In real estate, it's “location, location, location.” And for
pharma marketers looking for ways to increase their advertising with a
measurable ROI, the word of the moment appears to be “research, research,
research.” Never was this more evident than during the recent ePharma Summit.
Conference chairman, Paul Ivans of Evolution Road Consulting, set the tone for
the conference with some industry trend slides indicating that 80%of the US is
online and half of these people search the web for health info. Ivans noted
that one-third of these healthcare seekers routinely use social media as part
of their information gathering.
While most of the presenters and attendees agreed that
pharma marketers are not investing online in proportion to the results they are
getting, Microsoft's Peter
Neupert arrived at some interesting conclusions on this
subject during his presentation. Neupert is convinced that pharma isn't
spending enough on
e-research. And once the research is done, a better process
needs to be found to invest marketing funds to achieve the kind of ROI they are
seeking.
Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution and author of the book,
What Sticks, indicated that those companies that have spent the money on
researching how the web improves the marketing mix are already making
adjustments to their media mix. Companies that participated in cross media
optimization studies have invested much more heavily in online tactics after
seeing the results.
Brad Aronson of Avenue A | Razorfish noted that there are
more consumer Rx decisions influenced by peers than by health portals. He told
the audience that over 54 million adults have connected online to others or the
content created by others about their disease or condition.
Dan McKillen is president and CEO of the HealthDay news
service