If you’re headed to Philadelphia for eyeforpharma, you’re in for a treat. The “City of Brotherly Love” is packed with great restaurants, historical landmarks, and fun things to do. Many of the city’s top attractions are in walking distance of the conference venue, so there should be time to take in at least a little of the local culture before and after sessions.
Here are our suggestions for fun in Philly:
Before the World Wide Web made information access so simple, communicating could be a laborious process. If you needed to call someone or mail a letter, the phone book was your best option. Upcoming generations may not realize it, but “yellow pages” involved actual, physical pages before it was a URL.
Answering machines solved outreach obstacles to a point, but prior to their existence, you had to hope someone was on the other end or just keep trying.
One of the insights that arose from the 2018 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference was “You must operate as a health system, not just call yourself one.” That’s a difficult task, especially for large systems that are geographically dispersed across a state—even more so across the nation. It can be equally challenging for small- or mid-tier systems if their current communication strategy lacks key components.
Suppose you’re responsible for email marketing for an established pharma brand with a breast cancer indication. Which of the following metrics would you rather see? Click-throughs from:
If you took your car in for a tune-up and the service manager threw in a set of new tires for free, your first reaction might be excitement. What a deal!
Almost immediately, though, you’d start to question the quality of those tires. Are they new, safe, and reliable? How will they handle in bad weather or on a windy mountain road? How long will they last?
A MedScape survey conducted last year asked more than 8,500 doctors across 25-plus specialties for their opinion of where they would want to be treated—or where they'd send a family member for treatment—for a complex or difficult condition. The resulting insights are helpful for understanding what physicians look for in health systems when referring their own patients.
At the top of the list was having medically-respected physician expertise (42%). Access to leading technology (10%), and low error rates (7%) also were important. Other anecdotal factors surveyed physicians relayed were "on the cutting edge of new treatments and technology," "good leadership; it improves quality of care at a specific hospital," and "best outcomes, usually due to a high number of cases seen in that hospital."
This is the final article in our “Pharma and Digital Ad Fraud” series, which has considered a range of issues related to non-human website traffic, including bot creation, bot detection, and fraud prevention.
These days it’s hard not to be alarmed about digital ad fraud. Bots make up more than 50 percent of all web traffic. Digital ad fraud is predicted to cost $19 billion in 2018. Huge bot networks are readily available for rent, and bots convincingly masquerade as human.
Fortunately, advertisers, marketers, and technology companies are joining forces to improve the accountability of digital media. Here’s a quick look at what accountable media means for pharma marketers.
In the 1990s, a 3D craze took hold in part thanks to Magic Eye® 3D images. If you’ll recall, these images are designed so that viewers unveil three-dimensional illustrations by strategically focusing on two-dimensional patterns. While some people have a difficult time picking out the hidden figure, others can clearly focus and it is revealed—magically.
Creating a robust “3D physician profile” can’t be left to magic. What makes the difference between a fully fleshed-out physician depiction and a flat representation? The right email list.
Practice makes perfect. That’s what I tell my four kids when things don’t go their way the first time. While it doesn’t always hold true in life (some of us just weren’t meant to be famous musicians), that old adage is definitely applicable to email marketing.
One of the strengths of email marketing is how easy it is to refine campaigns over time – by improving messages, narrowing targets, and applying the insights gleaned from one deployment to the next. As the following image illustrates, comprehensive industry data is the key.
The literal meaning of the phrase “straight from the horse’s mouth” is “from the highest authority” or “from the original or most reliable source.” Its origin was in horse racing, as in "I got a tip yesterday, and if it wasn't straight from the horse's mouth, it was jolly well the next thing to it." Now, of course, the phrase is common in any context that requires assurance and certainty.
Does your email list contain email addresses straight from physicians’ mouths? It jolly well better.
Our “Pharma and Digital Ad Fraud” blog series examines essential issues related to digital pharma marketing. Previous blogs have discussed good and bad bots, blacklisting and whitelisting, bot generation techniques, and most recently, two simple ways to reduce the risk of ad fraud.
This week we’ll look at the relationship between bots, web analytics, and marketing planning.
Data, by nature, doesn’t seem personal. It’s all numerical variables and coding matrixes, right? Not exactly. When you use that data it as a foundation from which to extract physician insights, what results is highly personalized communications. And, not in the definition of what many health system marketers consider “personalized.” Making assumptions based on aggregated analytics or creating physician personas which you think best fit your brand heads you down the path Evan Magliocca’s recent Martech.com article admonishes.
“I hate to break it to you, but you don’t know your customers as well as you think you do. A marketer’s understanding of a customer is usually an ideal view pushed by the brand team—an aspirational view that everyone believes. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Technology is forever in flux. For the most part, advancements make work (and life) easier and more profitable. Google’s recent announcement of its new format, "AMP for Email" is just one more movement forward to help companies better engage with their audiences—something DMD continually strives for with its own technological improvements, including the development of its audience identity management (AIM) platform.
What drives loyalty? If you Google that exact statement, results number over a million. From brand superiority to emotional investment, every “expert” on the topic will give you plenty of advice. While some believe brand devotion ultimately lies with the consumer, Forbes.com contributor Micah Solmon explains in this recent article that loyalty must be two-sided. When companies fail to recognize and embrace the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality, allegiance falters.
The FiercePharmaMarketing Forum is all about the “big ideas” that are moving digital pharma marketing forward. Over the next two days, attendees will explore a wide range of innovative marketing techniques and technologies.
Our role as an email services provider gives us unique insight into new ways pharma brands can use data to engage physicians and ultimately, provide better patient care. So, in the spirit of Fierce 2018, here are three trends we’re watching now:
In part one of this blog, I explained why it’s imperative to ensure your marketing voice is heard above all the noise that accompanies healthcare recruitment. One way to accomplish that is through a strategic multichannel approach, which, when done properly, allows your voice to become the one of reason.
The first two traits of successful multichannel marketing I discussed were:
Next week I’m headed to New York for the FiercePharmaMarketing Forum, a two-day conference that aims to help pharma marketers put the latest marketing techniques into action. Speakers from leading pharmaceutical companies will share their experiences using new technologies to implement a variety of marketing programs, including branded and unbranded, DTC, and social media. I’m particularly interested in the following sessions:
A world that’s increasingly dependent on technology cannot exist without glitch. Remember when a scheduling snafu gave all American Airlines pilots Christmas day off? Or the Apple software issue that repeatedly rebooted certain iPhones for no apparent reason? Just last week, JPMorgan suffered through a nearly three-hour window of clients seeing a different customer's account after signing in.
Let’s not forget the administrative-based delivery debacle that forced over 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken stores to temporarily close in the UK and Ireland, resulting in widespread panic.
