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.
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 from one of their competitors. 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.
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