The rapid evolution of digital has enhanced several industries, improving communication and fostering innovation across the board⁠—and the pharma industry is no exception. But, enhanced marketing communications and streamlined internal processes aside, brands and organizations cannot exist without adhering to regulations and focusing on delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX). In the pharma industry, especially, one entity cannot exist without the other. To thrive and indeed survive in the pharma industry, brands must place ethics at the heart of every activity, promotional or otherwise. There’s simply no room for complacency. Here we explore the vital importance of transparency in the pharma industry and its tangible link to CX, industrial ethics, and regulation. CX in the Pharma Industry: Why it Counts CX in the Pharma Industry: Why it Counts Consumers want to interact with brands or businesses that offer them a positive customer experience. While this common knowledge across industries, CX is sometimes overlooked within the pharma industry. A quantitative study from McKinsey quantitatively shows that customer experience in pharma has a notable impact on the bottom line. Essentially, by placing more focus on customer experience, pharma brands stand to increase consumer satisfaction while earning more sales and boosting their market share. In our hyper-connected digital age, the expectations of pharma customers are changing. In today's world, consumers command comprehensive access to information as well as greater transparency from pharmaceutical companies⁠—and customer experience is the vessel for meeting these expectations. It's the front line of communication. For instance, a pharma brand that recently launched a new product for rheumatoid arthritis enhanced its prescription journey by making it simple for patients to schedule calls with medics and join a patient-support program simply by scanning the barcode on the product’s packaging. To further broaden its CX offerings, the company also developed a dynamic mobile app that serves as a personalized patient companion, addressing specific issues or pain points throughout every stage of the patient journey. To evolve your CX offerings while delivering content or information tailored to the needs of your consumers, drilling down into the data, metrics, and insights is essential. That said, data fragmentation is one of the pharma industry’s biggest roadblocks. Fragmented data fosters inefficiency, breaking down chains of communication that could result in a poor customer experience or even worse, informational inaccuracies⁠—the kind that can prove detrimental in the pharma industry. But, by adopting more cohesive, centralized, and communicative internal frameworks while producing comprehensive buyer personas, pharma businesses can utilize the data that matters, improving every element of customer experience including vital marketing communications. While investing in CX is critical to success in the pharma industry, your strategies and initiatives will prove redundant without adhering to regulation. The Importance of Pharma Industry Regulation The Importance of Pharma Industry Regulation To some extent, every industry has a regulatory blueprint for maintaining standards, creating consistency, and upholding ethics. The life or death nature of pharma requires stringent rules and regulations, particularly when trading in healthcare and consumer products. There have been a number of well-documented scandals affecting the pharmaceutical industry over recent years. Given the fact that consumers value trust and transparency as much as product price, these scandals only serve to tarnish the reputation of the pharma industry as a whole. That said, to build consumer trust, it’s important Photo Editing Services to embrace industry regulation, using it as a blueprint or clearcut code of ethics relating to product development and marketing. Concerning trust, transparency, and ethical messaging, regulation is key⁠—as outlined in the essay, 'Role of regulatory affairs in the pharmaceutical industry' by Jony Mallik: “The success of a regulatory strategy is less dependent on the regulations than on how they are interpreted, applied, and communicated within companies and to outside constituents. Regulatory Affairs plays a crucial role in the pharmaceutical industry and is involved in all stages of drug development and also after drug approval and marketing.” To forge meaningful relationships with your target consumers, understanding all forms of relevant regulation is essential. Using these guidelines to steer your marketing activities, it’s important to spread awareness through your marketing communications while focusing on specific customer pain points without sharing any information that could prove inaccurate. In the pharma industry especially, keeping an open line of communication with your customers across touchpoints is essential, sticking to reality and building an engaging narrative around stats, facts, figures, and evidence to inspire trust and offer value. There’s ample room for creativity in terms of pharmaceutical marketing, but it is important to develop campaigns and strategies that fit within the rules⁠—if you don’t, the consequences could prove disastrous to your brand reputation.

It's no secret that influencers are the hottest thing on the digital scene at the moment. From an Instagram fashion influencer that leveraged brands deals for her "surprise" global scavenger hunt engagement to YouTubers like Logan Paul who use comedic and zany gimmicks to build followings in the millions -- influencers are here to stay. In the examples above, it's easy to see how influencers can build global communities and entice audiences through storytelling within the consumer market. However, the influencer ecosystem is also extremely valuable within the B2B marketplace. In fact, according to Marketing Charts, influencer marketing is one of the top four trends that marketers included in their strategic stack in 2019. With different goals and conversion timeframes than B2C marketing; B2B marketers can utilize influencer marketing to further brand affinity through authentic storytelling, build community, tap into the millennial and Gen Z audience, and much more. Here are five lessons on how to involve influencer marketing to do so. Lesson #1: It's all about authenticity – know your audience and be true to them Let's face it, audiences are smart to marketing messaging, and in today’s ‘woke’ culture, consumers want brands to be real with them. Marketing speak doesn't go far nowadays. When brands talk to their audiences on a relatable level, that is when the magic happens. With B2B influencer, marketing and engagement are about quality, not volume. Marketers need to be on the hunt for influencers who can relate to your products and values. In this case, it's not necessarily about how many followers you have, but understanding what makes people influential to their audience. It would be best if you preserved their authenticity and yours as an enterprise. Credibility is king. You lose the opportunity to impact and influence individuals without credibility, so identifying the right people who align with what you have to say and offer is essential. Influencer Marketing Takeaway: Work with influencer marketplaces or search on professional social media channels to find influencers that align with your brand and can speak to your audience with a knowledge-base that is true and informative. You can easily email them or direct message them on the platform to connect to learn about whether a partnership makes sense for the brand and influencer. Lesson #2: Meet your audience wherever they're at There is a multitude of social media channels that vie for attention spans and eyeballs. B2B marketing influencers might be on the standard channels like Instagram and YouTube, but it’s more likely their thought leadership will be hidden within communities like Reddit or on the professional social network, LinkedIn. Once you're able to target influencers, become part of the community and listen and take in their content; from there, you can determine how, when, and where to engage. Within these niche communities like on Reddit, you must add value to the influencer and their community. If you can't, the relationship won't be authentic. Influencer Marketing Takeaway: Just like with B2C marketing, when a massive celebrity like one of the Kardashians promotes a product that Philippines Photo Editor their audience can tell is ad-sponsored content (e.g., fit tea or teeth whitening), think of the same with B2B marketing. You need to have a product-influencer fit, and this occurs when you truly understand the influencer and the community they're a part of and how your product could benefit the audience. Lesson #3: Find your influencers in your boardroom -- with employee advocates Employees are often an untapped influencer base for enterprise companies. Big companies have many influencers within their employee base – companies must find a way to identify these people, learn about their audience then authentically support them. As employees are passionate about their work and within B2B it can be highly technical -- they can be your best asset for informing and educating audiences in a myriad of ways. They can speak at industry events or be the face of your social media channel or even host their own YouTube channels where they speak about larger B2B technology trends. Influencer Marketing Takeaway: You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Find influencers within your own company. Employees speaking authentically and engaging about your product will highlight a strong culture and knowledge-base about your product.