Pharma digital marketing maturity has become a hot topic as the industry strives to keep pace with technological advancements. And yet, we’re still seeing many companies lagging behind as they struggle to grow their digital performance – or even measure its impact.
So, what can you do?
This article looks at a snapshot of the pharma industry today to determine just how mature the industry is as a whole, then delves into the details with a roadmap to digital marketing excellence.
In a nutshell
What is Digital Maturity in Marketing?
When it comes to marketing, digital maturity means more than just having an online presence for your organisation.
It’s about fully integrating technology into every step of the marketing process for a measurable impact.
A digitally mature marketing team in pharma will use tools like data analytics, automation, and personalised outreach to create seamless (a.k.a. omnichannel), data-informed interactions with healthcare providers, patients, and other key stakeholders.
This may sound relatively simple. However, as technology (and your competitors) advance, the goal post is always moving. That’s why it’s important that you know how to measure digital maturity using a digital marketing maturity assessment. This will help you understand if you are truly pushing towards digital transformation or falling behind – even if it feels like you’re moving forward.
So, is digital marketing maturity the same as digital transformation? Not exactly.
- Digital maturity is a measure of how well-integrated digital technologies are in your company.
- Digital transformation is the active process of integrating those technologies.
You can be making significant steps with digital transformation on your journey to maturity, but they aren’t necessarily the same thing. But before we get into the steps to achieve maturity, let’s take a deep dive into the current digital marketing maturity levels of the pharma industry.
The state of digital marketing maturity in pharma
It’s no secret that digital transformation in the pharmaceutical industry is lagging behind other industries. The journey to a fully digital infrastructure is long and endless, as technology continues to race forward. We’ve seen first-hand how pharma companies are dragging their feet!
But changes are happening.
For example, before 2019, only 20% of pharma companies reported having digitally mature systems, while the majority were either in the early phases (25%) or building their capabilities (55%). Then the pandemic acted as a catalyst. Recent reports show that 35% of respondents felt COVID accelerated digital progress by more than five years.
This shows how even though the industry is lagging behind, change is possible. We just need to overcome the barriers to digital innovation in pharma. You are likely facing:
- Disconnect between the reality of digital adoption and your perception.
- Managers and leaders who aren’t ready for a shift in mindset.
- Marketing teams that need to upskill.
- Slow Medical, Legal and Regulatory (MLR) processes.
- Difficulty measuring and demonstrating ROI.
- Communication barriers.
- A potentially unnecessary rush to adopt AI.
- Struggles with data accuracy.
Learn more about the 8 digital marketing challenges that could stand in the way of your digital marketing maturity
It’s not just the marketing department that wants pharma to reach digital maturity, however. An Accenture survey found that 93% of patients now prefer digital engagement with healthcare providers – and that was way back in 2021!
Digital maturity has been a long time coming and although the industry is lagging behind as a whole, pharma companies can and are making leaps forward: the percentage of organisations not engaging in digital transformation dropped from 31.2% in 2021 to 15.1% in 2023.
A roadmap to digital marketing excellence
So, how can you go from lagging behind to achieving digital maturity – or even just matching pace with the competitive baseline?
The following roadmap to digital marketing excellence outlines the key steps you need to take.
1) Know where you stand: The digital marketing maturity model
So, what exactly is a digital marketing maturity model?
A DMM is a framework that takes a close look at your company’s digital marketing practices. It’s an assessment to figure out how effective and capable your marketing efforts are – from stakeholders to sales teams to the marketing department, locally and globally. It’s a holistic approach.
Digital marketing maturity model assessments typically break things down into dimensions, with a ‘crawl, walk, run, fly’ scoring approach (the 4 digital maturity stages). You might start at the crawling stage for one or more dimensions – that’s okay! The goal is to keep moving forward.
Learn more about the 4 digital maturity stages and how they are calculated.
Understanding how to measure digital maturity is not about measuring how many followers you have or even how many channels you use. The model digs deeper, looking at things like:
- How well you use data to make decisions.
- Whether your marketing tech is up to scratch (this is a never-ending task).
- If your team has the right skills and a framework to learn more.
- How good you are at creating and using content with an omnichannel approach.
Essentially, it’s a digital maturity audit that takes a clear, structured approach to evaluating your progress and proficiency in digital marketing. And with a clear structure, you can create a clear plan for improvement.
11 Reasons to Use a Digital Maturity Model
A digital maturity framework is an in-depth assessment, not a quick survey. Here are 11 reasons why it’s worth the time and energy.
Strategic Alignment: The assessment ensures your goals for achieving digital marketing maturity are aligned with your overall business objectives.
Benchmarking: By defining digital maturity benchmarks, you can compare your efforts with industry standards and competitors, highlighting areas where you fall behind.
Identifying Gaps and Risks: After a digital maturity audit, you can identify specific weaknesses, risks and challenges that should be prioritised for achieving digital maturity.
Organisational Buy-In: The framework facilitates greater understanding and support for your digital marketing initiatives across different departments, including stakeholders.
Resource Optimisation: Having a digital marketing maturity score helps you know where to allocate resources, including budget, tools, and personnel, to maximise impact.
Improvement Roadmap: You’ll finish with a clear and structured path for advancing your digital marketing capabilities over time – it sets you up for continuous improvement.
Measurable Progress: With the pharma marketing benchmarking you set up through the assessment, you can measure omnichannel efforts via tangible business results.
Increased ROI: Pharma companies that continuously strive for higher maturity enhance the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts, resulting in a higher ROI.
Competitive Advantage: With a digital marketing maturity model, you can stay ahead of competitors continuously by evolving and improving digital marketing practices.
Adaptability: Part of having high digital marketing maturity is being able to quickly adapt to changing digital marketing trends and technologies as they emerge.
Sustainable Growth: A DMM promotes long-term, sustainable growth by fostering an appetite for innovation among both stakeholders and local marketing teams.
2) Assess your digital marketing maturity
There are two digital maturity assessment options – DIY or guided. Let’s explore the options of taking a self-assessment or getting the professionals to assess your pharma marketing efforts.
Self-assessment
A self-assessment puts you in control. With a list of questions to ask and ratings to give, you are responsible for using the digital marketing maturity framework.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Cost-effective compared to hiring professionals | Lack of objectivity can create potential for bias |
| You’ll already have insights into your company’s operations | You may have knowledge gaps that prevent a thorough assessment |
| More flexible as you can audit at a time that’s convenient | Time consuming, especially if your team lacks expertise |
| Engages your team to promote ownership and accountability | With limited perspective, it’s hard to spot external trends and benchmarks |
Not sure where to start? Download our free list of 66 questions across 5 dimensions to assess the state of your digital marketing maturity
Professional Assessment
With a professional assessment, you’re relying on professionals to audit your company and provide a roadmap for your marketing efforts.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Access to specialised knowledge and experience | More costly to hire professionals |
| You’ll get an unbiased, third-party perspective | You’re dependent on external consults for insights and recommendations |
| Benchmarking against industry standards and current best practices | |
| Deep analysis with a more thorough, detailed evaluation |
Our solution: Hybrid Assessment
One final option that we’ve found to be very effective for many pharma companies is to take a hybrid approach to the digital marketing maturity framework.
This enables you to balance cost and time while ensuring the audit process is thorough and you reap the benefits of professional expertise.
Here is what we recommend:
- Gather the findings of both assessments to find your path towards digital marketing maturity.
- Take a self-assessment to gather internal insights and identify obvious gaps.
- Follow up with a professional assessment for a deeper, objective evaluation.
Phamax’s Digital DMMI
You can find quite a few premium and free digital maturity assessment tools online. We’ve heard good things about McKinsey’s Solve and you might know about Capgemini’s Digital IT Assessment and Gartner’s IT Maturity Assessment. But while all these models are vaguely similar, they all specialise in a certain area, whether it’s your business’ ability to problem solve or just maintain a strong IT system.
Phamax’s Digital Marketing Maturity Index (DMMI) focuses on digital marketing for pharmaceutical companies. That’s our area of expertise!
We built the DMMI around five dimensions. We explore these key dimensions of digital marketing maturity in this article, but to recap, the five dimensions are:
Digital Strategy
Data & Infrastructure
Content
Presence & Performance
Process & Culture
The DMMI is a 4-step process that enables us to take a holistic approach, assessing your entire marketing efforts, while also honing in on your maturity level. You could have stage four maturity with modular content production while struggling with stage one maturity for your data warehousing and consent management.
Not convinced? Get our whitepaper and discover how our DMMI can help you reach your digital maturity goal
3) Define Digital Maturity Benchmarks and create an action plan
Defining benchmarks
Once you’ve assessed your digital marketing maturity and pinpointed your current position across all dimensions, you need to decide what you’ll do next and how you’ll measure success.
This involves:
- Defining overall SMART goals and objectives.
- Identifying the tasks, activities and resources needed to achieve those goals.
- Employing digital marketing benchmarking to keep your team accountable and enable you to measure how successful your efforts are.
Creating an action plan
With goals and benchmarks – approved and agreed upon by all stakeholders – you can get to creating an action plan.
This involves:
- Grouping tasks into projects.
- Prioritising tasks.
- Allocating teams and resources appropriately.
- Setting budgets.
Ensuring that everyone is on board with the goals and objectives you’ve set will make actioning your plan much easier. This is where mindset really matters.
4) Learn, Monitor and Adjust
If you think the work ends once you’ve reached your benchmarks, you haven’t grasped the concept of digital maturity. The transformation doesn’t end!
Your next steps involve:
- Staying on top of pharma digital trends.
- Continuously learning new skills.
- Keeping stakeholders involved at every stage, to incorporate their feedback and priorities.
- Regularly monitoring and evaluating your progress.
- Making adjustments to goals and moving benchmarks to keep your company striving for more.
With the industry consistently moving forward, we recommend annual audits with a digital marketing maturity model. This will ensure that you don’t slip behind in one or more areas.
If you want to dive straight in, register to get our DMMI assessment for pharma marketing today.
