The sales of your pharmacy is not dependent on your location alone. Even pharmacy stores situated in awkward locations can increase their sales effectively if they use the right marketing techniques. In this age of intense competition, if you don’t adopt good marketing strategies for your pharmacy store, your business growth will stay more or less stagnant. So here we present you with some effective pharmacy marketing ideas that can help accelerate your growth. These ideas are:
1) Have a Website With Quality Features
Most of the online marketing strategies for your pharmacy will essentially require a website. So get a well-designed website with good features like easy navigation, fast loading time of site, mobile device compatibility, testimonials, and easy-to-find contact details. To increase the conversions of site visitors into your customers, have a live chat widget installed with a chat representative available to quickly attend to questions put up by your site visitors.
2) Send Out Press Releases for Your Pharmacy
Even in this day and age, a big majority of businesses continue to remain ill-informed on the potential advantages that may be gained through the distribution of a press release. A widespread misunderstanding that many people have is that the only use of press releases is to convey the latest news and announcements. However, this is a flawed perception. When a business uses a premium press release distribution service to send out its press release, the press release content becomes live across hundreds of sites including some ultra high-quality news websites like Associated Press, Market Watch, Yahoo News, etc. Getting more visitors, backlinks, and growth in brand value are the powerful advantages of a press release.
3) Rank Well Within the Google Local Listings
Google chooses three businesses to display in its local pack on the first page of search engine results when a user types a local-level keyword, for example, “best pharmacy in [city name]”. As there are many businesses in every sector including pharmacy stores, the competition to display business details in this local pack is steep. To be eligible for inclusion, you must first establish a “Google My Business” profile for your pharmacy business. Due to the complexity of factors involved in determining placement in Google’s local pack like reviews, authority, citations, relevance, and so on, it is recommended that you get an online marketing agency to handle the process on your behalf.
4) Make Your Site Show Up in the Top 10 Results
If your pharmacy website doesn’t appear within the top 10 results of Google when people type keywords like “pharmacy store in [city]”, then such potential customers will choose any other competing business of yours from the first-page search results. The method of achieving top page rankings is referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but there are a great number of factors that need to be managed for ensuring a good SEO of your website. It is much simpler to find information about search engine optimization practices online because of the abundance of free information on this topic. However, increasing the effectiveness of SEO can also be accomplished by contracting the task out to any firm that specializes in SEO.
5) Explore Quality Paid Advertising Options
Once Google ranks your pharmacy website in the top 10 results, your business will start getting a consistent stream of new customers. However, getting a good ranking in Google takes time. An alternate way to speed up customer acquisition for your business is by paid advertising. Google Ads and Facebook ads are two reputed platforms where you can get your ads running for getting quality leads. There is a significant variation in running ads on both these platforms. Having a basic knowledge of ad platforms and ad management is a prerequisite for successful paid advertising. Use the services of an expert digital marketing agency to get your business ads professionally managed.
6) Make More Customers with Social Media Presence
At a time when the number of social media accounts is in a few billion, it will be detrimental to your business growth if it doesn’t have an active presence there. Although having a business profile on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is important, it is not enough to generate results. Some preliminary groundwork will be required to build these profiles to a point where they have a following of at least a few thousand people. This growth can be achieved by consistently creating and sharing good content as well as by interacting with people over these platforms. If you’d want assistance with this process, you can get expert assistance from any social media marketing firm.
7) Get Noticed by More People With Local Influencers
Influencer marketing can make a good impact on the growth of your pharmacy business. The followers of these influencers (i.e. people with a high following on social media) tend to be engaged and are more likely to trust recommendations given by them. Many social media influencers make a living out of this business and you can easily find influencers who will happily promote your pharmacy business messages for a predecided price. The only requirement to benefit the most from this marketing strategy is that the selected influencers should have a decent following and must have a big enough proportion of population from your region.
8) Let More People Get Introduced to Your Store through Referral Marketing
There are many studies that confirm that when a product/service is referred by a friend or any close relative, people are more likely to make a purchase. This makes referral marketing a must-have strategy for your pharmacy shop. Additionally, it is also very simple to adopt and implement. Offering incentives/rewards to your current customers for referring their friends and family is the most fundamental way to get started with word-of-mouth advertising. This methodology of marketing is quite effective and you will soon discover its sales multiplication power in no time! Just trust the process and be consistent.
9) Have Custom Printed Products Ready for Distribution
A good marketing strategy is one that helps to create a lasting memory in the minds of customers. This can be accomplished by freely dispensing low-cost items to your customers, such as pen stands, balloons, pencils, pocket diaries, and other items, with the name of your pharmacy store printed on them. Moreover, whether directly or indirectly, every person who comes into contact with these custom-printed things will also become aware of your business identity which is an added advantage of low-cost merchandise marketing.
10) Use Email Marketing Potential
A well-targeted email list is a long-term source of income for your business and this is why you will find that many big businesses do tend to collect the email addresses of their website visitors. Given the fact that the price you will pay for maintaining an email list will be too small as compared to the returns provided by this list, it is therefore correct to say that ignoring email marketing is like leaving money on the table. To speed up the process of collecting emails, you must provide some good rewards or discounts in exchange for which visitors can be compelled to leave their email addresses on your website.
11) List Your Business in Selected Directories
Many times you might have come across high-ranking directories like Yelp and HomeAdvisor on Google. A very simple way to discover such high-ranking directories in your niche is by typing your niche-related keywords on Google and paying attention to the listings displayed on the first page results. As soon as you discover directories in search results, you must note them down followed by creating the listing of pharmacy store on these portals in order to get both backlinks and customers for your business.
12) Use Common Offline Promotion Methods
Though it is nothing wrong to focus heavily on digital marketing, however, you can expand your reach by using offline marketing methods. As most people have a short attention span online, offline marketing can be more productive in getting engagement from people along with helping your business to complement your online marketing plans. You can use the most popular offline marketing forms like billboards, distributing flyers and business cards, getting ads in newspapers, etc to promote your pharmacy business offline.
13) Start Taking Orders Online
More people nowadays seek convenience and a great step in this direction is by offering the luxury of making orders online by uploading prescriptions. You can convey this option to all the customers that are coming to your pharmacy store so that they can now avail medicines directly at their homes. There are many independent delivery options now available and you can partner with them to deliver medicines to your customers.
14) Arrange Specialised “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Sessions By Doctors
You can meet up with any specialized doctor and can give him/her some incentives for AMA sessions where people can ask doubts related to specific diseases to the doctor. Since your pharmacy will be hosting such AMA (ask me anything) sessions, it can not only give you new clients but can also help to get your pharmacy recognized even more in your region.
15) Partner with Niche Related Professionals
Be it, healthcare professionals, medical practitioners, small clinics, etc., reach out to them and offer a partnership proposal where they would write prescriptions on the prescription letter carrying your pharmacy name along with specifically referring your pharmacy to avail the medicines (if possible). You can also offer some commission to those health professionals who would be sending prescriptions to you.
16) Hold Free Check Up Camp to Promote Your Business
Organize health check-up camps for various common problems like blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. Once people come for this type of health checkup, you can additionally get a prescription written for them by a specialized doctor followed by serving the medicines from your pharmacy. You can announce free health check-up camps in local newspapers and on your digital assets like websites and social media accounts.
17) Build a Loyalty Program for Recurring Sales
Come out with discount vouchers and hand them to all your customers who buy medicines above a certain threshold. By giving such discount vouchers, you will give people a good reason to come to your pharmacy again for redeeming the voucher benefits. The more such vouchers that your business distributes to people, the more you will be successful in building customer loyalty.
18) Place Advertising in Targeted Locations
The advertisements containing the name of your pharmacy should be affixed on all such places where more people come for health-related issues. These places can be nursing homes, private clinics, community health centers, etc. As most people visiting such places will be people who have some or other health-related issues, it will help get your pharmacy shop more recognized.
19) Work on Your Counter Display
As the owner of a pharmacy, you must be having information on the most sold non-prescription items. You can make a list of such high-selling items followed by placing them in the most visible part of your pharmacy store so that such products can get even more sales and this will in turn increase the revenue of your pharmacy store.
20) Use Automated System for Getting More Sales with Reminders
Make a record of people taking those drugs that are required daily like drugs for diabetes, hypertension, etc. By maintaining such records on proper applications, you can automatically send them SMS reminders that its time to buy their regular medicine followed by the offer to get such medicines from your shop. If your pharmacy becomes successful in adding just a few patient records per day, at the end of the month, it will have a record of hundreds of people to whom your pharmacy can send reminders to refill their medicines from your pharmacy store.
21) Involve Your Business in Charities and Events
One of the offline marketing methods to promote your pharmacy store and to be noticed by more people is by giving donations to charities and by participating in local events. As a general rule, you must make the presence of your pharmacy business in all such locations where a good local crowd is expected.
22) Work on the Design and Look of Your Store
Images, colors, and designs make a very subtle subconscious impact on our minds, which in turn affects our choices for buying products and services. For this reason, you must look at your pharmacy store from the customers’ point of view and must try to work on the finer details of your pharmacy store to make it more appealing and aesthetically pleasing.
23) Arrange Free Checkups in Schools and Colleges With Coupon Combo
Your pharmacy can sponsor free health checkups in schools and colleges for common ailments followed by giving the students, some sort of coupons/discount offers that can be availed at your pharmacy store when they buy medicines from you. The students, on availing free check-ups of their body, will definitely tell their parents about the referral code/coupons received by you and this will indirectly help to get more sales to your pharmacy store
24) Add and Promote More Generic Medicines for More Revenue
You can buy the generic version of common medicines and can make your customers aware of the fact that they can get high discounts for buying such medicines. As the profit margins in generic medicines are very high, convincing customers to buy more generic medicines can be a win-win situation for both sides, the clients and the pharmacist. You must also inform your clients as to how they can save more money on medicines by switching to generic medicines which are equivalent in their quality to ethical medicines.
25) Let Positive Reviews Help You More
The reputation of your pharmacy can be easily judged by looking at online reviews left by people. Since reviews shape buying behavior of people, therefore maintain good reviews of your pharmacy business by offering good service and even by asking your customers to leave feedback online.
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