For centuries, healthcare was generally practiced under the assumption that the approach to men’s health worked just as well for women. But, advances in modern medicine and the evolution of specialized healthcare show that, even though there are similarities between men and women’s healthcare practices, it’s the differences between the two that mean the most.

So why then do so many healthcare marketers insist upon using the same approach when communicating to both men and women?

A recent study done by several healthcare ad agencies shows that women have different needs when it comes to their health than men. Furthermore, women can be segmented even further into age groups that have different healthcare wants and communication styles.

The answer to this dilemma, is effective, targeted marketing—a concept that many seem to have overlooked in the process of creating their advertising message. By looking at women as different segments, instead of a whole, the target audience can be reached more accurately and consumers are able to identify and connect more with the communications being sent out.

Ever since the iPhone and iPod touch came out, iTunes has been seeing owners download at least 10 new apps per month on average, and recently just celebrated it’s 1.5 billionth download.  Interestingly enough, the commercials you see are right: you name it and there’s an app for that. Some do nothing and sell nothing, like the Zippo Lighter app. But then there are other branded apps that actually provide value to a consumer. And now pharma’s getting into the branded app mix, too.

Sanofi-Aventis recently rolled out its GoMeals iPhone app that acts as “a food-tracking tool that allows users to search thousands of foods and dishes from popular restaurants and grocery stores to easily see the nutritional content of meals and snacks,” according to MedAdNews.

Even though GoMeals was created as a tool to support their online diabetes community, the app can be used by just about anyone who is looking to watch their daily intake. But more importantly, it gives the online diabetic community a trusted source of information and a brand to look to for all of their diabetic needs, even if Sanofi-Aventis isn’t directly selling Lantus, their 24-hour insulin shots.

Online advertising is no doubt a powerful means of communicating to targeted audiences. But, oftentimes a branded application or portal for information can be just as powerful when it builds up brand loyalty. Because once brand loyalty has been firmly established, you don’t have customers anymore; you have brand evangelists, which is one bond that’s incredibly difficult to break.

This means that pharma marketers need to make product information relevant to several different-and sometimes divergent-audiences at the same time, while making personal connections and delivering unique online experiences to each.  Intelligent campaigns shouldn’t drive everyone to the same singular URL. Instead, they should be directed to destinations that are individualized by therapeutic category, treatment plan or area of specialization.

So does that mean that the standard generic company or product website is dead, as many have proclaimed? Not quite.

The generic website, whatever its role, is evolving, as is the way we use the Internet today. Where a product site was once the be-all and end-all, today it is more of a tourist info center on the information superhighway, pointing consumers in the right direction to interact with your product in the way that suits them best.

But that doesn’t mean that destination sites don’t hold value as a centralized location for information. Consumers still need someplace to go to get information on your product. It’s just that general sites have taken on a different level of importance now, especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization for pulling in more “natural” and unpaid search results.

So what’s the best way to swim with the most current stream of online consumers and stay relevant without relying solely on a destination website? Be everything to everyone in your target audience. Instead of expecting consumers to search for you, shift the strategy to focus on being wherever they look online and customize your content, URLs and strategy to match their interests.

With nearly two-thirds of Americans regularly searching for heath care information online – Google recently reported more than 4.5 billion health-related searches annually at the hearings – and an estimated 75% of adults having access to the Internet, SM, and how people engage with it, is clearly much more than a trend. It is a continuing shift in consumer behavior and how patients process information and make decisions.

Beyond marketing, the pharmaceutical industry needs to be afforded the opportunity to disseminate critical and valuable information through the channels their customers are using.

And although only four pharmaceutical companies presented at last week’s hearings, by the time the consultation period ends on February 28, 2010, it is a sure bet that most, if not all, of the major players will weigh in.

Most of last week’s presentations centered around three fundamental, if not obvious, themes:

1. A decision must be made quickly
The Internet moves quickly and will not stand still, even for the FDA. Social media is undeniably a powerful and important means of communicating with highly targeted audiences. Reaching the right audience for any product or service is essential to success, and in no other industry is that more apparent and important than pharma.

2. You cannot control Internet content all the time
The fact of the matter is that you cannot police the Internet and all of the content that gets posted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As mentioned in the previous post, almost 80 percent of the Internet population researches health topics online. Pharma should have some way to interact with this population, regardless of whether it’s as simple as banner ads on a web page or more complex like ensuring that drug information is listed correctly on social media sites.

3. Present clear guidelines and they will be followed
The overall feeling of the hearings was not one of defiance on behalf of pharma and advertisers. Instead, there was a borderline plea for clear-cut guidelines and regulations as to what can and can’t be done with social media and Internet advertising. After all, the hearings were partially due to the fact that the FDA had issued 14 warning letters to several pharma organizations earlier this year.

But will these hearings yield any action, or at least clear direction? Technology and SM will not wait for the FDA to labor over establishing guidelines in the traditional manner. If they spend time frittering, people will no longer be Twittering and will soon be on to the next SM trend.

Timely and decisive action is needed. But the key component will be to build in the flexibility to adapt to emerging trends.

The fact is the marketing world is moving faster than the industry can keep up with. And with over 80 percent of the population researching health topics online, these hearings could be a watershed moment considering that tribal marketing is only going to increase as social networking becomes more ingrained into everyday life.   Both the FDA and US Government are leveraging technology to reach this audience and will hopefully soon provide clarity, along with guidance on new ways to communicate through this powerful medium.

But even as we wait for a verdict on how the FDA approves how social media and the Internet can be leveraged, the need for reaching these segmented audiences is still critical. Fortunately, AIR Health’s MyOperon web portal is the industry’s solution to reaching these crucial audiences through dynamic, preference-driven pharma marketing into one central, easy to access online hub. MyOperon communicates with audiences on an individual basis by aggregating the information they want and delivering it in the format they use most for an online community that is not only relevant, but also groundbreaking.

The biggest opportunity here lies in assisting the physician to maximize their time on the Internet. As with any research you’re conducting on the Internet, a lot of time is wasted shifting through links and articles that are not relevant to your original query. Oftentimes information is scattered across different websites and are not available in an easily digestible format. There are certainly ways to help them lower the amount of time spent by offering them customized and relevant information efficiently exactly when they are seeking it.

AIR Health’s MyOperon web portal helps to address all of these issues relating to inefficiency. The information presented is customized to the individual physician and takes into consideration their therapeutic focus, practice specific needs, patient load, any CME’s of interest etc. Additionally, the information is available on a real time basis, exactly at the time they need it.  This basically, cuts out all the shifting and sorting of the information on the part of the physician and maximize their engagement on the Internet.

• Power – Through the strength of Accentrx ^TM —our powerful suite of analytics and modeling tools—you will have the ability to understand, segment and target the physicians unlike never before.
• Preference – With the customized MyOperon physician portal you will now know how physicians prefer to be communicated with, what they want to have communicated to them and when they are seeking that information. Being able to communicate on a more personal level, based on areas of specialization, patient population and personal preferences is more engaging for the physician and more effective for you.
• Performance – At the end of 09-09-09 or any other day, it’s all about results. AIR Health Group’s analytics-based, preference-driven marketing approach has proven itself repeatedly in other industries and today we’re ready to begin doing it for you.

So enjoy this special day as so many others are. And if the power of threes hasn’t left its mark on you yet, here’s one more set of three you should really remember:

Analytics + Imagination = Results.

Who is AIR Health?

AIR Health LLC is a new division of AIR Marketing specifically targeted to pharmaceutical marketing. AIR is the nation’s leading data-driven, analytical marketing services company, built on the promise to measure and deliver ROI on each and every client program. Our philosophy is in the AIR name: Analytics, Imagination, and Results.

What is AIR Offering?

Building upon AIR Marketing’s expertise and its proprietary analytics technology called Cyclone^TM , AIR Health has developed two advanced marketing solutions for the pharmaceutical industry.

Accentrx^TM: A powerful analytical model designed to aggregate across your brand(s), all relevant physician preferences, as well as all sales and marketing interactions at the individual physician level. The result is a "single view" of each of your physician targets. In short, Accentrx creates an EMR-Electronic Marketing Record-for each physician.

Once the physician profile is aggregated, the power of intelligence is unleashed through Accentrx.

• Optimized Messaging - On an individual physician level, Accentrx gives you the ability to optimize and tailor messaging for each target physician based on his or her practice behavior, communications preferences and market dynamics (plan formularies, etc).
• Preferred Marketing Channels - Analyzing individual physician interactions across your various marketing programs (internally and across all your third-party marketing vendors), Accentrx provides you with a Preferred Communication Channel profile for each of your target physicians. This profile sets up real-time benchmarking for individual marketing channel utilization and ROI metrics.
• Individualized Target MD Communication Plan & Metrics - Accentrx provides you with an optimized message and tactical communication plan across your entire brand’s marketing programs. This preference-driven plan serves as the cornerstone when implementing most of your marketing programs across all sales and marketing channels, working from a single optimized database. Accentrx continues to capture and monitor all sales and marketing interactions across the brand, providing you with real-time longitudinal reporting and ROI analysis.

MyOperon

AIR Health further optimizes your marketing by taking all the intelligence derived from Accentrx on each of your target physicians and creating a pURL (personalized website and URL) for each of your physicians, called MyOperon. These individual pURLs provide a platform for your optimized message across all channels predicted by Accentrx and indicated as the preferred channels by the physician (medical representatives, live e-details, all Med-Ed activities, sample procurement, etc).

Each MD’s MyOperon pURL dynamically changes and adapts as the physician interacts with the site. As the physician clicks on one of your programs, other related marketing and education opportunities are presented in a prioritized fashion based on the physician’s profile and channel preferences. All of these preferences are stored and then leveraged to create an increasingly valuable experience for the physician.

These exciting offerings from AIR Health are based on over a decade of AIR experience and performance developing cutting edge analytical marketing programs for major Blue Chip Fortune 200 companies, including HealthNet, Hershey Entertainment & Resorts and others. You can find some of their stories on our website .

At the end of the day, the challenge remains delivering the right information at the right time in the right format to a precise group of physicians. Physicians have already indicated that they look to the Internet to help them with sorting through information and identifying tools to help advance their practices. Your company already has disparate databases with loads of data points. The challenge of course is making sense of all these data points, developing a single view of the physician and then deploying in physician-preferred channels to deliver your message.

A business model that integrates everything in such a powerful mechanism could dramatically lift the return on marketing investment. Plus, a business model and deployment system such as this would not only lift market share, but also be powerful enough to reduce costs! Your world could very easily go from having a 2-3 times return currently seen in most pharmaceutical marketing programs to 20-30 times ROI!

Now, before you start thinking that a business model and system like this cannot exist, let me introduce you to AIR Health (link to microsite). Leveraging decades of analytics-based marketing experience from AIR Marketing, this new solution brings together information from disparate databases to form a single view of the physician. Then it delivers custom messages to these physicians in the format they want and use. It’s automated, it’s personalized, and it’s integrated so that the return on marketing investment is as high as possible.

AIR Marketing has developed a portfolio of success stories in a range of industries delivering this kind of solution. As one of AIR’s clients in the technology industry says in one of the videos, “We hit about a 38:1 return on marketing investment ratio.” Further along in the video, this same client elaborates on how this kind of return was achieved, “It was a very short time period, but the targeting and data analysis was effective in building the campaign and driving revenue”.

If this can be done in other industries, it certainly can be done in pharmaceutical marketing as well. It’s time for pharmaceutical marketers to start leveraging all the tools available to them and deliver these kinds of returns. After all, that is how the great drugs came into existence in the first place - with first-in-class technology and research. Now, extend those same beliefs into your marketing programs with AIR Health and take your ROI to new levels.

Pharmaceutical marketers want the same efficiency that comes from an integrated record of customer interests and interactions. It’s time for the EMR - Electronic Marketing Record. Essentially, the EMR is a single view of our target customers, the key decisions makers and influencers that affect the outcomes of our marketing efforts.

This EMR has the ability to aggregate data points across all important demographic, behavioral, preferential and customer interfaces into one longitudinal marketing record, a single view of your customer that allows you to make efficient decision, reduce spending and dramatically improve the return on your marketing dollars.

While the health care industry moves towards the EHR, we as pharmaceutical marketers continue to operate in a mode of silo-ed, episodic marketing to physicians. We rely on disparate databases from different vendors. We never aggregate the data to share intelligence (behaviors and communications preferences) so we can work as ONE marketing team and communicate to our customers in a continuum. And to really make matters worse, we never truly measure our marketing outcomes.

It’s been done in other industries with more complex media models and much smaller and tighter marketing budgets. For example, take the case of Destination Hotels & Resorts, an AIR Marketing customer in the hospitality industry. DHR manages over 30 properties across the United States. The sheer number of different properties in a range of geographic markets meant there were many redundancies with the organization.

AIR Marketing offered DHR a marketing technology solution to create the efficiencies needed to improve performance and reduce cost. The custom solution, called Destination Delivers, consolidated customer data across disparate platforms and rolled it up into one location. This allowed DHR to obtain a single view of the customer and devise custom messages, offers and promotions. As Andre Fournier from DHR explains, “The consistency and the quality of the messaging was huge, and the return on investment was almost 10 times what we would have gotten out of on an individual basis.”

It is time for Electronic Marketing Record (EMR) in pharmaceutical marketing. Watch this video on database marketing for more insights into the work AIR Marketing has done in other industries!