How to effectively marketing the pharmacy grow in India.
With the way digital health is progressing, communicating with your patients digitally and marketing the pharmacy yourselves is of result hence growth.
Digital communication is the primary way people talk.-
According to indian pharmacopeia, 2cr. People in INDIA are on social media and we spend on average 5 hours a day on our smartphones. If that’s where we live now,marketing the pharmacy should be there too.
Our top value is convenient healthcare. We want to talk to a marketing the pharmacy right away and we want the medicine delivered to our door . Digital health is allowing for this to happen and we’re seeing an alarming rise in digital competition. Pharmacy must adopt a digital health strategy and communicate with their patients digitally to protect their business and grow.
We’re getting a discount for dispensing prescription items. Automation means that robots can dispense quicker, cheaper and safer, and the government understands this. We need to marketing the pharmacy ourselves better to attract more business and drive income from other avenues.
The opportunity that digital marketing offers is ever-expanding. Social media, along with other important digital channels, is continuously evolving and new marketing tools are being released every week. This represents wonderful opportunities for marketing the pharmacy to communicate with their patients, engage them and drive more sales.
How to marketing the pharmacy - The list below is exhaustive and you’ll not be able to do everything yourself. You’re a pharmacy owner or similar, not a marketer. So you’ll need help implementing, or at least advising on the best way forward.
1. Train your pharmacy team
I can’t stress this enough. Your pharmacy staff, trained well, can drive 10x the profits in your store. Multiple but ethical selling is the key, and providing incredible customer service.
As well as doing this yourself, I’d highly recommend marketing the pharmacy training company . These guys have unique modules on driving sales and delivering excellent service.
2. Have awesome in-store marketing the pharmacy
Posters, leaflets, brochures, business cards, banners, banner-rollers. You get my drift. However, it’s not about plonking this collateral in the pharmacy wherever. There’s an art to it. In my opinion, being minimal and clean is the way forward. This is all about the design of your pharmacy, which leads me onto the third point.
3. Design your pharmacy better
If the experience of a patient and customer is improved, they’ll return again and again. This is a proven concept. Your pharmacy might only need a few cosmetic changes. However, if the interior of your pharmacy doesn’t fit the number of prescription items you dispense, space is inadequate and the lighting is poor, then you’ll no doubt benefit from a redesign of your pharmacy.
Drx. BALINDER SINGH founder of the most popular JK MEDIOSE marketing the pharmacy design company in India can give you some great advice here.
Our attention spans, unfortunately, have diminished faster than my care for listening to news about Brexit. We need things to move around to keep our focus or grab it in the first instance.
That’s why marketing the pharmacy TV displays is the way forward. They’re engaging and they mean you can have less collateral and clutter in your windows and inside your store. They bring people into the store and engage them while they’re in there.
Healthpoint TV provides excellent solutions for marketing the pharmacy.
We can give the membership card to patients Rs.200/- to add with us and get a discount upto 40% and other free items can be given in the offer. Loyalty schemes are why we keep shopping at pharmacy and this is the best way to deliver the patients to the pharmacy. It’s obscene how much money I’ve given them. In fact, now I’m just angry thinking about that.
Anyway, loyalty schemes are important in marketing the pharmacy and should be digital.
6. Hold monthly in-store events
Could you hold an event in-store once a month? Possibly a makeover event led by one of your staff or a diabetes evening where you can showcase your new diabetic range of products but also give lots of value at the same time? Or could you even create an event like a lucky draw just for the business owners in the area?
There is no better marketing than face-to-face marketing the pharmacy. You have apps such as Facebook, Instagram or other social media to help you organize and you’re willing to spend three hours a month preparing the event.. Events drive trust, repeat business and growth.
7. Make your instore products digital
NearSt is a wonderful tool and service that essentially digitises all your products in-store and makes them available online when people are looking for them close by. The products can be fed into your Google My Business profile too. x.
8. Digitize your direct communication with patients
Phone calls are a pain in the eye, especially in the pharmacy. It should still be an option for people, but it should now be a secondary option. That’s because we now have WhatsApp Business and other great apps like Netmeds, that make communication so much easier.
I’ve seen it countless times. People leave bad reviews on Google if they can’t get through to a business on the phone. That would anger me big time, especially if it was to do with my medication, which helps keep me calm. Please give your patients an alternative way to communicate.
But apps like these are also incredible marketing tools. You can build an app and lists of people in these apps and market occasionally, but directly to them.
Other Apps that incorporate direct marketing features include prescription reordering such as PharmaEasy.
9. Harnessing the right PRM System
It makes complete sense that your PMR system, as well as being the main dispensing system, also acts as a CRM tool, which is part of the wider scope of your marketing the pharmacy.
Does your PMR system support text messaging or emailing to patients?
If you are thinking about changing your PMR, check out our some guidance on the PMR systems available. While you’re thinking about PMR systems, think about CRM too.
10. Drive conversions through a Mailshot
This is a more expensive option initially but the return on investment can be significant. Reaching 10,000 people in your community directly via a leaflet or flier drop does work, but it does depend on what you’re sending out.
Does it deliver the right message? What are you selling there? What’s your objective?
As marketing the pharmacy a business, however, we need to building a closer relationship with key stakeholders who are affiliated with your audience can be immensely powerful. Sending out a personal letter to them will be a great start.
An example: If you’re offering a Health Clinic, then sending a letter to all the Diseases and treatment will be extremely valuable. Follow this up with a phone call to strengthen the relationship, and even go visit them .
11. Visit key stakeholders and other businesses in the area
I remember when I used to work for Boots in Sheffield. I was the newly appointed Pharmacy Store Manager and naturally, I was filled with enthusiasm. One tactic that I employed was to personally visit all the GPs surgeries and different businesses in the area, simply to say “hi”, give them our brochure, and have a bit of banter.
In one year, I managed to grow item numbers by 10%, and the shop floor revenue increased by 15%. Of course, I can’t measure exactly how effective this tactic was, but it definitely had an influence on the overall business and was key in understanding how to marketing the pharmacy better.
12. Attend local events and network
People love events. And people are your customers, especially local ones. Take a look at Event brite to see what kind of events you might be able to attend and network. It could be a local business event, a school community event, or a charity event. Any event is an opportunity to network, talk to people and essentially marketing the pharmacy to them – consciously and subconsciously.
Inbound (Digital) Marketing
13. Facebook and Instagram
These two social platforms are related, however, they are different. These two are the best way to reach an audience local to you and is why we always employ them in our social media strategies for pharmacies.
Things to note as of 2022 are that organically, you’ll need to produce really good content for your posts to get seen and it’s difficult to build an audience quickly. This takes time. Organic social media therefore is a long-term strategy.
For a more overnight success, it’s all about Facebook and Instagram Ads. Harnessing these is a must in your social media strategy, and they are very powerful, especially if you have somewhere to direct people to, such as an online booking platform for marketing the pharmacy.
Watch, listen & learn on the JK MEDICOSE YouTube channel or visit our Pharmacy.
14. Local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
I cannot stress the importance of local SEO for a pharmacy, especially if they are delivering a clinical service. People are looking for your pharmacy services online, on Google primarily.
Instead of writing about incredibly awesome and important Google My Business is for your pharmacy, or marketing the pharmacy you have.
And then we have the world of blogging. We’ve proven time and time again, through analytics and talking to pharmacy owners, that blogging for your local pharmacy services is extremely powerful. It works. For some pharmacy owners, we’ve driven revenue by an extra Rs.-3K a month in one year through two, highly optimized blog posts that we wrote. At the time, it cost them Rs.125/- per post.Also, it’s worth looking into guest posting on other high-ranked local websites, such as local magazines.
15. Paid Advertising across Google
If you’re delivering a product or service for the first time, for example, you just started providing a Pharmacy to patients through a Pharmadoctor PGD, there is nothing more potent and quick at creating an ROI than marketing the pharmacy through Google Ads. That’s why it’s one of the more expensive options.
Google Ads are all about driving raw return on investment through optimizing ads and analyzing results. Read more to understand Google Ads in greater detail, or book a call to talk about advertising your pharmacy on Google.
16. Have a good pharmacy website
Don’t invest in a poor website with a lack of support. It’s just a waste of time and money for everyone. Instead, invest in a good, solid, mobile-optimized site that is flexible and has support for marketing the pharmacy. This will be your digital hub and you can do so many things with it. For example, you can:
Allow people to register for your EPS service
Integrate WhatsApp business on there
Provide as much information to your visitors as possible
Shop for items if you have eCommerce
Allow people to order their repeat prescription
Book your pharmacy services, right there and then (see below)
A website is mandatory because it links all the other digital channels and will allow you to direct your marketing efforts from these channels.
Check out this article for more on what makes a killer pharmacy website.
17. Develop an online booking system
We’ve recently begun exploring this with clients on how to market a pharmacy better and my gosh, it’s good we did. People want to book online for services. Fact. If you offer clinical services, then this is no doubt in your best interest.
With the right marketing the pharmacy around it, you’re able to drive 100’s of bookings every month, seamlessly, for the services you offer, which will then drive 5-star reviews for your practice automatically.
The other great thing about having such a system online is that we are able to measure our success here much more effectively.
18. Other social media channels
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, @twitter, WeChat etc. likely are great platform, specifically for video marketing and for connecting with CEO’s and marketing the pharmacy to corporations. If you're thinking about delivering the HPV vaccine and other medicine ,injection, syrup,and vaccines also can be upgrade on these plateform.
