Dose of Digital

Subscription Options
Subscribe via RSS

Or, subscribe via email:

What is RSS?
Archives
- 2009
- 2008
  - December 2008
  - November 2008
Most Popular Posts
- How to Avoid FDA Regulations Using Mobile Marketing | 1656 view(s)
- Pharma's Getting the Message | 1596 view(s)
- The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting | 1437 view(s)
- Do You Really Need Your Digital Agency? | 1286 view(s)
- FDA Uses Social Media, But You Can't | 1276 view(s)
Check Out Our Company

Bridge Worldwide is part of WPP - Leaders in Advertising, Branding, Marketing.
Twitter
Blogroll
Recognition

The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma

I’ve found that I’m answering more and more questions about relationship marketing in pharma, so I wanted to provide my perspective. Most pharma companies have some ongoing relationship marketing program typically in the form of a newsletter or other regular email or direct mail-based program. But there’s a lot more to relationship marketing than the occasional email especially when it comes to digital.

Relationship marketing is exactly what is sounds like. It’s marketing that involves an ongoing relationship between customer and company. “Relationship” is of course the key word, but often times, it’s really just a one-way communication:company to consumer. That’s going to have to change. A few trends in pharma and healthcare are going to make this happen whether we like it or not. Understanding these trends is going to be critical if your relationship marketing program is going to bring value to customers or be piled in with the rest of the spam out there.

Here are six emerging trends that every pharma and healthcare company needs to consider not just in regards to their relationship marketing programs, but in all their marketing efforts.

Healthcare Information 24/7 — The information that consumers will have access to and will use to make decisions will continue to increase in volume and availability.
Consumers As “Physicians” — With the staggering increase in bloggers, user-generated media (such as YouTube), and social networking, end users are creating and controlling more and more of the content available online.
Internet = Trusted Source — All other forms of media already fall behind the Internet as a source for healthcare information for most Americans.
It’s Their Data, Not Yours — In the future, consumers will have more control of their healthcare records and history.
Healthy Social Networking — Because of the sheer number of people utilizing the Internet, it is possible to find people who share the same experiences as you.
Constant Contact, Constant Care — Some technologies to monitor patients’ health, now in early development, which still are largely cumbersome and not embraced by the public, will become more widespread.

If you want more information on each of these trends, then you can download my full white paper on this topic: The Future of Healthcare Relationship Marketing (185 downloads)

Stay tuned for a presentation on this topic coming soon.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in The Basics on June 30, 2009 | 16 Comments and Tweets »

What Pharma Can Learn from Pringles

Yes, Pringles. The potato chip. Actually, technically speaking, they are potato crisps. Crisps or chips, I realized that there’s something that Pringles can teach pharma and healthcare. First, some backstory and a disclosure.

Last week was the Cannes Advertising Festival. It’s the Oscars of the ad world for those who aren’t familiar. The awards are given out in many different categories, but since this is a blog focused on e-marketing, I’m going to just talk about the “Cyber” category, which is all about digital. The Cyber awards represent the best of the best in digital marketing in every industry. Why do I suddenly care so much about the Cannes awards and Pringles? Well, our agency, Bridge Worldwide, happens to be the digital agency of record for Pringles. And, we created a banner ad (yes, banner ad) that won a Gold Cyber Lion award.

The more I looked at the ad, the more I thought that it just might relate to pharma. How can a Pringles banner ad tell us anything about digital marketing in pharma and healthcare? Great question. First, before we move on, check out the ad. Follow this link to check out “Can Hands.” The banner’s in the lower right…just keep clicking as long as you’d like. People who have commented on the ad call it “the only banner you’ll love to click.” You need to check it out for the rest of the post to make sense, so we’ll wait.

Now, if that didn’t at least amuse you, I’m not sure what else to tell you. I’m getting to the tie-in with pharma, but just so you know, I’m not going for some cheap publicity for this ad by writing about it here. It doesn’t need my help. Much to our surprise, this ad was (and still is) the talk of the Internet over the weekend. It’s showed up on the front pages of Reddit, Fark, and Buzzfeed. Of course, it’s been all over Twitter as well with well over 2000 tweets and more than 14,000 clicks on the shortened bit.ly URL alone. The link to the ad demo was the 4th most tweeted on all of Twitter on Saturday according to Twitturly. Without giving away too much confidential information, this ad has been viewed more than 125,000 times in the past two days. People going out of their way to see an ad.

So why am I telling you this? Simple, does anyone ever go out of their way to see your ad?

Let’s get a few things out in the open. Consumer packaged goods isn’t pharma. I know it. Remember, I used to be a pharma marketer, so I haven’t forgotten the rules. Pringles has a whole different set of rules compared to pharma. I know it. I also know that potato crisps or chips or whatever isn’t the same as treating a disease. Got it. But, let’s put that all aside for just a minute. Let’s look at what’s possible. For me, this is the only way we find things that are truly different, unique, and stand out with our customers.

Imagine that Pringles was a pharma product for a minute. There’s no fair balance here, but it wouldn’t require it. The brand name is mentioned (if you click a few times), but nowhere does it include the “indication:” potato crisps. I guess this makes this banner a reminder ad then.

We pharma people love and hate reminder ads. We love them because we can promote the brand without the clutter of fair balance, but we hate them because we can’t get in any key messages. Regardless, pharma spends a lot of money on these. My point? If Pringles were pharma, this ad would be regulatory compliant. Just saying.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not recommending that every pharma company make an ad like this. The whole talk about regulations is all academic. No pharma ad could probably get away with this tone. I’m actually not recommending that anyone make an ad like this. It’s been done. No one can really create a “never-ending banner” like this one anymore. But what I am saying is that there’s something for pharma to learn here.

This is what pharma banner ads look like today:

The Premarin Banner (with the cloud) on the bottom at least has some animation, albeit odd and “icky” animation.

I’ll just leave it at that rather than ask a lot of questions about what purple rain has to do with vaginal dryness.

Now, don’t feel bad if you think you banner ad stinks. Most banner ads are terrible regardless of the industry. Pharma isn’t a special exception. But, as the Pringles banner shows, there’s a way to make any advertising interesting and engaging. It just requires looking at things differently. So instead of relying completely on agencies that only have pharma experience (and pair it up with ours that might be about the same), maybe it’s time to look beyond pharma to see how everyone else is doing it. We know that we can’t do the exact same things other industries might try because of regulatory issues, but I also know that doing the same things we’ve always done in pharma isn’t good enough anymore either. This might be one of the times where the answer lies outside of our industry.

To be sure, I’m not recommending that you run out and make banner ads. I have no idea if you need banner ads or if they are part of your strategy. I want you to look bigger picture and realize that there are whole groups of really smart people that we don’t listen to because they aren’t in the pharma club or don’t know the handshake. Last time I checked, the pharma industry wasn’t doing that well at least compared to historical results. Maybe there’s no time like the present to start trying a new approach. Your equivalent Pringles banner ad may be a really innovative disease management tool or amazing caregive support website. Just keep going until you make whatever it is you are doing something that you can imagine people sharing on Twitter. Do you think we thought this would happen for a banner ad for potato crisps? Yes and no.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since starting to work at my current company, it’s this: it takes very little extra effort to make something great. It takes a lot of effort something to get started and slightly more to make something good. Once you get to “good” though, there’s really not more you need to do in order to get to great. You do need the right people with the right kinds of thinking and the right amount of time and resources, but those are the ingredients. Of course, I’m making it sound really easy and leaving out one important piece: you need some brilliant creative people. It only takes one idea, but you need people who are constantly coming up with them to find the one. Fortunately, we happen to have these folks. (Read the blog “Can Hands” creator, Jason Bender, co-writes).

So, who’s ready to do things differently? If you are, but don’t see how it’s possible, here’s my offer: You pay for the normal costs to get to “good” and I’ll pay for the additional thinking required to make it great. Don’t think it’s possible to make something share-worthy in pharma? Then challenge us. I’m glad to make it public challenge if you’d like (and put the reputation of this blog on the line) just to be able to show that it’s possible. It’s time for something different in pharma and healthcare. The only question is who goes first. If you’re ready, head over to the contact page and let’s get started. One caveat…this has to start with a “big pharma” company because if it can be done there, then it can be done anywhere. So, if you’re a top 20 pharma company (and I know you’re here), you’re eligible for this offer.

We’re ready for your challenge. All this talk about Pringles is making me crave a Super Stack.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Next Steps, What If on June 29, 2009 | 28 Comments and Tweets »

Twitter App Just for Pharma Regulations: Twegulate

While meeting up with some industry friends here at CBI’s 2nd Annual Bio/Pharmaceutical Emerging Media Optimization for Consumer-Focused Marketing conference, we talked a lot about Twitter. There’s also been a lot of debate about a recent addition the the Twitter-verse courtesy of Novo Nordisk. They recently launched Race with Insulin and promptly did something no other pharma company has ever done. They sent out a tweet with a pharma brand name. Here’s what their page looks like:

You’ll notice about the smallest fair balance fine print I’ve ever seen, but they’ve got it there. Their branded tweet was this:

After this went out, the industry bloggers promptly went into action. It was started by Ross Fetterolf, VP Digital Strategy at Ignite Health, who called this tweet “A Historic Day.” He closed his post with this: “I wonder if Charlie’s 125 followers have their Levemir flexpen’s primed and ready to inject along with Charlie when it’s time for his next dose. We’ll have to wait and see.” On the other hand, John Mack published a blog post about this tweet called: “Novo Nordisk’s Branded (Levemir) Tweet is Sleazy Twitter Spam!” He called the tweet nothing more than a “reminder ad.” John further added: ”A reminder ad of any sort — whether in print, TV, Web, or Twitter — is, IMHO, a form of spam. I consider, therefore, Kimball’s unabashed product endorsement Tweet a particularly sleazy example of Twitter spam. We certainly do NOT want to see more Tweets like this and I disagree with Ross; I sincerely hope that this Tweet is NOT used as a “model” for other drug companies who want to adopt Twitter as a marketing vehicle.”

I’m with John here. But there’s been quite a lot of debate back and forth on this. Supporters of the tweet say that those with diabetes do talk about the brands they use all the time in everyday language, so this is normal for them. Others, like me, might agree with that, but don’t agree that any person would normally mention their drug’s generic name and where to find prescribing information. Can’t quite picture that coming up in conversation.

I’m fine with Novo Nordisk trying this. In fact, I applaud them for doing it. I also realize the realities of what can be tweeted and what can’t and how fair balance must be used. Debate continues on how pharma can do branded tweets that are even better. However, has anyone stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a feasible channel for pharma brand marketing? Maybe disease state information, but not branded information. John Mack also thought of this idea: “Charlie Kimball’s [the driver who Novo Nordisk sponsors] Tweets would be much more interesting if he stopped posting about cleaning his race suit, taking Levemir, etc, and told us a little bit about how he FEELs being a race car driver with diabetes, how he deals with the unique problems his medical condition gives him, etc. THAT would truly be inspirational!”

That I can get behind. The reality is that if you do have to include fair balance in every tweet, you can’t have authentic conversations, which is what Twitter is all about. Stop trying to get a brand message into everything, pharma friends. That’s not the answer to everything.

However, knowing that my comments or John’s are unlikely to dissuade the most determined pharma brand manager, those of us at the conference tried to think of a tool that pharma could use to Tweet without worrying about running into regulatory issues. Steve Woodruff came up with the big idea. Twegulate. Well, I couldn’t help but run with the idea, so I rushed back to the hotel and created it. Here it is for the first time anywhere…Twegulate:

What’s great about Twegulate is that Important Safety Information (ISI) is automatically included in every tweet. You can’t adjust it, you can’t delete it. Because the ISI is so long, it doesn’t leave many characters for the rest of the tweet, but you do get a full eight characters. You can use this to add updates such as: “Not much” “Hello” “Good Bye”. Not hugely engaging, but it’s a start.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect Twegulate to be launched anytime soon. We really don’t need it. As it stands now, pharma companies are doing it on their own with existing tools. Our automated tool probably doesn’t have a market. Oh well, so much for retiring this week.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Next Steps, Twitter on June 26, 2009 | 33 Comments and Tweets »

Live From CBI Emerging Media Pharma Conference

Today and tomorrow, I’ll be at CBI’s 2nd Annual Bio/Pharmaceutical Emerging Media Optimization for Consumer-Focused Marketing conference. I’m speaking today (I’ll make the presentation available later).

You can follow all the goings-on at right here. Through the magic of Twitter, you’ll get live updates from me and many industry leaders who are also here.

If you have questions, send them in. Chances are someone here can answer it.

Also, you can view and download my presentation by following this link: “If You Build It, They Will Come…Or Will They?”

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=30270300be" >CBI Pharma</a>

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in The Basics, Twitter on June 25, 2009 | 5 Comments and Tweets »

Is Pharma Ready for the New iPhone (or any iPhone)?

In case you missed it (and welcome back to Earth if you did), Apple is releasing yet another version of the iPhone: the 3GS. In today’s post, I’m not going to tell you why this upgrade is going to dramatically change the way pharma markets its products using digital. Because it won’t.

However, one other announcement from Apple came out at the same time and went largely unnoticed. This little detail will change the way pharma markets its products in digital. While explaining all the cool features and enhanced speed of the new iPhone 3GS, Apple also told us that the current top of the line model, the 3G, will be reduced in price to $99. $99 dollars versus a current cost of $199 or $299 (depending on memory) is a big difference. $99 is one of the those magical buying points where something starts to look really affordable to people. In fact, in a recent study done by Neilsen prior to the announcement, they noted, “…the second most important factor-noted by 20% of respondents-as to why people did not pick the iPhone was its price.” It doesn’t take a lot of calculations to figure out that there’s going to be a huge increase in iPhone sales because of this decrease.

So, how does this affect you as a pharma marketer?

With more iPhones (and any other smartphone with a browser), more people can instantly get quality information no matter where they are. For you, this means in their doctor’s office, a pharmacy, a hospital. It essentially allows patients to immediately double-check their doctor’s recommendations. Picture someone who was just prescribed Lipitor walking out of their doctor’s office. Let’s say they have an iPhone. What’s the first thing they do when they leave that office? If it’s me, I check out Lipitor on my iPhone and see what it’s all about. This is going to become more and more the norm as these types of phones become the standard instead of just another high-tech gadget.

So, when your patient checks out your site on their iPhone, what do they see? Let’s consider our friend who was just prescribed Lipitor. If he checked out the Lipitor site at home. This is what he’d see:

Not a bad looking site. Front and center patient stories. Clear navigation. Good.

What about on the iPhone? The iPhone browser has one big limitation; it doesn’t recognize Flash. Flash, as you know, is what’s responsible for much of the animation you see on the Web today. Chances are that if you see something moving around on a webpage, it uses Flash. As far as the iPhone is concerned, Flash doesn’t exist. So, your very expensive to develop Flash piece (the patient stories) on the Lipitor site looks like this on the iPhone:

No more patient stories. Everything else still works, but you’re missing your big feature and there’s an ugly blank spot on your page that makes it look like it’s broken somehow.

Who else has the problem? I looked through the sites of some of the top-sellers out there and found a few more plus one that does it right (almost).

One that I found that goes on the “needs improvement” list is Actos. Here’s their website:

Here’s the iPhone version:

So long strange, talking, bacon-man (and the sound as well because he does talk in the Web version, but not on an iPhone).

One other site that I actually wrote about very positively in a recent post about addressing caregiver needs, looks great on a full browser, but not so much on the iPhone. It’s Exelon Patch.

Full Web version:

It includes the engaging visuals that really speak to someone caring for someone suffering from Alzheimer’s. However, when you look at it on the iPhone…

All the visuals are gone and you’ve got a page filled with tiny words.

So, is there a way to fix this? Absolutely. What’s more, it isn’t very difficult to do. Correcting the way your site displays content is critical so that users of smartphones (including the iPhone) can view it properly, but there’s one other even more important reason you need to ensure that you have an alternative to Flash on your site. It’s called Google. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Turns out that Google doesn’t like Flash all that much either (at least Google’s spiders don’t). Google cannot read Flash. It basically doesn’t exist. This oversimplifies the issue a bit, as Google can see some elements of the “behind the scenes” parts of Flash, but for the most part it can’t. Here’s a good article explaining some of the details if you’re interested. So what if Google can’t see it? If it can’t see it, it can’t index it, which means it can’t consider it in the rankings for search. Bad news.

So, here’s the deal. You’re beautiful website…

…looks like this to a search spider:

Not pretty, but that’s okay. Google doesn’t rank on pretty. However, it’s not okay if all your important keywords aren’t showing up here. If they are buried in the Flash, Google doesn’t see them. In this case, much of the content of the Iams site is contained in Flash and isn’t seen by Google. Interested in seeing how your site looks to Google? Here’s a great tool.

It turns out that there’s a great compromise that is a really simple programming fix and one that you should be requiring your digital developers to do. Essentially, you create two versions of your website. Relax, it’s not twice the cost. All you are going to do is create second version using some programming techniques that ensures all of your content that was included in your Flash piece is visible to search spiders. You can direct which page is seen through a really simple programming technique that allows you to check either browser type or other parameters that ensure the right visitor sees the right page. So, you can show search spiders one thing and regular people another. You can also show an iPhone version to iPhone users. You don’t need to understand the technicalities of how to do this, but if you really want to, contact me and I’ll get you in touch with one of our developers (no charge of course).

Let’s just see what it looks like. Someone in pharma has done it ALMOST perfectly. This is the normal Web version of the Seroquel website (note that I cut the page off a bit):

There’s a big Flash piece right in the middle of the page that feature some patient stories. It’s nicely done and looks great, but as we now know, the iPhone (and Google) isn’t going to like it very much. But, AZ (makers of Seroquel) handled this the right way. Here’s the iPhone version:

What you see is that the site explains that it’s optimized for Flash and gives you directions on how to install Flash if you don’t already have it. You still lose the stories, but at least you don’t have a big blank area on the page that leaves people wondering why your site looks broken.

For those paying close attention, you noticed that I said they did this “ALMOST perfectly.” Here’s the problem with this approach. All of the great content that is in the Flash piece is gone. If you use the simulator like I did for the Iams site, none of the patient stories are seen by search spiders. The stories are even narrated and have some good content, but Google doesn’t know about it. However, it’s possible to take that content out of the Flash file and display it essentially in transcript form only for search spiders. You have the transcripts already (because your regulatory team demanded them), so adding this to your site isn’t a big deal. It won’t mess up the look of the site because you can program it so that only search spiders can see the text. It’s a simple fix, but one that is overlooked pretty regularly. With all the competition out there for important keywords in Google’s rankings, you need all the help you can get. Why leave out big chuncks of content when you don’t have to?

In addition, you could invest a little more and make a non-Flash version of the patients stories that is going to be viewable on an iPhone. That was the point of this post after…optimizing for an iPhone. So simply saying, “Sorry, you’re out of luck because you don’t have Flash,” how about offering an alternative using static images or some other technologies that mimic Flash, but without some of the issues?

The big takeaway…make sure that people who are using smartphones can see your website the way you want it seen. Do a little experiment and find out what your site looks like to iPhone users. If you’re not happy with it, contact your developers and figure out how to improve it. Don’t leave your site with a gaping hole in the middle of it. This doesn’t instill confidence among visitors. At the same time, make sure that you are truly optimizing for search. The two really go hand in hand. If you have an issue with how your site displays on the iPhone then you probably have an issue with how Google sees it too.

So, go out and wait on line for a new iPhone 3GS today (or just ask to borrow a friend’s if you’re not quite that gung-ho).

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Mini White Paper, Room for Improvement, The Basics on June 19, 2009 | 11 Comments and Tweets »

Become the Best of the Best in Digital Healthcare Marketing

Ever ask yourself what the best of the best are doing in digital marketing for pharma and healthcare? I do. That’s where I get many of the ideas you see on this blog: watching the best of the best. As I’ve reviewed the best over the years, I’ve realized that they have a few things in common. They all do the same things really well. What I found was that this wasn’t a list of hundreds of things, but that they do four simple things really well and really consistently.

I also realized that this wasn’t just the framework for best in class digital marketing in pharma and healthcare, but that it also probably applies to every other industry as well. If you can follow this framework and successfully hit on all four areas of this framework, I can guarantee your success in the digital space. If you’ve set up your digital strategy well and ensure that it ties to brand objectives, this means that it’ll also drive sales for your brand. Not sure if your digital strategy is actually having a brand impact (i.e., sales)? Then you’d better check out my last post about following your customers’ path for success.

The four tenets of a winning digital strategy in pharma and healthcare

Partner

This simply means that you allow your customers to help set the agenda for the site. You allow them to drive the conversation, recommend what’s important, and/or customize the site to suit their specific needs. In other words, you don’t tell them what’s important, they tell you (and, therefore, other visitors) what’s important.

One great example is Sermo. Sermo doesn’t create the content to tell you what’s important. The doctors that use the site do this. These doctors essentially own the website.

Another example relating to letting customers drive the conversation is to literally have the conversation with them. Part of what our company created for Diabetes Control for Life (a disease management program created for Glucerna) was a simple live chat functionality that allows users to chat with a dietitian to get more information about diabetic nutrition issues.

Provide

This is the simplest to describe, but the hardest to do. Provide here means providing tools to help people manage their disease. There are an infinite number of ways you could do this and tools you can create, but the key is creating something that people will find useful and will help them better deal with their disease.

The site that does this best, in my opinion, is Patients Like Me. What makes Patients Like Me stand out is not necessarily the range of tracking tools it makes available (though they are well done and numerous), but rather how the tools can be used to compare your progress to that of other patients. What many companies fail to do well when creating tools for disease management is give you a compelling reason why you should regularly spend time inputting your information in the tool. That is, what will the patient get out of it if they do use it everyday? Getting someone to adopt a new habit like this is very challenging, but as Patients Like Me has shown, it can be done if there’s a real perceived value. This needs to be made clear to people when you initially tell them about the tool otherwise they won’t use it.

The additional value that Patients Like Me brings is that the data you input can be compared to others taking similar treatments or at the same stage in the disease. This leads to you being able to see aggregated data to know what you might expect in the future. All of this allows a patient to see right away how they are doing against “the norm.” It’s very comforting to know that you’re not doing worse than others, but in cases where you are, there is also a clear idea of what might be better. If you haven’t fully explored this site, go do it now.

The tracking tools are fairly straightforward on Patients Like Me, but…

…the data you input is used to form an aggregate of the entire community allowing you to see what others are experiencing and how you compare. That’s what makes it unique.

Balance

This is another one that’s hard for many companies, not just pharma and healthcare. The balance here is balance between brand needs and user needs. Many companies struggle because there is always pressure to get in all the brand messages you can, whenever you can, and as soon as possible.

The best of the best marketing (not just digital) manages to balance two important elements: brand goals and user goals. You really can’t do one without the other. If you only worry about brand goals, then you end up with a big list of product features that no one cares about. If you focus entirely on user goals, then, well, you go out of business. You can do both simply by knowing when to sacrifice one for the other. Providing content in a manner your customers are going to understand and in a medium with which they feel comfortable, delivers on the promise of meeting user goals. You can then add in your specific brand messages and check that box as well. Brand needs and user needs.

Who’s doing this well? Actually, a lot of pharma and healthcare companies do this well…on their unbranded sites. When it comes to their branded sites, it’s a different story. These are very heavily weighted towards brand goals and not user goals. One program I like a lot that shows that you can balance both is for the drug Suboxone, a treatment for opioid addiction. People can start at Turn to Help to learn more about addiction and what treatments are available. Regularly visitors to the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki will also know that this program includes the first MySpace site for any pharma brand, Addiction411. This is another unbranded page that deals with helping people determine if they have a problem.

Eventually, Turn to Help (above) points to the Suboxone brand site, but not before educating users about addiction and which treatments might be appropriate for them. Brand needs and user needs are both met during the user journey.

Yet another site that does this extremely well is Children with Diabetes. This site was purchased by J&J in 2008 and remained largely unchanged, but required a few tweaks to get into regulatory compliance. To give you an idea of how much user needs are balanced against the brand needs, you’ll barely see any mentions of J&J’s diabetes products on this site (J&J company LifeScan makes OneTouch). In fact, if you click and enlarge the picture below, you’ll notice that the advertisement in the upper right isn’t for OneTouch, but rather archenemy FreeStyle from Abbott. J&J let’s anyone advertise on the site, which essentially opens users to all the options available instead of just their products. Can you imagine a Crestor ad on a Lipitor page? That’s basically what this is. Perhaps this goes too far in giving into user needs.

Enlist

This means that you get the help of experts when you aren’t the expert. Too many companies pretend to the be the absolute expert in everything related to their brand and the category. That’s really hard to pull off. What ends up happening is that you aren’t an expert in anything (or perceived that way by customers, which is all that matters). Instead, pick one thing and be the expert in that. Going back to OneTouch, for example, this might mean they should focus on being the experts in diabetes testing. Not diet. Not exercise. Testing. There already are experts in the others, but OneTouch has a solid rationale for owning diabetes testing. Once you establish yourself as an expert, then you are also responsible for referring people to experts in other areas. So, if someone wants diet information, then you should have a ready list of places they can go. This is what consumers expect today. They don’t expect you to know it all, but rather, they expect you to be the best at one thing. Why else would they be talking to you? If you are trying to do too much, then you aren’t going to be seen as an expert.

Even the website that claims to be an expert in healthcare overall doesn’t try to do it all in every disease state. Instead, WebMD enlists help from multiple physicians (who are experts in their field) to help keep the site on the right path and to ensure the information that goes out is seen as “expert” in every way.

Summary

Follow these four tenets to get on the same path as the best of the best healthcare digital marketers. Partner, Provide, Balance, and Enlist. They all have one common thread: adding more value to consumers beyond just your brand. Of note, none of these says go out and do some social media based projects specifically, but I bet many people will take it that way. Instead, look across all the channels available within the broader digital channel and you’ll see that you can accomplish each of these four without social media. So, if that’s an issue at your company, you can’t use it an excuse here.

Can’t get to all four? No problem. Any one of these is better than none and is a huge step in the right direction.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Mini White Paper, The Basics on June 17, 2009 | 12 Comments and Tweets »

Follow Your Customers’ Path to Success

Here’s a simple question for everyone today. Do you know what people are doing on your brand website? You probably know how many visits you are getting and how many page views. You might even know the time people spent on the site and, if you’re really digging in, your bounce rate (including the specific pages people left from). Simple, right? If you’re not doing this, stop reading and go find this out. If you don’t know these basics or where to find them, then you’re not ready for the next suggestion I’ve got.

Great. I’m assuming you know the basic stats about your site, but I’ll go back to my original question: Do you know what people are doing on your brand website?

Here’s a simple test to see if you do. Review the list below. If you answer “no” to more than 3 of the questions, then you don’t really know what people are doing on your site. That’s okay. We’re going to fix that today. But first…the test.

Do you know…

the specific landing pages where people enter your site?
the keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site (organic and paid)?
which sites are referring the most traffic to your site?
which pages people exit your site from most often?
your site’s bounce rate (or even what bounce rate means)?
the path people follow once they enter your site?
where your site tends to direct people within your site?
if your site is achieving its goals?

So, how’d you do? Did you say “no” to more than three of these? If so, go find out the answers. Your site has some sort of analytics set up on it, so you might just need to find out who has the data. If you figure out that you don’t have any analytics from your site and you are a pharma or healthcare company, then you need a new website developer and/or new digital agency. There’s no excuse. I’m not saying that you need some very expensive analytics platform, but Google Analytics is really good…and free…and can be added to any site in about 10 seconds (okay, slightly longer, but not much).

If you answered “yes” to the majority of these, but answered “no” or “I don’t know” to number eight, then all bets are off. That’s the most important question of the eight, but I’ve found many healthcare and pharma marketers (and many others) don’t know the answer to this. The reason? Often there are no goals for the site. When there are goals, they usually are traffic-related, such as 100,000 visitors in 2009. That’s not a website goal. That’s just a number. What do you want your site to accomplish?

A few times in recent posts, I’ve suggested that you can simply get rid of your brand website. I always get some comments (usually offline) that this is a crazy idea. I always ask, “why?’ The simple answer I usually get back is something like, ” Well, well…well, just because. It’s crazy.” This comes back to the question: what do you want your site to accomplish? Think about it for a second and then read on.

Your answer to that question is the goal of your website. For a website that directly sells something, the goals are usually very simple: sell x number of widgets. For a site where you aren’t selling something directly, it’s more complicated. So, what did you come up with? Here are the goals that I often hear:

Educate patients about my product
Increase awareness of my product (or the condition it treats)
Provide disease state information for patients

I almost never hear “To sell more product.” But, in the end, that’s the goal, right? It is for a branded site. It probably is for an unbranded site as well albeit indirectly.That’s okay. If you’re a healthcare or pharma marketer reading this post, that’s your job…sell more product. Yes, sell it to the appropriate patients only, but it’s still the goal. If not, why are there sales and marketing groups in your company? Of course, you can’t sell product directly on your site, so you need a surrogate endpoint. Something you feel comfortable saying, “I know that if people do this, they are very likely to use my product.” What’s your “this”? Hold that thought.

If you now know your goal, you need to figure out if your site is accomplishing this goal. For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume this is a brand website, but an unbranded site would basically be the same.

Step one actually starts at the end. What activity on your site represents success? What do you want people to do that says you’ve reached your goal? This is the “this” that I asked you to consider a few sentences ago. Consider to yourself: ”I know that if people do this, they are very likely to use my product.”

Whatever you came up with is your site’s goal. You also need to consider if you’re satisfied with your “this.” That is, do you want your site to do more? If you weren’t able to come up with something, then you need to create something. Develop an activity that you know gets people closer to using your product. If the single most important activity wasn’t immediately clear to you, then your site probably isn’t doing much in terms of persuading people to try your product. Answers like “I want people to read this paragraph” or “I want them to download this PDF” aren’t good enough. Downloading and reading a PDF, no matter how great that PDF is, isn’t going to get someone to try a new prescription medication or have a procedure. Never. You need a stronger goal and you might find that you have to create something that represents this goal.

From my look through many healthcare and pharma sites, there isn’t a strong goal for the vast, vast majority. How about an example of a site where this a clear goal and path to that goal? Okay. I’ll give you one from a site my company did two years ago for Ethicon Endo-Surgery’s BariatricEdge. Without getting into a ton of background, this site is designed to help educate patients who might be candidates for bariatric (weight loss) surgery (either the gastric band or bypass).

You can see from the site that the path we want people to follow is built right into the site navigation. Down the left side is the progression we learned people follow when educating themselves about these procedures. It ends with “How to Choose a Surgeon,” which includes a tool (visible in red-bordered box in the image above) called the Surgeon Locator. When you’re ready to take the next big step, this tool finds a surgeon close to where you live. When you click on a surgeon in the results, you get something like this:

What you see is a bunch of ways to take the final step and make an appointment to talk with a surgeon. The site walks you all the way (almost literally) to the surgeon’s front door. I know from our research that people who get this far are many times (exact numbers confidential) more likely to actually have surgery than someone who didn’t go this far. That just makes sense. But people getting to this spot isn’t an accident. They are directed here over time. There’s a clear path for them to follow that ends with them finding a surgeon. Yes, there’s a lot of education before this point (just visit the site to see how much), but the education isn’t a goal in of itself. Using the Surgeon Locator tool is the goal. We know that if we don’t do the education part, people won’t ever get here, so we have to create a path.

What’s the final transaction you’d like people to do on your site? Can you imagine how different this site would be if the goal were simply to have people download a PDF? Do you think that would actually get people to have gastric bypass surgery? Of course not. It’s also not enough to get people to try your drug. Come up with a final transaction and then build a path to get people there. In an upcoming post, I’ll show you how you can track this and tweak your site to fix the places where people stray from the path.

For the record, usage of the Surgeon Locator tool exceeded the brand team’s expectations by 1o times. I credit this to the simple path we created for people, but I’d never have known that it worked if we didn’t create a meaningful, trackable goal right from the beginning.

I’ll ask once more: what’s the goal of your site?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Mini White Paper, The Basics on June 9, 2009 | 4 Comments and Tweets »

Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should)

I figure this post is the one that’ll get the most comments ever. It’s going to be the one that probably outrages you the most or makes you think that I’ve completely lost it (which perhaps I have). Here’s why I’m writing this. I’ve gotten really tired of all the discussion about social media in pharma and healthcare. I’ve grown bored with all the debates on why these industries should use social media. This despite the fact that I find myself writing and talking about it all the time. So, in an effort to move the debate along to something different, I decided to come up with a list of ten other digital marketing initiatives that pharma companies could try that make basic social media programs look like child’s play. I’m fairly sure that no company is ready to take these on, but they should start getting ready. Some of these just might be the next big marketing channel or idea that’ll vault some company ahead of everyone else. And I almost forgot, it’s what your customers are demanding.

Before I begin, know that I understand the regulatory realities of pharma and healthcare marketing. I lived them for 12 years. So, I’m not suggesting anyone run out and do exactly what I spell out here. I know it’s not that simple. However, I offer these to help stretch your thinking and to challenge you to figure out a way to do something that preserves the spirit of the ideas here, but doesn’t get you fired. If you need help, just give us a call. So, here they are, in no particular order.

Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should)

1. Create a game for the Wii Fit that helps your patients manage their disease and begin a proper exercise and fitness regimen. I just wrote about this. More details on why this is a good idea in my post.
2. Get rid of your brand website. No one is really visiting your site anyway. It’s likely not driving anyone to get a prescription and it’s almost certainly not getting anyone to stay on your treatment. Instead, take all the money you were going to spend on your site and create great content that you syndicate out to credible third-party sites. The information can include branded and unbranded information, but it would now be located where patients (and doctors) are likely to find it and pay attention. It’ll be on the health sites they trust at a time when they’re researching their condition.
3. Add ratings and reviews to your brand site. Don’t want to get rid of your website? Okay, how about adding ratings and reviews to your site. Every other industry has realized that this is critical to building trust with visitors because it shows authenticity. It turns out that simply having reviews can increase traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (see more detail here). In addition, negative reviews aren’t an issue so long as there aren’t only negative reviews. Your products are already being reviewed on sites like iGuard, so why not bring this onto your site and build some credibility with your patients?
4. Install Google Friend Connect. Wonder who your real friends are? Install this tool and see. Visitors can join your site, which in turn adds your site to their Google profile as one of their “friend” sites. They can comment on the site and quickly and easily share your site with friends. A simple way to add a little social media to your site without going too far. Not sure what Friend Connect is? Here’s the video from Google explaining it.

5. Allow patients to share their history with Google Health (or Microsoft HealthVault). Yes, more Google. I’m sure you know about Google Health, but did you know that you can become a partner and allow patients to export their prescription history directly from your site into their Google Health record? Why not make it easy for your patients? Oh, what’s that you say, you don’t let people track their prescription history and symptom improvement on your site? Hmmm. Nevermind this one.
6. Add features to your site that allow patients to track their condition and compare with others. If number 5 didn’t appeal because you don’t have any tracking functionality on your site, here’s your chance. The best in class healthcare sites feature tools to help people manage their disease. The best of the best (in my opinion) is Patients Like Me. They feature an array of tools that let you track your progress, medications taken, and side effects. What’s even more important is that you can compare yourself to others to see if you are doing better or worse and see which treatments seem to be working best for the community. You’ve got to give people a reason to come to your site and you do this by adding value beyond your product messages.
7. Hire five “community managers” to help fix your online reputation. Let’s be honest, no brand manager has time to monitor what’s going on online with their brand. They can’t keep track of everything that’s happening and everything people are saying (or can they?). Nevermind the monitoring, how about actually responding to some of the comments? What about correcting the blatantly inaccurate information? It’s certainly your right to do this, but corporate policies make this impossible. How about hiring someone (or a few someones) who are empowered to go online, search out this misinformation and correct it? They also can engage in discussions and help improve people’s overall perception of you. You can give them a set (approved) script of things they can and can’t say to guide where they get involved if you’re really worried about the legal implications.
8. Create a portal allowing physicians to get every piece of clinical information related to your product and its indication in one place. Now, wouldn’t that be useful? More and more doctors are using the Internet to research conditions and medical challenges (no duh?!?), but it’s still pretty hard to find everything you need and it involves a lot of fishing around. Sites like PubMed don’t offer a great search interface (just compare it to Google) making it hard to find what you need. How about instead automating some searches and adding a feed on your physician brand site that allows them to see the absolute latest clinical data about your disease state? Technically-speaking this is a pretty simple exercise, but will your regulatory team allow it?
9. Kick people out of your CRM program. While that might sound a bit Machiavellian on the surface, it’s for everyone’s benefit. Consider that your program probably has thousands of people in it that will never change their behavior, try their product, or be persistent with it. They just won’t respond to your program. Don’t feel bad, they probably wouldn’t respond to anything. The problem with allowing these people to enter and stay in your program is that in order to allow this you have to take money and resources from those who actually would benefit from something. If you only allow access to those you know you can help, then you can concentrate more resources on them, which will allow you to create more robust support systems and programs. You don’t have to completely forget the others if it makes you feel better, but you have to send them a very “lite” version of your program so you can focus where you’re going to make an impact. Don’t think it’s possible to figure out which people you can and need to help? Merck does. They created “‘The Adherence Estimator,’ an elegantly researched tool for predicting which patients will display poor compliance—by focusing on just three core issues: commitment to treatment, concerns over therapy, and cost (source here).” Now, that’s handy.
10. Implement OpenID on your website wherever you require registration. Don’t know what OpenID is? You will. It continues to grow as people have grown tired of having a different user name and password on hundreds of different sites. Instead, they can now have a single, validated user name and password that gets them onto any site that supports OpenID. Why should you care about this as a pharma company? Simple. Remember that most people don’t really trust you that much. Giving visitors a way to engage with you that doesn’t immediately require them to give you personal information (yes, an email address counts as personal) probably will increase the chances that they actually do engage with you. As you build trust over time and they realize that what you are providing is valuable, then they’ll start to volunteer more personal information in order to get even more useful content or tools from you.

So, who’s going to be first to implement any one of these? If you know of a pharma or healthcare company that’s doing any of these, I’d love to hear about it. Also, if there’s anything I missed, feel free to leave a comment.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Mini White Paper, Next Steps, What If on June 4, 2009 | 53 Comments and Tweets »

RealAge, Wii Fit, and Pharma Marketing

UPDATE: June 4, 2009. I’ve updated this post to correct a fact about RealAge. RealAge does not sell email addresses to any third party. However, as described originally by the New York Times, “RealAge sends the selected recipients a series of e-mail messages about a condition they might have, usually sponsored by a drug company that sells a medication for that condition.”

They might seem like an odd grouping, but I’m prepared to tell you how RealAge, Wii Fit, and pharma marketing all connect. For those not familiar, RealAge is a test you can take that purports to be able to tell you your body’s actual age versus simply your calendar age. By answering a number of questions (that seem to go on forever), it spits out a number that’s supposed to tell you if you’re actually older or younger than your years. Factors like family history, diet, exercise, and past medical conditions are all considered. According to the folks at RealAge, their test, The RealAge Test, is “ the first measurement standard for healthcare.” Really? I thought something like an x-ray or maybe a complete blood count might be both more first and more standard.

It came as a dramatic shock to people (not me) when in March of this year it was revealed that RealAge was selling your test results and email addresses to was sending emails to users based on their test results, which were sponsored by <cue foreboding music> big pharma. The New York Times broke the story and the outrage ensued. Of course, RealAge’s privacy policies say that they will sell your information stating quite plainly: “we will share your personal data with third parties to fulfill the services that you have asked us to provide to you.” Not, we might, we will. During this outrage, I pointed out one minor detail that people left out. Many people actually would welcome email from pharma companies and their products. In fact, I’d just written about it that same day. Turns out people were open to learning about pharma products from pharma companies via email. Email from a pharma company ranked above offline advertising and even above email from their doctor. So, perhaps the whole RealAge uproar wasn’t that big of a deal. People may have actually gotten useful information, targeted to their condition, at a time when they were open to hear about solutions. Isn’t that good for everyone?

The problem with RealAge’s solutions is that they simply leave you on your own to solve the problems it uncovers. It may say you need to reduce cholesterol and fat in your diet to get your “RealAge” higher, but there isn’t a consistent, long-term plan that you can follow. You need to go elsewhere for that. Where there are plans, they don’t fit into the current routines of people instead requiring them to change their behavior (e.g., like logging onto the same site everyday) so that they can change their behavior (e.g., like diet). It just doesn’t make sense.

So, let me move onto Wii Fit. If you haven’t heard of Wii Fit, I don’t know what to tell you. It became the single biggest game (really a platform though) in history surpassing Halo 3’s 6 million units back in March. At $85 a unit, that’s $510 million in sales. Not a bad start for any media. According to Nintendo, “Wii Fit is a combination of fitness and fun, designed for everyone, young and old. By playing Wii Fit a little every day, you, your friends, and your family can work towards personal goals of better health and fitness.”

I’ve talked in the past about how gaming could be one of the biggest future marketing tactics available to pharma. As for Wii Fit, Nestle has already sponsored a game on the system called Active Life: Outdoor Challenge. The promotion supports it’s Aquapod brand. I’m not recommending pharma sponsor a game on the Wii, though that might be interesting. I’m instead saying they should make a game for Wii. Unheard of you say? Making a game solely to promote your product? Tell that to Burger King who sold more than 3 million copies of its Burger King themed games at $3.99 each. Granted, not the same regulatory constraints, but conceptually, it can be done.

So, why the Wii Fit? Simple. Every pharma company seems to be moving towards the realization that simply providing information about its products isn’t enough. You also have to create programs that help people achieve the goals that your medication is designed to provide. In other words, if your drug is for dyslipidemia, you should also be helping me reduce cholesterol in my diet and getting me started on an exercise regimen. These connections, these valuable services, are what will help people stay on treatment and also improve the public perception of pharma. What I’m saying is that pharma needs to start creating programs that help keep people off their medications or get people off them sooner. A statement like that might get me banned from every pharma company in the world, but there it is. Is this unheard of?

Nope. Talk to the folks at Tylenol who have created an entire advertising campaign around encouraging you NOT to take Tylenol. They’re showing you how to avoid the very headaches they treat.

So, how are you helping people avoid your hypertension medication? How are you helping to get people off your cholesterol drug? How are you helping people be healthier as they take your chemotherapy as part of their cancer treatment? Wii Fit might be one way. Rather than create a complex and very expensive platform on your own site that tracks progress, maintains profiles, allows for goal setting, and many other complex features, why not use a platform that already exists and is in millions of homes? Here’s what one of the tracking screens from the Wii looks like (and no, not mine, so don’t worry, Mom):

With all of your marketing efforts, you’re trying to fit into people’s daily lives. It’s not supposed to interrupt, but typically it does (I’m looking at you DTC TV). More and more companies are figuring out this isn’t working and instead they are turning to marketing efforts that actually add value to people’s lives (read all about it at Marketing with Meaning). People are already using their Wii. They are using it quite regularly. If your messages are available here, then they are fitting into where people are. Check. But, they can also be meaningful if you manage to incorporate them into a game that’s helping make people get healthier.

One additional advantage of this is that you can reward people for ongoing compliance, as they can report if they are still taking your product when they log onto the Wii. The way I’ve seen pharma companies reward people today is to require them to log into a website each day and report that they took their daily dosage. Isn’t requiring that people remember to log into a site each day kind of silly? Recall that these are people who aren’t remembering to (or choosing not to) take their medication already. Why would they remember your site everyday? Since they are using their Wii regularly, it doesn’t require a behavior change to be part of your program. Your program, which may involve changes in diet and exercise, is already a major change, so why add another change to their routine? Instead, fit it in with their current activities. For many people, this includes Wii Fit. This is much different than many other online programs offer. They expect you to log in everyday to figure out your routine, but this is already a change. People can only take so much.

Rather than investing $20 million in DTC TV this year (again…with questionable results), why not take 20% of that and create something meaningful and long-lasting? You can provide a service to your customers and do something that no one in the industry has tried before. The recognition and PR alone would be worth the expense. For reference, there’s one game out there that has already shown a business result is possible in healthcare (my take here). Hope Lab created a game called Re-Mission. This game was created to help kids fighting various cancers. It’s essentially a first-person shooter-type game, but you’re battling the disease. Kids playing the game showed: “Adherence to at-home medication (trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and 6 mercaptopuring) was significantly improved in the intervention group compared with the control group.” Just playing this game improved adherence. It was compared to playing a game not related any disease. You can read the results that were published in the journal, Pediatrics.

Go out and get yourself a Wii Fit. If you can’t figure out how to create something that might help your target audience of patients after playing for an hour, I don’t know what to tell you besides give me a call and I’ll help figure it out for you.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Posted by Jonathan Richman in Next Steps, What If on June 1, 2009 | 14 Comments and Tweets »

Older Posts »