Clear objectives for an advertising campaign are essential. Do you want to build a specific part of your business, encourage patients to switch or raise awareness of your pharmacy in your community.
It is important to decide before the advertising campaign starts, so that the advertising can be designed to support your goals. Plus the results should be measurable so you can calculate the return on the investment.
With a limited advertising budget, some businesses set multiple objectives for the same campaign. But effective campaigns have a single measurable objective. Mixing objectives could, at best, reduce the outcome or worse, confuse prospective patients.
3 General Advertising Objectives.
Inform:
An informative ad is used to introduce the pharmacy, specific medicines or for example your testing services to the market. Before convincing a potential patient that your community pharmacy is the best option, they have to know what you do on a basic level.
Persuade:
Persuading customers is the most prominent ad objective of companies. Once patients have a basic understanding of the pharmacy and its services, the pharmacy can then advertise its unique value proposition to them. Top-of-Mind Awareness advertising helps your pharmacy to build impressions with your target market. These accumulated advertising impressions become crucial because they shape the initial-consideration set: the small number of options regarded at the outset as a potential treatment.
Remind:
Reminder ads reinforce your brand message to a well-established market. The general idea is to maintain Top-of-Mind Awareness and protect against competing pharmacies coming along and stealing your patients.
6 Advertising Objectives Suited to Community Pharmacies offering specialized services such as Compounding.
Raise Awareness:
Awareness advertising can be used if your pharmacy is new to the market, is introducing new products to new sectors of the market or prospective patients are not aware of the full extent of your compounding services.
Communicate Benefits:
If patients in the community have a low awareness of the benefits of compounding, this type of advertising objective enables you to stress the benefits of compounded medicines.
Generate Leads:
The purpose of some types of advertising is to provide leads that can be followed up by a marketing rep or sales person. Advertising that generates inquiries can identify the right people and open the door for your sales rep. The pharmacy does need to have the sales or marketing bandwidth to follow through; the systems like a funnel and CRM tools to manage the sales cycle plus the facility to nurture patients who are not yet ready to buy.
Encourage Switching: Advertising can play an important role in winning new patients as it encourages them to switch pharmacies. It can help you to increase market share or maintain share against competitive actions.
Support an Event: This type of advertising helps to build traffic for specific events such as an LDN seminar. Events are a good way to build credibility. Plus events can support your sales funnel for patients who are in the consideration or decision phase.
Solicit Customers through Direct Response:
Direct response is an advertising objective designed to elicit an immediate response or action from patients. This objective is particularly suited to pharmacies.
Examples of Specific Advertising Objectives
Examples of a specific objective for a specific campaign include the following:
- Raise awareness of your pharmacy within a clearly identified target market.
- Communicate the benefits of BHRT to women over 45.
- Generate physician leads for your marketing rep.
- Persuade prospective patients to switch pharmacies.
- Support your in-house pain managementseminars to potential patients with chronic pain.
- Build confidence in compounded medicines for pet owners in a 10 mile radius.
Forming the Advertising Objective
At the outset, the objective should be translated into concise, measurable targets. The advertising objective should also be defined in the context of your marketing objective and target market.
For example:
- Target market: 30,000 females >45 years living with 10 miles of the pharmacy.
- Marketing Objective: Increase the pharmacy’s BHRT business by 50% in 2 years.
- Advertising Objective: Persuade 2 prospective BHRT patients per week to contact the pharmacy.
Refill Assistant specializes in social advertising for community pharmacies.
