Creating an effective AdWords advertisement
Reaching physicians with complicated patients
Reaching physicians is somewhat of an art. Physicians tend to be extremely busy, and due to their lack of available time, they don’t want to waste their time by listening to some company try to sell them something that they think probably won’t help them. Physicians want to improve patient care, but they don’t want complex software or significant learning curves. To understand how to reach physicians, we must use fewer words. We must also understand what is important to them. This rule is true with any form of marketing, but it is especially true with doctors. Here’s what’s important to physicians:
- Improving patient outcomes and saving lives;
- Saving time;
- Preventing mistakes.
The background of specialty medicine
It is not uncommon, particularly within specialty medicine, for a provider to have a patient with complex multi-drug regimens that may be completely unrelated to the specialist’s area of expertise. Unfortunately, however, it is quite common for drugs with very different domains of pharmacotherapeutic effects to interact in unexpected ways. If a doctor knew in advance that the drug they intent to prescribe, for example, would cause a potentially lethal change in the level of an enzyme that is acted on by an unrelated drug that the patient was taking, then the physician would certainly choose an analogue of the drug, choose an alternative treatment option, or do something other than expose the patient to the risk imposed by the dangerous combined effect.
The vision of drug interactions
A drug interaction tool would provide exactly this service. It would allow physicians to restructure a patient’s drug regimen to ensure that desired therapeutic outcomes are achieved without serious adverse short or long term consequences. Such a tool would also save the physician considerable time that would otherwise be spent trying to investigate the issue by digging through literature and hoping to find the desired information. Such a tool would also save patients considerable money and time, prevent unneeded doctor visits, labs, and tests, and improve their overall satisfaction with their medical care. Although physicians may like to think that they don’t make mistakes, we all know that we are imperfect; therefore, a drug interaction tool would help doctors detect errors and prevent mistakes that could yield harm to patients and costly litigation.
Creating the ad – an invitation without false claims
Unfortunately, in this digital age, there are multitudes of technologies available to the provider that falsely claim to save physicians’ time, reduce medical errors and costs, and improve the quality of medical care. Very few of these technologies are able to justify their claims, and even fewer of these technologies are able to prove the legitimacy of their justifications. Like most of us, physicians really want increased intelligence. They want answers to questions that they haven’t asked yet, but they don’t want the answers until they are ready for them. They want a tool that improves their clinical decision making accuracy, but they don’t want to sacrifice countless hours of their time only to determine if they are wasting their time or not. By developing a service that is free to try and has a very simple interface, physicians won’t need to waste their time. They can try the tool, and if it helps them, then they will be happy; if it doesn’t help them, that’s fine – they will have wasted very little of their time and none of their money. We try to convey our message in advertisements like this one:
Predict metabolites’ effects.
Improve patient outcomes.
This ad is a simple invitation to come and see. When the free app is ready, we will adjust the ad accordingly. This ad reflects what the service offers: It provides predictive intelligence that improves patient outcomes. In general, from a marketing perspective, reaching our target audience requires that we use the language that our customers are most likely to use. This is precisely what we have done.
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