DMD Intelligence

Today’s ultra-competitive marketplace presents the ongoing challenge of recruiting physicians who meet all the criteria for a specific position. Successful recruitment demands precise physician targeting that engages them through personal channels. Whether or not physicians are actively seeking a new job, they may want to keep a proverbial toe in the water by checking out other opportunities. When the goal is to identify the best prospects for an open position, leaving it to chance is simply not good enough.

While Halloween horror is a fun fabrication, there’s a very real terror lurking for pharma marketers--one they may not even realize the magnitude of: spam. A scary unknown is set into motion as soon as you hit the send button. Will your message land successfully in an HCP’s inbox? Or, will it be caught in the frightening spam filter and sent to its virtual grave?

The question is not “Should we send marketing emails during the holiday season?” but rather “When should we send marketing emails during the holiday season?” Understanding open rate trends based on years’ past will help you strategize a deployment that ensures optimal engagement.

Patterns identified during last year's holiday season are expected to stay consistent this year. Take the following into consideration when plotting out your seasonal campaigns.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the annual conference of the AHA’s Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) and was inspired by the conversations surrounding digital engagement.

One topic in particular was the reluctance of some health systems to fully commit to digital as an effective way to communicate with their physician base. It is still inherent for these organizations to use traditional tactics like newsletters, direct mailers, or even print ads – even when digital has proven to produce measurable results.

Advertising has come a long way since the days of “Mad Men”. While there’s still something appealing about taking three-hour lunches and enjoying martinis in-office, the marketing logistics of that age now seem laborious and time-consuming.

You can strategize until you’re blue in the face, but when it comes to content marketing in the health system sphere, how do you know if your efforts are eliciting a profitable return on investment?

Traditional metrics like website page views, scroll depth, and the amount of time visitors spend on your site only provide a broad representation of traffic. Even if you are able to glean a generic synopsis of demographics (gender, locale) or how those visitors arrived at your site, this token data supplies no insight as to what type of content individual physicians are viewing, the CTAs they click, or where they go once they leave your site – all essential ingredients for measuring response and ultimately return.

A common connotation of holiday is taking a break. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a day on which one is exempt from work" and popular synonyms include vacation, day of rest, time off, recess, and one of my personal favorites, gone fishing.

Are you headed to HCIC 2017? If so, get ready to balance a busy agenda with some Texas fun.

The 21st Annual Healthcare Internet Conference is packed with informative sessions on some of our favorite topics, including digital marketing and big data. It’s also being held in one of our favorite cities: Austin.

Some physicians are bookworms. When they visit a medical website, they settle in and devour all the available content. Others are more like butterflies, landing on a website just long enough to sample an article or two before being drawn away by another, more enticing headline.

Physician recruitment may seem like a losing battle. There are so many challenges to first meet—then overcome—in the high stakes and constantly shifting healthcare climate. Faced with a physician shortage that’s estimated to present staggering scarcity by 2025, no room exists for health systems to hire the wrong candidate.

You may not have digital audience identity technology installed on your pharma website yet, but there’s still time to get it up and running in 2017. And, if you need to spend some year-end budget, there’s no better way to get your money’s worth in Q4.  

Physician recruiters are feeling the pain of the medical community’s current state of affairs. A recently released report by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) estimates a shortfall ranging from 34,600 to 88,000 doctors by 2025. By 2030, the deficiency is expected to total anywhere from 40,800 to 104,900 doctors.

One of the most anticipated events in healthcare marketing is right around the corner. The 2017 MM&M Awards will be held next Thursday, October 19 at Cipriani Wall Street.  A few lucky DMD team members will be attending, and like many of you, we’ll be waiting anxiously to hear the winners announced.

It starts with a sniffle, maybe a scratchy throat. Soon fever, chills, and body aches take over.

You have the flu, but maybe you didn’t have to.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does a fair job of educating the public on why getting an annual flu vaccine is the first and best way to protect yourself and your family from the flu. If you’re a physician, you also possess critical specifics on the vaccine. But, pharmacists are often the ones on the front lines administering vaccinations in urgent care, outpatient, and in-store clinics.

This week Frank Lin, DMD’s Chief Technology Officer, and I are at Digital Pharma East talking about audience identity management technology. That’s the data technology that identifies individual HCPs when they visit participating medical websites. 

If you already use a web reporting tool, you may be wondering why you need another. Some of the marketers at DPE have had the same question. After all, services like Google Analytics can give you a pretty good idea how much traffic you’re getting and what content is most popular with your website visitors.

Today’s hyperconnected and digital marketplace has revolutionized healthcare communications. Despite ongoing trends in the digital space, healthcare systems face a constant struggle in establishing an ongoing dialogue with physicians in an effort to limit patient referrals out of system and referral leakage. Even with newsletters, surveys, and other types of information distributed among physicians to encourage a sense of community, the challenge remains: How do you develop and nurture physician relationships in such a dynamic digital environment?

Kids love to build. Previous generations’ Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys were supplanted by Legos, and Legos currently share the construction sphere with digital games like Minecraft. Despite the shifts in technology, the activity remains beloved. There’s something triumphant about taking singular parts and creating a whole, a sensation of accomplishment and success.

Strong hospital-physician relationships are the backbone of a thriving health system. Without them, it’s hard to keep cases in-system, let alone attract referrals from independent doctors.