Leveraging Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 489

Awareness
Interest
Evaluation
Decision
Purchase
Support
WOM
Fig. 16.2 How WOM helps in the sales funnel
Social media also help in the sales funnel through WOM as shown in Fig. 16.2 .
Social media can enhance effectiveness of the sales funnel's different stages such as
lead generation, lead qualification, persuasion, customer relationship management,
and support.
As discussed earlier, social media are both a challenge as well as opportunity for
pharmaceutical firms. Building a social media strategy can be an overwhelming
task. Firms can follow the LEADS strategy to effectively implement social media
marketing (Hoffman 2009 ). The strategy comprises the following steps.
• Listen : In this first stage, firms listen in on the conversations in the social media
that relate to their industry, market, and brands. As the reporting implications of
patient experiences are better clarified by the FDA, pharmaceutical firms can
learn from monitoring the dialogs among doctors in the Sermo network.
• Experiment : Once firms have a good understanding of the key issues learned
from listening to conversations, they can identify key communication initiatives
to adopt through the social media. They can set up trials or experiments to exam-
ine the effectiveness of such initiatives.
• Apply/adapt : Based on the learning from the experiments, firms can decide
whether to apply the initiatives on a large scale across the gamut of social media
for a wider range of products or brands. Many times, they may need to adapt their
initiatives before rolling it out across platforms and brands.
• Develop : Once a firm applies its initiatives, it may need to develop its expertise
further in that method.
• Strengthen : In this phase, firms consolidate their social media capabilities. Based
on the results of their development initiatives, firms choose to enhance their
competencies in the use of social media.