How to Use Primary Market Research for Robust Digital Marketing

Written by: Dr Maxim Polyakov, Senior Vice President, Business Intelligence and Research at M3.

Pharmaceutical products play in a highly competitive field. Understanding the HCP target audience through market research is vital to ensure pharma companies are marketing their products effectively. The need for robust research is becoming more urgent as companies face increasing performance pressures, while continuing to scrutinise research budgets.

When pharmaceutical marketing teams design their digital marketing approaches, it can be all too tempting to jump straight into the planning stage and start putting tactics to paper. However, creating an approach without audience insight carries with it a risk of working in an echo chamber, where only internal company beliefs and narratives inform the plan, rather than relying on a more robust mix of internal hypotheses and external verification. An echo chamber may lead to suboptimal business decisions and costly inefficiencies.

In the dynamic world of pharmaceutical marketing, understanding the target audience is essential for developing effective approaches that deliver results. Knowing your audience better will always be more advantageous, and lead to a greater proportion of more effective decisions over time, than knowing them less well.  

The Importance of Leveraging Primary Data to Support Decisions

The healthcare sector is an increasingly data-rich environment. Pharmaceutical companies can leverage data sets on service usage, insurance claims, prescribing, and even relatively newer kinds of data from such sources as healthtech wearables and genomics.

However, when it comes to informing marketing approaches, data sources are often more limited. For instance, CRM systems tend to capture data on only a small proportion of the relevant HCP universe, and also tend to be able to analyse only what happened in response to a marketing tactic, not why it happened (or, indeed, what may have worked better).

By contrast, primary market research involves talking directly to the target audience, allowing pharmaceutical marketers to access first-hand accounts and experiences from their core demographic. The nature of primary market research means marketers can ask whatever questions they need to ask, including ones about hypothetical or future situations. This becomes particularly valuable, for instance, in a pre-launch environment, when there is no secondary data available as the product is not yet on the market.

Of course, primary market research has its own limitations. For instance, the subjective nature of personal experience means people might not be willing, or able, to tell you exactly what they think in the moment: it would take a research team with a specific skillset and experience to be able to navigate this successfully. That said, primary market research should be a critical component of every pharmaceutical marketer’s “armoury”.

How to Ensure your Primary Market Research is Effective

When looking to undertake primary market research to inform digital marketing (or any other topic), there are a number of important considerations.

The first step is defining what you want to find out from the research. Don’t rely on a vague set of question topics to cover, instead nail down a clear hypothesis (or a set of hypotheses) to test. Don’t be afraid to limit the scope of a research project, too, as one project can’t address everything. A better approach might be to run multiple phases of research, with each subsequent phase building on what you have learned in the previous one. You should also consider at this stage whether you feel you can run this research in-house, or if you’d benefit from a research partner (e.g. a market research agency).

Secondly, work out how you are going to test your hypotheses. This involves determining the best methodology or combination of methodologies to use, deciding how you are going to define and screen your target respondents, and creating the research materials to support the process (e.g. a questionnaire or an interview guide). This stage is also where you’ll need to make sure your research is compliant, and that the materials have appropriate medical and legal approvals in place.

Once all of that is done, the final step is to go into field with your research to collect the data, and analyse it to draw out the insights and recommendations. If your research was tightly focused on a set of clear hypotheses, this can be a more straightforward process – you should know what you are looking to prove or disprove. (During fieldwork, you’ll also need to remember to monitor for any mention of potential adverse events or other safety reporting situations.)

A Few “Watch-Outs”

There are several challenges that pharmaceutical marketers looking to undertake primary market research typically face. For example:

Regulation and compliance: The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated, and this extends to primary market research. From navigating data privacy legislation, to avoiding disguised promotion or over-sampling, to setting appropriate incentives that are aligned to fair market value – the list of compliance considerations is long, and becomes even more complex if you need to do research across multiple jurisdictions. 

1. Finding the right respondents: Pharmaceutical primary market research also often involves very specific audiences, and finding the right respondents, and enough of them, can be difficult. Companies can ensure they maximise their chances through using robust, verified, and profiled panels, as well as ensuring that rigorous screening is in place.
2. Designing and executing research effectively: Particular attention should be paid to how research is designed and executed: from picking the right methodology (or a mix of methodologies), to phrasing questions effectively (they should be impartial, and be able to cut through subjective bias, if required), to running robust analytics and showing the data in an impactful way at the end.
3. The final point here is worth a quick pause: if primary market research is there to enable better decisions, its outputs need to be actionable and clear on the “so what”. Otherwise, there is a risk that all of the great work and thinking that went into the research will trip at the final hurdle.

The good news, however, is that pharmaceutical marketers don’t need to handle this alone. They can typically rely on internal and external expertise: in-house business intelligence teams, and external market research agencies.

Conclusion

Not carrying out market research to inform digital strategy leaves marketers open to a whole host of risks. Some of these risks are financial. Forging ahead with a strategy (or a campaign) without a good mix of data to back it could lead to costly inefficiencies. And of course, not getting the marketing approach right could have implications beyond finances, if it also means that a product that can help patients does not gain as wide an adoption as it perhaps should.

Ultimately, the pharmaceutical industry is a complicated and competitive space, and developing a stronger understanding of customers can only ever add value.