COVID-19 took us to the next era—Digital Marketing
Story star from…
December 15, 2019, at 1:35 am, is the date etched in my memory. I took a three-hour flight with medical experts to Beijing, China for an academic conference. Shortly after the plane landed, the experts received a text message, “A patient has an unexplained fever, and Covid-19 nucleic acid testing came back positive!”. Without hesitation, the experts canceled the meeting and took the next available flight back to the local hospital, where the pandemic’s effects were already being felt.
Half of the experts left that academic conference. Within days, cities across China were on high alert as cases of this mysterious virus surged.
What struck me deeply was that when we went to visit medical experts in the field, all the hospitals were sealed off, all the patients were being centralized, and we risked our lives to be infected. However, we still insisted on visiting the hospital experts every day. We watched as one by one the medical staff collapsed and many of our colleagues fell one by one. In the end, all of us in China were forced not to leave our homes. What was worse, we still had to keep working. So, what should we do?
Something must be changed.
Digital marketing came. I have witnessed pharmaceutical companies begin experimenting with various digital pharma marketing strategies, from virtual doctor consultations to online drug promotions, paving the way for a new era in healthcare marketing. I witnessed its development and the post-epidemic era. We gradually turned offline academic meetings into online academic meetings, reducing people’s body contact, saving travel time, and meeting costs, and improving work efficiency. This new way of doing business wasn’t just a temporary fix — it was a glimpse into the future.
The convenience of online engagement has proven too valuable to abandon. Digital tools not only facilitate continuous education and communication between healthcare professionals but also provide more accurate tracking of outreach and effectiveness. The pandemic revealed that traditional methods, while valuable, could be supplemented and in some cases surpassed by digital solutions.
So, you must want to know who am I ?
Hello~ I’m Li, I am a sales and marketing executive who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years, in the top 2 Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies. I have witnessed the growth of the entire pharmaceutical industry and believe digital marketing will drive the next wave of innovation in the pharmaceutical sector. We are at the cusp of a transformation that will reshape how we engage with healthcare professionals, patients, and stakeholders alike. That is why I study in NYU’s Integrated Marketing program.
In the end
I will be writing every week on a different topic from the digital marketing world. Hoping who are interested in pharmaceutical digital marketing can follow me, we can discuss and develop in the pharmaceutical field.
