with Well-Researched PR
Last August, when FamilyMeds.com entered the crowded e-pharmacy market dominated
by companies with multimillion-dollar advertising budgets, it had to carve out
a competitive image with $250,000.
The PR campaign relied on well-researched online media relations and forging
strategic online partnerships to position the Web site as a leading online store
for prescription refills, pharmaceutical information and recommendations on
non-prescription products. Family-Meds.com's PR agency, Outrider, tackled this
challenge by developing a targeted hit list of publications and news Web sites
that provided significant coverage of not only pharmaceutical and Internet news,
but also online marketing trends, Web site reviews and consumer-focused health
advice.
To land regular coverage throughout the four-month campaign, Outrider developed
media hooks that tied FamilyMeds.com to relevant news events. Reporters were
pitched on FamilyMeds.com's position on President Clinton's proposal to regulate
e-pharmacies. And when FamilyMeds.com's parent company, Arrow Corp., acquired
17 of Kaiser Permanente's NorthEast in-house pharmacies, the news was aggressively
pitched to online news sites that cover pharmaceutical mergers and acquisitions.
FamilyMeds.com also invited news organizations to compare its convenience,
site design and pharmaceutical costs to the industry's heavy hitters like PlanetRx,
Drug Emporium and Drugstore.com. When the emarketer.com news site ranked 10
e-pharmacy sites, FamilyMeds.com was ranked No. 2.
Overall, the campaign's PR efforts landed continual high-profile industry coverage
on Web sites like http://www.dmnews.com,
http://www.digitrends.net, http://www.inpharm.com
and http://www.channel-seven.com.
This coverage helped FamilyMeds.com:
- generate more than 72,000 visits as of February with more than half of these
visits (39,000) from repeat visitors; - strike online partnerships with senior organizations that involved placing
Internet stations in senior centers and co-branding Web pages within health
plan sites; and - negotiate offline loyalty programs with supermarkets that involved co-branding
loyalty cards for discounts on health and beauty aids.
Campaign Highlights
Budget: $20,000
Target: business: Internet and pharmaceutical industries; consumer: women
and seniors
Components: online media relations, competitive analysis
Key team players: Fiona Lintner, publicist; Trisha Katona, account supervisor;
Alan Dietrich, account manager (Outrider)