What's Your Digital iQ

A growing proportion of pharma brand managers are starting to implement some type of social listening today. The conversation and data from social listening is undeniably beneficial, but there’s opportunity beyond mere listening. All brand managers have access to basic listening tools; but there are limitations to data gathered in basic social listening:

• It has been commoditized
• It lacks context in the aggregate
• The “aggregate” is immense! Where to begin?
• It’s a snapshot reflection of perspective & sentiment
• Heavy non-response bias
• You can make data say whatever you want it to say

Lucky for us, there’s much richer data that we can utilize to understand and properly communicate with our consumers. For digital marketers to be successful, we must make a shift from basic social listening to ”social intelligence”. Meaningful social intelligence is observing all available data points, building socially-infused persona archetypes, and iterating (and iterating again).

Here’s how to tap into this richer social data to create a competitive advantage for your company and brands.

Defining KPIs: Knowing what data is important

One of the biggest mistakes of digital marketers is not creating well-defined KPIs. Before we can start interpreting social data, we need to create clear business objectives aligned to intelligent KPIs.

• This is far more sophisticated than impressions, clicks, retweets and mentions
• Successful KPIs provide immediate insight into the performance of any communications program
• Social intelligence feed into communication programs, so let’s isolate the data the will help the most.

“You have to know where you’re going before you know what to pack.“

Let’s look at an example of how we move from basic knowledge to creating objectives and then setting a strategy.

Sample inputs:

• Hypothetical drug X hits the market. Disease state effects children
• Great efficacy, plus one daily oral versus injection (competitive set)
• HCP primary audience; consumer secondary (pull strategy)
• Skepticism/entrenched behaviors expressed by HCPs online

Sample Objectives:

• 20% market share among scripts written for disease state with 24 months
• HCP confidence in Drug X as viable new alternative to disease state competitors
• Patient interest and demand in new Drug X versus limitations of the current “no compromises” position legacy products

Sample Strategy

• Maximize the online channel because of its reach, efficiency, and performance transparency
• Registration of non-branded DiseaseState.com to deliver rich, patient/caregiver-focused content and materials related to disease state research, clinical trials, treatment methods, etc.
• Adherence-emphasis present across patient-facing drug site
• Clinical outcomes data easily accessible to HCP audience across HCP-facing drug site.

Leveraging the Power of Facebook with Pharma Brands

Facebook offers a plethora of patient (and HCP) demographic details.

Advertisers can use Facebook Ads tool to perform a demographic search. This demographic information is open to anyone and is self-provided by users. Along the same lines, advertisers can also search for user that have specific interests through what they have self-identified in their profile or by the groups that they have “liked”.

For example, there are:

• 1,005,140 people on Facebook who live in the US who have an interest in diabetes
• 59,760 people on Facebook who live in the US, show interest in #Crohn’s Disease
• 41,340 people on Facebook who live in the US, show an interest in Skin Cancer and have self-identified themselves as advocates.

Ryan went on to share an example of hyper-targeting demographic information where we was able to target a group as specific as 20 people from the entire 900 million Facebook user base – using only self-identified information.

BUT…that’s only where the fun starts.

This type of hyper-targeting creates an opportunity for marketers to create very specific landing-pages for those 20 people. At the point when they hit that landing page, cookies can be utilized to stay in front of those same 20 people across the entire web – feeding them hyper-relevant messaging.

If you’re interested in talking more about hyper-targeting health consumers through search or social networks, we encourage you to connect with Ryan DeShazer, VP of Search & Social at GSW Worldwide.

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