How Pharma can win back its online voice

Customer engagement now starts online. Around 80% of patients Google a recommended or newly-prescribed medication. And doctors routinely use search engines too – to stay up to date, to verify assumptions and so on.Indeed, it may be no exaggeration to say that the answers found online are possibly the biggest influence on patients and HCPs today. Understanding their real-world digital information experience is, therefore, critical to identifying the content influencing their behaviour.    But exploring what they really see and hear via search may shock you.Despite pharma ’s investment in evidence-based, balanced and accessible content designed for HCPs and patients, this is often buried far out of reach from the billion-plus health-related questions being asked of Google each day.Pharma ' s voice often simply isn ' t cutting through. An unsettling proportion of top search engine results is a blend of blog-based click-bait, self-published ‘authorities’, individual patient reviews, highly technical clinical publications and locally irrelevant information.   How bad could it be?  Well, there ’s a good way to find out.Share of SERPs Since the answers at the top of a search are the ones that count, a useful fundamental measure of any pharma company ’s visibility in search is what turns up on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, how often do you search beyond the first page of the results? Yet, perhaps surprisingly, assessing the nature of th...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news