistently dominates rankings for “pharma content marketing.” We estimate this article has generated the equivalent of $50,000 in paid traffic.
In total, onpage content drives about 15,000 visitors to the Pharma Acumen website per year (without any ads or paid outreach).
#2: Videos
Videos are becoming more relevant for reaching pharma companies. You can use videos to bring life to a brand story or demonstrate your services. Customer interviews, expert discussion on critical industry topics, and highlighting your brand’s strategies educate viewers and build trust with potential clients.
Embedding videos within your site’s articles also increases engagement and keeps people on your site longer, which in turn boosts your site’s SEO and overall organic impact.
You don’t need a studio; your phone and some simple video editing software can work wonders for your video outreach.
#3: Ebooks and Whitepapers
Ebooks and whitepapers offer more detailed explanations than blog posts since they cover specific topics in depth rather than just providing an overview; this makes them ideally suited for addressing complicated subjects like drug safety regulations or medical breakthroughs within pharmaceutical industries.
Long-form content like this usually contains research-backed facts along with expert opinions from professionals within the field. This helps establish credibility among readers who may need further convincing before deciding to access the content.
Ebooks and whitepapers are also great for repurposing as articles, social content, and emails. Just make sure what you repurpose is not just copied and pasted but reformulated for the type of content and platform you’ll use to publish it.
#4: Case Studies
Case studies and testimonials are a great addition to your website content because they help you demonstrate your results without selling. They enable prospective clients to imagine what it’s like to work with you and how you can best help them.
Keeping the case study tied to your client’s problem, the main results your achieved, and what strategies you used is a simple, effective framework for conveying your expertise and experience.
The Value of Outside Help for Inbound Marketing Strategy
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, inbound strategies are essential for any business to stay competitive. Companies that specialize in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and healthcare consulting have a unique set of challenges when it comes to reaching their target audiences.
In order to effectively reach potential clients, you must create content that resonates with your audience, entices them to reach out to you, and gives them the confidence that you’re an expert in your specialization.
One way to do this is by working with an experienced inbound pharma marketing team who understands the nuances of the industry and knows how to craft effective campaigns tailored specifically for pharma companies.
An outside consultant can provide invaluable insight into creating content that will not only capture attention but also convert leads into clients. They understand what kind of topics resonate with pharma executives and how best to optimize them for search engines, social media, and websites.
Another advantage of working with an outside consultant is access to resources such as analytics tools which allow businesses to track progress over time and make data-driven decisions about future campaigns.
This helps ensure that all efforts are being used efficiently and effectively towards achieving desired outcomes rather than wasting time or money on ineffective tactics.
Additionally, working with someone knowledgeable about the industry provides peace of mind knowing that all strategies are rooted in proven methods rather than guesswork (which ends up costing more in the long run if unsuccessful).
Leveraging Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Business
Hopefully, you’re convinced that inbound marketing for pharma companies is a great way to increase visibility and generate leads. With the right strategies and tactics, you can create an effective inbound marketing plan that will help you reach your target audience.
By taking advantage of outside help, optimizing content across channels, and following best practices for inbound strategies, you can help ensure success with your inbound marketing efforts.
If you're looking for help with growing your brand, understanding customer needs, and developing effective strategies to reach them, we can provide the expertise needed. Our team of experienced consultants has the know-how to develop an integrated inbound marketing strategy tailored specifically for your company that will drive growth. Contact us today to get started.