DTC 360

TV or Twitter?
By Richard Meyer

There are over 1,000 Facebook pages around chronic illnesses, and more people consult the Internet for health than ask their physicians. If a marketer’s job is to get in front of as many people as possible, then one has to wonder why DTC marketers continue to ignore interactive marketing in favor of TV, which provides less and less ROI.

Interactive Information
The average length of a patient visit with a primary care physician is 10 minutes. Obviously, this is not enough time to truly discuss healthcare treatment options, including prescription medications, so more and more people are turning to the Internet. Drug companies, for the most part, have continued with the same strategy for quite a while now, which consists of a drug.com Website and some search engine optimization. Some have posted videos on YouTube or have a small Facebook presence, but the Internet is not considered a primary marketing channel even though more and more people go online for health information.
In recent research I conducted for a client, we clearly heard that consumers do not want to engage in conversation with drug companies. There are, however, a lot of opportunities to bring patients together in a community so they can learn and share information on healthcare treatments and disease state information. Drug companies have to learn to clearly separate promotional information from credible health information. They also have to learn to write content that talks to people in a human voice instead of a high-level medical voice.
Online videos are another opportunity often wasted by drug companies. To hold consumers’ attention, these videos have to be under three minutes long and have content of interest to the audience—not the drug company. Most videos on YouTube are boring—and aren’t going to hold consumers’ attention on the Attention Deficit Internet, where up to 80% of people multitask.

One-on-One with Patients
With so many people going to the Internet for health information, what should drug companies do? First, I would recommend they review their online marketing plan for their product.com Website. The fact is that users may visit the site but get only basic information about the medication there, since they will go to a lot of other sources for credible information. Second is to take the message to where the audience is going online. Rather than repurposing consumer brochures, they should work with their KOLs to develop content that is both easy to understand and speaks to consumers in a one-on-one conversation. Finally, if their disease state is one in which people are willing to learn and share, osteoporosis for example, then create communities for that audience. Good marketers today act as aggregators of the brand and know when to bow out of the conversation.
Despite the buzz about social media, marketers still need to determine if the channel is a good fit for their audience. Many variables factor into that decision—including awareness of the disease state, awareness of the product, and willingness of the audience to share information. Perhaps, though, the biggest variable is whether they have the resources to administer a social media online strategy. Implement- ing a social media page is easy, updating it to ensure that the information is relevant is the hard part. The Gardasil Facebook page, for example, has done little to address the negative aspects of the vaccine that are posted all over the Internet, including on Twitter Moms.
DTC marketers face a lot of challenges today, but one aspect of marketing has never changed: That is to get your message in front of a big audience. The Internet not only allows you to reach a lot of people but also provides effective reach because it targets specific segments. If DTC marketers are to do more with less, they have to realize the Internet is now a primary channel and that the dollars spent on TV are providing decreasing ROI.

Richard Meyer is President of Online Strategic Solutions (www.onlinestrategicsolutions.com), an Internet consulting company. He has worked in healthcare marketing for more than 12 years, and writes at www.worldofdtcmarketing.com and www.richsblog.com. He welcomes comments at richardameyer@me.com.