Marketing and Patient Compliance

An increase of as little as 5% in patient adherence can contribute an additional $30-40 million to the bottom line every year.



An increase of as little as 5% in patient adherence can contribute an additional $30-40 million to the bottom line every year.

Working in analytics all day, we deal with so much complex information... I like things to be simple. Here are three simple things you can do to enhance the impact of your marketing now.

1. The more your target audience sees your name, the more familiar they become with you and the more likely they are to think of your brand rather than a competitor brand. We actually see this with our analytics in the advertising area more than any other. Advertising works, certainly, but it has to reach a threshold level to work effectively. We see that if effort behind advertising is minimal, the impact is simply not there. However, after a certain threshold is reached, it has strong impact (assuming the rest of it is right right message, right target audience, etc). You can get all the rest right with advertising but until it is seen enough times, you dont see the results. If you only show a TV commercial once, do you think you will get a result? Maybe, but it would have to be an extremely outstanding campaign! The reality is that you probably would not get a result. This is actually relevant to results measurement also. In our field, we cannot measure client brand results reliably until they are in the field for about six weeks; before that, we can't get an accurate reading on the impact of new messages or impact of a marketing activity. Things take time to gel, and if you do something and attempt to measure the results after one week, you may be seriously undercutting the ability for maximum results. Keep going.

2. Measure the financial impact of your marketing not just response rates or interactions. This is the difference between 'activity tracking' and 'real return' measurement. The CFO doesnt care if many physicians went to the symposia and said they liked it; what he cares about is how much extra money came in after you did it. It doesnt matter if there were only a few if they brought in so much in increased prescribing that it not only paid for the costs of the marketing but also brought in a serious amount of additional profit. Don't worry about interaction numbers. Make sure you generate at least five times what you spent on the marketing activity and you will be successful.

3. It is easier to keep a patient than get a new one. I know I keep going on about patient adherence but when you think about how much money is spent trying to find new customers and, yet, around 50% of patients stop taking their medication in the first 3 to 12 months, consider how much money is being wasted. This is like a bucket full of sand (sand represents new patients). We are busy shoveling sand on top of the bucket but the bucket has a massive hole in the bottom and 50% of the sand keeps falling out. Plug the hole! If the industry increased patient adherence by as little as 5%, an additional $30-40 million would be added to the bottom line every year.

In two step marketing, step one is to get them interested and step two is having them speak to a representative to get all the details -- and get "closed" by that representative. Keep the simple things in mind when planning your marketing and it can reap big rewards. For further information, please contact Dr. Andree K. Bates of Eularis, at www.eularis.com.