How to market your pharmacy’s services

Our sector has always faced an uphill battle raising awareness of the services it offers and the breadth of clinical expertise patients can access. But a profile boost in recent years, along with new service launches, creates opportunities to craft messages that will hit home with the public. 

Working in the pharmacy day after day, week after week, you and your team are immersed in your work and understand the breadth of activities you engage in and the services you offer to the public. 

Like most professionals, you are likely to have your own shorthand that others in the field will clock immediately.

But patients – even your most regular ones – will probably spend only a few hours per year in the pharmacy at most. 

Despite the sector’s raised profile since the pandemic and the arrival of new clinical initiatives, surveys have pointed to patchy public awareness of some services, even big-ticket launches like Pharmacy First. 

However, those few hours per week should still be enough to inform your community about what you can offer. One way to achieve this is to realise when to think past your professional shorthand and communicate to people in ways that make sense to them, and not just to your team. 

This is the essence of marketing.

There have, of course, been some seismic changes to the sector in the past few decades, like the rise of online pharmacy. Forthcoming developments like the introduction of ‘Model 1’ hub and spoke dispensing could pave the way for still more change. 

But for most community pharmacies, their basic operating format looks something like it did when the NHS was first created.

Customers will already know pharmacies dispense prescriptions and sell medicines, but many will have limited understanding of the value you add to the medicines supply function. As a result, they can be resistant to your questions and your involvement. 

Despite significant progress in recent years, we must acknowledge that some patients – not to mention other healthcare providers – can be surprised at the wide range of services and support that pharmacy teams provide. 

Some of this can be put down to a lack of consistent messaging. People wishing to promote their services often put out marketing messages that are inconsistent with ‘implicit’ messages conveyed by their business; as a result they find their marketing efforts are unsuccessful. 

Imagine taking a car to a garage on the basis of the excellent professional service you have seen advertised, only to find an untidy, disorganised, back street space run by a man in jeans and t-shirt.

Would you entrust your car to them? You might receive great service, but the marketing message is confused by the messages portrayed by the garage.

When the big supermarkets’ sales were being eroded by low-cost operators like Aldi and Lidl, they introduced value ranges to compete.

But they found that many customers didn’t buy these products even though they were the same price and quality. The value supermarkets had consistency in their messages and their brands, while the big supermarkets didn’t. 

It appears that people didn’t feel they were getting good value from an inexpensive product being sold in a more expensive-looking shop.