Effective Pharmaceutical Event Planning Strategies To Help You Succeed in 2023
In the pharmaceutical industry, success depends on increasing brand awareness and presenting yourself as an industry leader. Pharmaceutical events are great ways to achieve these aims, while simultaneously launching products, educating the public, or winning over investors.
But before you start investing in your event, you need a clear understanding of the why’s and how’s of effective pharmaceutical event planning. So, in this Superevent article, we’re going to share some useful tips that will help you plan, execute, and manage your next pharmaceutical event.
Let’s dive right in!
What Is a Pharmaceutical Event?
The pharmaceutical industry focuses on discovering, developing, producing, and marketing drugs for medical conditions. Pharmaceutical events offer the chance to share industry information with pharma researchers, healthcare professionals, and community groups, as well as offer training and education opportunities.
The annual Future Pharma conference is an international event that’s held virtually and is generally regarded as a world-leading pharma commercialization event. It brings together the heads of pharmaceutical franchises, and marketing and sales executives from reputable pharma companies to engage and interact.
The goal of this event is to support commercial leadership and gain insights into how to improve pharmaceutical marketing strategies in a constantly shifting landscape.
As we can see, a pharmaceutical event can have many purposes, and the type of event you host will either have one or more purposes. Let’s take a closer look at some different types of pharmaceutical events you can host.
Different Types of Pharmaceutical Events
Product Launch Event
A product launch event is where a pharmaceutical company introduces any new products on the market. This event can help share accurate scientific research surrounding the product and why it’s an effective addition to the industry to combat an illness and improve patient outcomes.
Product launches offer an opportunity to reach a diverse audience that includes loyal customers, investors, industry experts, and journalists. By encouraging others to share news of your products before, during, and after the launch, you can gain exposure more quickly and reach your target audience more effectively.
Investigator Meetings
Investigator meetings provide healthcare and pharmaceutical industry professionals with opportunities to communicate and gain valuable scientific knowledge, which will help them develop new products.
The success of your clinical trials often depends on the quality of your investigator meetings, which can ultimately impact the amount of time it takes to bring your product to market.
The target audience at investigator meetings is often the professionals involved in a new clinical trial, such as the pharmaceutical company and the trial site team members.
Speaker Training Meetings
Pharmaceutical companies leverage speaker training meetings to help develop the communication and presentation skills of key opinion leaders (KOLs) who have specific expertise in various disease areas.
The goal of these events is to establish KOLs as key speakers in upcoming pharmaceutical product launches so that they can convey complex scientific information in a way that a range of audiences can understand.
Why Pharmaceutical Event Planning Software is Important
Pharmaceutical event planning—whether in-person, online, or both—goes best when you use a reliable, comprehensive event planning tool like Superevent.
Here are the major benefits:
Improve engagement
By using a single platform to centralize all aspects of your pharmaceutical event, you can dramatically increase attendee engagement.
With modern features like schedules & reminders, virtual programs, voting, and integrated social feeds, your attendees get to interact and engage with your events in new and exciting ways that leave a lasting impact.
Improve data collection
If you’re hosting a product launch, understanding the demographics of your attendees is key.
For example, it’s important to know what proportion of your attendees are healthcare experts, customers, or journalists. Having this information on hand will help you effectively follow up with them after the event.
Superevent helps streamline data collection for you with your own event app. Plus, it makes it much simpler for you to segment your attendee lists to send personalized emails before, during, and after your event.
Time- and cost-efficient
Event management software makes the process of planning pharmaceutical events less time-consuming and much less stress-inducing.
It allows you to plan and manage multiple event planning tasks with your team from a single platform. You can also cut your costs by using one platform, instead of multiple, to handle your event registration, ticketing, creation of event websites, and attendee engagement.
How to Conduct Effective Pharmaceutical Event Planning
Step 1: Define your event objectives
The appropriate first step for any professional event is to determine its objective. When it comes to pharmaceutical companies, your event can serve a range of purposes, including:
- A product launch
- An educational seminar or webinar for the community or for pharma professionals
- A team-building conference
- A networking event
A great example of a pharma networking event is the Multi-Channel Pharma Marketing Conference. In addition to sharing actionable insights on how to optimize marketing, the event encourages attendees to connect with top pharma leaders and grow through personalized advice.
Once you have the purpose of your event established, then you can start tailoring your event plan according to your specific company goals. Perhaps you need to secure sponsorship for a new clinical trial, discuss new regulations in the pharma industry, educate the community, or assert your company as a pharma industry leader.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Identifying a target audience (or target audiences) for your event is key.
Start by landing on a set of demographics, interests, and preferences that the people you’re trying to reach share. This exercise will help with all kinds of event planning tasks—from choosing speakers and venues to finding sponsors and marketing the event.
Your audience can consist of:
- Customers
- The public
- Health professionals and KOLs
- Pharmaceutical service providers and suppliers
- Pharmaceutical field teams
- Pharmaceutical marketing teams
- Employees
Step 3: Iron out your pharmacy’s event budget
It’s important to identify a suitable budget that you’re going to allocate to your event.
Understanding your budget and costs will help you identify which areas you need to reduce spending on to provide enough leeway for other areas.
For example, if you’re on a tight budget, going virtual may be the best choice since you’re cutting out physical venues, catering, and decorations. Instead, you can focus your spending on a reliable virtual conference platform.
Step 4: Choose the right venue
Choosing a venue doesn’t mean you need to restrict your event to a physical location.
You can opt for an in-person event, a virtual event, or a hybrid event depending on your needs and goals. If you do opt for a physical location, it’s important to remember that it needs to be convenient, accessible, and within your budget.
Ultimately, your venue should depend on the nature of your event and the type of audience you desire to attend.
An educational forum or product launch event will most likely cater to a more diverse audience—and that means a hybrid format will probably be best. Running a hybrid event means you can have local health professionals and KOLs physically present, and potential customers and patients attending virtually.
Luckily, there is a range of effective hybrid event platforms you can choose from to host such events, including Superevent which makes it possible to create any type of event.
Step 5: Market your event
The promotion and marketing of your pharmaceutical event are key to ensuring its success.
You should develop a comprehensive marketing plan that includes content marketing (e.g., infographics, videos, white papers), social media and email marketing, and traditional marketing (e.g., flyers or radio announcements) to gain the maximum amount of exposure.
The goal here is to attract your desired attendees, generate interest, and create buzz around your event. Even once you have a comprehensive marketing plan, you should keep reviewing and updating it regularly to maintain relevance and effectiveness.
Step 6: Build in time for networking
Networking is huge in the scientific industry. That means facilitating networking opportunities is an amazing way to secure audiences for future pharmaceutical events and conferences.
Here are some easy ways to facilitate networking at your events:
- Schedule specific time slots during your event specifically for networking
- Provide dedicated spaces for networking–and breakout rooms if your event is online
- Conduct interactive sessions during the event where audiences can ask moderators questions, have discussions, and participate in productive games
Step: 7: Plan for active audience engagement
The best events involve audience members in different ways throughout to keep them interested, entertained, and engaged.
Superevent makes it easy to engage your audience with your own mobile event app, so your attendees can participate in Q&As, discussions, surveys, and more. And the best part? Your app will support any kind of event you host, whether it’s in-person, virtual, or hybrid.
Elevate Your Pharmaceutical Event Planning With Superevent
Pharmaceutical event planning can be pretty challenging—but with the right tools and strategies you can effectively promote your products and services, generate sales, and build valuable industry relationships.
Superevent helps pharmaceutical event organizers create fully customizable web and mobile apps that enhance the experience for attendees and simplify the process for organizers. You can monitor your planning team, manage attendees, and host interactive live streams and discussions—all from a centralized dashboard.
Want to learn more? Create an event for free today or book a demo with no upfront commitment!