Will pharma embrace the Web for DTC marketing now?

According to research from eMarketer the pharmaceutical industry has lagged behind mainstream consumer marketers when it comes to using the Internet to reach patients and drive new Rx's.

By Richard Meyer on Feb 19, 2009

According to research from eMarketer the pharmaceutical industry has lagged behind mainstream consumer marketers when it comes to using the Internet to reach patients and drive new Rx's.

The model for most DTC marketers has been to use TV advertising to drive people to the Web while trying to justify the high DTC spend through market research studies. The online strategy was to build a website , sometimes without doing usability studies, and purchase keywords from search engines so customers could find your product and go to your site. However this model ignores several important facts:

1: Patients are empowered today and do not take any marketing message at face value anymore

2: Pharma product websites are the least trusted for medical information (per eMarketer)

Now with marketing budgets being cut by almost everyone one has to wonder if online marketing will be cut at the expense of TV & print? My guess is that online marketing will continue to decline in relevance for pharma marketers for several reasons. First, they don't understand the channel and have hard time implementing because of legal and regulatory concerns. Second; DTC marketers still believe that they control the message and have not acknowledged empowered patients. Finally, in order to ensure maximum ROI for online initiatives spending on infrastructure IT programs has to increase (i.e. Web analytics).

One of the lessons from the Byetta's decline in growth of sales is that pharma needs to monitor buzz on the Internet and respond accordingly in a very fast manner. Services like Nielsen Buzz Metrics can help quantify threats to a brand and as thus allow marketers to address threats before they can hurt the brand. Online marketing is about now and the Internet time is measured in microseconds not days.

DTC marketers have to make better use of the Internet if they want to continue to reach more people will less money. But before they can proceed they need to understand that consumers don't trust their messages anymore and that patients have become consumers of healthcare.