World Tuberculosis Day
World Tuberculosis Day is observed on 24 March each year to commemorate the day in 1882 when Robert Koch announced his discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of tuberculosis, making it possible to diagnose and treat the disease. The goal of the day is to raise public awareness of the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis and to intensify efforts to end the global epidemic.
Tuberculosis remains one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 4,500 people die from tuberculosis every day, and about 30,000 people (including about 700 children) die from a preventable and curable disease. It is estimated that global tuberculosis control efforts have saved 54 million lives and reduced the tuberculosis mortality rate by 42% since 2000.
Tuberculosis can be defined as a disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a bacterium that almost always affects the lungs. It is curable and preventable. Tuberculosis is spread from person to person through the air. When a person with pulmonary tuberculosis coughs, sneezes, or spits, he or she expels tubercle bacilli into the air. Although your body can harbor the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, your immune system can prevent you from getting sick. For this reason, a distinction is made between:
- Latent tuberculosis. You are infected with tuberculosis, but the bacteria in your body are in an inactive state and you have no symptoms. Latent tuberculosis is not contagious. However, it can become active tuberculosis, so treatment is important.
- Active tuberculosis. Also called tuberculosis disease, this condition makes you sick and, in most cases, can spread to others. It can occur weeks or years after infection with tuberculosis bacteria. Signs and symptoms of active tuberculosis include:
- Cough that lasts three weeks or longer.
- Coughing up blood or mucus.
- Chest pain or pain when breathing or coughing.
- Unintentional weight loss.
- Fatigue.
- Fever.
- Night sweats.
- Chills.
- Loss of appetite.
- Tuberculosis can also affect other parts of the body, including the kidneys, spine, or brain. When tuberculosis occurs outside the lungs, the signs and symptoms vary depending on the organs involved.
There are two types of tests used to detect tuberculosis bacteria in the body: the tuberculin skin test and blood tests. A positive tuberculin skin test or blood test only indicates that the person is infected with tuberculosis bacteria. It does not indicate whether the person has latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) or has progressed to tuberculosis disease. Other tests, such as a chest X-ray or sputum sample, are needed to determine whether the person has tuberculosis disease.
When a case of tuberculosis is diagnosed and reported, a contact investigation is conducted in the patient's environment to rule out other possible cases of infection or disease and, if necessary, to begin appropriate treatment as soon as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that persons at increased risk for tuberculosis be screened for latent tuberculosis infection. This recommendation includes people who:
- Have HIV/AIDS
- Use intravenous drugs.
- Are in contact with infected persons.
- Are from a country where tuberculosis is common, such as several countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
- Live or work in areas where tuberculosis is common, such as prisons or nursing and convalescent homes.
- Work in health care and treat people at high risk for tuberculosis.
- Have children exposed to adults at risk for tuberculosis.
Without treatment, tuberculosis can be fatal. This active, untreated disease usually affects the lungs, but can also spread to other parts of the body. It is important to remember that proper treatment of tuberculosis is the best way to control the disease. The treatment of tuberculosis has two main objectives: to interrupt the transmission of the disease by acting on the people who are infected (so that they do not get sick) and to treat the sick to prevent them from transmitting the disease, curing their illness, and preventing them from developing complications. It is essential to complete treatment and not to discontinue it in order to avoid relapse and the emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is much more difficult to treat and more likely to cause complications.
Tuberculosis also remains a leading cause of death due to the rise of drug-resistant strains. Over time, some tuberculosis bacteria have developed the ability to survive in spite of drugs. This is partly due to people not taking the drugs as prescribed or not completing treatment. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis occur when the antibiotic is not effective and does not kill all the bacteria. The surviving bacteria become resistant to that drug and often to other antibiotics.
It is important to remember that tuberculosis remains a major public health problem and that it is essential to complete the contact tracing study and not to stop treatment until it is completed. This is the most important action that can be taken. If treatment is stopped early, tuberculosis bacteria have the potential to develop mutations that allow them to survive the most effective anti-tuberculosis drugs. The result is drug-resistant strains that are more deadly and much harder to treat. It's in everyone's hands!
The Impact of Marketing Strategies in the Healthcare Industry
Why is marketing important in healthcare?
Like other industries, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies cannot do without a solid marketing strategy to reach a wider audience, communicate brand values, or improve market penetration.
The impact of healthcare marketing strategies is growing, as evidenced by the increased investment in digital media by brands in the sector.
In addition, studies show that approximately 88% of people now search for relevant health information on the Internet, a percentage that continues to grow year after year, along with computer literacy.
For healthcare and pharmaceutical brands, taking advantage of this trend represents a unique opportunity, as well as a necessity, linked to the creation of marketing strategies to reach the target audience.
In this article, we will take a closer look at the impact of healthcare marketing strategies that we have observed in numerous successful projects for our healthcare clients.
Goals of Healthcare Marketing Strategies
The objectives and impact of healthcare marketing strategies should be closely linked. These can range from disseminating medical information to educate patients and help them make informed decisions, to driving traffic to a brand or product's website to reach a specific target audience (such as medical or veterinary professionals).
Here we look at some of the objectives that a good digital marketing strategy should achieve and the impact they have on the business, visibility, and reputation of healthcare companies.
Reach
Marketing strategies allow healthcare companies to reach a wider audience that may be interested in the brand directly or indirectly.
This can have a positive commercial impact in both the short and long term by associating the brand with specific issues and (through the marketing campaigns carried out) influencing an audience that previously did not know or associate the brand.
Retention
Retaining existing users (and/or customers, in some cases) is just as important as attracting new ones, which is why healthcare marketing focuses on building a positive relationship between brands and their target audiences.
Of course, all of this is only possible with the right marketing strategies that help build a positive connection between brands and their customers and/or users.
Inform and educate
Through marketing, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies can have a significant impact on raising people's general awareness of health issues. Health marketing can promote medical information through the dissemination of scientific articles and other informational materials based on truthful, validated data written by health professionals.
Thus, health marketing is not just about promoting a product or brand, as is the case with most traditional marketing strategies, but also about raising awareness and empowering people with information and data to make informed decisions about their health. Indirectly, it is a tactic that allows you to build a bond and a level of engagement with the audience you are reaching, making them interested in the brand and ultimately considering it as an option when choosing between different competitors.
Reputation
Another important impact of healthcare marketing strategies is the creation of reputation and brand awareness. In many cases, brand awareness is the first step in achieving marketing objectives such as new leads and sales.
If the audience coming to our website is more knowledgeable about the brand, it will increase the chances of generating conversions. Research shows that 75% of shoppers prefer to buy from a company they already know.
For this reason, marketing adds value when it comes to generating this brand awareness by improving a company's online visibility through better organic positioning, paid advertising campaigns on search engines such as Google or on social networks, and other strategies focused on other communication channels.
Bottom line
Only an effective marketing strategy can make an impact and allow a healthcare company to retain its users or reach new audiences.
In a previous article, we highlighted some free digital marketing tools that can be used to implement some healthcare marketing ideas to define a winning strategy and reach a wide audience, whether for healthcare professionals or end consumers of products and services.
For healthcare companies, finding a digital partner to help them define and implement their online marketing strategy can be a complicated task. There are very few marketing agencies that specialize in healthcare marketing and have a team of experienced professionals. Global Healthcare is one of them.
There are very few marketing agencies that specialize in healthcare marketing and have a team of experienced professionals. Global Healthcare is one of these.
International Childhood Cancer Day
February 15 is International Children's Cancer Day (ICCD), which aims to raise awareness of the disease and the need for every child with cancer in the world to have access to appropriate diagnosis and treatment, and to show support for children and adolescents with cancer, survivors, and their families.
Cancer is a disease in which some cells in the body grow uncontrollably and spread to other parts of the body. Under normal conditions, human cells form and multiply to make new cells to meet the body's needs. As cells age or become damaged, they die and are replaced by new cells. Sometimes the process does not follow this order, and abnormal or damaged cells form and multiply when they should not. These cells can form tumors. Tumors are either cancerous (malignant) or noncancerous (benign). Cancerous tumors spread (or invade) nearby tissues. They can also travel farther to other parts of the body and form tumors, a process called metastasis.
Cancer affects people of all ages and can occur in any part of the body. Unlike adult cancers, the causes of the vast majority of childhood cancers are unknown. Many studies have been done to try to determine them, but at this age there are very few cancers caused by environmental or lifestyle factors. In addition, current data suggest that about 10% of children with cancer have a genetic predisposition. For all these reasons, more research is needed to understand the factors that influence the development of childhood cancer.
Each year, more than 400,000 children are diagnosed with cancer worldwide, and it is estimated that cancer will be the cause of death for 8,544 children under the age of 15 in 2020. In Spain, according to the Cancer Observatory report, around 1,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in patients under the age of 14. The most common types of childhood cancer are leukemia, brain cancer, lymphoma, and solid tumors such as neuroblastoma and Wilms' tumor. Hematologic and central nervous system tumors are the most common, and it is estimated that approximately 50% of children under the age of 15 with cancer have leukemia or lymphoma.
Although much progress has been made in diagnosis and treatment, cancer remains the leading cause of childhood death in developed countries. The likelihood that a child will survive a cancer diagnosis depends on the country in which he or she lives: mortality is relatively low, with 5-year survival rates approaching 80% in high-income countries and reaching 100% for some specific tumor types, but in many low- and middle-income countries less than 30% are cured. These lower survival rates in low- and middle-income countries can be explained by late diagnosis, inaccurate diagnosis, lack of access to treatment, discontinuation of treatment, death due to toxicity (side effects of drugs), and preventable relapse.
Survival rates have improved in recent years. However, given the complexity of current therapeutic procedures, children with cancer should be referred as soon as possible to centers with specialized human and technical resources, where they will be treated by personnel trained in pediatric onco-hematology. For this reason, it is essential that parents and health professionals be aware of the first signs and symptoms and be alert to act when they occur.
Every child with cancer has the right to live a relatively normal life, with access to education, play and, of course, appropriate treatment to manage the disease. However, the reality is different for many of these children, especially those who live in conditions of extreme poverty, where their families and the country where they live cannot offer them any of these guarantees. This is why, in September 2018, the World Health Organization launched the Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer, which aims to address these profound inequalities. The goal is to achieve at least 60% survival for children with cancer by 2030 and to reduce suffering for all.
All children with cancer have the right to access the best diagnosis and treatment in hospitals with specialized units to maximize the chances of success. Home care and palliative care units are also necessary to improve the quality of life throughout the course of the disease. Therefore, it is still necessary to invest more in research programs so that science can find the true cause of this disease, and as a society, we must all do our part to change the lives and dreams of every child with cancer.
There are many ways to celebrate International Childhood Cancer Day. You can get in touch with one of the organizations dedicated to visiting these children to bring a smile or a word of encouragement to them and their families. You can also make a financial contribution through one of these organizations or foundations so that more children and young people can continue to benefit and receive treatment. What are you waiting for? Place your grain of sand!
2022 Veterinary Online Marketing Tools
Nowadays, all businesses and sectors need to be present on the Internet and therefore need to have a good digital strategy. The case of veterinary clinics is no exception. Moreover, people who have a pet generally consider it a member of the family, and when they have to go to the vet, they will choose one that has a positive online reputation, because no one will want to go to a veterinary center that has negative comments, an unprofessional website, or an unfortunate communication on social networks.
Therefore, regardless of the size of your veterinary clinic, it is essential that you consider digital marketing as an important factor for the proper functioning of your business in the present and for its growth in the future. You will be happy to know that digital marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing because you get better results with less investment.
To start managing the digital marketing of a veterinary clinic, as in most cases, you need to take into account these three basic steps:
- Planning: You need to define goals, strategies, and actions. Think about what you want to achieve, how and when. Once these objectives have been set and a budget has been defined, it will be easier to segment the actions necessary to achieve the goal we have set.
- Action: Plans need to be translated into concrete actions. It is important to put our plan into action. If we do not have the knowledge or the time to dedicate to our digital strategy, it is advisable to count on professionals in the sector who can help us.
- Measure: it is not enough to do; it is essential to analyze the results. Through data analysis, it will be easier to make informed decisions based on the behavior of our website users or the way our audience interacts with the digital content we publish.
To cover all the bases in your digital strategy, your practice will likely need SEM, SEO, social media, email marketing, content marketing, and link building efforts. And for this, there are a number of free digital tools that will facilitate your tasks and optimize your efforts:
Google Ads: is the basic tool for SEM (Search Engine Marketing) on the main search engine, Google; that is, to optimize the visibility of your veterinary clinic's website. It is used to manage paid campaigns and your ads will appear together with the results of organic searches. There are several formats to choose from, from the classic text ad on the search network to text, image and video ads on the display network, including more interactive platforms such as YouTube.
Google Analytics: Thanks to this tool, your veterinary clinic's website can give you a lot of information. Which pages are the most visited, what content your readers are most interested in, how long they stay on your site, and so on. This will give you clues to make content marketing, essential to generate content on your website that really interests your potential clients and is useful to them about the world of pet health.
Google Search Console: another fundamental tool for veterinary marketing (and not only), as it allows webmasters to check the status of the indexing of their sites on the Internet by the search engine and optimize their visibility, as well as providing much more valuable information about positioning by keywords, traffic segmentation by country, usability on mobile devices, etc.
GtMetrix: This tool, on par with Google's Page Speed Insight tool, helps you analyze the loading speed of your website, which is an important factor for positioning. If it takes too long to load, users will lose patience and leave your site. In addition, GtMetrix not only gives you a score for your site's load time, but also provides tips and recommendations on how to fix the problems it identifies, helping you improve your site's performance.
Hootsuite: A truly indispensable tool for managing your social networks. With Hootsuite, you can not only schedule social media posts and monitor what is happening on your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter pages, but you can also save a lot of time by responding to comments directly from the platform.
Canva: This is a very versatile and easy-to-use tool for creating graphic content without any design skills. Canvas offers a variety of free and paid resources and templates that allow us to create content in minutes without having to be an experienced graphic designer.
Mailchimp: Thanks to Mailchimp, you can easily manage the sending of your veterinary clinic's newsletters to your database, sharing with your clients the latest news or any valuable information you deem necessary. This tool will help you manage your email marketing efforts by providing you with data on email open rates and more, so you can optimize the sending of your communications.
Survey Monkey: This is the ideal tool to send any type of survey to clients, target audience, employees... Knowing your audience's opinion about your veterinary clinic and the services you offer is key to improving and growing.
Have you seen all the options? Take a look at these digital tools for your veterinary clinic and start now to communicate and position yourself better in the digital world. Most are free and easy to use, so choose the ones that are most useful to you.
Digital transformation in healthcare
Society is changing and adapting to digitalization in leaps and bounds, and the healthcare sector has no intention of being left behind. More and more healthcare professionals, institutions and organizations are using digital media to improve the communication of the services they provide. This is due to the advantages that have made these channels increasingly used, such as reach, immediacy, proximity, and personalization. If society demands a more humane, more digital, or more preventive healthcare, healthcare professionals must do the same.
It is appropriate to highlight some of the key points made by Kate Dion, health communications expert at 3D Communications, and Maturin Tchoumi, manager at the pharmaceutical company Roche Finland. In the talk, they discussed why the future of healthcare digitalization is so promising and how the pharmaceutical industry should contribute to the digital health revolution and growth. Below we highlight some of the ideas.
The digitization of healthcare has been with us for a long time, but the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated this process, not only in healthcare, but in all aspects of our lives. It can be argued that digital disruption connects and improves the quality of life.
The digitalization of the healthcare sector has shown that it can improve patient care services and ensure better patient continuity. This opportunity presented by the pandemic must be used as a method of learning in a way that serves the transformation of healthcare. For this to happen, all components and constituents of the healthcare system must be aligned and working toward the same goal.
Digital transformation and new technologies can facilitate the early detection of diseases and symptoms, a more exhaustive control of pathologies. In other words, to improve the quality of life of patients. Visits and monitoring that used to be strictly face-to-face are giving way to digital check-ups and phone calls that speed up the process and offer the same or better quality of service. While it is true that face-to-face care is essential in healthcare, many cases of follow-up and monitoring are favored by digital transformation as processes are streamlined and patients are more open to having this type of consultation on a more regular basis. Studies show a high level of patient satisfaction with this type of consultation, and all agree that it saves time and avoids logistical problems.
The emergence of applications for the control of various pathologies, such as diabetes, or the use of augmented reality and the metaverse for disease detection is becoming increasingly common and a clear trend for the coming years. It is estimated that the global digital health industry will reach an investment of $1 trillion by 2030. If it follows the same trend and upward curve of digitization of the sector, it will not be uncommon to extrapolate and increase the US data, where in 2019, 42% of patients claimed to use digital health follow-ups to the entire first world.
The real value of digital health lies in patient education. The digital transformation that the sector is undergoing will mean that all those patients who want to can have the same knowledge about their pathologies and clinical history as their doctors and nurses. The high flow of information that can be received will help to improve and prevent many diseases, resulting in a significant improvement in the quality of life of patients and their families. The healthcare sector will also clearly benefit from all these changes that are coming in the not-too-distant future.
All these upcoming changes need to be communicated so that patients can feel part of this growth process. Some of the goals of the digitalization of the healthcare sector:
- Become more patient/consumer focused.
- Increase online services.
- Attract and retain all patients more efficiently.
- Create a strong communication strategy that differentiates you from the competition.
- Communicate that we, as professionals, have adapted to their needs.
- Promote health-related information: news, advances, products, goods, and services within the reach of patients and consumers.
Finally, we look at how healthcare communication has adapted to the new needs of society, moving closer and closer to the communication and value propositions of the mass consumer sector. Today, it is more creative and uses the same tools and strategies that can be used in any other sector. However, communicating health today still requires experts who understand the scientific sector, its audiences, and its characteristics, because although the tone may change, the content must always be rigorous and scientific.
At Global, thanks to our multidisciplinary team, we help our clients in a 360º way, offering all points of view. From planning to design and execution of digital communication strategies. We develop customized strategies to achieve success and complete digital and communications integration for our clients.
Want to join us?
Antibiotic resistance – an impending pandemic
Antibiotics are substances that kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. Most are produced by microorganisms such as fungi and even other bacteria.
In medicine, they are used to combat bacterial infections, which used to be the most common cause of death.
It is important to note that antibiotics are only useful against bacteria and not against viruses, so diseases caused by viruses, such as influenza or colds, are not only not treatable with antibiotics, but counterproductive.
The first antibiotic discovered was penicillin, and this and other antibiotics that followed have saved countless lives. But when they are used carelessly and abusively, bacteria manage to survive them through sheer evolution by becoming resistant to their effects.
This means that bacteria that were once sensitive to a particular antibiotic become less so by developing mechanisms that allow them to survive the antibiotic attack.
Today, there are countless bacteria that are resistant to not one, but several antibiotics and are called multi-resistant bacteria. Even more alarming, there are bacteria that are resistant to all available antibiotics and for which there is no treatment. These are the pan-resistant bacteria, or superbugs, and they are the ones that will cause the great pandemic of this century if we do not take action.
Bacteria have powerful adaptive strategies against antibiotics:
- Vertical gene transfer from parent bacteria to daughter bacteria.
- Horizontal gene transfer, in which two unrelated bacteria transfer genetic material to each other, allowing them to rapidly acquire antibiotic resistance genes. They do this in several ways:
- Transformation: taking the genes that allow them to survive directly from the environment.
- Transduction: Where phages or viruses that infect bacteria can act as vehicles for antibiotic resistance genes.
- Conjugation: In which a plasmid or circular DNA molecule transfers antibiotic resistance genes between contacting bacteria.
- Integron: When attacked by an antibiotic, the integron is activated and rearranges the genes to find the antibiotic resistance gene needed for survival.
It is estimated that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant bacteria will cause more than 10 million deaths per year worldwide.
We are fast approaching a scenario in which the antibiotics we know today will be less and less effective in fighting infections, and the consequences could be on a scale we have not yet imagined. We would be talking about a world where a knee injury could be fatal. Surgery or a transplant would be mission impossible. Fighting pneumonia would be a losing battle.
This problem has been brewing for years and is currently responsible for more than 33,000 deaths per year in Europe alone, costing the healthcare system around 1.5 billion euros.
According to the World Health Organization, there is an urgent need to change the way antibiotics are prescribed and used, because even if new drugs are developed, bacterial resistance to antibiotics will continue to pose a serious threat to the entire world if current behaviors are not changed.
These changes in behavior must include measures to reduce the spread of infections through vaccination campaigns, hand washing, safe sex, and good food hygiene.
We must always remember that antibiotics are restricted drugs and must be prescribed by the treating physician. They have side effects that can cause serious health problems for those who deliberately take them, not to mention bacterial resistance to antibiotics, which creates so-called superbugs that become immune to treatment, allowing diseases that cannot be controlled and can lead to death.
The deliberate, excessive, and inappropriate use of antibiotics is one of the main causes of this resistance problem, for which we all share responsibility. The solution is in everyone's hands.
Post-Covid Syndrome
Post COVID Syndrome is defined as the persistence of physical, cognitive and/or psychological symptoms 12 weeks (3 months) after the acute phase of COVID-19, symptoms that cannot be explained by any other diagnosis.
If we define the post COVID syndrome as those COVID symptoms that persist beyond what is expected, and its consequent respiratory involvement, we must be particularly careful not to include here the symptoms derived from the sequelae and severe complications with involvement of various organs after infection, or even with comorbidity due to other pathologies concurrent with the process itself or previous diseases aggravated by the infection.
Thus, it is necessary to distinguish between post-acute COVID (symptoms lasting more than 3 weeks), prolonged COVID (symptoms lasting more than 4 weeks up to 12 weeks) and post-COVID syndrome or persistent COVID (lasting more than 12 weeks).
Post COVID syndrome can result in more than 50 symptoms, most of which occur in multiple forms. Symptoms may fluctuate or cause flares as it is a heterogeneous entity that includes:
- General malaise
- Post-viral chronic fatigue (low threshold for exercise endurance)
- Asthenia (fatigue at rest)
- Dyspnea (shortness of breath)
- Aphonia
- Coughing
- Arthralgia
- Myalgia
- Anosmia (loss of sense of smell)
- Attention disorders
- Difficulty concentrating or mental fog (disorientation, forgetfulness, confusion, and difficulty concentrating)
- Headache
- Epileptic seizures
- Memory changes
- Tachycardia
- Edema
- Sleep disturbance (insomnia)
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (post-ICU patients)
- Multiple organ sequelae
- Effects of severe hospitalization/post-intensive care syndrome
Post-COVID syndrome has been described in patients with mild or severe COVID-19 and regardless of the severity of symptoms in the acute phase.
Approximately 10-65% of survivors with mild/moderate COVID-19 have symptoms of post-COVID-19 syndrome for 12 weeks or longer.
As research progresses, the mechanisms of these SARS-CoV-2 complications and the cascade of dissemination and organs that may be affected, as well as the cytokine "storm" and hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis syndrome, are becoming known as major causes of these complications.
The initiation of damage and all these sequelae are probably caused by severe inflammatory responses, thrombotic microangiopathy, venous thromboembolism, and oxygen deprivation.
The cause of the diverse symptomatology of Post COVID Syndrome is fundamentally a multisystemic inflammatory response with associated functional organic wear.
However, to understand the long-term effects of COVID19, why symptoms persist or recur, how and who is affected, and the clinical course and likelihood of full recovery more time and much more research is needed.
8 Pharmaceutical Marketing Tips and Ideas for 2022
When it comes to pharmaceutical marketing, it is important to have the right strategy in place to maximize visibility and stand out from the competition. It is therefore essential to develop a multichannel approach that generates interest and visibility and helps build or consolidate brand trust.
We have compiled a number of online medical marketing ideas to help you stand out in 2022.
But before we get into the details of the ideas and the channels we recommend for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy, let's briefly define what healthcare marketing is and how it differs from other industries.
How is pharmaceutical marketing different from other industries?
The healthcare and medical sector is one of the most regulated and therefore it is necessary to take into account the restrictions and requirements of this industry when creating an online advertising strategy.
Promoting the products and services of companies in the pharmaceutical sector requires a special strategy that can be developed in several channels, as long as the requirements of pharmaceutical marketing and its differences from traditional advertising are taken into account.
Below are a number of ideas and tips to help define a winning strategy and reach a wide audience, whether healthcare professionals or end users of products and services.
- Segment the target audience
How a company chooses to communicate, whether in the pharmaceutical, medical device, or other industries, is largely determined by its target audience and how it plans to reach them. Taking the time to define who that audience is and what motivates them is key to developing an effective marketing plan. Getting the audience segmentation right, based on common characteristics such as geography, buyer type, interests, etc., is an extremely important element in establishing a successful marketing strategy. - Implementing a SEO Strategy for Pharmaceutical Marketing
An effective medical SEO strategy will help generate traffic from Google and other search engines and improve rankings for specific keywords related to the industry. The SEO strategy should include a detailed plan that includes the key pillars (among the more than 200 ranking factors recognized by Google), including content marketing, link building, and technical SEO. Hiring a pharmaceutical marketing agency with SEO expertise to ensure your company's website is truly optimized is an investment that can help you achieve your defined marketing goals. - Maintain an active blog
For any business, regardless of industry, having a blog can be a great marketing tool that can have a significant impact in terms of awareness and traffic, as it allows for a much wider range of keywords to be covered compared to landing page content, which is usually designed to communicate a much more direct and simple message. A blog also helps the brand position itself as an expert in its field, providing an opportunity to demonstrate its knowledge and identify itself as an authority, as well as being an effective means of engaging in a conversation with the brand's audience. Another option, in the event that maintaining an active blog is complicated, can be the creation of a news section to present important company news and recent press releases that mention the brand. This signals to users and search engines that the brand is active, builds trust, and ensures that new content is indexed. - Run paid traffic campaigns with Google Ads
Google Ads is a fast, efficient, and scalable way to reach your target audience. Paid advertising allows you to show your services or offers in specific locations in search results or with search and display ads, and remarketing allows you to "recapture" traffic that was not directly impacted on the first visit by showing specific ads only to people who have already visited your site or performed a specific action on your site. - Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns are sometimes the big forgotten part of an omnichannel strategy. But the possibility of segmentation offered by this tool is unique among marketing tools, and a newsletter targeted to the right audience can bring excellent results, in addition to helping to connect with the audience either for informational or promotional purposes. - Open a channel of communication with the public through social networks
Social networks, whether professional ones such as LinkedIn or "mainstream" ones such as Instagram or Facebook, are the privileged place to connect with the public. Both the end consumer and the medical or pharmaceutical professional use them. For healthcare brands, it is important to be able to maintain an active conversation with their own audiences through social networks, which are also an extraordinary tool to generate greater trust in the brand, either by generating brand awareness or by positioning themselves as an authority on certain topics. - Develop a professional website
Having a professional, well-designed website that meets usability and user experience standards is critical to creating a solid first impression and laying the foundation for all of your medical digital marketing efforts. Engaging the services of a pharmaceutical advertising and marketing agency to redesign your website could help provide the final push for more traffic, visibility and leads. - Tracking and Reporting
Installing Google Analytics script on your website to track traffic and see the evolution of quality and quantity metrics on visits is critical. This will help you make better marketing decisions and allow you to understand if the traffic you are generating is having a significant impact.
If you need help implementing these ideas into your pharmaceutical marketing strategy, don't hesitate to contact us.
The importance of measuring website performance and key KPIs to consider
When engaging in the digital world, there is a mantra to keep in mind: "For every action, there is a reaction." Every user who browses the Internet leaves a trail in the form of cookies that can be analyzed to use their behavioral data as an asset to improve the company's value proposition. When a user first interacts with the site, a cookie is created that identifies that user. If the user does not accept tracking cookies, the IP address is used by default, but the data collected is not as accurate as with cookies.
Web analytics consists of collecting and analyzing data related to a Web page generated over a period of time in order to optimize it and improve results. These data and reports give us the ability to understand web user behavior, identify areas for improvement, and target web content and usability to the average user we want to reach. There is a lot of data that can be extracted and analyzed, but to be able to interpret this information in an effective way, it is necessary to carry out a preliminary work in which it is established what objectives are to be achieved with the web. These objectives will be accompanied by key indicators, known as KPIs, which will be used to measure the performance of the Web based on the objectives previously set.
Objectives will vary depending on the type of organization and the purpose of the site; an e-commerce site will not be the same as a blog. But regardless of the objective, there are KPIs that can be extrapolated to any web topic. They are used to analyze the overall performance and observe whether the objectives are met or not, in order to launch strategies and optimizations to correct this data and increase the success of digital marketing campaigns. As mentioned above, cookies are the ones that collect this data and Google Analytics (the tool par excellence for measuring web KPIs) is responsible for collecting this data during the visit until the first thirty minutes, then it stops collecting information.
Here are some of the essential KPIs for web analysis:
- Users: each visitor who accesses the site. Each user is a cookie. If the user changes devices to access the site, two different cookies are counted.
- Sessions or visits: interactions carried out by users on the Web.
- Page Views: the number of pages viewed by users during their time on the Site.
- Average duration: the average time spent by the user on the site. It is a very important indicator because it reflects the interest of the users in the content of the site.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of users who visit only one page of the site and then leave without interacting with the rest. It is synonymous with the quality of the content and is the most difficult indicator to control.
- Traffic Sources: Indicator that provides information about the origin of our users' access. It can be organic, paid, direct, social, referral or email among the most prominent.
- Device: will provide information on what type of device users are using to access the web. This will allow us to optimize the usability by adapting it to the preferred device.
As we have seen, there are many metrics that can be used to measure user behavior on the Web. It will be important to interpret the data relevant to our goals so that we can optimize the web and better reach our target audience. If you would like to learn more about this topic or need help developing your digital marketing strategies and campaigns, please do not hesitate to contact us. We can help you create effective strategies that result in optimal web performance focused on your goals. Together we can grow in the digital environment.
Why do some vaccine recipients develop covid-19?
Since the start of the vaccination campaign, severe cases of COVID-19 have been significantly reduced. However, some of those who have received the full vaccine regimen still develop COVID-19. This is not to say that vaccines do not work or are less effective; on the contrary, all current data on vaccines show that they are very effective and also very safe, even against new variants.
Recall that vaccines prepare our immune system to recognize and defend itself against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and prevent the development of COVID-19 disease by generating an immune system response against the S protein, which is a specific and exclusive protein of the virus.
A person is considered fully vaccinated if he/she has received all the doses prescribed for each of the vaccines currently on the market. However, a complete schedule does not eliminate the possibility of infection with the virus, as these vaccines do not prevent infection or complete invasion of the virus.
People with a complete vaccination program will then have a trained immune system that will act very quickly in the presence of the virus. But while this is happening, the virus can multiply and the person would be infected but with no symptoms or very mild symptoms and could infect others. The simple fact that the virus faces almost immediate resistance from the immune system leads us to believe that there will be up to a 50% reduction in its ability to transmit.
This in no way means that the vaccine has failed. The complete and total success of the vaccine is the prevention of COVID-19.
COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 disease, especially severe cases, the vaccines are not 100% effective, but although their primary goal is not to prevent infection, they do prevent people from developing severe forms of the disease and dying.
Therefore:
- Infections are expected to occur in vaccinees. COVID-19 vaccines are effective in preventing most infections. However, (as with other vaccines) they are not 100% effective.
- Fully vaccinated individuals who become infected are less likely to develop severe disease than unvaccinated individuals who become infected with COVID-19.
- Even when fully vaccinated people do develop symptoms, they tend to be milder than in unvaccinated people.
- Vaccines against COVID-19 protect people against infection and severe disease, and significantly reduce the likelihood of hospitalization and death.
- Vaccination is important to reduce the spread of the virus and prevent the emergence of new variants worldwide.
- Vaccinated people are much better protected against severe disease and death from COVID-19 than unvaccinated people, including variants such as Delta.
- Vaccination is the best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 and prevent infection with the Delta variant, among others.
- Infection in vaccinees occurs when a fully vaccinated person becomes infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. Vaccinated persons who become infected may be contagious.
- Even if you are fully vaccinated, it is important to remember that prevention is still one of the best ways to avoid spreading the virus.
- Even if you are fully vaccinated, if you live in an area with substantial or high transmission of COVID-19, you, your family, and your community will be better protected by wearing a face mask in enclosed public places.
- There are groups of people who cannot be vaccinated, either because they have a medical condition that prevents them from being vaccinated or because of their age. In these cases, it is important to wear a mask, keep a safe distance and wash your hands.
- If you are pregnant, you can be vaccinated against COVID-19.
- If you are breast-feeding, you can be vaccinated against COVID-19.
