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pharmafile | March 26, 2007 | Feature | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing |Â Â e-marketing, marketing, marketing mix, new mediaÂ
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
Overexposure of e-detailing gave a poor response in many cases in 2006 and made many marketing and product managers nervous to invest heavily in this area.
What should a product manager consider when looking to use e-marketing?
Quality above quantity – and learn the lessons from the B2C market.
Placing a good message in front of a GP who has expressed an interest in a therapy area (by searching on the medical search engine SearchMedica, for example) will provide far more value for money than mass marketing to an untargeted audience.
Sponsored links and logos are customised and placed on the results page when relevant to the search done to achieve high click-through rates (CTR).
Where does e-marketing figure in the marketing mix?
It needs to feature very prominently.
Doctors spend 16 hours a month online – eight times more than they spend seeing pharmaceutical representatives.
Therefore, if pharma companies are not investing the effort in ensuring their print/sales rep messages are being mirrored online, then they are missing an essential piece of the jigsaw.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
Absolutely. Ninety seven per cent of GPs use the internet to find work-related information, so there is a great need for pharma to ensure all materials are accessible online in a targeted and measurable way.
Veronique Cotrel, Head of online, SearchMedica UK, part of CMPMedica
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
Because so many metrics are available for e-marketing and so many ROI analyses have been performed, we often get pushed into corners to defend these measurements. However, when you go back to the business and try to benchmark this performance against other activities, the data is all too frequently not there to support what we already do.
Our challenge is to step out of this corner and embed e-marketing as a trusted part of the mix and stop it being an isolated standalone activity vulnerable to the first budget cut of the year.
There are so many variables when you undertake e-marketing work. You can deliver an excellent e-detail programme to the right number of target physicians, but get sub-optimal results as the offline campaign is weak. We often expect too much and ask this channel to do the impossible, such as moving out of targeting non-prescribers and into prescribers, and we are really setting ourselves up to fail.
Another challenge for e-marketing is to use the internet where it will add most value to stop piloting and just do it.
What should a product manager consider when looking to use e-marketing?
E-marketing works most effectively when seamlessly integrated into offline campaigns. Don't use e-marketing to use up spare budget or because a vendor has shown you some fancy material. Use it to solve real business issues, such as increasing share-of-voice (SOV) and reaching priority low-see or no-see physicians with marketing messages. The channel works best when you run multiple programs over months, e-details in waves, threaded online discussions and e-CME (to name a few).
You will get best success when this is integrated with fieldforce activity and the recording of online interactions in CRM systems. This may sound a leap too far for some today, but you can aim for this over time.
What dividends has AstraZeneca seen in the use of e-marketing?
Effective campaigns can deliver increased market share and positive ROI. Influencing the depth and breadth of prescribing across brands and customer segments is entirely possible with this channel.
There are numerous softer measures, but in reality, it's only really an increase in sales which is taken seriously by senior management.
Where does e-marketing figure in the marketing mix?
In many companies, it is seen as a standalone activity and is not embedded. All too often, planning is based around tweaking last year's plan and adding a few nice-to-have extras, rather than looking at the key issues and strategic objectives and deciding on how best to deliver them.
Although pharma is innovative in the development of new products, that innovation-based culture frequently does not extend to marketing activities, which seems incongruous.
Pockets of e-marketing best-practice do exist, usually based on the enthusiasm of a particular brand manager/leader which they take with them to other brands.
Frequently, it is the brands with little or no fieldforce support that have embraced the channel with greatest enthusiasm – a small budget without the luxury of FTEs certainly encourages creativity.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
I would say: does pharma have a future without e-marketing?
Our customers are embracing this channel whether we do or not, and the statistics are compelling about their access to the internet and time spent online.
With the cuts in fieldforce numbers finally becoming a reality, senior managers need to look at cost-effective ways of maintaining SOV – how else can it be done?
I predict that the tipping point has finally been reached with e-marketing in pharma and this channel is finally going to get the attention it deserves.
Helen Harrison, E-marketing manager, established brands, global marketing at AstraZeneca
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
The challenge is in finding out what works for you, so you invest wisely. There are so many possibilities, it is very easy to make mistakes.
Share-of-voice and access are issues in e-marketing as in traditional marketing This means you must provide valuable materials that are engaging and specific to the physician's needs, yet still meeting brand objectives.
What is the first step for a product manager looking to e-marketing?
Look at solutions that are capable of integrating into an existing marketing strategy rather than replacing it.
Where does e-marketing figure in the mix?
E-marketing should not be a strategy in itself but a means to deliver within a marketing strategy that considers all channels. It can complement other marketing activities where it can achieve what they cannot.
Executives sometimes worry that technology is trying to replace the sales rep, when it can actually improve salesforce effectiveness.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
Yes. A growing future.
We tend to overestimate the potential of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. The increasing ability to receive new media over broadband and on different devices will continue to have a huge effect.
Mark Millar, Managing director, PraeMedica
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
In my view, the three biggest challenges are:
* To raise awareness within the pharma industry of the now established ROI data of e-marketing initiatives.
* To ensure that marketing budgets are distributed on the basis of proven return, rather than traditional marketing assumptions.
* To ensure that e-marketing is seen as an essential part of the marketing mix rather than an optional extra and one that must be integrated with existing activities.
What should a product manager consider when looking to use e-marketing?
They should first clearly identify what objectives they expect the e-marketing campaign to achieve for their brand. Not all e-marketing is the same and even small changes in how it is delivered can have a big influence on the return achieved – so they should get their potential suppliers to show hard evidence of the effectiveness of their offering.
They should then work closely with the chosen supplier to ensure that the e-marketing activities can effectively meet their objectives, making sure these activities are adaptable to the needs of the brand.
Where does e-marketing figure in the marketing mix?
E-marketing is not a stand-alone activity and needs to be fully integrated into the rest of the marketing mix.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
Undoubtedly – I think with the changes that are being seen in the industry, such as reduction in salesforce size and cuts to marketing budgets, much greater use will be made of e-marketing in the future.
Steve Doyle, Marketing manager, OnMedica
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
To get the industry to take e-marketing seriously. Does any brand in the industry have a defined digital strategy or an appointed strategic digital agency?
Most e-projects are developed ad-hoc and often handed to the most junior member of the team to cut their teeth on.
It wouldn't happen with PR or advertising, so why such a poor attitude to such a valuable resource as e-marketing?
A product manager considering the use of e-marketing should ask themselves the same basic marketing questions you would consider in using any marketing mechanism: what's your objective? who's your audience? is this a good route to my target audience? is it in line with brand strategy? how is it going to impact sales or profit?
Once these have all been answered satisfactorily then, and only then, its time to think of a digital execution.
Where does e-marketing figure in the marketing mix?
Digital crosses all disciplines: PR, medical education and advertising most agencies claim to have e-marketing offerings, so my (admittedly biased) opinion is that digital should be one of the core parts of the mix and not only that, there should be a designated specialist agency to liaise and work in partnership with all other agencies to ensure a consistent and strategic use of digital.
This approach will help clients to improve end product quality and drive down overall costs.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
With access to doctors at an all-time low, rep numbers being slashed, advertising spends halving and new ABPI pressures restricting traditional promotion routes: the answer has to be yes.
If you combine all those pressures with the fact that the NHS is putting the patient at the centre of healthcare provision and the continued increase of patient- power . then, the answer has to be a very, very loud YES! In fact, the question should be can pharma companies afford not to have a digital strategy in the future?
Wayne Page, Client services director, Big Pink
What are the biggest challenges in 2007 for e-marketing?
In an electronic environment that is rapidly evolving, with growing demands from the target audience, e-marketing channels are going to be challenged to stay fresh and continue to meet the emerging needs of clinicians.
What should a product manager consider when looking to use e-marketing?
He should look for companies that have a successful track record of engaging the target audience. This is the most important factor.
The main critical success factors can be defined as:
*Therapy area exclusivity within the channel
*Demonstrable ROI track record with a mechanism in place to demonstrate sales impact
*A multipurpose channel that provides a useful resource tool for clinicians
*The ability to direct appropriate promotional messages based on targeted audience segmentation.
*Integrating with other communication channels to deliver true multi-channel marketing, where e-marketing strategy supports other channels rather than competing with them.
The ultimate channel is integrated into the clinician's work-flow, so that as marketers, we are not asking the clinician to do something that they are not already doing.
Where does e-marketing figure in the marketing mix?
E-marketing is often the channel of choice to access hard-to-reach prescribers.
E-marketing channels can be un-intrusive yet highly effective as long as they meet the critical success factors.
Within the mix, e-marketing can be the glue that holds the pieces together by supporting other promotional tools and seamlessly transferring the clinician from one channel to another.
Does e-marketing have a future in pharma?
E-marketing is the future of pharma promotion. More and more, clinicians are gaining their knowledge through electronic channels. But ultimately, it's all about choice for the customer and pharma needs to fit in with changing behaviour of these customers if it is to continue to get in front of the right people.
Dr Steven Bauer, General manager, DXS (UK)
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