Every day, life science marketing and agency teams expend significant resources to identify and target high-value, brand-eligible healthcare providers (HCPs) through effective digital media strategies. And in today’s highly competitive environment, the race to create, target, and deliver winning pharmaceutical messaging to an HCP audience with very limited bandwidth for engagement is no easy task.
Within the modern digital ecosystem, advertisers must combine growth marketing tactics with an overall omnichannel strategy that leverages real-world data (RWD). And in doing that they need to strategically and efficiently allocate marketing resources. Ultimately, it all starts with data.
For those brands looking to implement data-driven strategies into their healthcare marketing campaigns, though, it’s important to understand that this aim comes with a number of obstacles.
The Obstacles to Successful Implementation
For marketing and agency teams, data-driven thinking must start at the planning stage. And yet, for a long time the cost of asking a question about the healthcare space has been way too high. Meanwhile, the answer takes far too long to arrive. Operating according to the traditional consultancy model, pharma brands pay high costs to farm a particular question out to analysts who then take three to nine weeks to deliver an answer. The standard consulting model,also, hinders campaign flexibility when tweaking queries or asking follow-up questions – both of which can entail further delays. Things are further complicated when brand teams don’t have the most up-to-date patient and practice data.
At the same time, healthcare claims coding is extremely complex. Depending on where care occurs, data can be captured in one of a dozen different medical vocabularies. It’s also not neatly packaged, even a single facility may use different claims systems for different insurers. PurpleLab™ creates its warehouse from over from a dozen sources, all of which must be fit to a uniform model to make sense of them. Marketing and agency teams need highly experienced people who can interpret these claims and sync these sources through a single language.
The Data-Driven Approach with HealthNexus
Ultimately, data-driven planning is essential from the get-go and a campaign is an initial hypothesis about the best way a market is going to react. To optimize its data-driven approach, an organization must be ready and able to tweak the initial hypothesis based on further data collected throughout the course of the campaign.
The right method calls for, precision data-driven strategies starting in the planning stage which allows teams to test up to a dozen different theories for how engagement with a particular medication, with a particular indication, and in a particular category is going to go.
Our work with life sciences companies offers countless instructive examples of how PurpleLab corrects for these issues. Recently, a marketing team formed a hypothesis that led them to specifically target specialists diagnosing a particular condition within a specialty area. While they were convinced their efforts must be concentrated on those specialists, HealthNexus offered insights that allowed us to easily go back and interrogate that hypothesis. In the end, patients were ultimately returning to their general practitioners to receive the prescription, meaning these marketers had to connect with those providers if they were to drive adoption. This shift brought much greater success.
Other examples could include the many marketing teams and agencies who come to PurpleLab looking to inform their consumer targeting strategy. Whether these companies are planning for a new drug launch or have a mature campaign that needs innovation, the first step for PurpleLab is to verify that the targeting hypothesis a client has brought them is correct. The HealthNexus platform stands out for the ability to easily query and size patient populations using a combination of prescribing, diagnosing and procedural inputs. What’s more is that PurpleLab’s methodology team makes sure that changes in clinical coding are regularly updated and reflected in our audiences, meaning that live campaigns have fresh and up-to-date audiences.
Today, life science marketing and agency teams need to transform real-world insights into strategic engagement opportunities quickly and efficiently. From start to finish, PurpleLab offers fast, flexible, simple and cost-effective means for planning and executing on the data-driven strategy your brand team needs to raise engagement rates with high-value HCPs.
Get in touch with the PurpleLab team today to learn more.