Interactive and Digital Marketing: Where the customer is

Baxalta’s effort to align its marketing to customer behavior has led the company into unmapped territory for a pharmaceutical company – Instagram.

 

Go to where the customer is, speak how the customer speaks.

Whatever the three or five or seven or 10 golden rules of marketing might be, go to where the customer is, speak how the customer speaks is the zeroth rule, the a priori rule that comes before all the rest. Because unless a marketer goes to where the customer is and communicates in a way she can understand, none of the other rules matter.

This is especially the case for pharmaceutical brand managers. The patients who use our products are becoming more virtually connected every day, more used to speaking in the language of the “selfie” and the “hashtag.” They are seeking out and consuming information in ways that would be incomprehensible to the marketer of five years ago, let alone 25 years ago. No present-day marketer could possibly continue to call Facebook new media while keeping a straight face; for many audiences, in fact, Facebook is already old media. And pharmaceutical companies, charged with communicating messaging that can be critical to the lives and health of its audiences, often struggle to keep up.

Keeping up, though, is just what we must do.

When it was launched as an independent company earlier this year, the leaders of Baxalta seized the moment to take a fresh look at the way they were marketing and communicating with patients. After a review of audiences and methods, it became clear that an opportunity existed in the marketing for Baxalta’s hematology portfolio. A large percentage of hemophilia patients are young – the disease is usually diagnosed by age three, and must be managed for a patient’s entire life. Thus much of Baxalta’s hemophilia audience was of the selfie and hashtag generation, yet the traditional marketing plans did not reflect this fact. E-mail, web-based educational tools, even the more “traditional” forms of social media are yesterday’s news to this part of the patient audience; they have other ways of communicating and collaborating and entirely different expectations when it comes to content consumption. So Baxalta’s hemophilia messaging, however well-intentioned, was simply not reaching a critical part of its audience effectively.

What to do?

We on the Baxalta hemophilia marketing team were forced to ask ourselves a question: “Where and how does this part of our audience communicate?” And with the help of agency partner Intouch Solutions, we found a possible answer: Instagram.

Yes, Instagram is a big reason why your teenage daughter is looking at pictures of her girlfriends on her phone rather than doing her homework. But in this case, that’s exactly its appeal. Instagram is how young people communicate with each other and document their lives today. The service has more than 300 million monthly active users, 90 percent of which are under the age of 35. Those users post something like 70 million photos each day. 56 percent of Instagrammers say that the platform makes them feel more connected to the people they know, and 52 percent agreed that it gives them a sense of community. According to one study, Instagram has an engagement rate nearly sixty times that of other social media networks.

But more important than the statistics, Instagram holds unique appeal because it captures the immediacy of the moment, provides a connection to a likeminded community, and ignites creative expression with its built-in tools for editing and curating images. It is an extraordinary tool for visual and highly personal storytelling.

All this should be getting any good marketer’s blood pumping a little faster. Because we have stories to tell too, stories that can and should be just as visual and personal as anything a teenager might produce. In spite of that fact, though, when we started looking into potentially using Instagram as a channel for Baxalta’s hemophilia communications, we could not find any other pharma company that was using it for brand messaging of any kind.

Surprising? Not really. It’s no secret that pharmaceutical marketing is generally not found at the most progressive edge of new marketing channels and technologies. The industry’s collective concerns regarding regulatory entanglements make for a powerful inertia towards the traditional, the known, the safe.

But in this case, that inertia wasn’t enough to stop us. Instagram was where our patients were, and its reach matched the gap in our old marketing strategy, so the business case for using it was strong. With that in mind, we made it a priority to develop close partnerships with our legal and regulatory teams, to ensure they understood why Instagram was the right way to target this part of our audience. We established a detailed process for content production and deployment and thought through all the scenarios, all the challenges that might arise on a channel like Instagram. Then we showcased it all with the legal and regulatory teams, exploring each scenario and response, the monitoring and moderation process, the need for 24- to 48-hour legal/regulatory review. And at the end of the day, we got the buy-in we needed and formed a strong partnership with our legal and regulatory colleagues.

How was this achieved? We had a general sense going in of what our content buckets were going to be and what sorts of things we would want to showcase. All that became part one of our initial presentation to the legal and regulatory team – an overview of general content for the first 12 months, the hashtags and images and language we’d be using. And since Baxalta has used Facebook as a marketing channel in the past, the legal and regulatory team already has an expedited review process in place for social media channels, so what we were proposing wasn’t completely outside their experience. Legal and regulatory still has to approve everything that goes up on Instagram, but they’ve been so involved in the process that nothing they see should surprise them – since we’ve already set the baseline and given the general overview, the typical response from legal and regulatory is, “Yes, because I’ve already seen that.”

But moving into Instagram wasn’t just a matter of convincing legal and regulatory. We also had to develop a thorough understanding of the behaviors and demographics of the Instagram audience and how they engage with the channel and each other. Developing such an understanding required a commitment to research – testing and learning, testing and learning again, testing and learning some more. One of the wonderful things about any social channel, Instagram in particular, is the ability to test and learn in real time, daily or even hourly. So rather than kicking off with some monolithic blast of material, we were able to push out content a little bit at a time and let our audience tell us what was working and what wasn’t. Based on that, we adjusted and expanded.

Our Instagram campaign began this past May after about six months of preparation. By the end of September, our content had received just short of 39,000 Instagram likes, an average of about 312 per photo, and 576 Instagram comments, about 4.6 per photo. Our engagement rate as a percentage of followers was just over 300 percent.

Of course, these numbers are not the end of the story. Our commitment to Instagram isn’t tied to a discrete period of time or some target level of engagement; as long as it remains the channel of choice for an important part of our patient audience, it’ll be a part of our marketing strategy, and we will continue to test and learn and respond as necessary.

Now, none of this should be taken to mean that we are preaching the gospel of Instagram to the exclusion of other things – in fact, Instagram is only one of many channels we are using to communicate with our hemophilia audiences. The gospel we are preaching is that of understanding how one’s various audiences communicate and finding the best ways to meet them there in a holistic, multi-channel effort. In our case, one of the outcomes of that understanding was Instagram; in your brand’s case it may mean something entirely different. But we as an industry cannot afford to allow tradition and fear to keep us from the channels that our own patients are using. We need to religiously follow that zeroth rule of marketing and be where our patients are. The COI – cost of ignoring – is, well, too high to ignore.  medadnews

 

Rebeca Bechily is group marketing manager at Baxalta US Inc.