Reaching Cyberchondriacs
When 73 million plus Americans seek health-related information online, marketers had better provide it.
When 73 million plus Americans seek health-related information online, marketers had better provide it.
Considering how easy it is to find a vast amount of health-related links just by typing a medical symptom or an ailment into a search engine, it’s no surprise the Internet is becoming the dominant source for people’s health information.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released this week, says these “health seekers” — which numbered 46 million in 2000 and grew to 73 million by October 2002 — go online to get information about specific illnesses, weight control, and prescription drugs. They go because they expect to find reliable information online (81 percent of Internet users say this), although they do usually check with a physician before acting on online health information. Most health seekers are women looking for information on behalf of someone for whom they are caring.
The Pew Researchers discovered:
Another researcher, Harris Interactive, conducted a poll in May to see how many people went online for healthcare information. Harris came up with a number of 100 million people — up from 97 million last year — and it has cleverly dubbed these folks “cyberchondriacs.”
According to Harris, some of the results are:
Advertising to Cyberchondriacs
With numbers like these, I’m sure you could guess that pharmaceutical marketers are swimming where the fish are by advertising online. And guess what? Such advertisers deem online advertising an efficient medium. The estimated advertising cost to drive a single consumer request for a specific drug, according to a 2000 Cyber Dialogue study, was $220 in print, $197 in television, yet only $14 on the Internet.
If you’re pursuing these strategies for your pharmaceutical company clients, remember that such sites need to be easy accessible by users and have robust content that is updated frequently to sustain users demands for current information.
Other studies indicate that users go to sites they feel they can trust. Many are those run by governmental and academic organizations, while others are large portals and search engines.
Tips to advertising to this audience:
Prove Your Worth
One of the most successful campaigns I’ve ever worked on was for a large pharmaceutical client. Unfortunately, I cannot say the advertiser’s name, but I can share with you the strategy, tactics, and results.
Initially, the client was skeptical of online advertising in general. We were told to “prove our worth,” which meant we were given a tiny budget. The planners hit the ground running only to find clutter everywhere. All the major competitors were scattered across large verticals, portals, and search engines.
Going back to the drawing board, we had to take a good, close look at what we had. We had already created a great Web site that had gained a substantial amount of traffic. Direct mail and print advertising were running consistently throughout the year. We were also about six months into a search engine optimization program, which was showing strong rankings and results.
We decided to capitalize on the offline efforts by tagging direct and print with a specific URL that linked to a dedicated splash page. We had come to the harsh realization that we did not have enough money to make an impact via online advertising that year. However, we needed to be online.
Because the drug we were advertising was for treating diabetes, we realized we could piggyback on print around the holidays. Diabetes sufferers have a particularly hard time making eating choices around this time of year because the holidays abound with forbidden foods. So, we implemented a campaign consisting of a mix of ad units that would appear on ad networks, portals, and search engines. These ads promoted a Webcast in which a dietician gave tips on how to deal with the situation. We sponsored that program, which linked to healthy recipes for the holidays. The campaign was easy to implement, incurred low production costs, engaged several hundred viewers per day, and captured a large number of email addresses of people looking for more information on the drug.
As we enter into the New Year, I’m sure many of us will be faced with small budgets that make it difficult to break through the clutter. Don’t be discouraged. There are many back doors — you just have to find them.