Digital Marketing: A New Mantra for Pharmaceutical Marketing

Abstract:

Information Technology has made a significant impact in every possible industry. IT revolution has made conventional concepts look unconventional and abstract and tacit knowledge take tangible meaningful forms, applications and has opened a whole new way of communication. It has connected the world in multiple ways. With various digital marketing platforms there are multiple options available and most importantly the communication process has become two ways as against one way in past. This paper describes acceptability & effectiveness of digital marketing strategies that various pharmaceutical companies should keep in mind with prospect of Indian Pharmaceutical market. Study went through both rigorous primary and secondary research with help of various statistical tools to access the usage pattern and measure its effectiveness of digital marketing platform in Indian perspective and we found out that there is Increase in people's acceptability towards digital marketing in India with respect to pharmaceutical & healthcare sector were platforms like E-mail, blogs, social networking website & video on demand found out to be most effective .

1. Introduction:

Digital marketing platforms have opened a whole new way of communication and have connected the world in multiple ways. This paper is an attempt to assess acceptability and efficiency of various digital marketing platforms in India through primary research and literature review.

2. Literature Review:

"Search queries originating from India have grown 20 times in the last five years, India is the third biggest Internet market in terms of users, with over 100 million internet user base, adding that 40 million people in India access the Internet from work, and 30 million from Cafes, apart from 11 million households that have a broadband connection installed, the amount of time that an average user in India spends online is now on par to TV viewing time at 16 hours in a week. On the Mobile Internet, more than 40 million Internet users in India access it through their mobile phones and there are 30 million app downloads in one week. The numbers of search queries originating from mobile phones have grown four times in the last 12 months and 50 times since 2007, more than 300 million people in India would be hooked on to mobile internet by the year 2015'', Rajan Anandan, VP-Sales & Operations at Google India at VC Circle E-Commerce Forum, Delhi on 7th March, 2011. He emphasized on the fact that Indians go online to search for product information and believe in Research Online and Buy offline. According to him 39% of total search on healthcare products and 5% buy healthcare products.

According to David Johnson, VP, Market Bridge, Pharmaceutical marketers have a ways to go in implementing digital marketing strategies and platforms. They acknowledge that a lack of digital marketing experience and organizational shortcomings have hampered its full adoption and integration. In addition, digital marketing strategy and execution at many organizations is set by brands. This decentralization causes further knowledge gaps and campaign inconsistencies. The majority of marketers are using more "traditional" digital platforms, such as email, search and their own Web sites to reach their target audiences. Pharma's reluctance to deploy "emerging" Web 2.0 tools such as social networking, viral video and blogs, is rooted in a lack of familiarity with those tools and a perceived inability to measure ROI. The fact that pharmaceutical marketers are not even experimenting