If you are in charge of marketing a pharmaceutical substance, then you must periodically conduct market research to learn more about your demographic, what they like about your product, what they do not like, and who you are not targeting that you could be targeting. The quality of your results will play a big role in determining your future sales, so it's important to do a good job with your market research. Here are four ways to improve your market research.

1. Collect data at multiple points

Maybe you are currently surveying customers when they pick up their medication at the pharmacy or when they visit their doctor. If you are only surveying customers at one checkpoint, you will have some customers who skip the surveys and some who have not used the product enough to have a full opinion of it when they take the survey. Start surveying customers at multiple points so that you get more responses and are better able to capture customers' true experience.

2. Check the feedback you're getting partway through

After you implement a certain survey system, let it run for a few days, and then carefully inspect the feedback you are getting to see if there are any adjustments you should make. For example, if you have 15 questions and most of the surveys you get back only have the first 10 answered, this could be a sign that your survey is too long. Shorten it up for more effective responses. 

3. Try to reach the diverse subsets of your customer base

Who uses your medication? Maybe it is marketed to people with high blood pressure, but 5% of users have actually been prescribed the medication off-label for migraines. Make sure you are reaching all types of customers. Talk to doctors to find out how they are actually prescribing your medication, so you can specifically target customers who are different from the norm.

4. Make sure your team works together

Assuming you have a team of people working on the market research for any one drug, make sure that team really does interact with one another regularly -- and not only regarding what is going well but also regarding the challenges associated with research, too. Schedule weekly meetings during which each person is encouraged to share what they are working on and what they have found. Some really great ideas for improvement can come out of these open meetings.

For more information, contact your local pharmaceutical market research lab.