“If you build it they will come” may have worked in Field of Dreams, but times have changed. There is too much competition for consumers’ attention online allowing them to choose from any one of millions of other sites. Consumers now spend less and less time on “traditional” websites and instead find themselves spending hours with social media instead. These days, in order to ensure consumers receive, understand and are engaged in your brand message; you must bring it to them rather then hope they find you. No longer can pharmaceutical brand exist on just one site, have just one presence, one URL.
Tata AIG General Insurance Company - Insurer Innovation Award 2024
If You Build It, They Will Come...Or Will They?
1. Make the Move to a Decentralized Marketing Approach to Branded Campaigns Jonathan Richman Blogger, Dose of Digital Director of Business Development, Bridge Worldwide @jonmrich
10. What I want, When I want it, Where I want it, In the forms I want, As much or as little, Filtered by my peers, Backed by expert opinion, Without unwanted interruption, And then I’ll share it with my “friends,” But don’t you dare tell a soul you know me. Meet “The Selfish Consumer”
49. 21 minutes per day (127hours/year) 2.4 visits per day More than 50% return daily Footnote: Comscore US, April 2007 & Facebook Internal Data, April 2007
86. Want to contact me? Jonathan Richman 513.253.1295 j.richman@bridgeworldwide.com Twitter: @jonmrich http://www.doseofdigital.com http://www.bridgeworldwide.com
Editor's Notes
By it, I mean your brand website. Can we simply expect to create one website, one property and believe that people will just show up.
I don’t think so.
Why? It’s simple competition.
Your “stuff,” pharma brand sites, is basic. It gets the job done. It’s not extended off the site to other places online. It’s also not terribly engaging many times. So, is your competition the other drug in your category? Is it other pharma products or healthcare sites?
No. This is your competition. Everything else that people can do online. You’re competing for attention, so you have to ensure that your executions are up to this standard.
So, make sure you figure out the answer to this question.
So you have 2 options. Push. Which even on a sunny day where you’re out for a ride in your wagon, doesn’t look appealing. Or...
You can have people literally beating down your door.
How do you close the gap?
Start with this though. Be relevant and not interruptive. We’ll put an ad on anything these days, but are people really thinking about car insurance when they are getting on the subway? Think about that for a minute.
Extending your brand beyond one site is really actually simple. You need to follow these four steps.
Knowing your customer means that your marketing matches what your customers know, like and understand. It prevents us from putting Fixodent (for dentures) ads at the X-games. [Note: this is Photoshopped and for illustration only].
Your customers might be one or the other of these very different segments. So, when it comes to digital, do you know what they do?
Teens like all of these things, and older women like these things. Great. So that tell you where to start.
But it’s equally important to know what to avoid as well. Teens don’t use Twitter despite the fact that they get it from a technical standpoint. It’s just for “old people” to them. And older women aren’t big blog readers. You need to know both what your customers do and what they DON’T do.
By sources, here, I mean sources of expert medical opinion...
Is it WebMD, Wikipedia, or the millions of people in discussion groups who give out advice like they are doctors?
Uncovering their sources also means that you understand how your customers interact with their sources. What language do they use? Healthcare marketers talk (and write on their websites) like the top one. Heartburn treatments. Whereas patients talk, and search, for the bottom one. Heartburn remedies. They search about 6-8 times more for heartburn remedies versus treatments. So what?
Your number 1 result for heartburn treatment is from about.com. The American College of Gastroenterology it isn’t but it has some credibility. For heartburn remedies, you get someone’s homemade site with homemade and untested “remedies.” We need to understand how our customers interact with their sources.
This is probably the simplest of all of the four
If the most complex digital activity your customers do is buy stuff on ebay, then a QR code based campaign probably isn’t going to make sense to them.
On the other hand, if you know your customers text a lot. Consider a teenage audience, then you probably shouldn’t do an email campaign. Yes, they understand email, but they think it’s boring. So here, you undershoot their technical savvy.
Getting this right is hard, so stay tuned for later in the year when I release a book on how you can match the “Digital Savviness” of your customers with your programs. It’ll be free, so come back to the blog often for updates [http://www.doseofdigital.com]
This is really two different things, but I think they go together.
Many people don’t interact with digital this way anymore...at home.
They’re going mobile, so it’s important that we make our content available for them wherever they go.
Making things shareable is simple now. You just add a little code that puts Share This on your site and instantly people can share with everyone across all their social networks.
If you don’t make your site shareable, people are going to share it anyway...
The Facebook toolbar is a good example...but here, you don’t know who’s sharing what with whom. If you had sharing tools on your site, you’d be able to track all of this. So, bottom line, people are going to make your site “social” whether you like it or not, and it becomes a question of how you “allow” this.
Here are the four steps once again...
So, back to reality (or at least as TV would have us believe). How do you do this in pharma? Is it possible?
Sure, it is. Novartis and Schering know their customers. They know that they are big casual gamers. Novartis sponsored some games on Pogo while Nasonex created their own game aptly titled “Don’t blow it.”
You have the opportunity to be a trusted medical source since there isn’t one in their online lives. For teens, WebMD isn’t a medical source. They might not even know it exists.
To teens, MySpace might be a trusted medical sources, so you can imagine the level and quality of information they are getting.
ReckettBenkiser knew this so they created the first pharma myspace page. It doesn’t look like a myspace page, it’s still really professional, but they know that teens are much more likely to engage with their brand here instead of on WebMD. This is unbranded. Reckett makes Suboxone, a treatment for opioid addiction, but it’s not mentioned here.
Instead, a few unbranded sites eventually lead to the branded sites, but not before completing a bunch of education steps about addiction and it’s treatment.
So, when you have the choice of reaching your customer, you might not have one. You can do both. You might need to do both.
There are a few healthcare and pharma company created iphone applications as well. One for Zicam with limited functionality and a lot of product information. The other example is the CareConnector from J&J. It’s got some great functionality for caregivers who are responsible for caring for, say, an elderly relative. It tracks medications, appointments, doctor names, etc.
Once again, here are the four steps for extending your brand...
So, we know this isn’t true. You can’t build just one site. You’ll miss many people.
You need to create a comprehensive “ecosystem” with multiple touchpoints across digital, but also you’ll notice that they are all linked together. So, look at your brand’s digital. Do you have one program? You need more. If you have more than one and they aren’t connected, figure out how to improve that.
So ,how can pharma do this tomorrow? Let’s look at Lipitor. Do you know the visitors to Lipitor.com? Guess who they are on average.
Chances are that you guessed wrong. Many people guess men, older, more affluent people. Knowing this information is critical to making sure you are presenting your information in a way that appeals to everyone.
You also need to understand other activities they are doing to figure out different ways and different places to connect with them.
Here is sources. Remember Google being Walgreens? You need to know how people are getting to your site. These are the top referring keywords for Lipitor.com. Great that “lipitor” as a keyword is driving traffic, but those people already likely have been prescribed Lipitor. You want more of the other people, “cholesterol” “triglycerides” etc. who don’t have a solution yet. Adjust what you are doing to make sure you’re getting people at the right time and remember to use their language.
You also need to know what other sources your customers are using. Here you see that people who come to Lipitor.com also visit Crestor.com, Lipitor’s biggest competitor. If people go to Crestor.com first and then to Lipitor, great. They didn’t find what they wanted with Crestor and came to you for a different solution. On the other hand, if they are going to Crestor after Lipitor, you have a problem. What information can you provide visitors from Crestor.com? You should have specific landing pages for these visitors that address what you believe they are looking for.
Regarding their digital lives, basic demographic data can’t tell you what digital technologies to use.
You have to dig in a little bit. Figure out what they like.
Maybe it’s e-card sites and casual games. So, does this mean that you should place banners on e-card sites and create your own casual game? Maybe. Maybe not. Remember, you competitors have this same data, so how can you look at it differently?
Going back to this “digital savviness” concept, through our research we can tell you WHAT ELSE they people are doing. And that’s the key to doing unique digital programs. So, that is, for those who are comfortable with the technology behind casual games, what other technologies will they be comfortable with?
Our research tells us that those who use ecards also do photosharing, watch YouTube videos, and read news online. This now challenges you to look at basic demographic data differently. Use this data to figure out what other tactics you can use instead of just the obvious ideas that come from basic demographics.
Let’s look at shareable first.
Here’s a great content page from Lipitor.com regarding risk factors for heart disease.
But why not make this easy to share?
No cost, really simple. But maybe you wonder who would share this with their friends...
Okay...just change the text. Looks different now, right? Maybe a son shares with a father or husband with wife.
Most people think ShareThis is all about social media. But it also incorporates more basic tools like email as well, so it works regardless of what technology your customers’ are comfortable with.
Here’s one other tool on the Lipitor site. It calculates my risk for heart disease...who should I be sharing this with?
How about my doctor? I probably want to talk this over with her. A simple technology addition to any website and there’s really no reason not to do it.
Let’s talk portable for a minute...specifically the iPhone.
As great as the iPhone is, it has a limitation that it doesn’t read Flash, so your engaging Flash intro is simple gone.
Same thing happens to the powerful, engaging imagery on ExelonPatch’s website as well.
What about Lipitor.com
Same thing. All the patient stories are gone. This is an easy fix, but it speaks to a bigger problem. If the iPhone can’t read it, chances are that Google can’t either. Google can’t pull text from most Flash pieces (without getting too technical), so it doesn’t index it either. That means that you aren’t getting “credit” for much of your great content. Make sure everything on your site can be seen by search engines. It’s possible to create a user facing and search engine facing versions of your site so you can have great visuals and SEO.
One more review of the steps to extending your brand. So....