The dilemma of defining the ROI of a digital marketing campaign for a pharma marketer

Understanding the ROI of digital marketing campaigns in pharma is like unveiling the holy grail for pharma marketers. But before we divulge the holy grail, let’s understand the HCP journey from the lens of a pharma marketer.?

The focus of any pharma marketing activity is to influence the opinion and behavior of the HCP in their decision-making journey. As product managers, they try to create different pieces of content around the brand, molecules, and evidence-based studies, conduct CME programs, introduce the benefits via a medical rep, etc. All the content is created and marketed with a single hope of awareness about the brand or molecule among the HCP group. Now it is difficult to exactly pinpoint which activity helped the HCP to explore and prescribe the brand. The problem is we cannot keep digital marketing activities in silos during this ROI calculation. In the current scenario, most pharma marketers are keeping digital marketing activities in silos, and then wondering why it is not able to generate any impact.?

Another problem the pharma marketer is confronted with is how to define the KPIs for digital activity. Most digital marketing agencies understand how to use digital marketing for promotion and conversation, but they are unable to understand the modus operandi of pharma marketing. While most pharma marketers understand medico marketing, they are not able to connect this with digital marketing. This has led most pharma marketers to abide by KPIs used by FMCG or allied industries. This mismatch has led to the bigger problem, of digital not working in pharma marketing.?

Instead, we as pharma marketers need to define the exact challenge or problem statement. Here are a couple of thoughts on how we can define the challenge statement:

• Doctor engagement –Are we faced with a challenge wherein the doctor is not interacting with the medical rep? Is there an impact on the number of physical meetings with the medical rep? If the answer is, yes, then we can create a solution that can help us engage with the doctor.?
• Doctor prescription – Are we marketing a new product? Has the doctor stopped prescribing our product? It is important to understand the WHY behind this problem before we create our marketing strategy.?
• New brand in a new category – Often companies launch new brands in totally new categories, here the problem is meeting new doctors, building relationships, and then introducing our brand. The approach for this challenge is different from the other two challenges.

The core idea is how we understand the brand challenge. As Albert Einstein said a long time back “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,”.?

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