How can we make a highly regulated environment like pharma more agile and how to install Growth Marketing? Find out in this article!

Implementing Growth Marketing in a highly regulated environment like pharma sounds like a crazy idea, right? How could you, if you’re dealing with many limitations and barriers such as the overload of policies and restrictions, the high involvement of different stakeholders, the long validation and approval processes and the lack of a structured approach when starting a new project? Moreover, physicians and patients often show a lack of digital engagement through digital channels. So why would you even consider it, as the world of Growth Marketing seems just too different from the world of pharma?

We all want an answer to the million-dollar question: how can we make an environment with so many limitations more agile and install Growth Marketing? Is it even possible to make it happen? Yes! We managed to complete a successful Growth Marketing project in one of the top leading pharma companies in the world. I can already tell you that this should be one of the first marketing methods that you’ll need to consider in your marketing strategy, as Growth Marketing can give a healthy boost to achieve your marketing goals.

Growth Marketing, what is it all about?

Growth Marketing is about rapid experimentation. In other words, Growth Marketing is about applying a constant test and learn process with the aim of increasing the impact of your marketing actions. The art lies in institutionalizing what works and quickly dropping what doesn’t so you focus your efforts on the most effective tactics for sustainable growth.

In a world where everything is going digital, where digital channels and a virtual way of working is becoming increasingly important to reach physicians and patients, Growth Marketing is an innovative way to be one step ahead of your competitors. In today’s world, speed & agility are crucial to reach your target physicians and patients. Now, more than ever, it’s important to experiment with new ideas and to discover which ones create the most impact for your target group.

Therefore, Growth Marketing can be used for all your marketing tactics. With Growth Marketing a pharma company can tackle several challenges, such as:

• Increase disease or treatment awareness towards both patients and physicians
• Lead and traffic generation to a website or a landing page
• Validate different value propositions with quick feedback loops
• Generate audience insights and discover what triggers them most
• Build digital capabilities in your team

Say ‘yes’ to a new agile way of working

Let me give you some tips and tricks that we learned, to start considering it without worrying about the barriers of the sector.

Involve your key stakeholders at the very start of the project. Growth Marketing is all about teamwork so it’s essential to have all important parties onboard and motivated to reach the goals. Share your plans with every important stakeholder, discuss risks and learnings and inspire and challenge them.

Start by doing a digital sanity check by mapping the digital available tools, the things that can be done, on which digital channels and who needs to be involved when doing so. Based on this digital sanity check, you will be able to plan and decide which tactics are feasible, realistic, and relevant for your strategy.

Preparation is key when starting this type of project. To test which creative assets work best, you need to try out many different versions, which all need to go through the approval process. We recommend validating all assets at once. Test different pictures, copy’s, CTA’s and have the different variants approved before starting the experimentation loop. Once the validation is done, the experimentation part will go fluently without having to worry about the validation process.

Start simple.Keep your experiments simple and run one experiment at a time. This way you it will be easier to measure the impact of a specific experiment and learn from it.

Don’t underestimate the power of social media to reach your physicians and patients. Such platforms have broad targeting options. Don’t be afraid to explore the world of targeting and optimize which target shows high interest and engagement in your campaigns. Your target groups are there, you just need to find them.

It’s all about changing the mindset! Based on our experience in several pharmaceutical companies, we observe that new tactics are not considered easily. But it’s all about changing the mindset! Think in possibilities instead of in what’s not possible due to compliance. Start applying the principles of testing, scaling or killing initiatives. Don’t be afraid of testing new things. Every (un)successful experiment will lead you to new insights about your target group.

Do you want to discover more?

Curious to know more? We gladly introduce the successful Growth Marketing project we executed for one of the top leading pharma companies in the world. What do you need to get started? Our dream team that consists of growth architects: consultants of The House of Marketing (who will be responsible for project and stakeholder management) and growth experts, consultants of Upthrust (our sister company who is responsible for setting up and running the experiments).

Want to discover more on how to tackle Growth Marketing?

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