Marketing is a must if you want to get the word out about your pharmacy, but creating a steady stream of content can feel daunting if you’re not a professional marketer.
It gets even harder if marketing duties are spread out across many staff members. To create a consistent brand image, your content has to sound like it’s coming from a single source.
Make marketing easier on yourself and your staff by creating a marketing toolkit. This resource puts every content creation tool in one place so it’s easy to make cohesive branded content for your pharmacy.
1. Brand basics
Write up a brief overview of your pharmacy to give employees a framework for creating marketing content. Include your mission and vision statements in this section, as all of your marketing materials should be able to relate back to those two documents.
You may not have a full marketing plan, but you should have a list of core messages, which can be included in this section. This could be info about what gives you your competitive edge, who your target customers are, and how your products and services help patients.
Ultimately, the information in this section will help you stay focused and create cohesive marketing materials.
2. Collateral files
Over the years, you may have acquired a lot of supplemental materials used to market your pharmacy. Material like logos, head shots, visual aids, brochures, white papers, and promotional images are sometimes known as “marketing collateral,” and when you create your toolkit, you should store all this collateral in one place.
By creating an easy-to-use directory, you ensure that all employees are working with the same information.
Plus, you save them time. Instead of having to take a new photo of the pharmacy for every social media post, employees can pull from a set of professional photographers.
Make sure you have a variety of sizes and file types for things like logos and photography so staff members can pick the file that best suits their needs.
3. Style guide
A style guide ensures that all of your official marketing materials have the same look and feel, helping you to create a unified brand image.
It will generally include information about how your marketing materials should look — like what color palette you should use, guidelines for font usage, and when and how you should use brand-specific imagery like logos.
But style guides aren’t limited to appearance. Most also include guidelines for how to write about your pharmacy. For example, you may decide to refer to people who visit your practice as “patients” rather than “customers,” or you may create rules for how to talk about specific products and services.
4. Content calendar
Coming up with a consistent flow of marketing content can be a challenge, but it gets easier if you establish a content calendar.
Every year, create a calendar that identifies the major events that could be marketing opportunities for your pharmacy. Include information like general holidays, like the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, but remember to include health-related events as well, like Heart Health Month or Pharmacy Technician Appreciation Week.
Then, when you are stumped about what sort of marketing content to create, you can look at your calendar and see what events are coming up and use that as inspiration.
5. Writing templates
Make it easy for staff members to create new marketing content by putting templates in your marketing toolkit. These will contain all the information writers need to create something new.
For a blog article, the template might include spots for a headline, sub-headline, body copy, and a call to action at the end.
For a social media post, a template could have prompts for a two-sentence post, an image, links, and hashtags. Create different social media templates for different platforms. A Twitter post will have different requirements than an Instagram post, which will have different requirements than a Facebook post.
Include tips for SEO best practices to help staff members create material that is easily searchable.
6. Pre-publication checklist
Before anyone presses “publish” on a piece of content, have them go through a checklist to ensure it’s free of errors.
Some items on the checklist could include:
- Run spell check
- Common grammatical errors to watch out for
- Fact check
- Include alt-text for images
- Check links
- Images are properly sized
- Previewing pages on desktop and mobile
A Member-Owned Company Serving Independent Pharmacies
PBA Health is dedicated to helping independent pharmacies reach their full potential on the buy-side of their business. Founded and owned by pharmacists, PBA Health serves independent pharmacies with group purchasing services, wholesaler contract negotiations, proprietary purchasing tools, and more.
An HDA member, PBA Health operates its own NABP-accredited secondary wholesaler with more than 6,000 SKUs, including brands, generics, narcotics CII-CV, cold-storage products, and over-the-counter (OTC) products — offering the lowest prices in the secondary market.
