What’s Your Ad-Buying Strategy?

Today's guest post comes from James Ellis. Ellis is the Digital Strategist at closerlook inc. and blogs at digital-pharma.tumblr.com. He also needs more activity on his Twitter account (@digital_pharma) if you'd like to tell him he's wrong. No, really.

There’s no preamble or cutesy anecdote to draw you in this time. Just a question:

What’s your online ad-buying strategy?

Maybe the question should be: do you even have an ad-buying strategy? Well, Besides picking a budget and spreading the money around. I’m not sure that counts as a strategy.

You've got SEM and display ads, you've got sites and targeting. You've got email, mobile and push ads. You've got conference targeting. You’ve got re-targeting. And any one of those idea has about a dozen (or a few dozen) channels, and each with a bunch of people willing to sell you on that channel.

Where do you spend the money?

Do you prioritize by saying that you need to hit this conference and that conference? What if only one of those conferences has an official web site? For that conference, you’ll need to spend money on some other site about the conference. Surprisingly, the official conference site is far cheaper to advertise on than the non-conference site.

And you've got to hit the search engines, right? That’s where people (HCPs or DTCs) go looking for solutions to their issues – solutions you solve. This is where you aren't interrupting their web surfing so much as speaking up when they are looking for you. So, you’ve gotta be there.

And what about social media marketing? Facebook has got a great ad system, if you know how to use its targeting system properly.

What about channels? Should you be advertising on EHR sites for your HCP market? But they are still pretty spread out with no one vendor taking up the lion’s share of the market, let alone the majority. So if you’re gonna play there, you’re going to have to spend on two or even three sites.

And what about re-marketing, where, after having visited your site, you continue to hit them with ads, even if they are on someone else’s site? The cost is a fraction of what the big medical portals charge, but has anyone shown that HCPs who see your ads while shopping for khakis are at all inclined to click? Or even become more brand-aware?

And then there’s the big medical portals. Big money for the right audience, and no one has ever gotten fired spending money there, right?

So with all these choices, how do you make spending decisions? Do you print out your media plan on tabloid paper and throw darts at it? Medscape in January, Google in March, EHR#1 in June? Cut the insertion orders into bits, glue them onto turtles and race them down the hall? First turtle gets the biggest buy, so stop when you hit your budget numbers!

And what about benchmarking? If you are spending all this money, what do you expect to get out of it? Are you measuring clicks or conversions? What about micro-conversions? Can you correlate ads with prescription changes? I bet you’d like to, wouldn't you?

Do you ask big broad questions like, ”If I had to spend it all on SEM or display ads, which would be better?” or, ”If I pilot a re-marketing campaign, how many conversions would be a success?”

Do you have all your click/conversion data in one folder and your budgeting/costing data in another? Why don't you combine them and see the cost of each conversion on each channel?

If you can't answer these last questions, can you really say you have a strategy? And given the amount of money you’re spending, shouldn't you have a strategy?

Fight back in the comments or just yell at me on Twitter.

What impact can health apps have on wellness?

Source: Mashable

Health apps are the third fastest growing app category, and have a strong presence at over 1000 currently available.  So what can they do for public health?  Doctors believe quite a bit, 40% believing that apps that aid in weight watching, monitoring blood sugar and vital sign monitoring can cut down on doctors visits.

When speaking with Mashable, Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning, stated "With the forthcoming changes to the U.S. healthcare system, there will be an increased focus on wellness programs and preventative medicine. Mobile health offers a tremendous opportunity for people to become more involved in their own health and wellness.”

The infographic to the left also points out several other interesting facts: 78% of US consumers are interested in mobile solutions, there are 320 million phones in the US, while there are only 1.7 million hospital beds.  See the graphic at Mashable.

While mHealth apps are very popular and growing daily, what do you think the real impact will be?  Will society take them on begin to use them to manage their health?

ePharma Summit Provides a Fun and Important Kickoff Event for Manhattan Research’s 2012 Agenda

ePharma Summit Media Partner Manhattan Research recently posted their experience at the 11th Annual ePharma Summit!  We'd like to share it with you.  It is also posted at the Health and Pharma Insight Blog .

Posted by Lem Sanders, Director of Business Development.  Follow him for updates on Twitter or LinkedIn.

ePharma Summit is a timely kickoff for the 2012 Manhattan Research calendar. A preseason bowl game, if you will. Many of the events attendees and speakers are instrumental in shaping our research agenda and we’re grateful for their views and support. It’s nice to see many of our clients in a midtown Manhattan ballroom under 7th Avenue that features a small army of technology advocates cheering and contesting the complexities we face and the solutions we pitch. All of this takes place while a Peruvian flute band plays down the street across Times Square from a team of break dancers. The Giants have won the Super Bowl and it’s warm outside. The party has officially started and for two days the discussions help galvanize our key research objectives for several of Manhattan Research’s Global market research studies which are in the late stages of planning. Following the event we finalize programming for questionnaires for 4000 physicians across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The data will be available in Q2 with a rush to get insights to our members. The feedback we receive from events like ePharma Summit is vital to our research and it keeps our firm most relevant in a difficult space. Great conferences provide the necessary chatter on real issues we consider closely with our subscribers and we work closely to address these high curveballs with survey research and advisory content. We even talked to non pharma representatives like Gatorade to hear the thirst quencher’s social strategies and how we can tie them to pharma. Whether the debates range from mobile behavior trends to social media challenges to emerging pain points, all of them seem to involve Facebook and the iPad but we still leverage events like this to continuously map our topical agenda to pressing problems that can be solved realistically with quality research. By late spring we’ll have new data and insights to assist hundreds of healthcare stakeholders and perhaps set the stage for further debate during the key summer and fall events. Perhaps some will even carry over to ePharma Summit ’13. I’ve been attending digital pharma events with Manhattan Research since 2004 and it’s safe to say interest and investment in the space has gained significant momentum, especially in certain areas like mobile and physician customer service. Let’s look forward to studying them closely and answering the call in the months ahead. We can and look back at the February Summit experience to see what we’ve uncovered.

Doctors adopting iPads, so how can hospitals benefit?

Source

In a recent study from Manhattan Research, they found that of 1200 doctors surveyed in five European countries, 20% said they owned iPads and 27% of those doctors use these devices while at work.  An additional 40% planned on buying an iPad in the next 6 months.  According to TUAW, these rates are the same for primary care physicians and specialists.  Their general use is typically researched based, focusing on medical articles and videos and education of the patients.

Interestingly, in the US, some apps have been created in the hospital environment to help the physicians.  In San Diego, the Palomar Pomerado Health Systems in San Diego developed an App that help the doctors within the hospital.  According to PC Advisers,  an app created that pulled information on the patients in their surrounding area in the hospital and delivered their information to the tablet.

Here's how it works:
Physicians log in to the app, which uses location services to generate a list of their patients who are currently in the hospital. The app communicates with patients' RFID wristbands to determine their whereabouts. And the list is auto generated and sorted by patients who are closest in proximity to the doctor accessing the app.

The app gives doctors up-to-date summaries of patient information including allergies, active medications, lab info, recent vital signs, and more. A doctor can drill down into more detail in each area by tapping an icon, to see, for example, data on recent blood tests, prescriptions, various patient charts and notes, and even look at X-rays.

What benefits can both iPad and Android based tablets have for hospitals and physicians?  Will streamlining the systems and platforms have for both patients and doctors?

The Grand Theory of Pharma Marketing

Today's guest post comes from James Ellis. Ellis is the Digital Strategist at closerlook inc. and blogs at digital-pharma.tumblr.com. He also needs more activity on his Twitter account (@digital_pharma) if you'd like to tell him he's wrong. No, really.

Einstein’s last project before he died was the search for the grand unified theory, proving how all the major forces in the universe are related: gravity to the speed of light to the attraction between electrons and everything else. It remains the “holy grail” of physics, something huge, important, and possibly unknowable.

HCP marketing has a grand unified theory that marketers are trying to understand. A unified theory would tell us that a married male gastroenterologist in Alabama with a degree from a public school who works in a small private practice needs X touches before he will change their prescription behavior, but an unmarked female Obstetrician in a large hospital in Seattle will need Y touches.
Our unified theory shows us how tactics are related to each other. If an HCP has seen a complete eDetail, for example, maybe they need five fewer touches than one who has never seen one. What about rep visits? Or conference attendances? How do they all interrelate, and how much work do they do in encouraging behavior, by themselves or in tandem with the other tactics?

It's far easier to think in smaller terms. Here’s a hypothetical campaign: Send a million emails and see how many someone has to get before they’ll go to a web site. How many web visits do they need before they register? How many registrations turn into an eDetail viewing or sample request? How many samples (both with and without a rep visit) will lead to more prescription writing?

We look at these questions in isolation because looking at them in the larger picture is... messy at best, requiring very complex mathematical models. To be fair, if any of us were better at math, we’d probably be engineers instead of marketers. And the kind of math we’re talking about goes beyond the pre-calculus class we took freshman year. And if I had a nickel for every marketer with an MBA who said that they barely passed their stats class, I’d be able to retire. To an island. That I owned.
That’s why companies exist that are full of math nerds who can run modeling data and tell us what our deciles are. They tell us who should be prescribing and aren’t, and who needs a little push based on what data they have available to them.

But again, this is small ball. What if we started thinking big?

What if we took all the data we had... But, we don't have enough data. We need a lot more data, and it's gonna take a little work to get it.

For the next year, every banner ad you put in the field needs to get a dynamic ID number. In places where an HCP has to login, correlate that ID number to the HCP ID. You already know what emails are being sent to that target in your brand, so figure out a way to get all your brands to collect the same data so that you can put it into one big pool. Take all the data the reps send back (oh yeah, you might need to teach reps how to collect info so they can tag and input it into your CRM). Take all your eDetail data. All those business cards you collect at the conference to win a free iPad. All the mailers. All the web traffic (cookies, people). Every giveaway, every teleconference or teledetail, every meal, every pen left behind. All these things are collectible and able to be connected to a given target. Then add everything else you can find out about your target: specialty, school, practice type, practice size, gender, age, geography, marital status, family status, psychographic data about their parents and how they were raised (what, you think that’s not available?), everything. Think like Amazon or Target. Collect every coupon that’s been redeemed, every prescription filled, every visit, everything. We’re playing for the majors now, so stop thinking small.

What could all that data in the hands of serious math nerds tell us? Here’s a sample of the questions they can answer: are reps effective (broken down by specialty, brand, location, practice type)? How many emails does it take before a target prescribes (and how many before they will opt out completely)? Do nurse practitioners ever click on banner ads? Is there value in seeing your brand name again and again on an ad even if it doesn't lead to a click? Which is better: email then a rep visit, or a rep visit and then email? Which works better at a conference: a lot of little trinkets or a chance to win a big prize?

The days when a brand didn't know which half of their marketing was effective is long long gone. These days, we aren't far from knowing if a PCP in New Jersey wants your brand emails every 21 days or every 18 days, and how many they need to receive before a rep shows up to make the visit worth the trip.

But it all starts with thinking big and collecting the data. What data are you collecting? How are you planning on using it?

Maybe you need better answers to those questions.