An audit of digital marketing effectiveness can make your budget work much harder. Many organisations get less than 40 per cent of the RoI they could from their digital marketing. Minor changes – such as clearer calls to action, simpler sign-ups for email and clearer messaging in banner advertising – can have a dramatic effect on the impact of web marketing. 

1. FOLLOW THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

• To ensure your digital marketing campaign follows the customer's journey, look for effective handovers from search engine pages deep into your site
• Consider the customer's experience of your landing page
• Review the marketing goal of each web page and look for improvements.

2. RELATIONSHIP MARKETING AND SEGMENTATION

• Critically analyse your segmentation strategy and how decision makers, influencers and other stakeholders are treated by your business
• Examine how customers are converted and the connection to relationship marketing programmes.

3. MEASURING PERFORMANCE AND PHARMACEUTICAL MARKETING KPIs

• Check you are capturing marketing and audience activity data effectively
• Consider which data are most meaningful for your business
• Review or set the key performance indicators (KPIs) based on what matters most, eg, number of site visitors that match target profile, number of conversion rates for email sign-ups, dwell time.

4. EXPLORE THE COST PER IMPACT

• Develop a model for calculating the cost per impact for customers in your digital channels
• Review the different types of impacts you have and weight them to reflect the value they give the business
• Repeat the process with classic media, and traditional sales and marketing channels.

5. WHAT TO AVOID

• Pharma websites that neither support customer conversion nor build contact groups for relationship marketing
• Brand microsites that sit outside the main strategy and fail to get discovered in search engines
• Email relationship marketing that is far too general and fails to target segments effectively
• Websites that remain on-screen brochures rather than immersive and engaging marketing experiences. 

When a simple audit like this is complete, look for the cost-per-contact in digital channels and compare to journals and conferences – it can be the most enlightening piece of data of all. 

Digital marketing should be the driving force in campaigns geared to healthcare professionals, but most campaigns still put digital in a minor supporting role. In general, pharma brands have been slow to adopt digital marketing, but audits can quickly help indicate a stronger channel mix. The advice here should get you and your team thinking about how online and digital tools could unlock a step change in the effectiveness of your pharmaceutical marketing strategy.

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