We’ve come a long way since pharma’s websites were ‘best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.0’ and the web designs that were prevalent way back in the mid-1990s would hurt modern eyes with their lack of sophistication.
Nonetheless, how to best respond to what 30 years ago was still the World Wide Web remains a question that has yet to be wholly answered. The industry has some pressing new challenges to face in the web space, but many companies also have yet to confront some legacy issues.
Preeminent among these are the huge variety and number of websites that most pharma companies still have. Within a single company these might be in the high hundreds, or even the low thousands, many of which may not be known about at a central level or have no clear strategic intent. Without some serious review or consolidation, this causes significant problems of efficiency, not to mention the negative end-user experiences most of our benchmarks are showing.
There are internal and external risks when people don’t know which websites are active. Simply cataloguing them is a vital first step towards reducing risk and optimising the user experiences that a company’s various web properties provide.
Driving value and meeting needs
Web strategy is not just about providing good experiences; within it pharma also needs to understand how to drive value, based upon the reality of varying country requirements and customer expectations. To drive the efficiency and global consistency of brand messages, many global pharma companies have implemented global-to-local web content models. These see central teams creating and disseminating content to affiliates where it is then adapted so that it aligns with their specific local needs and regulations.
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