Finally, big data’s role in the massive world of pharma advertising is reaching an inflection point – and it has less to do with generative AI than you might readily assume. Media spend statistics from earlier this year raised eyebrows when they signaled this outlook, indicating that the pharmaceutical industry had surpassed tech to become the second largest ad spender. Spending by pharma is up across all media types, while brands are increasingly looking to advertise across a full range of channels.

The real reason pharma companies are investing more in advertising is thanks in large part to increasingly sophisticated ways of using real-world data (RWD) to understand these campaigns’ impact and how to optimize them. From the perspectives of the industry’s biggest players, it’s real-world data that holds the key to driving advertising ROI and, ultimately, improving patient outcomes.

An RWD Revolution in ROI

As pharma advertisers race to perfect their omnichannel execution, RWD – from electronic health records, claims data, patient registries, wearables, social media data, and more – offers the ability to create meaningful metrics for pharma specifically, far beyond the high level brand awareness and click analytics previously available.

Real-world data, of course, has existed since the inception of the healthcare insurance industry. But, as Havas’s Chief Activation Officer, Mike Bregman, very recently explained, there’s been a disparity between the activation of buying, planning, and targeting in media versus the reporting, measurement, and optimizations that happen post-campaign. Historically, companies would get a market analysis around once a year and try to use sparse insights to help build out a plan.

Today, things are different. Thanks to increased interoperability of RWD and digital data assets, these disparate datasets can now be integrated together to answer previously unanswerable questions. Pharma marketing organizations today can use RWD to understand patients’ channel preferences and shift tactics during campaigns to drive the best engagement.

Whether it’s understanding which doctors to engage with a personalized message on their phone or getting the right educational materials in the aisles of the right pharmacy, RWD can help advertisers both target more effectively and craft campaign messaging.

But even with these vastly increased capabilities, capitalizing on this potential game-changer is dependent upon two things: one, having the right data; and two, knowing how to use it. Whether accessing RWD through healthcare institutions, public health databases, or partnering with a data provider, advertisers must first be certain they’re tapping high-quality and HIPAA-compliant data.

Beyond compliance, though, there’s an art to leveraging RWD for achieving meaningful insights, for making more informed decisions, and for creating more impactful advertising campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for boosting ROI through real-world data.

Enhancing Targeting through Audience Segmentation

For pharma advertisers, the strategic RWD roadmap starts with effective data analysis and segmentation. Whoever you’ve partnered with to access RWD, pharma advertisers will need to lean on expert personnel or cutting-edge analytics tools to integrate and harmonize disparate data for meaningful analysis.

Through streamlined, adept analysis, RWD can enable advertisers to vastly enhance their patient and provider strategy. RWD can provide detailed insights into patient demographics, medical history, and treatment responses, helping companies understand which patient subgroups or populations are most likely to benefit from which medications. Analysis can identify gaps in patient care and unmet medical needs while offering geographic insights into which regions exhibit higher prevalence rates of certain conditions. Advertisers can also explore RWD to identify the frequency of comorbidities – or co-occurring health conditions – in certain populations.

Segmenting their audiences according to these factors, advertisers should aim to form highly targeted campaigns around granular understandings of specific healthcare challenges, the geographic locations of relevant patients and providers, and which patient populations tend to suffer from a combination of health risks. Utilizing certain tools or platforms, advertisers can also use predictive modeling to forecast future treatment outcomes and adherence rates for their target audience, proactively tailoring strategies to emerging issues.

Effectively reaching healthcare providers (HCPs) to increase prescription rates for the right medications is now especially critical both to commercialization and improved patient outcomes. Advertisers should aim to tailor campaigns to HCPs by first assessing the effectiveness of treatments through RWD and then providing practitioners with evidence-based information on which medications will produce positive outcomes.

The compound effect of this approach allows for the creation of all sorts of additional layers of analysis, including a better understanding of the relationships between individual healthcare providers and the system they operate in. This can include things like mining claims activity to understand the full range of facilities providers operate across. With this info, they can map out the appropriate touchpoints for campaigns.

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Refining Messaging and Planning Your Multichannel Approach

Moving onward from data-driven planning to strategy implementation and testing, advertisers must next harness the trove of insights they’ve gleaned to strategize for multichannel marketing and perfect their messaging. The RWD insights you’ve gathered on your different populations should direct companies as they nail down which advertising channels they’re going to prioritize for what. Having the right message in the right place at the right time has everything to do with choosing the right mediums – be it digital marketing, social media, email marketing, direct mail, or others. This in turn depends on where patients and HCPs are most active and engaged.

Once you’ve decided on the right channels, turn your focus to communication. Today’s winners in pharma advertising are going to be able to deliver appropriately tailored messages to their different patient segments. These messages will highlight how a particular treatment addresses that subgroup’s particular needs, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Enhanced messaging not only means personalized communication but also knowing when to deliver the message and how the right communication at the right time can steer patients towards better outcomes. Pharma advertisers must place special focus on treatment journey mapping to identify key moments in the physician-patient interaction. By examining RWD drawn from claims data, for example, companies can pinpoint patterns of healthcare utilization, tracing and timing event sequences from visits to healthcare providers, hospital admissions, and emergency room visits. With this info, advertisers can deliver messages tailored to each stage of the treatment pathway.

In our experience, RWD from claims data can also really help companies understand and manage obstacles that arise along treatment journeys. For example, non-adherence – or, when a patient abandons a drug or therapy – is an ever-present threat to patient outcomes. RWD can help identify factors that contribute to non-adherence and inform the development of adherence-focused educational advertising campaigns. While these tactics have historically been the preserve of market access teams, marketers who are thinking about their total addressable market need to understand what share of patients are going elsewhere because their insurance turns them away, or because the out-of-pocket cost is too high.

Campaign implementation and analyzing performance

Even as marketing teams move to implement their data-driven campaigns, the process remains one of trial and refinement. Maximize your ROI by continually querying the data, creating hypotheses, and testing them out.

This starts with assessing RWD for treatment outcomes among your target audience to see if patients are experiencing the benefits you’re promoting. It also means monitoring your data for any safety concerns or negative outcomes that arise. Whenever possible, use patient satisfaction surveys and all patient-reported outcome measures from RWD to measure the impact of the treatment on patients’ Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL).

In other words, from the very start companies should look to set KPIs to measure the success of their campaigns and consistently evaluate these results. Pharma advertisers should maintain a feedback loop and be ready to modify accordingly.

In the end, campaign effectiveness is all about positive patient outcomes. So, take a close look at your partnerships and process. Educate your team on the benefits and challenges of using RWD. Verify that you’ve got high-quality, compliant RWD, that you’re dynamically updating this data, and that you’re integrating its insights into each component of your business process. Pharma advertisers can see the chance to make impactful change – now they must be sure they’ve got the know-how.

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