Dualia AB Blog

Why customer segmentation is what makes you win or disappear. Part 2

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry 3/2023, September 2023. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that the thin segment descriptions handed down from head office work for a sales rep who already knows the customer and fail for everyone else, and that the fix is a persona built jointly by sales, marketing and medical, used as the focal point every discussion returns to. The two failure modes it names, circular meetings that fall back on the product, and groups using the same words to mean different things, are described without reference to any tool, platform or year, so a reader can judge for themselves whether they recognise them.

Three things need checking before anyone acts on them, and this note names all three, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. First, the data. The article proposes segmenting named healthcare professionals on prescribing behaviour, on demographic information such as age and gender, and on how they have acted in digital settings, and it does not set out what the legal basis for holding and combining that would be. Take that to your own data protection function before building the segmentation, not after. Second, the sequence in the worked example, where a rep meets the customer, sends the follow-up that is already in the communication plan, and then tells medical affairs so the colleague there can take step three. How far medical can be sequenced into a commercial plan is set by your own code of practice and your own compliance function, and the article treats that question as out of scope throughout. Third, the piece is written from inside the author's own method: ABC+ is his workshop model, the article says so, and the recommendation runs towards it.

Two of the article's own moves are worth knowing about as you read it. The difficulty of getting agreement in pharma is established with an anecdote from the author's own workshops, roughly 15 minutes to settle on a role with a B2B group against up to an hour and a half with a pharmaceutical company, and that comparison has no source beyond his own practice. Further down, the case that the method works rests on the sentence that this alignment arises every time, in every workshop, and the article closes by saying it has been proven again and again, neither of which is evidenced. What the conclusion builds on is the anecdote and that claim about every workshop; the line about it having been proven again and again sits inside the conclusion itself and is not separate support for it. Two further quantitative claims about the industry sit in that same conclusion, that the basics are completely different today from what they were ten years ago and that the race started fifteen years ago, and neither carries a source either. The three references at the end are given as author, year and a summary, without journal, publisher or link, and the neuroscience of memory and attention that the summary section says the series took its route through is not cited in this part at all, so a reader who wants to check any of it will have to go looking.

That we reach the right individual with the right message, in the right format, at the right moment is something we know is decisive for the success of our medicines. It is a fact, combined of course with solid and favourable results in phase 3 and phase 4 studies. But where the latter is a given, otherwise we would not have a product on the market, the former continues to be a large problem. In this article and an earlier one, Fredrik Holmboe, speaker and digital strategist in the pharmaceutical industry, explores the different types of customer segment used by pharmaceutical companies, the challenges and the opportunities that come with customer segmentation done properly, and the importance of a clear focal point for breaking down the silo structures we all know are there and increasing the cooperation between the sales, marketing and medical departments. You will find the first part of this two-part series in Pharma Industry 2/2023 (see under Utgåvor on pharma-industry.se).

The role of customer segmentation in the pharmaceutical industry today

In today's pharmaceutical industry, customer segmentation is a decisive strategy for working effectively with healthcare professionals (HCP) and driving sales. Segmentation is no longer only the sales department's area of responsibility, though. To create effective communication strategies that resonate with HCPs, both the marketing and the medical departments have to play a key role in the segmentation process too.

Sales reps still play a decisive role when it comes to gathering and sharing detailed segmentation data with their organisations. By capturing information about HCPs' prescribing behaviour, practice characteristics, attitudes and content preferences, the reps can give the marketing and medical departments the insights they need to develop messages and material tailored to the specific needs of different customer segments.

The different customer segments used by pharmaceutical companies

Customer segmentation means dividing customers into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, such as their specialty or therapy area, prescribing behaviour, demographic information and clinic affiliation, factors that are part of the classic CVM (Customer Value Matrix) segmentation where customers are segmented on potential and on development along the "adaption ladder" that has been defined and that is used as a measure by the sales organisation.

Specialty or therapy area: this segment means dividing HCPs by specialty or therapy area. Different specialties have different needs and preferences, and we can develop targeted messages and material that speak directly to the interests of each specialty.
Prescribing behaviour: this segment involves dividing HCPs by their prescribing behaviour, such as the volume and frequency of the prescriptions they write. High-volume prescribers may require a different level of attention and engagement than low-volume prescribers. By understanding the prescribing behaviour of different HCPs, targeted engagement strategies are developed that meet the specific needs and preferences of each group.
Demographic information: this segment involves dividing healthcare staff by their demographic information, such as age, gender and geographic location. By understanding the demographics of different customer segments we can tailor our engagement strategy to appeal to the specific characteristics of each group. A company can for example use different messages and material to work with younger as against older HCPs.
Clinic affiliation: this segment means dividing HCPs by the characteristics of their workplace or clinic. This can include factors such as the size of the clinic, the type of workplace and the variation in the patient population. By understanding the different conditions of clinical everyday life for different HCPs we can again develop targeted engagement strategies that meet the specific needs and preferences of each group.

After that we have attitude and behaviour characteristics, which form a behavioural segmentation, often grounded in behavioural patterns that have shown up in interaction at physical meetings together with how an individual has acted in digital settings.

Attitude and behaviour characteristics: this segment means dividing HCPs by their attitudes and behaviours. This can include factors such as the level of knowledge or experience of a particular therapy area or treatment, as well as their perception and thoughts about a particular medicine or company. By understanding the attitudes and behaviours of different HCPs we can develop engagement strategies that address specific concerns.
Content preferences: this segment means dividing HCPs by their preferences for the type of content they consume. By segmenting on content preferences we can tailor our engagement strategies to the specific type of content our customers prefer. This helps make sure they get content that is the most relevant and interesting for them, which means a better customer experience that over time, held at a good level, lays the ground for customer engagement and a more positive perception of us as an organisation.

Each one of these customer segments has unique needs and preferences, and effective segmentation strategies require a deep understanding of them. An understanding no single department can muster on its own, and which instead needs searching cross-functional work with time for discussion around a clear focal point. So that the discussion does not fall back on the message and the product, but puts the Persona that represents the segment at the centre.

Challenges and opportunities for customer segmentation in the pharmaceutical industry

Although customer segmentation is a critical strategy for pharmaceutical companies, it also brings several challenges. One of the biggest is the need to balance the competing demands of different customer segments.

As an industry we are used to trying to meet the whole market with the whole of our message. We are not trained to differentiate our message to the extent a digital world requires, we have run "one-size-fits-all" for decades.

And now we have the goal of creating personally adapted engagement strategies that deliver communication with the right content, in the right channel, in the right format, at the right moment.

How should we prioritise our time and how should we prioritise our budget?

Take just a few quick examples. Are we able to develop messages that:

appeal to both high prescribing and low prescribing doctors?
meet the needs of both primary care doctors and specialists?
are useful to nurses in their meeting with the patient?
help the patient stay on their prescribed medicine for the time specified?

How should we balance product communication with communication "above the brand"?

What is most relevant? And for whom is the thing we are focusing on relevant?

Another challenge is the need to continuously refine and optimise segmentation strategies as customer needs and preferences develop over time. We have to be able to adapt to changing market conditions and take in new data sources, new data, new insights from that data, in our segmentation strategies in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Despite these challenges there are also significant opportunities that come with customer segmentation.

This is why customer segmentation has to work for the marketing department too

In the previous part of this series I describe two different scenarios, a sales rep's physical meeting with the customer in the room and the virtual meeting with the customer, and how those two differ on some genuinely fundamental levels.

Among other things we have established that a skilled rep can make a "dull" sales campaign interesting through the way they act, a way of acting that is not transferable to a virtual meeting.

We have also established that customer segmentation with a relatively thin description of a segment is an inheritance we have to challenge today.

That is because the thin description works for the rep who knows their customer, but it does not work for a marketer who has to create relevant (and here I refer to the previous article where I reflect on what "relevant" really means) communication over time for the customer.

So now we take the reasoning a step further and bring the marketing department into the mix.

The idea is that in the pharmaceutical industry customer segmentation is used to develop targeted marketing and communication strategies that resonate with different customer segments. Personally adapted market communication is the goal to the extent that it is possible, and we are talking about omnichannel marketing.

But we all know we are not there, and many are wondering how we get there.

In fact I think every commercial organisation is wondering exactly that, or definitely ought to be wondering and discussing exactly that, and that many commercial organisations, above all in the pharmaceutical industry, do not have any really good answers.

Because if no solution is found for how the personally adapted delivery of the sales campaign by the rep, in the room, can be replicated in the communication from the marketing department so that this communication is personally adapted too, you are standing still. And today standing still means the same as going backwards, becoming less competitive and eventually starting to see your market share fall.

It is in order to get relevant, personally adapted communication from the marketing department as well that customer segmentation has to work, and then, most important of all, without creating too much change in the cooperation with the European or global organisation.

Would you not agree?

A solution to the dilemma of personally adapted digital communication

When a problem exists that stays around for a long time, like this one about how hard it is to get relevant, personally adapted communication out of the marketing departments, I am now going to get a little personal.

I am now getting personal about my vision. You with the red personality, skip to the next subheading.

What drives me, what made me set a personal vision of being in one way or another a driving factor towards better market communication from pharmaceutical companies in Sweden, is that at the end of 2011 I ran straight into what is called "the wall". Hard. And it took me a long time to come back.

I connect a large part of why that happened to the processes around market communication, and the cooperation between the sales, marketing and medical departments, not being efficient enough.

A year or so after I started working again I gave my first lecture, that was in 2014 in front of a small, lovely group at NetDoktor's office, and something under a year after that I dared to send an article off to Niclas and Patrik, the founders of the magazine Pharma Industry, which is much more frightening, because an article is something I cannot change once it is in print.

So I write, I lecture and I do as much as I can to learn more that I can then pass on, all in the hope that it will lead to a small change here, a small adjustment in how a question is framed there, and how in the end, through many small streams, that will meet my vision.

Sometimes it feels like banging my head against a wall. It is after all the pharmaceutical industry we are focusing on here, and it is perhaps a little telling that today I still use certain presentation slides from my first lecture in 2014.

But I love what I do, and I will not stop for many years yet, and every bit of support or feedback, every challenging question, every request to come and speak or to be part of a project that I get is so enormously valuable.

And being personal in the way I have just been under this heading is something I would like to see more of. I see it as courage to be who you are and to be authentic.

Now back to this business of discussing winning or disappearing on the strength of customer segmentation.

The danger of circular discussions

Think about this in your next working meetings where you focus on something digital. Does the dialogue at some point start turning into some form of circular pattern?

What do I mean by a circular pattern?

Well, it is when there is a lot of "we ought to", "we have to", "that sounds good" and "this needs doing". Or formulations like those, where they do not really lead to any clear tasks to carry out. The meeting does not feel like as effective a meeting as it could have been. And it is relatively common at this point for the group to fall back on what is a safe, shared place, which is the medicine and the medicine's benefits and USPs.

Do you recognise that, or do you think you will recognise it in future?

I have experienced it on a number of occasions in all kinds of different organisations, situations and constellations. And what has turned out to be the solution in many cases is getting a shared ground for the group to stand on, and I will touch on some of the parts of such a shared ground.

What has happened now during the pandemic is that so much has changed, new terms have become current, new processes have appeared, new digital resources such as websites, analytics tools, tracking systems, dashboards and more have become everyday things that we are simply expected to understand how to work with.

This is when a shared semantic ground to stand on is above all needed, where semantics is the study of the relation between linguistic signs (words) and their meaning.

As an example of this I usually take "email marketing". What is email marketing? What makes email marketing good? What are the absolutely fundamental must-haves for making email marketing work? What are the finer details that lift every KPI? How do we balance content focused on the product and content "above the brand"? Which data should we use to optimise continuously, and what does optimisation actually look like in email marketing?

We all have some form of ongoing email marketing, but I would bet that if you looked into the questions above in a working group you would find many different interpretations.

If the working group does not have a shared semantic ground to stand on, where the subject they are discussing and the words they use carry the same meaning and sense for everyone, circular discussions come easily, with a near guaranteed inside-out perspective and a product focus in the initiatives that eventually get carried out.

The danger of not having a focal point

The next reason a working group is less effective is that it lacks a focal point for the discussion. A focal point that, like the semantics, means everyone in the group has a shared understanding of what is actually being discussed and how it is to be used.

What do I mean by a focal point?

Well, a focal point is the "object" of the discussion that everyone knows, knows what it is and knows how it is to be used, which is needed in order to create progress and carry the dialogue forward. In this context that "object" is a Persona. A proper and easily understood description of the recipient of the communication being discussed.

Here I break off with a quick anecdote. When I run workshops according to our ABC+ model with B2B organisations, it usually takes around 15 minutes to agree on which role (for us: segment) you want to focus on, and the group can jointly describe, in broad terms, why they want to focus on that role.

When I have run exactly the same exercise at pharmaceutical companies, that exercise has sometimes taken up to an hour and a half.

Why?

Well, because at the pharmaceutical company there are more factors to take a position on than in a B2B context. Differences between geographic areas, size of clinic, access to care resources and more. In fact the factors listed at the start of this article.

So skilled sales reps, well educated people and in no way less capable than the ones at the B2B companies, rather the opposite, take longer to land on a shared view of which role (for us: segment) they want to focus on. And by extension, take longer to be able to describe, jointly and in broad terms, why they want to focus on that particular role.

With that anecdote as an introduction to the difficulties that exist in creating a shared focal point, we now take the next step to what is probably the greatest source of confusion in commercial communication in our industry.

To begin with there is a difficulty in choosing a role with a shared view of why.

But difficulties are also to be found in what you have as a group to discuss and work from, which is the thin segment descriptions we have all received from a head office somewhere and have one view or another about. Segment descriptions that rarely represent the market we see and work in, and that even more rarely are genuinely relevant to our commercial communication.

Here you may be thinking that the segments we have to work from actually are useful and are used every day by our organisation to drive our business. If you are in that thought, I would ask you to stop and consider whether the segments that exist are useful for steering product-related information, or whether they actually form the basis for "all other" communication.

The communication that is usually appreciated most by healthcare, the kind that lands "above the brand".

In my experience the segments we have in the pharmaceutical industry are (almost) always used to steer product-related information. And that is where we really have to create a change.

The power of a shared view, when more departments start working in the same direction

Let us now assume, in order to take the reasoning further, that a working group at your company has landed on a shared view of what the role they want to focus on looks like. That as a group they can describe in broad terms why they have chosen that role. And that as a group they have decided which existing segment they are going to work from.

With those factors in place, the working group at a pharmaceutical company has exactly the same conditions and the same ability to move on in the workshop process according to the ABC+ model as a working group at a B2B company.

What now happens, when you choose an existing segment as the basis for a description of a role as above, is that you marry the world of the sales rep to the world of the marketer in a very neat way, and by extension marry in the worlds of the other customer-facing colleagues too, above all the world the medical colleagues work in daily.

In that marriage lies the basis for creating a Persona for commercial communication that can be agreed on across functions.

And it is a Persona description we have to arrive at.

We have to leave the thin segment descriptions we all find hard to relate to, and even harder to work together around, far behind us and take the next step.

Why?

Well, because the Persona is of course better and more thoroughly described than the segment. But above all, the description that makes up the Persona is produced in the cooperation between mainly the sales, marketing and medical departments.

Which means everyone has a shared view.

Imagine that discussion and the power that comes from having that shared view.

When everyone has the same focal point, a focal point produced together. A focal point people feel secure in. A focal point where they know the semantics. A focal point that removes circular discussions, that removes the risk of falling back on that safe shared point I mentioned above. The safe point that is always the medicine and that leads without exception to a hundred percent product focus, and not a customer focus.

This shared view arises every time, in every workshop, and it is now that we start to approach a real foundation for a strong customer focus. We start to approach personally adapted, relevant communication, and, to stick my neck out a little, from the marketing department as well.

The advantages of correct customer segmentation in the pharmaceutical industry

By starting from existing customer segments and creating Personas from them as focal points, according to the process described above, pharmaceutical companies can develop more targeted and effective engagement strategies that meet the specific needs and preferences of different groups of HCPs.

That is the direct result and a clear goal we have to have.

What we create at the same time is the possibility, in cross-functional conversations, of working out clear buyer journeys where we even have the possibility of starting to touch on what is so popularly called omnichannel orchestration.

The strategy for working the customer often lands on the sales rep. They are to be the conductor who leads the communication to the customer, and for omnichannel to succeed in practice they have to have the time to agree, together with the marketing and medical departments, on which arguments, which science and so on are available.

And again, and I repeat it because it is so incredibly central and important, for those discussions to result in something that creates relevance over time there has to be a clear recipient, a focal point, at the centre of what is discussed and decided.

That focal point takes shape in the form of Personas.

Let me give you an example. A sales rep is out in the field and meets a customer who turns out to be one of the 3 to 4 defined Personas the rep's product team has to work from, and so the rep knows immediately what is to be communicated and how what is communicated in this particular meeting can be followed up later.

Why?

Well, because what is communicated has already been worked out across functions.

The rep can then, since it is in the communication plan, in the engagement strategy of the buyer journey, make the send that is the most relevant of them all. The send that continues the dialogue that has just taken place, as part of a strategy.

Once those two interactions are done, the rep can then inform the medical department so that the colleague there can follow up with the customer in step 3 with the medical information that has been worked out across functions as the appropriate next step.

That step 3 then makes up the springboard for step 4, step 5, step 6, and so on.

The rep can become the conductor who steers what is communicated and when it is communicated, since it follows the agreed engagement strategy. A strategy that of course does not (only) run from A to Z, but has several layers and ways forward, which makes it possible to follow the customer in their individual wishes or needs.

From that set-up it then becomes possible to hold the right meeting with the right communication, to do the right follow-up, to send the right material to someone in the care team, the nurse for example, in order to support the doctor, and so on.

It is only now that we can really start to talk about real buyer journeys, or as I prefer to call it, it is only now that we can talk about a well-thought-through engagement strategy that creates customers who experience a very good customer experience.

And it is only through a good customer experience over a longer period that we can come anywhere near customer engagement, where customers actually want to interact with us on the strength of the value we have consistently given them.

Time to create the right conditions?

This whole line of reasoning falls back constantly on how it is Personas and not segment descriptions that have to be the focal point of every discussion.

But above all it falls back on giving the sales, marketing and medical departments time to sit down and work out these Personas, and from them create different engagement strategies as well as tactics that support the best possible omnichannel marketing.

Would you say that time exists in your organisation?

Would you say you end up in circular discussions?

Would you say you have different views of the semantics you work from?

Would you say you have, or lack, a clear focal point?

Would you say you have an established engagement strategy that involves several departments?

Would you say you are where you should be as an organisation, or that you have a long way to go?

Would you say you need guidance through this process?

A quick summary of the series

Customer segmentation is a decisive factor for success in the pharmaceutical industry, and not only in our industry but in every commercial organisation. The questions touched on in this series are questions every leader in every commercial organisation should be touching on.

By dividing customers into distinct groups, communication and engagement strategies can be tailored to specific needs and preferences. That requires close cooperation between different departments, though, and there is a large dilemma.

We live with an inheritance that has its origin in the sales force once being the company's spearhead out towards the market, which means that essentially all internal structures and processes for customer segmentation and customer work are built on the needs of the sales organisation.

Sales reps have a key role in both gathering detailed data on customer behaviour, attitudes and content preferences, and acting as the conductor in an omnichannel orchestration.

To succeed with that, the knowledge gathered has to be shared with the marketing and medical departments, so that a cross-functional group can shape relevant engagement strategies, messages and material. Here tools such as the CRM system need modifying to make storing and sharing the information easier.

To illustrate the importance of material that is personally adapted for the customer, the article took its route through neuroscientific research on memory formation and attention, where the difference between which sales material works in a physical as against a virtual meeting was brought out.

It is not possible to use sales material intended for a physical meeting in a virtual meeting. The material for the virtual meeting has to be built from the ground up with neuroscientific research as its basis.

To get away from the inheritance we live with, to create good conditions for cross-functional cooperation with commercial communication and engagement strategies at the centre, to increase the chances of succeeding in every customer meeting whether it is physical or digital, we have to base all our interaction with the market on Personas and build from there. That is decisive.

These become shared focal points in the cross-functional work, they reduce the risk of circular discussions, they reduce the risk of scattered messages, and they have to start from existing segments but be deepened in order to become more useful.

Circular discussions, and views of what words mean that pull in different directions, are far too common, especially now after the pandemic when change happened faster than ever before. Introducing a shared set of terms and semantics makes a shared view easier. There is incredible power in a shared view where departments work in the same direction.

Through workshops where different departments jointly work out Personas, a stronger customer focus and more consistent messages can be reached. This lays the ground for well-thought-through engagement strategies and more effective omnichannel marketing.

Models such as ABC+ can be a good tool for guiding cross-functional working groups through the process of creating clear Personas and engagement strategies. With the right method and a shared view in the organisation, customer segmentation can contribute to greater internal engagement.

Customer engagement is based on a positive customer experience over time, where the customer consistently receives valuable communication. Communication like that is impossible to keep up over time without time being invested in discussing the questions and subjects touched on in this article.

With the parts touched on in this article in place, you dramatically increase your chances of a better sales result.

The best way to grow is to help.

Conclusion

Having written this series, I realise that we in the pharmaceutical industry have a fair amount to think about when it comes to the way we segment and communicate with customers. My hope is that the article raises questions we can address together, for the reason that advanced segment analysis and cross-functional Persona work is the key to successful communication and greater engagement in the modern pharmaceutical industry. What is needed now is a shift from traditional silo thinking to a hybrid world where the customer is and always will be at the centre.

Or as I usually prefer to put it, in simpler words and slightly more plainly:

Traditional silos and processes quite simply do not work any more. We have to start thinking in new and broader ways in order to genuinely understand the needs and behaviours of different customer groups. This is about starting to work across functions with Personas and agreed engagement strategies that put the customer at the centre.

It will take time, time you have to ask for. It will take internal engagement and a process that is clear to everyone in order to find the forms for this new way of working. The potential to create stronger engagement from the market and reach better results is enormous.

The conclusion simply has to be that it is time to kick out old habits, to kick out the inheritance we live with, and together find our way back to, and then work from, today's "the basics".

Because "the basics" are completely different today from what they were only 10 years ago. The race started 15 years ago and change in the pharmaceutical industry is slow.

So start today. Create the Personas you can all stand behind, start from existing segments in order to marry the worlds of the sales, marketing and medical departments for a greater shared view. There is incredible power in a shared view and it will increase internal engagement.

Bonus #1 is that what you create matches the segmentation in your CRM system.

Bonus #2 is that you as a leader drive change management in your organisation without it being disruptive.

The subjects and questions touched on in this series are the ones I think about every day, questions and subjects there are clear and well-defined methods for finding answers to, where organisations that have their answers in place will see enormous differences.

It has been proven again and again.

You will find me most easily on LinkedIn, and with that I wish you all the best.

FREDRIK HOLMBOE

Owner & Lead digital strategist at Dualia

References with summaries

"The Dark Side of Virtual Selling: Effects of Emotional Exhaustion on Salesperson Performance and Turnover Intentions" by Erik Erhardt, Michael Ahearne and Zachary Hall (2020). This study examined the negative effects of virtual selling, in particular the emotional exhaustion sales reps experience from conducting sales conversations through digital channels such as Skype, Teams or Zoom. The researchers found that virtual selling can be more mentally demanding than selling face to face, since reps have to work harder to build relationships and handle non-verbal signals. This can lead to emotional exhaustion, which in turn can reduce sales performance and increase turnover intentions.
"The Challenges of Selling Virtually" by Jill Konrath (2019). This article brings out several challenges with virtual selling, including the difficulty of building relationships, creating trust and holding attention through digital channels. Sales reps also face technical challenges, such as a poor internet connection or software failures, that can disrupt sales conversations and damage relationships with customers.
"Overcoming the challenges of virtual selling" by Lee Salz (2021). This article discusses the difficulties of virtual selling and offers strategies for overcoming them. One important challenge is the lack of non-verbal signals, which can make it harder to establish relationships and build trust. Sales reps can overcome this by being more deliberate in their communication, using video where possible and paying close attention to the tone and the language used by their customers. Another challenge is the need for sales reps to be skilled in using digital tools, which requires continuous training and support from their organisations.

Until next time I wish you all the best.

FREDRIK HOLMBOE

Owner & Lead digital strategist at Dualia

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Part 1 is here on this site. Turning existing segments into personas that sales, marketing and medical can all work from is what the Omnichannel Journey Sprint is built around.

Why customer segmentation decides whether you win or disappear. Part 1

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Tue, 23 May 2023 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry 2/2023, May 2023. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that a sales campaign built for the room does not transfer to a screen, and that a customer segment described in six or seven sentences cannot carry the work the marketing department is expected to do with it. Written in 2023, it treats the virtual meeting as the normal case, not as a pandemic exception, and that has held. Two things date it, and both sit in the middle of the piece. The five points on relevance came from ChatGPT4, and the article presents the model's agreement as support for a position the author had been arguing for years; that was a common move in the first months the tool was widely available, and it is not the kind of support it was taken for. It matters here because the conclusion a few paragraphs later is built by combining that list with Carmen Simon's research, so a reader should know which half comes from published work and which from a model's output. The aside calling the model far better than Google belongs to the same moment. One further caveat the article does not raise: the 55, 38 and 7 percent split it cites is Mehrabian's, and that study was already contested in 2023, so it carries less than the text asks of it. The body is republished unchanged.

Reaching the right individual with the right message, in the right format, at the right moment: we know that this is decisive for how our medicines end up being used. It is a fact, combined of course with solid and favourable results from phase 3 and phase 4 studies. But where the latter is a given, otherwise we would not have a product on the market, the former remains a large problem. In this article and the one that follows, Fredrik Holmboe, speaker and digital strategist in the pharmaceutical industry, explores the different types of customer segments used by pharmaceutical companies, the challenges and the opportunities that come with segmentation done properly, and the importance of a clear focal point for tearing down the silo structures we all know are there and increasing cooperation between the sales, marketing and medical departments.

A closer look at the difference between sales communication and marketing communication

There is a difference between sales communication and marketing communication. Sales communication is about what happens in the room and what happens digitally, while marketing communication is about reaching the market, either in analogue form or digitally. The two can look similar. After all, "it is the same customers our commercial communication is aimed at". Right?

But the difference is enormous, and there is a great deal of research behind that claim.

Sales communication and engagement from a neuroscience perspective

With a background in cognitive neuroscience I find this area extremely interesting, and we start with sales communication, the conditions the sales rep works under, and the brain of the person on the receiving end.

Using a sales campaign built for face-to-face meetings in a digital setting does not work, because the conditions are completely different.

I have put that claim in italics because it matters that much!

They are completely different because they are completely different for the brain of the person receiving them!

Research by Erik Erhardt (2020), Jill Konrath (2019) and Lee Salz (2021) highlights the challenges of digital meetings. More about those studies later on, and more about how campaigns should be designed to appeal to the receiving brain. But first, let us look at the face-to-face meeting.

The face-to-face meeting

In the face-to-face meeting we have all the signals evolution has taught us to read:

Body language: posture, gestures, movement.
Facial expression: the expressions that show feelings and reactions.
Tone of voice: pitch, volume and tempo.
Paralinguistics: sounds and pauses that are not words, such as a silence that says more than a thousand words, sighs, groans or laughter.
Gaze: eye contact and where you focus your eyes.

Looking at that list, most of it seems achievable in a virtual meeting too.

Then we come to Albert Mehrabian, psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his well-known but in most cases somewhat overgeneralised study. He claims that body language accounts for around 55 percent of our communication when it comes to feelings and attitudes. Tone of voice accounts for around 38 percent, while the words we use account for only around 7 percent.

The study is considered overgeneralised because it was really about how people interpret contradictory information when they communicate feelings and attitudes, and not about communication in general.

But given how often Mehrabian's study is quoted, and how often it is used in communication training, then together with the three studies mentioned earlier we can draw one simple conclusion:

Using a sales campaign built for face-to-face meetings in a digital setting does not work, because the conditions are completely different. They are completely different because the conditions are completely different for the brain of the person receiving them!

There is that argument again, simply because I keep seeing, and I am sorry to have to say it, a sales campaign built for physical meetings being shortened slightly and then used in the digital meeting.

That is the wrong approach if the goal is to create change and move a customer along an "adaption ladder". Completely wrong!

Why am I raising this in an article whose focus is supposed to be customer segmentation?

Because there is a very clear reason, and I will come to it a little later. But first, one more dimension to the segmentation dilemma.

"The commercial inheritance"

First we need to establish another hypothesis that I believe has a lot of bearing on the subject. It is an inheritance every commercial organisation lives with today.

It comes from the fact that the sales force was once the company's spearhead into the market.

As a result, a large part of, not to say all of, the internal structures and processes meant to identify the market's best customers and its greatest potential are built around the needs of the sales organisation.

Today that setup is no longer enough!

What is needed is a more nuanced approach to reaching the market!

Now back to the example above, where a sales situation was illustrated with the rep either in the room with the customer or meeting the customer virtually. Same rep, two different scenarios.

And, as noted earlier, almost always handled with no distinction at all between the physical and the digital.

The same opening, the same slides, the same close are used virtually as physically in almost every organisation which, at the risk of sounding like a parrot, is not good enough!

Why?

The virtual meeting, neuroscience and engagement

To answer that, let us take a short detour to Boston in 2018, where I had the privilege of listening to Carmen Simon, a world-renowned expert and researcher in cognitive neuroscience, at the Inbound conference that HubSpot organises every year.

Her research goes deep into how our brains create memories tied to engagement and decision making, and her presentation, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, really stuck in my memory! It was superb, with everything that happened in it, animations and sometimes something as simple as a subtle wave of shading sweeping diagonally behind the text. Purely to keep our brains engaged.

In her groundbreaking and very readable book from 2016, "Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions", she presents a fascinating "formula" for creating memorable content.

Carmen Simon's model for creating memorable content rests on the idea that effective communication should engage the audience, hereafter "the customer", and help them remember the information so that they eventually make decisions based on it. Here is a short overview:

Attention: capture the customer's attention by presenting relevant and engaging content. Use visual elements and storytelling to make the information more attractive and easier to relate to.

Encoding: make the information easy to process by breaking it down into smaller, digestible pieces. Use plain language, metaphors and comparisons to help the customer understand complex concepts. Nobody is ever finished learning.

2.1 The author's addition to Carmen's model: in connection with encoding and storage, something called cognitive consolidation takes place. This is the process where the brain converts and stores information from short-term memory into long-term memory. The term is used in neuroscience and psychology to describe how our brain handles and stores memories in a more lasting way. Cognitive consolidation is an important part of learning and is part of why we can hold on to information over time.

Storage: help the customer retain the information by presenting it in a memorable way. Use repetition, elements that stir emotion, and novelty to make the content more memorable. This is simply about creating connections in the listener's brain that make it easier for them to recall the information later.

Retrieval: at this stage we are no longer with the customer, so we must have created triggers that help them remember the information through things they meet in their everyday work. We have to have connected our presentation to situations, patient encounters or similar events that help the customer's brain make the link between what is happening in front of them and our presentation.

Decision making: this is where solid preparation before a presentation really pays off! Here we have to rely on the earlier steps having laid the ground for a decision in our favour. If the customer has understood the message, felt engaged and consolidated the memory, it is more likely that they will make decisions of their own that are in line with what we have communicated. It matters here that we have given them clear and relevant options for action that they can use to make well-founded decisions.

By following this model, commercial organisations can create content that not only gives the sales force the support it needs in terms of sales material for virtual meetings, but also captures customers' attention and in the end influences how they decide.

But what is it that makes a sales campaign appear to work in the physical meeting, you are asking now, right?

The answer is that in the physical meeting there is a skilled rep who can adapt the message, the body language, the energy level, the ability to hold the room's attention, and everything else that makes a skilled rep skilled. With a skilled rep in the room it can turn into a show, and a show is memorable in itself. That rep's skill in the room falls flat in a virtual meeting. There, the rep needs support from the sales campaign.

The sales campaign

I hope it is now clear that what is needed is a sales campaign built from the ground up to suit the digital meeting, which in short means more storytelling, more video, more animation, and a structure that leads the customer's eye the right way. Above all, fewer static slides with black-and-white scientific curves.

That kind of static, information-heavy slide is known in some circles as "death by PowerPoint", which also happens to be an interesting TED talk that I can recommend.

Back to sales campaigns and the rep's meeting with the customer, because this is where I come to what I promised earlier, that is, to explain why I spend such a large part of an article about segmentation on the difference between a rep's physical and virtual meeting with the customer.

The reason is that to succeed with our goal of moving a customer along an adaption ladder, of helping that physician give our medicine to the right patient at the right time and in the end lay the ground for better care, we have to be relevant.

We have to be relevant.

And what does it mean to be relevant?

Simple. You just have to say the right thing at the right time. Then you are relevant. Right?

Not if we approach the concept of relevance through first principle thinking, which means breaking a problem or a concept down into its basic elements and building an understanding up from those elements. When it comes to being relevant to a listener or a customer, we can use first principle thinking to identify the basic factors that create relevance.

Understand your audience: start by understanding the listener's or the customer's needs, values and expectations deeply. That means doing research, asking questions and gathering insight into what matters to them.

Adapt your message: use what you know about the audience to create a message tailored to their interests and needs. That can mean adjusting the tone, the content or the presentation of your message to make it more relevant and more engaging.

Create value: offer solutions, insight or information that is valuable to your audience. Make sure what you offer is useful, practical and relevant to their situation and their needs.

Build relationships: create a sense of trust and genuineness by building long-term relationships with your audience. That can mean being transparent, honest and consistent in your communication, and showing empathy and understanding for their perspective.

Capture attention: use techniques that capture the listener's or the customer's attention and engagement, such as storytelling, humour or emotional triggers.

Those five points came straight from ChatGPT4, which in so many cases is far better than Google, for one simple reason: to see whether what I have been lecturing about and claiming for many years has been correct. I am glad to say that ChatGPT4 and I agree.

Compare the list that comes from Carmen Simon's research with the list of the fundamental building blocks of relevance for a listener and you will see a great many similarities, and by combining the two lists it is possible to deduce more insights still.

Above all, it is possible to arrive at one fundamental conclusion, and this is where we get to segmentation of the customer base.

Finally, you are thinking. Is he going to write a whole d*mn book before he gets to the point?

If you know me, you know that I like to put things in their context before I get to the point, so that the point lands in a clear context.

This subject is important enough that it needs a proper context.

Why customer segmentation done properly decides whether you win or disappear

Let us start with how it usually looks today.

The customer base is often divided into five different segments, each of them usually described fairly briefly. Briefly in the sense that an entire customer segment, "Cautiously progressive" for example, is described in 6 to 7 sentences, and that those sentences are then meant to form the basis for the marketing department's work.

But we have longer descriptions, you say now. Yes, you probably do, but they are usually produced at global or European level, and produced with the "most important" markets in focus, meaning the EU5 markets.

I know, because I have helped create that kind of global segment description. Even though we produced reasonably good personas, which is better than segment descriptions, they still did not fit very many markets. That was the reason we had Brazil and Australia as pilot markets in the project where I led the content strategy.

With just over four years as a product manager behind me, I also know how that kind of work is received up here in the "cold north".

With these observations about customer segmentation and how it usually looks, I come to the most important point of this article:

It is not enough to build the organisation's entire commercial communication on the inherited view of competitiveness that lives on, that is, from the time when the sales department was the company's spearhead into the market, now that the marketing department's contribution to the company's competitiveness has become so much more important.

Since that paragraph is the foundation of this whole article, please stop here and think about what it means in light of what you have read earlier in this article. Stop and think about what it means. Really.

You can read the continuation of this article in Pharma Industry 3/2023. Until next time, I wish you all the best.

The Swedish original is published at pharma-industry.se, and Part 2 is here. Segment descriptions, personas and the joint work between sales, marketing and medical are what the Omnichannel Journey Sprint is built around.

15 tips to improve your life science webinars. Part 2

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry, September 2022. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

Part one dealt with what you prepare before the broadcast. Part two moves to what happens in and around it: the voice, rehearsal, a plan for when the technology fails, promotion, interaction during the broadcast, the call to action, the follow-up and the recording. That is the ground the article covers, and it covers it as production craft, not as a report on the state of the market. Tips #8, #9, #10 and #13 name no platform and no date, and nothing in them rests on a figure the article would need to source, so this note passes over them. What follows names every other section, either because it is tied to the year the article was written or because it carries a claim the article does not source.

Tip #11 promotes the webinar on social media and is written under the platform practice and the privacy rules of 2022. It reports that LinkedIn had assured advertisers a few years earlier that filtering healthcare professionals on professional role fell within what counts as compliant for pharmaceutical companies; it recommends search engine optimisation of prescription-medicine pages that sit behind healthcare-professional verification; and it recommends placing a pixel, a Facebook pixel for example, on those pages so that visitors can be retargeted on social media, which the article says should be permitted. Check the platform position, the pixel and the retargeting against current Lif guidance and your own privacy review before acting on any of it. The passage quoted from Lif's document 1709 appears here in our own translation from the Swedish, and the Swedish wording is the one that binds. Tip #12 names Zoom, Mentimeter and Sli.do as the tools for polls and live interaction; those are the products of 2022 as the article found them, in the same way that Envato elements is in tip #02 of part one, and what each of them offers now is a separate question. Tip #14 recommends an evaluation form and a follow-up email after the broadcast, which means collecting answers and correspondence from named healthcare professionals, so where that data goes and on what basis you hold it belongs with your own data protection function. Tip #15 goes further than that: it treats a recording placed behind a conversion point as an exchange in which, in the article's own words, you get permission, consent, to keep communicating with the customer in other channels. Whether a value exchange behind a gate can carry consent to further marketing is the question to put to your own data protection function before the page is built, and this note does not say what the answer is. The bonus tip closes by hoping to see the reader at the Pharma customer engagement congress in London in 2023. It is written there as a hope, not as a plan, and the date it points to has passed.

Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you, and the first is a choice of method. The bonus tip builds its case on one congress. It says the point was raised again and again in London, and that a congress attended by some of the most senior executives at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies singles the step out. The conclusion the section reaches, that you in particular should take a helicopter view of what your own organisation is investing in, rests on that observation and on nothing else the article puts forward. What makes it worth naming is that the same paragraph sets a stricter standard for everyone else: no study would be approved on n=3, the basis has to be larger, and it has to be evaluated over time. The article does not reconcile the two, and a reader is entitled to hold the second standard up against the first. Tip #01 in part one rests on the same congress. Second, the article reports two claims about survey behaviour without naming a source for either: that a longer form has a considerably lower response rate than a shorter one, and that multiple-choice questions get more responses than free-text questions. They stand here as the article had them, not because this site has checked them.

Do you run webinars as part of the marketing mix for your medicines? Are you curious about ways to improve your broadcasts and make them more engaging for healthcare professionals? If so, this series is for you. Across two articles we will highlight fifteen aspects, fifteen tips, that will help you improve your webinars, develop your digital marketing of medicines and over time reach more people in healthcare. Here are the remaining 8 tips (plus a bonus tip).

Tip #8: Speak clearly, work with your tone of voice and avoid talking too fast

In a physical meeting we use body language, facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice to complement what we say. A webinar is often narrowed to a presenter's face and shoulders, sometimes the upper body, which may bode well for much of our non-verbal communication still getting through. And sure enough, that is a common argument for why webinars are so good.

But from my own experience of lecturing over webinars, experience that grew considerably during the pandemic, I would say that without other people in the room your own body language becomes less expressive. I have noticed that I gesture and move less, which is fairly natural, but I would also argue that facial expression becomes more sparing.

For those reasons the voice becomes a more important instrument for holding the audience's attention.

It becomes especially important to speak with a clear voice and to avoid talking too fast, because that can make it hard for your audience to follow you. It is also important to use tone, and to use pauses as a way of making a point land.

Pausing gives not only you time to think, but also the audience time to notice, understand and take in what you say.

Tip #9: Practise, practise, practise

An earlier tip in this series dealt with the importance of writing a script for your presentation, and let us now assume the webinar goes live in a few days. You have planned everything and feel confident about what is coming. But there is one last step you should take before you go live, and that is to practise.

I tend to walk around at home mumbling my way through the script for my slides at least two, sometimes three, days before a bigger lecture. It has proved best if a couple of nights of sleep are included, so that the learning settles.

Starting to rehearse the presentation in good time opens up the chance to rearrange slides and arguments for a better flow through the presentation, and to write down cue words and notes on paper.

And if something then goes wrong, of the kind covered in the next tip, and you have rehearsed enough, the chances are better that your confidence holds and that you handle the situation well.

Give yourself the best chance of succeeding by practising, practising, practising.

Tip #10: Have a plan for what to do if something goes wrong

You know who your target group is, the content is well supported, well worked through, visually appealing and aimed at your ideal customer, your Buyer persona.

There is a well-considered offer, every phase of your webinar is mapped, troughs are followed by peaks in the run sheet you have produced, and every slide has a script.

Every slide carries one main message, no more than that, and where needed it is supported by clear elements that do not stuff the slide full of information.

The slides are mixed with other formats to maximise engagement in the audience.

Everything is planned down to the last detail and you have done everything right. Even so, there is a chance that something goes wrong, and in a live broadcast there is almost always something that does not quite go to plan.

That is why it is important to have one more plan, the plan that describes in detail what you will do if something goes wrong.

Plenty can go wrong, of course, but some of the most common failures are that your computer crashes or freezes, or that the internet connection suddenly becomes insufficient or drops entirely.

In a physical meeting there are usually alternatives, such as drawing on a flip chart. In a webinar the technology matters more for conveying information and interacting with the audience.

So ask yourself: what would you want to tell them if everything except your ability to talk to the audience disappeared? Which are the most important messages in your presentation that still give them a valuable experience? It is often harder to rebook a webinar than it is to give the broad brushstrokes live and then follow up with a summary, or the whole presentation, in a video afterwards.

See your slides for what they are, a teaching aid that reinforces your messages, and do not rely on them completely.

Your audience is there, after all, to listen to what you have to say, not to look at your slides.

Tip #11: Use social media to promote your webinar

More and more pharmaceutical companies use LinkedIn today to promote events, both physical and digital. It is done by tailoring, by filtering out, the recipients based on things like region, professional role and workplace.

A few years ago LinkedIn came out and assured us that their algorithm was reliable enough that this kind of filtering on healthcare professionals falls within what is considered "compliant" for pharmaceutical companies.

So there is an opportunity there.

Another opportunity, one that takes a little more preparation and time, is the fact that in Sweden we can search engine optimise product websites for prescription medicines and so increase relevant traffic to the site.

Lif's guidance "Användande av digitala kanaler utifrån Läkemedelsbranschens etiska regelverk 1709" says the following about websites:

Web pages carrying information about prescription medicines directed at healthcare professionals can also be keyword optimised. Since the page is only reached through verification from a healthcare professional, the keyword optimisation does not contribute to the information reaching the general public.

The advantage here is that you can place one or more pixels, a Facebook pixel for example, on the pages of your website where you have made sure that your customers are the visitors. With that kind of pixel on the visitor's, the customer's, computer you can then run "retargeting" campaigns on social media. This should be permitted, because we are again blessed with the question where the visitor states that they are a healthcare professional every time they visit your website anew.

So this tip comes in two versions: the simple one where customers are filtered on their professional roles, and the somewhat more time-consuming, more advanced and more precise way with "retargeting" based on pixel-based campaigns.

Tip #12: Engage the participants during the webinar

Webinars are an excellent chance to interact with your audience and get feedback from them. During the webinar, make sure to ask the audience questions and to make your broadcast more interactive by taking and answering questions from the audience or running a live poll. That will help you gauge their level of engagement and understanding.

Most platforms, Zoom for example, offer the ability to create questions ("polls") that can be presented at selected phases during the presentation. There are also other platforms such as Mentimeter and Sli.do that can be built directly into your slides.

Multiple-choice questions asked either through the streaming platform or a third-party platform are often a safer way to get interaction going, since most people hesitate to open camera and microphone and so become part of the broadcast in order to interact and ask their question.

Tip #13: Include a call to action in (the end of) your webinar

A webinar can only reach its full potential if it includes calls to action, CTAs, for some form of continued dialogue. One or more "next steps".

Conversely, if there is no CTA at all and you instead only inform during the broadcast, on the assumption that what follows is "business as usual" with the usual interactions that would probably have happened anyway, you miss an important opportunity.

In Tip #3 you worked out an offer for the audience.

Make sure, where it is appropriate, to include CTAs continuously during the broadcast and to close with one well-defined and clear CTA.

If you want to work with running calls to action, they can be mentioned by whoever is presenting, but they do not have to be, since they can be placed as a "news ticker" along the bottom of the screen when it suits.

That what you ask for is well worked through matters just as much as delivering the call, or the calls, at well-chosen points in the broadcast.

Tip #14: Follow up with your audience after the webinar

When the webinar is over, do not forget to follow the broadcast up with your audience. Thank them for taking part and share a link to an evaluation form, where it matters more to get answers to 3 or 4 well-chosen questions than to 7 to 10, questions that in one go give you the answers you would most like to have. A longer form often has a considerably lower response rate than a shorter one. Multiple-choice questions often get more responses than free-text questions.

You can also ask an open question directly in the email about whether the participant has a follow-up question they never got the chance to ask during the broadcast, or thought of afterwards.

The most important thing is to think of communication as separate streams, where the webinar was one stream, the email conversation suggested above another stream, the follow-up on the offer you promoted during the broadcast another stream, the follow-up from colleagues in the sales or medical department another stream, and so on.

The reason it matters to think in separate streams is to avoid missing the potential in any of them and, as far as possible, to keep the conversation with your audience going, so that they take more steps into your world.

As I have said for many years now: "The company that gets its customers to take the most steps into its world wins".

Tip #15: Offer a recording of the webinar

Even if people cannot attend your webinar live, they may still be interested in watching it at a later point. By providing a recording of the webinar you give your audience the chance to take in the knowledge at a time of their own choosing.

And if there is also a chance to use the recording as a conversion point, meaning a place in your digital world where an exchange of value happens, take that chance. You get permission (consent) to keep communicating with the customer in other channels, and the customer gets access to the value in the webinar.

Bonus tip

When I wrote this series I had just come back from the Pharma customer engagement Europe 2022 congress. Customer engagement is red hot in the Swedish pharmaceutical industry and it is the new area many companies are trying to find their bearings in. At the congress, Personas, or Buyer personas, were named as the basis for all communication (see Tip #1), and after that the focus was on basing every plan, every discussion and every execution on data.

It is only through analysis of data, and the insights that follow, that you can evaluate whether your "tactics" worked or not. Your gut feeling, or one or two customers saying your initiative was good, is in short not worth very much. That does not mean that either the gut feeling or the handful of responses that came in are wrong. It only points out that the basis is far too thin. There is no study that would have been approved with n=3. The basis needs to be larger and it has to be evaluated over time.

This too was raised again and again during the congress in London.

So it would be close to negligence not to point out the thing that is often forgotten in the very busy reality we live in, and that is that you have to schedule time for evaluation.

It is so important that I will write it again.

You have to make room for a considered analysis and evaluation of your event already at the planning stage of the broadcast. Book the meeting early, well ahead of the broadcast, so that everyone knows it will happen and has the chance to prepare, so that the work you do in that meeting leads to real insights that are then used in planning the next initiative.

If you, like so many others working at Swedish pharmaceutical companies, do not take the time to take on the "evaluation" step thoroughly, then here too I will stick my neck out and say that your future career is at risk.

It is not for nothing that pharmaceutical companies invest such extraordinary sums in building platforms that assemble the data you have available and present it in graphical reports. It is not for nothing that a congress attended by some of the most senior executives at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies highlights this step as tremendously important. Something that must not be skipped.

So my bonus tip is not really that you should analyse data and evaluate your webinar, though of course it is that too. BUT... my tip is that you in particular should take a helicopter view to work out the clear investments being made in your own organisation, and make sure you build your own knowledge in that area.

Customer engagement is certainly one such area, and if you set out to learn more you will shine.

Perhaps, hopefully, we will see each other at "Pharma customer engagement" in London in 2023.

15 tips is a lot and we have had to split them across two articles, but if you have other tips for improving webinars or presentations in general, or if you have something to contribute on eHealth to the magazine, do comment by sending me an email. You can reach me at fredrik@dualia.se.

Until next time, I wish you all the best.

Fredrik Holmboe

---

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Related service: Content Engine Sprint.

15 tips to improve your life science webinars. Part 1

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry 2/2022, June 2022. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument in 2022 was that a webinar succeeds or fails on preparation, and that preparation starts with knowing precisely who you are speaking to, not which specialty they belong to. That is the case the article makes, and the seven tips in this first part are written as advice, not as history: define the audience, get the content and the visuals right, build an offer, plan the phases and write a run sheet, script what you intend to say, keep the slides clear, and vary the format. The opening section is autobiographical and carries nothing to check. What follows names every other section, either because it is tied to the year the article was written or because it carries a claim the article does not source.

The surroundings the piece was written into have moved on. It was published while webinars were still a recent habit for most pharmaceutical companies, and generative AI became widely available in 2023, after it was written, which is worth holding in mind through the sections on producing content and slides. Two passages are tied to 2022 in particular. Tip #02 recommends Envato elements as the place to find presentation templates and sets it against what Microsoft supplies; that was the article's choice of tool in 2022, and what it, or anything competing with it, offers now is a separate question; the same holds for the platforms named in tip #12 of part two. Tip #3 closes by inviting readers to send eHealth contributions to Niclas Ahlberg at his Pharma Industry address. That invitation was the magazine's and it was made in 2022. It is reproduced here because the article is republished in full, and nothing on this page renews it.

Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you, and the first is a choice of method. Tip #01, the tip the rest of the article keeps returning to, rests on a single congress: the article reports that at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2022 in London the importance of personas came back in more or less every presentation, and reads that as the way the wind is blowing. What comes after is built on it. Tip #7 closes by saying that everything rests on the questions answered in tip #1, and the last line asks the reader to go through the whole article again through that lens. One congress, described from the author's own attendance, is what carries that, and no second source is offered for it. The bonus tip in part two rests on the same congress. Second, the article reproduces figures and a formula without naming a primary source for any of them: the 0.001 percent of relevant studies a specialist could get through, attributed to a lecture by an unnamed representative of a parliamentary committee and hedged in the article itself as not exact; the claim in tip #5 that the first 10 to 30 seconds of a webinar set the tone; the chain in tip #7 from engaging content to attention, to a memory formed, to a decision made possible, given as a formula; and the account in tip #4 of brains built to visualise stories from our time on the savannah. They stand here as the article had them, not because this site has checked them.

A few words to begin with

The most important course I took in all my years of schooling was "Speech", an elective in upper secondary school, one hour every Tuesday afternoon for a single spring term. The aim of the course was to study presentation technique, how famous speeches are built, and to practise speaking in front of a group.

That course took me from being the poor soul standing at the front of the class with a shaking piece of paper in his hand, and I truly hated speaking in front of a group, to finishing the term with a presentation in the school's almost full auditorium.

Without my knowing it at the time, the course also laid the ground for what later became my working life.

Since the day I stood in that auditorium and presented, I have had plenty of reason to think about presentations, and a long line of sales training sessions and speaking occasions has passed by.

This article lists the best tips picked up along the way, most of which apply to both webinars and ordinary lectures.

Tip #01: Define and understand the audience you are talking to

I was recently at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2022 in London, and something that came back in more or less every presentation was the importance of focusing on Personas, also referred to as Buyer personas. That is the way the wind is blowing, and you should do what you can to stay at the front of that area.

So the first, most basic and most important tip for improving your webinars, and your digital marketing in general, is to understand in depth who you are talking to. The answer to that question is not "oncologists", "general practitioners" or "asthma and COPD nurses".

The answer goes deeper than that, and if you have heard me speak or read my earlier articles you will find plenty on what Buyer personas are and why they matter.

At the overall level the usual questions apply. Who is the audience you want to reach with your broadcasts? Which subjects would interest the audience? Which angle, which tone and which content would attract them?

To then work out which person in your target group matters to your particular business, you have to start by building your ideal customer in the form of a Buyer persona. This can be done in several ways, and various frameworks of guiding questions have been developed.

The one we normally use is called Empathy mapping, a framework that looks at challenges, needs and opportunities, influences, thought processes and the "why" behind a decision. All of these aspects are always examined from the starting point of the customer's relationship to your product or service.

This first step is decisive, and it is a step that cannot be skipped.

It is so decisive that I will stick my neck out and say this: if you work in marketing and communication and do not have a proper grip on this concept, your future career is shakier than you think unless you do something about it. That is how decisive it is.

There are many good sources on how to build a Buyer persona. Hubspot and Content Marketing inc. are two of the driving organisations, and I have written about this basic aspect of digital marketing in several of my articles and lectured on it since 2015. So it pleases me to hear more and more often how global, regional and sometimes local organisations in the pharmaceutical industry are starting to base their communication on this model. The most important thing then, and it is not always the case, is that the Buyer persona you create is grounded in the sales organisation's (micro)segmentation.

My hope is that you too are heading into, or are already in, an internal conversation about Buyer personas. Because once you ground the work in that kind of customer description, every relevant internal stakeholder gets one shared target, the best possible customer, and with it the chance to have more focused discussions about marketing activities and other initiatives.

Tip #02: Make sure your content is well supported, well worked through and visually appealing

Have you ever taken part in a webinar where you discover that the information shared is out of date, plainly wrong, or does not deliver what was "promised in the advert"? Or where the visual and educational experience sits dangerously close to "Death by powerpoint"?

It is not a great feeling, and with the phrase "In every (digital) interaction you either earn trust, or you burn trust!" as a guiding star, it is easy to conclude that a situation like that burns your brand properly.

As marketers in the pharmaceutical industry it is our responsibility to make sure the above does not happen, and we do that by making sure that what is presented during the webinar is well supported and well worked through.

As we all know, this normally happens through the company's internal approval process. But what kind of effort is usually made where you work to help the speakers with new scientific data to improve the content?

Or, as a communicator and marketer with a sharper eye for how information is conveyed, to help rework their slides so they teach better?

When you map out and finish the webinar's content, think about both content and appearance.

That may sound obvious but, hand on heart, presentations fall short on these two components far too often, and most often on appearance. Including presentations from those of us in the marketing department.

So here is a tip inside the tip.

Today you do not need expert skills in Powerpoint or Keynote to build professional presentations. Envato elements is a website where you can find more or less everything you could ever need for creative work, including thousands of presentation templates designed by professionals. "Professional" does not have to mean lavish or spectacular. But what you find on Envato elements is far better than the templates Microsoft provides.

So if you want your customers to take your webinars seriously, and you want to stand out from the crowd (who does not?), make sure that what you present is well supported, well worked through and visually appealing. It signals clearly that you are more committed than some estimated average, and that you take their time seriously.

Engagement earns trust!

Tip #3: Build the offer you want to promote during the webinar

Marketing medicines is highly complex, with many details to consider before, during and after a webinar. One of those details is how to offer something more than a good speaker and, beyond that, "only" information about the medicine and the chance to order materials.

Today those are hygiene factors and nothing that separates you from your competitors.

You have to be able to offer your audience something that helps them solve a problem or makes their clinical working day easier.

Areas worth talking through to find such an offer include knowledge beyond the purely medical, easier access to data, the patient consultation and the conversation with the patient, or information from the patient ahead of the consultation.

I imagine the eHealth field has many good, creative and valuable solutions here, and I would welcome seeing such examples presented in this magazine. If you have something you would like to write about, get in touch with Niclas Ahlberg at niclas@pharma-industry.se.

Back to your offer.

You have surely seen how the audience photographs what is presented, because they want to return to the information later. What would a summary of the speaker's, or better still the speakers', most important take-aways look like? We have sometimes produced a graphically appealing "one-pager" that sums up what was said during the webinar. For something equivalent these days my thoughts go more towards a summary in the form of a video message.

In summary. If you can offer your audience something valuable during the broadcast, they are more likely to stay for the whole webinar, where that value is usually presented, more likely to receive you on a follow-up visit, and finally more likely to view your next webinar positively.

Tip #4: Plan every phase of your webinar and build a run sheet

Do you remember lessons where a teacher of the old guard filled the whole hour with a long monologue full of facts? Have you also been lucky enough to remember a teacher who built the facts out with examples and stories?

By planning your webinar in advance you can map the flow of the presentation and make sure all the important facts are covered, while at the same time assessing where examples may need to be added.

Bear in mind that webinars tend to have "troughs" when it comes to pace and to how much attention a participant needs in order to follow along. Do what you can to keep those dips short, and try to bring in the following peaks as soon as possible.

An example. A presentation moves from being more storytelling to being more focused on facts. Our brains are built to visualise stories about people and events, which served us well when we lived on the savannah, but makes us less good at working through long stretches of numbers, graphs and abstract reasoning and conclusions.

Think about the different phases in your webinar, where the peaks are and where the troughs are, and whether they can be separated by, for example, moving graphics and a short audio loop, so-called "bumpers", a short video that visualises what has been presented, or simply one or a few questions to the speaker. Something that breaks the rhythm and takes the attention back.

Then work out a detailed run sheet together, one that structures the broadcast so you are sure to cover every part you want to include and at the same time creates the most engaging flow possible through the peaks and troughs of the broadcast.

Remember to mark the places in the run sheet where your offer is to be promoted, so that it happens naturally and not too often. Or too seldom.

I wrote more about run sheets, peaks and troughs and "surfing the wave" in the article "Webbinarier – dags att se det som något mer" (webinars, time to see them as something more) in Pharma Industry issue 3/21, which summarised my experience from two large webinar projects.

Tip #5: Write a proper script

You obviously do not need a script for your webinar, because you know your subject inside out, right? You have talked about it plenty of times. Or you are "only" going to open and then hand over quickly to a speaker. So no script is needed. Or is it?

It is the first 10 to 30 seconds of a webinar that set the tone. In less than half a minute you have to catch the audience's attention, get them to leave everything else they could be doing and focus on you instead. You have to move them into the right "mindset", with the right questions in their heads, so that above all they, but also you, get the most out of their participation.

All successful speakers prepare thoroughly, including those who seem to improvise their way through a presentation.

On one occasion I watched a person be asked on the spot to stand up and present a subject to us in the audience, which they did in a way that seemed improvised but was concise and very good. It was of course impressive, and my thoughts circled around how some people simply seem to be born with the gift of speech.

A short while later I saw the same person deliver exactly the same presentation again, almost word for word, and again in a way that seemed improvised. Then and there I realised that both occasions had been very well prepared, and that someone who is well prepared can come across as spontaneous and easy-going.

What I am saying is that even a presentation as short as 30 seconds needs to be properly worked through. There is no second chance to run the same opening for that audience a few hours later. You only get that one chance.

That too may seem obvious. But if you are a red-yellow personality type like me, you may tend to try improvising your way through presentations. After a few too many painful belly flops born out of improvised presentations, I now remind myself to make time for proper preparation. Every slide in the presentation gets a script, and that is how a structure and a flow through the material is created.

Tip #6: Make sure your slides are clear and concise

During a lecture by a representative of a parliamentary committee focused on Swedish healthcare I learned, and the figures here are not exact but the point is clear, that if a specialist in general medicine read scientific studies eight hours a day, seven days a week, that specialist would still not get through more than 0.001 percent of the relevant studies being published.

Healthcare professionals are, like the rest of us, constantly bombarded with information.

So when you put your slides together for a webinar, make sure they are clear and concise. Stick to one main message per slide, and use images, charts, clear bullet lists with only a few points, or anything else that is easy to take in, to support that main message.

In my view animations should always be used to assemble the main message of a slide step by step, point by point, so that the slide teaches.

If you also use clear and varying background colours, with your message contrasting against the background, you add another layer of clarity. If background colours are not possible because of strict corporate templates, you can certainly do something with the images you put in.

Your audience will appreciate not being overloaded with information and left with the feeling that it "goes too fast", and they will be more inclined to pay attention and take in what you say if they are at the same time mildly surprised by colourful slides or strong images.

Here too there is more to find in the article "Webbinarier – dags att se det som något mer", under the heading "Neurovetenskapen bakom engagemang" (the neuroscience behind engagement). And if you want to read more about creating good presentations I can recommend the excellent book Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. A word of warning with a twinkle in the eye though: read that book and you will never look at slides the same way again, and if you are exposed to a lot of "corporate" presentations you should probably leave it alone.

Tip #7: Use a range of different "formats" to keep your audience engaged

When you present it is important to use a range of different "formats" to keep your audience engaged. The most common thing is that we use PowerPoint slides when we present, and if the advice in tip #6 is followed you are some way towards engaging presentations.

If on top of that you can use infographics, preferably animated ones, video clips that reinforce or clarify, a change of scene by drawing on a whiteboard, or even live demonstrations of a concept over a shared screen, then our brains are stimulated and we, meaning your audience, become more engaged.

By using a range of different formats you will hold your audience's attention and make sure they understand your message.

And if the goal is for the audience to make some kind of decision based on what you present, the formula runs like this:

Engaging content leads to attention and engagement, which leads to a memory being created, which leads to a decision being possible.

Note that the formula begins with "Engaging content". Which raises the question: for whom?

To engage someone you need to know who that someone is, and in doing so make sure that this someone is exactly the person you want to engage. Everything rests on the decisions you make in answer to those questions, and we are now back at Tip #1.

Every tip in this first article carries the same underlying question, for whom, and if you have the time, read the article again through that lens.

If you have other tips for improving webinars, or presentations in general, or if you have something to contribute on eHealth to the magazine, do comment by sending me an email. You can reach me at fredrik@dualia.se.

Until next time, I wish you all the best.

Fredrik Holmboe

Owner & Lead digital strategist at Dualia

---

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Related service: Content Engine Sprint.

Webinars. Time to see them as something more

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry 3/2021, September 2021. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that the standard pharma webinar, an introduction by the company followed by one speaker and a slide deck for 45 to 50 minutes, stopped working once every company started running them, and that the way out is to build the broadcast as a production with a rhythm of its own. That is the case the article makes, and the practical advice around it, many speakers on short slots, one message per slide, planned energy lifts across the running order, is offered as production craft drawn from two productions the author ran himself. The note below goes through every part of the article, because passing over a section in silence would read as a verdict that it needs no comment.

Two things about the evidence are worth having in front of you. The case is built on two of the author's own productions, a global webinar series in 2020 and a company kick-off in 2021, described from the inside, and on one conference lecture. The figures reported from them, more than 22,000 participants in 117 countries across 15 live broadcasts, are his own account and are not independently sourced here. The opening claim that doctors receive between 10 and 40 webinar invitations is introduced as something "there are figures saying", with no primary source named, and the article gives it without a time period in the opening and as per week further down. The section on the neuroscience behind engagement is relayed from a lecture heard at a congress in 2018, and the claim about Avatar having the shortest time of static image up to that point carries no published source, so it should not be repeated as an established finding. The cross-reference in that section to "PI 4-18" points to the congress report published here as #INBOUND2018, Boston.

One mechanic in particular needs handling before it is copied. The way the two pieces of value were delivered in the global series was that participants who wanted them had to contact the company's local sales representative, and the recorded series is described at the end as premium material you get access to when you leave your contact details. Both of those are collection of personal data from healthcare professionals and a handover of that data to a sales organization, and in a pharma setting that is a question for your own compliance, regulatory and data protection functions before the first invitation goes out, not after. The rest of the article is a document from the middle of the pandemic and reads as one: the request from Lif that companies stop taking time from care staff, the year and a half of homes as offices, and the collapse of the personal sales meeting are all conditions of 2020 and 2021, not the situation now.

There are figures today saying that doctors, depending somewhat on speciality, receive between 10 and 40 invitations to various webinars. Having looked into this business of webinars for a while, the picture is relatively clear. The majority of these webinars are what I call standard webinars, that is an introduction by the pharmaceutical company and after that a presentation by a speaker whose slides carry a lot of information or text. With the competition that has arisen within the webinar channel, it is time to see them as something more. It is time to take the next step in order to get ahead.

It is very nearly time to go live. I am sitting at my laptop and we are in the large conference room at At Six in central Stockholm. In the room there are close to 50 participants, all of whom have taken their seats around the eight round tables set out in two rows. The flowers are on the tables and on the stage, the lights are on, and behind the scenes the two moderators are ready to run out.

Along one long side sit the eight of us who make up the project and production team, each with our own task. The enormous wall screen, 12 meters wide and 3 meters high and running at 8K, glows an energetic pink.

It is time for a pharmaceutical company's kick-off, and as I look out over the whole arrangement I am proud that everything is in place, and that for the second time I have been given the company's trust to put together the team that will deliver a broadcast out of the ordinary.

Today we have lived through a year and a half of covid pandemic. Virtual meetings and webinars have become everyday fare, something we all both appreciate and are beginning to get thoroughly tired of, now that our homes are our offices.

There is something very easy about a virtual meeting, we do not have to invest so much in the interaction, and at the same time it lacks the physical closeness and the natural dialogue that mean so much in the interplay and the engagement between people.

The same holds within healthcare, where care staff have fought like heroes against a care burden that has at times been overwhelming. Early on, Lif went out and asked the pharmaceutical companies not to email, visit or in any other way take time from care staff, all so that the industry for its part would give room for treating patients.

The personal meeting for a salesperson employed at a pharmaceutical company disappeared practically overnight.

When the worst of the shock had settled, the companies began to look over the possibilities at hand for reaching healthcare, and one after another they all turned to webinars as the form of contact.

Today we hear about doctors, depending somewhat on speciality, who receive somewhere between 10 and 40 invitations to webinars per week.

This means that the ordinary webinar, that is the one involving a short introduction by the pharmaceutical company's representative followed by a speaker showing their slides for 45 to 50 minutes, is starting to look far too unappealing.

It is now time to take the next step, to start seeing a webinar as something more, and in this article you will read about two different broadcasts that each, in two different ways, have shown how important it is that we develop our webinars into something more if we are to reach the success we want through that channel.

But we pause the pharmaceutical company's kick-off for a moment in order to start at the beginning.

22,000+ viewers in 117 countries

It was a Friday afternoon at the end of March 2020 when a colleague received an email from a pharmaceutical company's global marketing organization. Earlier the same day their global chief executive had decided that some form of communication should be created online to remedy the interaction between them and the market having come to a halt. All their salespeople around the whole world were sitting still in their homes and not meeting their customers, so this communication was to be created immediately.

The email we received that afternoon contained the question that became the starting shot for intensive planning work, which in the end resulted in more than 22,000 people in 117 countries taking part seven weeks later.

I had the privilege of becoming part of the small team that was quickly put together to work out a plan for what in the end became a series of webinars to be broadcast globally.

The setup we created was a series of five webinars, an hour long, where each webinar had 4 to 6 speakers and was broadcast three times during one day in order to cover the time zones in different parts of the world.

The plan was sent in and landed on the chief executive's desk, where it was approved at once.

We could get going in earnest, and a little over a week later we went live with the first webinar, while having a clear overview of the series as a whole.

Before, during and after

In our planning work the customer was at the center throughout, and we spent a lot of time and focus on identifying the needs they had in the pandemic that had sunk its claws into the world.

One factor that helped a great deal was that there had been a collaboration with the pharmaceutical company for many years, so the combined customer knowledge in the team was large.

The insights we landed on regarding the market's needs were mixed with the mantra "before, during and after", which became a central part of our discussions, and the goal was that each webinar should contain one small and one large value, both of which would be available after the webinar.

The small and somewhat simpler value became a one-pager containing each speaker's best tips, summary or similar from their presentation. The larger value became a form of material that would help the participant in their clinical everyday work, and consisted of different types of "tools" for the patient meeting.

Both of these materials were promoted again and again during the webinar, carefully placed within the broadcast so that we did not become repetitive, through the message that if the participant wanted access to either of the materials they should contact the company's local sales representative.

Many speakers, shorter time

A very important ingredient in the recipe for success was that we engaged what can be considered an unusually large number of speakers for a one hour webinar.

The thinking behind it was as simple as it was obvious.

In order to succeed in reaching out, and above all in getting through, to such different types of markets and therefore such different types of individuals as we had as our target group, we had to maximize the engagement and the sense of value.

Each speaker was given either 3 to 4 minutes, 6 to 8 minutes or 12 to 15 minutes to convey their message, and when an experienced speaker who normally has 30, 45 or 60 minutes at their disposal is asked to compress their "usual" message into a much smaller timeframe, something very interesting happened.

Everything became very much more focused, direct, clear and informative.

In each webinar there were two longer keynotes, and then the broadcast was balanced with medium length and short presentations depending on need and on what I call a little further down "the broadcast's wave pattern".

For the participant there was therefore a pulse throughout, a pace, where something new and interesting was happening almost all the time. A break came and something new started practically all the time, and between these came elements known as "bumpers", that is graphic elements with energetic music.

And the result?

The goal was to create communication that had a value for the recipient, that was experienced as engaging and that got the interaction with the market going.

All in all more than a staggering 22,000 participants in 117 countries took part in the total of 15 webinars broadcast live, in large part thanks to the global sales force, who had been given very clear directives from top management to sell the webinar series in to all their customers immediately and with great focus.

There were many who took part, and with that there were many who picked up the prompts placed in the broadcast to contact their local sales representative in order to get hold of one of the two materials, and after each webinar that was exactly what happened.

The salespeople began to be contacted by their customers at a level they had never experienced before.

What we as a planning group, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company and with each of our excellent speakers, had hoped for was to turn around the deadlock the pandemic had created, and looking back we have been able to conclude that we succeeded.

In the feedback collected afterwards there were many statements saying that the webinars had been too short, that people wanted to see more and that they were incredibly good and informative. One quotation that stuck was that "our customers say they get the answers to questions they have not even had time to ask".

My reading is that something like that cannot be achieved unless you work with a strong focus on the customer and on what is valuable to them.

I was myself given the trust to stand in front of the camera for four of the five webinars, and when I was not doing that I sat behind and was part of the support team answering questions.

The combined experience from the project gave the insight of how incredibly important it is always to create the room to plan enough with the customer in focus, and always to keep the mantra "before, during and after" in mind.

As an extension of that mantra you should also explore the possibility of maximizing the lifespan of what has been created, and today the webinar series is used as premium material you get access to when you leave your contact details.

So what began as an email one Friday afternoon in March gave a great value for the company then, and now, looking back, it carries on creating customer contacts and building business.

The neuroscience behind engagement

The setup we chose, with several speakers and high activity in each webinar, has a scientific basis.

In 2018 I was at one of the world's largest digital congresses, INBOUND18, in Boston, and wrote an article about it in PI 4-18. There I saw the neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon describe the neuroscience behind attention and engagement.

She argued that what best captures our attention is when we know roughly, but not exactly, what is coming in the next few seconds, and above all when it comes to visual stimuli. She argued that movement, activity, color and so on are incredibly important in presentations, and above all in virtual ones where there is no presenter in the room providing part of the stimulation.

There I learned that one of the world's most successful films, Avatar, was also the film that had the shortest time of "static image" up to that point.

By "static image" is meant when nothing is moving on the screen, and in that context she compared Avatar with the old westerns where views over a still desert could run for several seconds.

Taken together it can be said that attention and engagement get a boost when our senses are stimulated in a way where we know roughly what is coming, but not exactly. Decisions can then be taken on the basis of the information according to the following pattern:

Engaging content leads to attention and engagement, which leads to a memory being created, which leads to a decision being taken.

So how do you apply that to a webinar?

It is incredibly important to separate the physical meeting from the virtual one. In the physical meeting there are naturally more stimuli, which gives one set of conditions, while the virtual meeting lacks many of these stimuli, which then have to be replaced by others.

One of the techniques that comes naturally in virtual meetings is to avoid static, non-animated slides in the presentation that stay up too long.

In the global webinar series we turned that into several speakers per webinar, presentation slides that carried strong and lively colors, and movement in the form of both larger and smaller animations. We also aimed for each slide to convey a single message, and where possible reinforced by a powerful photograph or illustration, which resulted in more slides, most of which were shown for less than 20 seconds.

All in order to increase the sense of activity and participation, something that in turn boosts attention and engagement.

In a setup like that you also build in the possibility of "lifting the energy level" at the points where the presentation contained "heavier passages", which means you can see a webinar as a kind of wave pattern where the viewer experiences heavier and lighter passages to take in.

See the webinar's content as a wave

So it is now time to come back to At Six and the pharmaceutical company's kick-off, and with that to travel forward in time by about 18 months.

It is time to go live.

Expectations are high, my smart watch informs me that so is my pulse, and I have to say that I love it.

The intro music "Move on up" starts playing and the countdown from 58 seconds begins. The moderators run onto the stage with only a few seconds left. In their hands they have their cue cards.

It is a large production we have put together, with a center in Stockholm that also had hubs with a film team each in Norway, Finland and Denmark, where the local teams had met. But since the whole organization could not meet because of the pandemic, the main goals set were to create interaction between the teams and to build energy in the organization.

So it is time to think about engagement again, and this time in the form of identifying and following the broadcast's natural wave pattern. And what does that mean?

Well, a broadcast's wave pattern means that there are always passages that are heavier on facts, or just somewhat longer without a break, and therefore tougher when it comes to holding the participant's attention and engagement.

These parts of the broadcast are seen as downward slopes and valleys on the wave.

To handle this downward trend, elements are cut in that lift the energy. It can be in the form of a "bumper", that is a graphic element with energetic music, or a short pre-recorded and mildly amusing element.

The goal of this is to lift the energy level in the broadcast and with it among the participants, which then becomes the upward slope and the crest of the wave.

Other examples are when a longer welcome speech is alternated with short, entertaining conversations with colleagues in the other countries, or when a colleague showing figures and graphs is followed by an inspirational speaker.

That is how the whole running order for the broadcast is built up, minute by minute, block by block. With the focus throughout on identifying and following the broadcast's natural wave pattern.

Conclusions and take home messages

The expression "alone is strong" rarely holds in the era we live in, and in the two examples I have drawn insights from above it holds no better. The article is written from my perspective, but in every project there have been skilled, experienced colleagues and partners who have all contributed an enormous amount.

It is always interesting to start thinking about how this can be applied in the pharmaceutical industry, about how I can come up with various thought-provoking suggestions. But there are such incredibly experienced and skilled people at the companies around the country, and I hope that you who have read this article are one of them. That you see how you at your company can use the tricks and the lines of thought mentioned here to improve your broadcasts to some degree and where the need is there.

It is time that we as an industry take the next step and see webinars as something more than just a webinar. That we see it for what it really is, entertainment.

Entertainment that flows both up and down, with certain necessary elements of scientific data.

Time to start surfing the wave.

Until next time,

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital jack of all trades

fredrik@dualia.se

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. The congress report referred to in the neuroscience section is #INBOUND2018, Boston. Building a channel that people come back to is what the Content Engine Sprint is for.

Using social media as a pharmaceutical company

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Mon, 03 May 2021 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry, May 2021. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument here was that the regulatory constraint on pharma in social media is narrower than most companies assume: you can talk about almost anything, anywhere, as long as it does not touch your prescription products, and the closed group is the one place where that rule changes. That framing is the reason to read it. Four of its six points carry advice that a reader acting on it today should take to their own functions first, and this note names all four, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled.

Point six treats the closed-group opening, and the manual membership check it rests on, as established, so confirm the current position with your own regulatory function before product content goes into any group. Point five uses the word consent for a name-and-email registration that unlocks access to material; that is how the industry spoke in 2021, it is not a legal reading, and the thing to have your data protection function look at is the mechanism, an access gate paying for a registration, not merely what it is called. Point two proposes influencer collaborations without touching disclosure or labelling, which any such collaboration now has to settle with legal before it starts. Point four proposes reusing material across channels, and where that material has been through medical or regulatory approval, the approval was given for a defined use and not for every later placement.

Two smaller things. The article repeats industry figures whose primary source it does not give, among them the processing-speed claim, the ninety-five against ten percent recall, and the fifty percent video share. And the platform specifics belong to 2021: Twitter has since been renamed X, generative AI has changed the production economics behind the short-video advice, and Facebook was the channel the article worked from, so read the six points as mechanisms and the Facebook detail as the example it chose.

In the autumn of 2020 I stood in a large conference room at Grand Hotell Saltsjöbaden and lectured to a good dozen marketers from various pharmaceutical companies in the room and a handful who had joined over Zoom. All of them are experienced, good at what they do, and had ideas about what they wanted to get out of the two days we had together. So I asked, and put together a list based on the group's answers. The most common question was the one about relevance to the customer, but the question that was still standing when we wrapped up the course, the only one I had not covered satisfactorily, was how you can use social media as a pharmaceutical company to market medicines. So here is an article on exactly that subject. And who am I, then?

My name is Fredrik Holmboe and I work with creating digital strategies for commercial communication within the pharmaceutical and life science industry. The training above was the usual course "Multichannel marketing for pharma marketers" that I run together with Pharma Industry once or twice a year, a course that comes round again at the start of June and is open for registration. I hope to see you there...

But back to what a pharmaceutical company should think about when it goes out onto, and makes use of, social media. What I have in mind above all are platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, and in this article I will focus on Facebook.

Further down in the article I will talk about how prescription medicines can be marketed on Facebook, but first a few obvious examples of other options worth considering when you go out onto social media, options that have an effect:

1. Put your employees forward (employee advocacy / activation)

For most companies it is a challenge to open a channel on Facebook, often with worries about what content should be posted there. My usual answer is that as a pharmaceutical company you can talk about more or less anything, anywhere, as long as it does not touch your prescription medicines. That leaves an enormously large and open field of possibilities to consider, and posts from your employees are one obvious example.

Data from Marketing Charts shows that 7 out of 10 consumers feel a stronger connection to brands whose CEO is active on social media (nicely done on Twitter, Malin Parkler) or where the employees share information about what the company is working on.

In my earlier articles I have brought up examples such as Chewbacca Mom, where Candace Payne showed off the Chewbacca mask she had just bought, a clip that has been viewed millions upon millions of times. That clip is a guaranteed laugh if you watch it on YouTube. The mechanism at work in that case is authenticity, something you can use in your communication too.

People love seeing who the people behind a brand are.

Show who the sales manager is, who the receptionist is, the lab engineer and the project manager. Put your salespeople, your management team and your business developers forward.

So you are the company and you are the brand, and it does not get more authentic than showing who you are, what you stand for, what you struggle with and what you are striving towards.

2. Use relevant influencers on a smaller scale

Something I have been hammering on about for several years now is that pharmaceutical companies ought to spend a great deal more time showing what successes they have beyond the pill. How much is reinvested in research? How many doses of medicine are donated to developing countries? How much is given to charitable organisations? Have you managed to get a B Corp certification, proof that you prioritise goals other than pure profit, the way Chiesi Pharma has?

As you bring those messages forward, look into who the strongest voices are. Perhaps it is one committed individual, perhaps it is several across different areas who together can build the story.

The most important thing to look at is the engagement they get from their followers, not how many followers they have. That is what has paved the way for the trend of using micro-influencers with somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 followers at the low end and up to 50,000 or 100,000 followers at the high end, instead of the really big names, who often have lower engagement.

Use people who already have a voice and an audience, so that the initiatives you carry out, initiatives of such value to society, get better reach.

People feel greater trust in influencers who have a clear grounding in the message, and all of it rests on storytelling and on creating an emotional connection with the recipient.

Again the point is authenticity, but in this case in collaboration with people outside your organisation.

3. Use video

Today it is easier than ever to create video, and whole productions can happen inside our smartphones and go from there onto any platform at all. There are signals saying that 50 percent of marketing today should be video.

So mentioning video in this list goes without saying.

You are certainly running a number of webinars today, and perhaps you are allowed to use the recorded webinar in your marketing afterwards. Sometimes that is not the case, because the presenter does not want their material spread that way. Might it then be possible to pull out a few sequences of 30 seconds to 1 minute each instead? A length that suits social media much better.

Is there scope to create short films that shine a light on a medicine-related question? Without naming the medicine, of course. It gives you a way to show which questions you are focusing on, it builds brand awareness, it fills your channels, and if it is done with a certain measure of humour, with a twinkle in the eye, the chance of it being shared on by others goes up. The mechanism at work then is the reasons we share on social media, which are:

To share valuable content with others
To define our personality online
To create and maintain contacts
For self-fulfilment
To support causes and organisations

Because video contains both sound and moving images, and because we are 60,000 times faster at processing visual information, 95 percent of viewers remember the message compared with only 10 percent who get the same message in text. With the level of impression we get from video, it is no wonder that video is the fastest growing format online today.

4. Use the same content in several formats

This was touched on briefly in the previous point, with the example of being allowed to use shorter parts of a webinar in cases where the whole webinar could not be used.

There is a term in digital marketing called content repurposing, which carries several meanings. In part it is about reusing the same content in several channels, which means adapting the material to different formats and lengths. In part it is about going through what content exists that is not being put to use today but that, with some adjustment, has a value for the market. And in part it is about combining existing content into a longer and more extensive article or video, so as to give the recipient more exhaustive information without them having to search it out themselves.

What matters most in reusing content is that it is so-called evergreen content, which means that it has a value and is current today, and that it will have a value in a year, or a couple of years, as well.

When you use the same content in several formats on several different platforms, the key is to take account of each platform's visitors and their expectations of what they are going to experience on that particular platform.

5. Generate consent through social media

In points three and four, video was mentioned, along with how the same content can be used in several formats, one example being short clips to get pithy messages out to the market.

Those short clips can also be used to advertise a lecture or a course, where the interested person gets the chance to register with name and email address and so gain access to the material.

For that to work, the clip needs to lead on to a landing page that is empty of more or less everything making up the frame of an ordinary website, that is the usual header, footer, menu and so on, and contains only information about the lecture or the course plus a form to register with. The only aim of the kind of landing page I am describing here is to act as a target for marketing activities intended to generate leads, hence the absence of distracting objects, not to lead the visitor on to other parts of your website. There are other initiatives that do that far better.

Common examples of material you can gain access to through a registration are:

Lectures
Courses
Exhaustive product descriptions
Congress reports
Results from surveys

6. Use closed groups to market prescription medicines

In a closed group where you have manually approved every membership request and made sure the group contains only healthcare professionals, you have the possibility of marketing prescription medicines.

But for the group to be worth both being a member of and actually reading what gets posted in it, which are not infrequently two entirely different things, the content in the group has to amount to a great deal more than product marketing.

Within the concept of inbound marketing, which I often work from when I help companies with their commercial communication whatever the format, we talk about three different steps in a buying process. These also have a distribution between them in terms of how large a share they make up of the total content published:

Awareness, 60 percent
Consideration, 30 percent
Decision, 10 percent

According to the distribution above, which has proved to work very well, it is only in the decision phase, Decision, that you talk about the product's properties and benefits, which then makes up only 10 percent of the total communication.

What these steps mean, what type of content lands where and the psychology behind it is enough for a whole article, but in short it can be said that the greater part of what you create should focus on delighting the recipient and giving them value. When they are happy and feel they have been able to consume valuable information from you, the willingness to receive your product information opens up.

So what can you bring up in a group that fills a feed regularly, and preferably often, without being product-focused?

Some of it we have raised earlier in this article, and as a complement here are a few thought starters:

Lectures
Training courses
Instructional films
The latest articles from your website
The best tips within the therapy area
Panel discussions and studio interviews
The history of the therapy area
Events in the group, for example a neurology nurses' conference
Send in your best Christmas photo with the staff
Questions (polls) and results
Congratulations at holidays
Marking special days, for example MS Day
External monitoring from, for example, developing countries
Collecting articles from other press
Company profiling: goals, vision, positions on current questions, raising debate, staff
Putting forward the first neurologist who carried out a particular treatment
Updated treatment recommendations by county council, discussing the differences
Study results, new studies, graphs presenting results
The HCP association gets a say
The patient association gets a say
Book tips
The chance to put questions to your medical department

There is a great deal to bring up in a closed group for healthcare professionals on Facebook that is of interest to the members. With some thought, and of course thorough preparation so that you are running ahead of your publishing schedule, I hope that you and your team succeed in creating the best closed group for your target audience.

If you get there and manage to get a small community of your own going, you will probably get away with a few product-focused posts at regular intervals.

In closing

As always, my hope is that this article has been of value to you and that a small seed has been sown that leads to you improving your commercial communication online in some form.

Because it is more important that you do one thing, and do it really well with great value for the recipient, than that you do many things that are all good enough.

Online we are very easy to swap out, and if the communication is not good enough you lose the market's eyes and ears, and over time communication that does not live up to expectations damages a brand.

So if you reading this are a marketing director, CEO or equivalent and have the ability to influence the number of initiatives you run in a year, work to bring the number down and thereby raise the quality of what you create. Among other things there is probably a great deal to do to improve your webinars, if it is the case that you are running ordinary webinars (one camera, one presenter), so that you stand out from the crowd.

Sharper communication reused across several formats is a win for everyone, except possibly the competitor.

All the best,

Fredrik Holmboe

fredrik@dualia.se

The Swedish original is on the publisher's site: Att använda sociala medier som läkemedelsbolag. If you want help turning a thin channel into one worth following, that is what the Content Engine Sprint does.

Digital marketing and webinars. Maximising the value of every initiative

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry, November 2020. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that a webinar is not an event but a piece of raw material, and that the work before and after it decides what it is worth. What it asks for is fewer initiatives done properly, a defined recipient in the form of a buyer persona, and time set aside afterwards to cut one webinar into many smaller pieces of content. The daisy flower approach, the reverse 80/20 split between making and promoting, and the point that the second half of the work is the half that gets dropped are all written as advice, not as history.

Where it needs checking is in the promotion mechanics, and this note names every place, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. The pre-webinar list recommends a tracking pixel on your HCP site so you can retarget visitors on LinkedIn, messages to the members of a closed LinkedIn group both in the group and individually, InMail from a premium account, and AI-driven banner targeting that identifies a likely customer in real time, aimed at doctors or patients. The last of these carries the words "fully in line with GDPR" in the article itself; that is a legal claim made without a source, and the same gap sits under the tracking pixel and the retargeting. Data protection is also only one of the two questions that recommendation raises: advertising towards patients is governed by the rules on medicines advertising, which are a separate body of law from GDPR, and this note does not say what those rules allow. Take that leg to your own compliance function as well. The post-webinar list recommends a landing page where the only goal is that a visitor fills in name and email to get access to the recording, and says the page carries "all the relevant checkboxes for GDPR" without saying what they should say; making access to content conditional on marketing consent is the specific pattern to take to your own data protection function before building it, not after. The article treats the promotional-approval side as out of scope throughout, including the instruction that speakers should repeatedly point participants to material held by the local product specialist, so that route needs to go through your own compliance function. The real-time translated subtitles named as a Zoom feature, and the QR code tip, both describe what products did in 2020 and should be checked against what they do now. And the covid-19 parenthesis next to the recommendation to aim for a physical meeting dates the whole piece: it was written when that meeting could not happen.

The figures, and two of the arguments, are worth reading with your eyes open. The article carries no references. The reverse 80/20 rule is introduced as something that "usually comes up", the claim that HCPs read up on their field in the evenings and at weekends rests on "all the surveys", and the claim that pharmaceutical companies do not live up to what healthcare expects digitally rests on "all the surveys and analyses I read", none of them named. Two of the article's own turns are worth knowing about as you read: the conclusion that the goal of digital marketing in pharma should be to create the conditions for a physical meeting is supported by the author's recollection that objections raised in his own lectures were resolved in his favour essentially every time, and the closing section answers its own three questions yes after saying outright that it has chosen to close its eyes for a moment to the factors that make all of it harder. The article is open about that second move, which is the right way to read the first one too.

In digital marketing every marketer should ask the question "how can we maximise the value of our coming initiative?" The reasons are many. Partly it is about budget and time, but above all it is that digital marketing today has to be optimised, has to rest on analysis of data, and has to be used in as many ways as possible in order to be done properly. In this article digital strategist Fredrik Holmboe presents how you should think before, during and after a webinar in order to maximise the value over time.

To maximise the value of something, anything, there has to be time to identify what is valuable to the recipient. It is not what you say but what the recipient hears you say that matters, something that is always filtered through subjective judgement.

In digital marketing there is no possibility of adapting a message based on an interpretation of the recipient's expression, such as facial expression and body language, that rests on subjective judgement. That is possible in a physical sales situation, but once a message has been presented on a screen it cannot be adapted.

There is no filter, no possibility of explaining yourself further if you sense that the message was received in a way that was not intended.

What is on the screen is what the recipient takes in. Every time and over time, something that turns out to matter further down in this article. Full stop.

That is why it is important, as far as it is possible, to identify who it is you are talking to and what is valuable to that someone.

That happens in a few well-defined steps:

Business plan
Product plan
The recipient

a. Who is it?

b. What do they believe?

c. What do they think?

d. Interaction preference?

What do we want to change in the recipient?
Our message, the one that will create the change
Which channel should we use and why?
Sequence of follow-up communication

a. Channel per message

How do we measure, analyse and optimise?

What is always in place in every organisation is the business plan and the product plan. But do you have a clear definition of the recipient?

This is not the sales department's segmentation into A, B and C customers set up in a matrix, but a clear, multi-dimensional and detailed picture of who the recipient is. A so-called "buyer persona".

Do you have one of those as the basis for all your market communication when it is created, adapted and packaged?

The problem that arises if a clearly defined recipient is missing is that the answers to the steps that follow in the list above become vague, and the risk is high that the format, tone and focus of the messages vary a great deal over time.

To be relevant over time and convey value on several consecutive occasions, the first contact with you as a company and with your communication has to be followed by communication of an equivalent kind in terms of content.

Reverse order

In earlier articles I have always chosen to put the main subject of the article into a context through an opening description. In this article I do the opposite and go straight at what is promised in the headline and the standfirst, and then discuss the context afterwards. It is called "the inverted pyramid" and it is something that has long been used in journalism, where an article has always started with what has the greatest news value.

In the later part there are various tips for learning more about the area, do not miss them.

Before, during, after and extended value

A basic observation: sitting alone watching a presentation on a screen for an hour with the same speaker makes it hard to keep your concentration.

To hold the attention of the participants in a webinar there are several visual tricks. One important factor is making sure something happens on the screen of the person watching. Sharp colours, movement, sound, film, animations and so on are examples you can use.

The very best way of holding someone's attention, though, in my experience, is to bring in more speakers for the same webinar. The overall value people feel they get from taking part becomes greater, combined with the fact that big changes happen when the speaker changes.

Create an engaging tempo in the webinar

To give an example, some webinars I have spoken at had up to six speakers lined up in a one-hour webinar, where each speaker presented their subject somewhere between 3 to 4 minutes, 6 to 8 minutes, or up to 12 to 15 minutes. But no longer than that.

In the feedback it was clear that the participants felt there had been a tempo in the webinar and that in terms of content it was very valuable.

So if possible, with the goal of holding the viewers' attention, bring in more speakers per webinar.

Some basic details for succeeding with a webinar

You are now going to run a webinar and have brought in one or more "key opinion leaders" (KOL) to speak. Let us assume they are KOLs from several different countries, so the webinar will be in English and broadcast in the Nordics.

Aside from what is to be presented during the webinar, you have produced some form of material that you know is valuable to the participants. The simplest is probably to ask the speakers to write down their 5 to 10 most important points from their presentation and put it together into a good looking A4 PDF. But with time and cooperation you can certainly come up with something better and more substantial.

You have also made clear what the next step after the webinar is, a step that should drive your business forward. In my view this is something that creates good conditions for getting a physical meeting (when that is appropriate given the current situation with covid-19).

Finally you have produced a short survey that participants are linked to after the webinar. There you ask the usual questions about what they thought of the content, the speakers and so on. You also include a question about what they would like to see more of in future. If you ask for a name in the survey, look into the need for GDPR-related information. The advantage of asking for a name is that it opens up further segmentation of your customer database, either in the CRM system or on your email sending platform.

Ahead of the webinar

You send campaign-related emails to your segmented list of HCPs.
The segment that has been at your earlier training sessions: "We are running another webinar, this time with ..."
The segment that has not been at any of your earlier training sessions: "We at [the company] are pleased to present [KOL] who will talk about [subject]. Our earlier training sessions have had an average rating of 4.9/5 in the area of [therapy area] ..."
You send a postal mailing to a selection of customers. One tip many people do not yet use is QR codes, which today can be scanned with the camera on an ordinary smartphone.
The sales reps get material for promoting the webinar in meetings, by email and possibly by SMS.
You put a banner on your website for HCPs promoting the webinar, and you put up a note about the webinar under "Coming webinars".

What more can you do? Here are some examples you may not be using today:

Retargeting on social media
If you have a tracking pixel on your website for HCPs, you can promote the webinar to those who have been on your site and therefore carry that pixel on their computer, through LinkedIn for example.
Message in a closed group on social media
If you have created a group for HCPs on LinkedIn for example, you can send a message both in the group and as a personal message to the group members.
LinkedIn InMail
With a premium account on LinkedIn you get a certain number of InMails per month. These can be used to send messages to individuals you are not connected to, and so can be a way of reaching your most important customers.
Trade media
Niche trade media that goes specifically to your target group, for example oncologists reached through Onkologi i Sverige, is a good channel both digitally and in print.
Artificial intelligence
If you want to be at the front, it is today possible to use artificial intelligence (AI) to boost and maximise a company's banner advertising, whether you are addressing doctors or patients. Based on a range of different factors, and fully in line with GDPR, the AI model can effectively identify a potential customer with high precision and reach that person where they are here and now, in real time, in a range of different media.

As you can see there is a whole smorgasbord of channels, and of variants within each channel, to use for promoting a webinar.

A final but incredibly important part of what should happen ahead of a webinar is to remind those who have registered on several occasions, for the simple reason that a virtual meeting is easier not to turn up to than a physical one.

The first send is of course the confirmation that the registration has gone through, and that is the moment to say more about content, speakers and anything else of value to the recipient.

After that, the usual set-up for reminders is 1 week before, 3 days before, 24 hours before, 1 hour before, and when the webinar starts.

All the sends should carry information about where those who have registered can turn if they have any questions, ideally in the form of a direct number to the person who has coordinated the event.

What happens during the webinar?

The safest option for broadcasting a webinar "live" is to record what is to be presented in advance, but there is of course an appeal in broadcasting completely live.

One big advantage of broadcasting genuinely live is the possibility of bringing questions from the participants into the broadcast to be answered immediately, something that in my experience gets the other participants going and asking questions, and creates an involvement that shows up later in the evaluations.

But let us say that in this case you are running a webinar where the presentation itself is pre-recorded.

Before the start of the webinar, run a video of a digital clock counting down from 10 minutes. As a nice detail a calm melody can be added, which then becomes more energetic closer to the time of the webinar.
Use a moderator who welcomes the participants to the webinar, introduces the speaker and explains how and where participants can ask questions during the webinar.
If possible, bring in the speaker or speakers to answer questions after the presentation. It is not unusual for most of the questions to come after the presentations, if you have told people that is an option, and for the webinar to run over time as a result.
Start the recorded presentation by the speaker or speakers.
Whether the webinar is live or recorded in advance, the speakers should on several occasions raise the possibility for participants to get hold of the material you have produced, and the fact that this is available through the local product specialist.
Take and answer questions through the chat or the Q&A channel. There can be several people answering in different areas so that you cover every possible question.
Use a so-called "news ticker", a news strip, that sits for a minute or so at the bottom of the picture. This is done once or twice during the webinar to promote one of your resources or materials that are relevant to the participants.
Always end a webinar with a clear call to action, that is, an offer describing what the participant has to gain from acting the way you want, and tell them how they will be sent to a very short survey to answer a few questions.

One detail that can be worth knowing about is the possibility of translating what is presented into another language, presented as subtitles in real time, on the Zoom platform.

What happens after the webinar?

This is when you have the chance to really maximise the value of your effort.

Since you created a piece of material before the webinar, which was promoted several times during the webinar, this has probably resulted in participants getting in touch with the product specialists.
Since you had a clear call to action at the end of the webinar, you now harvest the fruit of it.
Since you created a survey ahead of the webinar that a few percent of the participants took the time to answer, that now has to be evaluated.
Every webinar, provided the speaker or speakers allow it, should be put up on your website for HCPs as so-called "premium content".
Create a landing page presenting the webinar where the only goal is that visitors who have not seen the webinar fill in their name and email address in order to get access to it. On this page you have all the relevant checkboxes for GDPR. The design of landing pages matters, so do google to understand which factors play a part when you design your page.
Promote the webinar to all the customers who did not watch it live, following the list above for what you do ahead of a webinar in terms of email sends, postal mailings, material for the sales reps, banners on your website for HCPs and possibly retargeting on LinkedIn for example.

In all the steps, before, during and after, there are a few points that are especially important, and they are the ones aimed at creating the conditions for the next step in your customer contact.

The reason? The primary goal of digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry should be to create the conditions for a personal meeting between a product specialist and an HCP.

When I have lectured I have met certain objections to that goal, but in essentially every case we have been able to agree that the objection sat in an area where "marketing handles the progress". By that is meant that in some industries digital marketing is all it takes to move an individual from unaware to customer, and that this ought to be possible in dealings with HCPs too.

But there is a rule of thumb that comes up now and then, which is that the first and the last contact should be physical, and that in between there can be digital interactions that move an individual closer to a purchase or a prescription.

So it is for that reason, together with the large access challenge we have, that the goal of digital marketing in the pharmaceutical industry should be to create the conditions for a personal meeting between a product specialist and an HCP.

Summing up before, during, after and extended value

That it takes time to follow the points above before, during and after a webinar in order to create maximum and extended value is not hard to understand. That is exactly why every webinar needs more room in the budget and in the calendar.

And not only that room before and during a webinar, only to then leave the project as one more tick on a long to-do list, but above all afterwards.

With a correct set-up for a webinar you create the conditions for several extra advantages for you as a company, where the main one is, aside from the chance to analyse the information you have gathered which is genuinely important, that you have access to a valuable resource you can use in future sales and marketing activities to make contact with the customers you do not have contact with yet and perhaps do not even know about.

But it takes time, budget and a chance to focus on making every webinar really, really good. And how you create the conditions for making outstanding webinars means we move over to the context that surrounds the steps described above.

Focus more and do less

There are too many simultaneous projects running in the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies for digital marketing to be done properly.

There is too little time to analyse and optimise digital marketing projects.

It is clear in all the surveys and analyses I read that pharmaceutical companies in general, with a few exceptions, do not live up digitally to what healthcare expects.

Last but not least, digital marketing is not cheap. Even though there is an incredible return on investment (ROI) to be had if it is done the right way, it is not far off burning money if it is done the wrong way.

When every company is in the middle of a digital transformation, and digital marketing is in every business plan and product plan, it is no longer possible to duck the fact that digital is and will become a very large part of our lives.

The first issue of this magazine was printed in November 1998 in connection with Läkarstämman and sent out to pharmaceutical companies around the country. That is 22 years ago, and it is easy to land on the thought that a long era of outstanding information in printed form is going to its grave in order to continue digitally from here. But is it really that long?

When I talk to colleagues who have worked in the industry since 1998 I hear, not too rarely, that sales and marketing work towards healthcare is broadly done in much the same way now as it was then.

What I hear is that the biggest difference now compared with then is that today we try to squeeze more things into a working day than ever before. Is that something you agree with?

I started at Janssen-Cilag, as it was called in 2006, and when I think back on how I worked then and how sales work looks today, I am prepared to agree.

What I am not quite prepared to agree with is that more projects, doing more, is better for improving competitiveness. In digital marketing it is in most cases precisely the opposite. It is always better to do fewer and really good things than more and half good ones.

So how do we change the view that more is better, and maximise the value of every initiative by focusing more and doing less?

Gather information

The first sentence in this article read: "To maximise the value of something, anything, there has to be time to identify what is valuable to the recipient."

One of the most important tasks for the sales force, who are the ones with the most time out with customers, should be to gather information from the market and report it back to the other departments in a structured way.

The reason is that all the surveys of how HCPs read up on their profession say that it happens in the evenings and at weekends, when they are not busy with patients and administration.

For us to succeed with the right message for the right person, in the right format at the right moment, the basis for deciding which initiatives to invest in has to be broad.

It is the need in the local market that decides which initiatives have the chance to move people and be valuable, and it is the defined recipient in the form of a "buyer persona" that decides the basic shape of them.

And the sales force is by far the best at gathering that information and building a broad basis for the decision. That is the external perspective.

When we then look at the internal perspective and how the marketing department should work, I want to present the following concept.

"The daisy flower approach"

A few years ago I was at a training course, Advanced multichannel marketing, in Paris where I came across the concept of "the daisy flower approach" and I have to admit it was love at first sight.

The concept is about picking out 2 to 4 larger initiatives during a year and focusing a large part of the available resources on them, while dropping a number of less important initiatives.

Like a flower with petals, an event is created, a webinar, where the webinar is in the middle of the flower and all the activities around the webinar are the petals.

To connect that with the steps and suggestions I listed earlier in the article, let us assume you bring in several speakers to keep the tempo up and really get as much valuable information as possible into the time set aside. It is then entirely reasonable to assume that the webinar costs more money and takes more time to arrange.

At the same time the webinar probably becomes much better, since those watching get more valuable information from more reliable sources for a smaller investment of their time.

Which means that the time you spend preparing an initiative like a webinar is time you save for your customers in terms of value in the form of time, if we stay with the reasoning above.

Maximising the result

When it comes to the petals, the reverse 80/20 rule usually comes up, which in practice means you should spend 20 percent on creating a piece of material and 80 percent on promoting it.

Once the basic material has been created and promoted according to the suggestion for how to act afterwards, it should be gone over again with the aim of cutting it down into smaller parts and other formats so that it can be used in other channels.

One piece of content, such as a webinar, has the potential to be the seed of a large number of other pieces of content.

To give a concrete example of how this can be done, I point to what is probably the world's best example of what is called re-purposing, the digital guru Gary Vaynerchuk's content model, https://bit.ly/gary_vee_content_model

It is of course obvious, but worth raising anyway, when it comes to approval of marketing material. A piece of content that is a smaller part of an already approved piece of content has a greater chance of being approved quickly, even if that is occasionally not the case, since every individual piece of content has to be seen in its own context. But broadly it holds, and we all know that content which is easy to create and gets approved quickly is a blessing for every marketer in the pharmaceutical industry.

Finally, tying it all together

Can fewer initiatives over a year lead to better and, for the customer, more valuable interactions with you as a partner?

Can fewer initiatives lead to the chance to analyse and optimise market communication, whatever the channel, and so create better and better activities over time?

Can fewer initiatives lead to extensive marketing in terms of the amount of content?

In this article I have put forward arguments and reasoned that the answer is yes to all of those questions, well aware of and with great respect for factors such as governance and material from head offices around the world.

In order to get to a line of reasoning that does not stop at exactly those factors that make things harder, I have chosen to temporarily close my eyes somewhat to them.

I think that if we are going to get change, we cannot stay in what makes things harder but have to take a big step over it and focus on what can actually be affected in your own market.

It would be incredibly interesting to hear your view and to discuss the subject.

I, and many with me, hold that digital maturity and commercial communication need to get better in the Swedish pharmaceutical industry, and my goal is to be a strongly contributing factor to that happening.

If you want to be my fellow passenger on that train, do get in touch and we will see how we can work together for change in your organisation specifically and in the Nordic pharmaceutical industry more broadly. You reach me on 072-9757000.

All the best until then,

Fredrik Holmboe

fredrik@dualia.se

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Cutting one piece of work into everything it can become, and putting the time in afterwards and not only before, is what the Content Engine Sprint is built around.

Is email marketing dead?

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry, June 2020. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that email as a channel is alive and that the disappointing results come from the delivery: templates that are not built for mobile, generic subject lines, dated design, and figures nobody looks at. The four things to stop doing read much as they did in 2020.

Six things here need checking before anyone acts on them, and this note names all six, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. First, the measurement. Open rate is treated throughout as the number that tells you how well you are doing and the number you optimise against, and the closing section offers open rates of around 60 and 70 percent at two pharma companies as figures to aim for; the first is the author's recollection of a company he worked at, the second is something he says he heard about only the other day, so they are anecdotes and not benchmarks. Before optimising against open rate at all, check with your own sending platform how opens are counted today and what your recipients' mail clients do with the tracking pixel that counts them. Second, consent and profiling. The article says interest data should be collected "in accordance with GDPR" and, at the end, recommends putting multiple-choice questions into the newsletter itself to gather what is needed for better segmentation; it does not set out what the legal basis for that collection would be. The same gap sits under the hyper-personalisation section, which describes tailoring each send to the individual from every metric held about that individual. Anyone acting on either should get the position from their own data protection function first. Third, AMP. Embedding video and forms in an email through AMP is presented as new and available; whether it works for your recipients depends on what your sending platform supports and what their mail clients do with it, so check both before designing a send around it. Fourth, the figures. Every one of them carries a footnote, which is more than most articles in this series manage, but several of those footnotes point to marketing vendors' own blogs and knowledge bases, not to primary research, and all of them are from 2018 to 2020. The article is straight about this in one place, stopping to note that the survey company behind its opening statistics sells email software, and that is the right way to read the rest of them too. Fifth, the section headed "Trends 2020" is dated by its own title, and the advice to search for "email marketing best practice 2020" carries the year with it. Sixth, one word. The article uses bounce rate for a reader who opens a newsletter without interacting with it, which is not the only meaning the word carries in email tooling, where it is also used for sends that were never delivered. Read the definition in your own platform before comparing your number with anything said here.

None of this was written in a world where a generated summary can sit between the recipient and the sender; generative AI arrived in 2023, three years after this piece.

It has to be said, a fair number of companies are not happy with the results they see from their email marketing. Given that the opening of the multichannel marketing series focused on email and KPIs, that article is now followed up with tips for improving them. Email marketing is definitely not dead, and in this article digital strategist Fredrik Holmboe goes through four things you should stop doing immediately and five things you should consider starting.

Time and again for more than a decade, the end of email marketing has been announced. But the idea that email as a channel for reaching your target group is dead could not be further from the truth. At a time when most marketers, not only in the pharmaceutical industry but outside it too, are struggling to break through the noise and reach their target group, 78 percent of those asked in the report "State of email marketing 2020" [1] saw increased engagement on their sends.

The same report says that 99 percent of all consumers check their email every day, that more than 50 percent of everyone living in the United States checks their email more than 10 times a day, and that 73 percent of millennials, people between 24 and 39, prefer marketing material by email.

Let us be a little critical of those numbers and pull them down somewhat. The company behind the survey, Litmus, offers a platform for exactly this kind of email sending and reasonably has a certain weighting in its favour in the group it asks. But even with a critical eye on the numbers, it is still easy to see why collecting consent in order to make email marketing possible has been an important goal for pharmaceutical companies, both globally and locally.

With permission to send marketing material by email to an HCP (healthcare professional), you have a direct communication channel with very large potential in terms of both impact and ROI (Return on Investment).

What is confusing, though, is that in far too many cases the business results do not appear.

How is it possible that good results fail to materialise in a world where opening email is such a large part of people's lives, which raises an important question:

Why is there a gap between the fact that consumers check their email all the time and the fact that they do not act on it in a way that satisfies the sender?

Perhaps the answer is that there is nothing wrong with the marketing channel, but rather with the delivery.

Best practice in email marketing

It is worth always keeping an eye on the marketing channel you are using, signing up for the sends of some of the best email marketing companies in the world and putting those in a folder called "E-mail best practice examples". Every so often you look in that folder for inspiration, something you can supplement with a couple of Google searches for "email marketing best practice 2020".

Because bluntly, it is not we who set the standard for how our doctors and other healthcare staff will experience our sends, it is the best players in the market, and it may be as simple as you not having kept up with how email marketing has developed and how it currently works.

Meet what the target group expects and optimise from the statistics

For email marketing to work well you need to meet what your target group expects, and use statistics to measure and improve your email campaigns in the right way (see the earlier article on KPIs for email marketing).

If you disregard those two fundamental building blocks in digital marketing strategy in general, and email marketing in particular, you will probably miss most of the potential your digital newsletters have. Not because email marketing as a strategy is dead, but because what you have produced and put in place is out of date.

This article is written with the aim of giving an insight into some aspects of email marketing you should consider when you create a digital newsletter, and a little later in the article those will come based on the trends for 2020. But first, here are some things you absolutely have to stop doing.

4 things that break your email marketing

There are some things in email marketing that, incredibly, still happen, and to succeed in 2020 and onwards you should stop doing the following:

Using templates that are not mobile friendly

The world is mobile now. When I check my email in the morning I use my phone, where I generally prefer to read my email. If something catches my interest I may choose to read it later on my computer. But most often I scan through my inbox in the micro pauses that come up during the day. Do you do the same?

Today the user experience is everything in all marketing.

Emails that are not designed and technically adapted for mobile will in all likelihood raise the bounce rate, that is, the reader opening a digital newsletter without interacting with it, exponentially, because of a poor user experience.

Since it is so easy to drop you in favour of the competitor, or drop the competitor in favour of you, based on who gives the better user experience, every one of your sends has to be fully adapted for mobile. Both in design and in technical build.

Always check the preview for different mobile screens and computer screens, and for text only (not HTML), in your email tool before you press "Send".

Using impersonal subject lines

Nobody will ever act on an unopened email, and what is on the subject line can either carry a whole email campaign or sink it. Open rate is the KPI that tells you how well you are doing.

Subject lines that are generic, impersonal and without emotion will be swallowed entirely by all the other email sitting in your recipient's inbox, and with that only add to the noise.

The solution is to personalise subject lines with a name or with specific areas of interest, done with judgement so that it is not overused. To be able to do that, a first name has to have been registered (easy) and information about interests has to have been collected in accordance with GDPR (harder, but far from impossible) and then used through segmentation of the recipient list when you send.

Further solutions can be to use emojis to stand out visually from the crowd. Sometimes it can be as simple as noting the season, the largest congress that has just taken place, or asking a question that is relevant to the recipient, in order to raise the open rate.

Think about what the newsletter's key take-away is and combine that with the above. Experiment with different variants and then keep following how open rate develops in your send statistics, so you can optimise your campaigns.

Sending out newsletters with poor design

There are more aspects to designing a digital newsletter than adapting it for mobile. When studies say it takes 0.1 seconds to form an impression of what a person is like, and even faster, 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds), to form a view of a website that decides whether the visitor stays or not, good visual design is quite simply incredibly important. [2]

Looking quickly over them, most of the newsletters I open today, from various industries, are really dull. They are rarely personalised or show any sign of segmentation, and it is not unusual for them to have a design that looks 15 to 20 years old. These thoughtless newsletters sink the user experience and the perception of a brand like a stone.

Well aware that in the pharmaceutical industry a template for digital sends often comes from a global or regional head office, is not of a particularly high standard in terms of design, and unfortunately is a template that has to be used, perhaps there is some room for, say, campaign sends that challenge in a positive direction with a modern and fresh feel? And that of course, broadly, stay inside the frame of the visual guide.

In the section "Trends 2020 in email marketing" there are some examples of how you can use new functionality to improve your sends.

Ignoring the statistics

Happily, more and more people are starting to focus on the statistics that digital marketing provides, and consequently on the statistics in email marketing too. Every effort should ideally be evaluated on cost against impact, figures that are then reported upwards in the organisation.

But it is far from everyone who examines their own initiatives by going through the data that exists with the aim of optimising. Lack of time is often the most common reason, which is not hard to understand in today's world, but which is still in a way hard to take in.

Fundamentally we all want to do a really good job and feel pride in our craft as marketers. An analysis of the statistics helps give you the answers you need, and optimisation can follow from them.

Through analysis you can break down the behaviour of your email recipients and show, among other things, how many opened the newsletter, where in the content and how they interacted, which email client they used, which day and time of day most of the sends were opened, and so on.

Analysing and acting on your measurements leads to better results.

Those are the things you absolutely should stop doing. There is quite simply no room for that kind of mistake, that is, not improving from data, in today's competition for the reader's attention. Missing that step essentially only means you become one more of the companies that has not done its homework and so adds to the pressure in the inbox, something very few people appreciate.

When you send email to the people who have deliberately given you permission to communicate directly with them, something that has probably happened because you have done so much that is good in other channels and built up trust there, make the most of it.

It is always the recipient who should be at the centre, and that is important to keep in mind at all times. Send things that are essentially only of value to the recipient, sprinkled with a little of what you want to communicate. Then you get a really good balance that the recipient appreciates. And after that, follow the trends that apply in 2020 and onwards.

Trends 2020 in email marketing

There is a great deal of information about which trends now apply in email marketing and it is not always easy to sift out what is actually relevant. But a summary of some of the things that come up again and again is the following:

Minimalist design

Make it easy for the reader (and for yourself) by sometimes having only one message per send, where the focus sits somewhere between what is of interest to the recipient and what you want to say. One example is the following send from the fictional company My Company:

It is obvious what I am expected to do when I open the newsletter, buy clothes for men. It notes the season and their seasonal products with cheerful colours.

It is also minimalist in the sense that it loads very fast, on mobile too, and is fully adapted for mobile.

What would a corresponding send look like if it were focused on an online presentation by a key opinion leader in a therapy area that is relevant to the recipient?

Hyper-personalisation

In the list of things that should stop, there is the sending of digital newsletters of the "one-size-fits-all" mass mailing kind. The extension of that call in a positive direction is personalisation, with a first name in the subject line as one example. Hyper-personalisation takes this a step further and uses, among other things, AI to tailor sends to the individual, based on every measurement available for that individual.

Searches, choice of interaction and with what content, time spent on a search, product, service or web page, which format is preferred such as text, video or podcast, time of day and day of the week are some examples of data and measurements that can be used.

The digital infrastructure needed for this kind of data collection and adaptation of communication is very extensive and is most often used in e-commerce. That puts hyper-personalisation quite far from the conditions and the focus of the pharmaceutical industry, and I have not heard of any example where it is used. Perhaps you have?

But again, it is companies like Amazon, Spotify, Google and other giants we interact with daily that set the standard. And so everything you send out should hold a high standard, given the conditions you work under, in order to convey solid quality.

Which gives impersonal, unsegmented mass sends another kick.

"Mobile-first"

To continue on the track of "positive extension of an example from the list of things you should stop doing", here comes "mobile first", that is, newsletters that are designed to look good on mobile in the first instance.

It is not only me who opens email on my phone when the chance comes up, 61 percent of all email sends are opened and read on a mobile [3] and as many as 79 percent of mobile users have made a purchase through their phone. [4] With statistics like that it pays to design for mobile first, which can mean a design where the whole window on a smartphone is covered by a single unified graphic element, a little descriptive text and a "button", a call to action, in a contrasting colour whose only purpose is to make the reader act, through colour and wording.

Think about how this could be used by you. Perhaps you should try making the next digital send with an invitation to an event "mobile first". Test it and compare with earlier sends of the same kind.

Video content

There is no doubt that video has grown in popularity in recent years. With cheaper technology the format becomes available to the many, something that has among other things paved the way for a whole generation of YouTubers.

What we appreciate about video is the closeness it gives. We see and can experience a situation almost as if we were there. It becomes authentic and credible.

As I write this at the beginning of May we have just finished a webinar series in life science broadcast live across the whole world, three broadcast times over one day per webinar in order to cover all time zones. The target group was HCPs, and when we were done we could sum up that around 22,000 unique viewers took part in the content, and the feedback from the series is very positive. What was above all raised again and again was the clarity with which the information was conveyed and the value of being able to get answers to questions immediately during the broadcast. Another result from the webinar series is that afterwards viewers sought out the sales reps to get hold of something they had found valuable during the webinar. This was the first time in the company's history that this kind of contact seeking from the customer had happened on such a scale.

A figure from 2018 says that 90 percent of consumers consider video valuable as a basis for a purchasing decision. [5]

With the relatively new technology AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) it is now possible to, among other things, put films into a digital newsletter. This is what a send from the fictional company My Company can look like:

Think about how you can use video embedded in an email send as part of your digital marketing. Perhaps one way is to use a key opinion leader in a short film to drive traffic to an online training, a quiz or a registration page for an event. Another option can be to simply give the reader short feedback in video format from an earlier training you ran, as a teaser ahead of round two of the same training when you are about to run it again.

Brand storytelling

Authenticity, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), openness, closeness. All are slogans in an era of brand marketing. We have to some extent tired of over-polished and staged advertising and instead appreciate more down-to-earth communication.

That said, it is probably time to humanise your brand through the power of storytelling so that you can capture your subscribers and engage them. Stories have a much greater ability, according to some data 22 times greater ability, to stick in our memory compared with facts. [6]

Through email marketing you can take those of your subscribers who have shown interest behind the scenes, show them the people behind the company name and at the same time give them something that benefits them in their daily work.

What would that kind of series of sends look like at your company? Would it be in video format?

In closing

This article began by establishing that email marketing is not dead, and that the reason positive, business driving results fail to appear is probably an outdated strategy and implementation.

At a pharmaceutical company I was at previously the open rate on email sends was around 60 percent, and only the other day I heard about another pharmaceutical company where the open rate on sends to doctors was as high as 70 percent. Those are good figures to aim for.

What has died, or rather should have died long ago, is newsletters that suffer from one or several of the mistakes listed at the start of the article, with long blocks of text pasted into an old template with no clear reason for why the send was made or what the reader should act on.

In the same way that a company cannot "afford" to have a website simply in order to have a website, it has to drive business, that same company cannot afford to abuse the trust it has been given by sending out poor digital newsletters with no clearly defined goal.

As mentioned earlier, an email address is a direct communication channel to one of your customers. It is hard to get, very easy to lose, and for as long as you get to borrow it, it is one of your most cost-effective communication channels of all. Look after it carefully.

Finally I want to add an observation of my own about AMP and how you can use AMP in digital newsletters beyond putting in a video. Among other things you can put in multiple choice questions, something that can be used to gather information directly in the newsletter. This is very good for getting in the information you need for better segmentation of your recipient lists, and with that creating the conditions for sends that will certainly improve your statistics on all fronts.

Hoping that the article has given you one or two valuable insights into how to succeed with modern email marketing, I want to wish you a pleasant summer.

Stay well, you and those close to you, and we will meet again in a future issue of Pharma Industry.

All the best,

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital strategist

fredrik@dualia.se

References

https://litmus.com/ebooks/state-of-email
https://cxl.com/blog/first-impressions-matter-the-importance-of-great-visual-design/
https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/knowledgebase/5409-average-industry-rates?lang=en_US
https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
https://www.renderforest.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics
https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/stories

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Building sends people have a reason to open, and measuring what happens after they do, is what the Content Engine Sprint is built around.

Search engine optimization. What to think about in 2020? Part 2

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry, November 2019. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument in this second part is that on-page work only takes you so far, and that what separates the sites that win is what happens away from their own pages: who links to them, and why. The definition of a good link, popularity, topic relevance and trust in the domain, still describes what practitioners look for, and the account of private blog networks and the September 2014 crackdown reads as history, not as advice.

Four things here need checking before anyone acts on them, and this note names all four, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. The opening claim that backlinks make up 40 to 50 percent of a well-executed SEO strategy is given without a source, and it is the single figure in the article a reader is most likely to carry away; treat it as a 2019 estimate of a weighting, not as the weighting. PageRank is used throughout as a value you can read off a site that links to you, and the article does not say where you read it. Before working that way, check what number you would actually be looking at and whether it comes from the search engine or from the tool showing it to you. The link building section recommends acquiring links by asking for them, by guest posting in exchange for a link in the text and in the author bio, and by running outreach programmes with paid tools; the article presents that whole class of tactic as ordinary practice, and anyone building a programme on it should read the search engines' own current guidance on link schemes before starting. And the competitor analysis section proposes producing content that mirrors a competitor's profile in order to take their links, which is a positioning question as much as an SEO one.

The platforms and tools belong to 2019. LinkedIn Articles, Medium, Reddit and Quora are named as the places to publish for visibility, Twitter has since been renamed X, and the fact box lists nine tools that should each be checked before use, among them a Google Analytics that has since moved to a different version. The article is honest about its own limits in one respect worth noting: it says outright that nobody knows how link quality is judged because the algorithm is secret, and then offers three factors anyway, which is the right way to read the rest of it too. Neither this article nor Part 1 was written in a world where a generated summary can sit above the links; generative AI arrived in 2023, after both. One paragraph in the manuscript, at the end of the section on organic links, breaks off mid-sentence, and it has been left out, not completed.

As a continuation of the series on digital marketing published here in Pharma Industry, where subjects such as email, websites, webinars, eRep and eMSL, social media, basic search engine optimization (SEO) and more have been covered, it is now time to dive even deeper into the world of Google and the other search engines to see what makes some websites do better than others in the search results. In this article Fredrik Holmboe, digital strategist, together with Robert Nyberg, specialist in international SEO, goes through among other things what is said today to make up around 40 to 50 percent of a well-executed SEO strategy, namely backlinks.

Well aware that there are not many readers of Pharma Industry working with prescription products who will get much use out of this article in their daily work, it is written nonetheless with the thought of being a support for you who work with OTC products and disease awareness, and of serving as general grounding in the subject of search engine optimization.

When we talk about digital marketing, the foundation of all communication online is some form of content. Content placed on some form of digital resource online, such as a website, or in a social media channel such as Facebook.

Wherever content is published, and whether it is in text form, as an image, film, animation or an audio clip, it competes with an incredible amount of other content on the same or an equivalent subject.

To avoid being one of the organizations that adds to the digital noise we all suffer from daily, and so getting very little return on investment (ROI), you have to burrow into the details and take your SEO seriously.

And by "burrow into" is meant not only that you school yourself in the kind of SEO covered in the previous article (PI 2-19), what is usually called "on-page SEO", but also that you look at what is called "off-page SEO", which is the strategies and initiatives that happen outside your own website. This is often the part of SEO that organizations forget entirely, with the result that the organizations which take in the full span of search engine optimization give themselves a competitive advantage online.

We are writing this article to give you as a reader a greater insight into the full span of search engine optimization, and our hope is that you get small moments of recognition and then choose to go back to earlier articles about multichannel marketing here in Pharma Industry to widen the story.

You will find those articles if you google "Pharma Industry Fredrik Holmboe".

You do not always have to go into every detail, but you have to know that it is in the details that you win digitally.

A short introduction to SEO

In earlier articles I have written about how much content is actually created (Social media, PI 3-18), about how you can hold a very important focus in your own content production by creating a proper buyer persona (Mistakes to avoid, PI 1-19) and about how you work on from there with on-page SEO (SEO part 1, PI 2-19).

One of the threads running through those articles has been to make the point of how important it is to hold a focus in what you create and publish online. If there is no narrow focus, the result risks becoming too scattered, and therefore toothless, in the data-driven world Google rules over.

It is not without reason that the expression "publish and pray" was coined, and, we still have to say it, far too often we see examples of large resources being put into a content strategy where the preparatory work is thin and the execution, and therefore the result, suffers for it.

Let us instead assume now that all the pieces are in place, that the preparatory work has been done thoroughly, that content has been created with high value for your defined buyer persona and that it is based on a proper keyword analysis. Let us assume that these articles have been published by the book, with correct title tags, alt tags, H1s and H2s, bold sentences, bullet lists, relevant internal linking to your own articles and one or two external links to articles in the same area. And so on. What do the companies that succeed best at landing high in Google's search results do beyond all that?

They do what they can to get as many other websites as possible to link to their most valuable and most worked-through content. The reason is that links from other people's websites to your own have always been an important, positive signal for Google and a fundamental part of SEO work. These links are what are called backlinks.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a reference to your website from another website, inserted there together with a link. Every time another website mentions and links to your website, you have gained a backlink.

An example: If you want to read more about what backlinks mean, there is a very good resource on Wikipedia.

The three underlined words are in this case a backlink to Wikipedia, since they say what the subject is and link to the relevant page.

How is the value of a backlink calculated?

A term Google has long used is PageRank, which is a "valuation" of every indexable page or URL Google has found. PageRank is one of the factors in their algorithm for ranking pages in the search result at the moment of a search, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and two of the factors, among many others, for judging a page's PageRank are that page's incoming links, both in terms of quantity and of quality.

To put it in an image, you can liken links to votes of varying strength. How much impact the incoming link has on your own page's position in Google's SERP is decided by how many incoming votes, and what individual authority those votes carry, exist at the other, linking page.

The simple logic behind why Google values backlinks is that the people responsible for a website, when they choose where to link, more often link and "give their vote" to a popular and high-quality website than to a poor or mediocre one.

So many incoming links matter, but it matters just as much that they are of high quality.

Private blog networks, a short history

At the end of the 1990s Google saw off, among others, the then largest search engine Altavista. The success factor was precisely the PageRank concept and the quantity and quality of links between websites.

Fast forward ten years and private blog networks (PBN) have been created to exploit that concept.

A private blog network has a subject focus, and the linking between the network's various blogs is designed to raise each blog's average PageRank.

Through a defined link structure the owners then created blogs to which they built a large volume of backlinks, which gave those sites high authority within their respective subjects. Via those sites they then sold outgoing links to customers who wanted to improve their own website's position in Google's search results.

This was a well-established tactic nine or ten years ago, and many companies built their entire business on a website that generated a lot of traffic.

Now fast forward to September 2014, when Google began focusing on squeezing these private blog networks, and overnight there were many websites that disappeared completely from Google's search results. Many companies that saw their whole business disappear from one day to the next.

What happened was that Google began classing links from private blog networks as "toxic", today called "link toxicity", and with a link profile full of that type of incoming link, websites were punished hard.

What is a valuable backlink?

A valuable backlink is, as we have already established, a link from a website with a high average PageRank. But that is not the whole truth, and since Google keeps its algorithm secret with constant updates, nobody really knows. But over time three points have emerged as relevant:

Popularity. If the website linking to you has many high-quality backlinks, some of that value will be transferred to your website.
Topic relevance. If the website linking to you has the same subject focus, that is considered more valuable. A link from the American FDA is more valuable to a pharmaceutical company than a link from General Motors.
The domain's credibility. If the website linking to you has existed for several years, written within the same subject area and therefore become a credible source, that is more valuable than links from a newly started website.

Link building

In SEO, the work of getting more backlinks is called "link building", and it is difficult and time-consuming work. To get a good result it takes creativity, strategic thinking, analysis, hard selling and the patience to follow the same strategy over a longer period.

A good link building strategy should contain one or more of the following tactics.

Organic links

Create content and put a lot of focus on spreading it across different channels. As for written content, this can be published in channels such as LinkedIn Articles, Medium, Reddit and Quora to get better visibility. To spread the article (wherever it is published), this can be done on the personal and company channels of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

With greater visibility and spread, the chance increases that good content will get links from the people who consume it, so-called organic links.

Organic mentions

Sometimes your company, brand or product is mentioned on a website without there being a link to you behind it. This is called a "mention" and is perhaps the simplest and most scalable way to generate backlinks.

Often referred to as reactive link building, it is about using tools, SEMrush for instance, to scan the internet for words or phrases connected to your business. The tool lists the websites that have mentioned you, whether they linked or not, on which page they mentioned you and whether it was in a positive, neutral or negative context. Contact the website, thank them for mentioning you and ask whether they would consider linking to you in a way, if that is possible, that gives their visitors added value.

Outreach

There are quite certainly websites you would gladly have a link from if you got the chance. Perhaps a list of wished-for sites already exists today? If not, paid tools such as Buzzstream and PitchBox can help identify and simplify the process of finding high-quality websites for you, creating a list for prioritization and sending out messages to whoever is responsible for the site. The difficulty in this tactic is the answer to the question of why your wish for a backlink should be granted by the other organization.

High-quality websites usually get several requests a week, so how do you stand out from the crowd?

Assume you have put large resources into putting together an important research report. You know the results have great potential to affect, for instance, public debate, the current state of research or how healthcare treats a particular diagnosis. What you now do is contact the relevant publications, websites and organizations whose readers, visitors or members have a very large interest in your report. With a setup like that, the chance is good that those you contact will choose to link to you and your report, since it gives great value to their audience.

Guest writer

You can write a really good article and then offer it as a post from someone at your organization as a guest writer. It is not unusual for the exchange to include the chance to include a link in the text and one in the author biography.

Competitor analysis

When it comes to SEO and how you analyze competitors' websites, there are mainly two areas: a gap analysis of the site's link profile and a gap analysis of its content.

In an analysis of a link profile you focus on what kind of links the competitor has, the quantity and quality of the links, the text on the links, the amount of traffic from the links, and on identifying which keywords and phrases the site gets its traffic from.

On the basis of that link analysis you then build further on the gap analysis of content, where it is clear which content has attracted the best links and which keywords and subjects have generated the bulk of their traffic volume.

With that analysis as the foundation, you produce content that mirrors their content profile and is better in terms of substance and user experience. This content can then be used in your outreach to create links.

Measuring and evaluating SEO results

Technical setup, content and links are critical for getting a website onto Google's first page in the search results. Constantly measuring, evaluating and acting on your search engine optimization gives you the chance to take your results further still. Website traffic, engagement and links are some of the most common KPIs people look at, and beyond those you can keep an eye on:

Organic traffic growth (traffic from Google, for instance)
Keyword position in the SERP (split by branded and non-branded)
Conversion from organic traffic
Average time on the website and bounce rate
Which are your best pages in terms of organic traffic
Growth or loss of backlinks

Closing words from Fredrik

Having now written nine articles in total and run a couple of two-day seminars together with Pharma Industry, it is clear that many people find search engine optimization a technical and heavy subject. At the same time, the delight is just as great every time I run a live demonstration using one of the tools below and show the audience data and insights relevant to them and their business.

It can be something as simple as showing the keywords people actually search on within a particular subject, or running an analysis of a link profile.

As theory, SEO is a heavy, technical subject, and if you have read through both articles then kudos to you, well fought. In practice SEO is really, really enjoyable given the insights that often come out of the analysis work, and if you want to know more we are only a phone call away.

This two-part article series was started off by one of the questions that came in to the PI editorial team about digital marketing, and if you have a question in the area you would like answered, email the editors at redaktionen@pharma-industry.se.

Until next time.

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital strategist

Head of Inbound

Robert Nyberg

International SEO specialist

Fact box: tools for evaluating search engine optimization

Every craftsman knows that a job is easier to carry out if you have the right tools, something that holds true when you work with search engine optimization too. Below are tools that are free to use, marked with an asterisk, and those that cost money.

On-page tools

Off-page tools

Tool	Comment
Buzzstream	A simple web-based program that helps you promote content with automation to your target group in order to create links
PitchBox	An advanced web-based program that helps you quickly and easily find bloggers, influencers and others, and with the help of automation promote content in order to create links
ahrefs	Content, links and mentions

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Part 1 is here on this site, and at the publisher. Building content other people have a reason to link to is what the Content Engine Sprint is built around.

Search engine optimization. What to think about in 2019? Part 1

fredrik@dualia.se (Fredrik Holmboe) — Mon, 27 May 2019 09:00:00 GMT

First published in Pharma Industry 2/2019, May 2019. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument in 2019 was that search visibility is won on data, not on assumption: decide who you are writing for, check whether anyone actually searches for the words you have picked, and then build pages a search engine can read. That description of the work still stands, and the section on topic clusters and pillar pages is the part most likely to be useful as written. The closing section is worth reading for the gap it names in itself: it says featured snippets, location-dependent lists and ad slots were taking a growing share of the result page, especially on a phone, and then says outright that how you win those slots is not covered here. Look at the result pages you care about before treating the rest of the advice as the whole picture.

Several recommendations should not be acted on without checking the current position first, and this note names all of them, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. First, the numbers and limits, all of them 2019 values. The click-through figures used in "No potential, no result" and "Search engine optimization is built on data" (about 30 to 35 percent of clicks for first place, around 12 percent for second, 10 percent for third and 2.5 percent for tenth) carry more weight in this article than they look like they do, because the entire worked example of Focus #1 against Focus #2 is arithmetic built on them; the method of comparing two keyword groups survives, the traffic figures it produces do not. The title tag limit of 55 to 64 characters and the meta description limit of 164 characters are given as fixed rules, so check the current display limits and check the assumption underneath them, that what you write is what gets shown. The 1,890-word finding under "Content consolidation" is a correlation drawn from one company's study of blog posts, and the article turns it into a target; the reference is given, so read the source before adopting the number.

Second, the things the article treats as established that a reader should test for themselves. LSI keywords are presented as a working category with their own examples, so check whether the search engine you are optimizing for describes anything of the kind before you build keyword work on it. The claim under "Adding multimedia" that bounce rate is something Google measures closely, and the claim under "Sharing on social media" that shares signal value, are both stated as settled ranking signals, and both are worth confirming against current guidance before anyone optimizes for them. The rules that a keyword has to appear in the H1, in the subheadings and inside the first 100 words describe an older, mechanical style of on-page work, and they are the easiest place in this article to overdo it. One recommendation sits outside SEO altogether: "Skilled writers" proposes having a writer interview the subject expert and then ghostwrite the article in that expert's name, and in a life science context authorship and contribution disclosure is governed by publication ethics, so take that one to the function that owns it.

The article carries three numbered references. Other figures in it are given without a primary source, among them Google's 70 and 90 percent share of desktop and mobile search, the traffic loss at prevention.com and patient.info after the August 2018 update, the 75 percent of visitors described as speed-readers, the recommendation that at least half of content production should be video, and the search volumes and competition scores in the worked example and in the answer at the end. On the competition score in particular: check what your own tool measures by that word before reading it as a statement about how hard something is to rank for organically. The closing quiz is worth reading for what it is: the article demonstrates its own method by counting how many times it used its own keywords and quoting a search volume and a competition score for them, and it concludes from that count and from its word length that the piece "would carry weight". That is the 2019 way of showing the work, and the conclusion rests on the same two measures flagged above. Neither this article nor its sequel was written in a world where a generated summary can sit above the links; generative AI arrived in 2023, after both.

In the previous issue of Pharma Industry, the article "Mistakes to avoid when you create a digital strategy" ended by asking whether you as a reader had a question about digital marketing for us to answer, and one of the questions that came in was about search engine optimization (SEO): "What do you think you should keep in mind about search engine optimization in 2019, is there anything in particular to consider?". Fredrik Holmboe works here with his colleague Robert Nyberg, a specialist in international SEO, to describe across two articles some of the most important factors you should have in mind when you commission written content in 2019.

First and above all else, there is one king among the world's search engines and it is, as we all know, Google. In our part of the world, at any rate. In China it is Baidu that rules, in Russia Yandex leads and in South Korea people turn to Naver. But in our part of the world there is no argument. Google is master of the hill and handles about 70 percent of all searches made on a computer and a full 90 percent of all searches made on mobile. With a single target, a single search algorithm, optimizing for search ought to be easier. The problem is that Google likes to update its search algorithm, often.

Keep up to date: modern SEO

Keeping up with the adjustments that happen, and with how they affect your website's various positions in the search results, is constant work. Among other things, a change to the algorithm on 1 August 2018 took aim at websites with a medical and health focus. Sites such as prevention.com and patient.info were hit hard and saw more than half of their daily traffic disappear overnight. And it is not the first time that has happened.

There are a few larger updates over the past seven or eight years, among them Google Panda (2011), Google Penguin (2012) and Google Hummingbird (2013). Each of these updates has since been updated again in several rounds over the years, with a single aim. To secure a search experience that is as efficient and as relevant as possible.

Because if you stop and think about it for a moment, you can see that one of Google's very first business goals for its customers, the people searching, is to get them to disappear as quickly as possible and not come back. Not many companies have that as a business goal.

The practical reason for this is that if the person searching does not come straight back to Google, then Google has in all likelihood succeeded in connecting that visitor with what they were looking for. If the visitor does come back after a short while, it often means Google failed to connect them with the value they were after.

The central part of all search engine optimization is a working digital machine that produces targeted and valuable content.

A buyer persona creates focus

To get your content production right, and to some extent your SEO strategy too, it is often a good recommendation to start from a buyer persona (see below). The reason is that with a central picture of the target in the form of a buyer persona, it becomes easier to prioritize everything from keywords to which content is valuable and relevant.

With a clear buyer persona you get the chance to answer a lot of marketing questions through the single test "Is this relevant, important or interesting to [name of persona]?".

A buyer persona is a semi-realistic representation of your best, most ideal customer within a chosen target group. A persona is often created in cross-functional collaboration, where sales, marketing and other customer-facing departments work together to arrive at a persona that is as clear and as richly detailed as possible.

No potential, no result

When it comes to keywords, it is important to have a grip on the total potential, that is, how many searches are carried out per month and how many other players are competing for first place, the competition, so that you set your expected result at the right level.

If nobody, or very few people, search for the exact words you want traffic from, then it follows on its own that there will be no traffic even if you end up in first place on Google.

The same applies if the ones you are fighting for first place against are Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Medium or some other genuinely heavyweight site: the results will not come unless you have very large resources and run your SEO perfectly.

Search engine optimization is built on data

We are now going to get fairly technical, which is a large part of successful SEO, for the simple reason that Google loves data.

If we look at the two examples above, search volume and competition for the top positions, they can look like two fairly trivial conclusions. But there is in fact a recent example where a cross-functional working group we worked with chose to go (against our recommendations, which simply has to be said) for one group of keywords, Focus #1, which they felt sat closer to the part of their business they wanted to build.

The total search volume for Focus #1 was around 1,350 searches a month, which was low for their industry. And given that first place on Google's SERP (Search Engine Results Page) captures around 30 to 35 percent of the clicks made,1 that meant they could at most have got around 400 to 470 visitors to their website. If, and it is a big if, they managed to win first place, from which the great majority click onward.

The percentage of the total search volume you can potentially capture falls quickly from first place to second (which gives around 12 percent), to third (around 10 percent) and then keeps falling steadily down to about 2.5 percent for position 10, the last slot on the first page. Statistically speaking, essentially nobody visits page two of Google's SERP.

What we had recommended the company do instead was to focus on a group of keywords, Focus #2, made up mainly of seven or eight keywords. In total, an average of just over 10,000 searches a month were carried out on those keywords, and oddly enough the great majority of them had very low competition. With that focus, first place on Google's SERP would have given somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500 visits a month. Even if it was not the part of the business they wanted to build, Focus #2 was still a large part of their total business, and compared with Focus #1 a far better bet.

But the choice had been made, and as expected the search statistics did not change much to begin with, which led the deputy CEO among others to start questioning how effective the chosen strategy was, and we were given the chance to come back to the question of where the effort should be focused. A decision was taken to change course towards Focus #2, at which point the results began to show, both in visitor statistics and in the business-driving conversions on the website.

The upshot is that to get your search engine optimization right and reach the best results, you have to base your decisions on data and not on assumptions.

Skilled writers

It should be mentioned briefly that another factor which decides your SEO strategy is hiring good writers. There is a large difference between writing text for online and writing for print, and a whole article could be written on that subject alone. Here is the short version.

Your writer needs both a basic understanding of SEO and deep knowledge of the subject at hand. These two are often hard to find in one and the same writer, which is why it is not unusual for good writers who can write for strong SEO to interview the subject expert who knows the topic and then ghostwrite articles in the expert's name.

This is a good way both to keep the total cost per article down (total production time and cost, quality, readability and the expert's time spent) and a good way to explore your own organization's need for different kinds of specialists before you hire staff.

And with that small aside out of the way, back to search engine optimization.

On-page optimization

On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO, makes sure that the search engines understand what your page is about and can therefore match it against relevant searches.

A list of the factors normally counted as on-page SEO:

Unique keywords
URL
Title tags
Meta description
Main heading (H1)
Intro paragraph
Subheadings (H2/H3)
Body text
Formatting
Adding multimedia
Internal linking
External linking
Page speed
Sharing on social media

Unique keywords

One of the most important aspects of SEO is that you as a company "speak the same language" as the people you want to be found by. That can look obvious, but it is in fact not unusual for a company to make the mistake of focusing on the words it wants to work with itself, and so end up in the wrong place and miss relevant visitors.

There are different types of keywords, given below in English because a Swedish translation simply made them less clear:

Short-tail keywords

1 to 3 words with higher search volume, higher competition and relatively imprecise
Example: Raincoat

Long-tail keywords

3 or more words with lower search volume, lower competition but more precise
Example: Raincoat for a small dog

Short-term fresh keywords

Often event-related, with a larger but often short-lived effect
Example: Avengers: Endgame

Long-term evergreen keywords

Words with relevance over time, though often with lower effect
Example: Search engine optimization

Product defining keywords

Words that describe a specific product property, high purchase intent
Example: instead of wound tape, "elastic suture tape"

Customer defining keywords

Words that describe the persona you are aiming at
Example: Elastic suture tape for emergency nurses

Geo-targeting keywords

Words aimed at a particular city, for instance
Example: Avengers: Endgame Gothenburg

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords

Words closely related to a word you have chosen, often appearing as suggestions when you start typing in Google's search field
Example: Lemon can give lemon tea, organic lemon and so on

Intent targeting keywords

Informational: words focused on answering questions
Example: What is elastic suture tape
Commercial: words often related to service or product information
Example: Suture tape specifications
Transactional: words focused on some form of action
Example: Donate money childhood cancer foundation

The list above, together with a detailed persona description, is the basis for finding the subjects and the language that marry your offer to the relevant searches carried out every day.

From this you create a list of around 10 to 15 keywords, which in turn forms the basis for a deep keyword analysis. Read more about this in my article "Mistakes to avoid when you create a digital strategy" in PI 1/2019.

When an article is then to be written, decide which keyword is in focus together with two or three supporting keywords. One example could be "elastic suture tape" as the main focus keyword, with "wound tape small wounds" and "taping wound edges together" as supporting keywords.

The trick in this part of an SEO strategy is finding the keywords that, in unique combinations, have high potential, "speak the same language" as your persona and, woven into the text, give a positive reading and user experience.

Title tags

Maximum length: 55 to 64 characters (length is what decides, that is, the pixel width of the characters).
Add at least one keyword, and do not repeat the same keyword twice.
Feel free to use informal modifiers such as Top, Best, Find, Deadline.
Use the pipe sign "|", brackets and parentheses as separators.

An example: Best diet for you with colon cancer | Vegetarian (2019)

URL

There are a few rules of thumb for a URL, and the most important of them are these:

A URL should be unique to the page, which means it is static for as long as a change is hard-coded into the page's HTML. The other option, a dynamically generated URL, is a URL created specifically for one unique visit and based, for instance, on a search in an underlying database, and this type of dynamic URL can increase the risk of duplicate content in Google's indexing, which is bad for good SEO.
A URL should be short and contain the page's main keyword. Together with the page's title tag, headings and content, the URL is one of the most important factors for Google when it comes to interpreting what the page is about.
The URL should be of the https:// type and not http://, which means the visitor's connection to the site is protected by a security certificate.
Use hyphens to separate words.

An example: https://domainname.se/vegetarian/diet-colon-cancer-2019

Meta description

A meta description is the text that briefly describes each result in Google's SERP, for instance.

Maximum length: 164 characters
Add at least one keyword, and do not repeat the same keyword twice.

An example: The 2019 update. 10 examples of vegetarian food that have given considerably better quality of life with colon cancer. Read more about the best diet for you with colon cancer.

Main heading (H1)

The main heading should be an H1 in the HTML code and contain at least one of the keywords.

Intro paragraph

The page should open with a short intro of at most 45 to 50 words summarizing what the page contains, so the reader gets a quick understanding of the value waiting for them. The purpose is mainly to catch the visitor's interest so that they stay and read on.

Subheadings (H2/H3)

The subheadings should be an H2 or H3 in the HTML code and contain at least one of the keywords.

Body text

The chosen focus keyword should appear somewhere among the article's first 100 words. After that, work with supporting keywords from your list along with synonyms and words or phrases related to the keywords you chose for the article.

Formatting

Text with poor formatting makes reading harder for the visitor, which is particularly relevant online. Focus on readability and the visitor experience, and bear in mind that many visitors, around 75 percent, do not read the content on your site word for word (so-called speed-readers).

Choice of font and font size
Contrast between background and text
Limit characters per line to 50 to 60
Short paragraphs, 1 to at most 5 lines per paragraph
Get straight to the point, following The Inverted Pyramid (value first rather than last)
Create breaks in the text with bullet lists, quotes, images and so on
Use bold text for variation and to highlight important information

Adding multimedia

As mentioned above, a break in the text with an image can be positive for the reading experience. But films and infographics can also reduce bounce rate, that is, the visitor leaving the page too quickly, something Google measures closely.

As for images, they should have a descriptive alt text that contains the chosen keyword. As for films, aim to fill your website with a lot of film, both shorter and longer; many global thought leaders in digital marketing recommend that at least 50 percent of your content production should be film today.

Internal links

Today Google rewards something called topic clusters, which means that a website's internal link structure is focused on individual subjects. Add strong internal links to important pages you want to give an extra SEO boost, and use keywords to describe the link. A tool such as aHrefs can be used to identify which links on your site are strong. Read more about SEO, topic clusters and internal linking under Internal linking below.

External links

Outgoing links to pages with related content help Google understand what your page is about. Be clear in your choice of words so the visitor understands where they will end up when they click, and include one of the page's main keywords. Add one or two outgoing links.

Page speed

Optimize the page's content, for instance the file size of images, to reduce the time it takes to load the page. Slow pages are punished with worse positions in the search results. If you are unsure how quickly your page loads and want to know what measures you can take to speed it up, you can test it using Google's tool Page Speed Insights.

Sharing on social media

Make it easy for the visitor to share the content on social media. More shares on social media signal that the content is valuable and increase the chance of getting so-called backlinks, that is, links from external sources to your website. More information about backlinks and what that type of link means for your search engine optimization is coming in the next issue.

Content consolidation

Companies that have worked at publishing articles over a longer period can see in their analytics tool which articles perform best and which perform worst. By worst is meant no visitors or few, and no links or few from external sources.

One company analyzed 1,000,000 blog posts to find out whether the length of the content has any bearing, and found that it does. Longer articles performed better in the search results than shorter ones, and above all they found that articles of at least 1,890 words performed best.2 That is one of the reasons why you as a company should focus your search engine optimization on a few, longer articles according to the topic cluster model described under the next heading.

A quick way to reach a substantial mass in each article is to look at whether the worst-performing articles on your site can be reused. If they are not generating value for your business they are only gathering digital dust, and they can usefully be rewritten a little and worked into a larger whole.

SEO and internal linking

The purpose of a good and considered link structure on your own site is partly to give the visitor a good user experience and good opportunities to find more interesting related content on your website, and partly to show Google which pages are more important than others.

What matters today is to separate subjects as far as you can, and even to clear up your current link structure on the site, in order to arrive at what are called topic clusters. In issue 4/2018 of Pharma Industry I touched on topic clusters if you want to read more.

In short, topic clusters are about creating clusters around a so-called pillar page, that is, a page containing a general, all-encompassing, long and well-written article about one subject, one topic. Schematically, this pillar page is surrounded by a number of cluster pages containing more in-depth articles. These cluster pages link to the pillar page and thereby signal to the search engines that the pillar page is an authoritative page on the subject, something that over time helps that page rise in the search engines' results.

If you follow this strategy for internal linking over time, you eventually create topic clusters.

First place is always the goal

All search engine optimization aims at reaching first place in the search results, whether that is at Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex or Naver, and getting there is not easy. Google looks at more than 200 factors3 and in this article we have touched on some of the most basic ones.

Something that has not been covered is how, for instance, Google's SERP has changed over time and which results are listed. This article has been about the organic result list, since that is still the one which in the great majority of cases captures most of the clicks.

But today things like featured snippets, location-dependent lists (local listings) and ad slots take up an ever larger share of what we see after a search. Especially on a smartphone, which we search from more and more, and there are of course strategies for how you win those slots.

Not everything fits into one article and some of it will not fit at all. But in the next article we put the focus on what is called off-page SEO, which is the part of the world of search engine optimization that happens beyond your own website. More about that in the next issue.

But before we round off entirely.

This article has been written with a certain amount of search engine optimization in mind, and before you read on, think about what I have done. Did you notice it while reading, or can you see it if you look back over the text?

The answer follows at the end of this article.

Until we meet online or in the next issue of Pharma Industry.

Fredrik Holmboe

Head of Inbound & Content

Robert Nyberg

International SEO specialist

The answer

The article used words such as search engine optimization (14 times, H1 once, H2 once), SEO (17 times, H2 twice), keyword and keywords (27 times), digital marketing twice, SEO strategy 3 times, and on top of that a range of variants such as search engines, modern SEO, on-page SEO, SEO boost and combinations such as search engine optimization SEO.

The keywords listed here have a total monthly search volume (in Sweden, with Swedish selected as the language) of a full 11,800 searches, with a competition factor of 27 out of 100, which is low.

The article runs to just over 3,300 words, which is above the 1,890 words that have been shown to be an optimal level for successful SEO.

As part of a developed SEO strategy and a continuous flow of articles following the topic cluster model, this article would carry weight. Provided it gave you as a reader value, which I of course hope it did. Do get back to me.

References

https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-analytics/comparison-of-google-clickthrough-rates-by-position/
https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking
https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se, and Part 2 is here. Keyword work, topic clusters and a steady flow of articles that hold together are what the Content Engine Sprint is built around.