John Weaver

In my experience Paid Search has been an afterthought for many Pharma brands when planning their digital marketing strategy. SEO has long been the focus for online search peeps and when it comes to budgeting Paid Search is one of the easiest pieces to eliminate since it does not provide the “long-term benefits” that SEO promises to provide your site. So rather than cut your SEO or Social Media budget to ensure Paid Search is running many folks consider cutting it completely. Wow!

There is no question that SEO can and more than likely will have a significant traffic impact for the website in the long run, but what about now? You just launched a new branded or supporting website and no one knows it exists. Email marketing, press releases, and social media buzz will get it started, but where is the calvary? There is nothing worse than discovering a website with valuable content that people could benefit from that no one knows about. The bottom line is SEO and Social Media Marketing will bring in leads “overtime” but every day a website is up and running without Paid Search running represents a huge missed opportunity for relevant leads.

Below is the long awaited top 10 reasons why every pharma site should be running Paid Search:

1. Instant Traffic – instant relevant traffic sent to your website (not 60-90 days like SEO)

2. FDA Changes – we all know how quick the FDA wants things changed when they see something that violates there guidelines. With Paid Search we are able to turn ads and keywords on and off in seconds not days.

3. Targeted Keywords – If your targeted keywords aren’t working you can adjust them immediately.

4. Uncapped Budget – If your brand is having a strong year and there is extra budget to spend at the end of the fiscal year we can increase your daily/monthly budget to drive additional exposure for the campaign.

5. Beat Your Competitors – Outranking a competitor with SEO can take months or years if their site is seen as an authority for a specific keyword, but with Paid Search your budget can allow you to regain the leads they’ve been capturing.

6. Landing Page Testing – depending upon your site’s goals landing page testing may not apply. For those of you that are thirsty for new patient leads then listen up because testing your landing pages is key to improving your conversion rate. So make sure your team or marketing agency is taking the time to test which pages on your site are converting and what factors are helping the most i.e. a 1800 number call-out.

7. Wider Reach – I guarantee you ( yes I said GUARANTEE) that your Paid Search account will create exposure for your brand on more keywords than your site could possibly be optimized for with SEO. If your have a 20 page site it should only be optimized for roughly 60-70 keywords, which misses a lot of potential traffic.

8. Clear Results – I’ve heard several pharma peeps mention that they need to be able to clearly report to their executives how well the digital marketing campaigns are performing. Your Paid Search report will be the one you will want to give them since the SEO report will note a work in progress for the next few months.

9. Site Change – There is nothing more frustrating to me than when a client decides to change directions and pull down a perfectly good website. I’ve seen several websites that performed well in Organic Search be pulled down due to executive goals changing for the brand. If you were running Paid Search its no big deal because you got the leads you paid for but if you only focused on SEO you turned the site off right when it was starting to perform well.

10. New Tools – Google is constantly coming out with new ways to improve their Paid Search system and recently released their remarketing tool to the public after a year of testing to high profile clients. These tools will allow your brand to not only be at the top of the search results page, but it will provide some significantly better targeting methods than SEO currently provides.

This is an amazing tool that is now available to all adwords customers, but I can already see the problems for Pharma Brands. The remaketing system cookies your visitors that have been to a page or section of your website and then “follows” them around to other websites they visit and displays your ad if that website allows Google Ads to be displayed. So yes if your client visits a website called WeCureCancer.com and your ads are relevant to cancer then there is a very high chance that your remarketing campaign will be in effect on this website. Yikes! I can hear the FDA typing up warning letters already. Hopefully we can dig into this and see how we can limit where or what sites are included.

If you are wanting to learn more about what Google Remarketing has to offer I will let the video below speak for itself.