As pharma and healthcare companies become more sophisticated with their digital offerings, it starts to become much simpler to provide individualized content. Before there was digital, printing a thousand versions of the same educational brochure simply wasn’t a practical option. Now, digital technologies make the task of providing customized materials simple (and no printing required). The wild card in all this is that you have to have quality content that’s also the right content for your audience. Let’s assume for now the content out there is quality. I’d like to address the second part: figuring out if it’s the right content for your many different audiences. At the end of this post, you’ll find six tips for using digital to influence caregivers.
- This blog is all about the latest technology advances that are going to improve our health and lengthen our lives. It's not the blockbuster drug advances, but digital technology that will lead the health revolution. I'm your author, Jonathan Richman.
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Bringing Digital to Pfizer’s Drug Giveaway
First, I would like to applaud the folks at Pfizer for their new MAINTAIN (Medicines Assistance for Those Who Are In Need) program. Yes, it’s a little bit of stretch to get to the acronym, but pharma’s got to have them. For those not familiar with the program, basically, it provides one year of free drugs if you’re unemployed at no cost. A couple of important caveats: you have to have been on the Pfizer drug for three months prior to losing your job and have no other healthcare coverage for drugs. Essentially, this is the Hyundai Assurance program for pharmaceutical products.
The Ante of Quality Assurance
As part of my regular research, I’m constantly checking out websites all over the Internet. I’ve even had the chance to be a judge for the WebAwards. Point is, I’ve seen a lot of what’s good and bad online. There’s stunning creative with terrible content and there’s amazing content with lifeless design. Occasionally, the best of these combine to create a site that both looks beautiful and has tremendously valuable content. They’re rare, but they exist. Unfortunately, this isn’t all that it takes to have a website that customers engage with and changes their minds. In the end, the number one requirement is that is works.
Do You Really Need Your Digital Agency?
As someone who works for a digital (and relationship marketing) agency (Bridge Worldwide), I was a little hesitant to write the title of this post. It’s a fair question though: Do You Really Need Your Digital Agency? I’m addressing this question not just to all the pharma and healthcare marketers out there, but also to all the agency folks that are regular readers. Your question is just slightly different: Does Your Client Really Need Your Digital Agency?
Pharma Search Engine Rankings Need Fixing
An anonymous pharma friend recently asked me to do a simple analysis. He asked, “how do we rank in search engine results for our important keywords?” Answer: terrible. I was pretty surprised by my basic analysis and really didn’t understand how a site so rich in content (and built at such great expense) could perform so poorly in this important metric. Question is…why should you care about search?
How to Make the Social Media Risk Worthwhile
There’s no question, some risks just aren’t worth taking. Naturally, the reward should justify the risk. This is especially true in the land of pharma and healthcare marketing. The regulatory and legal folks at these companies really have a simple job at the end of the day: figure out if this promotion/concept/message/etc. is worth the risk. Yes, I recognize their jobs are, in fact, much more complex, but this is what it comes down to. So, to be sure that the company can answer “yes” to this challenge, the regulatory and legal folks make changes, require new messages, increase fair balance, and sometimes outright deny permission to try something. Many times this is keeping marketers from getting the company into hot water (whether we really believe it is or not). Sometimes, however, we (adding myself in here as a former pharma marketer) don’t understand the reasons and think that some “rulings” just aren’t necessary.
Forget Communities, Create Channels Instead
A few weeks back, I read a really simple, but (to me) really important blog post from Stephen Saber, CEO of CrossTech Group – the parent company of New Marketing Labs, CrossTech Media, and CrossTech Partners. (Like many of my best finds, I came across this on Twitter, so I’ll say it again, if you don’t have an account, get one now.)
The premise of Stephen’s post was simple: should marketers be creating communities or channels in the social media space? Stephen argued for channels and I completely agree. I also think that as far as pharma and healthcare marketing goes, this is the only way to go. So, what’s a community and what’s a channel? Here’s how Stephen defined them:
