There has been considerable discussion in recent times about ‘local’ versus ‘global’ engagement strategy, or whether there is some kind of mystical balance of the two. Earlier this year Creation Healthcare was pleased to facilitate seminars in New York and London with leading global pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, during which the constraints and opportunities of global healthcare engagement strategy were discussed.

Creation Healthcare are long-time proponents of setting aside time to define an overarching global strategy; we are therefore sometimes asked by new clients, “Do you really think we should have a global engagement strategy?”

This is a great question, to which we (almost) always answer “Yes”.

Some may say, “What about the local nuances?”; “What about the language challenges?”; “What about the regulatory variations?”; “What about the different technology constraints in each region?”; and so on.

We certainly do understand these issues. With 30 consultants all over the world Creation Healthcare is well aware of the challenges facing each territory, and we are constantly increasing our local in-country knowledge in order to make the best recommendations for our global clients. As much as we often encourage global strategy, we also know that it is absolutely necessary to have a local, tailored strategy to suit each individual territory or brand.

It is also true that at a global and companywide level, there are inevitably some common guiding principles that can bring continuity and consistency to the way an organization communicates, presents the brand personality, and ultimately engages with people – even on an international scale.

Incidentally, if you are skimming this article to find the quick-fix, ‘give-me-the-ten-tips’ commandments, you may wish to pull out now.

The reason for the title of this article is that it describes an approach, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.

Let me explain using a ubiquitous metaphor. Most people in the world – regardless of their own personal religious belief, country of origin, or language – have heard of the so-called “10 commandments”. Indeed, quite a few people could list at least some of them from memory.

Interestingly, orthodox followers of the ‘Torah’ (as these books of laws are known) usually insist that there are actually 613 commandments all told, and that the 10 commandments are more of a ‘table of contents’ – a sort of cheat sheet for remembering the detailed laws and regulations.

Elsewhere, there is even a further distillation in to just two guiding principles. It is fair to say that in religious circles the 10 commandments have certainly permeated the human race over the past several thousand years, across millions of people in many languages and cultures.

We’ve found that this same concept also works for guiding an organization in healthcare engagement. Creation Healthcare maintains that it is possible to create ‘10 commandments’ which can be implemented globally, to bring new levels of (consistent, on brand) engagement.

Of course there really isn’t a single set of ‘10 commandments of healthcare engagement’ that would apply equally well to every company or organization, hence you will find no simple list here as a ‘take-away’.

Rather, each organization is uniquely different in its own right, with particular heritage, traditions, idiosyncrasies and ‘personality’. Therefore it makes perfect sense that each company should really develop their own global engagement strategy (and resulting 10 commandments).

Creation Healthcare can deliver a customized process to help you formulate your own global strategy 10 commandments; all you have to do is give us a call now.

On the one hand, physicians’ adoption of social media interaction with patients through the Internet is restricted due to legal and regulatory issues. On the other hand, patients seek trustable health information on the Internet and want to share their experiences and exchange information with peers. In a low engagement, low trust environment like the Spanish healthcare market, the www.vi.vu experience shows a path for interaction between users (patients or not) and professionals in a credible and safe way.

The network is open to health professionals and patients on a linking and question-and-answer basis. Each member can create their own network of professionals depending on the kind of information they are interested in. It is possible to interact privately but many of these conversations are archived publicly, enabling anyone with similar conditions to benefit from reading about them. Professionals also interact between them and exchange information.

Attracting professionals through reputation

Spain has a universal and publicly funded National Health System. Although in some regions the right for physician election exists, this is not the general rule. At least 25% of citizens have private health insurance to supplement the public offer. It is in this setting that physicians and hospitals or clinics begin to be conscious of the need to have a reputation among patients in order to be selected through the private insurance.

The www.vi.vu network offers professionals and healthcare providers a system for referencing and recommendation based on their professional profile and their activity in the network.

In the network, physicians act as mediators of information between parties. As Ignacio Parada – manager of the network – says, “they prescribe trustable and useful information”.

In this sense, the more active you are, the better indexing ranking you have in search engines (like Google) and the greater likelihood you have of obtaining a recommendation as a trustable source from patients and/or other professionals.

The network was launched last March in its final beta version and already has 400 professionals and thousands of users who share more than 4,000 links and 700 answers. Users and Patients join the network by invitation from professionals or by their own means.

Empowering patients

www.vi.vu permits any member to build his own team of professionals which provides useful information and counsel, either publicly or privately. This enables the patient to be in charge of his recovery process or to prevent any illness he could be exposed to.

Once the patients have acquired experience in an illness they can also be a trustable source of information for others and can upload or link any information they consider will help others.

Crowdsourcing information

The information traded in the network is already on the Internet. “There is no need to create new content when there are huge amounts on the Internet from credible sources”, says Parada. These credible sources are better know by health professionals. In some cases, the professional can refer to content created by the pharmaceutical industry or insurance providers. In this way, they have an  opportunity to send their information to patients. “But of course, they have to adapt it to the patient and sweep away any advertorial or message inducing to purchase of their products”, according to Parada.

www.vi.vu offers different services to health providers who want to carry out network projects with health professionals, such as talking to members on a daily basis in order to help them provide information in best manner. For example, many professionals have good articles about how to cope with a disease which might be better understood if translated into audiovisual media or supported by graphics.

Vi.vu aims to show professionals in the healthcare industry the opportunity they have through the network, to become trustable agents and gain credibility from the public. They think that the future of the network will come from the ability of the industry to participate, be a player and help the network to succeed in enabling all agents to benefit from the service.

They have a good number of clever ideas to develop the network further. For example, they plan to offer educational disease management programs or drug interaction databases. For now they prefer to consolidate the model, help professionals understand the importance of their online reputation and the vital role they can play in guiding their patients through trustable sources of information.

We’re delighted to have been asked to lead the SMi Social Media for Pharmaceuticals MasterClass in London, April 14th 2010.

Registration is now open: Find out more or book your place now.

Paul Grant, our Head of Strategy implementation will join Daniel Ghinn, Director of Digital Engagement to lead the MasterClass in which delegates will learn about current opportunities and challenges faced by pharmaceutical companies in engaging stakeholders, consumers and patients through social media.

Participants will discover how to use social media to interact with individuals and communities online, and how to assess the effectiveness of online engagement in achieving planned outcomes. The MasterClass will include current case studies from pharmaceutical companies worldwide, exploring what is working well and not so well.

Join us in the MasterClass and you will find out how to take small steps with measurable outcomes to develop a low-risk social media strategy that achieves successful results, and how to navigate the social media landscape amidst complex regulatory compliance issues.

The class will be ideal for people in pharmaceutical companies with responsibility for engaging customers and stakeholders including consumers, patients, healthcare professionals, and patient organisations.

Existing experience of using social media for pharmaceutical engagement is not necessary; while attendees with some existing experience in this area will be able to bring their skills right up to date.

The MasterClass is CPD accredited, offering you measurable value as part of your continued professional development.

To find out more or book your place, download a MasterClass brochure: Social Media for Pharmaceuticals or visit the MasterClass website.

Social media is increasingly being used as a test-bed for conducting research with users, bringing them into the product development process as active participants and monitoring trends in user or client behaviour.

If you’re operating in a regulated healthcare environment, your social media participation might start as an information collation or broadcast tool rather than for direct engagement. There are numerous tools which can enable you to keep track of your competitors and measure user behaviour to inform your own marketing, engagement and product development strategies.

1.     Product and brand tracking tools

As a marketer, keeping abreast of the competition is an essential part of your job. They days of scouring press releases in trade journals, awaiting annual reports and attending far-flung conferences are in the past: today, more information than ever before is online and accessible about you and your competition and can be delivered direct to your desktop.

Ensuring you sign up for the relevant e-newsletters, Twitter feeds and Google Alerts for your competitors is an effective and immediate means of benchmarking how your own activity and profile compares with your competitors.  This previous article in Engagement Strategy takes you through the process of setting up alerts and information feeds. Users of social media can be quick to respond critically and publicly to situations and experiences, so tracking formal press along with conversational mentions allows you to monitor more effectively how your own and competitors’ brands are being discussed.

With the recent news that Google will be including social media in its search results, following on from the recent integration of Google and Microsoft’s Bing engine with Twitter into search results, considered management of brands and corporate profiles in online conversations and measuring responses will become increasingly significant in the development of the semantic web as user-recommendation interlinks with search engine functionality.

2.      Accessing research

Many search tools now make it easier to access research, articles and links to online resources archived by other users:

Academic research:

Google Scholar searches published academic research using weightings to rank publications based on how often they have been cited in other publications.

Mendeley, which describes itself as the iTunes for research papers, is a new service from Stefan Glänzer, the former Chairman of music search service Last fm.  It allows researchers to store together, search and cite easily all their research and connect with other researchers. Funded by the backers of Skype and Warner Music, this technology is not exclusively for the hallowed corridors of academia but is intended for wider roll-out to other research and enterprise sectors.

Enterprise search:

It’s likely that historic data you need to map longer-term trends may already exist in another department or site within your organisation. Enterprise search is a software solution to provide in-depth analysis to information within the enterprise, sourcing information from a range of internal sources including email, databases and intranets. It is a technical form of knowledge management for larger organisations, relying less on human cataloguing and gatekeepers and more on search parameters.  Enterprise Search is typically a high-budget, high-tech solution for large enterprises and knowledge institutes, however, lower-cost solutions using the easy usability and functionality of search engines are growing in popularity like Google’s Enterprise Search solution.

3. Bookmarking

Popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati and Delicious allow professionals to catalogue their reading; these results can be made accessible to others or even integrated as feeds into a website or blog.  Social Mention allows search by keywords within bookmarking sites in addition to other social media tools such as blogs, microblogs and networks.  By storing research results as separate CSV/Excel files, you can perform analysis comparing responses from different platforms and also identify the key ‘thought leaders’ and influencers in your field.

4.     Tracking and measuring user engagement

Sentiment analysis:

As the web becomes more focused on person-to-person interactions, sentiment analysis has become a growing trend to analyse the quality of users responses rather than just tracking the volume of engagement through links or webpage views.  The Social Mention page above, left, shows how sentiment can be rated as positive, neutral or negative by analysing reviews, recommendations and a database of emotive keywords to determine the attitude conveyed in any communication.

Trending tools:

Many bespoke social media engagement platforms now provide sophisticated trend analysis tools which track the less easily measurable outputs of online engagement.  Free tools like Nielsen’s Blog Pulse allows you to measure blog trending topics in quantitative terms.  Likewise, Trendpedia allows the same with comparison charts of competitive terms, showing the market awareness and profile from online editorial and comment the brand or company is attracting, which can be converse to its actual market position:

In addition to social media, measuring queries with search engines can reveal how users are responding to or using your product.  Running a search on users questions relating to a medical condition shows a range of results:

Knowing patients concerns and how they choose to phrase them presents an opportunity, allowing the marketer to respond to these search terms with timely consumer information in the form of well optimised pages on your own website, driving traffic and increasing consumer confidence.

Telligent is a specialist social media platform which aligns consumer engagement with brand management.  It provides extensive analytics to track ‘soft’ measurement of engagement to prove ‘hard’ results from social engagement including measuring sentiment, levels of connectivity, productivity in internal groups and ‘hot topics’.

Partnering with other professional groups or sponsoring social media sites and services may provide access to a rich mine of engagement data.  Telligent’s current clients include the American College of Healthcare Executives, the American Psychiatric Association and the British Dental Association.

5.    Crowdsourcing research and open innovation

Crowdsourcing, engaging a community of people in a task through an open call, was a term first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article.  Howe described how the National Health Museum in Washington, DC, sourced photos of pandemic victims from an exhibition from istockphoto using the ‘wisdom’ (or frequently just the footfall) of crowds to access and deliver affordable services.

Crowdsourcing also links closely with the idea of open innovation, a term coined by Berkley Professor Henry Chesbrough to describe how big corporations need to look outwards to buy in the latest innovations from smaller or more specialist businesses, a model now used by many technology companies including IBM and Google.

Some businesses are developing open innovation through galvanising and organising crowds of specialists. Edison Innovations have a web portal to identify new markets and innovations by tapping into ‘scopers’, the thorn-in-the-side of industry who always point out what could be done better.  The system stems from the belief that most market research is flawed and produces only constant ‘yes’ answers. It exploits the frustration of scopers and benefits from the wisdom of crowds (many who will participate just for the fun of it) which online technologies can harness.  From this pool Edison Innovations develop the idea and sells it to an established business or start-up on a royalty basis.

In a controlled DTC market, your crowdsourcing may be based around inter-sector exchange, connecting and learning from medical practitioners, journalists, researchers or other thought leaders in your field, tapping into both open and closed networks.

Open networks:

Linked In Answers is an open, global forum to pose questions to the world’s largest business network and to stimulate discussion and debate.  By searching against keywords specific to your specialist area and contributing to the discussion, this could help to diffuse criticism or influence opinion about your brand whilst supporting the industry.  It’s a perfect way of flexing your muscle as a thought-leader, in conjunction with a blog or other engagement strategy.

Don’t forget the deceptively simple Twitter Search tool for engaging with, and monitoring the comments of, other thought leaders or influencers in your field.

Closed networks:

You can conduct research with specific users through closed groups using social media networking sites such as Doctors Hangout, but avoid the temptation to hard sell: observe and interact but respect the informality and ethos of the network, as those engaged in conversations through specialist networks or in groups within social-based networks like Facebook are not going there to be sold to in the first instance.

If you are conducting research, online survey tools such as Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo allow you to create a quick and simple online survey which can be easily analysed and segmented.  For closed groups, password protection is a feature of Question Pro.  Participation levels and quotas are hard to achieve for robust research but it can allow for a quicker frame of response to single-topic, immediate issues, and you may be surprised to find out how many people are interested in taking part. People are more likely to respond if they feel their views are being taken into account to progress innovation and development, and they can access the results at the end of the survey to benchmark their own experiences with their peers.

There are many online tools to conduct market research, but the measurement and analysis can be time consuming even when the tools themselves are free or low-cost so usage requires a strategic approach.  If you would like to talk with a digital strategist you can contact us to find out more about how to effectively use these tools and services.

As healthcare and pharmaceutical communication rapidly adapts to changes in regulations and best practices, it is increasingly important to keep abreast of the latest news and events, along with general information sources – as soon as they are published on the Internet. You may already have a good handle on information techniques using RSS, alerts, and mentions, in which case you may not need to read this ‘how-to’ article.

However, with so many new tools and techniques emerging everyday, its always good to see if you can pick up anything new. I’m totally immersed in this world, and yet just the other day I discovered a fantastic new tool which makes it even easier to know what people are ‘asking’ about the pharmaceutical brands that I am watching.

Sometimes it is the not so significant day-to-day changes and lessons being observed and learned through social media, which can be a trigger for implementing new creative and effective communications initiatives in your own organisation.

Isn’t this ‘social media’ considered dangerous territory for Pharmaceutical companies?

While it is true that the rules of two-way social media engagement are not fully specified for pharmaceutical communications teams online, there is of course no regulation to prevent the use of these tools for understanding customer sentiment.

More importantly, it is now possible to be a leader within your field if you have taken a small amount of time to seek out and configure your sources so that you are the one continuously known for having your ‘finger on the pulse’, thanks to your real-time streams of information.

Have you heard of RSS? I know, it is one of those ‘geeky’ technology terms which in themselves can be enough to prevent the uptake of useful services, just because they sound complicated. The good news is, for all the ‘tech-talk’, this is remarkably simple to get into.

You see, the power of the Internet is in the sheer quantity of resources and information that are available. Unfortunately it is this same vastness of information which can make a simple search in your favourite search engine seem overwhelming, especially when there are so many results which don’t have the exact focus you are looking for.

So rather than ‘searching’ for information, I personally let the information come to me.

This simple paradigm shift is essentially what RSS and social media can do for you too.

OK, I’m interested, so how do I set up my information sources?

There are a number of tools which are free to use, and may already be available through a profile or account that you are using.

For example, Google Reader is a simple tool for collecting and sorting the breaking stories from multiple sources. If you have a Google Mail account already, you can simply visit the reader website and log-in to start using the service. If not, you may wish to create a log-in username and password.

You could also use your browser, or one of many other tools that can understand RSS. It is worth mentioning that you may come across more ‘geek-talk’, about ATOM, XML, and so on, but you really don’t need to worry about understanding all that. Just choose one and you are ready to start.

I personally choose Google Reader to manage my interests in work related ‘blogs’, news sources, updates on events, and to occasionally discover other people that are interested in the same things as me, or to have conversation about topics.

Make it personal, for my interests are not your interests

Given that you are interested in healthcare, you can browse to find what are called ‘feeds’ (which just means ‘information streams’) that you may want to read or ‘digest’ every day, or every week, or whenever you have time to take a look.

When you find a ‘stream’ or ‘feed’ that looks like it has regularly interesting content, you may wish to ‘subscribe’ or ‘follow’ that information source. Perhaps you would also like to give the stream a ‘tag’ or organise it into a folder for convenience.

Say you type in ‘pharmaceutical marketing’. You will see a list of websites that have ‘RSS feeds’. All that means is that the content from the website can also be read away from the website through syndicated ‘readers’. My preference is to choose the ones that have a lot of people subscribing, and are regularly updated. I like to have a trial period, and if I find that the content is not relevant most of the time, or too frequent, or in any way not what I want to be reading – I simply unsubscribe.

Too much information, I’m being bombarded here

It doesn’t take long to find lots of good content, so much so that you can wonder how to read it all. I find that sorting the various streams into folders helps me to prioritise content.

For example, I am generally interested in quite a few things that are not related to my work. I therefore have a folder for ‘Innovation and invention’, another for ‘electric vehicles’, another for ‘environmental economics’, and so on. I might only take a look at these non-essential folders once per week, however my Government and Healthcare feeds are read nearly everyday.

How else can I find information?

As you surf the ‘Net, you may come to a website or an article that you find very compelling – and you see that the website has a variety of other pieces that you would have been interested to know about – when they were first published.

So you can look for the RSS icon, which could be in a number of places. It is usually an orange coloured icon, with a series of waves coming from a dot. The most standard version looks like this;

However, don’t be surprised if some websites have a more creative interpretation of the RSS icon. Look at some of these:

It may instead be up next to the website address, such as in the following example (note that this one is blue – but still follows the same design idea;

By clicking this icon, you will be asked how you want to subscribe to the feed.

Because I use Google Reader, I would usually add the feed to my Google Reader account.

You might already be publishing your own information feed

Did you know that you yourself may also be providing a feed to others? If you use Twitter or any other type of social media tool, there is a good chance that behind the scenes there is a RSS feed associated with it.

Just visit your page and you may notice that there is a ‘RSS icon’.

How else can I keep up to date with the latest healthcare information

Twitter and Friendfeed

Many people are starting to realise that Twitter is useful for business as well as pleasure. It is certainly one of the most concise and immediate ways of communicating with a lot of people. If you are not sure how it works, or haven’t yet had a go, please read our no-nonsense guide to using Twitter. You may find that there are a lot of useful sources on Twitter who are providing relevant information, even if you aren’t ready to engage in Twitter conversations.

Alerts

Another useful tool (again by Google) is the alert function. When I am working with a brand I immediately set up alerts so that I can monitor any search results that may be picked up by search engines. It is somewhat primitive, and could result in a lot of emails that you can’t always stay on top of – but if you create a couple of rules, they can be sorted and kept away from your day-to-day and more urgent/essential communication.
http://www.google.co.uk/alerts

Social Mention

It is somewhat similar to Google Alerts, however this has a particular focus on ‘mentions’ in conversations using social media. Try doing a search for one of your brands. After a short period, you will find some interesting results… and wow, there is an RSS feed icon if you would like to subscribe to the results.

http://www.socialmention.com/

Commercial tools

For the most serious and robust approach, there are commercial tools which enable real-time tracking of the influences and issues happening online. No one tool does everything well, so generally your digital strategists will have access to a suite of tools which enable them to keep an eye on the world wide web, from various perspectives.

In any case, if you would like to talk with a digital strategist you can contact us to find out more about these tools and services.

While it may seem that adverse event (AE) reporting is an obstacle to the take-up of social media by pharmaceuticals, it seems that in reality, there is very little cause for concern.

Download this free whitelabel slideshow to use or customise for your internal presentations.

Here is a simple truth. A pharmaceutical company needs to sell its products so that it can continue to operate profitably and fund activities such as ongoing research and development.

As with any commercial organisation, customers are usually initially introduced to products via word of mouth, editorial content, or advertising. If we accept this premise, it is possible to move onto the serious business of strategically planning the ultimate customer journey, from initial exposure to the brand, through to the purchase of a pharmaceutical product through a pharmacy, albeit in full compliance with relevant regulatory constraints.

The idea of customer relationship management is old, and the customer journey is a model that goes back to early days of retail. The concept is that a customer should ideally grow in allegiance or loyalty to the brand over time. Along the way there will be peaks and troughs as they are satisfied, or inadvertently unsatisfied, with the experience of interacting with the brand.

In reality, there are many different types of customer journey, and, in the case of pharmaceutical companies, the various touch points with the brand can be very indirect. Consider a scenario such as a prescription-only medicine prescribed to a patient by a healthcare professional.

So how does a common journey transpire:

At each point in the journey, various sources can influence the customer’s perception of the brand. A pharmaceutical company needs to plan for optimum engagement at every one of these touch-points, and be the primary positive influence, without breaching government regulations or guidelines about pharmaceutical advertising.

Bear in mind that the specific journey will depend upon not only the individual consumer, but also factors including the regulatory frameworks within which the brand is experienced – in particular whether direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing of prescription medicines is allowed – and whether the brand in question is a prescription-only or over-the-counter medicine. In non-DTC environments the customer might be seen as somebody other than the patient, such as the prescribing healthcare professional or the healthcare service paying for the medicine – such as an NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) in the UK.

Yet even in a non-DTC environment such as the UK or Europe, where a pharmaceutical company is not allowed to advertise its brands to consumers, the boundary-less nature of the Internet is such that it is highly likely the consumer will have been exposed to the pharmaceutical brand when searching online for information about a health issue.

With this in mind, a digital engagement strategy will help the pharmaceutical company to set goals and develop a goal funnel which shows how and why individuals experience a change in loyalty over time.

Commercial enterprise are comfortable using customer relationship management (CRM) systems to identify leads, conversions, and ultimate revenue, and they want a tangible pipeline on which they can base other business decisions.

Sometimes the goal is not necessarily a sale as such. It could be that the pharmaceutical company needs journalists to write more editorial about the company. It could be that healthcare professionals are choosing to prescribe or recommend a competitor product because they are themselves not sufficiently loyal to the brand, or not fully aware of a product’s benefits.

Whatever the goal, there is an associated ideal customer journey and goal funnel that can be developed to measure and learn from.

Contact one of our healthcare specialists to find out how you can increase pharmaceutical sales through engagement strategy.

Marketing and communications departments, external agencies, senior management and the IT department within pharmaceutical companies, have somehow found some common language around which they can communicate. ‘Hits’, ‘Visitors’, ‘Bounces’, and ‘Repeats’ have been some of the so-called measures of an online success or failure. Yet in today’s world of digital engagement, these numbers have so little consequence compared with the insights now available from true indicators of success.

In reality, is it actually important how many people visit your website? Does this indicator really have a lot of meaning?

A new frontier in measurement

When Google Analytics was launched in 2005, a whole new age of measurement came to website managers and marketers. No longer confounded by boring tables and bar charts, the Google Analytics tool provided a simple distillation of the main website metrics on a dashboard, so that any person with access could simply see “are we doing better or worse than the last time we looked?”

That is not to say that there have not always been layers of detail which conscientious marketers have been able to interrogate to gain extra insights.

• Which pages did they arrive here from?
• Where did they go from here?
• How long were they here?

All of these queries could be investigated to gain a greater understanding of what works or might not work for any web page.

Functioning funnels and goal setting

Measurement really started to step up when the concept of ‘goal funnels’ was introduced. A goal funnel is a predetermined path that a marketer expects or wants visitors to take on the website. It usually results in an action. Perhaps to download a paper, or to sign-up to a newsletter, or to vote, or to make a phone call, and so on.

The beauty of the goal funnel is that the marketer can see clearly how different visitors react at each stage of the prescribed journey. Some may leave early in the process. Some may go right through to the end, and then suddenly depart. All of these measurable events create an opportunity to glean even more meaning from the people that are interacting with the brand online.

• Why didn’t they complete the last step?
• Where did they go instead?
• Is is something we said or asked of them?

The creation of goal funnels means that you know where there are gaps or weaknesses in your customer journey. Continuous refinement of this funnel will inevitably lead to a streamlined and efficient conversion process, which can only lead to improved return on investment.

Real-time usability studies

In the past, if you wanted to do some usability testing, you would commission an external research partner to facilitate live user testing of designs and phrases to determine which had the greatest impact and delivered the best conversion results. Today, it is possible for real-time A/B split testing or multi-variate testing to be happening on your website, all the time. What does this mean? It means that those little uncertainties about your communication strategy or copy can be tested, against alternate versions, to see which of them is the most effective for the actual people that visit your campaign pages online.

Sometimes when you are too close to a subject, it can be easy to start using internal ideas, acronyms, metaphors, and company slang without realising that the people that you are intending to communicate with have no idea what you are saying. More often than not, what we as experts ‘think’ is the best way of communicating, proves to be secondary to another which we consider to be inferior. So with an automated optimisation strategy in place, you can be testing images, headlines, straplines, catch phrases, calls to action, and more. Every minute of every day, and with every visitor. This is not with an unrelated demographic either. This is using very targeted individuals who are actually interested and engaged with your brand, because they have taken some of their precious time to visit your website.

Interception of targeted individuals

Pay per click advertising and digital display advertising are interesting and sometimes appropriate ways to drive targeted visitors to your campaign landing page. With modern trending, benchmarking, segmenting and social media monitoring tools, it is possible to build your own intelligence about the ideal profile of your target visitor. With this bespoke understanding of your market, you can strategically choose how to intercept users in the place where they can be found, using a variety of engagement strategies.

Conversion rather than visits

Whereas ‘visits’ give some sort of tangible indicator of overall exposure, they don’t necessarily tell the truth about ‘who’ or ‘why’ they are there. Far more important is a visit that turns into a meaningful action.

This is the strategic art of measuring conversion.

A conversion can be any number of strategically determined actions, for example:

• Time on page as a conversion goal
  A user who finishes reading an article won’t always click a button or register another event in the browser to indicate that she’s done. In those cases, it may be useful to count a conversion after the page has been loaded in the browser for a certain amount of time.
• Advanced A/B Testing
  This is A/B testing which allows you to compare entire pages against each other, to see which has the better performance.
• Experimenting with dynamic content
  Sometimes you need to use variations of content from a database to see which gets the best results.
• Tracking all movement past the landing page
  In this case, you’re not concerned with the specific action that they’re taking, so much as that they’re actually taking action and not leaving your site after viewing your landing page.
• Improve your newsletter subscription rate
  You can discover the best page design or message for enticing people to sign up for your newsletter.
• Experiment with site-wide changes
  This may involve changing your header content (such as a tag line or a logo), or experimenting with the look and feel of navigation elements or colour choices. Is there a clear winning approach?
• Comparing old vs. new website designs
  When it is time to bring in a website redesign, you can measure improvements in results from a new ‘look and feel’, and fine-tune accordingly.
• Testing the same section across many pages
  Introduce a new section that appears site-wide to see if (and where) it attracts appropriate attention
• Testing many sections across multiple pages
  Have varying content with different calls to action, to see which brings increased engagement
• Counting a conversion when a link is clicked
  Maybe someone visiting the page is not enough, you need them to click a specific link to be counted as a conversion
  
• Counting a conversion when a form is submitted or button clicked
  Perhaps your conversion goal is that a visitor completes a form and submits it, or even that they click a ‘print’ button on the page
  

As with any good return on investment analysis, the most important question should really be: “Of those that visited our website, how many took the action that was expected?” The above examples take the concept of analytics past traditional ‘hits’ or ‘visits’ and into the meaningful area of ‘Are we really engaging online?’.

To find out how you can implement improved conversion strategies online, speak to one of our consultants.

Some marketing is sporadic and disjointed, with one activity seemingly completely disconnected from another – so much so, that for an interconnected world there is confusion about what the message and value proposition actually is. The ‘net’ effect (pun intended), is noise.

Then there are those organisations that, like a symphony orchestra in concert, have every marketing channel and consumer touch-point working together in harmony. Each piece plays a small, but vital, part in the whole experience. Just like an orchestra, each pharmaceutical brand is only as good as the weakest communication channel and the last interaction. Each interaction between the brand and the consumer (or professional, or media) either builds or removes satisfaction. Likewise, if one channel is to be improved, all channels need to be simultaneously improved for the orchestra to continue working in concert.

In the past, each communications channel had a unique strategy and budget for promoting awareness of the brand. Television had a strategy, in-pharmacy advertising had a strategy, billboards and public facing messages had a strategy, the interface with professionals and doctors had a strategy, and so on.

Yet over the past ten years, a slow realisation has dawned throughout the industry that it is increasingly important to intercept responses to broadcast media by ‘bolting on’ an accompanying website. Given that Internet users spend more time online than watching television, it seems that in these ‘bolt-on’ cases the cart is leading the horse.

The simple fact is, we now live in a digital world, and we are all participating in an information media revolution. Any communication initiative needs to start with ‘digital’ at its core, followed by any ancillary offline or supporting broadcast channels.

It is easy for a pharmaceutical company to think that they have a campaign that is not digital. Perhaps if there was an idea for some product placement in a movie script, for example. But that would be a mistake.

All campaigns are digital

Whether the prompt is an advertisement in a cinema, a page in a magazine, or a billboard by the roadside, people will be talking about that campaign – online.

So the new rules of engagement involve providing initial stimulus, followed by understanding and participating in the conversations that result online. This mew model for interaction is not without challenges.

One great challenge for marketers and communications teams is actually keeping the message consistent across all mediums and channels.

Another challenge is that the modern consumer has access to all the world’s information and entertainment. They are no longer ‘fed’ content, as in the broadcast model of old. They increasingly choose how and when they would like to consume information. Because they can be so ‘choosy’, they also need brands to show that they know and understand their needs and buying emotions.

John McKean, in “the Human Touch” proposes an acronym which is easy to remember. It can be thought of as the ART of understanding buying emotion;

1. Acknowledgement
   • You know who I am
   • You know my relationship to the company
   • I am valuable
2. Respect
   • You respect my decisions and way of interacting
   • You will take time to listen to me
3. Trust
   • You are trustworthy
   • You will protect my information
   • You will do what you say you are going to do

This acronym applies as much to a pharmaceutical company which is not selling direct to consumers, as to health-care or well-being companies that are completely public-facing. Everything that a brand says or does will ultimately affect the greater perception of the company. Common sense says that the public ‘feels good’ during interactions with your brand when you:

• Are accessible
• Respond promptly
• Keep your promises
• Are transparent and consistent
• Remember they are humans

In an age of analytics and consumer tracking, we are able to continuously monitor the pulse and emotion of the people that interact with our brand. Brands that are embracing data-driven analytics are able to make informed strategic decisions that are not about “We think…”, but “We know…” In this new paradigm, we cannot think of people as statistics or ‘number’s, but we can extract great intelligence which drives the direction of the business as a whole.

“Our management team is passionate about competing on analytics”
Michael B. Polk, President, Unilever US Inc.

The whole marketing and communications industry, across all sectors, is developing and responding to this changing technological and communication landscape. It is a fairly level playing field, and pharmaceutical companies are poised to grow into a positive and loyal relationship with interested people online. It simply takes small and manageable initiatives that are informed by an overarching company-wide engagement strategy.

An engagement strategy is so much more than a ‘marketing plan’, ‘sales plan’, ‘communications plan’ or any other operational departmental plan. It is nothing less than the very strategic core of the brand – how we will engage with people, and with what channels, and when. The new rules of engagement put ‘people’ and ‘interaction’ at the heart of the business strategy.

In the new rules of engagement, everything is measurable. Therefore marketing activities can now be held accountable to the budgets that they are assigned. As one of the greatest cost centres in an organisation, marketing and communications have for many years occupied ambiguous ground where results are not necessarily directly proportionate to organisational performance. The days of ‘grey area’ have passed, and it is now possible to very concisely assess the effectiveness of any marketing activity, even where it doesn’t necessarily tie to bottom line revenue.

In implementing these new rules of engagement, a good starting point is to identify what you know, and what you do not know. From this, you can commission appropriate research to better understand the people that are interacting with your brand, so that you can listen and learn about how to best engage with them.

Why not freeze that big campaign budget that was destined to disappear into unmeasurable territory, and then consider how that same budget could be strategically applied to deliver increased interaction between the brand and the people, with digital communication at the core.

Making the transformation in a digital and interconnected age need not be difficult, and to find out how to apply the new rules of engagement in your company, you can simply contact one of our consultants now.

The ‘current’ pharmaceutical online

For many pharmaceutical brands, the uncharted waters of online interaction are fraught with regulatory hazards which understandably very few individual employees particularly want to venture near, let alone try to pioneer or start setting new standards.

Some pharmaceutical executives are not necessarily equipped with the complete facts or knowledge to lead their companies into a future of online engagement. The majority have been waiting for someone else to test the boundaries of regulatory bodies, public perception, and competitor backlash.

In the meantime, the online health consumer is moving onwards in leaps and bounds, embracing social media tools in order to find appropriate answers to their own health and well-being questions.

Pharmaceutical brands are now realising that they cannot delay for much longer, and that it is time to join the foray. Knowing where and how to start is another thing altogether. Whilst their creative agencies haphazardly suggest the latest social media fad or trend, justifiably cautious pharmaceuticals are wondering what sound insights will inform their strategic decision-making.

One fundamental aspect of a successful online engagement strategy, is to measure and collect useful data which can be used for benchmarking and for identifying trends in user behaviour.

For a pharmaceutical company, the ‘target market’ is not necessarily as clearly defined as with typical commercial brands. Although it is well known that there is typically a set of messages for Doctors and Physicians, messages for consumers, and a message for journalists, there is also an overarching constraint about which communications initiatives are acceptable and which breach industry guidance.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘current’ pharmaceutical is still in the early stages of experimentation with online media – preferring to rely on the tried and true art of traditional ‘above-the-line’ messaging.

The ‘future’ pharmaceutical online

Jumping forward in time, the pharmaceutical of the future will have long established online marketing and communications strategies, with engagement at the centre. New rules and regulations will be in some cases enforced and in others relaxed, and the dust will have settled to some extent over the issue of engaging directly with consumers using the Internet.

Most of a pharmaceutical’s communications and promotional budget will have shifted away from above-the-line (as we know it), because the Internet will itself be the primary ‘above-the-line’ medium. For example, television is already converging with the Internet, and Google are even offering Adwords placement for TV programmes in the US.

Targeted behaviour-specific content, cause-related interactive portals, search interception, product placement, and conversation participation will be mainstays of a future communication strategy.

It may be that the Internet will no longer be thought of as a ‘computer connected to a wall’ – but as a piece of wearable clothing, or an in-store billboard, or a house. As is already happening, the Internet will no longer be thought of at all, but rather the focus will centre on the resource and convenience of an instantly searchable and interconnected world.

Most importantly, there will be SuperCallaGigaFlops of data sitting on servers, which will tell a clear story about the human interaction and general perception of the pharmaceutical brand. The history of related current affairs, the impact of a product launch, the discovery of a new compound, a merger or acquisition; all of these events and the consumer’s responses will reside in the data like age-rings in a recently felled tree.

Yet the pharmaceutical of the future will have more than just data residing on computers or in drawers, they will have trained and informed internal resources who are equipped to garner competitive insights which give them an edge. After all, age-rings from a tree are of little insight unless a person has the analytical expertise to read and interpret the trends and variations over time.

“For every leader in the company, there are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kinds of decisions because they’re fact-based decisions.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Such companies will have real-time and continuous monitoring of all that is said and done online in reference to their brand. Their responses will be instantaneous when an event warrants company action – for the entire culture of the company will have understood and integrated with the preferred communication needs of tomorrow’s consumer.

Preparing for the future

The ‘future’ described above is not a far-fetched imagination of a world decades from now. It is very much on our doorstep. Some pharmaceuticals understand that they can win the race by preparing for and embracing the interconnected world now on the ground floor, such that they are positioned to surely overtake their rivals.

So what can be done today?

Start measuring everything and invest some time and effort in ensuring that your marketing and communications team ALL understand how to use and interpret analytic or metrics information. If the extent of your company’s internal reporting consists of ‘Hits’ and ‘Unique visitors’, there is an entire world of insight and strategic direction that already awaits.

Many great free tools are now available, many of which have yet to be implemented in a meaningful way in the pharmaceutical industry.

Unfortunately, relying on external agencies to provide summary sheets of all the ‘positive results’ from a campaign, gives an unnaturally distorted picture and does not provide the opportunity to learn from the areas that could be improved. Tomorrow’s pharmaceutical wants to know both the good and the bad, so that their continuous improvement methodology will enable them to incrementally gain a lead in areas such as positive brand exposure, increased loyalty, positive word of mouth, and so on.

Begin the journey today

This very day, you could influence your company’s intelligence and help to pave the way for informed strategic insights in the future.

1. Ask a digital strategy consultant to show you how you could take control of your analytics
2. Book some training for your team so that they ALL understand and can interpret analytics
3. Conduct a workshop to define the types of goals and strategies which you want to measure into the future

Why not contact us and speak to one of our consultants.