Show of hands: Who has never worn a health tracker? The step counters, heart rate monitors, sleep trackers, continuous glucose monitors, and other devices measuring our physical performance and wellbeing prove one important thing we were supposed to learn at management school: What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed. What’s true in our daily lives is true in pharma marketing, as well.
While we all know things that truly matter are impossible to quantify, we also know measurement is a key component of marketing. Anything that doesn’t convey demonstrable benefits in the form of meeting key performance indicators (KPI) tends to get cut sooner rather than later. Departments need to prove their worth to executive management.
Marketers are keenly aware of this: There is not much consensus over what type of marketing delivers the most value. To try and answer this question, five considerations are important:
• Balancing Different Types of KPIs
One well-known KPI is return on investment (ROI). Patient marketers frequently tell us ROI is important in establishing value of patient-based programming. It’s the most certain way to secure the continued funding of those programs. However, ROI is easier to demonstrate the more directly your tactic is tied to sales. Patients can’t make a snap decision to get on product, as they navigate numerous layers of the healthcare system to even begin to get access (prescription, insurance approvals, financial assistance, etc.). They often require multiple touchpoints before the effort delivers an ROI, which additionally may be challenging to attribute to the patient marketing initiative. However, does this mean patient marketing is unnecessary or without value?
In patient pharmaceutical marketing, we are often looking to meet the patient at certain inflection points throughout their journey to drive to an optimal health outcome and, in most cases, prescription fulfillment. Success along those inflection points is typically defined as “engagement.” That’s different from just ROI. Moving and meeting a patient along their journey holds value, which, over time, might be converted to ROI. For example, if you run a campaign over 24 months and measure ROI every month: Are you going to pull the plug if, in the first month, you have a negative ROI? Hopefully not! ROI is not the appropriate KPI for performance measurement in the short run. While your campaign is running its course, the KPIs you measure might include engagement, consideration, adoption (with or without script), community building, community engagement, CRM growth, or other indicators you’ll have to find a clear definition for.
• Measuring “Table Stakes”
In an ideal world, the proper order to approach tactical marketing planning is as follows:
• Set goals and objectives
• Define KPIs best suited to measure progress toward goals and objectives
• Determine tactics most likely to deliver progress on the KPIs
However, in the real world, marketers don’t usually get to run their own show. Colleagues from other departments are going to expect certain “table stakes.” “We have to have a brochure,” they’ll say. Conversely, tactics you know to be effective may be perceived as optional by everybody else.
So, when you’re mandated to pursue certain tactics, make sure you measure their performance, as well. You may not be able to strike the tactic off the list, but you can still optimize it for performance. Table stakes or not, measurement is an important way to ensure your activities do what they’re supposed to do and will continue to receive the funding and support they need.
• Going Easy on Resources
This should be obvious, but it does warrant mentioning: Quantitative measurement must go hand in hand with common sense. Any resources in time or money you expend on measurement need to be justifiable by what you’re measuring. Obviously, you shouldn’t conduct a national opinion survey on your brand just to measure the impact of a local patient outreach initiative; that’s not to say national opinion surveys are never justified. What’s reasonable and what isn’t depends on the initiative or tactic and differs for enterprises of varying scales. Patient marketers need the ability to think differently and creatively about how to measure their programs and how to show value for the brand. You have to be humble enough to acknowledge the limits of what you can and cannot measure and confident enough to make reasonable assumptions about the connection between what’s measured or what we’re trying to understand.
• The Problem of Attribution
KPIs can’t always tell us precisely if the indicator measures the effect of our initiatives or if it’s a reflection of other influences. For example, if our KPI relates to the number of prescriptions in a certain city, these numbers could well be a result of our marketing initiatives targeting that city. But they could also relate to factors independent of these initiatives, such as new specialists moving there, or even initiatives conducted by the competition.
The best KPIs, of course, measure directly the progress that is unquestionably related to the company’s efforts. In pharma marketing, this is most convincingly accomplished with live patient and caregiver engagement. The audience is right there and interested. You can ask questions and conduct a recontact study. Most likely, you’ll find out in each individual case if the initiative has prompted action or not.
• Communicating Intangibles
Measuring KPIs is essential to direct how you generate value into the future and to demonstrate why you’ve done what you did. However, sometimes you create things that are enormously valuable yet almost impossible to measure: You’ve changed lives forever—how are you going to translate that into numbers that capture the significance of this result? How will you quantify “fulfilling unmet needs?” KPIs will only get you part of the way there. In those cases, to really demonstrate the value of your efforts, you should take a qualitative approach. Produce a case study. Better yet, encourage executive management to go to a patient program. As it turns out, making live connections is not only the strongest form of marketing, it’s also the most effective way to show what numbers cannot.
Businesses optimize their performance by quantitatively measuring relevant KPIs. This has become so second nature to us that individuals are starting to do the same with their lives, hoping to find patterns and answers. But from time to time, we should look up from our spreadsheets and discover the many priceless intangibles of life and business. In the long run, those will mean the most.
