The pharmaceutical sector is an information-intensive, data-driven industry that needs accurate and up-to-date insights, whether it’s trying to understand the effects of medications or learn what the general public thinks of its brand.

That’s where media intelligence comes in. So, how does this strategy work, and more importantly, how does it benefit companies in the pharmaceutical industry?

What Does Media Intelligence Mean for the Pharma Industry?

Media intelligence is all about understanding what people are saying about your brand and your products. It uses media monitoring and analysis tools to trawl social networks, comment sections, and other sources of information. These are then filtered to highlight key information and create actionable insights.

What are the Benefits of Media Monitoring and Analysis for Pharmaceutical Companies?

There are many ways that a pharmaceutical company can benefit from media intelligence services, including:

Understanding the Needs of Patients and Buyers

What issues are patients facing? What type of products and services are clients looking for? These are questions that can be answered using an effective media monitoring campaign. 

Customers won’t always tell you directly what they think of your products and services. They aren’t always forthcoming when it comes to their needs and preferences, either. But these are the sorts of things they discuss with other users, the things that they praise, request, and complain about on third-party sites.

Media intelligence effectively lets brands become a fly on the wall. It’s like a no-holds-barred focus group, and it can unlock insights that otherwise wouldn’t be discovered. 

Learning the Patient Journey

In the pharmaceutical industry, it’s important to learn about the lifecycle of a drug and the journey of the patient taking it. This information can be used to improve the prognosis of current patients and to create better solutions, treatments, and products further down the line.

Media intelligence can inform current and future strategies by providing all of this information. What’s more, data is gleaned in real-time and is constantly updated, providing both quantitative and qualitative data points that can be very valuable in the right hands.

Brands are often disconnected from their customers, even though they rely on their health, happiness, and well-being to stay in profit. Media intelligence can establish a connection for the immediate benefit of the brand and the eventual benefit of the consumer.

Detect Risk Signals for Brand Reputation

Reputation management is an important consideration for any modern brand, and for it to work correctly, it needs to be proactive and not reactive.

In other words, you can’t wait for something to go wrong and then decide how to deal with it. Everything happens quickly online. A scandal breaks one minute, everyone knows about it the next, and by the end of the day, your reputation is ruined and people have moved on to the next scandal.

You need to deal with the issue before it snowballs into something bigger and more destructive. Media monitoring can help with this, as it will tell you what people are angry about, what they are complaining about, and why they are unhappy. Once you have that information, you can act on it, thus preventing the issue from escalating.

It’s not limited to massive scandals, either.

For instance, if customers are complaining about bad customer support, it could spiral into a bigger issue, one that leads to a lot of bad reviews, complaints, lost clients, and a reputation that’s hard to recover. By highlighting these issues early, you can speak with your staff, re-train them, and introduce better, faster, and more efficient customer support options.

Monitor Healthcare Trends

Every industry is a slave to the latest trend. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, if you’re selling something that people aren’t buying, your business can’t succeed. On the flip side, if you can make a product today that everyone will buy tomorrow, there’s no end to what you can achieve.
Media intelligence includes aspects of trend monitoring. You will discover what people want and how they want it to look. You’ll also learn about the competitors who have tried and failed, giving you insights into the direction you should take and letting you right their wrongs.

Identify Engagement Gaps

By scouring the digital landscape, media intelligence could help identify engagement gaps. What’s being said and what’s not being said? Where are people engaging, where are the gaps, and how can your brand fill these gaps?

Social media is like a giant marketplace stocked with millions of stalls and billions of customers. Every customer is voicing their demands and opinions; every brand is shouting at the top of their lungs, desperate to be heard. It creates a cacophonous rabble that makes it difficult to get your message across. But there are areas that are a little less chaotic, and media intelligence can help you find them and exploit them.

Check Marketing Campaigns

Analytics are used across many online marketing platforms to give you an idea of how effective marketing campaigns are. They will tell you how many people are clicking, liking, sharing, and otherwise engaging.

But that’s all quantitative data. They can’t provide the sort of insights that will tell you how happy consumers are with the campaign and what sort of impact it has on your brand’s reputation. Engagement is great, but not if it comes at the expense of your reputation.

With media intelligence, you can combine that quantitative data with real-time qualitative insights, telling you what people think as well as how often they click or buy.

How to Use Media Intelligence

Ready to explore media intelligence services and see how they can benefit your brand? 

A Data Pro offers an array of media intelligence services targeted at companies in many different sectors and can assist with reputational analytics, editorial services, and more.

We combine the latest advancements in AI and machine learning with an experienced human touch, giving you actionable insights into your brand, products, and industry. You’ll learn more about your customers, your competitors, and yourself.

Learn how we can help: