page 1©2010 closerlook, inc. closerlook.com

Everything about being a good, sophisticated marketer within pharma for the next decade or more will be about better understanding physicians—at the physician level, not in aggregate—and what they need to practice medicine, as well as determining how you, your products and your company can help them. eDetailing, for all its perceived faults, has provided great initial opportunities for pharma to better understand its physicians, provided it is enlisted as the true relationship marketing force it can be. And, eDetailing may provide a solid step toward generating critical and continuous physician insight that can be used to create new opportunities of competitive advantage.

I know all about eDetailing, but why should I believe it is better than any other tactic?The truth is, it may not be—it really depends on how you’ve implemented it and what success measures you’ve put in place. The interesting thing about eDetailing is that in any given program, there exist several touch points with a physician across a set period of time and through a variety of channels:

• Recruitment (e-mail, direct mail, web, SEM, rep- delivered invites)

• Content engagement (website, eDetail viewing, Q&A, surveys)

• Fulfillment (rep follow-up, honoraria delivery, sample delivery)

• Re-recruitment/retention (e-mail, direct mail)

That’s several opportunities to make a brand impression, and several opportunities to learn a lot more about the physician you’re targeting. The amount of behavioral visibility you have into ALL of those touch points is a key indicator of how strategically valuable the program can be. Good programs provide a lot of visibility, with clean physician-level data, and bad programs provide little or no visibility at the physician level. Visibility is important in order to assess the relative efficacy of all of the sub-components that make up the program. Ultimately it can lead to physician-level profiles that indicate channel preference, promotional sensitivity, message preference and overall level of engagement.

Get the gold.Make sure your eDetailing programs help you uncover valuable insights to properly engage physicians.

Get the gold. Make sure your eDetailing programs help you uncover valuable insights to properly engage physicians.

page 2©2010 closerlook, inc. closerlook.com

There are a lot of data from a single tactic, much more than are generally obtained from any stand-alone tactic, and data are critical in making informed marketing decisions. Unfortunately, most programs are rarely established with full data transparency being a key success measure, relying instead on the binary pass/fail nature of ROI, so most product managers never end up pressing for this level of insight.

Ok, so now I get that eDetailing can provide a lot of data, but seriously, what do you expect me to do with them? I’ve only got so much time in my day.Unfortunately, this is what we hear more frequently than we’d like, and it’s a view (you should know) that is shared by many eDetailing companies (“…they’ll never do anything with that information anyway…”).

The question you need to ask yourself is, “Do I think I have enough information to know that I’m making the best use of my marketing investment?” Most likely your answer will be “no” because most of us are operating on the “go with what you’ve got principle.” But let’s examine what you might be able to learn by conducting a good eDetailing program, what the data might tell you and what you might be able to do with them:

Transactional/relationship data• Clicks• Open rates• Promotional response• Time on site• Channel preference• Number of solicitations to cause a return visit• Opt-ins, opt-outs• Follow-up requests

All of this amounts to extremely valuable insight into what it takes to enroll and keep physicians in your program. It’s also, incidentally, what most third-party tactic providers charge you hand-somely for, because they use all of this information to maintain their relationships with physicians, which they in turn rent to you. It’s a strategic deci-sion to determine whether your company wants this insight for itself, but until you do have it, you will always have to pay for it and it’s only going to get more costly as access becomes a tougher issue. Beyond cost alone, this information can be used to more selectively work with list vendors and chan-nel partners to maximize your reach and frequency, in ways that find your target physicians with greater efficiency.

Get the gold. Make sure your eDetailing programs help you uncover valuable insights to properly engage physicians.

page 3©2010 closerlook, inc. closerlook.com

Behavioral/observational data • Content preference

(charts, illustrations, text, audio, video)• Click paths• Engagement• Prescribing behavior

Why put a lot of time and investment into video when your physicians would rather download and read a study? Or perhaps some of your primary care physicians enjoy podcasts, and some specialists would like to see a video presentation by a national key opinion leader? Beyond listening to what physicians tell us they like, watching them to see what they do tells us a lot about where we should invest, and what types of media we may want to merchandise to a specific physician upon his or her return to the website. People like to learn and be informed in different ways, and physicians are no different. The bottom line is, getting a physician’s attention is pretty difficult these days—getting the next part right with the content is pretty important to keep them coming back.

Attitudinal data• Survey response

• Q&A

Much like your qualitative and quantitative studies, but without the rigor of a formal market research effort, this information rounds out the data you’ve already collected on participating physicians to help explain what is apparently important to them. This mitigates the need to project responses to a larger population of physicians—these folks have told you directly what they care about, giving you a wonderful opportunity to respond and enrich the experience for them.

Fine, I get all this, but it all seems like a lot of work. Why should I care?Well, the simple truth is everything in pharma marketing is changing at some level, and no one really knows how it’s all going to shake out. We feel this every day and it’s making it increasingly harder to know what to do next. For several years there existed fairly tried and true marketing approaches to pre-launch, launch, new indications and late life-cycle conditions. But now, with smaller markets, tighter budgets, decreased access and legislative and regulatory pressures, it’s not as easy to know what will necessarily work. We really don’t have much choice but to raise the level of intimacy with physicians so we know how to serve them better, and ultimately, how we can help them serve their patients better.

Done, I’m sold, what do I do next?If you’re currently conducting eDetailing programs, do an assessment of the level of data you’re getting from your partner. The e-mail address of your participants is important and should be mandatory for any program, as is the physician’s individual identity. Be wary of any partner that refuses to share this information. Audit what additional transactional/relationship data are available to you so that you can better assess how each participant interacts with your program. Match this information up against your learning objectives for the program, and test the value of that information by assessing how it provides value to and informs other tactics.

Get the gold. Make sure your eDetailing programs help you uncover valuable insights to properly engage physicians.

page 4©2010 closerlook, inc. closerlook.com

If you’re new to eDetailing, resist the urge to do a pilot. There’s really nothing new to learn here structurally, and most eDetailing pilots are really code for underfunded budgets and loose objectives. Experience has demonstrated that these programs work if the objectives are sufficiently thought out ahead of time and the programs themselves are well executed. If you have concerns about primary care physician vs. specialist response rates, recruitment or honoraria options, or media to enlist, speak to a seasoned eDetailing provider who will be able to fill you in.

Finally, be clear about what you want to learn about your physicians, in addition to your required ROI thresholds. Make a list, and hold the program to it. Be honest with yourself about the company’s ability to react to the information you obtain, and push as hard as you can for a highly personalized experience. Your physicians will appreciate it and will reward you with their participation.

Jon Sawyer, Principal Jon Sawyer is the Practice Lead for closerlook’s pharmaceutical practices and oversees the delivery of all marketing programs at closerlook. A marketing strategist by trade, he

is instrumental in creating and delivering innovative marketing solutions for healthcare clients.

Jon has extensive experience with integrated marketing-strategy development, communications, data-segmentation analysis and digital strategy. He has over 14 years of experience in business planning and marketing-communications development within the healthcare industry. His clients include Astellas Pharma US, Inc., TAP Pharmaceuticals, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Ortho-Biotech, Novo Nordisk, Santarus, Inc., Ther-Rx, Abbott Laboratories, Eli Lilly and others. Jon holds an M.S. in Integrated Marketing from Northwestern University.

Want to continue this discussion? Get in touch with jon sawyer at jsawyer@closerlook.com.