I enjoyed my appearance at the ExL Pharma Search Engine Marketing for Pharmaceutical Companies conference today in Princeton, New Jersey. We had a sudden snowstorm yesterday, so you know that the folks who were able to make it really wanted to be there. My pitch, called Remember Search Marketing is Marketing, talked about how you can use search marketing to raise brand awareness and conversions, but my favorite part of the day was listening to Eric Papczun of Performics.
Eric had excellent advice on organic search optimization, but I was most interested in the stats he showed about the pharmaceutical industry:
- 58% of Americans say that online information is their most important source for health information (Pew Research)
- 54 million Americans look for information on pharmaceuticals on the Web (Manhattan Research)
- 80% of Americans (113 million) have researched health information on the Web (Pew Research)
I haven’t worked with any pharmaceutical companies on their search marketing programs, so I was interested to see what health searchers do. Not every industry is as large as health care, so you may not have industry-specific statistics for your industry. But if you do, they can go a long way to convincing the boss that search marketing can’t be ignored.
