Introduction
One of the principal contributors to the prosperity and development of various organizations, especially profit-oriented companies, is undoubtedly an effective marketing campaign. In this regard, marketers apply different promotional strategies to create customers’ awareness about products or services, build long-term relationships with them, and enhance their loyalty. This paper aims at developing a promotion strategy comprising the necessary media mix to promote Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines, investigating the resource requirements, providing specific metrics for the success evaluation of marketing proposals.
Promotion Strategy
The strategy will be based on promotional activities such as traditional advertising, public relations, social media, and e-commerce. In particular, traditional advertising is commonly regarded as the most powerful marketing instrument extensively used by companies to attract clients’ attention (Gitman et al., 2018). In the case of Pfizer, advertising efforts will primarily target informing the distinct advantages and complete safety of the product through television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Public relations is an indispensable component of promotional strategy in the case of pharmaceutical products, including vaccines. In this regard, Pfizer should provide the most recent and relevant information and evidence that describe and favor their products via the news media, product publicity, public affairs and events, and lobbying.
Another powerful tool that has emerged in the latest decades is social media. According to Statista, as of 2020, more than 3.6 billion individuals globally use social media platforms, primarily Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube (Tankovska, 2021). By 2025, this rate is expected to reach almost 4.5 billion. Through Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, Pfizer has excellent opportunities to create and maintain a connection with an enormous customer base by delivering actual and basic information about the benefits and safety of its vaccines. Furthermore, social media allows for building an upmarket brand image symbolizing quality and effectiveness. Finally, a mandatory promotional tool is e-commerce that involves developing the company’s interactive website that provides the newest data about the product and helps generate sales via online ordering.
The Resources Required for the Strategy
The first type of required resources is definitely money or financial resources needed for the advertising campaign. In this respect, expanses are divided into two types: cost of goods sold and operating expenses (Gitman et al., 2018). Pfizer’s promotional strategy mainly relates to operating expenses, that is, the indirect cost of the product. Operating expenses, in their turn, comprise selling expenses and general and administrative expenses. This resource category typically requires billions of dollars; for instance, in 2020, the company spent approximately $11.6 billion on selling, administrative, and informational expenses (Mikulic, 2021). The former is connected with marketing and distributing vaccines and entails the payment of salaries and commissions for salespeople and the cost of advertising, sales supplies, and delivery. The latter necessitates paying salaries and fees for specific managers, consultants, accountants, marketers. Other resources include expertise requiring a team staffed by genuine professionals of different occupational fields. For instance, in digital marketing, a team consists of content managers, content creators, SEO specialists, and content reviewers. The final resource is time that the company can take advantage of to reduce the project’s cost.
Evaluation Metrics
Evaluation Metrics can be developed based on customers’ interactions on the Internet and favorable discussions in media. The metric for brand awareness can include the number of press and social media mentions. In addition, metrics for user engagement consider email interactions, the website’s and blog’s views and shares, social shares, click-through rates, email open rates. The increasing customers’ activity and intense interest in Pfizer’s articles, publications, videos discussing the topics related to COVID-19 vaccines will indicate the success of the promotional campaign.
Conclusion
Pfizer aims at making the world population healthier through breakthrough products and discoveries and tight partnerships with governments, institutions, non-profit organizations, and other entities. COVID-19 vaccine developed by the company using an innovative method, namely, messenger RNA, and following high-quality standards can improve and protect countless lives. In this regard, the provided promotional strategy will align with the company’s mission and principles because it enables the fast propagation of necessary and actual information, causing heightened awareness and encouraging people to be vaccinated.
References
Gitman, L., & McDaniel, C., Shah., A., Reece, M., Koffel, L., Talsma, B., & Hyatt, J. (2018). Introduction to Business [eTextbook]. OpenStax.
Mikulic, M. (2021). Pfizer’s ad spending from 2008 to 2020. Statista. Web.
Tankovska, H. (2021). Number of global social network users 2017-2025. Statista. Web.