Pharmacy Business Success Program
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Parata Systems' Small Business Success Program on marketing for independent pharmacies. This first slide deck examines the fundamentals of building great marketing plans. Our intention today is to focus on building the foundation for your marketing plan. Parata is excited to bring you this marketing course that will help you build a powerful marketing plan that sets a strategy for success and utilizes tactics that will help you grow your business. Sign up for the full course at: http://success.parata.com/08-LP-Slideshare.html.
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Pharmacy Business Success Program
- 1. Pharmacy Business Success Program Lesson 1: Developing a Marketing Plan Presenter’s Info: Courtney Wilson, Marketing Manager Parata Systems
- 2. Agenda 1.Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals 2.Conducting a SWOT analysis 3.Understanding your target audience 4.Securing your most profitable customers 5.Defining your value
- 3. S.M.A.R.T. Goals Goal: 10% of Customers Converted to Strip Packaging
- 6. • Female • 35 – 50 yrs old • Married w/ children • Runs a personal taxi service • Kids w/ allergies • Values convenience & organization • Talks to a lot of other moms • Values the opinions of peers both online & word of mouth Chronic Carl • Male • 30 – 50 yrs old • Single • Monthly script for Xanax & Ambien • Works in technology field • Values face to face consultation • High-stress, hightoxin lifestyle • Spends a lot of time online Suzy Soccer Mom Paranoid Pat Target Audience • Male • 40 – 65 yrs old • Chronic conditions such as hypertension, hea rt disease, diabetes • 5+ prescriptions at any time • Struggles with adherence • Sedentary lifestyle • Values convenience & organization
- 10. Summary 1. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals 2. Analyze your environment (SWOT) 3. Know your target audience 4. Secure your most profitable customers 5. Define your value
Editor's Notes
- Hello and welcome to our Small Business Success Program on marketing for independent pharmacies. My name is Courtney Wilson and I’m a marketing manager here at Parata and I’m really excited to be here today to talk about an important topic, the fundamentals of building great marketing plans. Our intention today is to focus on building the foundation for your marketing plan, throughout this lesson we’ll be presenting pieces of the puzzle and showing how they come together, and at the end you’ll be able to create a plan that is actionable and helps you reach your goals.We know how much you have on your plate and that marketing isn’t always top of mind. You’re focused on your duties as a pharmacist and the day to day operations of your business.That‘s why we’re excited to bring you this marketing course that will help you build a powerful marketing plan that sets a strategy for success and utilizes tactics that will help you grow your business. With that said, let’s dive right in!
- So, for today’s lesson we’re going to review the importance of setting S.M.A.R.T. goals, how you can conduct and effective SWOT analysis, the power in understanding your target audience, why securing your most profitable customers is so important and how you can define your value as a pharmacy.
- When we start building a marketing plan we start with your organization’s goals and consider how our marketing efforts can support those goals. Some goals we can support and some we can’t. Once we know what goals we’re supporting we set our own SMART goals to get there.So, let’s begin building our marketing plan with a SMART goal. For the purposes of this presentation, I’ll offer something up…Let’s define the goal as converting 10% of my patients to strip packaging by the end of 2014. OK…does that goal meet the SMART criteria? Well, it’s specific and measurable since we’re talking about 10%, it’s certainly action oriented, you want to get them converted to strip packaging, it’s realistic and it’s time bound, we want to do this by the end of 2013.We’ll refer back to this goal often to make sure we’re on the right track with our plan.Once you’ve established a set of business goals that meet the SMART criteria, it’s time to move on to analyzing your current environment.
- Now that you have a goal, to convert 10% of your customers to strip packaging by the end of 2013, it’s really important to examine your current marketing situation. SWOT is particularly useful in developing a quick perspective. It’s a scan of the environment, not necessarily a detailed analysis. By truly understanding the potential opportunities and threats to your success, you can use those insights to effectively develop a marketing plan that will capitalize on your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses.A few helpful tips on this. You’re likely to find various items in each bucket so rank them in order of impact. There may be many opportunities, but which one would have the most impact on the growth of your business? There are probably multiple threats, but which one is the most likely to create a barrier to success?SWOT also works well in group sessions. Engage your team in the exercise. You may uncover an area of great strength that you were not promoting or discover a new opportunity that you weren’t aware of and want to build it into your plan. Also, engage people outside your business as well. Your spouse or a friend who has a strong business acumen.
- Now that we’ve set the framework for your plan by setting the goal of converting 10% of our customers to strip packaging, and we’ve analyzed the current environment, it’s time to talk about who your customers are and what makes them tick.Understanding your target market is vital for proper marketing. To keep things simple we’re going to focus on your current customer base, because that is how our SMART goal is defined. You want to convert 10% of your customers to strip packaging.You will employ different tactics to market to your existing customers than new customers. For example, you’ll target your existing customers with more in-store promotions and it’s much easier to do direct marketing to folks whose information you have on file, weather that be through your host system or in another database.Keep in mind, it’s much easier, and cheaper to keep existing customers than gain new ones. We’ll talk much more about tactics and strategies to gain new customers in subsequent webinars, but first we want to make sure that we understand our current customers.What problems are they looking for you to solve? What do they value in your service? Where do they go for information? What is their value to you and your business?
- Here you can see that we have sketched out some examples of the kind of information you might glean from examining your target audience. The actual process of developing these is far more detailed, but I wanted to show you how you might apply some of the findings to your marketing.Let’s take a look at Suzy. What do we know? We know she’s incredibly busy. Maybe one of her kids has allergies or another chronic condition that requires a regular prescription. She really values anything you can do to make taking medication more convenient and give her peace of mind that her kids are taking the right medications at the right time. PASS packaging is a great example of a solution that may help her. She can pack Jimmy’s lunchtime meds for his camp director right next to his PB&J and be more confident that he’ll take the right meds at the right time. Anything you can do to help alleviate some of her stress is a huge benefit, and something she’ll keep in mind when talking to other moms.How about Carl? Carl may be an ideal customer for a solution like adherence packaging. He hasn’t taken great care of himself, he works hard at a desk job that promotes a very sedentary lifestyle and he’s developed some chronic conditions that need to be treated with ongoing medication. Adherence is tough for him, there are a lot of medications to take and he’s a busy guy. He doesn’t always remember what he’s taken and what he hasn’t. PASS packaging can be a solution to his problems.This is so critical because once you understand the problems your customers face you can gear all of your marketing in a way that speaks to the solution you have for those problems. In this instance it’s strip packaging, but you may have other services that you find is of value to them.
- Keep in mind….the reason we’re talking about this is that securing your customer base is critical. Considering approximately 10% of your customers likely account for 50% of your revenue. Identify those customers, just like Suzy or Carl, and make sure you have a solution in place to help solve their problems.These are the chronically ill patients who are taking 5 or more meds a day, and they are the ones that payors, public and private alike are targeting for fast savings so they can keep them out of the hospital. 1 in 5 Medicare patients wind up back in the hospital within 30 days of discharge costing tax payers upwards of 17 billion dollars a year. Medication adherence is key to this equation. Considering that almost half of consumers use more than one pharmacy, and strip packaging aggregates prescriptions, those who use it have a great opportunity to grow their business and impact patient health at the same time. When you turn a complex problem like a bag of vials, into a simple solution like strip packaging, it’s a game changer.
- You’ve established your goal, done your SWOT analysis and begun to segment your customer base it’s time to develop a high-level message that will help provide a framework for what will ultimately inform your communication plan.When developing a messaging strategy, having a clear, primary message can help keep your messaging focused and on point that clearly speaks to the problems a customer faces and how you might solve that problem differently than the competition. PASS packaging is a powerful differentiator. Making the lives of your customers more convenient and positively impacting their health can certainly separate you from your competition.Going back to our SWOT analysis, consider some of your brand strengths and how those may differentiate you from other pharmacies in your community. Take some time to consider what differentiator you can use to establish that position. Is it a new service that you offer? We’ve done a lot of the work for our customers when it comes to positioning adherence packaging, and we can show a few examples of what we’ve developed for use. But the most important thing to do when developing a clear value proposition is to speak to the problem that you solve for your customers. It’s the end result that matters most, not necessarily the way you get there, which is the product or service.
- We’re going to take a look at a few real life examples of how your understanding of your customers and the hard work you do in coming up with a compelling, primary message come together in a tactical format.These are actual pieces that Parata customers have access to through our Business Growth Toolkit. You can see that we’ve done a lot of research about the benefits of PASS packaging in the typical retail setting. Our message is clearly about convenience and better adherence. This really speaks to some of the concerns we talked about. Remember Carl who’s so busy that he forgets to take his medications, or Suzy, who is worried about her son getting the right meds at the right time. Just add water, couldn’t be easier.Throw that annoying box away…think outside the box. These are the manifestations of a messaging strategy that takes into account the brand strengths, the competitive landscape and most importantly, what your customers want.
- So, just to summarize what we’ve gone through today.We talked about setting SMART goals and picked one of our own to base our plan on which was converting 10% of your existing customers to strip packaging.We analyzed our environment with a productive SWOT analysis which you included your team on and shared with trusted advisors outside of your businessWe talked about segmenting your existing customer base to identify your most profitable customers, the problems they face and how you can help solve them.And lastly we talked about how you can truly define your value as a pharmacy and speak those same problems your customers are facing.\That’s it for today’s lesson, thanks so much for participating in this course. We hope you’ll join us for next week’s lesson when we’ll cover traditional marketing tactics that you can apply immediately in your business to create brand awareness and drive additional revenue.