CPHI Online Webinar Series – Innovative Strategies for B2B Pharma Marketeers

On February 20, 2024, CPHI Online hosted a webinar on Innovative Strategies for B2B Pharma Marketeers. Featuring expert speakers from across the pharmaceutical value chain, this webinar delves into how B2B pharma marketeers can create better content to engage their audiences throughout their customer journey. 

 To fully understand the needs of the webinar’s audience, a post-webinar survey was conducted to ask attendees about their digital marketing strategies. Attendees were asked how they were currently managing their digital marketing strategy. Only 38% of attendees had an internal team dedicated to digital marketing – almost a quarter of attendees did not have a digital marketing strategy at all. The remaining attendees either worked with an external agency or partner to implement digital marketing campaigns or had their broader marketing teams managing digital activities. There is a wide gap between the demand for a dedicated digital marketing strategy and the ability to implement such activities.  

The key to content - produce better, not more 

Nick Myers, Head of Planning at Oliver Agency, kicked off the discussion by uncovering emerging and long-lasting trends in content marketing. “Making content better is really about hitting a sweet spot of relevance and interesting-ness,” Myers explains. He plots the two qualities on a compass graph – any combination other than relevance and interest results in distractions and noise in a content-saturated environment. In our CPHI Online Pharma Marketeer’s Toolkit, we found that as of 2022, 39% of healthcare professionals stated that digital content from pharma companies was rarely useful for them. B2B pharma customers don’t want more content – they want better content.  

Juliet Preston, Group Director, Content at CG Life, quotes: “To derive value from your content, you have to provide value through your content. It sounds simple but it often gets lost [especially in] paid media campaigns, where there’s money getting put behind different resources. The quality of the resources gets put aside and people fall back on the idea of a ‘sponsored [piece of content] and people will sign up. You always want to have something with inherent value.” 

There exist numerous trends in strategic content marketing but Myers lists some of the following as the top trends: 

Generative AI revolution: Generative AI can help with content creation or the development and optimisation of SEO. Building brand-safe generative AI tools remains a lucrative market for industries to tap into as most companies may not want to put commercially sensitive information in current generative AI technologies.  

Increased authenticity: More and more, B2B companies across different industries, including healthcare and pharma, are utilising influencer marketing to keep up with changing attitudes towards traditional advertising.  

The use of humour: This strategy is also on the rise in tandem with the rise of authenticity, in order to communicate otherwise dry pieces of information.  

Better content throughout the customer journey 

Olwyn Spiers, Senior Manager, Integrated Offerings & EMEA Market Development at Thermo Fisher Scientific, addresses how content marketing can complement year-round strategies around event participation and audience engagement. “We need to develop content for customers that is strategic, not commercial... the narrative that we work hard to achieve is to educate the target audience so they see us as experts in that field of interest. We also need to avoid ‘one-hit wonders’ - and instead work to develop content that takes people on a journey of engagement.” 

Preston provides some examples of valuable content throughout a buyer’s journey, which B2B marketeers can implement in their marketing strategies. From initial awareness through to validating a buyer’s decision and improving customer success and retention, Preston emphasise the importance to continue nurturing a customer’s journey past the initial engagement with better content.  

Marketing funnel | Sprout Social

Spiers also highlights multi-channel marketing, in particular content marketing, event marketing, and multimedia channels, as critical to achieving a continuous customer marketing journey. In a case study review of the CPHI Online Trend Report in partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Spiers discusses the use of the report across many channels, each with their own unique opportunity for engagement, leading up to the CPHI Barcelona event in October 2023. 

Key challenges: the audience asks 

The Q&A segment offered attendees the chance to address some of the key points from the speakers, asked by Stipa:   

Stipa: In speaking about sponsored content, what are the primary goals with these kinds of assets - lead generation, visibility, etc? How do you nurture these? 

Spiers: We had two trend reports sponsored by Thermo Fisher Scientific in partnership with CPHI Online. The first report, published in 2022, was titled ‘The Future of Outsourcing’ and the most recent report, published in October last year, discusses CDMO and CRO partnerships for patient centricity. It’s a little too early to say right now because we are not through that full year and don’t have the full data on the second Trend Report. We’re still generating leads on that report. Having said that, I do think the more general topic on the ‘Future of Outsourcing’ resonated more with a wider audience.  

Stipa: What is the best way to work with your Sales Team and understand what their needs are, and how you can support them from a Marketing perspective? 

Spiers: We start planning at the beginning of Q4 for the year ahead. So, we will have focus groups with our team a good quarter in advance. While we have defined our strategy, we do ‘pulse’ them to find out if we’re on the right path. I also hold a monthly meeting with our key stakeholders in the European region. We report on what we’re doing and what we’ve planned, and it gives them an opportunity to engage with us and to give us recommendations and feedback on the campaigns we are running. 

Stipa: Budget can be a challenge when getting started with new marketing initiatives, particularly for smaller companies. What would be your recommendations for companies who want to branch out into digital, but need to be mindful of costs? 

Myers: Ai is a great tool to use at the beginning for planning and creating initial assets. At the planning stage, AI can be used to do research by pulling through a review of relevant company websites. The latest version of Chat GPT can also search the web. Chat GPT can also create virtual focus groups where one can input rules for the AI to identify certain types of customers that you may wish to speak to or target. Large-language model AIs can pretend to be a subject matter expert to have a conversation with – so you can use it as a springboard for ideas. While something like Chat GPT is not the best for writing something in-depth like a blog post on a particular subject, you can get an AI-generated draft and tweak the initial text to make it more unique. Finally, for a small business, I’d recommend tapping into some of the other products available, such as Jasper, which is an AI platform created for marketeers, and Pencil.AI for the creation of ads.  

Preston: The early stages are a common entry point. Even just for research, plugging what you need into Chat GPT and seeing what it spits out in terms of the buckets of topics – there needs to be a lot of additional research, fact-checking, and original insight for it to be an interesting resource – but it helps to set the framework. Other platforms are fun to experiment with as well. I like byword.ai, which is another platform for generating content. You can choose the subheads to generate and build the structure while optimising it for search. So, if you don’t have writers on your team or you have folks who have technical knowledge who struggle to write, those are good platforms to experiment with and do the due diligence after having a draft to work with. 

Spiers: I think if you’re a small company and you want to develop better content, look at your resources internally. Who have you got within your organisation who can tell the story well? You can even speak with one or two commercial people and ask what they are hearing on the street. Have focus groups or have telephone conversations with experts and develop simple content such as case studies. Case studies tell a fantastic story. If it’s too much to write a White Paper or an eBook or you haven’t got enough content, maybe do an infographic. There are lots of fantastic ways to engage with your customers to tell the story you want to tell. 

Stipa: We have discussed using humour as a way to catch the reader’s attention – is there a way to determine how this will resonate? 

Myers: There was a piece of research a few years ago by Google that found B2B was a more emotional decision-making process than B2C. That’s because the stakes are really high because it’s people’s jobs on the line. B2B buyers’ expectations are also raised based on their consumer experience. What I’m trying to say is that people don’t leave their humanity at the door when they come to work, they are still people. The job for us as marketeers is to understand what is the right type of humour – it might not be slapstick, it might be wit. There are different types of humour and you have to find the right type with your audience. The best way to do that would be to speak to your customers. And to Olwyn’s point, talk to your representatives and sales team because they know your clients very well. At the high end of B2B, it’s extremely personal so it pays to know your audience very well. 

Stipa: How can one create content that resonates effectively with different cultures and regions? 

Spiers: That’s a challenge isn’t it? We need to consider countries overseas and whether there’s a need for translation or not to be effective. My advice would be to connect with an agency or somebody within that region to collaborate with them on that outreach. For example, in China, LinkedIn isn’t really used by WeChat is. So connecting with someone who has those connections on WeChat can set up that channel for that outreach. Also, be realistic on what your level of outreach can be. It might be difficult to reach certain regions because of the need for translation, so start with regions with commonalities. 

Myers: At Oliver, we go beyond translation as well. We have trans-creation, which is not only turning the message into the language of the target region, but also looking at the cultural significance and relevance and checking at the ideation stage of whether it will travel well. As an agency, we have the advantage of having people in markets around the world so we can more easily localise. So perhaps it is worth working with a partner if you aren’t already in that market. 

Preston: I think this ties perfectly back with the humour question – jokes are very regional, it could land poorly in certain regions. The other thing I keep in mind as well, particularly in the pharma industry, is how global the industry is. A company headquartered in the US may have a science team based elsewhere. You can’t base where the company is headquartered when creating content. 

Digital B2B pharma marketing: innovative strategies for innovative marketeers 

The CPHI Online webinar Innovative Strategies for B2B Pharma Marketeers brought together a diverse group of like-minded marketeers, executives, and pharma professionals for an hour of strategic brainstorming. Those interested in boosting their B2B marketing campaigns and strategies were introduced to emerging trends in digital pharmaceutical content marketing.  

Interested in finding out more about how tools like AI and Chat GPT can propel your marketing campaigns into the future? Download our FREE marketing toolkit eBook here, or check out our feature article on how Chat GPT will impact pharma marketeers.  

Watch the full webinar on-demand here.