How Pharma Companies Can Leverage Search Insights to Drive HCPs to Unbranded Content

 A recent study has analyzed the different terms and phrases that patients versus healthcare providers (HCPs) tend to search for when looking for oncology information online. The study shows that patients tend to search for more broad topics, with a focus on side effects (e.g., “side effects of radiotherapy”) and general treatment types (e.g., “what is chemotherapy”). HCPs, as expected, tend to search for more specific phrases with a focus on clinical trial data, risks, and product details (e.g., “DNA damage response”, “antibody drug conjugates”).

Additionally, the research shows that the phrases most commonly searched by patients tend to have a much higher search volume than those searched by HCPs, and 93% of the 758 relevant keywords were searched only 100 times or less (out of 51,930 total searches per month).

From my work this summer in pharmaceutical marketing as well as my past work in healthcare consulting, I have seen that pharma companies will often create “unbranded” pages that do not mention anything specific to the product but provide education to patients on getting diagnosed, resources for managing their condition(s), and occasionally some general information on product classes/types (without promoting the company’s specific product). Companies will sometimes create physician education pages as well that aim to educate physicians on the condition (with more details than the patient site) and information on how physicians can help these patients, again with no product promotion.

This study highlights the need for having these separate patient and physician education pages that speak the “language” (i.e., use the terms) and address the topics of the target audience. It also implies that there is an opportunity to target knowledgeable physicians/key opinion leaders in a specific medical field by focusing content (and the specific words in it) in the “middle area” of the long tail (or as the article calls it, the “sweet spot”) of HCP search terms. By targeting this middle zone, companies can ensure that their material shows up in a reasonable number of searches but also shows up to physicians who want information on that specific product class/mechanism of action, thereby maximizing the value of these unbranded HCP pages.

Source: https://pharmaphorum.com/digital/research-reveals-search-engine-habits-of-patients-and-hcps/