Pharma B2B Insights: Navigating Growth and Trends

[Music] in the pharmaceutical industry the competition is intense how do these Brands get their messages out in front of the Right audience at the right time this is why I'm excited about my guest today Stacy gains she is the business development manager of tech publishing and she's going to give us some insights on how pharmaceutical manufacturers can do this but before we get started my name is Donna Peterson and you are listening to the B2B marketing Excellence podcast I go around the world speaking with business owners marketing leaders talking about what is working and what is not we all know marketing is changing at warp speed we have to stay current and that's I'm hoping you'll get some good tactics and tips from these podcasts so let's jump in hi Stacy how are you today hi Donna I'm doing well thank you it's nice to see you again thanks for having me oh it's a pleasure to have you we had such a great time talking at the interfx show last year yep all about pharmaceutical manufacturers how do they get their brands out there and that's why I thought I need to talk to her she needs to come on the podcast I hope I can help I'm sure you will one of the things I wanted to ask you is given your background and strategic Partnerships in marketing what strategies do you think are important for pharmaceutical manufacturers to effectively build those relationships Ah that's an age-old question that I've been asking myself for 25 years but I guess that being said I mean I'm happy to share with you what I have you know adopted for myself over the years and have passed along to my team over the years there's really four things I keep tried and true to my heart and they're not rocket science right your traditional sales strategies I would say that the first one is that the old adage of people buy from people they trust is absolutely true and it's at the Forefront of kind of of everything I do I try to remind myself of that every day um and there are certainly ways that you can build that trust but it takes time and I think one of the mistakes I see a lot of companies make today is they don't necessarily set a realistic timeline for how long it's going to take especially if you have a new business development person in there or you're approaching a new client for the very first time I mean business development people may have multiple clients they might have hundreds of clients they need contact on their list they may have one key account with multiple divisions and multiple people regardless you have to set real realistic expectations for how long that that can take and yeah I think the average regardless of whether you're in the service industry or you're selling a product can be at least eight to 10 touch points before you're gonna have close a deal so how long is that going to take in your world right that's right and that's why I always get so concerned when I see people they'll do one thing they'll do one email blast say it doesn't work and change course and I'm like wait and and not only are they changing course they're going and changing several different things let's change the subject line let's change the content call to action and it's now we don't know what was working and what was it oh I I couldn't agree with you more I couldn't agree with you more that was another thing that I I often do is you have to pay attention to the sales cycle right where is your potential buyer in their sales cycle and I'm old school I like the awareness and discovery of content education engagement with that content driving to purchase right where are they in that funnel and I see a lot of companies just jumping all over the place and they'll come to me and say hey Stace we're looking for lead genen and I'll say okay I've been in this I've only been in the farm industry for four years but I read my competitive magazines and I read all of our newsletters and I don't know your company and what you do does everybody else okay yes do they know why you're different than everybody else you can't just jump into leads you've got to establish What Makes You Different better why should someone pay attention to you so I think you're absolutely right have to be hitting people at the right time with the right message in the right place but you yeah and you have a very good point right there because I'll speak to companies and oh our competitors and I said wait a minute if you do your marketing you really don't have a competitor because this other company maybe they're doing the same thing but their mission might be different their goals might be different and if you get that out in the marketplace people will start to see oh you know what they're different they'll maybe build a rep a relationship with you and that's when they'll buy from those companies over and over yes exactly that's such a good point some people might be looking to broaden their market share and not necessarily increase their sales there's a lot of different goals floating around out there and just because your competitor is doing one thing it doesn't mean you need to jump on that same band Wagoner approach it the same way for sure yes I think sales people need to be strategic too right you need to do your homework and ask a ton of questions used to tell my salespeople over and over if you're not asking a million questions you're not doing your job because not only does that help establish your relationship and make sure that this potential partner to be knows that you have their best interest at heart but it helps you understand where they fit into your world and how you can provide Solutions where you can and where you can't y you need to own where you can and where you can't right you can't be all things to all people so I definitely use those tools I guess the most important thing for me in establishing a relationship is in-person meetings and I think this industry got really I think the whole world got really complacent during Co with these video calls you need to be in person with these people as often as you can and the right people if you can get buyin from your decision makers along the way it's going to be much easier at the end of the day that bottom line I think just like you said right now there are a lot more players involved in the decision to buy a piece of equipment or sign up for a magazine to go to a conference there's more people there and you need to go to those in-person events because you build a rapport with sometimes it could be the entire team which that will help you get to the sale quicker but it'll also make you build those relationships that instill trust yes exactly and it's hard today a lot of people have moved to working remotely you can't just buy the office on a Thursday afternoon noon and see three or four people you might be lucky to get one but I do think finding out where they are and seeing people face to face is key I think you have to stay close to the the process as well um when you're pursuing a new partnership you can't just give up after one or two tries you need to keep pers being persistent and trying to find new ways to find these people maybe it's LinkedIn maybe it isn't an event maybe it's their office maybe you found something in the news that makes sense for them how do you relate yes finding different ways to reach out different vendors tactics things like that and then if you do happen to sell something don't abandon that process because yeah gosh you were the one they establish trust with and so if you just pass it off to a project manager maybe that's the way it's supposed to work but stay close to that company you may have to come around and resell them reignite them down the line and it's also a great way to spy on your own company right or Insight how's it going I know I flipped you over to this team how are they doing anything that we can improve so I think that's important too staying close and I think the last thing in building relationships for me is making it easy for people to buy from you yes you've got a massive onboarding process it's going to take forever set those expectations up front or figure out what's important to your buyer and get those things ironed out ahead of time y to be honest and upfront is key because if you tell them okay this might taste six months or nine months you're right they set that expectation of what to expect not that you say oh it'll be up quickly and here they are at three months they like okay what's happening and then nothing and then six months now they're really getting mad it it really doesn't work out well for you no correct yeah I'm with you the other thing I wanted to talk about is when we were talking about relationships and iners events I think you and I've talked about this before with you I love inperson events because what I've seen now is because some companies are doing remote they go to these conferences and the entire team comes to the conference because they meet they have their team meetings they get the education from the conference but you're right if you're trying to talk to a company now you can talk to maybe six players in that company build a relationship and so when you build that relationship even if your step or Hands-On with that client is over you still might check in oh how'd your daughter do did she go to Colorado you just check in with them and that just keeps that relationship going yeah I think spot on yeah it's it's very interesting but the nuances of building a relationship do take time absolutely I see a lot of companies underestimate that time frame and expect Revenue to be hitting their bottom line within a year and sometimes you're looking at multi-million dollar CDM deals and of course the companies want to get going right away but it's going to take a long time to get that over the line maybe the client you're approaching is already ready to sign on the data line with someone else and you've got to go in and convince them that you're the better player knowing when their fiscal years are and where they are on that purchase funnel timeline is key it is key and I think sometimes companies have to remember think about it yourself do you form like really deep relationships within one year no it's usually a series of years of different things that happen that make your relationship get deeper so that they end up being your best friends or best connections and sometimes the best thing to do is say I can't offer you that service but here's somebody who can and then when they have something for you they'll come back to you they trust you don't try to be all things to all people do what you do shout it from the rooftops but cough it up when you don't yeah that's a really hard thing to do because as a business owner and we're in the B2B marketing space it's hard for to sometimes say no to people because I'd like to help everyone of course you want to see your company grow but I know my wheelhouse is manufacturing it's pharmaceutical manufacturers metal working or the food industry so it's very specific Niche and so I have said no where some business owners are like what are you crazy yes I'm not GNA have those sales but it ends up the clients's going to be better served because they're going to go to an expert in their area I'm going to spend my time working in my Lane that I'm good at it's going to take us less time and it's really going to end up really being more profitable for the company to say no I'm telling you that person has friends in the business too and and acquaintances and colleagues and they're going to say oh I just spoke to the perfect manufacturing B2B marketer you've got to go see Donna yes so I I think what comes around goes around and if you're if you have integrity and you stay true to who you are as a business it it can only help you yeah I I agree I agree you and I could talk about relationships all day but one of the areas of building relationships comes down to segmenting your files and how can you explain your process in doing that in segmenting your files so that you can give messaging that really resonates with that individual sure yeah I think it's really important for for a lot of reasons let me back up I think the most important thing is quality of audience right whether you're looking at reach or you're looking at segmenting your audience you don't just want to roll down your car window and throw out a bunch of money way and even if you're looking for big numbers you want to anybody can buy traffic today so who is the audience that you're reaching where are they from are they an organic audience did you buy a list like where does it come from yes I think it's important to know that when you're partnering with somebody and I think segmenting is important just because it helps you increase your Roi for the most part and reduce your waste from I think it saves you time it also saves you a lot of time yeah that's a really good point from our perspective at texair we have a very broad for each brand a very broad audience umbrella for the medicine maker which is the brand I work on that's the pharmaceutical industry right but then we have subsets underneath that brand whether that be the celling gene advanced therapy section or small molecules and Equipment manufacturers or um bioprocessing and then from there we can slice and dice through our robust audience development platform any way you like so if you're looking for I would really like to reach biotech within biofarma and I'm looking for R&D and I'm looking for lab scientists who work in cell line development we can do that for you I have a a partner right now who is running an umbrella campaign um and they are targeting three very distinct audiences underneath their umbrella campaign with distinct messages and it's all going on at the same time um I just finished a campaign for another company who ran four email blasts to a very small Niche audience of under 2,000 people and they pull that campaign across the four email blast pulled an 89% open rate on average with an 8% click-through rate absolutely increase your Roi that being said there are tactics for everything and I do worry that sometimes we're abandoning we're going with Trends or we're abandoning the tried and true to try to stay on top of the market for example I come from video games and Tech and that industry 10 years ago said we're all going digital we need to measure where we're going and now they're all coming back to traditional print and other ways emails that are more engaging right that keep people engaged longer so there's definitely a way to use segmentation if it's done right and then I guess you can also look at segmentation across tactics too right so with our platform you can I can tell you how many people we have in that segment for our newsletters for our email blast list and you can hit them different ways with different messaging or how many people have engaged with a certain type of content online we can build a mirror audience of hours on our social media platforms and then blast that out for you on meta and LinkedIn so a lot of different ways to segment but it is definitely a timesaver and a money saver it is and this is why industry specific Publications are such a valuable Source I will shout that from the rooftops because a lot of people come into to me say Oh Donna I'm just going to buy these 10,000 leads or I'm going to use this B2B data platform and I'm like but you don't understand if you go to Industry specific Publications they can do exactly what you say they can Whittle it down so maybe you're not going out to 10,000 or maybe you're still going out to 10,000 but your 2000's going to get this message and 2000's going to get this message because you have all the details about the individual some of it's already self-reported meaning the individual reported the information you're not scraping the information of wherever no this is self-reported information so the people are giving it they're definitely interested in it and now you're able to send them messages that speak directly to them with a subject line and of course you got what 89% open rate you said we did it amazing and I that company only spent a couple thousand dollars on that campaign so I think that it can be really effective and what you're saying about list I do think that there companies like texair and our competitors out there we spend a lot of money to promote our own book right and build our own organic audiences and there's brand loyalty there and there's there is credibility in that message coming from one of those not necessarily from Zoom info or from some other place you can get a generic list they've engaged with our content they've opted into our content they want to be receiving it and that's half the battle yes it's if you do a banner and you just use a programmatic platform when it gets your banner up there everywhere where they're looking or you put it on a newsletter of a reputable publisher if I get something in from Ama or marketing profs I open it because that is my wheelhouse that's my area you subscribe we subscribe to it and if you've subscribed to a newsletter you're going to open it meaning they're going to see your banner yes I think that there is a lot of credibility in going with Publishers and with Media Partners or with Partners who have lists that you trust right yes yeah it's a whole gray area you've got to be careful but you're right you've got to trust it but you got to do a lot of research knowing exactly where do the names come from how do you keep them cleaned and updated but I don't need to educate you on that all that a question I have then so what Matrix do you prioritize when evaluating the success of a pharmaceutical manufacturing campaign that's a good question I come from the media side so I let the clients dictate what's important to them or our partners dictate what's first and foremost so they'll deliver us their kpis and it's my job or our job to say we can deliver on these or we can't deliver on those you still want to move forward yes we do and then providing what's important to them for some people it's what is our cost per lead and are we hitting that cost for other people it's we're just looking at Impressions some people are looking at clickthrough rates or video completion rates so it's different for every single ad partner we just need to be really clear on what we can deliver and when we can deliver how often that reporting is going to come in meeting their expectations and I think one thing that I really pride myself on is trying to catch those if we need to optimize a campaign or try to catch any issues sooner than later if an audience Target isn't working it's too broad maybe it's too narrow to go to that client and say hey this isn't really working this is what why we think it might not be working these are ways we think we can optimize it do you want to try this for round two if that doesn't work you just have to own what's going on and then make good on that I think I let the clients lead on metrics but for the usual standard of course is here's how many Impressions you're getting here here you know here's how many people engaged here's how many people clicked and and we go from there so from what everything you said there's two things that stood out the first thing is that open communication back and forth I agree with you the company has to tell you clearly what are they looking at as their goals yes what are there kpis but then the other thing that I've tried to stress to my clients because I know they want to see high open rates High click-through rates and of course sometimes that can be a great area and again I know I sound like I'm saying the same thing but when we go to Industry specific sources I told them you've got to have some confidence that your brand is in the right spot people don't put a lot of value or they really can't put a number to branding with a lot of my equipment guys it may they may not need an hplc machine right then and there but if they see the message over and over with good information that they're giving out good instruction or just tidbits guess what when they need that hlc machine they're going to reach out to that company and that's where I say you've got to have confidence in the sources you're using I agree I I also think you're you're touching on a good point too if you're not if you're not there you're not there you're right right you can't be seen if you don't have a message out in the market even just a general awareness ongoing I see a lot of companies come out of the woodwork or they've just done a merger and acquisition and they've changed their brand name and they run it for six months and they say okay the awareness portion is over you think really really I don't know if it really should be yeah I think you're right you have to be there at the right time with the right message and you have to make sure that your plan incorporates you know that funnel throughout the entire campaign yeah if if something's not working for you too maybe it's the Persona that you've built and it needs adjusting and you can learn from your campaigns what's working and what's not and create or build a new persona try a new publication or a new vendor perhaps you've actually just oversaturated Their audience with your try something new we've done that where we've paused something for a while we've gone back and then it works great again but like you said if you take little adjustments then you can analyze it to see what is it that we should change where if they go in and they change five different things and I mentioned this before how do we know how do we know what is working and what's not and that's where one thing at a time they should change yeah we do this with our businesses your business our business all the time we make adjustments our small molecule we used to have a print publication now we have a newsletter and we've limited the amount of newsletters for small molecule that go out and we've created a section in our magazine because we had a lot of duplication between our Pharma audience and our small molecule audience now because we've limited the exposure or I shouldn't say limited exp limited the number of contacts we hitting these people with the engagements through the roof yeah so you have to make those adjustments along the way whether you're a provider or an Advertiser and that's hard thing for a provider to do because of course they'd love to get more Revenue but in the end I feel if they limit the exposure the messages will be received better from the individual and then the advertisers are going to see a better rate which customers and you'll have yeah it's definitely a delicate balance and it takes a lot of people above my pay grade making those decisions a lot of the time but but it's worth it to do those deep Dives it it is got to stick to Quality you can't just bombard your list you can't just be saying oh yeah take a 100,000 for a fact really only 5,000 are going to be interested and when you do that's when you'll see those good results I agree yeah so then I was gonna ask you give us an example of a successful campaign but I'm sorry I think you already gave that to us when you're seeing an 89% what open rate and then you said a 8% quick rate yeah do you have another campaign you want to tell me about that was a really good one and it was a great and I actually shared that with our entire sales team to show them how well segmenting can work right and that customer I know is going to come back and it might have been small dollars on our end but a great Roi for them and so the next time they want to run absolutely they'll come back to us and that's what it's all about I do think that one thing that I've learned in this business I think needs improving upon is the one-off campaigns that I see run all day long and our most successful campaigns tend to be longer form multi- tactic Omni we did one recently for a well-established brand in the business who had a new service coming out they wanted to do a webinar so we ran our traditional eblast and newsletters we ran the webinar which I love webinars I love educational pieces because they can hit awareness they can hit education and if you g them they're lead generating right so you can kill a lot of birds with one budget but what we did is we took that webinar and we turned it into an article post webinar that we ran in print and online we pulled out segments of the print article and segments of the video yes to use on social media Instagram with the video Twitter with the short and it worked really well and then if you engaged in an eblast for the webinar but didn't actually register we went and retargeted you and said hey do you want to watch On Demand and if that didn't work here's the Gated article yeah right yes so we were able to hit so many different facets with one pretty much one budget for a webinar y so that one worked really well too that is so wonderful because a lot of people just do the one off like you said one and done that's it and no you can get so much out of it just like this podcast with us we've talked about it afterwards you're going to get seven podcast links you're going to get YouTube but then you also get videograms short videograms that you can use on LinkedIn and then small ones that you can use on YouTube because you can do this interview so what we're going to talk for maybe about 30 minutes you can break that up it can give you at least 15 days worth of content that is that's inside I didn't even think about how many pieces of content you can get out of this one oh I know I know for a fact I've said to people if you do an hourlong interview you can get 60 days worth of social media posts LinkedIn newsletters you can create a plethora of content I'm quoting you on that you can from this one and the great part about it is like what you said you end up then not even really thinking a cohesive strategy because on every single one of these challenges it really ties back into that one message so it reinforces it and giving I say to clients all the time give that educational information out because then that proves you're a thought leader and it instills the trust economy is a scale sister economies a scale yes yes and because if you do something like this or a webinar people know it's not AI generated you and I are actually talking it's it's us because now people are seeing all these blogs out there and all these articles and people are stepping back saying you know what is this really them or is this just generated AI generated where if you talk like this when they see our faces they figure us out a little bit is she quirky is she this but then they also know it's our actual voice our actual thoughts yeah I couldn't agree with you more it's one of the things you asked me in the beginning of this was how to build relationships and I think authenticity is should have added that to my list you have to be authentic right yeah that's how you can stand out is if you're authentic and you show your unique weakness so again World innovator is a B2B marketing agency but we're 43 years old we're women owned we're familyowned you see how it brings us down to a smaller pool and then we deal with basic in the industrial space so what used was this big pool of B2B now is down to here which is great because these people understand us when we're talking and we're able to give them a lot of value I hope so sure hope so that's exactly what Texar is doing you said it with the segmenting of your whether it's an email blast or whether it's a marketing campaign across different channels when you do that's when you're really going to build those relationships I think so too yeah so my last question for you and you might have just answered it by saying being authentic but is there an emerging Trend you foresee for the future for pharmaceutical manufacturers ah oh my gosh I said that I come from the land of tech and video games and I've said for years that the farm industry is about 10 years behind where I see other business to Consumer and some other B2B industries that being said I think covid put everybody body on an even playing field for a while and during that time I think technology really blossomed and with things like generative Ai and machine learning I saw actually one of your podcasts on generative Ai and how it can be useful I think that tool is amazing I think it's not an emerging Trend but it's getting harder and harder for companies today to get data they have to through gdpr and all the consumer protections that are happening now in our space and so I think content is King it has been and it's going to remain king for a while you it has to be high quality in order to to get people to opt in and engage and so you can either tap experts and help your own smmes for that content but a lot of people are either smaller startup companies or they're massive and they their their SNES don't have time um you can tap Publishers like myself or agencies like yourself to help with that content but you can also sit down and crank something out and have one of youres to take a look at it and just tweak it you can use a generative AI to maybe refresh older content yes and breathe new life into Evergreen content that might be driving SEO to your business so I definitely think gener generative AI is going to be hitting us over the head in a few years and I finally see this industry and I'm so grateful catching up in terms of video it's gotten so much cheaper to produce 82% of traffic out there mobile tra or video traffic it's video on web traffic and things like social media finally it it can be so useful and inexpensive and highly targeted so I definitely see Trends in those areas thinking about anything else maybe Partnerships I know it's been a huge collaboration year in mergers and Acquisitions and I see some Partners now like we had an aseptic filling cdmo partner with an equipment manufacturer last year to share cost of a sponsored feature like I'm hoping more Partnerships like that will come into play it just reduced costs for everyone around and gives everybody kind of a broad perspective so yeah I I definitely see a lot of things happening in the way of of be business to Consumer coming to the world of B2B yeah yeah I definitely agree when covid hit it did push B2B to concentrate on quality but also concentrate on those personal getting that personal out there companies can't stand behind just pictures of their machine they've got to put some of their key employees those actual faces out there and then like you said generative AI right now when I go and I speak at different conferences that is one of the top topics they always want me to talk about is generative Ai and their marketing and the only thing I will stress to people is because you had the PE companies that jump on and they're like okay we're gonna get 20 blogs out this week month and but they just take the generated content and push it out there all we're doing there is creating noise we're just cring Market right and you're oversaturating the market yes you are and that's why I say I like using chat GPT or any as a baseline as an assistant maybe gives you an idea maybe me tweet something that you already wrote so it's your thoughts your ideas it can be definitely very useful I just warn companies to be careful don't just you know you're right I I also would warn companies to be careful of other Trends make sure that they're tried and true or that you have the budget to roll down your window three podcast is a great example I'm getting a lot of inquiries about podcast well podcasts Were Meant to build an audience or to tap an audience that already exists people expect additional content to be coming down the line not a oneoff yes so you can't expect to do one podcast and have that perform well for you it needs to be marketed or presented as a series it could would depending on the topic and where you're marketing it but I would just be wary of Trends and then blowing them off as they didn't work for you or without really digging into the data to find out how you could have perhaps improved that or yeah I read a statistic the other day I wish I knew it off the top of my head but I don't but I think it was 90% 90% of podcasts stop after five episodes now I understand that because I remember at first when I started this I'm like oh my goodness is anyone listening to this like why am I bothering but the numbers do not show the true picture now I've been at trade shows and I know I've told this story before but a stranger I didn't even know came up to me and said I listen to your podcast keep up the great work and walked away and I'm like wait a minute who but you're getting a reach farther than you think and five isn't enough to see if podcasting works this will be episode 76 for us and so we have kept this going every other week like you said with the continuity people know we're going live with another yes yes yes yes and yes so you can't give up and you got to go a little long term to see if it works or not yeah you can't just run it one time and then say I don't know if that worked for me yeah it doesn't work Stacy I want to thank you so much for your time today I found this to be very helpful and I know my listeners will also so thank you very much I always love talking to you Donna and I look forward to seeing you again in person definitely hopefully interx yes I'll be there I'll be there with Bell on thanks for having me you're welcome talk to you later bye [Music] [Applause] bye

Channel: World Innovators

Views: 2,271

Keywords: texere publishing, b2b marketing, b2b marketing excellence podcast, world innovators, marketing initiatives, manufacturers, pharmaceutical marketing, marketing podcast, marketing executives

Id: -IJMrKtcXnU

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024