It’s nice to be back after a long vacation. My vacation actually ended yesterday, when I spent the day in Philadelphia at the ExL Pharma conference for search marketing. I gave the opening keynote speech, helping savvy pharmaceutical industry marketers get a better handle on the changes happening in search marketing, but I always would rather write about the great question I got from the audience and today is no exception.
Several audience members asked questions all revolving around the same problem—”How can you implement all this great search marketing advice in such a heavily-regulated industry?”
It is a problem. I heard horror stories of weeks spent getting approval to change the title of a page. Others recounted that their lawyers don’t allow common misspellings, even in the keyword metatag. Clearly, it’s not simple to operate in regulated environments.
I think there are two answers to the regulatory stranglehold. First, you need to be willing to do more work up front in order to be flexible later. So, the typical advice I give to “do it wrong quickly” doesn’t work if you are allowed to use only the one marketing message that got approved. If that message does not work, you’re sunk—you’ve managed to do it wrong slowly. Instead, you must put in the effort to get multiple marketing messages approved, even though you aren’t sure which ones will resonate. You should get different marketing modules approved so that you can swap in the ones that work and drop the ones you don’t. (Moreover, when you want to personalize your site, you might find that some of them work for one target segment and others for another.)
The second answer is one that the audience was not expecting. You need to stop thinking about marketing as something only you and your company can do. You need to let your customers say things that you can’t. Perhaps you must get regulatory approval for everything you say about your product, but your customers don’t. If you can share with your customers the factual information about your products, some of them will pass the message along for you. This always happened with word-of-mouth, but social media marketing makes it easier and faster to pass on messages than before. Think about how you can empower your customers to be your ambassadors.
I know that both of these answers go against the buttoned-down culture of most regulated industries, but that is why they could be so powerful. If your company is the first one in your industry to unlock the secret of Internet marketing, other companies will find it very hard to copy, because they would be just at the start of the cultural changes you’ve completed.
Sometimes, doing the hard thing is exactly the way to differentiate. Is your company making the hard decisions that mark it as a leader in your industry, or is it just going along with the rest of the crowd? You can’t stand out by doing what everyone else does, so ask yourself if there is something difficult you’ve been avoiding that would make your company the one to emulate.
