ROI From Marketing Spend
“The key to growth in the Pharma space is more closely associated with understanding consumer needs as opposed to creating or improving products. With this in mind, pharma marketers need to place emphasis on identifying customer needs and finding solutions to meet these needs” – Healthcare Weekly 2020
The Need For Change
Patient centricity should be every player’s responsibility and every patient’s right. Many players are already seeing the need for change.“Many companies across the pharmaceutical industry are in the process of transitioning from a traditional model centered on product marketing to a new model focused on delivering health outcomes,” – Reuters Events.
Where Is Pharma Marketing Now?
Pharma Marketing is experiencing an important change where Pharma approach is no longer centered solely on healthcare professionals & their prescribing decision making. Instead we have noticed a pivot where marketers are more interested in appealing to the patient. However, we do know that the patient has become more active in their diagnosis and the days of just doing what the doctor says have long gone, with eight in ten internet users searching for health information, and 74% of those using social media. Whilst the patient voice is acknowledged, & patients are becoming more proactive, is the industry keeping pace to understand them? Highlighting the importance in grabbing every opportunity to know your customer, gather data from various touchpoints and create a personalised, relevant service for customers.
How Does Understanding your Patients Behaviours Improve your Marketing Strategy?
Patient research can be generic, unfocussed and not always relevant to the real world. Pharma Marketing has shifted enabling greater patient engagement by getting behind their views, attitudes and behaviours. The emphasis on patient-centricity has never been more important to connect Pharma marketers to their target audience, but do current tools get you there?
- Target patient profiles used in clinical research will describe symptoms, diagnosis thresholds, age, co-morbidities but may not cover how the patient feels, how they define normal, how in control or confident they are.
- Outcome studies describe the past on what a patient did but not why they behaved in a certain way.
- Treatment pathways can be evidence-based but can also be generic or idealised, do they address real-world settings. Regional formulary differences and access to specialists can make a huge difference.
So…Tomorrow Do Things Differently.
Why you Should be Listening to The Patient Voice
The voice of the people taking the drugs – the actual patients – hasn’t been as loud as it should have been. That’s despite extensive evidence that listening to patients and learning about their experiences can dramatically improve drug development, delivery, and accessibility, as well as patient support.
The gaps in patient understanding and engagement could be argued result in sub-optimal treatment, slow uptake of new therapy and wastage of prescribed medicines through poor compliance.
- Inability to fully explain why patients behave as they do
- Reliance solely on HCP prescribing decisions and advice on initial diagnosis
- Lack of timely tracking of the patient voice
- Assuming artificial patient research can be extrapolated to the real world
- When engagement with patients does occur, is it one-way
- Best practice examples do exist but remain rare so our collective knowledge does not develop
How to use PatientMetRx® in your Marketing Plan?
We provide you with the functionality to generate a report capturing the voice of your patients to then use to analyse against the marketing content you have used to establish correlations.
No need for a data analyst as we can provide you with this if you need further context or data.
PatientMetRx® and your ROI
Patient journeys are a hot topic in healthcare. Unfortunately, they are not always executed from the patient’s point of view. No matter what point of the patient journey you are targeting, you must account for the emotional state of your patients. Understanding the true voice of your patient and implementing this into your daily marketing strategy will:
- Bring patient needs to the front of your marketing efforts.
- Enable you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
- Better understand Patients’ feelings and behaviors.
- Generate a simple KPI to benchmark against competitors
PatientMetRx® allows you to embrace the modern patient.
#DoThingsDifferently
References:
- Social Media and Health Care Professionals: Benefits, Risks, and Best Practices – National Library of Medicine
- A Shared Purpose: 6 Ways to Draw Pharma Together – Reuters Events
- Pharma Marketing: How to Successfully Market in the Pharma Industry’ – HealthCareWeekly
About PatientMetRx®
PatientMetRx® is an AI accelerated machine learning platform that has turned the liberation of patient sentiment on its head through data science to create a single source of truth about feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. People describe their healthcare experiences through stories on social media, interviews, and research. PatientMetRx® uses advanced data science and technology including its own specialized LLM’s (Drug-GPT™) to structure signals at scale to make the complex simple. Tracking actionable insights and mapping across the patient journey comparing HCP and Patient Voices. Keep your finger on the pulse by putting the Patient Voice at the center of strategies. If you’re wanting to stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly changing industry then try it out today.
