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2022 managed to both whizz by, and also be a year in which we achieved so much for our Pharmacy clients! Here’s our round-up of what we learned in 2022, as well as what we look forward to in 2023.

The team assembles at our HQ in Sheffield for a Training Day!

Pharmacy Mentor’s 2022 in numbers

  • 65 New Clients
  • 65 Websites built (coincidentally the same number, not every new client had a website built!)
  • 12 New Positions hired
  • 14 New TrustPilot reviews

Client Wins and Growth

There were some really great client wins in 2022. It’s especially great when re-strategising becomes necessary because clients have outgrown the service.

We understand knowing what’s working for other pharmacies is super useful, so here are a couple of those successes that we can showcase without this article getting too long.

1. Migrating 1,000’s of patients over to our new Prescription Ordering System

This pharmacy wanted a new website, but felt stuck with their old one because they had 1,000’s of patients registered to the integrated prescription re-ordering tool.

We established an affordable method of migrating these patients over to the new system, which we can now replicate for other pharmacies in the same situation of feeling chained to a provider because of their patient base.

an image showing the internal patient dashboard for an EPS systemThe Patient’s Dashboard where they can manage, order and pay for their prescriptions and any family’s prescriptions.

They now have a beautiful website, with a modern interface which keeps things simple for both patient and pharmacist. The migration was rolled out carefully, with patients being sent emails with simple instructions of how to log-in to the new system.

  • 1000’s of patients successfully using the system and ordering prescriptions
  • Live chat system – which is very busy, showing patient’s preference for communicating that way
  • Separate Private Prescription Ordering
  • Online bookings for services

2. 7,200+ Flu Bookings generated through organically ranking on Google + Optimised Booking Calendar

This year’s Flu Season was as busy as ever, but this UK Community Pharmacy chain increased their outreach and also streamlined their workflow with over 7,200 appointments between September and December.

This was achieved through a combination of Search Engine Optimisation work, making sure they appeared on Local Google Searches when patients searched for Flu vaccines, and optimising their website by adding an optimised Booking Calendar, making booking an appointment a breeze for patients.

With it being a larger organisation, we also trained their teams across the UK on using the Booking Calendar, making sure that patient experience was consistently a delight wherever they were based.

What was the ROI?

The Return on Investment with this project was MASSIVE – between 720% and 1,008% return on the £5k investment.

  • Installation and optimisation of our popular booking calendar
  • Online recorded training provided to the entire team
  • Entire cost of implementation = £5000 one off
  • Average gross profit of flu jab = around £5 to £7. Therefore, gross profit generated = £36,000 – £50,400.
  • ROI = 7x to 10x.
  • The online booking calendar is now being used for many services. No subscription fees paid or commission taken.

3. Generating 18,400+ Online Clinic Bookings throughout 2022

This Pharmacy has a thriving clinic, because they committed to marketing it properly.

Over the past three years, we’ve developed their marketing piece by piece, until now they’ve got a thriving model where any input (investment) drives significant output (returns).

With SEO in place, they drive a significant amount of organic page views to both their Travel Clinic and Pharmacy Websites. The image below shows how many people are visiting the Travel Clinic website on any given day and the source of the visitor.

screenshot of Google Analytics showing that the website gets more organic traffic than paid

They’ve also invested significantly into Google Ads, with our Advanced Google Ads management. Their lifetime spend with Google is around £117k over the course of around five years, but it’s been dramatically increased since we’ve set up the rest of their digital ecosystem. (£68k of this budget was spent in 2022).

That sounds like a lot.

But with a total of 18,429 bookings, each averaging around £60 spend with some spends in excess of £300, that £68k investment has yielded between £1,105,740 and £1,842,900 in revenue for 2022.

What did we do for them?

  • Built them an online booking calendar that can be used across two websites – their custom-built pharmacy and travel clinic websites – they didn’t have a booking system before. This was £500.
  • In 2022, they generated a total of 18,429 bookings, mostly made up of PCR Testing and Travel Vaccinations. This booking system also reduced walk-ins and phone calls which reduced disruption to the pharmacy workflow.
  • The total spend for 2022 was around £75k including improvements to their websites.
  • The typical purchase for Travel Clinic bookings is £60. However, some people pay over £300. That means generating anywhere between £1,105,740 and £1,842,900 in revenue for 2022.
  • The culmination of all of this is we’ve helped this pharmacy turn £68k into £1m+ in 2022.

Our Evolution

Naturally, in helping pharmacies grow, we’ve had to grow ourselves. In 2022, we added 12 people to our team.

Developing the Development Team

Many of our new hires were in the Web Development team, as that side of our agency has, quite simply, exploded in demand.

Hiring two Senior Developers changed the game from what was a struggle in coping with the demand to getting on top of things and delivering to our PM Standards.

David Watson, David Fisk, Ben, Shar and Joe all joined the Web Dev team in 2022, and their collective efforts is in no small part responsible for delivering excellence. With the plans that we have for evolving our online prescribing systems and building out The PM Members Dashboard, expanding our development team was a must.

A TrustPilot review from a Pharmacy Mentor Client which reads: We have worked with Pharmacy Mentor for a while now and the service has been excellent. Our journey began with building a website which has developed in to creating bespoke features such as a prescription ordering system. Our website booking system for pharmacy services has been an integral feature. It has allowed us to organise the pharmacists day and drive uptake. From this we have worked with the marketing team to advertise and reach out to a wider patient base to offer both private and NHS services. Communication has been great with all staff members on various platforms. Staff have always been friendly and more than happy to help. In my personal experience they have gone above and beyond to ensure we receive a solution to any issues or queries.

One of our favourite reviews from 2022.

Cultivating the Client Relations team

Something else we wanted to improve on was our communications with clients. We know that people want one point of contact, so we hired two additional Account Executives, Joan and Roa, who now act as client ambassadors between our team and clients. This means clients don’t need to go around the houses to find the right person to speak to, or chase things up – it’s all handled for them by someone they know.

Improving our Processes & Output

Improving through client feedback

This really is what shapes our business for the better. We are continuously trying to get feedback from our clients, understanding where we can improve, whether that’s delivery, our communications, or elsewhere.

We know we can always do better and therefore, it’s a critical part of our journey at PM, and helps us deliver better for our clients. We’ll never stop learning and innovating.

Being more regular

Not like that, although we did learn to speak Pharmacist’s language a lot more when discussing digital marketing as a business.

No, this regularity is about the consistency with which we held both Company Updates and Training Days.

Our CEO, Saam giving a presentation to the team at the latest Company Update.

Company Updates and Training

The monthly company updates are where the company’s progress and goals were reviewed. For a team that works more remotely than not, these meetings are so important for fostering a company-wide team spirit.

Our team is based all over the UK (and beyond), so getting everyone in a room together isn’t a regular occurrence.

However, we’ve committed to a training day every three months, when every UK based team-member meets up, and we go through both skills training within departments and Pharmacy training, where the pharmacists in our team lead sessions improving the knowledge and understanding of pharmacy life across our whole team.

We’ve learned that these events are critical to fostering a better culture in our team and thus, helps us deliver more effectively for our clients.

Diagnosing & Prescribing

This was an interesting change, as it was far more of a mindset change, with ripple effects into process changes.

We’ve never wanted to “sell” to pharmacies, we’ve always wanted to help them. It’s similar to healthcare. You don’t want to sell people medicine they don’t need. You want to help them fix their problems, and the sale follows naturally afterwards.

Thinking of ourselves like Pharmacists also led us treating the rest of our processes like Pharmacist-related activities.

  • Pharmacist Information Leaflets – We now include the guides we’ve written as attachments when sending proposal emails. Let’s say you’re beginning a Google Ads service, whilst you’re thinking over whether it’s the right time for you. We’ll send you a link to The Complete Guide to Advertising Your Pharmacy Online, for example.This gives prospective clients the chance to revise everything our Pharmacy Growth Specialists have discussed with them in their own time, with all the relevant information on demand.
  • Marketing Use Reviews – We’re still working on this process, but we’ve got something really exciting planned for later this year, making sure every PM client is getting the most out of their marketing, and that results and performance is transparent.

What we’ve got planned for 2023

2022 was a successful year, but we’re not resting on our proverbial laurels for the year ahead. There are some big things coming regarding what we can offer pharmacies, and the seeds of what we’re going to develop have come from client feedback, demand and understanding the direction pharmacy is heading.

Data. Data. And more Data.

We’ve been there and done it, as far as Pharmacy Marketing is concerned. But we haven’t quite got the T-shirt’s printed.

One of our main objectives for 2023 is how we can capture data for our pharmacies better that we are doing, and make it more “visible” what the work we do equates to for a pharmacy. We offer a plethora of critical digital treatments for pharmacies and we’re looking at how we can centralise everything for the pharmacy more effectively.

Without giving too much away, we’re heading to a place where pharmacies will understand the most important metrics from the work that we do more easily and transparently, and what this means in terms of growth for their pharmacy.

We’re going to help you understand, with better and relevant data, how imperative your website is for your pharmacy, and the marketing we do around it that generates business. We already know what the most important data and metrics are for a pharmacy when using our services. It’s why we exist – to grow these numbers for a pharmacy.

In short, we’re going to take a deep dive into how we’re going to extrapolate the following better for our clients:

  • No. of patient/EPS sign-ups
  • No. of clinic bookings and revenue generated
  • No. of POM, P-Line and GSL treatments sold online
  • Your ROI from general marketing spend
  • Communication frequency online
  • The trends in growth
  • What all the other analytical data means around these, for example your website traffic, keyword scores, your social engagement and more

We’re also going to help you find more growth opportunities than ever before – and there are so many out there.

Working with 100’s of pharmacies across the UK means that we can also begin to “benchmark” data . This will mean you can see what’s working for pharmacies in similar situations to you, giving you the ability and knowledge to make better business decisions and be confident investing in marketing.

Our Culture

Better delivery for our clients starts with our people. As well as investing in better data analytics for our clients, we’re going to be investing in more advanced training and development for our team.

Innovation is a strong value of ours and we’re going to be looking at ways to further improve how we communicate with each other, our system and process, and always recognising greatness within our teams .

With the regular employee satisfaction surveys we send to our people, just like our clients, we look to make sure they are heard and the feedback is acted upon. This helps us build on a culture where we feel great at work, and is all part of The PM Code that we’ll be more of in 2023.

Want to scale up your pharmacy business in 2023? Book in a consultation call with our Diagnose and Prescribe team.

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The more we’ve worked with pharmacies, the better we’ve been able to adapt in a way that better serves the Pharmacy Sector.

As our team has grown, so too has the way we work.

Pharmacists at the heart of our restructuring

Two of the major changes we’ve made directly impact the way we work with our clients. And our clients are actually our source of inspiration for one of the changes. We’ve adopted a clinical approach to our service, treating our marketing like medicine. We know it’s going to improve the service. But we hope it also helps pharmacists understand the way we work better, too.

Diagnose & Prescribe

First off, we’ve changed the name of our Sales Division to “Diagnose & Prescribe.”

“Sales” never really fit the way we worked anyway.

Why Diagnose & Prescribe fits our ethos

Communication is all about speaking the same language. Using healthcare terms for our processes helps our clients intuitively understand what we’re going on about. Naturally, pharmacists and pharmacy owners don’t always have knowledge of marketing, so the more we can bridge that divide, the better.

Sales has a tainted reputation, mainly because the practice is rife with bad habits and behaviour. Diagnose & Prescribe is really just how Sales should be. Assessing what the problem is, and recommending a solution. Patients can’t be prescribed medication without having a consultation. The idea of selling a service to someone who doesn’t have a need is equally unthinkable. So, until salespeople clean their act up, we’re not salespeople. We’re consultants.

Fran, one of our Pharmacy Growth Consultants, working hard on developing digital strategies for pharmacies

How does our Diagnose & Prescribe service work?

Our new Diagnose & Prescribe division operates in a way that will be familiar to pharmacists too, as there are several key components to our service with inspiration from inside the pharmacy.

New Marketing Service

A bit like a New Medicine Service, we want you to understand exactly what you’re signing up for. When we’re sending out proposals now, we include links to the in-depth articles we’ve written about the services. These are our Pharmacist Information Leaflets (PILs), meaning you always understand the general benefits and potential side-effects of any services we recommend.

JP, creating the articles we use for our Pharmacist Information Leaflets.

In addition to this, our MUR service conducted by the Diagnose & Prescribe team makes sure your service is going as expected. Our Pharmacy Growth Consultants check in every 3 months with you to make sure your service is running the way it should, and that the desired outcomes are on track to be met.

Quarterly MUR’s (Marketing Use Reviews)

Just like how medicine works differently for every patient, marketing works differently for different pharmacies. This is something we mention to pharmacists a lot. Your reputation, your infrastructure, your location, all these things affect how well your marketing works. Just like a person’s overall health would impact how effective a treatment is.

And so, again, ethically, we feel a responsibility to keep our eye on your pharmacy’s marketing health. Our Diagnose & Prescribe team is beginning to review all our clients’ marketing strategies on an ongoing basis. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, similar to medical tolerances, as your pharmacy grows, (from all the marketing you’ve been doing!) the dosage may need to increase. As an example, a starting budget of £150 for your Google ads may work well when you’re introducing a service, but the more capacity you get to deliver that service, the more you can advertise it.

This is a consultative process throughout. Our team listens to the symptoms of the problems you’re experiencing, and diagnoses accordingly.

Introduction of Dedicated Account Executives

Another essential part of our restructuring has been dedicating a team specifically to communicating with you. As our team has grown, we’ve developed specialist divisions to deliver our services. With more clients joining us, having the departments communicate directly with clients began impacting the delivery of the work. With so many clients, communicating with them became a full-time job.

Our Account Executives giving a presentation on their department

So, we created a full-time position. Two, in fact. Dedicated entirely to communicating with and being an ambassador for clients. This works so well because it means as a client, you only need to speak to one person, no matter what service you’re talking about. Need your website amended? Want a specific social media post? Need to talk to someone about your blog, or advert? All one point of contact.

The Account executives understand your history and your objectives and act as your ambassador to our team.

Our rapidly expanding Web Division

At the dawn of the pandemic, when it became apparent just how poor most pharmacies’ online presence was, there was an explosion of demand for effective pharmacy websites akin to the Big Bang for our Web Team. And, just like the Big Bang, we’ve been expanding ever since. Our Web Team and division is now the biggest in our Company. We’ve built over 200 websites of varying complexity, from the brochure-style pharmacy website to online prescribing clinics and custom-built pharmacy back end solutions. Consisting of front end developers, core PHP back end developers, UX designers and project managers, this innovative division is allowing pharmacies to build their entire operations online to streamline work and drive revenue in new ways. Watch this space.

The evolution of our Marketing Division

Our marketing team used to handle way too much, being full range marketers who would deal with client communications, advertising, organic social media, graphic design, blogging and copywriting. In the last couple of years we’ve been evolving to specialise each of these skills, which delivers better and more efficient end results for our clients. We now have a specific SEO, Paid Ads, Graphic Design and Social Media sub-team within this division, meaning that each arm of our marketing is stronger and more specialised than ever.

Co-ordinating our entire team

After trialling different solutions, we also discovered ClickUp, which has completely revolutionised the way that everyone in Pharmacy Mentor works. This has again massively ramped up efficiency, and reduced human error by introducing robust procedures and SOP’s.

Clients are already happier

The image shows a TrustPilot review. Pharmacy Mentor have been great to work with over the last 18 months, however the recent changes with Lewis as a dedicated account executive and JP working on Strategy has been a more seamless and efficient way of working.

We’ve already heard good things about our new approach, but we won’t rest on our laurels. We’ll continue evolving and adapting to client feedback. With where we are now compared to where we were two years ago, it makes the next two years an incredibly exciting prospect. We hope you can join us on the journey.

A message from our CEO

Saam Ali, a pharmacist by trade and our Founder, gives his two cents:

“It’s been an incredible journey for us so far. As with any business, there have been great highs and many lows. But, what makes us stronger by the day is continuously listening to our client’s feedback, our passion for digital innovation and a thirst for helping the most accessible healthcare points in our communities, pharmacies. We’re on a really important mission and we’re going to do what it takes to get us there. I’d like to thank all of our clients, partners, team and everyone else involved in this great story.”