As Beth Herskovits mentioned in her Pharma Exec article on Apr 18, 2007, Pharma’s Fortunes Fine–For Now, patent expirations are looming and pipeline forecasts are not robust…therefore revenues for the pharma industry will dramatically decrease by 2010-2012. I am hearing rumblings that the industry needs to begin strategizing on how to operate as a smaller, more nimble industry.
Perhaps I can humbly offer an opinion. Many of our client’s website traffic is derived from search engines. Of course, one reason is they are well optimized in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), but also because many people are researching diseases and treatments. I would estimate over 50% of our clients’ traffic comes from the SERPs (of course this varies during a large DTC or DTP campaign).
Consumers are actively searching for health information, in fact research says that up to 95% of people online look for health information. We may need to reconsider how we market to consumers. Awareness and branding on a broad scale are undoubtedly important; however, I don’t think there is a single employee at Catalyst watching TV commercials. Granted we may be a bit biased but the question remains: is the consumer tolerance changing?
Perhaps pharma marketers need to invest more money into search and into a website that responds to a search visitor. We create sites for those that see our DTC ads, yet most of our visitors come from search engines. Every conference I attend (about one a month) I hear pharma markets mention the internet is the most cost effective way to reach a consumer or patient, yet we continue only to invest 5% of our marketing budget to the digital space and there is rarely a “digital strategyâ€.
The future will force us to look at alternatives and perhaps the visionary marketers in the pharma space (and I know there are many out there) will anticipate this shift and begin investing in a different marketing strategy. Perhaps digital strategy will drive the marketing strategy in 2010?
