In an industry where innovation is key to remaining competitive, pharmaceutical companies are struggling with digital maturity. Overestimating digital capabilities and rushing AI adoption without clear strategies are just a couple of the pitfalls.
If these challenges sound familiar, it might be time to reassess your approach to digital marketing.
Our Digital Marketing Maturity Index (DMMI) has helped point many pharma companies in the right direction by evaluating their digital capabilities and highlighting areas for improvement. While helping these companies, we’ve noticed that there are eight key challenges in digital marketing for pharmaceutical companies that come up time and again.
Ready to confront the obstacles and transform them into opportunities? Let’s explore how.
Key Takeaways
Perception vs Reality
There’s a disconnect between where companies believe they are and where they actually stand in their journey towards achieving digital maturity.
You might believe that you’re doing quite well, but industry standards are continuously growing. What was cutting-edge in 2022 is already outdated in 2024. If you stand still for too long, you’ll fall short of evolving expectations.
That’s where this challenge to digital transformation in pharma really lies. If you’re not looking ahead and facing reality, you’re not ready to effectively adopt omnichannel marketing and all it encompasses – because what it encompasses is continuously expanding.
Leadership and mindsets
Having the right tools isn’t enough for digital pharma excellence. You’ve got to embrace cultural shifts and mindset changes to keep up.
We find that some pharma companies focus too much on visible elements, like creating attractive websites, and neglect the things that are really important for driving actual results, like SEO.
They also get sidetracked on individual channels rather than taking a customer-centric approach (which is integral for digital marketing maturity). Internal silos that prevent teams from communicating also make achieving a seamless customer experience difficult, to say the least.
This is where leadership is needed to unify communications and foster innovation. As McKinsey notes, “An innovative mindset also pushes for fast, customer-led results. So marketers need to be agile. The pace is no longer set by a yearly brand plan, but instead by weekly or even daily experiments.”
Upskilling the marketing team
Pharma marketing teams are making an effort to upskill… but not effectively.
While some training exists, it often misses the mark, with absent or overly complex instruction. And this is coming in at a terrible time. As traditional B2B field sales continue to decline, there is more burden on marketers to digitalise sales. Without the necessary training, marketers are struggling.
This is a serious challenge in your way to digital marketing excellence! In addition to taking a digital maturity assessment to understand where exactly your skills are lacking, you should focus on skill areas that have been growing in recent years; AI, social media, and data analytics.
Slow MLR processes
Slow MLR (medical, legal, and regulatory) processes can seriously delay your marketing campaign launches. Approval bottlenecks from multiple stakeholders are usually the culprit, causing you to miss opportunities.
So, the challenge here is that your need to be agile in digital marketing clashes with these slow processes. As a result, you’ll battle with reducing content flexibility and increasing costs.
Jaime Blais from Janssen Pharmaceuticals highlighted this at the Indegene Digital Summit, explaining how medical affairs teams need to “proactively collaborate” throughout the MLR review process to beat this challenge.
At phamax Digital, we include modular content in our Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment for this reason too – it can help you stay flexible with content creation.
Measuring and demonstrating ROI
The next challenge is not necessarily that pharma companies aren’t succeeding, but that they aren’t measuring and showing it (a key part of our Digital Marketing Maturity Assessment).
If you have difficulty measuring your success and demonstrating a solid ROI, you’ll face serious challenges from the top.
Without a demonstrable ROI, stakeholders can begin to believe that digital marketing is ineffective or that the marketing budget is too high. Interestingly, we also see this happen to marketing teams that place too much emphasis on short-term sales. You can also face this challenge if you measure what you believe to be success rather than actual customer value (see the first of our digital marketing challenges).
Communication barriers
The next challenge to digital transformation in pharma is communication – or a lack of it.
Through our digital marketing maturity model assessment, we have uncovered a split between medical and commercial teams. This split is forcing them to work with different tools. This alone is slowing down the entire process and making communication unnecessarily difficult.
Removing communication barriers can do more than streamline digital marketing efforts, however. A recent spotlight in PharmExec notes that “collaboration between […] teams can help proactively identify and address potential issues. This proactive approach helps mitigate risks, protect the company’s reputation, and ensure patient safety and well-being.”
Rushing to adopt AI
Achieving digital marketing excellence doesn’t necessarily mean rushing to adopt AI tools, even if you see big names like Sanofi going all-in.
This is especially true if you don’t have a clear objective. Using AI just for the sake of it could be holding you back.
Before getting stuck into AI, we recommend practicing with simple scenarios and a clearly defined ROI. Figure out how to use AI effectively before using it in every direction – this will prevent AI becoming just another complication on your list of digital marketing challenges.
Data Accuracy
The final challenge we’ve seen frequently during our digital marketing maturity assessments is data accuracy. When teams (usually sales but sometimes also marketing) don’t update your DAM (digital asset management tools) or CRM, data is near impossible to collect.
But that’s not the only side to this challenge. With the issue of data privacy and regulations (see challenge number 4), understanding what data can be kept and used is more complex than ever. And let’s not forget that with increasing privacy protection, the data you can collect is shrinking rapidly.
The solution here is to unite teams and work with MLR to streamline your data collection process and stay within regulations.
