If your drug has multiple competitors in the market, how do you stand out?

Medicines are advancing at a faster pace than ever before and, in some therapy areas, physicians are overwhelmed with options to treat patients. As a medicine manufacturer, how can you serve doctors effectively and help ensure the right patients receive your product?

Let’s take today’s IBD market where multiple treatment options are all vying for attention. In order to stand out, you need to be thinking about the ‘extra’ you can bring to the table. What more can you bring, beyond the pill, to help you connect with your HCPs? Here are some ideas based on what we discovered from HCP social listening. 

Understand unmet needs

One way to increase your profile within a therapy area is by better understanding your eHCP community, their unmet needs and what you can do to add value for them. By understanding what they need and considering how you could support them you can build trust and favour.

In a recent study into online conversations in IBD, we saw that despite a number of expected treatments within the paediatric IBD space only a small percentage of IBD conversation among HCPs focused on this area. By understanding the lack of conversation about paediatric IBD, we see an opportunity for pharma to help increase discussions on this topic. Potential tactics include finding HCPs who are talking about this and helping them raise their voice, or creating resources to support paediatricians.

Another unmet need we discovered in our research was around a lack of real-world data. Some HCPs in Japan felt that they were unsure on the pros and cons of different treatments in Ulcerative Colitis and were expressing a desire for more real-world data. By discovering this need and providing that real-world data, a pharmaceutical company could help make HCPs feel supported as well as support prescribing decisions to the benefit of patients.

Engaging HCPs in the right way

Continuing to look at our study into the online HCP voice in IBD, our analysis highlighted the impact of offline events on HCPs which led to more online conversations. When looking at the topic of mental health in the context of IBD we saw they had a far greater impact than other initiatives.

By understanding the online behaviour of eHCPs you can find the best way to collaborate with them and ensure your engagement campaigns have the most impact

Competitor analysis

In order to stand out it can also be really important to understand how HCPs perceive your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses so you can differentiate your awareness and educational content effectively to capture market share. In our analysis we noticed eHCPs expressing confusion over the many different IBD treatments available. Helping to shape a clear proposition on your differentiation can help reduce confusion. But first you need to understand how your eHCPs perceive your competitor’s products and campaigns and where you can best fit in. 

These are just some ideas on how to improve your presence in a competitive market like IBD. By learning more about what your eHCPs need you can start to serve them best.Pharmaceutical professionals looking to deepen their understanding of the IBD market and enhance their competitive intelligence should register for our on-demand IBD webinar. It provides a detailed exploration of these topics and offers practical insights for strategic planning and decision-making.