Take a chance, but be cautious.
Do something new, but hold on to what’s familiar.
Spend less, but deliver big.
Be an industry leader, but show me someone else who did it first.
This is the balancing act that challenges many pharmaceutical marketers today. Here’s one answer: Cookie your target audiences, but give them total control.
Every day each of us uses the Internet for business and personal reasons. With each use, our digital fingerprint builds in the background. It’s the way of our new digital world. It affects us all. So why, when it comes to pharmaceutical marketing, is understanding someone’s digital experiences seemingly so taboo?
One reason, of course, is fear of violating regulatory guidelines. Another is concern for negative customer perceptions (and corresponding repercussions) due to privacy issues. And a third is the absence of clear FDA guidance with regard to digital media generally. To be sure, these are significant factors that unfortunately drive many business decisions today regardless of industry. But a little creativity goes a long way, and executing the smartest, most respectful campaigns possible is one viable solution.
So, be an innovator and create the best possible digital program that reaches your targets, and do it within the guidelines of established best practices.
Create a sophisticated mix of targeting that best achieves the proper connections with your different audience segments, and leverage contextual, interest-based, profile/registration data, and list-matching/authentication targeting methods.
Use strategic targeting to maximize exposure and connectivity with your desired audience, and follow the lead established by other respected (and regulated) industries including banking, finance, and insurance.
When you connect with your audience targets in novel ways that leverage elements of individualized understanding or as part of an audience segment group, you greatly improve your chances of creating more effective, lasting relationships than ever before. This is the power of digital media and the future of digital CRM.
So, take that cautious first step.
- Do something familiar but in a creative new way.
- Leverage your budgets, but deliver big ROI.
- Forge a new path in pharma along the course already successfully established elsewhere.
- And in the process create unprecedented success for your brand that will have a substantial positive impact on share, revenue, and the bottom line.
