Pharma marketers need proper tools—to integrate planning, activation, measurement, and optimization as a total package. With this approach, they can spend less time on the complex “plumbing” required to run data-driven programmatic campaigns and instead place their focus where it belongs: delivering outcomes and results.
Ideally, marketers should be in a position to evaluate their campaigns and outcomes to inform future strategies holistically. However, they typically have relationships with multiple media partners, such as one agency that handles campaigns for healthcare providers and another that focuses on educating patients about specific treatments and conditions.
Not only does dealing with multiple stakeholders prevent a seamless integration between planning, activation, and measurement, but it can also lead to data loss and latency in measurement. The inevitable result is inefficiencies in campaign optimization.
Challenges in Measurement
Cross-channel attribution partners typically gather audience results and other metrics through monthly or quarterly reports, which offer findings such as important vendor insights. But these reports are highly limited in scope and aren’t actionable. By the time the data is analyzed, marketing campaigns are already mid-flight.
What’s more, most agencies and demand-side platforms (DSPs) do not use the right metrics to optimize pharma campaigns. The industry prioritizes front-end metrics such as click-through rates and viewability. Those KPIs don’t necessarily speak to business outcomes such as script lift. To date, that data has not been available in real time and to receive that data has traditionally been very manual and time-consuming.
Metrics and Measurement
With a more robust ad-tech solution, marketers have access to a range of metrics that they can use to optimize campaigns in real time, looking at variables such as Audience Quality (AQ), clinical visits, TRx (total prescriptions), NRx (new prescriptions), and NBRx (new-to-brand prescriptions). The right solution also enables marketers to leverage this data to coordinate media buys that target relevant patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs), increasing the likelihood that both see the same messaging and as a result, have the same information prior to a visit. In beta tests, DeepIntent confirmed that when HCP and patient media is coordinated, pharma companies can see up to 35% higher script lift. This positive outcome is ultimately what most interests pharma companies, not clicks and website visits.
The most effective measurement method to evaluate the outcome of a campaign involves looking at prescription data in real time and algorithmically optimizing a campaign around it. What may have worked in the past is no longer efficient, as marketers now have access to the data that informs their marketing strategies across the board. These algorithms and the “always-on” approach they facilitate are necessary to analyze, evaluate, and optimize a real-time campaign.
Prioritizing Patient Outcomes
Pharma marketers now have variables like cost by creative at their disposal. With the right partners, marketers can determine which creative drives consumers to be interested in a drug, ask their doctor about it, and get the prescription filled. And with the right solution, marketers can gain a much greater understanding of who the patient is, based on data available about consumers who pick up a prescription and optimize live campaigns accordingly. It is also possible to understand more about the patient in a non-medical context through household income, occupation, life stage, language preference, and ethnicity—extending beyond age and gender, limited datasets marketers had to rely on in years past.
The data available today is changing the business of pharmaceutical marketing—and the previous lag in data that bedeviled marketers is fast becoming a thing of the past. Modern marketers have the tools to take action and optimize their campaigns toward the metrics that truly matter.
