As someone who receives the majority of Facebook likes from my mother-in-law, I am not the right person to talk to regarding creating popular personal Facebook pages, however, when it comes to serious medical content, I have a few insights that might be helpful to consider when getting people to view content.
I promised to write the 2nd part of my 3-part series: Content is King two years ago – so I imagine this is much anticipated… or entirely forgotten about. I am changing the title a little to what I promised as I think it is important to view this from a larger perspective.
So here is the scenario:
You have established that the content you are producing is relevant and fills a knowledge gap to your desired audience, however, that anticipated audience has not turned up.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, is the noise. You are competing with a huge number of relevant and interesting pieces of content. There are over 28,000 peer reviewed journals, publishing over 2.5 million articles annually1 just to give you an idea.
There are a number of content options, and whether you are publishing in a peer-reviewed journal or hosting content on your site, there are 5 key things to look at:
1. Publishing in the right journal?
Think about what you want from the journal; look at the impact factor, Altmetric scores of articles, number of readers in print, associated society, online stats, and whether it has gold open access options.
Often the brand of the journal is important – the more prestigious, the better for citations and potential media coverage. Ultimately your authors will make the decision on the journal, however knowing the journal’s strengths and weaknesses help you identify the right strategy moving forward.
Within the pharmaceutical space, it is very rare for publication teams to assess how the marketing or sales teams would use the publication. This seems crazy, considering that key studies make up a huge part of marketing collateral.
2. Assuming you’ve published in the right journal – are you making the content interesting?
Considering 93% of communication is non-verbal and video is more engaging, publishing content in different formats seems helpful.
Based on Wiley research, four times as many people would prefer to read content with a video included, rather than just written content and journals are quite interested in accepting different formats.
It is important to note that videos and assets like infographics are summaries and easy to share, making viewability easier and will help you later down the line when promoting your content (point 5).
3. You have published your studies on your corporate website and no one is coming?
This is always going to happen. You must have a corporate website, but you also need to understand that you will have to invest in a lot of traffic driving campaigns to get usage up to a reasonable level. You can also include licensed peer-review content to help provide a balanced approach. Wiley offers a service called content feeds, which pulls in top quality content to help create the right engagement. If this is appealing, then you can go further and invest less in the corporate site – and more in educational platforms or microsites.
4. How to drive traffic?
This is very simple. Here are the rules for traffic driving:
Traditional banner advertising will not help you. It is fine for brand awareness, but with an industry average click-through-rate of 0.07%, it is not a good option for driving traffic.
Email advertising is diverse in its results. There are many different email options, from email blasts to e-newsletter sponsorship. Different publishers will have different options and the CTOR, OR, CTR etc. may seem confusing. You need to be clear on who is actually clicking on your stuff and who is visiting your site. If someone is clicking on an email and reading someone else’s advert, then an email open rate would be misleading.
Think outside the box! Wiley is piloting a new program called PDF advertising, which enables adverts to run on the articles for select journals. This is a new service and is seeing click-through-rates of over 8%. Ask questions and think about options that might not exist yet – advertising is a flexible gig.
So, you’ve published in the right journal, you’ve made sure it has interesting formats, you have the correct website strategy and you are driving traffic using sensible ad tactics. You should be in a great position. The most important factor is point 5.
5. People
Netflix don’t market their programs very aggressively. It’s all word of mouth. Word of mouth is powerful. If you have a great sales team, strong author and KOL relationships and helpful marketing organization and you are consistent in your messaging and approach, you will excel. It can be as simple as talking to people at conferences or sharing a link to your site or your paper*. If you combine your people with your journal choices, enhanced content, good website strategy and traffic driving. You will be on to a winner.
Wiley is one of the largest publishers in the world and we specialize in partnering with pharmaceutical companies to create strategies around delivering the most impact for your papers and driving traffic and engagement. Get in touch for more information on how we can help.
* It is important you check copyright ownership and licences before you share articles.
Reference:
1 . Ware et al. 2015 International Association of Scientific, technical and Medical Publishers, the Netherlands (4th edition).
