This year, the pharmaceutical industry will spend more on its promotional activities than any year before. It’s estimated that the total U.S. promotional spend for 2021 will be around $30 billion. Of that overall total, the advertising spend on healthcare and pharma digital ads is estimated at $11 billion for 2021, an 18% growth over 2020. While those media communications have always been critical to educating patients and their physicians, informing them about disease states and revolutionary treatment options, this year they have been more vital than ever.
However, an increase in promotional spend alone does not equate to an increase in campaign effectiveness. Some recent estimates from U.S. marketers state that 30% of their promotional dollars are wasted on the wrong channels or strategies. That 30% is reaching unsuitable audiences and missing the opportunity to drive disease state or brand awareness with patients or prescribers who need the information. Wasted promotional spend often produces an unsatisfying, negative experience for customers and raises concern that brand messaging is not reaching the right patients and prescribers, while at the same time, negatively impacting the bottom line.
It is difficult to keep track of the performance of all campaign elements that create complexity in diverse media campaigns. It’s no surprise that in 2021, 21% of marketers cited their biggest challenge is providing the return on investment for their marketing activities, and over half – 57% of marketers worldwide -- feel overwhelmed by the volume of incoming data. It can be difficult to find the time to gather any actionable insights when most of the time spent is tracking disparate data sets and attempting to create ad-hoc reports and analysis.
Today, technology is available to solve those challenges. You can connect vast amounts of data across an omnichannel engagement ecosystem, generating precise insights you can use to optimize spend and resources across brand, marketing, and sales teams. You can improve performance and value with greater transparency and speed across your organization.
Taking an Omnichannel approach is to pivot away from the old multichannel model. With more sources of information than ever – digital, personal, events, social media – audiences are gravitating towards channels where they can get what they need, when they need it, in a form they can easily understand. You can no longer indiscriminately push messages through multiple channels and hope they add up to a positive experience that drives business results.
At IQVIA, we stress the importance of having all your marketing data in one platform. Consolidating your marketing data and analytics into one streamlined view makes it much easier to understand channel mix, the different tactics in market, and the relative performance of each individual element of your campaign. In fact, people can process data visualizations and other images 60,000 times faster than text. By platforming and centralizing reporting, it’s easier for our clients to process and accurately understand the measurement we provide to them.
Achieving this view is absolutely an attainable goal and will allow marketing teams and media agencies to spend less time sifting through data and more time shifting investments across partners and tactics. This will ensure they are maximizing every single dollar in the brand’s media budget.
We’re committed to helping you reach the right audience at the right time and cut through the clutter—which brings us to our main goal: informing smarter marketing decisions.
The Omnichannel Marketing team at IQVIA spent the last several years building out a measurement and optimization approach, delivering valuable innovation and solutions that meet the needs of life sciences companies and seamlessly fit into their workflow. With those needs in mind, we designed IQVIA Omnichannel Navigator - a novel platform that brings revolutionary consumer and HCP media optimization experiences into a user-friendly interface. The platform name speaks to how it navigates users to make optimization decisions with pinpoint accuracy, using the best and largest healthcare data sets in the world, and enables them to make informed decisions about their marketing spend at the speed of business.
With IQVIA Omnichannel Navigator, marketers gain access to market-leading, privacy-safe data that’s presented in a personalized and user-friendly interface. This allows stakeholders across multiple organizations to make quick investment pivots and maximize their ROI. With weekly reporting, personalized data visualizations, granularity of data cuts for each channel, and full transparency into the sample sizes being measured, IQVIA Omnichannel Navigator doesn’t require users to choose between speed and accuracy. It enables both.
To find out more about IQVIA Omnichannel Navigator and speak to one of our omnichannel experts, click here.