Balancing Sales And Marketing Investments In Pharma
Challenge
- A leading biopharmaceutical company in the US wanted to understand the effectiveness of their marketing and sales activities across both patient and physician segments.
- They were also interested in the role of both disease awareness and drug specific websites in the patient journey.
- In addition to both segment and patient journey insights, measurement needed to be provided at the geographic level to understand the role of detailing and sampling.
- Finally, all these insights needed to be understood in the context of the drug lifecycle and inform budget optimization at each main stage of market development.
Solution
- Advanced dynamic multi-level hierarchical bayes models were built to understand the dynamics driving Rx volumes between two main physician segments (PCP’s and Specialists) and types of marketing and sales spend within and across DMAs. This enabled the client to identify what portion of Rx were driven by marketing vs. drug detailing in the short-term. Dynamic brand models were then developed to identify the impact of brand equity and patient perceptions in the long-term.
- Leveraging the modeling results and the Marketscience SimOpt tool, the client’s marketing mix was optimized across online and offline channels and DMAs. We also provided them with detailed insights around specific media performance improvement strategies balancing the short- and long-term.
- The insights suggested some significant changes to the balance of detailing vs sampling by physician segment so the dynamic cross-market structure of the models was leveraged to support a test and learn approach to implementing the changes and further refine the optimization.
Results
- 5% increase in Rx volume driven by measuring the interaction of paid and owned channels
- 12% ROI increase when reallocating same budget towards optimizing site traffic by physician segment