Pharma marketers are navigating tightening budgets, complex regulations and growing pressures on healthcare professionals. What does it take to cut through the noise and make an impact?
Cutting through the unrelenting pressures that busy healthcare professionals (HCPs) face takes more than well-crafted messaging – it requires deep insight into their needs and robust clinical evidence to communicate medical advances effectively.
It’s important to recognise the growing discrepancy between the level of personalisation HCPs experience in their personal lives, as consumers targeted by platforms such as Uber and Netflix, and the far less tailored communication they often encounter in their professional roles. While HCPs are used to highly customised experiences as consumers, their professional interactions with pharmaceutical companies can feel generic and impersonal by comparison. Bridging this gap is crucial for engaging today’s busy and digitally fatigued healthcare audience.
An ever-expanding range of treatment options, rising digital fatigue and a burnt-out healthcare workforce mean pharmaceutical marketers need to be armed with a full understanding of who wants what types of information, how they want it, and when – all while navigating the myriad of challenges that doctors face.
Yet despite best efforts, engagement remains a critical hurdle. A 2024 study by Veeva Systems found that HCP engagement with pharma field force and online channels has fallen to just 53%, and of those still engaging, 62% interact with only three or fewer companies.
Understanding what doctors are up against is essential to crafting communications that truly resonate
Pharma is also under strain. When M3 surveyed 400 pharma marketers in the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland, they learned that budgets are shrinking and drug sales targets are climbing resulting in increased pressure on pharma marketers.
In its The Evolving World of Pharma: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities white paper, M3’s research stated that around 90% of pharma marketers have at least 12 areas of responsibility for budget allocation. This included digital advertising and sales materials, content creation and localisation, websites, HCP engagement and market research.
The research found that more than 50% of pharma marketers require new marketing materials at least every two months. While frequent updates are common across many industries, pharma marketers face additional hurdles – such as strict compliance checkpoints and the rigorous MLR review process – that can easily delay production, increase stress, and make it even more challenging to keep pace in a fast-moving environment.
HCPs often want to see a range of comprehensive information before prescribing a new treatment. This typically includes clinical trial data on efficacy and safety, comparisons with existing therapies, prescribing guidelines, mechanisms of action, and real-world evidence. Such detailed insights enable HCPs to make informed decisions, ensuring patient safety and optimal treatment outcomes.
To address this, M3 is transforming medical communications so they reach HCPs while also helping pharma marketers meet their compliance obligations. The M3 Group operates in North and South America, Asia Pacific, and Europe with over 6 million healthcare professional members globally across its websites. Doctors.net.uk has more than 250,000 users while Data4NHS, operated by M3, holds the largest NHS personnel database with over 152,000 records and is the only database with 100% NHS email addresses, providing direct access to the NHS.
of pharma marketers have at least 12 areas of responsibility for budget allocation
Doctors under pressure
Medics currently exist in an environment where free time to delve into what’s new in their field is hard-won due to perpetual stress. The GMC’s report, The state of medical education and practice in the UK Workplace experiences 2024, emphasises the struggles faced by doctors in the context of a depleted workforce and a burgeoning workload. Recognising these pressures isn’t just a matter of logistics — it demands empathy. Understanding what doctors are up against is essential to crafting communications that truly resonate.
The GMC highlights how ongoing workplace pressures continue to erode doctors’ wellbeing, warning that this damaging cycle must be broken if both healthcare systems and the workforce are to recover. While plans to grow and support the medical workforce are a positive step, the report stresses that these must be backed by clear implementation and long-term development strategies to deliver real impact.
It goes on to reveal that 44% of doctors find it difficult to provide their patients with the sufficient level of care needed at least once a week. Difficulty providing patient care was linked to struggling with workload, high risk of burnout, lack of support and insufficient autonomy. In fact, M3’s 10 Data Trends report found that 75% of EU5 doctors think their workload is unsustainable and agree their peers are burnt out and have low morale. These figures denote the severity of doctor burnout across Europe, with these issues spanning much further than the UK.
On the impact of such conditions, the GMC found that sustained high workload pressures may be a factor causing many doctors to make additional self-directed changes to their ways of working as a form of mitigation. In 2023, 19% said they had reduced their contracted hours in the last 12 months, and 41% said they had refused to take on additional work.
When M3’s researchers looked into what was contributing to a difficult working environment, a lack of clinical staff was by far the most significant challenge, selected by 75% of doctors. And, on the flip side, marketers producing content for HCPs are up against various challenges including maintaining consistency in style and tone (50%), localisation and translation of content (38%), time constraints (37%) and quality control (37%).
Creating tailored content adds to the challenge. Pharma marketers are constantly balancing the need to produce engaging, audience-specific materials with the pressure to stay on-brand and be compliant. But with tight budgets and limited resources, creativity can end up taking a back seat. The challenge lies in meeting rising expectations for personalisation without sacrificing consistency or overextending already stretched teams.
of pharma marketers require new marketing materials at least every two months
Understanding your customers
Tim Russell, executive vice-president at M3 EU, explains that pharma marketers must “do more with less.” He says: “Gone are the days where you’ve got a £3m promotional spend and plenty of resources. Today, companies are more focused on what they’re trying to achieve. M3 has European coverage with very distinct offerings in terms of how to communicate with doctors in a digital setting. A big part of that is creating quality content. We are experts in developing peer-reviewed, peer-driven, co-created content as appropriate – we work with pharma to do just that.”
M3’s 10 Data Trends research underlines this need for high-quality content, where digital communications are personal, relevant and arrive in the right place, at the right time and in the right format for the HCP. To this end, medeConnect, M3’s market research division, routinely conducts primary research on target audiences to build a robust foundation for a campaign’s content, and to track its subsequent trajectory.
Equipped with medeConnect’s qualitative and quantitative findings, the business crafts content and disseminates it via trusted channels as a single end-to-end process for its clients. Content is repurposed for use across multiple channels, be that for a conference or other uses, helping marketers to reach as many HCPs as possible, in the most appropriate way.
Where we come in is very much about understanding doctors, what they do and how they want to receive information
Generic information, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not make the cut. M3’s report, Tailored and Targeted Pharmaceutical Marketing at Scale, explains how the business uses personas to understand its audience and tailor communications as a result. These fictional but recognisable descriptions of a persona embody the characteristics of a segment, such as product adoption, and an individual’s professional motivation and communication preferences.
“Where we come in is very much about understanding doctors, what they do, where they go, and how they want to receive information. And creating tailored campaigns to fit with this. That’s what we are experts in,” says Russell.
“Through our market research, we gather extensive information that allows us to track and evaluate the impact of our work across M3 channels. This data not only measures effectiveness, but also guides our collaboration with pharmaceutical companies to refine messaging and determine the best course of action. What are doctors doing? What is the patient pathway? We look at all those different elements to really help pharma understand the depths of the therapeutic area that they’re working in.”
He adds that the company takes an agile approach to ensure content is optimised on an ongoing basis so it is fit for purpose, not just for doctors in general, but for many different types of doctor, in an ever-changing environment.
Looking ahead, Russell shares his perspective on what pharma marketing needs to meet its goals. “Pharma needs to ask, what am I trying to achieve? And will this project help me, the business, the company, achieve our commercial objectives?”
At the heart of this approach is a deeper question about purpose — not just achieving commercial outcomes, but making a real difference to patients’ lives. He adds: “The real measure of success is whether it helps get the right patients, and more of them, onto the right treatments. If it does, that’s when we start to see genuine improvements in how people live and manage their conditions. That kind of impact is driven just as much by ethics as it is by strategy — because ultimately, this is about helping people live longer and better lives.”
In an increasingly complex landscape, pharma marketers must strike a balance between scale, precision and empathy. By understanding doctors’ needs through data-driven insights, the industry can deliver content that brings positive and lasting impact.
