Bill Harriss
Pharmaceutical companies are slowly winning the battle to halt the FDA’s efforts to regulate drug promotion on the internet and through social media. The Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) and Pfizer filed a brief with the U.S. District Court in April requesting to limit the FDA’s guidance to prevent the free speech of drug manufacturers on social media sites such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
For over 15 years, pharmaceutical companies have been conducting multiple CRM programs to prospects and providing loyalty programs to patients. On the web, they have a decent understanding of tracking methods, such as page views, clicks, bounce rates and time on site. However, analytics will be quickly evolving beyond clicks and simple reporting of CRM campaigns. With the onset of social media, it’s a perfect opportunity for the industry to analyze both online and offline data, thus uncovering patterns in patient/prospect behavior and increasing conversion/adherence rates.
So given the use of free speech on the internet and in social media, pharmaceutical companies can use this digital domain to obtain and analyze behavioral insights of patients and prospects to answer the following questions:
- What content and pages on the website are prospects most likely to look at in order to take action and visit their physician?
- Which prospects would fulfill a prescription after visiting a website or social media site?
- Does an unbranded or branded social media site result in an increased ROI?
- What is the life cycle of behavioral interaction of a prospect across multiple channels? How does this result in a prescription?
- Does a social medium influence a patient’s adherence to a drug?
The bottom line is that the social media revolution occurring in the pharmaceutical industry could open up a wealth of opportunities for marketers, helping them to understand their patients/prospects on a new level and supporting the fact that no data should ever be left behind. Certainly this is a marketer’s dream come true! It’s like developing a “supply chain” of data. It takes what marketers have done in traditional database marketing and creates a new way to integrate the information, resulting in different, new insights.
About the Author:
Bill Harris is a Practice Leader in the Healthcare and Consumer Markets for SIGMA Marketing Group. Connect with Bill on , or follow him on .
