Guest Blog: Digital Marketing in 2013 – A New Year, A New Strategy

It’s no secret that digital marketing has been on the rise. Mobile marketing and social media have seen the most impressive growth in the marketing mix. These growth trends indicate that certain digital channels will soon surpass more traditional media tools.

It might be tempting to dive right in and add digital marketing so you can say you’ve done digital. But to get the most out of digital channels and the interactions they offer, it’s important to first make sure you have a smart marketing mix rather than just developing a tactic within a specific channel.

You can do this by following some key elements.

1) Measure and Analyze: Have planning and analytics in place to measure and refine your tactics. Measuring and analyzing digital channel effectiveness is often overlooked and deemed too expensive, but it increases the opportunity for you to get things right the first time.

2) Understand Digital Consumers: Understand how your consumers will use your digital marketing channels, and how to align their behaviors and use with your business objectives. Ensure they are gaining the most value from the time they spend. Developing online videos, disease-based websites, and apps can help support and educate patients.

3) Listen: Pharmaceutical companies are starting to find they can create effective marketing strategies by listening to and learning from activity on social media networks. Listening is critical because not all channels will work for all conditions or therapies. For example, an anonymous forum or blog might spark more conversation than asking users to like a Facebook page.

4) Consider Mobile: With mobile growing so rapidly, you need to ensure you are developing resources and educational platforms that are mobile-friendly to effectively connect with audiences in their preferred way of communication. Physicians must also be kept in mind when developing a mobile strategy. There is a growing demand for tools and services that help physicians communicate better with patients about treatments, so the development and use of apps is critical to remain competitive in the pharma industry. You must understand how physicians use their devices so you can identify time-savers, high- impact transactions, and valuable services.

Whether you’re just starting to create a digital strategy or you’d like to refine and improve your existing strategy, you can learn more and see what industry experts have to say in our recent article, Digital Marketing: Driving New Strategies in 2013. Click here to check it out.

With 2013 just weeks away, it’s time to start planning how you’ll include digital marketing in your strategy.

This blog was kindly written for DigiPharm by PharmaVOICE – The forum for the life-sciences industry executive.