Marketing and Sales Education Center

Expiring patents for best-selling cardiovascular drugs, including Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi's anti-clotting drug Plavix and Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering treatment Lipitor, have left drug makers scrambling for next-generation replacements.  The patent losses could reduce sales of cardiovascular drugs to $60 billion by 2017 from $83 billion in 2011, according to analysts' forecasts.  In Reuter's article "Big bets aim to jolt heart drug sales back to life", it was reported that "big pharma" hopes a new generation of drugs can replace the cardiovascular drugs that are coming off patent.  Recent product launches have achieved less than expected results and new heart medicines still in clinical testing represent some of the biggest gambles ever made by these industry leading companies.

Mark Fidelman wrote an op/ed piece on Forbes.com titled Salesforce.com's New Social Strategy is Brilliant, Here's Why that I thought was very relevant to how sales professionals will develop new business leads and interact with their customers.  It is a given that social media has transformed how we interact with each other - not just communicate.  It is now about open and free flowing information exchange.  Those companies that do not adapt to open exchanges of information with their prospects and customers face being left behind by their competition.

Recently, I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.  For those of you who have been living in a cave over the last 30 years, Steve Jobs is the visionary co-founder and eventual CEO of Apple.  He was also CEO of Pixar, a Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) production company. Both of these companies changed the way we viewed computers, technology and computer generated movies.  Both Apple and Pixar created a superior user experience and they weren't afraid to push the envelope on new technology; they developed products that consumers didn't even know they wanted or needed.

If you want to increase web traffic for your company's website, search engine optimization practices are still an integral tool to achieve this.  Although the latest Google algorithm changes suggest that you design your website for visitors and not for the sake of search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still important to pursue.  It is worthwhile to spend some time on optimizing your website in an effort to fine tune it to ensure you are promoting the content on your website so that it attracts the right kind of visitors.

Establishing your initial keyword strategy is the first step towards leveraging your online marketing efforts.  If you want to ensure your content is seen by as many eyes as possible, you must effectively generate as many relevant keywords to your business' content as possible.  If you don't have the right keywords, nobody will see the great content you have labored over for so many hours to create.

Online marketing is very different today than what it was even five years ago.  Today, the cutting edge of online marketing is now called inbound marketing.  In the beginning, if you set up a website with nice graphics and a few simple pages, that was online marketing.  In a traditional sense, it was a virtual store front.  Some innovative websites took it a step further and even let you buy things right on their website - through a shopping cart!  Back then, you hoped people walked by ('surfed'), looked in your store window (landed on your site), saw something that interested them in the window (home page) and walked in (viewed ALL of your pages).  Does anybody remember at the very beginning of browser technology with Netscape?  Netscape changed everything about how we gather and share information.  IBM came out with OS/2 Warp and promoted it with this funny video.  Okay, it was funny at the time but it was SO hot!

E-commerce was born.  That was so awesome and it was fun while it lasted until the tech boom went bust!  Does anybody remember the tech crash of 2000?  My wallet still has nightmares about it.

Welcome to the launch of Evenstar Marketing’s Blog and to our first ever blog post!