Article: The Mandate For Designing Around The Customer Experience - August 2019
By Forrest King, Founding Partner, JUICE Pharma
How the customer’s experience should drive website creation
Designing around the customer experience is something that is quickly driving yet another seismic shift in creating pharma promotional work across multiple channels. Here is a quick peek behind the curtain that illustrates how the customer’s experience should drive the creation of a brand.com website. Let’s take a look at how the art of SEO is upending the way we conceptualize, build and deploy websites.
Your customers, HCPs and HCCs, expect that the websites served up by search engines should specifically answer the query they input into the search field. If they aren’t satisfied with the answer you provide, within seconds, they move on. You cannot expect they will tour your site in search of the information they queried. The answer they seek needs to be there as soon as they arrive on site. They need to know whether they’ve hit the jackpot or need to place a new bet.
All this means is that the creation of pharma websites is much harder than ever before. Today, when we create medical, brand or disease content for a website, we need to create it in a way that specifically answers the customers’ questions that lead them to your site.
Specifically answer questions that lead customers to your site
Here is a grossly simplified example. Image a person searches for “What is PBA?” When they click through to your website (assuming you rank near or at the top), they would hit the jackpot if your H1 copy reads, “PBA is a condition of spontaneous uncontrollable crying or laughing. PBA stands for Pseudobulbar Affect Syndrome.” Easy enough, right?
Not so fast. Remember the other players involved. There are the other stakeholders who have influence and objectives that need to be addressed as well. Like who? Well, the marketers may want a more strategic or differentiating lead-in, the medical director informs you that the content is incomplete or needs to be in a different order, the legal representative reminds everyone that you can only reference the symptoms of the disease that align with the endpoints in the label, and the indication needs to precede the H1-tagged content.
The end result can easily turn out to be a completely unsatisfactory experience for the customer who was looking for a simple, unconvoluted answer. What they were seeking is now buried somewhere within the content, if it remained there at all. The good news is that we are all awakening to the new world of customer-experience-driven content that links directly to search behaviors.
The challenge we all face is essentially creative
It is a complex problem that needs creative, problem-solving skills—promote your brand advantage and drive preference while anticipating the needs of your customers. Address their needs, gain trust, then share your story. The consequences of not providing this seamless customer experience are costly. What will you do when you are asked why your website site isn’t performing well in search, or why the bounce rates are so high? After reading this post, you will be in a position to say, “we must not be providing our customers with a good customer experience.”
To close out...
As complicated human interactions with technology, natural language processing and advancing search algorithms are all coming together to improve the human-tech interaction, we will need to accept the challenge of putting the customer experience at the center of the process, which applies threefold to all non-personal promotion.
You can find Forrest King on LinkedIN.