Advice You - Internet and Businesses Online

Poor Eddie the e-marketer has been plagued by errors in judgment all his life. From always picking the longest line at the toll booth to buying lots of dot com stocks right before the bubble burst, he constantly struggles with making the right choices. >From disagreeing that a car really needs oil changes every three thousand miles to insisting that the eight-track is going to m

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

ake a comeback, Eddie bumbles through life perplexed. One area that particularly suffers is his e-marketing efforts.

You see, Eddie recently got himself a new website for his business. Unfortunately, he's been trying in vain to turn it into a vehicle for getting leads and making sales. He's confused. He's dazed. He thrashes about lost in a maze. Although he at least understands

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

the importance of e-marketing for driving traffic to his site, he's like a hamster running on a wheel, wasting energy and getting nowhere. Let's take a look at a few of the more typical e-marketing errors Eddie regularly makes.

Treat the Web as a different medium

The other day his business partner, Betty, showed Eddie a recent half-page ad they ran in one of their industry's m

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

agazines. Eddie, excited at how pretty the pictures were, wanted it up on their website pronto. Did he alter it in any way before they posted it to the site? Did he add a specific call to action hyperlink in it? Did he optimize the large print graphics so they would download fast in people's browsers? Nope. He just took the ad, as is, and posted it. Eddie has never been able to

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

rasp the idea that traditional marketing and e-marketing, while related, are not the same thing. What works in print doesn't always work online. Why? Different mediums require different approaches. Look for Eddie's static magazine ad in his first TV commercial, just the motionless ad on the screen for thirty seconds. Riveting.

The Web is interactive. Site visitors can click but

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

ons, fill out forms, or post immediate comments in forums or blogs. When Eddie was having his site built, he really just wanted to have a way to talk about his business. He wanted to tell the world how great his company was and the exciting history of its formation. This is called brochure-ware. It's just taking a company brochure, posting it online and adding a few links. To sa

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

y that Eddie is underutilizing the Web is like saying the ocean is mildly wet. The Web is extremely powerful and businesses have a choice of taking advantage of its power, or just scratching the surface with simple brochure-ware. It's similar to buying a tank, climbing in and lifting the hatch only to shoot spit balls at the enemy. If you have that kind of power, use it.

Ask yo

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

r customers what they want

Since Eddie doesn't really grasp the interactive nature of the Web he guesses what his potential customers want and need. One day in a meeting Eddie was scratching his head, staring up at the ceiling and saying, 'Gee, if there was only a way to figure out what our customers want, a way we could get in their heads, and a way to reach enough of them to

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

et a really clear picture, hmm . . . ?' Thankfully, a timid but sharp junior associate raised her hand and suggested that they just ask their customers their opinions and needs directly, and do it online where they could ask a whole bunch of them.

Eddie jumped at the idea. Finally he was going make the right choice, albeit aided by a junior associate, but the right e-marketing

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

choice nonetheless. They created an html form with forty of the most important questions he could think of and posted a link on their homepage called 'Customer Survey'.

Offer incentives

Only three people ever filled the survey out, and that was it. Eddie was dumfounded. What went wrong? He was hoping for hundreds. The problem was that Web users are not patient and generally do

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

't like to fill out forms, especially long ones. Even more importantly, they don't like to do something for nothing.

If you were jostling your way through a crowded store in a big rush and a bored teenage clerk asked you to fill out a survey of forty questions but wasn't offering anything in return, how likely would it be that you'd do it? A more effective approach for Eddie wo

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

ld have been to narrow down his list of questions to four instead of forty, and offer a coupon for 10% off any online purchase in return for filling it out. If you want to create leads using your website, offer something for free and require your visitors to give you a bit of information first. They'll be much more likely to respond if they get something they perceive as valuabl

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

e in return. Give the people what they want, an incentive.

Regularly study your website statistics

Another area that Eddie seems to miss the e-marketing boat is in analysis. He doesn't have time for looking at all those pesky Web statistics. He can't be bothered with analyzing the number of visitors who come to his site, or how they got there, or where they go once they're the

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

e. He's rendered blind to his e-marketing campaigns' successes and failures. It's like always ignoring your checking account balance and then despairingly wondering where all your money went each week. What's worse, because he ignores the numbers, he has no useful information to help plan his next campaign. Numbers help in life.

A jumbo jet is off course 90% of time. It reaches

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

its destination successfully by constantly checking the data on its exact position and continuously making the appropriate adjustments until it lands on target.

Likewise, an e-marketing objective can be best reached by analyzing the data and making the necessary modifications. For example, if your target is a thousand visitors a week, then look at your website statistics and le

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

arn where the majority of your visitors are coming from. Discover what type of site, link or search engine is doing a lot of the referring. Then adjust your time and budget accordingly.

It's been rumored around the office that Eddie sometimes locks himself in his office and counts his new website's hit counter, prancing around in jubilation each time the counter goes up by one.

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

Yet he hates to hunker down and look at all the numbers, all the visitors, all the referrals, and then conduct a meaningful analysis to help understand the past and better plan for the future.

Since Eddie hates looking at his site statistics, he has no idea how well his last email marketing campaign went. He sent out five thousand emails to a rented list and then asked his sale

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

people if they got any more phone calls that day. It'd be like a television network executive asking his employees if they happened to see their neighbors' TV sets on the night before to determine if the new show did well. Hey Eddie, I have an idea, check your Web stats for page views and you'll know exactly how successful your email was!

Poor Eddie the erroneous e-marketer, i

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

s he condemned to sub-par performances in life and business? If he tries to learn from his mistakes, if he starts to treat the Web differently than print or any other medium, he'll start to see results. If he uses more of the Web's power and potential, tapping into its interactivity and offering easy ways for his site visitors to communicate with him, and if he offers incentives

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

to motivate his visitors to take action, then maybe, just maybe, he may not be doomed after all.

Unfortunately, after choosing the longest line at the toll booth again, his car's engine seized from idling and poor oil maintenance. So to pass the time waiting for the tow truck, he popped in an eight-track cassette, flipped open his cell phone and purchased some more Enron stocks

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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