5 Tips for Emerging Biotechs: How to Maximize HCP and DTC Media Investments

Emerging biotechs are innovating at a fast pace, accounting for 52% of FDA approvals in the past three years. While all biopharma marketers need to understand the impact patient and HCP media has on business outcomes, emerging biotechs — and smaller to mid-size biopharmas — are under even more pressure given limited budgets and smaller teams. Marketers from Corcept Therapeutics, a company in the rare disease space focused on cortisol modulation, and Dynavax Technologies, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical that focuses on adult vaccines, share how they are working with Veeva Crossix to successfully leverage marketing analytics tied to health metrics to build a foundation, optimize performance, and validate their marketing investments.

1. Build a foundation for making the right investments

Establishing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, is the first step in developing a strong base for your marketing investments. This means answering two questions: Does media matter to the patient and the healthcare professional (HCP), and is media driving actual business outcomes? The right data can provide answers so you can be confident about where you are investing money and what the expected outcome will be.

2. Understand your patient journey

A large part of building a strong foundation is knowing when you should reach patients with media to help appropriately influence their decision to start treatment. Eleni Kornblatt, vice president of commercial strategy and new products at Dynavax Technologies, stresses the importance of understanding your patient's journey. “We try very hard to understand when the provider is recommending the vaccine and when the patient is asking for the vaccine, and that’s where we put our investments,” she says. “We then measure those investments to prove that's where we’re driving impact and where our investments should be.”

For Myles Lawless, senior director, head of digital and omnichannel marketing at Corcept Therapeutics, this looks a bit different. “In the rare disease space, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” he says. “We don’t have massive budgets, and the journey for patients in rare diseases is not linear — it can be five plus years for a person with a rare disease to be accurately diagnosed.” In addition, rare disease is often about establishing awareness of the disease before driving people to start on treatment, and the patient populations are small.

Therefore, his team embraces a test and learn approach to look at various channels and determine if that’s where they need to be. They test, measure, and then decide whether it’s positively or negatively impacting strategic objectives. “Omnichannel for us doesn’t necessarily mean all channels, but rather what channels are most relevant for our audience,” says Lawless.

3. Quantify results to know what works and what doesn’t

The right measurement is essential to identifying what’s working — and what’s not working — throughout the life of your campaign. Top-of-the-funnel metrics can help you answer questions like whether you’re reaching the right audience. In Crossix Measurement, you can set up different audience quality metrics that help you understand the type of patient you are reaching such as if they are diagnosed with a specific condition, or if they’ve received a previous vaccine. You can then substantiate and correlate it to your outcomes to identify that leading indicator.

For example, looking at the vaccine journey, the patient might go to the healthcare provider who recommends a vaccine, yet the patient might receive the vaccine in a retail location. Crossix can connect the claims data and the visit to show that a patient saw a healthcare provider and then, three weeks later, got the vaccine. The healthcare provider is then credited for providing that influence along the journey. Connections like these can be especially helpful in validating marketing investments.

There are also many factors influencing patients and doctors when it comes to starting a treatment plan or receiving a vaccine. Therefore, having data to better understand those factors and the conversion impact can help you see if your investments are in the right place or need to change. “Even if you see a lift in your business, you may not be able to say it’s from your media activity,” says Kornblatt. “With Crossix we can measure if a patient is exposed to the campaign and then gets a vaccine versus someone who is not exposed to the campaign and also receives a vaccine,” she says. “This gives us the lift.” With data to prove impact, her team has the confidence to say where they should spend their next dollar. “Without that data, the business case is not as strong,” she says.

4. Optimize your marketing campaigns to maximize your dollars

Once you have your foundation, in-flight optimizations can help maximize the impact of your HCP and DTC marketing dollars. Weekly insights from Crossix help both Kornblatt and Lawless make these timely and informed data-driven decisions. Kornblatt and her team look at leading indicators such as audience quality and engagement on the vaccine website. Patients who are on a website for 30 to 40 seconds are probably scheduling a vaccine appointment. The team can then follow that patient journey and tie high-value site actions to health behavior using lagging indicators in Crossix such as visiting a doctor or receiving the vaccine.

When it comes to leading indicators, Lawless stresses the importance of defining what success looks like so you can figure out how to best measure it. “When I’m reviewing website audience engagement, it’s okay if I don't see deep time on site, but instead I’m seeing a high-value action like downloading a specific piece of content or enrolling in a particular program,” he says. “If we can get them through that key process as quickly as possible, we can then follow up with them and build a relationship.”

“Crossix also helps us test different hypotheses,” he says. “For example, we can see if a certain media tactic leads to a specific outcome and see if there is any correlation or causation.”

5. Defend and validate your marketing investments

When it comes to providing information to senior leaders, both Lawless and Kornblatt agree that it’s essential to move beyond vanity metrics like impressions or click-throughs and translate results into a language that they can react to. “We are confident that we understand our target audience, in our case, the wellness seeker,” says Kornblatt. “We can point to the leading indicators to confidently say we're reaching patients with the highest propensity to convert.”

While the data provides Lawless and his team good insight into their current state, it also helps them validate expansion into new areas. For example, he is trying to get a better understanding of the symbiotic relationship Venn Diagram of how digital non personal promotions and Corcept’s field team drive audience engagement. “A lot of the work that we do with Crossix is to figure out who is exposed to media and our field colleagues, who is exposed only to the field, and who is exposed only to media,” he says. “We can then create hypotheses and determine further tests to see if we should shift anything.” From there he and his team know how they need to pivot moving forward. “You can learn a lot from both your successful tests and your failures,” he says.

Key takeaways

Emerging biotechs and smaller to mid-size biopharmas often need to do a lot with less people and budget. That’s why the right measurement is even more important for making confident decisions backed by data that can help maximize marketing dollars.

“Resist the temptation to be in all channels,” says Lawless. “Start small, pick a few key channels, test and measure them, see what you learn, and then build over time. This can help you realize quick wins to show value, that you moved the needle, and are certain about what to do next.”

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