Download Measuring Physician Interaction with Brands

Dec 2013
Vol. 12, No. 9
•
Pharma Marketing Network®
www.pharmamarketingnews.com
Measuring Physician Interaction
with Pharma Brands
Medikly’s Physician Value Index is a New Tool for
Optimizing Marketing Performance
Author: John Mack
Published by:
Pharma Marketing Network
PO Box 760
Newtown, PA 18940
[email protected]
PMN1209-03
Pharma Marketing News
Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013
T
he age of the empowered physician represents a
contradiction of sorts for pharmaceutical companies. There have never been more ways to
reach physicians and other healthcare providers
(HCPs), yet it's never been so challenging to effectively
engage them (see Figure 1, below).
Driven by the decline in face-to-face interactions and
the availability of on demand access to digital channels,
HCPs now choose when, where, how, and if they
interact with pharmaceutical companies and their
brands.
p. 2
Physician Value Index
Medikly, an innovative provider of physician engagement solutions, proposes a new model for measuring
digital marketing effectiveness: the Physician Value
Index or PV Index™, which integrates four key aspects
of how a physician interacts with a pharmaceutical
brand:
1.
2.
3.
4.
presence,
participation,
influence and
sentiment.
The Digital Analytics Challenge
With more than $60 billion being spent annually on
marketing and communications to HCPs, pharmaceutical marketers need to reinvent how they allocate,
optimize, and justify spend through real-time, databased insights and intelligence.
Using the PV Index, pharmaceutical marketers can now
incorporate a new capability model of measuring marketing performance and its contribution to driving business value.
According to a March, 2013 Accenture survey of 200
senior pharmaceutical executives, the number one
business priority is the reduction of sales and marketing
costs. Among those who indicated they plan to reduce
S&M costs in 2013, 87% said “increased use of
analytics to target spend and drive improved ROI” was
a strategy they would employ to achieve that goal and
83% cited “increase use of digital and multichannel
interactions” (see Figure 2, page 2).
“The technology is nothing special,” Gullapalli told
FierceBiotechIT in a recent interview. “Where we as an
organization differentiate ourselves is how we apply
New York City-based Medikly was founded by CEO Dr.
Venkat Gullapalli, a pediatrician. The startup’s webbased software combines listening with digital engagement and analysis functions.
Continues…
Figure 1. Physician Marketing Trends and Challenges. Source: Medikly, Inc.
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Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013
p. 3
technology that has already existed in the consumer
space to the pharmaceutical space. Our algorithms are
specific to physicians and capturing their information.”
The following is an edited transcript of the discussion.
You can listen to the entire audio podcast of the
discussion here: http://bit.ly/PMT200
Medikly’s solution answers many of the questions
pharma marketers have about the performance of their
digital marketing efforts, including :
John Mack: In reading some background material
about Medikly, I learned that Gartner identified your
platform and Physician Value Index as a disruptive
technology. Why is it a disruptive technology?
• What types of online content do physicians
consume?
• Do they prefer delivery via email, Facebook or
another platform?
• Whom do those doctors influence?
Pharma Marketing Talk Interview
Venkat Gullapalli, MD and Mark Goldstone, Co-CEOs
of Medikly, spoke on Pharma marketing Talk about a
reaching, engaging and understanding healthcare
professionals (HCPs) by gaining insights into the HCP
journey through various digital touch points. The
discussion focused on Medikly's Physician Value Index
and answered the following questions:
1. What is the Physician Value Index?
2. Why is Medikly proposing this framework?
3. Why can this model—which couldn't be achieved
before—work now?
4. How does the PV Index apply to pharma,
agencies, and healthcare publishers?
5. How will the PV Index change the pharma
marketing landscape?
Mark Goldstone: By being able to understand more
about the physician audience in different channels, we
can understand their behavior and unmet needs and
help them find the appropriate content and relationships. The technology is seen as a little disruptive
because with access to this kind of information it has
the ability to totally change how people do marketing in
the pharmaceutical space.
Mack: I’m always interested in learning about new
technology especially as it applies to digital marketing,
which I know the pharmaceutical industry has been
embracing lately. The Physician Value Index is interesting because you’re trying to follow the physician’s journey or get insights into how they use different digital
channels to get information and interact with pharmaceutical companies. Is that correct?
Venkat Gullapalli: Yes, but let me give you a little more
perspective. Having engaged physicians over the last
fourteen years and as a physician myself, one of the
Continues…
Figure 2. "Top five strategies to meet cost reduction goals." Source: Accenture. Life in the New Normal:
The Customer Engagement Revolution.
© 2013 Pharma Marketing Network (www.pharma-mkting.com). All rights reserved.
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Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013
challenges that we’ve always had is determining what’s
really happening when we engage physicians. How is
our interaction with them affecting them and how can
we better understand their preferences and behaviors,
especially these days when many interactions are
digital and face-to-face meetings with sales reps are
declining?
So the technology is designed to answer just that question. It allows pharmaceutical brands or publishers or
agencies to really understand from a multichannel
perspective in real time how their audiences are consuming their content and how that content is affecting
them. In return, they are able to make real-time decisions.
Where we are different is that we’re providing folks with
actual insights—it’s not a data dump. We’re not showing you bounce rates or downloads. We’re showing you
what those types of activities mean and what you can
do about it as a pharmaceutical brand. It’s nice to know
that you’re increasing traffic by 20%, but what does that
really mean to you as an organization and what should
you do doing about it?
Goldstone: I’m going to add a little bit of context to the
Physician Value Index and why that came about. In the
old world, if a physician or a consumer was disgruntled
or upset about your product they just wouldn’t prescribe
it or they wouldn’t buy it. In today’s world, a disgruntled
physician might complain online to hundreds of his
closest colleagues and that digital amplification effect
has a huge impact on your brand and on your sales.
p. 4
In fact, if you think about the very concept of brand
management, the brand manager’s role is to take the
very carefully crafted value in a brand and ensure that
it’s delivered effectively across all of the touch points
that might reach the audience. But in today’s world, in
the digital world, if you create a piece of content and
you put it online, the physician can take that, comment
on it, and pass it on. In other words, you’re not in
charge of your brand anymore unless you are considering understanding how to manage your audience and
that’s where Physician Value Index comes in. If you
understand the value of your brand to physicians, you
can make marketing decisions and better manage that
value.
Presence, Participation, Influence and Sentiment
Mack: As I understand it, the Physician Value Index
identifies four key aspects of how a physician interacts
with a pharmaceutical brand and these four are presence, participation, influence and sentiment. Can you
explain how those are measured or what you mean by
those aspects of the index?
Goldstone: The PV Index™ allows you to be able to
make some real-time marketing decisions based on a
real under-standing of the value of physicians at a
particular point in time.
The Index covers four broad aspects of how an HCP
interacts with a brand, with each of these aspects
broken down into various aggregate measures
Continues…
Figure 3. A hypothetical case study that illustrates how a marketer can apply the PV Index™. Source: “The
Physician Value Index™: A Framework for Optimizing Marketing Performance and Spend in the Digital Age”
(http://bit.ly/MKwhitePaper).
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Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013
combining online and offline data, e.g., information
gathered from sales calls, live meetings, and sample
requests.
Presence is a measure of how many and how much
interaction there is across any of the digital assets that
the brand might either own or be associated with. In
other words, how many times or how many of those
different assets/touch points a physician might be
accessing.
Participation is a much deeper measure of the intensity
of that participation and of that presence. It’s about how
much they’re participating, uploading content, downloading content, interacting, placing comments, and
really engaging with the brand or its assets.
The more presence a physician has and the more
participation they have, the greater the involvement, the
deeper the engagement, the more value they have (see
Figure 3, page 4).
Influence is a measure of how much of that content a
physician is passing on to other physicians, how often,
how regularly and to how many colleagues. So
influence is a very key measure.
Finally, sentiment is a measure of how positive or
negative a particular physician is about a brand or a
company or a category.
So, you may have a physician who is not a high prescriber but who is highly influential and very positive
about your brand. This physician has high value because he or she is passing on positive information
about your brand and influencing colleagues in a
positive way. It’s almost free media and this physician
should be a part of your media strategy that involves
optimizing content and choosing the right communication channels.
Mack: Are we focusing primarily on digital marketing
here and tracking what influence individual physicians
have throughout digital media that they might be using?
Gullapalli: The PV Index is a framework that any digital
agency or marketer can apply. They already have the
tools, which can be used for offline communications as
well. From our perspective, this fits nicely into a standardized way of understanding digital and engagement
beyond how we’ve traditional defined engagement,
which is views and downloads. This now gives folks,
whether it’s Medikly or not, the ability to go out there
and say this is how we really need to understand and
measure and make decisions when we engage
physicians.
silos and manually. But we are now able to not only
understand what particular action contributed to a
specific brand but also what specific physician in a
channel—i.e., from our perspective, a social channel—
contributed to a specific action towards your brand.
Integrated Data vs. Big Data
Mack: It sounds like there’s a lot of data that needs to
be collected in order to do this. Is this something that’s
not been possible before?
Gullapalli: You know, we’ve been doing this for the last
twenty or thirty years. But the information has been very
fragmented; i.e., different metrics, different KPIs, different databases, different organizations. What we’ve
done is to take all these KPIs and metrics and channels and integrate them from the ground up. Now, whatever channel that you’re in, you have a standard set of
metrics that apply across the board.
And there’s the convenience factor. If you’re on the
brand team at pharma and you’re overseeing six
brands, you don’t need to call your brand manager and
have them call all the agencies and publishers and wait
for responses. You can just log onto the dashboard and
see how your brands are doing across all channels,
across all agencies. You can immediately see the value
that particular engagements and physicians bring to
your brand.
Goldstone: The platform allows us to be able to divide
physician groups into different audiences depending
how they might be defined specifically from a marketing
perspective. When you understand more about those
audiences, their content consumption, their channel
usage, you can begin to better target that audience in
effective and efficient ways and measure the impact
that any content might have.
A Blomberg Terminal for Pharma Marketing
Gullapalli: Also, with this data, we’re able to provide
you with benchmarks that haven’t existed before. For
example, when you launch an email marketing campaign, you get results back that benchmark the campaign against a healthcare industry average. That’s
really not relevant to pharma brand campaigns. In
contrast, we provide our partners and our clients with
benchmarks that are specific to their organizations, to
the pharma industry.
Goldstone: Because we’re pulling data from many
sources into one place, we’re beginning to see some
very interesting insights into the marketplace. So that’s
one point of difference.
Because our platform is integrated, we’re combining
and automating a lot of what typically has been done in
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Pharma Marketing News
p. 5
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Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013
Another point of difference is that the platform has been
built from the ground up with healthcare professionals in
mind. The algorithms, the KPIs, everything that we built
has been built around pharmaceutical marketing.
Gullapalli: Just to add to that, I think the value that we
provide is not competitive in any way. Think of it as the
Bloomberg terminal of pharma marketing. You can use
it to prep for pitches, enhance existing campaigns, or to
be the underlying foundation for a new campaign.
p. 6
We’ve had agency clients who have gone into a pitch
using our data and the first thing they’ve said is “these
are your physicians, this is the channel they’re using,
these are their usernames, these are the conversations
that they’re having that are relevant to your brand right
now.” That type of insight didn’t even exist up until a
year ago.
Pharma Marketing News
Medikly helps pharmaceutical organizations better reach, engage, and
understand HCPs by gaining insights into the HCP journey through
various digital touch points and highlighting how these touch points
impact the behaviors and preferences of HCPs and their intent to prescribe.
Contact Information
35 East 21st Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10010 USA
Phone: 212-951-1525
Email: [email protected]
© 2013 Pharma Marketing Network (www.pharma-mkting.com). All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
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