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In the marketing world, a “hand-raiser” can be summed up in a simple sentence: A person who identifies himself as a prospective customer, to a company, by volunteering contact information. For the marketer, receiving that interest is a choice position to be in.

Physicians who are viewing online job posts are, in a way, raising their hands. But, until recently, unless they took the extra step to hand over their personal information, you couldn’t know for sure which physicians were in the crowd. Rather, it was just a sea of hands—undeterminable through a foggy landscape of aggregate data.

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.

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:

Doing digital marketing in a world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook can make even the most seasoned pharma marketer feel like a Lilliputian. Our individual campaigns are essential to our brands, but they’re inconsequential in the total scheme of the technology that underpins digital commerce.

In other words, the giants make the rules, and we have to play by them. That requires being nimble enough to stay on top of each successive change.  

This is the third blog in our "Pharma and Digital Ad Fraud" series. In the last few weeks, we’ve explored the differences between good and bad bots, as well as the strengths and limitations of blacklisting and whitelisting. Today, we’ll look at some of the ways bots are created and why they’re so prevalent.

Bot traffic now exceeds human traffic across the Internet, especially in pharma. According to our research, 60 percent of total traffic on some healthcare websites is bot-generated.

Where do all those bots come from? To find out, I took a journey to the dark side of online publishing and bot generation. Here’s what I learned.

In 2018, it would be inconceivable for a product or service brand not to have a web presence. The immediate availability of information over the web now means it stands to influence awareness and engagement, with an expanding role in the sales process. 

While retailers face challenges as regularly as the pharma industry when constructing a customer-friendly website, pharma has much more to consider in terms of meeting HCPs needs. Whether a shoe brand runs small or true-to-size fit is much less complicated than ensuring a drug profile is comprehensive, up to date, and readily accessible to those who seek it out.

Pharma marketing can feel a bit like a game of Clue. No matter how carefully you plan your strategy, once the game (or your campaign) gets rolling, it’s difficult to know who is doing what:

• Was it Dr. Chan outside the OR reading a clinical trial on her iPad?
• Or Dr. Meyer in his office viewing a journal article on his laptop?
• Perhaps Dr. Lewis in the hallway downloading a co-pay offer on his mobile?

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the monthly Association of Medical Media (AMM) meeting in New York. Like most media professionals, AMM members are very concerned about digital ad fraud.

This is the second blog in our “Digital Marketing to Physicians” series. The first blog addressed email deliverability. Today we’ll explore how health systems can use email marketing and audience identity management technology to engage with physicians.

Print still reigns in healthcare marketing to physicians, but digital marketing is gaining ground. Recent research from Kantar Media shows that although 61 percent of physicians prefer to read the print version of medical journals, the number of physicians who read both the print and digital versions increased from 68 percent in 2016 to 73 percent in 2017.

Physicians, pharmacists, and other healthcare providers are all too familiar with drug and medical device shortages. The problem has been increasing for at least a decade, and the current situation in Puerto Rico has brought it front and center once again.

As the New York Times recently reported, many pharma and med device companies have factories in Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria devastated the territory’s power grid, the manufacturing capacity at many of those facilities was dramatically reduced. Consequently, a number of widely used products, including surgical staples, plastic tubing, Tylenol®, and the HIV drug Prezista®, are now in short supply.