When it comes social media advertising, the pharma industry was one which was slow and hesitant to make the change towards it. Despite the fact that other industries embrace change very readily; the pharma industry is still slow and hasn’t been so ready for a change. Regardless of this fact, big pharma has finally made the leap and has utilized social media for their marketing strategies since a large number of their target audience are on these platforms.
From finding viable investors to garnering better brand awareness, social media platforms have a number of different uses. Based on research conducted on pharma’s use of social media, you can easily see a few trends emerging from it. The following are some of the major ones.
Facebook Takes the Lead
Becoming the go-to platform for various marketers in the pharma industry, other marketing teams have claimed that they will be making use of Facebook soon. In fact, a total of 73% of pharma’s marketing teams had future plans which included the use of Facebook.
The larger reach that Facebook provides makes it more attractive, particularly since pharma’s marketing practices were largely limited to traditional media including print and TV advertisements. By opting for the use of Facebook, they can also effectively utilize their media budgets and work on smaller ones too.
Instagram Makes an Appearance
Despite the fact that Instagram wasn’t considered in previous years, testing it out has shown favorable results and a total of 18% of pharma marketers said that they would be using it in the future. Instagram has a huge audience that can easily be reached and in comparison to Flicker and Pinterest, it has generated favorable results. Flicker and Pinterest, on the other hand, have been cast out of the race, with no plans for using them in the future due to the limited results garnered from their use.
LinkedIn and Twitter
LinkedIn has always been used by the pharma industry professionally and it is now yielding better results in terms of marketing. The results have shown that the number of pharma businesses advertising through it has grown by 29% and another 55% plan to utilize the platform in the future.
In comparison, Twitter numbers have gone down and 19% of pharma marketers have actually stopped using the platform. However, it is not completely a loss since 45% have stated that they will include it in the future.
More Focus on Mobile
Moreover, marketing tactics have also seen a shift with more pharma marketers embracing the need to go mobile. Not only is mobile marketing being utilized more, but it is also being looked into due to the number of health apps including fitness apps, nutrition apps, weight watching apps and more which started to make an appearance and have been popularly utilized.
While there are still some apparent challenges that big pharma has to overcome, including updating their use of technology, the numbers all point towards a favorable improvement, particularly when it comes to their marketing practices.
