For years, pharma companies have spent millions building and rebuilding websites that too often feel designed to satisfy internal stakeholders rather than the people who actually use them. Brand teams want messaging. Legal and regulatory teams want compliance. Corporate communications want consistency. Agencies want engagement. Somewhere in that process, the patient gets lost. Pharma websites don’t have an awareness problem. They have a relevance problem. Here is a free PDF download for my readers on how to make websites relevant again.
We were in the middle of a presentation by the DTC brand manager when an IM popped up on my screen asking, “Does this data seem right to you?”. The data in question was a cherry-picked summation of online health seekers’ use of pharma product websites. It wasn’t accurate, and it didn’t show the full picture of how today’s health seekers use pharma product websites.
Rather than raise an objection at the meeting, I huddled with the rest of my team to ask, “What should we do about what was presented?” One of my team members, who has a LOT of years of experience, said, “We can’t put our credibility on the line by ignoring bad data.” The follow-up call with the brand manager was uncomfortable, but I told her much of the data presented was inaccurate. When I sent her updated data, she was very grateful.
I’ve been through a lot of in-house presentations, and while they are needed to share information and win over skeptics, presenters should never willingly omit some data or the latest data to win bigger budgets or a strategy.
I’d like to offer my readers a free PDF report on Making Pharma Websites Valuable To Online Health Seekers. I’ve tried to integrate credible, up-to-date data. In the near future I will be offering various PDF reports for sale at a very low price with proceeds donated to the American Cancer Society.
