Digital Marketing Mistakes Made By Pharmaceutical Companies

Digital Marketing Mistakes Made By Pharmaceutical Companies

The pharmaceutical industry is one industry that witnesses a huge digital marketing gap between its potential to do well in organic search results and its actual performance. Below are three reasons why this happens:

- Digital marketing budgets are weighted towards online advertising. It is easier to create banner ads and deploy it on various advertising networks, than it is to outrank leading medical websites, like WebMD, for particular medical terms. In addition, a large amount of funds is spent on the designing of pages that are not search engine friendly. Instead, it would be better to allocate more digital marketing funds to SEO. The increased revenues collected through SEO, are sure to earn back these costs, and also pay for a better page design.

- Using the same paid search rules for the organic search: Pharmaceutical businesses like to play it safe when it comes to Internet marketing, as the FDA is known to levy huge fines for flouting regulations. As there are no fixed guidelines for organic search listings, the same paid search rules are applied to organic search. This results in the creation of the page titles and descriptions, which do not give information about page content, or induce searchers to click links. Instead, digital marketing specialists should inform their clients how search engines pick out titles and descriptions, and write out suitable ones that are within FDA rules. They can also increase other SEO efforts like link building and link exchange, to get better revenues.

- Failure to use the powerful corporate websites to their advantage: Most media articles and press releases about a particular company usually link to the company's corporate website. These links are extremely useful for SEO purposes; however, many pharmaceutical companies have no idea about this, and send out their Internet marketing content in PDF files, with the link hidden somewhere. Also, companies should avoid creating micro sites on separate domains, and instead create them within sub-folders of their main domain. This will create a web of internal links, which will enhance their other digital marketing efforts.

Internet marketing professionals, who cater to clients from non-pharmaceutical industries, would usually think of the above tips as common SEO knowledge. However, in the pharmaceutical sector, more than 90 percent of companies are known to make these very same digital marketing mistakes. If such companies adjust their strategy, even slightly, they would soon begin dominating SERPs.