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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There is nothing more enlightening than hearing from a patient tell their story and their journey through diagnosis and treatment. More and more today, they are going directly online for more information. It seems to be the only place they can go to get digestible information.

But, to their surprise, ePatients quickly find that they are not alone. Most times, they realize that they only previously knew the tip of the iceberg about their condition and the people it affects. The public doesn’t always understand the condition and what the effects are on daily life…and that includes doctors and pharma companies.

Kelly Young lives her life with rheumatoid arthritis. In 2009, she became a leading voice in the RA community when she launched Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior, her blog and resource center for RA. This site has become a platform for RA community member and Kelly to share their story and their experiences.

During her talk, Kelly shared her story about 2 of the really poor experiences with doctors attempting to diagnose and treat her pain. Meet those two doctors:

“Dr. Do Little”

Kelly visited who she referes to as “Dr. Do Little”. She sat in his office and proceeded to tell her there were no cures for what she was suffering from. She might be able to treat the pain, but there was nothing he could do for her beyond that.

“Dr. Dip”

This is scary. Kelly told her story to a different doctor and talked about the pain and inflammation she had in the tip of her fingers. The doctor went on to inform Kelly that what she was suffering from was not Rhumetoid arthitis becuase it was impossible for it to affect those joints in the fingers.

Returning to her hotel room that night, Kelly stay up all night researching articles that nearly all said that RA can affect the last joint in the fingers. The doctors was blatantly wrong.

Medical knowledge doesn’t just have to come form medical institutions

Patients have more to offer than just being part of a survey. Researchers, doctors, pharma brands are not giving the patient a platform to speak about their journeys by putting them in a room and then giving them a $20 Starbucks card. Fostering patient insights provide an opportunity to improve countless facets of healthcare.

Kelly’s experience as a patient helped her develop some really intriguing perspectives on what she is hearing from brands and doctors and what we as marketers can do to be better partners in healthcare.

• To communicate with patients, begin with listening
• Put yourself in the patients shoes – or in their mother’s, sister’s, or spouse’s shoes
• Patients desire meaningful engagement and opportunities to provide input
• Patients know more about chronic conditions than those who report on them. When there are inconsistencies, patient communities probably hold the answers
• Slick ads that miss the mark anger patents and erode trust

Kelly shared a 3-step quick start guide for healthcare and pharma companies to engage with patients.

1) Read blogs and conversation from the patient leaders of a specific condition

2) Establish relationships with patients

3) Bring patients onto your research and marketing teams to determine best way to communicate