Greg Rice, in his Future Pharma Marketing Blog has a great entry about why its important for Canadian Pharma marketers to not rely on a US .com site, but to deploy a Canadian product site or micro-site. The primary reason is to enable the marketer to create an integrated, engaging campaign. You simply can’t place a reference to a US .com site on your Canadian ads, or link through to it from your banners. And while on the surface, it seems like the assumption “they’ll just go to the .com if they want more information” is a reasonable one, when you look at the user experience of that model, you see a series of breakdowns of what could be a very positive brand experience.
Lets say a physician sees an ad in a Canadian medical journal and is intrigued and she wants more information. Great! Must have been a good ad. But wait! There’s no URL. Breakdown #1. She could Google the brand name and find the US .com site, but as a marketer, you sure aren’t making it easy.
Lets assume this doc actually does google your brand and gets to the .com. OK, its easy enough to find, but the branding in the US is often different. Suddenly the ad she saw and the message she received and compelled her to look for more information is no longer the key message on the site. Suddenly she is being provided a whole new message, one that simply does not match the one that compelled her to go the web. This is breakdown #2. And the chances that the user will simply click away are very high.
Ususally US site are very robust, so lets assume our Canadian doctor continues to view the site. She decides to check out the Health Care Professional Resources – often a helpful and value-rich area of a site. Here comes breakdown #3. All online resources are US sites. Not only that, but all othe nline patient support sites only allow US residents as well. Not very supportive to her patients, are they?
At the end of the day, the message that Canadian physicians receive is that “we really don’t care” about you or your patients. To me, that’s the biggest and most damaging breakdown of all: to leave a customer with the sense that they are simply not important. Not worth the trouble.
There’s no wonder that consumer brands don’t rely on global sites for all of their local online marketing efforts. Its not just a language issue – there are differences in local markets that need to be addressed, and local sites enable direct engagement with that target audience.
The good news is that a local site can sometimes use US digital assets to make the construction of a Canadian micro-site more efficient and cost effective. That MOA video that cost an arm and a leg can be repurposed for minimal cost. You can also ask your US colleagues to place a link on their site that states “Canadian Healthcare Professionals Click Here”. But chances are, they will get to your site first, because you’ve got the URL and a call to action in your ad, banners, and google ads all helping your target find your site.
Now isn’t that a great way to tell your customers that you really do care?
