Marketing strategy roadmap: introduction to building a marketing plan

Welcome to the marketing strategy roadmap. This module is the first of seven, and it's the introduction on how to build a marketing plan for companies in the life sciences.

Before we go on to the topic, I want to share a little bit about who I am. My name is Jean Francois; I am an independent consultant working in life sciences for over 15 years. I am an author, so I have written two books on the topic, one on market research for life sciences and one on marketing strategy for life sciences, and my specialty is mainly medical devices, nutraceuticals, biotech, pharma, healthcare, working for companies from large pharma, and up to small start-ups- the whole gamut of companies in this space.

In today's presentation, we will be going over four main topics, and these are the four main steps when you are building a marketing strategy. First, we will be going over how to complete your situation analysis to have a good grasp of where your company is. We will then discuss a little bit about how to develop your marketing strategy, but this is a whole module in itself, so we will be doing a very light overview. We will then talk about how to prepare your implementation and control tools to ensure that your strategy is going effectively, and the last step we will be talking about is how to set up metrics to evaluate the progress of your marketing strategy.

Before going into all of that, I think it's very important to know yourself, and what I mean by that is that you know your company and know what it is trying to attain in terms of objectives. You have to be able to answer the following questions, and some of them, you might look at them and say these are very basic questions. But, for example, the first question, when I say, what is your product? I've had a client in the past who couldn't even answer that question. His product was so virtual, so difficult to define that he hadn't gone through all the steps to really sit down and define what he was trying to sell. So, you have to ask that question. You have to also answer, do I have a product? Do I have a feature? Do I have enough to build a company? Sometimes you will have a wonderful innovation, but that innovation is not enough to sustain the company. You might be in a situation where you're going to build up that feature and just license it to a company that is then able to sell that product. You have to be able to understand what your organizational objectives are as well. Do you want to be a company for profit, a non-profit, an integrated company? These are all models and questions you have to be able to answer yourself. A very important question is also, who is your client? As we will see in life sciences, many times, your end-user is not your client, he is not the person purchasing your product or your service. But, it is rather, perhaps, the insurance company, the hospital, the clinic, the doctor who is your client and in that sense, you have to be able to adjust your marketing strategy to talk to your client, not necessarily to the end-user who will be using your product. The last thing is that it's very important to understand your competitive space and what it looks like. One of the VCs that I worked with in the past often told me that if a company comes up to them and says they have no competitors, it often means that they have no market and by that, it means that perhaps your product is too niche, or maybe your product just won't sell. It's really important to have a realistic assessment of what your competitive space looks like to be able to acknowledge there are other companies that might have something similar to what I'm doing, but here is my competitive advantage over them. This competitive space and the acknowledgment of it is very important to know when you're going forward and building that marketing strategy.