No one cares about you - they care about themselves and what you can do for them.

That is the big lesson for the shift in marketing over the past 10 years. Online marketing is not about getting attention by having the most creative concepts. It’s about having the most creative strategies. And that requires a whole new approach.

If you build a beautiful branded website all about your product, they won’t come. The whole model is not about reach and frequency - it’s all search engine optimization. You have to attract them to your site, engage them while they are there by answering their questions and get them to return by providing real value.

As Josh Klein so clearly said in his blog about television:

“The internet wasn’t built for businesses, it was built to share information, first for the military and later for academics. Business has grown out of this original purpose, but it wasn’t the intention…

The web is not a passive medium. It’s built for engagement.

Why do companies insist on putting up brochureware websites, then wonder why nobody is visiting? Who gave them the right to take up valuable cognitive space without providing anything of value? This brings us back to the line that got axed from my presentation.

‘Nobody cares about you.’”

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Knowing your target audience is a basic rule of marketing. For all the new technologies that sprout up each day, this fundamental remains true. But can new technologies unlock aspects about your target audience and how can the healthcare industry in particular use this data practically?

In this post, I will show you two techniques for discovering your target audience (along with metrics to back it up) and I will also show you two free resources to get started. (If you are new to demographics or social media, be extra sure to read to the bottom.)

To do all of this, let’s take one audience subset as an example: female caregivers. We assume the Mom set is online, but where are they? Do they use social media tools? What influence do these individuals have online and in the doctor’s office that make them unique?

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I ran across an interesting report this morning from 2006 discussing the rise of “nichebuster” therapies. According to this report, niche therapies are driving future drug growth and incentivizing R&D growth over sales spending. So as long as two years ago, the trend away from the Blockbuster model was recognized as far as therapy development was concerned.

A few highlights from the report:

> To successfully capitalize on the nichebuster model, drugs companies should focus on characterizing the target market, and use targeted marketing spend to access specialist physicians to drive clinical trial progression, approval and successful uptake

> Dependence on blockbuster-generated revenue is set to fall from 2004-2010 as the industry turns to a nichebuster strategy, utilizing increased licensing activity, R&D collaborations and small-scale M&A deals to harness innovation and provide access to niche markets with a high unmet need

> The shift into niche markets is helping drive a more personalized approach to therapy. Central to the development of the nichebuster model is the raised importance of personalized therapies, which is being driven by increased used of diagnostics. This trend is helping to clarify market segmentation and will boost the size of the total drug industry.

The shift in new therapy development comes with a corresponding shift in the way people are using the internet for pharma marketing. No longer just an informational medium, internet strategy has to be integrated into the way business is being done. With niche patient populations forming chronic disease communities online and the increased need to reach specialists with small sales forces the whole model is shifting.

PhRMA, the drug-industry trade group, says it’s banning some of the freebies that sales reps dole out to doctors. This includes pens, mugs, and logo-laden prescription pads. The trade group has outlined it’s position in a comprehensive code of conduct that drugmakers will be encouraged to follow. This is part of a move to further limit the giveaways phama companies have traditionally used to get attention from health care providers. In a news release, PhRMA CEO Billy Tauzin said:

“Although our member companies have long been committed to responsible marketing of the life-enhancing and life-saving medicines they develop, we have heard the voices of policymakers, healthcare professionals and others telling us we can do better.” 

What does this mean for Phama reps and Pharma marketing?  This will increase the speed of adoption of web tactics for reaching doctors.  It will also continue to move marketers to adopt more direct communication, transparency, and good content. How much did the logos on prescription pads really influence physician’s choices anyway? One added benefit of going digital is that more direct education based marketing can be tracked.

Susan Rubenstien of the WSJ notes the code doesn’t tackle one of the touchiest issues: it doesn’t cap how much drugmakers can spend on consulting or speaking arrangements with doctors. The New York Times reports, companies will have to set their own limits and track how much they pay doctors for speaking services. That move could pave the way for compliance with a national registry of payments to doctors by companies, an idea that’s gaining popularity in Congress.

How this will effect the ‘direct to patient advertising through the internet’ vs. the ‘direct to physician’ advertising remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to see budgets begin to shift, don’t you agree?

The image is from the Drug Rep Toys blog, a fun sit filled with lots of other examples of various promotions offered to doctors over the years.

Today’s healthcare organizations are marketing at the intersection of 3 powerful forces: changes in healthcare, changes in communication channels, and changes in how we construct knowledge. It’s a time of great challenge. With so many competitors for your audience, the cost of missed opportunities can run high. But it’s also a time of great opportunity that can enable you to develop relationships and move your organization to new levels.

Healthcare marketers have always understood the value of relationship. This hasn’t changed, but how you build those relationships has changed and nowhere is relationship more critical than in caring for those with chronic diseases.

If being in a relationship means “mutual engagement,” what are the basic building blocks and how do these get translated online?   Here are a few  ideas that seem obvious:

• Trust is always critical online, but it is especially important when it comes to people’s lives and health, as we’ve previously discussed.
• Listening is important if you want to be found through online search, and it’seven more important in keeping the relationship going once your audience finds you.

What are other attributes of good relationship that apply online ? (Here’s a few ideas to get you going and to expand upon … integrity, accountability, responsiveness, community, sharing…)

handshake II photo by Álvaro Canivell

There was a lot of backseat analysis this past week about the different styles of campaigning between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hillary used a more traditional top down approach to managing her “message” with the voters. The Obama camp worked from the ground up to adopt a grass roots approach that set the stage in each state before he got there to campaign. He used the web and social networking in particular to great effect.

Time Magazine observed:

Obama’s Chicago headquarters made technology its running mate from the start.  That wasn’t just for fund-raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter lists—normally a closely guarded crown jewel—to volunteers, who used their own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend minutes of their cell-phone plans to contact every name and populate a political organization from the ground up.  “The tools were there, and they built it,” says Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.  “In a lot of ways, the Dean campaign was like the Wright brothers.  Four years later, we’re watching the Apollo project.”

So, what can we as Phama marketers learn from this? First, it turns out that marketing for drug therapies has a lot in common with marketing for a political candidate. This is especially true when you are talking about niche markets treating chronic disease states. There is the brand reputation, a community aspect, and the fact that the “voting” or “purchasing” is hard to count ahead of time (although you can use IMS data to “poll” drug or therapy choices). Finally, privacy laws make it appropriately difficult for the “marketers” to find out who the “purchasers” are.

So, through transparency and the utilization of your viral marketing capabilities you can build a community around strong ideas.  Just like Barack,  you can use technology in marketing and “brand positioning” to spend less to greater effect.

Manhattan Research recently came out with a new data covering usage trends of healthcare professionals (HCPs). They found that:

• 99% of physicians are online for personal or professional use
• 97% of all physicians are online for professional purposes

The shift shown between 2005-2008 was definitely trending toward heavy online usage rates:

• Conferences: offline -15%; online +11%
• Journals: offline -8%; online +23%
• CME: online +12%
• Medical reference and textbooks: online +15%

Online growth is especially strong in specialty areas. Oncologists and pulmonologists are especially likely to go online during patient consults (usually for the patient’s benefit – pointing out support areas, etc.).

94% of HCPs say they see about 10% of patients bringing in health information from online sources. The result? 50%+ of HCPs say they then spent MORE time with the patient; most of the rest report spending about the same time with their patient, and only a tiny percent spent less time with patients who brought in info gathered online.

There is a definite move toward a 2-way dialogue for marketers. Right now these figure show this is moving faster on the HCP side than the patient side.

HCP participants more also likely to be:

• Primary care physicians
• Female
• Own a PDA/smartphone
• Go online during/between consults
• Slightly younger

Other notes of interest:

• In 2008, 75% of HCPs visited a corporate or product website, though the visits were sporadic. Manhattan Research suggests that these shouldn’t be the main focus of your marketing plan (to the detriment of search engines, society sites, etc).
• Physicians don’t want to totally get rid of the human drug rep.
• Online service portals need great content and integration with your overall marketing plan. Only a few excel at this, including Merck Services (where you can access a live remote rep), Nova Medlink, and Genetech BioOncology.
• eDetailing is trending downward, but HCPs aren’t requesting it less. Rather, there are fewer invitations. (Manhattan Research suggests that some companies may have been burned in past years, but that the real lack is with quality content that integrates the research/learning experience HCPs are really looking for).
• 20% of HCPs use Wikipedia.

Trust is important for all corporate websites but it is especially crucial within the Pharma web community. Pharma must earn trust, it’s not a given. The pillars upon which to build a T.R.U.S.T.E.D. site are: Transparency, Relevance, Usability, Service, Timeliness, Educational, Direct communication style.

Here is a list of things to think about to increase the Trust level for your web presence:

• Be transparent – even when it hurts, if you don’t control your own message someone else will.
• Full disclosure on side effects in easy to read fonts (see above).
• Show the real organization behind your site.
• Show the personalities and people behind your organization.
• Give something away without a direct, obvious, or immediate payback.
• Educate all of your users, this will keep them coming back.
• Walk the walk, if you say you have high service make sure your programs support this message.
• Listen between the lines: What are people not looking at? What are they searching for that your site doesn’t provide?
• Reference your site in offline materials and connect to trusted organizations online; ideally you should have a plan to have trusted organizations connect to you too.
• Manage / create your own relationships with users; this is never something you should outsource.
• Respect cultural differences & use graphics of all types of people.
• Stay away from terms like ‘afflicted with’.
• Know that trust and advertising are inversely related, be restrained with promotional content.
• Respect boundaries.
• Respect your audience’s time.
• Avoid errors, even small ones.
• Make it easy to verify accuracy of info on your site.
• Find your place in the healthcare social network as a trusted partner; this is a big challenge but there is a place for Pharma at the table.
• If you gather information, tell why you want it.
• Make it easy to contact you.
• Look into using HON certification criteria.
• Develop a statement of what your users can expect from you.
• Recognize differences in how experts and users evaluate your site.
• Help your users learn how to evaluate information.

Books took over 500 years to develop a universally understood interface. The first feature length movies were basically filmed stage plays, and it’s taken 80 years to develop from that into the MTV aesthetic. Is it any wonder it is taking us some time to figure out how to design websites?

When we pick up a book, we already know how to manage its particular interface. We all know that we open books from left to right, that there is a table of contents, pages have numbers, and it possibly even has an index. We look right past this to interact directly with the stories or information — the content if you will — housed in the interface.

Movies first looked a lot like plays since that was the primary way audiences processed information generated through a visual narrative. Over the years as creative people experimented with elements like faster cuts, better audio, and special effects to develop a visual shorthand.

We are still in the infancy of interface design for the web. Most web sites are building off the book structure, with tabs that look like a table of contents, and a beautiful “cover”. This assumes that people will come to your homepage first and that you are telling a linear story. With the rise of search, and especially Google, this is not a useful assumption.

There is a fractionization of information going on and our web design should follow. We know from Jacob Neilson that people are goal oriented on the web. Really understanding this means that we don’t design beautiful homepages solely to be pretty. We also don’t use linear structures, metaphoric language, and lots of copy to convey most ideas. The whole user experience is now the brand, and brands are about small interactions.

This transformation of how we experience information using the web is happening faster than we expected, and the marketers who do it the best will be the winners in next few years.

Top photo by domesticat, bottom photo by Hobvias Sudoneighm

There was a editorial in March in the New York Times talking about the extraordinarily high price of Cerezyme. Cerezyme, a drug manufactured by Massachusetts-based Genzyme eases the symptoms for Gaucher disease, a rare, sometimes fatal, inherited disorder that can cause enlarged livers and spleens, anemia, and bone deterioration.

The editorial goes on to say:

The company justifies the high price as necessary to sustain a business that develops drugs for remarkably small groups of patients. Only about 5,000 people around the world are taking Cerezyme, including about 1,500 in the United States. The company makes other very high-priced drugs for patient pools that are even smaller.

The experience with Cerezyme and other biological drugs defies conventional wisdom on drug marketing, which holds that blockbuster drugs — generating revenues of a billion dollars a year or more — are generally those that can be sold to vast numbers of people. But Genzyme has made Cerezyme a blockbuster, with sales of $1.1 billion last year, by charging very high prices for a few thousand patients.

Cerezyme is not alone. There is a growing market of niche biopharmaceuticals that are treating rare diseases, and every year more appear on the market. For diseases that used to kill people there is now hope — in many cases — of maintaining a higher quality of life. This is a good thing. It does require new thinking, however, in how we insure patients, how we market to them, and how we support them.