Developed a Campaign Effectiveness Capability for a Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturer to Accurately Evaluate Promotional Efforts

Creating marketing strategies for pharmaceutical brands is tricky. The pharma industry is a highly regulated and complex domain with various organizations competing against each other, and it requires high ethical standards when it comes to marketing communications. According to an industry report, pharma marketing expenditures have increased by nearly 70% in the last 20 years [1]. And a huge portion of those marketing expenditures is used for marketing directly to HCPs.

However, the way pharma companies interact with HCPs has changed a lot over the last few years. With the outbreak of the pandemic and the proliferation of digital channels, traditional marketing approaches have started losing their efficacy. Direct in-person interactions in the form of field force visits have reduced considerably, and they are replaced by fast and efficient digital platforms that offer more exposure and flexibility. But for pharma marketers, this digital-first approach has brought about a new challenge: how to measure the success of a campaign in this digital environment?

Our client, a renowned global pharmaceutical company with a diversified portfolio of products, was looking for an efficient and accurate framework to measure the effectiveness of a website registration-based promotional campaign targeting HCPs. The client wanted to know whether it was positively influencing HCPs to drive additional sales. To measure the campaign's effectiveness, TheMathCompany designed an intelligent framework that conducts a "lift analysis" on sales data to quantify the increase or decrease in sales.

By partnering with TheMathCompany, the client wanted to:

• Create a new, internal capability for the analytics team
• Evaluate campaign performance in terms of financial impact and sales
• Calculate the lift in sales and how it translates into ROI
• Empower their analytics team with a standardized measurement framework
• Help their marketing team use campaign performance insights for making business decisions

TheMathCompany designed this framework by understanding the end users and placing them at the core of the project. For the client company, their marketing team served as end users. The analytics team’s limited capacity prevented them from collaborating with the marketing team to estimate campaign performance and generate complex, brand-related metrics such as behavioral change, sales lift, and much more. After testing a few different analytical methods internally, TheMathCompany developed a transparent and efficient framework that delivered accurate insights. It received positive feedback from the client, and its wide scope and flexibility also meant it could be scaled into an enterprise-wide, standardized campaign effectiveness measurement framework.

The client's primary objective was to develop a measurement capability that assesses the impact on sales attributable to the continuous promotional campaign targeting HCPs. In the first stage, TheMathCompany worked to understand the client company's challenges with internally developing such a capability. TheMathCompany quickly understood the client's analytics team did not have the necessary bandwidth to develop analytical models that evaluated the long-term performance of a promotional campaign. After several rounds of discussions with the client's marketing and analytics teams, TheMathCompany outlined the initial solution.

In the second stage, TheMathCompany drafted the Statement of Work (SOW) by carefully examining the client’s problem statement and expected outcomes. TheMathCompany identified the level of analytics involvement required to design an effective framework. In this stage, the client’s analytics and marketing teams worked closely with TheMathCompany’s expert team to understand which parameters needed to be used, the level of personalization, KPIs, and other data visualization features.

In the third stage, TheMathCompany’s expert team gathered relevant data related to the promotional campaign. After a few rounds of internal discussions to explore different methodologies, the expert team finally opted for a non-experimental causal inference technique with additional checks to minimize inaccuracies. We decided on a 12-month time period for the analysis and narrowed the analysis down to the significant parameters that translated to a lift in sales.

Also, we used our proprietary AI/ML engine, Co.dx, which includes built-in machine learning accelerators, to produce fast and accurate insights. After running the data through these ML models, we discovered a significant sales lift when comparing pre-campaign to post-campaign periods. The team then quantified and converted the sales lift into a return on investment (ROI) to measure the campaign's performance.

The fourth and final stage of the solutioning journey involved the consumption of the campaign effectiveness measurement framework. TheMathCompany presented the final results – the insights gathered – using a business-focused dashboard. TheMathCompany’s internal consumption team collaborated with the client’s marketing and analytics teams and other stakeholders across several sessions and detailed the process followed to reach those insights. The expert team explained how it segregated the data, what parameters were considered, the reasoning behind choosing them, and how it converted the lift to financial terms. 

The complex nature of the analysis carried over to the consumption of the resulting insights. TheMathCompany conducted multiple sessions to train the client on how to utilize the capability to analyze campaign performance and scale it to other similar campaigns.

Empowering Clients, Through Simplified Decisions

In the initial stages of discovery and experimentation, the client wanted TheMathCompany to build an analytical program that could be migrated to the client environment with results to be showcased using Tableau dashboards. But as the project progressed, TheMathCompany introduced our proprietary AI/ML engine, Co.dx, which includes built-in analytical and data visualization capabilities. With comprehensive AI/ML widgets and solution blueprints built with deep industry expertise, the Co.dx app offered much more flexibility to conduct quick and accurate analysis for complex datasets involving different parameters and showcase the results with dynamic visualization dashboards.

By partnering with TheMathCompany, the client was able to:

- Conduct accurate campaign performance measurement

- Measure lift by integrating complex parameters like NBRx and TRx

- Translate the sales lift to ROI without overlooking critical parameters

- Acquire a standardized capability to measure campaign effectiveness

- Obtain granular insights on the number of targeted HCPs and their behavior changes pre- and post-campaign

TheMathCompany designed the framework to be scalable and extensible. To calculate the ROI, the client initially asked TheMathCompany to consider only one cost driver. However, TheMathCompany understood other factors that also drove costs and built the machine learning models with provisions to accommodate those. TheMathCompany also delivered a dynamic, easy-to-use dashboard that modeled how ROI changed dynamically as other cost factors for the promotional campaign were updated.