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Aug 18, 2023

How marketing automation can help rare disease companies break through

How marketing automation can help rare disease companies break through By Ravi

How marketing automation can help rare disease companies break through

By Ravi Singh

By definition, a rare disease is a medical condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. So, for pharmaceutical commercial teams promoting rare disease products, finding the patients who need these innovative therapies can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Traditional pharmaceutical sales and marketing approaches will be inefficient when trying to reach such a small population. To maximize efficiency and effectiveness of commercial efforts, commercial leaders must take a creative approach to their targeting strategy. In many cases, this means identifying patients before they are even diagnosed with a rare disease. This approach requires providing health care practitioners (HCPs) with disease-awareness education in addition to traditional product marketing. And, to reach patients before diagnosis, commercial teams must get in front of a broad group of primary care physicians in addition to the specialists who treat the rare disease.

Marketing automation can help commercial teams engage effectively with a large number of HCPs. With a marketing automation effort, a commercial team can share relevant educational materials with HCPs in a digital format and monitor engagement to identify the highest priority physicians, which can inform the field sales force's efforts.

Particularly for pharma companies with limited resources – which is commonly the case for companies developing rare disease products – marketing automation allows them to deploy their often-small sales forces more effectively, and helps reps prioritize their efforts.

Following a three-step approach, a rare disease company can deploy a robust marketing automation effort that drives commercial success.

Step 1: Uncover the customer journey

Implementing a marketing automation program starts with analysis of the customer (i.e., HCP) journey. The commercial and marketing teams should work together to divide their target list into groups based on where each target is in their journey. For example, the HCPs could be sorted by those who are:

To categorize targets into these groups, pharma companies should use prescribing history, call history and engagement with previous marketing programs, along with any other customer data to which they have access. Additionally, the sales force is a valuable source of knowledge on a company's targets. The commercial team should capture local knowledge from the sales force and use that information to further inform the customer journey.

Step 2: Build a content library

The next step in developing a marketing automation program is to create the content for the campaign. Because a marketing automation program requires frequent digital touchpoints to generate useful engagement data, marketing teams must develop a wide range of materials about both the product and the disease – from educational articles to product efficacy data to detailed case studies.

And the content should take multiple formats. In addition to emails, the company should consider a product website as well as articles on third-party platforms. It's crucial that the team is able to track engagement data (i.e., email opens, clicks, webpage bounce rates, etc.) across all its content.

As the marketing team develops content, it must think about the flow of HCPs through the customer journey. If an HCP is starting out in the first group – unaware of the disease – the company should first serve unbranded content about the rare disease. If the HCP engages with that first piece of content, they should be sent more detailed content about the disease and how to identify patients. As the HCP continues to engage, the company can begin to introduce the product and share treatment advice.

Companies should serve HCPs starting in one of the other groups – where they are aware of the product or prescribing it – more detailed and product-specific content from the start.

Finally, the marketing and commercial teams must develop content for HCPs who don't initially engage with the campaign. For example, if a physician doesn't open an email, the team should consider sending the same email with a new subject line a week later. And, if they still don't open the email, the team could serve them new content at a later date. It is important to continue contacting HCPs who don't engage for two reasons:

Step 3: Measure, refine, and repeat

Once the commercial and marketing teams have mapped the customer journey, grouped the targets, and developed content to reach HCPs at the various stages of the journey, one more step remains before a company can launch its marketing automation campaign. The marketing and commercial teams must decide how many digital engagements should take place before they flag an HCP as "high priority" and pass them along to the sales force.

Once the teams determine this threshold number, the company should launch its marketing automation campaign and begin a thorough measurement effort. By collecting and reviewing comprehensive campaign data, the company can begin to identify trends that help it improve the campaign over time. For example, it might find that certain specialty HCPs have a higher propensity to prescribe a company's product than primary care physicians, regardless of engagement. The team should share that data with the sales force to help them prioritize their targets and call on the specialty HCPs first.

Companies should experiment to perfect this engagement threshold number over time. For example, if reps are falling behind in their follow-up efforts or express that the leads are not as interested as anticipated, the commercial and marketing teams should increase the threshold. Alternatively, if they set the bar too high and end up passing few HCPs to the field sales team, they should consider lowering the engagement threshold.

Companies can also use data to refine their efforts with HCPs who are not engaging with the campaign. Over time, data analysis can help companies identify the best cadence at which to follow up on unopened emails or to pinpoint the best day and time to reach physicians each week.

Once the marketing automation program has been launched and the company has measured results and refined the program based on data, it must ensure the campaign is set up in a continuous cycle. To maximize the effectiveness of the campaign, a field visit should trigger the transition of the HCP into a new category on the customer journey, which then leads to new digital promotion. For example, if an HCP who started in the "unaware of the disease" group engaged with the program and was visited by a rep, that HCP should now be considered ready to diagnose and moved into the next group on the customer journey. Following the rep visit, the HCP should receive new content related to their new position on the customer journey map. If the teams are not aligned, HCPs can fall off the radar after reaching a certain point in a customer journey or can receive mixed messages from the marketing and commercial teams.

Best practices to maximize marketing automation effectiveness

Implementing a marketing automation program and using it to drive sales force activity with HCPs can generate commercial results. In one case, a rare disease manufacturer we worked with found HCPs who had engaged with digital marketing materials and then called on by the sales force were six times more likely to enroll new patients than those who had only been visited by a rep but did not engage with the marketing automation program.

Companies considering implementing marketing automation for rare disease promotion should keep in mind these best practices:

Rare disease companies have a valuable mission to get their therapies to the patients who desperately need them. But with such a small target audience, and often limited resources, identifying those patients is a challenge. A marketing automation campaign can arm the commercial team with valuable engagement data to help them better prioritize targets and more easily find the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Ravi Singh is an associate manager at Beghou Consulting.