Healthcare Trends
A successful HCP portal in five steps
For pharmaceutical companies, specialist portals for healthcare professionals are a key foundation for success. This means it is important to design portals in a way that attracts lots of visitors while also motivating users to register. What aspects need thinking about for this? What are the obstacles to clear? Christiane Lafrentz, General Manager of WEFRA LIFE SOLUTIONS, and Can Yildiz, Management Board member and Head of Digital at WEFRA LIFE MEDIA, know the factors that boost visits and registrations in equal measure.
Digitalisation has left a strong mark on specialised pharmaceutical communication. These days, healthcare professionals (HCPs) are also frequently, or even most of the time, getting their information about medications, treatment plans, clinical studies and case studies online. Most pharmaceutical companies run specialist portals to present their approaches and products to this audience, though they are often not a smashing success. In these cases, the companies wind up asking themselves two questions: why are the visitor counts so low? And why are the visits not turning into registrations?
Christiane Lafrentz, General Manager of WEFRA LIFE SOLUTIONS, knows the answers: ‘Many HCPs shy away from registration. Frequently, the reason is that they do not want to change their habits and just want to keep visiting the websites they have visited in the past. It often also comes with an impression that they will not be able to deal with the sheer mass of digital content otherwise, or that they will avoid extra effort since every new registration also means another password, for example. On top of that, concerns about the security of personal data have a strong influence. Ultimately, it is also about weighing up the concrete benefits that registration has for a user and about what content makes the website different from others. This is not always plain to see.’
The hurdles can be used to identify effective problem-solving approaches, explains Can Yildiz, Head of Digital at WEFRA LIFE MEDIA. ‘We have developed a method that can make a specialist portal an effective instrument for exchange with the target audience. It involves five steps: deciding about the investment, ensuring an outstanding user experience, providing an attractive offering, building confidence and developing a media strategy.’
Investing time, money and effort in the portal pays off
Both experts emphasise that a specialist portal needs to be viewed and treated as a product of the pharmaceutical customer, so there needs to be a decision about making the investment, too. ‘This also involves an aim of defining business KPIs for the portals and monitoring their achievement over time,’ Lafrentz explains, ‘You need to budget for not only the one-time set-up of the specialist portal, but also its care and maintenance and, if necessary, optimisation. In this context, we at WEFRA LIFE can provide a robust cost estimate for our clients’ goals.’
When it comes to the portal’s design, there should be a clear focus on reflecting the state of the art for design. ‘Visually, specialist portals have to compete with known platforms like Netflix, Zalando, Amazon, Apple or Instagram, and users orient themselves based on these platforms,’ Yildiz observes, ‘That is why it is important to at least meet these expectations and, ideally, even exceed them.’ The key motto should be, ‘design does matter’. The digital expert knows what is important for design. ‘It is crucial to use insights about content as well as usage-specific user preferences as a basis. What is the preferred type of content? What are the most discussed topics at the moment? How does the target audience like navigating the page, and what functions are the most important ones for this audience? These insights are needed in order to develop the optimal user experience design.’
To open visitors up to registration, Lafrentz recommends preceding it with a newsletter subscription and, moreover, keeping the volume of data asked for during registration as limited as possible. ‘Other data can be collected later through a range of other activities.’
Another challenge with specialist portals is raising visibility through Google algorithms, because only the content visible before logging in is relevant for them. It might be advisable to design search-engine-optimised pages featuring teasers compliant with healthcare advertising laws, as this can increase visitor numbers without any further media invest. A thorough keyword analysis for the desired audience is critical for this.
Relevant content and attractive offering maintain interest
Yet the task is not only to make visitors aware of the page, but also to maintain their interest over the long term. ‘The main goal of a specialist portal is vibrant usage and user participation,’ Lafrentz says. If pharmaceutical companies want to check how active the engagement on their portals is, the marketing professional recommends a simple test: ‘Calculate the average visit duration and the frequency of recurring visits to your website.’ Yet what can be done if this calculation does not deliver a satisfying result? Lafrentz and Yildiz know what to do: fresh, stimulating content and a wide range of offerings for users – and those users will then stay loyal to the portal. ‘Visitors need to get the impression that membership will give them significant benefits, and that is the key,’ Yildiz emphasises. The marketing expert sees a wealth of options for providing an attractive offering: ‘The content most desired among HCPs is usually CME-certified, that is, professional development and learning modules.’ On top of that, he says exclusive access to new studies and publications as well as early-bird registration options for webinars, conferences and workshops can be appealing for users. Yildiz adds that discounted event tickets can be an idea as well, if legally possible. Invitations to collaborate can be an incentive, too. ‘For example, encourage the doctor community to participate in joint research projects based on the data they provide,’ Lafrentz suggests, ‘This can also improve the participants’ academic profile at the same time.’Can Yildiz has also had good experience presenting interactive content: ‘Information about academic research, such as clinical studies, are often offered in PDF or PowerPoint files of many pages. The intention with them is to let the users themselves choose the content relevant to them. Interactive displays are smarter, more modern and more appealing to users and can be designed with drag-and-drop functionality or 3D models, for example.’ Personalised content is also always stimulating for users, Christiane Lafrentz adds, ‘They might, for example, be selected articles, videos or studies for the HCP’s respective specialisation.’
Data security: creating trust
Data protection is a sensitive topic for many users and can be an obstacle – occasionally even the main obstacle – to registering on a specialist portal. ‘Companies need to look at this from the user’s perspective and assess honestly how trustworthy they seem when it comes to data security,’ Yildiz advises, ‘It starts by asking if the company collects and stores the portal’s data itself or uses a third-party provider for the registration and login.’ Having sovereignty over the data is a key marker of quality, as the IT expert explains. Only when a business operates independently of other actors and, additionally, with full transparency and credibility can it convey a secure feeling to users when they provide personal information, encouraging their registration. Yildiz has a recommendation: ‘It might be advisable here to present a data protection notice in a clear and compact form and answer the following questions in particular: for what purpose is data collected? Where and for how long is it stored? How can users request erasure?Attention-grabbing campaigns for the portal
In view of the heavy competition made up of not only other specialist portals, but also social media and Netflix, it is important to ensure the specialist portal’s continuous visibility. ‘It must be seen as a safe, reliable source of information and as a place of exchange,’ Christiane Lafrentz explains. Can Yildiz highlights how a continuous media campaign is advisable, even on a limited budget. ‘The portal’s URL at a minimum should always be integrated into the materials and external communications. A QR code is a low-cost and also low-effort option for promotion and it should be integrated into print products in particular.’
Other recommendations from the experts: shifting attention to SEO and SEA and integrating data-driven advertising. ‘The Healthy Programmatic media buying service created by WEFRA LIFE ensures the placement of programmatic display advertising in front of and behind the locked area of our exclusive publisher network, an area which complies with healthcare advertising laws. It lets businesses address healthcare professionals with corresponding content post-login, with little to no ad waste.’
The experts’ analysis of the aspects that are critical when developing and maintaining a successful specialist portal are based above all on years of experience and expertise in this field, which is also what distinguishes WEFRA LIFE SOLUTIONS as a communications agency. ‘Whether for a modification of an existing specialist portal, or for the planning and design of a new one, WEFRA LIFE SOLUTIONS offers extensive services from web and user experience design to brand guidelines as well as SEO optimisation and medical writing,’ Christiane Lafrentz explains, ‘We look forward to collaborating with existing clients and new ones!’
Those wishing to know more about the specialist portal success strategy developed by WEFRA LIFE SOLUTIONS can watch the detailed masterclass on it by clicking on this link.