MarTech for Life Sciences: Building a Scalable Stack for Small and Midsize Growth

In today’s fiercely competitive market, small and midsize life sciences companies face unique challenges during product launches. Success hinges on speed and timing since there’s only a brief window to capture market share before competitors step in. That’s why having the right MarTech stack is no longer an option, it’s become extremely essential.

While larger organizations have matured their MarTech ecosystems, smaller players often struggle with selecting the right tools and platforms that align with their commercial vision. Navigating this dynamic MarTech landscape requires a strategic blueprint tailored specifically to the life sciences industry.

Challenges with the Modern MarTech Ecosystem

Large life sciences companies have already invested heavily in comprehensive MarTech ecosystems, leveraging cutting-edge platforms across multiple layers, such as the Experience Enablement Layer, Activation Layer, and Intelligence Layer. These MarTech integrations enhance customer experience, streamline marketing activations, and enable data-driven insights for informed decision-making. As they continue to push the boundaries of MarTech, these companies maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly digital world.

Smaller companies can draw inspiration from these leaders while tailoring their own MarTech for life sciences approach. With the right foundational systems in place, they can ensure compliance, boost marketing efficiency, and lay the groundwork for scale.

Creating a Strong Spine: Boosting Growth with MarTech

Developing a strong MarTech spine helps unify fragmented tools and processes, enabling integrated, multichannel customer journeys. It allows teams to measure campaign performance, innovate faster, and scale smarter. For life sciences marketing teams, this is the first step in creating a sustainable and future-proof digital infrastructure.

The MarTech Spine also plays a significant role in delivering concrete attribution by assessing campaign effectiveness across multiple channels and platforms. It can also undeniably foster innovation in life sciences marketing. Once a strong MarTech Spine is established, companies can incorporate new channels, platforms, and orchestration tools into their marketing mix, refining their omnichannel strategies, and enhancing overall performance and return on investment.

Architecting a Robust MarTech Spine

To achieve an effective and scalable MarTech stack, companies should adopt a life sciences-specific MarTech framework or blueprint. This strategic approach will enable them to build a solid foundation for effective drug launches, drawing inspiration from larger counterparts who take a city planning approach for enabling advanced platforms. This approach informs investments in key MarTech layers, and ultimately growth and success in the competitive life sciences market.

To build a robust MarTech Spine, small and midsize pharmaceutical companies must focus on integrating key components that work in harmony to support their marketing efforts. This means aligning all platforms with business use cases across compliance, content, sales, and analytics. The result? A connected MarTech ecosystem that enables smarter decision-making and better ROI.

6 Key Components of a Life Sciences–Ready MarTech Spine

1. Consent and Preference Management: Bridge to Compliance

Platforms such as OneTrust and TrustArc offer robust solutions to manage consent and preferences for healthcare professionals and patients. They provide customizable consent forms, preference centers, and automated workflows to ensure regulatory compliance while respecting users’ choices. In addition, these platforms offer advanced analytics and reporting, enabling organizations to monitor and refine their communication strategies for improved engagement and satisfaction.

2. Content Management Systems (CMS): Powering Consistent Messaging

Veeva Vault, Sitecore, and Drupal provide comprehensive content management solutions tailored for the life sciences industry. These platforms support content creation, review, approval, and distribution across multiple channels, ensuring a consistent brand message and regulatory compliance. Moreover, they offer advanced features such as version control, content reuse, and collaboration tools to streamline the content management process and improve efficiency.

3. Sales Enablement Platforms: Connecting CRM and Commercial Goals

CRM (customer relationship management) systems such as Veeva CRM and Salesforce provide powerful sales enablement tools for the life sciences industry. They offer advanced features such as account and territory management, customer segmentation, sales forecasting, and real-time analytics. These platforms also support integration with other MarTech tools such as marketing automation and content management systems, to enable seamless collaboration between sales and marketing teams and drive better customer experience.

4. Marketing Automation Platforms: Fueling Personalized Campaigns

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketo offer feature-rich marketing automation solutions designed to help life sciences marketers to streamline their marketing efforts. Email marketing, lead scoring and nurturing, campaign management, multi-channel marketing, and advanced analytics are some of the key features. These platforms also integrate with CRM systems and other MarTech tools to provide a unified view of customer data and facilitate personalized marketing campaigns.

5. Data Storage and Management: Unifying Insights Across Channels

Data warehouses and Customer Data Platforms such as Tealium and Segment help life sciences companies to manage and analyze a large amount of data from various sources. These platforms provide data storage, aggregation, and transformation capabilities, enabling organizations to create a unified customer view and derive actionable insights. By leveraging these tools, companies can enhance their data-driven decision-making processes and improve personalization across marketing and sales initiatives.

6. Business Intelligence Platforms: Driving Data-Backed Decisions

Tailored for the life sciences industry, business intelligence platforms offer powerful data analysis, visualization, and reporting tools. Platforms such as QlikView, Tableau, and Microsoft Power BI integrate seamlessly with data storage and management systems, providing users with easy access to data. These tools allow users to create interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations, enabling stakeholders to quickly identify trends, patterns, and outliers. As a result, data-driven decisions and faster corrective actions are made possible by using these platforms.

Boosting Growth with MarTech: The Power of Integration

The MarTech Spine achieves its full potential and delivers flawless and seamless experiences to customers when all foundational platforms are interconnected seamlessly and aligned with the relevant business use cases. This creates a powerful and unified marketing ecosystem.

By developing a robust MarTech Spine that aligns with your commercial vision, you can deliver seamless omnichannel customer experiences and ensure that you stay ahead of the game.

At Indegene, our MarTech Advisory team consists of seasoned experts with a deep understanding of the intricate interplay between marketing and technology. With diverse backgrounds in both domain and technology, we are well-equipped to navigate the ever-evolving MarTech landscape, ensuring successful enablement for small and midsize life sciences companies. Talk to us to learn more.