Brand management, the ability to review what people are saying about your brand, used to be fairly simple, but today the challenge is enormous; blogs, podcasts, micro-blogging, instant messaging, Wiki’s…oh my. For all industries brand management is important, for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry it is business critical at all times and can enter regulatory realms. I know regulatory, that is why I am going to say take baby steps.
This is the same industry that ten years ago told me search marketing is unethical and we will not get it through regulatory. Yes, I am that old. Anyway, we all are aware of the negative perception the general population has of pharma. If you search in the Google results under any pharma brand you will find a number of negative results. In fact, on average, Catalyst finds about 30% of the branded keyphrase SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) are negative. Type “Vioxx” into a search engine, three of the first ten organic results are negative and three of the four paid search results are negative. Perform a test on your brand? What percentage is negative? What percentage is negative when you type in your competitor’s brand name? What is your tolerance policy? Do you have one? Perhaps you should present a policy to the corporation. Pharma Company X Best Practices: -if the SERP results for the brand name are negative by 25% or more, engage in search reputation management. Or if our SERPs are worse than our competitors, engage in Search reputation management.
What is the value?
- Fortunately, all online content leads to one central location, search engines. Whether this content is fact or fiction, the search engines are usually the first place consumers will form an impression of a brand. Manage the results on a SERP and you can better protect your online reputation.
- Secondly, and I know this is more of a giant leap, research you will better understand what people are saying about your brand and condition.
How does it work?
- Monitor your brand keyphrase results in the first five pages of the search engines; categorize them as positive, negative and neutral.
- Leverage your existing assets, optimize these assets. Pharma has patient testimonials, press releases, podcasts, TV commercials, etc. - if these assets are in a digital format, optimize them! Optimize these assets to appear in the search engines for your brand keyphrases. Crowd the negative results off the first couple of pages with your existing assets.
- Paid search: your paid search vendor should be monitoring and notifying the search engines of trademark misuse. Second, buy the top spot for your brand name.
- Domain misspellings and jacking. If you are a popular brand, beware; type in your brand name and really look at the results, far too often there is URL jacking. Folks buy a URL similar to yours and consumers are unaware and click on that link. For example, “Allavert.com”, which is a common misspelling for the the allergy drug Alavert.
- Continue monitoring, continue optimizing.
For more information check out our press release about Reputation Management.
