- 4 January 2008
- Author: Onyx Health
- Posted in: e-Marketing
- Tagged under:
e-Marketing New Year Resolutions Worth Keeping
It is that time of year again when we are all back at our desks full of enthusiasm (well some of us are) and ready to take on the challenges of 2008. The biggest challenge facing the UK pharmaceutical industry is probably how best to develop our sales and marketing strategies to show a good ROI in an ever changing NHS environment.
Last year saw great anticipation, excitement and discussion about e-marketing, with many companies starting to invest in basic activities such as e-detailing and Pfizer making the great leap forward in developing a partnership with SERMO, the US medical social network. We also saw a proliferation of companies offering e-detailing, e-CME and pod and web cast services.
At present we are in the early stages e-marketing, but as the web is likely to become much more important to your customers than it is today, so it will be necessary to integrate the channel into your sales and marketing activities, as the impact of traditional activities continues to be challenged.
To help you with your e-marketing here are some New Year’s resolutions that you may want to consider making.
- Be prepared to change, create ways to identify and listen to marketing signals and look at how you can adapt and respond
- Be flexible and experiment, you need to explore the diversity of online and what it could do for your brand
- Expand the richness of the information about your disease area/brand on the web to get the information to customers at the very moment they are looking for it
- Think broader than e-detailing, many traditional media outlets such as Hospital Doctor and Pulse magazine have made the transition online, how can you capitalise on this?
- Make the most of your traditional marketing activities by including podcasts and webcasts in your programmes to expand your target reach
- GPs and hospital doctors are not the only people online. Nurses, pharmacists and patients are all using the channel
- Open your mind to the value of social networking by:
- Developing your own network
- Participating directly within a community
- Sponsoring or being associated with specific communities
- Supply communities with the information or services they request
- Observe, listen and learn from how participants discuss and behave in relation to your brand
Call Onyx Health to learn more how we can help you develop your e-marketing strategies and programmes in 2008