Corporate Blogging for Pharmaceutical Companies

Pharmaceutical companies have a marketing problem if they want to develop a corporate blog. A pharmaceutical company cannot quickly develop new content for a blog; as the company will have many regulatory restrictions that require internal legal, and medical oversight to ensure compliance. Therefore the pace of content development for a pharmaceutical company will be slow.

The value to developing a corporate blog comes in part from two areas, (1) learning from your customers and (2) the search engine optimization benefits from a blog. The SEO benefits are in part derived from the quantity of content and the cultural acceptability to have many pages of content on a daily or hourly basis on a blog. Search engines like new content, especially content that comprises of short paragraphs with many rich and relevant keywords.

If a pharmaceutical company cannot develop content quickly they cannot really write a blog about a drug or disease easily. To develop a corporate blog for a pharmaceutical company either the company will complete a lot of content development several months in advance of posting for daily content postings (which may lead to stale content), or you would have to look for another solution.

I would suggest the solution lies in the ability of a corporate blog to teach a company more about their customers needs and wants. Patients who are sick, research the web and communicate with fellow suffers, often patients will build their own web sites on a particular topic. Why not provide free blogs to patients.

Patients would use their blog to describe their symptoms, describe solutions and communicate via their online community. They would be using their blog to learn about their disease, and in the process might educate an online community about a company’s solutions for a disease.

Critically however a difficulty lies in linking to the corporate sites, and making sure there is disengagement between the pharmaceutical company and the patient’s blog. Solve that problem and pharmaceutical companies would have many points of contact and links from content rich websites about their industry and drug solutions. This can be a PR and SEO boon, but also might be a PR disaster. If there are problems with the drug or even a non-justified defamation campaign you might have just given your detractors the tools to ruin your reputation.

However, as I have described quite a few times before on this website, part of the marketing and PR dynamic with your audience is to communicate with them on an ongoing basis. If you know what they are saying and have connections with them your company will be able to mitigate the effects of PR damage by acting quickly and honestly.