- 29 November 2007
- Author: Onyx Health
- Posted in: e-Marketing
- Tagged under:
Pushing and Pulling – the fight to get a doctors attention
Can you remember life before Google? The results of our searches were largely ruled by Yahoo and those website owners who paid significant amounts of money to get links to their sites appearing high on our search pages. Google’s searches changed all that. Now we get to search for the information we want. The Google guys realised very early on that people wanted information relevant and customised to their personal needs, and this is exactly why their search has become such a global phenomena.
Whilst with the help of Google we have got our searches sorted out, we are still inundated with promotional e-mails enticing us to websites. We are living our lives in “information overload.”
In the early part of the decade we saw a shift in traditional healthcare communications, as peer reviewed journals went online. However in recent years there has been an explosion of new sites targeting doctors with medical education and promotional materials. Only recently Doctor Magazine launched their internet portal, following in the footsteps of GP and Pulse and whilst the likes of Doctor.net may only send one e-mail a week to doctors other companies are not as mindful.
It is not unusual for a GP to get as many as 35-50 promotional e-mails a day. So just as we have seen many doctors closed their doors to the army of sales reps will they soon be diverting all promotional e-mails to their junk boxes?
In the very same way we all jumped on to the Google search engine bang wagon, those familiar with maximising the internet’s capacity have now moved onto Google alerts and RSS feeds. Both allow you to customise the information you receive and control exactly how and when you receive that information.
In healthcare all the leading peer review journals including the Lancet, BMJ and many patient groups have RSS feeds, which allow a user to receive regular updates on the topics that they are interested in, rather than have to wade through irrelevant e-mails. Doctors in the UK are only just catching on to this service but its use is likely to increase as doctors further capitalise on the benefits of using the internet for eCME and clinical purposes.
So, what can pharma companies do to maximise RSS feeds and Google alerts? Firstly, test out the service yourself, register to receive Google alerts for your brand and see just how much information is out there. Look at where you keep information about your brand online, ensure there is an RSS link, start using the RSS logo whenever you put a website address on a piece of promotional material to encourage doctors to use it to receive regular updates about your product.