Efforts put in by pharmaceutical companies to reach more physicians

Indian pharmaceutical industry is observing a hard market competition these days which is getting harder day after day. Also, since doctors are the most crucial target audience, pharmaceutical companies keep on trying and putting in tough efforts to reach more doctors. Over past some years, even Government laws are evolving which has made it compulsory for companies try different strategies in order to emphasis on reaching and convincing more and more healthcare professionals.

For many years, pharmaceutical companies have been using different tactics. Broadly, they can be classified as under:

Traditional tactics

• Providing free drug samples is quite a known technique to convince the physicians write the medicines. Many pharmaceutical companies have been successfully implementing this marketing strategy for many years now. In reality, even physicians enjoy receiving free drug samples. You will be surprised but our pharmaceutical industry is spending billions annually after this most effective marketing weapon. Why wouldn’t companies spend much but? When free samples often encourage physicians to prescribe more expensive and newer medicines even the same content is available for lesser rates from some another drug manufacturer.

• Complimentary perks is yet another strongest marketing tool to sell expensive drugs. Would you like to get air tickets, books, meals and other such things for free? Yes? Exactly! Similarly, our doctors also love to receive them. This kind of practices has been banned in many states by the Governments.

• The opinion leaders are something new in case of traditional techniques. It’s a whole different game if compared to free samples and complimentary benefits. Many Indian pharmaceutical companies consider that this is one of the best and most powerful indirect strategies to aim the physicians. The companies develop a healthy professional relationship with opinion leaders or industry influencers who thereafter, convince the doctors to write their medicines.

Modern tactics

• A mobile or tablet app has become the new-generation marketing tactic for many pharmaceutical companies. This is because doctors and many healthcare professionals are one of the earliest adopters of mobile technology. And with all these medical professionals already married to their smartphones, this trend is crazily going forward.

• Various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn have new marketing weapons of pharmaceutical companies. These days, no other channel is as effective as social media because everybody is almost real-time active on it and hence, it becomes easy for companies to spread their marketing message among various communities and groups of healthcare professionals.

Concisely, pharmaceutical companies have a number of marketing techniques on hands from which traditional ones are getting outmoded. But the modern techniques are getting more and more effective.