Digital marketing, much more than an advertising tool

When we talk about digital marketing, the common sense is to think about a tool companies use to advertise their business. However in some industries digital marketing has been able not only to influence the advertising strategy of the companies but also to change the structure of their main business model.

During my consulting experience I had the chance to work for an international pharmaceutical company to optimize their marketing strategy. Because of the recent economic crisis, my client had to cut costs by reorganizing its sales force and making it more effective. Sales representatives are part of the core business of a pharmaceutical company. Their job is quite difficult, as they have to sell drugs to very busy doctors that do not want to meet them. In 2010, one every four American doctors claimed he/she was not willing to meet sales representatives because of the “bad reputation” that pharmaceutical companies have. Facing this current situation, many companies started to use digital marketing to improve their sales techniques and cut costs. Digital sales became the opportunity to sell drugs without the intrusion of an office visit. AstraZeneca, for example, created a digital marketing tool called “AZ Touchpoints”, a website where doctors can ask questions, order free samples, ask about insurance coverage and learn about all the products. The site contains also brochures that the doctor can print out and use with his/her patients and is supported by a call center to answer whatever question a doctor might have. These new digital marketing instruments are not seen yet as replacement, but as a good supplementing instrument to sales representatives. The advantages of these new tools are that they give the possibility to decrease marketing costs by reducing the number of sales representatives, have a better utilization of reps allocating them to new products or to the most complex drugs and they also give the doctors the option to avoid meeting the sales force. Moreover by tracking doctors’ behaviors on the website, the pharmaceutical company can understand better their interests and target accordingly the new products offers. The negative side of this marketing strategy is that the sale becomes much more “pull” than “push”, in the sense that doctors have to decide by themselves to go to the website and look for the product instead of being pushed by the sales representative. Still overall the new strategy seems to work pretty well. Proof of that is given by the constantly increasing number of new medical applications and websites, such as Coags Uncomplicated, which offers tools to help doctors diagnose bleeding disorders and many other apps offered by Sanofi-Aventis, Merck, Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Novartis AG.