It’s hard being a pharma marketer today. Targeted treatments are forcing us to reach ever-shrinking audiences—often with ever-shrinking budgets. Digital innovation has elevated customer expectations. Content ubiquity has changed the traditional treatment dynamic, and the proliferation of data has made decision making more, not less, challenging. In a market where the decisions made can impact both business and health outcomes, there is very little room for error.

It’s no wonder, then, that according to the CMO Council, 2 in 3 pharma marketing leaders indicate that they are not very confident in the ability of their marketing and advertising strategy to effectively produce critical outcomes. Am I reaching the right people in the moments that matter? Is my messaging relevant and differentiating? Am I leaving script volume on the table? And, given the competing ideas and motivations of the often-siloed partners supporting the business, many are left asking, “How do I best allocate my budget to produce optimal results?”

So, what’s the secret to ensuring your marketing investments are delivering maximum impact? At Evolution Road, we believe organizations achieve success through an approach built upon a foundation of three key pillars.

1. Readiness — understanding all the macro and micro dynamics surrounding the product, the category, and target audience is critical to successful marketing. Also critical is a clear understanding the capabilities of the business and its partners to deliver impact; people, process, data, and technology all need to be assessed and prepared to deliver impact.
2. Activation — with the right team in place and a complete understanding of the market landscape, one must identify and prioritize the key business challenges through the lens of impact. Investment levels need to be determined based on the optimal go-to-market strategy, with modeling techniques applied to predict ROI and to project confidence upwards in the plan.
3. Realization — delivering impact requires an organization to have the right partners in place, aligned around expectations for impact, with clearly defined rules of the road. One must also have a clear measurement strategy in place that allows for in-market insight creation and the ability to realize a plan that optimizes investments and impact over time.

In pharma, risk is a constant, but that doesn’t mean that as a pharma marketer you need to accept it—especially when you have a proven way to mitigate it via a focused approach to delivering impact. The rigor of the approach not only reduces risk, it provides a bulletproof rationale for the decisions that underlie your marketing plan and increases confidence that it will work.

The road to success starts with impact. Let’s hit it together.

 

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