Leveraging Social Media for Competitive Intelligence in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Here we describe a guide to leveraging ‘Social Media for Competitive Intelligence in the Pharmaceutical Sector’. Like that of any other sector, the usage of social media has become an indispensable element of marketing in the pharmaceutical sector. It is one of the ‘pull’ marketing strategies routinely applied by savvy marketers. For most companies, a social media campaign is one of the most effective means of implementing marketing initiatives and often provides a high return on investment.
Social media also turns out to be one of the best sources from where organizations can get high quality primary competitive intelligence. Reasonably easy access means social media is a great place to watch rivals’ strategies and tactics, devise counter strategies and leverage learnings from them. Tracking the activities of various players over time allows organizations to gain deep insights about competitors’ strategy and provides an opportunity to refine ones’ own strategy.
Primary intelligence gathering opportunities from social media are bidirectional i.e. one can gain insights into competitors’ assets and practices while there is also an opportunity to get feedback about own assets and practices. This also allows pharmaceutical companies to capture and enrich the voice of customers (patients) in decision making. Social media clients, for example, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on enable patients to talk freely about their experience with various aspects of the product, its non-obvious benefits, and side effects, it’s packaging and shipping amongst a multitude of other insights that decision makers might seek. Several qualitative insights such as ‘quality of life’, ‘economic utility’, ‘delight-factor’ etc. can be incorporated in the intelligence gathering exercises.
BiopharmaVantage is a boutique healthcare consultancy that takes pride in providing exceptional quality competitive intelligence services to pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies. If you would like to explore how we can assist you, please contact us.