Originally Published MX November/December 2005
ADVERTISING, DISTRIBUTION, & SALES
Marketing to the Online ConsumerInternet users are receptive to messages presented as education, not as advertising.
Daisy R. Khalifa
Change makes things happen. And change has come to many medical device company executives who now see direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing occupying a position square in the middle of product life-cycle planning.
Until recently, device manufacturers only watched while pharmaceutical companies practiced the art of consumer drug marketing intelligently and sometimes flamboyantly. Having all but mastered DTC marketing techniques in every medium, including the Internet, the drug industry spent $4 billion on advertising in 2004. But the climate has changed. External and regulatory pressures have begun to force pharmaceutical companies to look at the veracity of their ads and seek better advertising alternatives.
This has put the medical device industry in the auspicious position of being forewarned by the regulatory red flags raised by the drug companies' DTC approach. Also, it has seen a consumer market clearly beckoning. What device companies intending to sell to consumers need to do is address some basic but important questions regarding where to start in creating an effective DTC advertising campaign, how to avoid the pitfalls that pharma discovered, how to ensure compliance with FDA requirements across the board, and, last but far from least, how to launch a consumer campaign with a budget significantly smaller than that available to a big drug company.
The Internet
The obvious direction to go—one already touted by many corporate marketing and media experts—is toward the Internet, a powerful central hub for reaching consumers. The Internet is now the most trusted media source for healthcare consumers. Roughly 62% of all Internet users, or more than 73 million health seekers, look for medical information online, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.1
According to experts, the majority of these health seekers conduct their own online medical research before visiting a physician. And, upon diagnosis, a large proportion of those patients expect to remain actively involved in determining their own treatment. It is important that medical device executives appreciate some key facts about this target audience. They are a Web-savvy group, educated and eager to find reliable diagnostic information, and they tend to turn away from Web sites that are trying to sell, in favor of sites providing credible noncommercial information.
Drug companies spending vast amounts of money to brand and tirelessly sell pharmaceuticals to consumers may be a thing of the past, given what is evident today about the Internet. Online resources are a powerful draw to the health-seeking consumer. Moreover, the Internet's capacity to communicate information vividly sends a clear message to the medical device industry: device manufacturers can enjoy the benefits of a similarly effective consumer outreach campaign for a fraction of pharma's DTC advertising outlay, through the development of an intelligent, dynamic, Web-driven marketing initiative.
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| Estafanous |
"If you are going to do online promotion to patients, make sure it is educational content," advises John Estafanous, president of Estco Medical (Bethesda, MD), which specializes in interactive marketing for medical device and life science companies. "The goal of a DTC campaign is to provide comprehensive resources for patients to help them manage their diseases and conditions."
Some device manufacturers have already made an investment in celebrity- endorsed television spots. Currently, 60-second advertisements featuring Jack Nicklaus and B. B. King urge viewers to learn more, respectively, about Stryker's ceramic and titanium hip and LifeScan's blood glucose monitoring products. While these ads may be reminiscent of a more traditional—and costly—consumer marketing campaign, they are, says Estafanous, primarily a means for driving consumers to an educational Web site where they can learn more than they are going to hear in a 30-second ad. It is the online educational component that determines a successful DTC marketing effort.
Getting Started
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| Figure 1. An online direct-to-consumer campaign for a medical product should be viewed as its own product life-cycle initiative within the larger scope of the product marketing enterprise. (click to enlarge) |
An integrated marketing plan, whether to launch a drug or a medical device, can involve a full schedule of strategies and tactics. It encompasses many time-consuming projects, from FDA compliance and third-party outreach to public relations and high-volume direct mail.
The DTC online campaign should be viewed as its own product life-cycle initiative within the larger scope of the product marketing enterprise (see Figure 1). However, given the weight of its potential effectiveness, it can and should essentially define the consumer outreach effort. In other words, a company need not seek an expensive celebrity endorsement or make a costly print or broadcast buy in order to launch or brand the device successfully, provided all of the online objectives are met.
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| Mickelberg |
Pharmaceutical companies invest a great deal of money in advertising. But the medical device industry is different. "A medical device company's budget will likely be smaller, because devices have a profoundly different and shorter life cycle than drugs," says Larry Mickelberg, a senior vice president at Medical Broadcasting Co. (MBC; Philadelphia), an interactive healthcare marketing agency. "For medical device companies, nearly everything about an online campaign is geared toward meeting customer service expectations online."
The starting point for a well-integrated online DTC marketing campaign is planning centered on three general areas: positioning, educational content, and outreach (see Table I). A marketing team will make a critically important decision about which Web-based tools and software to use to drive the online program. Says Estafanous, this ideally should be a software package that "establishes a unified theme that gets pushed out to the consumer."
As with the overall product marketing plan, positioning is the earliest phase of activity. Positioning is viewed as a creative undertaking in which all collateral marketing material is made available in a Web environment. It involves integrating traditional work products, such as messaging, design, and product logo, into the Web campaign. Marketers and interactive technicians join forces to establish and generate message presentations, choose key words to promote for search engine optimization, design and produce banner ads, and, basically, put a substantial amount of image-related online media in place for use throughout the life of the campaign.
Perhaps the most extensive phase of online DTC start-up is the development of educational content. This is the point at which the marketing team is actually building the patient-education components, such as product- and medical condition– specific Web sites, virtual product catalogs and video, medical animations, syndicated content (which usually includes animations), clinical outcomes data, demonstrations, information sheets, and talk-to-your-doctor guides, as well as a range of Web-based tools for physicians.
Again, the level of sophistication of the Web-based software is critical (see Table II). It is vitally important to investigate available people and programs in order to find those that can provide the best service and support for developing robust graphic illustrations and animations, for integrating themes and data, and for measuring progress.
Types of Web Sites
It is important to understand the difference between a so-called nonbranded Web site and a product home page. A product home page presents a straightforward product endorsement; it obviously is a marketing Web site. But a nonbranded Web site, also known as a condition Web site, is designed to help consumers manage their medical conditions. A nonbranded site might include information about competitive medical devices as well as the site-generating company's own product, showing little sign of being a promotion for a particular device.
"This is not a blatant promotional channel for one medical device, but a comprehensive resource that discusses the universe of best products and drugs that can help patients manage their diseases," explains Estco Medical's Estafanous. "Putting a Web site together that also mentions competitive products, creating a trusted resource that is valuable to consumers, not only drives up compliance with treatment, but also establishes that site as a reliable online destination."
From a strategic perspective, the condition Web site, providing objective information about a specific illness, is something that might be made available to consumers just prior to the launch of a product designed to treat that illness. Thus, when the medical device that serves the therapeutic area featured on the nonbranded site is launched, consumers will readily make the association between their illness and the new treatment available to them.
"A nonbranded Web site is a site that contains information focused on a specific disease or therapeutic area for which the medical device has relevance," says Estafanous. "The device manufacturer's challenge is to simplify complicated literature and complex technologies and develop them in a way the consumer can understand. This means harnessing all of the graphic capabilities of the Web and using them to advantage."
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| Figure 2. The Cleveland Clinic's Cole Eye Institute Web site allows visitors to learn more about how eyes work by taking an animated tour. The site includes visuals and descriptions of various Lasik laser vision-correction procedures. (click to enlarge) |
The educational-content phase of site development also involves a fair amount of third-party outreach to establish online partnerships. Syndications, sponsorships, and linkages with consumer health sites, academic sites, and news sources all add credibility to Web site content. Syndication partnerships are a means by which device manufacturers supply an animation or descriptive graphic to a third party in order to promote and further brand their device. The Cleveland Clinic's Cole Eye Institute, for example, offers a number of animations for various Lasik laser vision-correction procedures in one portion of its Web site, two of them syndicated by Alcon Inc. (see Figure 2).
In conjunction with developing educational content for consumers, the device manufacturer will need to develop a parallel set of tools for the clinical audience. Physician sign-off is a key component of any medical device marketing campaign. An integrated DTC campaign takes advantage of rapidly growing Internet use among doctors, and will introduce an array of elaborate online aids for physicians.
For example, a virtual product catalog that fully articulates highly complex procedures can set one medical device apart from the others. Physicians will increase their use of a device if its benefits are clearly demonstrated, if it makes a procedure quicker, and if patients are aware of it and ask for it.
"Healthcare professionals are bound to be enthusiastic about on-demand training," states MBC's Mickelberg. "If you provide a video-based product demonstration that shows a surgical procedure and every possible nuance—including the device in action—you will get the physicians' attention, and quite likely their loyalty."
Doctor Locators
Another key third-party alliance brings insurance companies into the picture and involves building, or linking to, a directory of physicians who treat specific health conditions. Such a directory is known as a doctor locator.
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| Figure 3. Laser vision-correction company VISX Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) compiles a directory of information provided by ophthalmologists for this consumer health site. The site includes a doctor locator for customers with specific vision needs. (click to enlarge) |
The objective for the medical device manufacturer here is to determine ways in which to partner with insurance companies so that consumers, inquiring about doctors who treat their condition, can learn more about a physician's methodology, which may incorporate the use of a particular medical device. A good example of a doctor locator page created by a device manufacturer is one provided by the laser vision-correction company VISX Inc. to a consumer health site (see Figure 3).2
"Insurance companies have developed robust Web sites to help consumers find doctors," says Estafanous, "and it behooves them to make sure that patients are getting the best treatment, because this reduces costs and improves outcomes over time."
A typical scenario might involve a physician telling a patient she needs a new hip. The patient will want to learn about all of the options for artificial hips, including the best ones for her, and make a treatment decision for herself. Then she will want to find a doctor able to practice the preferred therapy, or suggest that her own doctor might do it.
Estafanous says that having a doctor locator is essential. "The manufacturer's challenge is to create consumer demand for its medical device by providing the best consumer information and doing so in an intelligent manner that won't alienate the doctor. Concurrently, consumers need to appreciate that, most likely, they must go through a physician. So, what the manufacturer is doing is maximizing the different channels available to direct patients to those physicians who can provide the manufacturer's devices."
A marketing team should also take time to create appropriate disclaimers and furnish FDA links and information on regulatory matters for the product Web site. Regarding FDA compliance, Internet marketing must abide by the same statutes that apply to print, radio, telephone, and broadcast advertising by any drug, biomedical, or life science company that sells its products to consumers (see sidebar).
Finally, the outreach phase of the program includes the execution of a variety of tasks that are much more in keeping with traditional public relations activity. Among these are making decisions about electronic commercial ad buys at consumer health sites; undertaking search engine optimization, which is a means of associating key search words with links to the company's disease-management or product site; and posting electronic news and press materials to the product Web site.
Outreach includes exploiting Web-based tools for program measurement and metrics. It is important to have software components built into the online DTC program that allow the marketing team to measure its success. While these metrics may not reflect the number of devices sold—that is, the traditional return-on-investment model—they can reveal, for example, how many consumers are printing out product data (presumably for presentation to their doctor), the number of online tools being used by visitors to a Web site, and how many information requests are being completed.
Conclusion
The consensus among industry experts today is that few medical device companies are fully involved in online DTC campaigning, but that many are in the early stages of serious planning for such programs.
"Medical device companies are beginning to fully realize that the Internet is the best place to segment their market," says Estafanous. "And it is absolutely the best place to find the consumers who are most interested in a product."
There are numerous opportunities to use the Web to illustrate one product's advantages over the competition. Estafanous claims that one thing that is essential is the right technical software. Another is a willingness to embrace change.
References
Daisy R. Khalifa is a freelance writer based in Arlington, VA.
Copyright ©2005 MX
