By Carl Engelmarc, Director, Refreshed Wellbeing
Let’s face it, it’s not easy being in pharmaceutical sales and marketing these days. Limited access to healthcare professionals (HCPs) means diminishing sales force returns. Print advertising is becoming less effective. Other traditional marketing tactics like congresses, meetings and continuing medical education (CME) are increasingly challenged by regulatory bodies. Continual growth in patients’ internet use means they have a stronger share of voice in their own care than ever before. Doctors are spending more and more time looking for clinical information online and out of practice hours. I could go on and on…
Data suggests that in recent years there’s been a massive shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing in the pharma industry. In all, pharmaceutical companies boosted their measured spending on internet media by 36% to $137 million in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
Faced with delivering sales targets, business and brand objectives against a backdrop of outdated and failing sales and marketing processes, models and increasing regulation, pharma marketers need to develop a powerful eMarketing strategy and toolkit to enhance dialogue with key audiences and turn obstacles into opportunities.
The regulatory shadow
One of the fundamental issues in Europe is the lack of guidance from regulators on what can and can’t be done online. In the UK, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) and the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) are taking a wait-and-see approach, penalising those companies that overstep the mark. Under this context, the hesitancy amongst pharma companies to adopt eMarketing strategies is understandable.
Though renowned for risk-averse marketing, the pharma sector is starting to push the ambiguous regulatory boundaries when it comes to eMarketing. A campaign with recent stand out is Boehringer Ingelheim’s (BI) work to promote its RELY study. When the results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress in September 2009, BI used tweets from their corporate Twitter account to provide real-time highlights of the study results as they were presented. In the world of European pharmaceutical marketing, this was a daring initiative. How did BI do it without incurring regulatory wrath? All of the content used pre-approved wording taken from press materials, so they were able to avoid the lengthy vetting and legal approvals process that would have otherwise killed the spontaneous nature of the initiative with red tape.
In the UK, there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the regulatory tunnel, with the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society currently putting together best practice guidelines for the pharma industry and its agencies to follow.
Despite the shadow of regulation and challenges to marketers therein, consider this: Can you afford not to be investing in eMarketing?
Getting started – Online Value Proposition
There is a considerable array of potential online channels and initiatives, and they’re growing at an exponential rate. So how do you decide what to do? SEO? Paid Search? Pay-per-click? Paid for inclusion feeds? Closed Loop Marketing? Social media blogs, feeds and communities? Media alerting services? Affiliate marketing? Sponsorship? Co-branding? Widget marketing? Viral marketing? Behavioural targeting? House list emails? Website? Blogging? Partner microsite?
Before you jump on the Twitter bandwagon you need to be focussed on what you want to say and really understand who you’re talking with. Only then can you start thinking about what’s right for you.
First things first. Make sure your Core Brand Proposition (CBP) is clear – from this will stem all your communications, whether online or offline. The CBP should provide clarity about who you are, what you do, where you do it, what makes you different and why you can be trusted.
Next, define your Online Value Proposition (OVP). The OVP should reinforce your CBP and credibility, but the messaging demonstrates the value your target audiences get from your online presence, which they can’t get from you offline or from your competitors
Babybond, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of private pregnancy scans, is a great example of an original and effective OVP. The brand has a highly successful offline business with a network of over 30 clinics, based on the CBP “The UK’s first ISO Quality Endorsed ultrasound provider, offering a unique and unrivalled combination of professional standards and ultrasound experience at every scan.” Their OVP is “giving our customers complete control over where and when they have their scans.” This is delivered through a powerful real-time booking system for scans on their website (www.babybond.com). The first scan appointment is automatically matched against location availability, with alternative dates and locations provided. This would take many long and potentially frustrating phone calls to different clinics if done offline. The system also generates a calendar of subsequent scans for critical points throughout the pregnancy. This allows Babybond to up-sell other scan products and to educate customers about key scanning stages during pregnancy. All of this fully supports the CPB, while providing a unique online brand experience which neither offline channels nor competitors can match.
Who are you conversing with?
Understanding your key audiences in the digital world is mission critical because you will be moving away from telling people things towards conversing with them. Developing a successful eMarketing strategy means you need to know your audiences, what are they looking for, and their online behaviour.
It’s likely that you’ll have varied audiences such as HCPs, patients, caregivers, payors and the media. You need to define ‘personas’ for each of these. Sometimes there will be several personas for each audience type. What is their buying/information seeking process? What is a valuable visit/communication? Once contact is established what will they do next and what do you want them to do? What are their preferred platforms – web, email, mobile? How much time do they spend on those platforms? What type of content do they consume? What is their search behaviour? How do they prefer to be serviced?
GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli brand has carefully considered the need states of its consumers. The result is a home page (www.alli.co.uk) with content created around the consumer’s decision-making chain, while HCPs are directed to a different site catering to their needs.
Only once you’re armed with your OVP and customer personas should you start thinking about the various eMarketing channels that will populate your toolkit. Ask yourself: Which segments require distinct content? Which are the key segments that should be targeted preferentially, or more prominently, online? What sort of profile information do you already have to enable targeting? What do you know about your customers that will help you develop content that is more relevant to their explicit needs?
Content is king
Moving into the world of Web 2.0 means you’ll need to think very differently about your content to drive customer engagement and participation. Digital content in pharma is typically approached as an afterthought, something that’s done once traditional assets such as the ad and detail aid have been developed – if there’s any budget left. More often than not this is a PDF at worst, or an animated flash version of the detail aid at best.
Let’s look at how the entertainment industry uses content. One of the best examples right now is the “New Moon” book and how it uses appropriate and different content within various digital media channels. First came the book. Then a script was created for the movie – a rewrite of the book to support storytelling in moving images. Next, a computer game – again, it might have some of the characters from the book and movie but the plot is completely different as it’s based on user exploration, not linear storytelling. Then content was revised and applied in relevant ways to an iPhone app, a ringtone, a sound track, a blog, a discussion forum and much more.
While many of these channels and applications may be inappropriate in the pharma industry, my point is that you need to develop content that works for all your different media and channels as you develop your eMarketing strategy, not as an after-thought.
Measuring your activity
The joy of eMarketing is that you can measure virtually anything quite easily, a major reason why so many brands are shifting away from traditional marketing channels towards digital. You’ll need to work with your internal team and agencies to set up a diagnostics framework and metrics that measure the impact of your eMarketing activities on an ongoing basis. This will not only provide you with return on investment data, but will also supply invaluable feedback on your audiences’ online behaviours, allowing you to continuously refine your digital activities.
Any measurement will of course relate to your company’s specific sales, business and brand objectives, but often include:
- Business contribution: online revenue contribution (direct and indirect), category penetration, costs and profitability.
- Marketing outcomes: leads, sales, service contracts, conversion and retention efficiencies.
- Customer satisfaction: site usability, performance/availability, contact strategies, brand impact.
- Customer behaviour (web analytics): profiles, customer segmentation, usability, clickstreams and site actions.
- Site promotion: attraction efficiency, referrer efficiency, cost of acquisition and reach, search engine visibility and link building
- Employee satisfaction: does your eMarketing help your sales and marketing team do a better job? Is it empowering them? Does it make it easier for them to hit their targets? Do they feel that they are working for a great company?
Here’s an example from a top five pharma company’s psychiatric division. Physicians had problems finding relevant information about a specific psychiatric condition, treatments and related drugs on the Internet, combined with the pharma company’s sales teams increasingly unable to meet physicians. An online psychiatric community was created, including news, information, congress reports, abstracts, discussion forums as well as e-learning and e-detailing functionality. The results? One third of the targets joined the community as first time visitors, average visiting time was more than 9 minutes – a strong indicator of customer satisfaction, customer retention rate was 85%, 70% of the targets signed up for an e-newsletter and 50% of the targets signed up for e-learning.
Understanding more about your target audiences’ access to, and consumption of, information in the digital age gives incredibly valuable insights into how pharma businesses can gain a competitive edge and generate business benefits. Key to this is adopting new ways of working, using new technologies and platforms, and developing cutting edge content and functionality. By embracing innovation in customer engagement and relationship management through digital channels, pharma companies can build mutually satisfactory relationships with their ever-growing range of customers and influencers, improve brand exposure and maximise sales.