Digital strategies for pharmaceutical brands

Web strategies for pharmaceutical brands

2016-06-16T09:37:01Z

A dozen practical tips for boosting ROI in by putting the web to work, properly

Digital Marketing Handbook: July 2009

Pharmaceutical brands were slow to web marketing. The cautious behaviour of the sector, combined with uncertainty of regulation, held pharmaceuticals back while marketers in finance, professional services, manufacturing and business services raced ahead online. In this tactical roadmap for pharmaceutical brands Danny Meadows-Klue highlights key steps every brand should evaluate for boosting the effectiveness of their communications planning. For the experienced digital marketer this will be a useful checklist, for those new to the web it could revolutionise the communications mix - and for finance directors it could be the key to saving 20% of the marketing budget without any drop in results.

Download: Web strategies for pharmaceutical brands

Continuing the conversation?

2016-03-16T10:44:57Z

How could we accelerate your pharmaceutical marketing strategy? Simply ask.

Email the author of this report directly:

Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com
DigitalStrategyConsulting.com/dannymeadows-klue

Digital Communications Audit

2015-05-16T11:34:12Z

How to measure what’s working, and what’s not in pharmaceutical marketing

Getting the best value from your digital channels demands understanding what works and why. In a fast changing environment, many brands have websites and email programmes that are years behind best practice, failing to engage their stakeholders, generate leads, build brand equity and create real value. A digital communications audit provides the fast track to understand how your digital investments are working and what’s needed to accelerate ROI. They give an expert view, independent of your teams, agencies and stakeholders. They deliver insights quickly and include key recommendations as well as prioritizing critical issues.

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Customer journey analysis in pharmaceutical marketing

2015-04-16T11:42:51Z

Digital marketing should be working at each step in the purchase journey to encourage conversion to sale. When we analyse customer purchase journey behaviour, we look for how doctors and health authorities really make their decisions. Your digital communications should be working for the primary purchaser, the influencer and other stakeholders. They should be working in partnership, integrated with all other forms of marketing.

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Contents: Online marketing strategies and tactics for phramaceutical brands

2014-12-16T10:52:01Z

Introduction and context
Innovation and change
Practical advice for improving ROI
Three ways pharma brands can use the web to build relationships with customers
Three ways pharma brands can harness web media in their online marketing strategy
Three ways pharma brands can reduce field sales force costs
Three ways pharma brands can use web analytics to listen to their customers online
Online pharmaceutical marketing: where to start in building your digital marketing strategy
Extra support for pharmaceutical brands from Digital Strategy’s team

Introduction and context

2014-11-16T10:38:08Z

The web and email went mainstream in the UK around ten years ago. A fifth of all advertising in the UK is now online, making the web outrank television. Google has become the starting point for most people researching big decisions, and the combination of bookmarks, blogs and social media have become new tools for navigating and exploring issues. Every offline media business now has a massive online copy of their current and archived content, and the centre of gravity in publishing and broadcasting is shifting to the web.

]]> In commerce, early adopter sectors such as insurance, ticketing, book shopping and IT hardware have shifted online almost entirely, while sectors such as real estate, new car sales and job hunting have seen the starting points in the customer journey shift while still retaining face to face contact at later stages. The journey of a customer towards purchase is now blended between traditional and digital channels.

Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are symptoms of a massive cultural shift that is restructuring economies, social connections and the way people make decisions both in and out of work.

The pharmaceutical industry is simply a microcosm of this wider sea change, and while most pharma brands may have been surprisingly lethargic in embracing these new channels, the same isn’t true for their customers. From India to Latin America, South Africa to Scandinavia, doctors and healthcare professionals have embraced the web and email as a key tool in their everyday working lives. In many markets from North America to Western Europe, patients too have found the web so essential they are as likely to google up their symptoms as they are to ask a pharmacist. The decision-making landscape for pharmaceutical purchases today is unrecognisable compared to 2000.

Brands wanting to connect with patients, prescribers and purchase influencers have no choice but to embrace the new channels, and the given the general backwardness of the pharma sector they may even gain significant competitive advantage by moving quickly – as well as helping them cut costs by reducing their investment in classic channels.
Among professionals the switch in behaviour hasn’t finished. Every few months people find themselves spending more time online than they did before, using more sites, talking more with their friends, clocking up more hours on social networks, and shifting more of their communications.

In a world where patients turn to Google rather than their pharmacist and doctors go to online forums rather than conferences, the conservatism of the pharma industry has come at a heavy price.

Innovation and change in pharmaceutical marketing

2014-10-16T09:38:08Z

When new innovations arrive in business, some sectors adopt them quickly, others more slowly – and when it comes to digital channels, pharmaceutical firms among the slowest of all. We’ve been tracking the growth of digital marketing since 1995 and the pharmaceutical industry is a curious anomaly.

]]> The combination of big management structures, global frameworks, understandable conservatism and unclear regulation has left pharma marketing five to seven years behind more innovative sectors in the use of the web. From clinicians to administrators, those involved in the purchase process switched to the web, but few pharma brands properly followed. Many rarely reach out beyond their own websites, and most websites remain simple Web 1.0 brochureware pages that play only a marginal role in the sales conversion process.

The result is a massive missed opportunity. Now that budgets have become tight, innovation will force its way through because the smart use of integrated digital marketing is preventing most firms from making the cost savings they need to. While every brand has a website, few had the vision and strategy to turn them into high traffic hubs their customers and influencers would regularly use. Most pharma brands only dipped their toes into web advertising, failing to realise the role online journals play in bringing together audiences and why they’re a sure-fire way to reach the right people. Most brands still fail to approach search engine marketing with a meaningful strategy so they don’t make it easy for potential customers to find them. Just as significant is the role of talking with existing customers or prospects and the potential that relationship marketing can play in transforming the attitudes and brand preference people have.
Email is one of the most under-rated tools in the pharma industry. It can achieve cut-through in a crowded media market, deliver precisely segmented and targeted messaging, and fit so neatly with the sales process that it fuels meeting appointments, conference attendance and re-ordering. It can also deliver thought leadership and insight right to the people who matter and do this at times and places to suit them, rather than the brand.

Now the financial climate is forcing firms to innovate, the pharmaceutical sector is in for the biggest shake up in a decade. Change is coming, and for the marketers bold enough to innovate, there’s a competitive wave they and their brands can ride for the next five years.

Practical advice for improving ROI in pharmaceutical marketing

2014-08-16T09:38:08Z

Having worked with thousands of marketers from across a dozen industry sectors, and in more than 30 countries, we’ve distilled down these key steps for improving ROI. For experienced digital marketers they will simply reconfirm best-practice is in place. For those newer to digital marketing they may unlock areas the business has not yet explored.

These dozen tips for best practice digital marketing for pharmaceutical brands are grouped into four areas firms can check and apply quickly

Three ways pharma brands can use the web to build relationships with customers
Three ways pharma brands can harness web media in their online marketing strategy
Three ways pharma brands can reduce field sales force costs
Three ways pharma brands can use web analytics to listen to their customers online

Three ways pharma brands can use the web to build relationships with customers

2013-12-16T10:39:56Z

Building relationships using online marketing

Relationship marketing is the most powerful tool in converting leads into customers

Pharmaceutical marketers should invest in their customer databases: start your communication strategy here
Take the message to market: use email in pharmaceutical marketing to reach customers in their inbox
Build eRM campaigns in pharmaceutical marketing to drive conversions

1 Pharmaceutical marketers should invest in their customer databases: start your communication strategy here

2013-10-16T09:39:56Z

Every brand needs to find ways to reach its target customers directly. Whether through renting lists from online media, or building the lists themselves, that database is key to starting successful relationship marketing.

Create segmentations that match your sales processes and build the foundations for a relationship marketing channel. Divide people between those who are customers and potential customers, those who make the decision and those who influence, those who are prescribers and those who are patients.

Look for ways to capture data at every opportunity. Find ways to acquire more new leads by using your web presence smartly – using both your own websites and your online advertising. Explore other classic channels and motivate your sales force to incorporate email into the data they capture for every new contact. See the database as the engine of your marketing and everything else starts to follow.

2 Take the message to market: use email in pharmaceutical marketing to reach customers in their inbox

2013-08-16T09:39:56Z

Email is the longest established form of internet marketing, predating the web by over a decade and providing the most cost effective touchpoint for customers, stakeholders and partners. When there is smart segmentation of the data behind an email campaign it’s easy to target the right message to reach the right person at the right time.

Today’s HTML format mailings provide smart gateways to brand websites, they can take the best and most relevant of what you have on the web and package it seamlessly into a digest right for the customer – and at a marginal cost of almost zero.

There’s an accountability in the mailing process because marketers can track open-rates and pass-on rates much of the time, identifying when and how deeply target prospective customers are engaged with the brand. And that research insight comes without the intrusion of telephone interviews or surveys, customer’s real attitude can be uncovered in days.

3 Build eRM campaigns in pharmaceutical marketing to drive conversions

2013-06-16T09:39:56Z

Simple one-size-fits-all email broadcasts are only the starting point. The power of email lies in the richness of its targeting. Segmenting the market into different types of prospects and communicating based on their specific interests and attitudes unlocks leaps in response rates. This is how to turn lead generation into conversion. In the right hands email becomes a self-learning tool for the marketing team, building more granular profile data that can be integrated back into sales management systems like Salesforce.com.

Three ways pharma brands can harness web media in their online marketing strategy

2012-10-16T10:01:55Z

Online media: Fish where the fish are

Using online media to reach the right audiences in the right mindset

Pharma brands should reach audiences online where they want to engage
Track the exposure web ads generate
Explore podcasts, video debates and white paper downloads

1 Pharma brands should reach audiences online where they want to engage

2012-09-16T10:02:34Z

In almost every country doctors and medical purchase decision makers are now heavy online users. It’s no surprise they over-index on web audience research because between PubMed, the journals, Trust websites and pharma sites, the internet has become indispensable. For GPs it’s even become an essential first line of defence as patients present themselves with self-diagnoses drawn from an alarming combination of Google and Wikipedia. Clinicians, medical administrators and policy advisors simply cannot practice without networked computers.

If the first rule of marketing is to understand your customer, then the first rule of media is to reach them in the places they come together. Within today’s regulatory framework of the web there are clear ways to harness web media and the online clinician is readily interested and keen to be engaged. Their use of the web may be at times and places that suit them rather than field sales, but in the hands of smart online media planners, the messages for a pharma brand will only be seen by those interested in the specific therapy. Lord Leverhulm’s adage of ‘half my advertising being wasted, if only I knew which half’ has been answered with surprising clarity.

2 Track the exposure web ads generate

2012-08-16T10:02:35Z

Smart marketers use the web to quantify the cost per impact and the results generated. In skilled hands the web can be highly accountable and the best of friends for marketers faced with budget cuts and having to choose between different tools. Working well as a branding medium as much as a direct response channel, websites and web advertising is well documented in building awareness and changing brand perceptions. But even the simplest banner can act as a trigger for the download of a data sheet, the results of clinical trials or the registration for an offline event.