Pharma Times | Matt Lowe
Recently I attended an event
listening to some very bright and accomplished individuals share award-winning
campaigns for major brands such as Sony PlayStation and Durex.
It occurred to me that the
disciplines required to create and execute these campaigns are no different
from those required to compete in the highly competitive pharmaceutical sector,
where the brands are equally impressive but considered harder to market. Why is
this?
One of the presenters, fresh
from the SXSW conference, mentioned that within digital the power lies with a
few – the Googles of this world – but is provided by the masses.
For me, there are a number of
parallels within pharma. The disciplines required to co-ordinate
marketing and PR activities, as well as orchestrate and execute a complex
digital strategy, are owned by a few but tasked to the masses.
This poses a number of tough
questions for industry. We can’t assume that digital is a passion for the
traditional marketing head. Being tasked to implement complex digital tactics
across a multitude of platforms and channels, while setting up and tracking
goal conversions and analytics in order to refine and provide agile content,
can be quite daunting. Most would accept they need to learn a new set of
skills.
However, to succeed in this
space means competing with the aforementioned major brands and thousands more
across a range of disciplines that are all too easily avoided by throwing down
the ‘guidelines and regulations’ get-out-of-jail-free card. In order to compete
in this world, marketers need to consider how to create visible, agile content
and implement true end-to-end projects, within the constraints of the pharma
regulations, rather than build iterative online tactics that don’t increase
authority for the brand.
As we move to a
patient-empowered healthcare system let’s not forget that patients are like you
and I. Universally those with access to the internet will `Google it’ when
needing information. Those who don’t reach for a search engine will visit their
social networks. These two facts alone cast a spotlight on the issue at hand.
Pharma has long been lambasted
for fearing social media, but who in a pharma company can share their search engine
marketing plan, that arguably would have far more impact if executed
effectively without the compliance headaches than any social campaign evokes.
Who in pharma even has a search engine marketing plan?
Having sat through the recent
PM Society Digital Awards launch event of award-winning projects in pharma, how
many disease awareness campaigns even mentioned search? Not one.
This is bizarre to me,
especially as healthcare professionals, on average, use Google six times per
day, with 93% taking action as a result of their search, while patients use it
as the go-to tool for search, video, imaging etc. A simple keyword analysis
will show you what patients are searching for and it’s unlikely to be ‘I have
lower radiculopathy of the lumbar region’. They type in ‘my back hurts’. Around
40,000 times a month for that exact query alone!
This leads us to the social
listening exercise. The SLE is gaining traction in the pharma RfP, and rightly
so. It will determine who your audiences are, what they want, how they feel,
and what platform they are on, which in turn allows you to sequence the right
channel and serve up relevant content.
All of these activities
precede any content publication, but it slingshots us into the realm of today’s
buzz word, ‘agile content’. Yes, content is still king, but it has far
more chance of driving a change in behaviour if it’s married with a
laser-focused influencer matrix that determines who you target for outreach and
PR. This will determine the traction of your campaign, and with all social
platforms lowering organic reach, the only way to ensure that you harness the
massive search volumes around keywords, and interest in your brand is to create
great content that cuts through the noise. With 90% of data ever created
being generated in the past two years ‘attention is the brand’.
HCPs and patients have
traditionally found little value in pharma sites, but that, for me, is because
most of them look like they have been built for scientists. While IT and
procurement fumble with cumbersome back-end systems to try and build a CRM tool
that adds value, it’s the bright and accomplished individuals at the coal-face
who can make a difference that are being dealt a bad hand.
Show your hand, sit on your
hands or go all in. These decisions will determine who leads the pharma arms
race to create the award-winning brands that start to make our consumer
counterparts take note.