I find most pharma brands looking to create their online presence lost in the dark. Struggling to make their presence felt.
They’re overwhelmed by the vast number of digital channels and ever-changing strategies.
Unlike traditional pharma marketing, where you approach your customers directly, digital marketing is a much more diversified approach, inclined towards creating effortless ways for your customer to connect to you.
Put in rather simple words, it’s a non-linear, dynamic, and intuitive form of marketing.
You can define digital marketing as your brand’s path of self-discovery through online channels. You need digital marketing, because the more easily and directly approachable your brand is, the better chance it has of attracting the right kind of audience.
How do you get your pharma brand noticed by your target audience?
Well, the answer is fairly simple– by optimizing for online searches. Why?
Because every bit of information is now available at everyone’s fingertips, the first instinct of anyone now is to do a quick search online. For example, patients are using search engines to become more aware of the symptoms and treatment procedures, while healthcare professionals are using them for extensive research and self-awareness.
Let’s face it. The quality of the content that pops up on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) is part of your brand image. But more than quality, what matters is the position.
If you’re not on the front page of the search engine result pages, chances are high that you could not attract the right amount of traffic, since most users do not look beyond the first page. If you rank high, people assume that you’re reliable, thereby giving your brand credibility.
What exactly is SEO and how does it help me rank better?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the different strategies you use to pull your website up to the front page of search engines.
These strategies make your website more approachable to your end users and make the content more interpretable to search engines, thereby creating a perfect platform for self-discovery.
Since most traffic to any website is directed through search engines, SEO plays a pivotal role in increasing website traffic and reach.
How can you as a pharma marketer optimize for search engines?
To help you understand how, you, as a pharma marketer can leverage the power of search engine optimization, let’s consider a case study.
Let’s say, your brand intends to market an antiseptic cream. Realizing the fact that traditional marketing campaigns are no longer that effective, you decide to make a digital footprint by creating an information catalog for the cream. It puts up all the necessary factual information on its website, uploads videos, and tutorials, and creates an online forum where patients share their experiences about the product.
However, the major part of the struggle lies in making the content discoverable. If the content is not discoverable when a user looks up terms like “antiseptic cream” or ”cream to apply on wounds” on search engines, the campaign might not get the right traction.
Well, that’s exactly where SEO comes into the picture.
Formulating an effective SEO strategy is all about thinking from a user’s perspective.
“What kind of information would your audience like to see?”, ”Can you think of keywords your target audience would search?”, ”Can you optimize your website’s content to match those keywords?”,” Can you create a well-structured website that can be interpreted easily by the search engine crawlers?”
SEO is the answer to all the above questions.
All in all, SEO ensures that whenever someone looks up search engines for any piece of information, they get the right and relevant results. you can optimize for search engines by structuring their content to get maximum visibility.
Why does SEO matter?
Simply put, SEO is all about creating your online presence. It’s about understanding your online audience’s needs and calibrating your website to match them.
Why does it matter?
Well, you need to realize that your target audience is getting smarter and more digitally savvy with time.
Patients spend a considerable amount of time researching symptoms and reading reviews of any drug or treatment before opting for it. They also spend a considerable amount of time assessing the credibility and viability of the proposed solution.
Healthcare professionals use search engines to stay abreast of all the recent medical developments and to study the effectiveness of different pharma products. They also use the power of searches to easily connect with other literary sources that would help them in improving their diagnosis.
I hope this blog post helped you in understanding why search engine optimization is such a crucial aspect of digital marketing for pharma brands.
