Pharmaceutical reps have a tough job. They spend their days traveling from one practice to another, hoping to catch doctors willing to give them a few minutes of their time to demonstrate new products. And if they do manage to see a few clinicians in a day, they are often looking at a very hard sell. Things are even tougher when they encounter doctors who refuse to see them.
There is a common misperception that doctors unwilling to meet with pharma reps are out of reach. It is not true. Doctors who don’t have time for quick meetings still need to know about the latest and greatest pharmaceutical products. Pharmaceutical companies just need to figure out how to reach them.
As a technology company that offers proprietary databases to digital marketers, we believe we know the solution: meeting physicians in the digital space. They may not have the time or interest to entertain pharma reps in the middle of the day, but they are all online.
Digital Marketing Is Everywhere
If you are having trouble envisioning what it might be like to reach physicians digitally, perhaps it’s because you still view medicine as an entity separate from all other industries. Ask yourself this: is medicine still a business? And if it is, it’s a business in which effective marketing works. The most effective marketing these days is digital marketing.
Physicians go online to read medical journals. They have social media channels and email addresses. They watch YouTube videos and download mobile apps to their phones. These are all arenas that can be tapped for marketing purposes.
Research Data Is Key
Now, we don’t want to give you the impression that digital marketing is either easy or guaranteed to produce. Nothing could be further from the truth. Digital marketing requires work. And to succeed, you need the right research data to point you to the best target audience. This is where our digital engagement solutions come into play.
Here at iMedical Data, our solutions cut through the noise to help you make the most of email marketing, social media, etc. Our data puts you in touch with the perfect audience based on a variety of segmentation parameters, including online behavior and demographics.
Our data is largely first-party data provided by those individuals in the target audience. In the case of pharmaceutical marketing, this would be physicians. More specifically, it would be the physicians most likely to be interested in the products a pharma rep has to offer.
Combining Our Data with SEO
Our qualified and comprehensive data is your starting point for reaching physicians who don’t want to see pharma reps. Combine it with solid SEO practices and digital marketing becomes an exercise in profitability. You reach physicians where they are: online.
As for SEO, it is the practice of utilizing tools and strategies to drive traffic to a website. Proper SEO brings physicians to marketers and pharma reps so that leads can be more easily pursued. Proper SEO also targets audiences with the messages they most need to hear.
Do you see where all of this is going? It is great when pharma reps can get face time with doctors. In-person visits to local practices is a tried-and-true method of pharmaceutical marketing that still works. But it can only work if reps can actually get in to see doctors.
If they cannot, the next best thing is digital marketing. Doctors uninterested in seeing pharma reps are not out of reach. They just need to be reached from a different angle. That angle is digital.