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August 29, 2017 0

The scope of what we call marketing seems to be growing every day. Within the professional lives of many in the business of pharmaceutical marketing, a campaign of one-size-fits-all magazine ads alone was considered sufficient to launch and sustain a multi-million-dollar brand. Then came television, then the internet, then mobile devices, and on and on – and with each, the expectations of our audiences have grown. Today customers expect an experience from brands, one that caters to their individual needs through a variety of media, especially digital and interactive media. And for all the progress in the digital space, pharma as an industry has not done a particularly good job of providing these coordinated and customized experiences. How to improve? Read on.

Mobile-friendly just isn’t good enough.

Adapting your desktop website to make it “mobile-friendly” is starting to look a bit backwards, given that more than half of web traffic is now coming from mobile devices. If we really want to engage our audiences where they want to be engaged, we need to be thinking mobile first. Every patient interaction that we seek in the digital space – ads, websites, interactive content, email, all of it – should be created with the mobile experience at top of mind. Old-fashioned responsive design works okay for vanilla text content, but any communication tool with any degree of complexity in it ought to be built for mobile, not just able to adapt to it. Agencies and marketers need to adapt to capture attention in the first 35 characters of email subject lines. They even need to think about thumb fatigue when designing pages that may be too long.

Mobile-savvy patients expect quick hits.

People don’t use mobile devices for the same reasons they use desktops. They don’t go to their smartphones to do in-depth research; they go there to find information fast. So marketers need to be tailoring their mobile experiences that way. A good mobile site should offer access to information, services and tools quickly – services and tools like health trackers, copay support apps, specialist or pharmacy locators, non-intimidating patient education portals, touch-here-and-ring-the-patient-support-center-right-now. Great masses of text or dozens of links on a page are not your friend in the mobile environment. We see a day in the near future where patients can even “FaceTime” with their doctor or nurse for live but remote care. Telemedicine, powered by mobile and a desire to reduce healthcare costs, is about to boom!

Plain old targeting isn’t enough any more either.

Data is everywhere and those that capitalize on it will win. So we need to target more deeply – to hypertarget – and think in terms of the cultural prisms through which our audiences will view our communications. To do this we must move beyond traditional segmentation and actually build whole experiences to match each segment. For example, if your brand might have an opportunity in the Hispanic population, you should be developing your communications for that population from the ground up, not just as an offshoot of the “standard” materials. In the old days marketers used to write everything in English and translate as necessary – but today’s audiences, whatever their ethnicity, are expecting more than that. So cultural adaptation versus plain translation is the key to connecting with multicultural audiences. They are expecting communications and images and services that are attuned to their cultural background, and may be actively turned off by those that aren’t.

Leverage landing pages – and please, let’s optimize them.

A handful of pharma brands are beginning to catch on to the vanity URL and landing page concept – creating landing pages focused on narrower topics within brand.com and then strategically salting ads with them, with the hope of creating a deeper connection. For example, one might embed brand.com/efficacy into a TV ad that focuses on copay information, so that the patient ends up encountering multiple reinforcing messages. The trouble is that, as frequently happens in pharma, too many brands are investing in vanity URLs, tossing them out into the marketplace, but never really following up to optimize their use. With just a little added push – the push of A/B testing multiple URLs in the same ad or multiple ads with the same URL – brands could find out which combinations generate the most click-throughs, the most interest – and the best experience for the patient. The idea is to make every dollar work as efficiently as possible. If patient experiences are to be a matter of priority for your brand, you’d best be paying attention to the outcomes of those experiences and optimizing accordingly.

Mind your language, and how much of it there is.

We love our content in pharma. Maybe it’s how invested we are in our brands, or maybe it’s the regulatory requirements and complex review process, but we as an industry find it difficult to resist loading up our patient communications with everything at once. Yes, some of that cannot be avoided due to the need for important safety information and fair balance. But even on top of those guidelines we tend to be content-verbose, trying to squeeze everything into one experience or capture everything possible in a single registration form. It takes a true digital marketer to have the confidence to keep it short, sweet, and sticky, creating an experience and journey over time that delivers the content and value to the patient in digestible pieces.

So we need to narrow the focus of our messaging. Let our customer choose what he or she is seeking and provide it, and it alone, with a pathway to more as needed. Lose the long pages with multiple messages. Offer one call to action rather than four. Keep everything simple, scannable, short, and sweet.

Integrate, integrate, integrate.

Pharma companies love to create monuments to their brands. They can’t just offer a diet tool; it has to be the company’s branded diet tool. But customers don’t think that way. Customers want tools that are applicable across the whole spectrum of their lives, and they don’t much care what brand is attached. For example, many patients with diabetes have other health issues, too, like hypertension. In our present brand monument environment, that might mean one health tracker from the diabetes company, another from the cardio company, and maybe even another from the weight loss company, all beautifully lacquered up with each brand’s name. Or, the patient could use Apple’s Health app, which can take inputs from virtually anywhere and cover all of those bases, creating a simpler experience. Which do you think the typical patient will choose?

So we need to start thinking more holistically. If we really want to improve the patient experience, we have to start building tools and services that can be tied together with other tools and services, even third-party ones, rather than just monuments that are unique and proprietary to our own brands and companies. And yes, some companies are doing this already – Novo Nordisk with Glooko, Sanofi with Google, Novartis with Verily. But we need to see more of it. If a truly integrated and productive patient experience is going to be a matter of priority for pharma brands, we are going to have to start partnering across industries and converging when possible to provide patients the ideal seamless experience.

Aaron Uydess


August 29, 2017 0

Today’s healthcare environment – with access to therapy and pricing top of mind, new “right to try” laws, possible legislative changes, and big shifts in the ways that consumers get health information – requires more innovative and thoughtful approaches on how to communicate than ever before. For many pharmaceutical companies, advocacy is a highly promising and rewarding way to connect with patients, families, and communities. Now, some of those efforts are coming under scrutiny.

Advocacy organizations exist to help the people and communities they serve, and can have some impressive reach. One great example is the fact that breast cancer mortality is down 38%, influenced by efforts of Susan G. Komen® to leverage science and education, and directly help patients. And there are numerous reasons that industry stakeholders engage with advocacy groups. Many pharmaceutical companies collaborate with advocacy organizations on non-promotional and unbranded activities to support the community in capacity building, education, and to build advocacy skills. Some have more direct brand objectives in mind, and support advocacy organizations with the goal of getting endorsements from the advocacy organization or from patient ambassadors. Some work with advocacy organizations so that they will recommend specific products to their constituents or to speak with legislators on behalf of companies or products.

Transparency is key to building trust

Trust is essential to building fruitful relationships between the community, advocacy groups, and industry. But lack of transparency can undermine these relationships and may have a negative impact on how the community perceives advocacy organizations and by association pharmaceutical companies. Because trust between them and the communities they serve is key, some advocacy groups have chosen not to accept pharmaceutical funding, so they can say that they are completely outside the influence of industry. The reality, however, is that it is extremely difficult for many advocacy organizations to provide the services and develop the reach and consistency they would like based only on their own public / private support and community fundraising. For this reason advocacy organizations are often open to mutually-beneficial partnerships with industry that ultimately help the patient communities they serve.

But the current level of transparency around funding of advocacy groups has recently been questioned. The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA Internal Medicine published articles that assessed whether advocacy organizations might have significant conflicts of interest because they accept support from pharmaceutical companies. What the investigators found raises questions about the need for added transparency. According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, 80% of large organizations (annual revenue at least $7.5 million) were found to receive industry support. However fewer than 20% reported specifically how much they received from industry sponsors. More than one-third had an industry executive on their board, and another quarter did not state their board members’ occupations. Only about a quarter published conflict of interest policies, none of which specifically addressed industry influence.

Findings published in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that two-thirds of smaller organizations (median annual revenue $299,140; interquartile range $70,000 to $1.2 million) were funded by industry and more than 10% received more than 50% of their funding from industry. More than 80% from these smaller groups felt that advocacy organizations should be cognizant of the potential for conflicts of interest, but only about half were highly confident in their organizations’ conflict of interest policies. More than seven percent were consciously aware of pressure to align with corporate interests of donors. The findings illustrate how the majority of large and smaller advocacy organizations receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, but do not have applicable conflict of interest policies to preserve transparency – potentially raising questions about credibility and undermining trust.

Advocacy organizations are not the only ones coming under scrutiny. Since 2013, the federal government has issued subpoenas to a number of pharmaceutical companies to analyze their ties to patient assistance charities. The investigations continue, and now involve many top pharmaceutical stakeholders. These inquiries are similar to those concerning financial ties between industry and physicians and their institutions, and potential conflicts of interest that could influence physicians’ clinical decisions. Financial ties must be disclosed to avoid a potential conflict of interest, or even the appearance of a conflict of interest, so that patients’ welfare remains the primary interest.

Advocacy is stronger with transparency

Should the pharmaceutical companies stop supporting advocacy organizations? Absolutely not. However, all parties should be transparent about their relationships and financial support. Recently, Stat News reported that a pharmaceutical company was found to be a secret funder of a patient advocacy organization that was working to secure more government funding and insurance coverage for treatment. Because this charitable donation was initially concealed, “outing” the company as a financial supporter became the news story. This shifted the focus from the potential positive impact of support for this advocacy group, and possibly diminished the advocacy group’s important role and ability to address a critical community need. Transparency is an effective way to help advocacy groups avoid the pitfalls of implied or actual bias concerning their work, removing a potential barrier for positive impact on the community.

Just as pharmaceutical companies have to publicly disclose payments to physicians, and many physicians are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest based on industry relationships, it is reasonable to ask advocacy organizations to disclose their industry sponsors and the financial support they receive. This could be similar to a Sunshine Act for advocacy – only hopefully with less complexity! The goal is for all stakeholders to feel confident that everyone is transparent and playing on a level field and lets communities feel positive about the organizations representing them.

Denise Erkkila

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August 17, 2017 0
Sponsored Content

Every 42 seconds, someone in the US has a heart attack. Each minute, someone dies from a heart disease-related event.1

Even though heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the US, many adults are uninformed of the causes, symptoms and proper treatment of heart-related conditions. In fact, according to PatientPoint research, over half of patients who are treated for heart health said their issues were unexpected. Further studies have found 70% of adults are not familiar with symptoms associated with heart disease.2

As these statistics reveal, the need for education and support materials for patients at the point of care is paramount – and critical to pharma companies’ success. Because if heart health isn’t top of mind for most adults, it’s likely your treatment isn’t, either. And with nearly half (47%) of cardiologists now restricted, gaining awareness among physicians is also a growing challenge.3

To ensure the right message is delivered to these heart “unhealthy” patients at the right time, PatientPoint conducts in-depth research in the space. Here’s a snapshot of patients who visited cardiologist offices installed with the PatientPoint Communicate – Cardiology Waiting Room Digital Screens Program:

  • Average age: 60 years
  • Gender: 60% female
  • Race: 79% white / Caucasian
  • Employment status: 59% retired
  • 42% are accompanied by another adult
  • 59% want to lose weight
  • Top conditions identified to be at risk for or diagnosed with: high blood pressure / hypertension (72%), high cholesterol (68%), arthritis (55%), heart disease (53%), heart attack or cardiac event (48%)

This information enables us to develop content specifically tailored to these conditions, gaining unprecedented positioning as a trusted consultant to our partners – clients, physicians and patients – to ensure their message makes the most impact at each important moment.

Let’s look at each of these points a little more closely:

  • Waiting room: Patients say the waiting room is often the most stressful part of their visit to the doctor. Reinforcing your brand message alongside easy-to-understand digital information regarding heart health, healthy living tips and personalized messages from the practice will put your brand top of mind right before patients visit with the doctor. Heart patients don’t want to hear about arthritis content. We speak the patient language.
  • Exam room: Once in the exam room, patients crave in-depth education. Interactive touchscreens bring health information to life, whether it’s through a personalized quiz, short article or a brand testimonial video. Once the doctor arrives, he’s likely to use the touchscreen to show the patient exactly what’s happening in her heart via full-color, 3D anatomical models. It’s here where your brand can provide the support and savings information to help guide discussions and, ultimately, decision-making.
  • After the visit: Because the risk factors for heart disease and stroke are directly related to lifestyle choices, continual engagement between provider, pharma company and patient is important to ensure treatment success. We know those age 45-64 (the common age range for the onset of many cardiovascular conditions) still see print as a valuable information resource,4 and including your message in brochures patients can take home and reference later will help reinforce your brand as part of the solution to living a longer, healthier life.

The scale of the cardiovascular market is driving greater demands of quality outcomes data. Providing the right education to patients and providers at the right moments will help pharma companies remove barriers to access and support long-term adherence.

 

References

  1. American Heart Association, 2015
  2. Cleveland Clinic survey, 2014
  3. ZS Associates, “AccessMonitor,” 2015 Executive Summary
  4. 2015 Two Sides North America

Linda Ruschau


August 14, 2017 0

If you haven’t been living under a rock (or aren’t my parents), you are probably aware of the rise in popularity of voice search and voice enabled devices. Thanks to technology like Google Assistant, iOS Siri, and Amazon Echo, voice search is exploding in terms of both adoption and technology integration.

A comScore study in 2016 noted that 40% of adults now use voice search at least once per day and 60% of those people started using it in the last year. A recent report estimates that more than 24 million Amazon Echo and Google Home devices will be sold in 2017. As the technology behind these devices improves, people are turning to them at an increasing rate to obtain information, seek answers to their questions and incorporate them as a part of their daily routine. Because people can typically speak up to 150 words per minute versus being able to type 40 words per minute, and using voice search is seen as quicker than typing or using an app, voice search continues to grow in usage.

The manner in which people are using voice search, beyond just music playback, seems to focus on location based queries and answering basic questions. These uses line up well with the core functionality of voice search and are natural first steps for many people who are getting familiar with the voice search format.

However, there is much more potential in how voice search can be utilized to engage with searchers beyond what we’re currently seeing – this is especially true in the health information space.

Using voice search for health information
Currently, the number of voice search enabled health dedicated applications is very limited. One of the few available now is WebMD’s Amazon Alexa skill, which is essentially a custom voice search program geared towards health information. This new skill is aimed toward answering basic health questions and providing information in a quick and easy voice-enabled format.

Perhaps in the near future, voice applications could simply build on the commonly used question and answer format to help patients at the earliest stages of their health journey to identify potential health conditions and provide questions for them to ask their doctor.
However, while making use of the straightforward question and answer format is a good foundation, there is a plethora of untapped potential for the health information vertical to go even further and create truly interactive, immersive voice search experiences.

For instance, one of the real values of voice-based personal assistant devices is the way they have started to weave themselves into the daily routine of users. This adoption could be useful for people who manage their health conditions on a daily basis. People who live with diabetes, for example, have a variety of concerns they need to be mindful of which could potentially be tied in to the usage of voice based personal assistant devices. These uses could include:

  • Reminders can be given when it is time to eat, drink and check blood sugar levels
  • Using location-based weather forecasts, the assistant can give recommendations for exercises appropriate for that day and even skin care tips in order to keep skin hydrated
  • From a dietary perspective, when someone utilizes the “shopping list” feature of these devices, perhaps a diabetes app can recognize the ingredients and make suggestions for recipes to make using those ingredients that are diabetic friendly
  • Searches for recipes or restaurants can factor in diabetic restrictions when making recommendations, which will allow the voice search experience to be not only highly efficient but extremely personalized to that person’s location and health needs

As people continue to utilize voice search based devices, the amount of health information applications will continue to grow and open up new avenues to engage people with very individualized healthcare information experiences.

Taking healthcare conversations to voice search
It’s one thing to have a presence in voice search, it’s another to provide an application that people find truly helpful and improves the quality of their health journey. To create a voice search experience that is meaningful and useful, developers must provide people with trustworthy information as efficiently and accurately as possible in their moment of need. This is easier said than done, but the ability to offer such valuable and intimate service means there is the potential to become a part of each person’s daily routine.

Much of the potential value in voice search is in the organic experience it can create. Where healthcare is concerned, many people still feel that having a conversation about your health questions, such as you might have with your doctor, is a more natural and credible experience than Googling for information. Voice search and personal assistant devices have the capacity to create a conversational experience that can make people feel more comfortable and thus dive deeper into their health information search by engaging in a way that more closely mimics the interaction that might occur with their physician.

Healthcare brands and organizations who wish to make full use of voice search will have to be true to themselves and to their audience about the types of information they are seeking and how to answer those questions. For brands, this means potentially providing information that they might not normally be comfortable with discussing. Topics such as side effects and pricing are often avoided on brand websites despite searchers frequently looking for this type of information. In addition, we often see in our research that people commonly make comparison searches, essentially typing in “brand A vs brand B”. This is content that is typically not included in brand experiences. In order to feel comfortable engaging in voice search and adopting a vastly new method of searching for health information, people will need to feel as confident in the answers they are receiving as if they were coming from an unbiased source such as their own doctor.

As people embrace this new technology to seek out health related information, the healthcare world has a tremendous opportunity to make an impact. This starts with creating an experience that truly harnesses the value of voice search to empower the user to feel more in control of their own healthcare.

Richard Deede


April 13, 2016 0

You know that men and women are so different that we have to look to the planets to sort out the contrast.  But when it comes to trusting the biopharmaceutical industry, we’ve found that the genders are at the same time similar and different.

ThinkstockPhotos-78459443For the last two years, we have conducted a revealing survey among women making healthcare decisions asking how much they trust the pharmaceutical industry – the WEST Survey on Pharma: Women’s Engagement, Satisfaction & Trust. This year, we also conducted the same survey among 300 men, the MENT Survey on Pharma: Men’s Engagement, Needs & Trust, again through our subsidiary Health Stories Project, an online community of people inspired to tell their health stories to help others to connect and learn.

We undertook both surveys with the goal of understanding how true patient engagement can help build a foundation of trust with these important audiences. Though we will publish detailed results later, we’ve pulled out the top three responses to several questions to share some key findings.  The results were very revealing.

Differences: Men and Women

We know men and women are different, and now we know it is because their brains are actually built differently.  A study of 1,000 brain scans[i] showed that “on average, female brains are highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, and connections in male brains are typically stronger between the front and back regions.”

  • As a result, men tend to perform tasks predominantly using the left side, which is the logical/rational side of the brain.
  • Women, on the other hand, use both sides of their brain, because a woman’s brain has a larger Corpus Callosum, which allows women to transfer data between the right and left hemispheres faster.

As expected, our surveys showed several differences in how men and women perceive the biopharmaceutical industry.  We asked men whose opinions they would find very or extremely credible when forming an opinion of a pharmaceutical company.

  • Men’s top choice: a technical expert.
  • This is compared to women’s top choice of a friend or family member, which actually took the #2 spot for men.
  • Men’s top three influencers were rounded out by an academic professional, showing the value men place on validated, vetted authority figures when they are looking for information they can trust. (And women place a premium on their trusted personal relationships.)

The survey also emphasized differences in the way men want to communicate with the biopharmaceutical industry, again with subtle differences from women’s responses.

We asked about specific initiatives biopharma companies could use to communicate directly with patients and caregivers to understand their needs that would have a lot of or significant impact on a company’s trustworthiness.  Both men and women agreed that direct channels that enable the industry to communicate with patients would have the most impact, but their emphasis was tellingly different.

  • Men’s top choice was creating an online community where the company and patients or caregivers could engage with one another.
  • Men’s second and third choices were methods companies can use to regularly gather feedback from patients, including focus groups and in-person or online patient/caregiver advisory meetings.
  • In contrast, women’s top three choices were reversed: their top two choices were methods companies can use to regularly gather feedback from patients, and their third option was creating an online community.

Another departure between the responses of men and women was evident when we asked if recent attention to drug pricing has changed survey respondents’ perception of the pharmaceutical industry.

  • Men were significantly less sensitive to pricing issues, with 62% of men but only 42% of women saying recent events have not changed their perception of the industry.

Similarities: Men and Women

However, there were also several key areas in which men and women’s perspectives were very similar.  When describing themselves in the survey, a majority of both men and women said they were the primary decision maker for someone else, such as a child or spouse, who has taken a prescription medication.

  • Surprisingly, 92% of men said they were primary decision makers.
  • According to a recent Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) survey: 94% women who work and have children under the age of 18 make healthcare decisions for others[ii].

And though men were less influenced by recent attention to the pricing of pharmaceuticals than women as referenced in the Differences section, we were surprised that the perceptions and trust of both men and women were not as impacted overall by recent events in pharma as we thought they might have been, even after a year with high-profile negative attention on the pharmaceutical industry.

And finally, while we are still analyzing all the data from both the men’s and women’s surveys and we don’t want to give away all of the results, I can tell you that across the board, men have more trust in the biopharmaceutical industry than women.

More Details at DTC National 2016

Pam Garfield, SVP of Strategy & Innovation with Patient Health Perspectives, will be presenting the full results from the 2016 WEST women’s survey, overlaid on the 2015 results, at the DTC National Conference  next week.  If you are attending, be sure to look for her presentation, “Do Women Trust Pharma?” for all of the details.  We will also present the men’s survey results later this year.

 

References:

[i] http://www.fitbrains.com/blog/women-men-brains/

[ii] http://www.talentinnovation.org/_private/assets/PopHealthcare_ExecSumm-CTI.pdf

Cheryl Lubbert


March 29, 2016 0

The relevance of social media monitoring and engagement in the healthcare industry

Billions of conversations take place every month on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, as well as blogs and forums. These conversations are not only taking place in social settings, but are influencing companies as well. Social media use continues to rise as we see more people using it in both their personal and professional lives — and brands are responding by continually looking for better ways to engage with them. All of these conversations comprise pools of rich data, but listening to them for meaning can be challenging. So, how do companies make sense of all this endless data to determine how and where to listen, identify what consumers are talking about, classify the types of content they are posting and understand the behaviors they are engaging in?

C3i Healthcare Connections Graphic 1In the healthcare industry, patients and healthcare providers (HCPs) are looking to social media for information and support regarding their health and the health of their patients. They serve as a “perpetual focus group,” whose conversations taking place on social media provide brands with the opportunity to listen. Patients share their opinions, ask questions about diseases and treatment options, and directly or incidentally report adverse events. Meanwhile, HCPs voice opinions on the healthcare industry, provide thought leadership on a wide range of topics such as participatory medicine, reimbursement, and medical education. In a recent survey, more than 40 percent of respondents reported that information found via social media would affect the way they coped with a chronic condition or their approach to diet and exercise; 34 percent said it would affect taking certain medication.1 This demonstrates to companies that patients are directly impacted by what they view on social media and in order for brands to leverage that data radiating out of all the social conversations, several factors need to be in place.

When determining how to utilize the data in social media conversations, one rule-of-thumb is to work backward — start with objectives and determine which categories of data would support the analysis and provide actionable insights. Companies can build a tagging structure based on relevant categories, such as: source (e.g., social media platform), author, type, topic, behavior, and sentiment. For example, if a branC3i Healthcare Connections Graphic 2d is looking to identify who is talking about a product, the kinds of content they are posting, and the topics within their content, a structure that would classify posts into categories such as Consumer, Branded Product, and Medical Inquiry could be utilized. As more and more posts are tagged, patterns, trends, and themes can be identified.

Social media strategists must be cognizant of the regulations pharmaceutical companies face when approaching social media usage and determining involvement. Many pharmaceutical companies have legitimate concerns regarding social media participation, including the need to have:

  • Identification, triaging, and reporting of Adverse Events (AEs), Product Quality Complaints (PQCs)
  • Consistency of messaging and having a team that can adhere to social media promotion guidelines and regulations
  • Previous experience and internal knowledge in terms of social media engagement and usage

The current regulatory environment is understandably daunting and serious consideration must be applied when developing a social strategy. While these challenges exist today and are likely to remain for the foreseeable future, there are prescriptive solutions and industry best practices available to mitigate risk.  Regulations and the strategies that come about as a result can impact a pharmaceutical company’s ability to continue that social media conversation. Reliable processes can be implemented, borrowing best practices from existing patient interaction policies, as well as social monitoring and engagement strategies from other regulated industries.

Other key steps and factors to consider to successfully make sense of social conversations include:

  • Train staff – Reduce risk by utilizing highly trained specialists experienced in the nuance of monitoring, identifying, and triaging AEs.
  • Establish documented workflows – Configure a systematic approach to the identification of AEs and PQCs and their triaging to the appropriate Pharmacovigilance point-of-intake.
  • Technology – Utilize cutting-edge technology platforms to monitor and tag conversations. Although there is no replacement for human engagement, as volume scales, technology becomes increasingly critical for success.

The importance of listening is always stressed in the pharmaceutical industry, but the actual work requires an appreciation of how different people “speak” on social media (patients versus HCPs), understanding the value of categorical organization of data, and the selection and application of appropriate technology. There is no silver bullet, but building meaningful structures out of disparate sets of data is doable – in fact, it’s necessary if the industry is to make the most out of today’s social media landscape. Leveraging social media data and engagement opportunities are crucial imperatives for companies to support key business goals focused around patient and provider programs — and it will pay off.

 

Reference

  1. Social Media ‘Likes’ Healthcare: From Marketing to Social Business. PWC Health Research Institute. April 2012

 

Phil Baumann


March 29, 2016 0

Healthcare is the most personal of categories, and the micro-/macro-economic benefits of addressing individual patient needs and barriers at population-level scale are huge. Digital marketers from the early 2000s will remember the earliest pushes into personalization – most efforts were not successful. But a lot has changed, especially in the past year. A new generation of multi-channel marketing (MCM) is coming – one that successfully merges time-tested crafts of traditional digital, direct, and RM with rationalized people-based marketing enabled by ad-tech and CRM automation.

We see 2016 marking the turning point in our ability to orchestrate a direct, personal customer interaction in a logical, spontaneous sequence, that is automated and in real time. The results we’re seeing are positive – lifts in ROI as high as 5-10% across industry groups, as well as higher engagement rates, lower media costs, more scalable revenue and profits, better health outcomes, and a rich proprietary data trove that drives the single-most-important source of competitive advantage today – customer relationships.

MCM transformation must now move beyond the incremental. Bigger value creation will be architected through connected journeys where segmented, personalized game plans automate a range of individual addressable opportunities. These media investments won’t necessarily show up on Kantar, so competitive intelligence will be harder to glean going forward. Companies should look both ahead and laterally in their MCM maturity curve to create disproportionate value. For example, digital-centric brands pushing forward with personalization may look to drive greater scale and cultural relevance via traditional DTC and pilot addressable video. HCP-sales-focused organizations should better integrate the consumer/ patient influence models and direct relationships. DTC-focused brands who lack time to master search and content marketing can demonstrate digital halo to secure funding for automation initiatives. Despite this great diversity and range of motion, most firms have to create greater value. Here are four developments I would emphasize to drive continued MCM maturity in 2016:

  1. Prioritize Addressable Media in the MCM Playbook

Personalization is the pinnacle of people-based marketing. It relies on the fact that addressability, the ability to target an individual and create a tailored event stream at scale, is increasing volumetrically across all of the people-based platforms we work with every day, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many more. As the agenda and role of the consumer are changing rapidly, marketers have to personalize the way we speak to our audiences.

The good news is that personalization in healthcare can be accomplished in lots of different ways with different levels of effort and risk thresholds. Consider some of these as entry points:

  • Personalized marketing materials include different treatments and offers – or the copy, creative (imagery), and calls to action – based on the recipient
  • Personalized content provides specific materials that are relevant to the individual based on preference data, medical specialty, condition,  demographic data, or based on key terms that the individual provides
  • Preference personalization is when healthcare companies enable their consumers to select product options and manage desired interactions
  1. Accelerate Strategic Planning Cycles via Real-Time Analytics

The prediction for 2016 is that advanced analytics, with more powerful campaign platforms like Adobe Workbench, will continue to become mainstream, particularly to inform how customer strategies drive the overarching business strategy at the enterprise level. Traditional analytics teams working towards monthly reports could not, and cannot, operate in real time. Now, real-time reporting requires faster synthesis and strategy planning oversight. Whether you’re in CPG, financial services, entertainment, or healthcare, all marketing game plans are learning to operate in more real-time environments. Thus, customers’ immediate needs, behaviors, and values can be served in the instantaneous moment of truth. Speed to insight is the new source of competitive advantage in increasingly crowded marketplaces.

  1. Increase Adoption of Next Generation of Immersive Media

We will see further convergence between the addressable digital, virtual world and the real world. You must collapse the physical and temporal distance between your customers and the brand while inserting the brand into both prescriptive and spontaneous journey maps in unique relevant ways. The power of both addressable and more immersive media, including live human-to-human interaction, and supportive content marketing will increasingly simulate and unlock steps towards the real life health experience. Journey mapping will focus more on connective experience design across advertising and augmented care delivery, creating highly experiential value chains that are more immersive accelerating the pace towards true behavior change.

  1. Layer Brand Storytelling Across the Connected Journey

A tighter link with brand storytelling will give newly empowered MCM teams a considerable edge over those who try to build brands in traditional ways. Brand storytelling needs to capitalize on the revamped MCM toolset – one that guides customers to immerse in newly combined digital / virtual reality, but also keeps them focused on the behavioral goals that lead to better outcomes. Whether it’s completing a hospital procedure or starting and staying on a potentially costly prescription medication, brand stories are essential to guiding desired behavior. The future of customer care is about caring for people and people feeling cared for. When measuring healthcare outcomes, high customer motivation scores correlate to a positive mental attitude. Brands must be evaluated on the softer scores that indicate behavior change alongside the hard metrics that indicate engagement.

Connected Journeys Will Define What Good MCM Looks Like

Given changing media consumption behavior and the rise of addressability, brands will be increasingly built in the addressable mid-funnel, giving multi-channel marketing powered by connected journeys a resurgence in 2016. 2016 will require a healthy dose of ideation, but shifting to a customer-driven world where real-time segment needs drive more dynamic planning cycles will accelerate change and speed to volume for most brands. Going forward into 2016, if we expect to fundamentally change the way we go to market, we all need to get better putting the customer at the center of the planning process to illustrate the ideal experience, then align the teams, tools, and talent to push ahead further and faster in the individual conversations that will drive brand success going forward.

Croom Lawrence


May 20, 2015

In her 1996 book It Takes a Village, current presidential candidate and former United States Senator, First Lady, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton detailed her view that multiple determinants, such as community involvement, cultural/environmental influences and social interactions, contribute to how a child is raised. Similarly, inciting a consumer call to action with disease prevention outreach programs takes an amalgamation of different social and behavioral theories which rely on the same factors as the village concept. Studies assert that outreach programs based on more than one theoretical foundation, including Million Hearts which was established by combining the Health Belief Model (HBM) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), are more likely to produce a desired positive outcome than those that lack theory or are based on only one theory.

The Health Belief Model

The first social behavioral theoretical foundation, Health Belief Model (HBM), emphasizes that the willingness to take action and prevent risk depends upon the beliefs about the susceptibility and severity of disease; the perceptions about the benefits and barriers; cues to action and self-efficacy.

In a hypertension prevention study, Hispanic respondents not only misperceived that certain behaviors are barriers that would increase their risk factors, but also expressed a lack of confidence in their ability to perform such behaviors as having their BP checked regularly, limiting their salt intake, eating five or more servings of fruit and vegetables daily, exercising at least 30 minutes four or more days of the week, and controlling their weight. The general perception that hypertension was not a severe disease and the susceptibility misunderstanding resulted in 68.6% of the respondents being at increased risk for developing hypertension.

The Theory of Planned Behavior

The second social behavioral theoretical foundation, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), assumes that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control predict actual behavior. Attitude refers to beliefs merged with the value placed on the behavioral performance outcome. Subjective norm signifies the perception of the social expectations to adopt a specific behavior. Perceived behavioral control reflects the beliefs about the level of ease or difficulty of performance behavior.

A circle of culture surfaced in a hypertension prevention study concerning poor eating patterns passed from generation to generation; physician distrust and questioning reasons doctors would want to lower BP because of the belief that physicians would not have a job if they addressed this health issue; and an unwelcome move that changes consumers from insiders to outsiders when they act differently by engaging in healthy behaviors. Severing cultural traditions and adopting preventive behaviors suggested by health care professionals resulted in social pressures.

Combining HBM & TPB: The Million Hearts™ Program

The Million Hearts™ national outreach program engages Community Health Workers (CHWs) to help achieve the goal of preventing one million heart attacks and strokes in the United States by 2017. The CHWs educate consumers about the importance of fit lifestyles and specifically promote these tenets for maintaining a healthy BP:

1)     Having routine screenings for high BP;

2)     Understanding BP numbers and the significance of lowering BP while searching for economical ways to increase lower sodium and whole grain foods and still keep their weight within BMI;

3)     Comprehending the ramifications of uncontrolled BP that include damage to eyes, kidneys, heart blood vessels, and brain; high risk of heart attack and stroke; and chronic kidney failure requiring dialysis.

CHWs encourage consumers to interact with other members of the community including their physicians about clearly defined health goals and keep a daily record of BP readings to track progress. CHWs also introduce consumers to social workers and others who can teach them how to apply for programs and insurance that help pay for health care. Many Hispanic consumers prefer to learn information with plain language fotonovelas, similar to comic books, which are common in the culture. Personal interaction is carried out by “promotoras” from the same ethnic background who honor the tradition of reading a fotonovela with consumers.

In summary, creating a consumer call to action with disease prevention outreach programs such as a Million Hearts™ takes a village of community involvement, cultural/environmental influences and social interactions supported by different theories including HBM and TPB. The underlying premise is that a combination of theories informs the message. Theories determine why, what, and how a health issue should be addressed and assist in developing successful program strategies that reach targeted priority populations to affect a positive impact.

References:

Del Pilar Rocha-Goldberg, María et al. “Hypertension Improvement Project (HIP) Latino: Results of a Pilot Study of Lifestyle Intervention for Lowering Blood Pressure in Latino Adults.” Ethnicity & Health 15.3 (2010): 269–282. PMC. Web. 19 May 2015.

Glanz, Karen, Rimer, Barbara K., andViswanath, K. Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice (4th ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2008.

Noar, Seth M., Chabot, Melissa, and Zimmerman, Richard S. “Applying Health Behavior Theory to Multiple Behavior Change: Considerations and Approaches.” Prevention Medicine. Volume 46. March 2008.

Peters, Rosalind M., and Thomas N. Templin. “Theory of Planned Behavior, Self-Care Motivation, and Blood Pressure Self-Care.” Research and Theory for Nursing Practice 24.3 (2010): 172–186.

Peters, Rosalind M., Karen J. Aroian, and John M. Flack. “African American Culture and Hypertension Prevention.” Western Journal of Nursing Research 28.7 (2006): 831–863. PMC. Web. 19 May 2015.

admin


May 20, 2015

Most pharmaceutical marketers understand the importance of including search marketing in their media plans. Often the champion of the final click, a good paid search campaign contributes to the overall success of any advertising effort and connects your brand to active seekers within the marketplace. Unfortunately, advertisers often focus the majority of their attention on the brand.com site and, at times, overlook the importance role disease awareness (DA) sites play within search strategy through enabling the option of executing a multiple listing strategy.

Let’s take a step back and look at how a good DA site provides marketers with the opportunity to better capitalize search results.

But… what if I’m not first-to-market?

I know what you’re thinking – unless you’re at the helm of a first-to-market treatment, you’re probably thinking that a DA site just doesn’t fit your strategy. Certainly first-to-market competitors have a great opportunity to educate and grow interest in a category for patients and HCPs with an awareness site. However, the opportunity to influence this audience on a condition or disease state exists for more than just the first-to-market competitor. Unbranded education content generally resonates strongly with audiences wary of an overtly branded message and provides marketers with a forum to set the stage for a branded message to follow at a later point in time.

What’s more, a proper DA site need not be overly complex or represent the pinnacle in site design to be effective. Instead, focus investment on good, quality content that stands out from the crowd and strikes a new position on the condition. Savvy digital marketers can take this opportunity to set the table and influence what patients and HCPs should expect or demand from the category. Following on-brand messages can then reinforce differentiation to maximize this added perception. Examples of differentiation can include cost, safety, or even dosage and delivery (e.g., why take an injection when treatment is available via pill).

Finally, DA sites generally resonate better than brand.com sites for unbranded search campaigns. Diagnostic indicators of post-click success – including bounce rate, page views per visit, and even time on site – generally return stronger numbers when an unbranded searcher consumes DA content. With the right site design and layout, the engaged audience can be converted to the brand.com site and ultimately shaped to take the action the advertiser desires.

Once advertisers commit to adding a DA site to the portfolio, a multiple listings approach can be pursued within search. Below, I’ve broken out what makes this tactic so powerful for search advertisers.

Competitive blocking

This additional listing provides added flexibility to advertisers looking to provide active seekers with as many opportunities as possible to connect with their brand and their message. You may already be following this strategy without knowing it – having a separate website for HCPs and patients enables a second listing to populate the search results with a message unique to each audience. The DA site furthers this approach and provides the opportunity to reach both audiences who may be higher up the funnel.

Some advertisers truly embrace the multiple listing approach and create separate DA sites for patients and HCPs, creating yet another additional search listing. The possibilities are endless!

Added coverage and efficiency

Employing a multiple listing strategy provides a great way to even the playing field against competitors with deep pockets determined to remain in the top position. Added listings provide added impression share and SOV opportunities at greater efficiency than an all-or-nothing approach to search positioning (which is why I always advocate employing a separate domain for your patient and HCP brand sites).

If each of your site properties achieves even a 15% impression share, you can quickly begin accruing over half of the available search opportunity without spending the same cost per visitor that you would with fewer listings forced to remain at the top to ensure traffic volume forecasts are achieved.

Flexible messaging opportunities

Multiple listings provide advertisers with greater opportunities to determine the optimal investment levels within search. What’s more, using a test-and-learn approach often reveals which unbranded categories make sense to drive directly to brand.com and which respond better to the unbranded table setting of your DA site – and of course, which terms should have the opportunity to drive to both!

Know thy funnel

Many brand managers regard the branded site as the best chance to engage patients and HCPs. Unfortunately, speaking to a brand naïve audience searching on general condition terms via a branded site usually leads to poor engagement and a questionable user experience. Since we know that qualified patients and HCPs tend to search using basic, single-phrase keywords, it remains difficult to assume what level of brand awareness a searcher has based on the keyword they input.

Disease awareness websites play a critical role in successfully engaging patients and HCPs who may remain higher up in the conversion funnel. Multiple listings provide the opportunity to not only engage in message testing but also audience A/B testing. Which site property makes the most sense for these keywords and ad groups?

Creating a DA site provides brand managers with added flexibility in how they create and execute their paid search campaigns. Having the advantage of added listings in the search results allows advertisers the opportunity to customize their messaging and audience alignment approach at a much more granular level, all while returning greater efficiency and engagement.

Oliver J. Nelson


May 20, 2015

It’s pretty much impossible to count how many people in the world are afflicted with disease; there are simply too many diseases and too many people to count. And if you count the loved ones of those with diseases, then it’s safe to say that virtually everyone is affected by disease.

Our global population of roughly 7 billion people is afflicted with all kinds of diseases, from infectious to non-communicable. Yet education and action are sorely lacking in developing countries and even powerhouse nations like the United States.

It isn’t till one is burdened with illness that one can actually be aware of the severity and implications of it. Unfortunately, by then we must act in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive, preventative, and healthier one.

Activating: a year of disease awareness

Disease awareness months have been around since at least 1985, when the American Cancer Society and the pharmaceutical division of Imperial Chemical Industries (now part of AstraZeneca) formed National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Since then, every month has been claimed as an awareness month for many diseases. For example, May is Mental Health Month, Stroke Month, Lyme Disease Awareness Month, Celiac Awareness Month, Healthy Vision Month, and Arthritis Awareness Month, to name a few. The monthly “real estate” is totally crowded and the months have less impact when they are sharing with other groups who are also trying to build awareness.

The goal of awareness months is to educate and drive screening. They promote action by driving checkups, and get the larger communities involved in many different initiatives, from walks and runs to health fairs.

The abundance of disease awareness days, weeks, and months provides an opportunity to take a holistic educational view on disease states at large. Even if you’re living with and being treated for only one particular disease, it’s necessary to understand that there’s a whole universe of diseases out there. Get screened and try to prevent illness. The more you’re aware and understand what you need to do, the better chance you have of avoiding disease. And helping others avoid it, too.

Social platforms: spread disease awareness

HealthWellNext, a thought leadership publication, has created a social platform called HealthAwareNext to spotlight and educate around disease months throughout the year. They refer to it as “A Year of Disease Awareness.”

The goal of HealthAwareNext is to educate and drive awareness about disease states. Each month will feature impactful call-to-action content showcasing unique graphics that not only grab attention but educate as well, with real-world information on screening and testing for that month’s condition. The content will be spread via healthawarenext.com as well as through the social media platforms Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. The hashtags #HealthAwareNext and #YearofDiseaseAwareness, as well as disease-specific hashtags, will drive to relevant content.

HealthAwareNext started in January by focusing on cervical health, followed by heart health in February. March was dedicated to vision health and colon cancer awareness. April put a spotlight on sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and May highlights mental health and stroke. When 2015 ends, it will be with a collection of disease month assets that are as informative as they are visually arresting, and that provide always welcome attention for these diseases. The ultimate goal is to get people to take charge of their health – and make prevention a year-round activity.

Elizabeth Elfenbein