Study Finds 'Relevance Gap' in Pharma Digital Marketing
- by March 16, 2007
The study, conducted by Medical Broadcasting Co., a Philadelphia-based health care agency, and CBI Research, Inc., a conference company, found that most of the pharma marketers surveyed incorporate podcasts, blogs, RSS, online video, two-way communication, personalized content, product comparisons, and other social media into their personal routines, yet have largely failed to translate those engagements into marketing plans for their brands.
In doing so, they are missing significant opportunities to connect in meaningful ways not only with consumers, but with physicians.
The study found that fewer than half of the marketers surveyed offered two-way communications options, personalized content, and product comparison to their customers.
Where customized content is concerned, 72% of respondents said they used it personally, but only 42% reported making it part of their marketing plans. In terms of advanced technologies, 82% of marketers surveyed said they take advantage of them personally, but only 20% offer them to target customers.
"The industry is lagging way behind across both consumers and professionals with respect to the newer technologies on the Internet, and totally with respect to health care professionals," said Bruce Grant, senior vice president of business strategy at MBC, who led the survey.
And yet, 71% of the marketers surveyed say they regard the Internet as a channel for providing information and services on-demand, rather than the kind of awareness-generation typified by mass-media direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising.
Of those surveyed, 37% plan to increase spending on direct-to-consumer campaigns, and 47% plan to increase spending to target health care professionals in 2007.
"We were really looking at the use of Web 2.0 and social media content technologies that marketers themselves were using," Grant said. "Across the board--about 2 to 1--marketers themselves were using these technologies [podcasts, blogs, RSS, etc.] but not for their brands."
Grant said nearly 90% of pharma marketers use product comparison sites like Orbitz and TripAdvisor in their own lives, but fewer than 40% offered the feature on their Web sites.
According to data from Manhattan Research, a health care market research firm, 99% of physicians are online and 90% are using the Web daily; one-third are accessing it daily for professional purposes; and 79% of the doctors say the Web is essential to the way they practice medicine.
"This is a void that somebody's going to fill," Grant said. "If the industry doesn't make its information accessible, it will find itself marginalized from the discussion." He suggested that AARP, Public Citizen, or Consumer Reports might step in to offer such features if pharma marketers don't do it.
One of the most surprising findings in the study is the fact that not even half of the pharma marketers polled offered Web sites for interacting with physicians about their brands. In addition, less than half said they had no plans to create such sites.
"What you find in the industry is a bi-modal frequency of distribution--a small group is using search in a pretty sophisticated way but a large number is not," Grant said, adding: "Even rarer is the degree to which marketers are integrating search with offline campaigns." TV, print, and radio continue to reign supreme in direct-to-consumer marketing in terms of generating awareness.
But most pharma marketers appear to be missing an opportunity to interact with consumers and physicians.
"The kind of messages we have are uniquely information-intensive, much more than virtually any other category of marketing," Grant pointed out. "A decision about your health care is a considered purchase. Our messages are uniquely stage- and segment-based. The kind of information that consumers look for varies over the course of the treatment." In addition, online video enhances marketers' ability to deliver powerful messages and information.
"We're in an on-demand world where a substantial degree of power has shifted from marketers to consumers, so marketers need to be thinking about how to join their customers where they are already," Grant said. He cited search as a major driver of consumer-generated behavior and the fact that Wikipedia appeared on the first page of search results 63% of the time, according to Hitwise data. "At this point, blogs and social networks are really competing with pharmaceutical marketers. Pharma lives in a world where it shares influence with other influencers and that calls for a different kind of mindset," he concluded.
