How Pharma Companies Can Make the Most of Online Insights

Brand health

Some things have remained unchanged by the pandemic, like the importance of tracking brand health. This can incorporate a wide range of metrics which will differ depending on the organization and their objectives. For pharmaceutical companies, common ways to check on brand health will include general brand monitoring over time, keeping an eye on conversations or news clippings around CEOs, and checking on the reception of earning reports (among many other activities).

Top tips for improving brand health measurement:

• If your brand health measurement isn’t teaching you anything, it’s time to rebuild it. It’s an easy thing to kick down the road, particularly in times of crisis. But reliable brand health tracking can help set the pace and keep a business accountable to its objectives.
• On-the-go measurement and long-term analysis are equally valuable. Ensure that brand health performance can be checked at any time, but also set up regular reporting for key stakeholders. The key to the cadence of brand health insights is to ensure they reach decision-makers at the right time, when action can be taken.
• Set up alert systems to keep track of brand health in real-time. Using a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research, Alerts and Signals can be set up to warn stakeholders of changes in the online data. For example, an article containing reference to a key initiative from a prominent journalist or a sudden increase in negativity coming from a particular forum.

Data-driven comms

Suddenly, consumers are familiar with terms like hydroxychloroquine and ‘R number’. They’re concerned about immunity, health, and ingredients, and emotions are running high.

For pharma companies, navigating all this from a communications point of view has been (and will continue to be) treacherous. When should they respond to public outcry? What product announcements should be made? What donations to charity or health organizations might be well received by the public? Neat processes that saw comms teams and analysts through before have become obsolete, unable to handle the demand.

And, while decisions are being debated, there are the risks of chastisement for silence and misinformation filling the gap.

Top tips for effective communication:

• Competitor analysis can be incredibly useful when assessing whether or not your brand should be active within a conversation. Examine previous events that have similarities to the current situation. How were communications received? Being proactive with this kind of analysis means you can plan, knowing the potential risks and rewards of speaking up.
• Timing and tone of voice are key considerations. This can be influenced by the competitor analysis mentioned above, but make sure to check the mood of conversations you’re seeing. Even if you’ve got a positive initiative to share, the wrong tone of voice could spark a backlash.
• Take this opportunity to level up on agility. The world is moving fast, but pharma tends to move slow. Try to chip away at the processes that slow down effective communications.

Understanding key opinion leaders

The basics of influencer marketing might seem a far cry from the needs of a pharmaceutical brand, but discovering and monitoring key opinion leaders is an important use case for the industry.

This is not just about finding influential advocates and detractors for products (although that is part of it). Most important is to find key influencers and groups of influencers talking about your category or area of interest and understanding what they’re saying. These conversations might be positive, negative, emotive, or misinformed, but all are vital to getting the full picture.

Again, this might not apply to particular products – it could apply to any topic of interest. Perhaps it’s politicians talking about their worries around a Covid-19 vaccine, key healthcare practitioners discussing the pros and cons of a group of drugs, or patient advocacy groups discussing a piece of policy.

Top tips for understanding conversation from KOLs:

• This is not a set-it-and-forget-it deal. Key opinion leaders will emerge over time, so ongoing discovery is important for keeping your monitoring current.
• Using a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research means you can set up alerts and signals to keep key stakeholders abreast of what’s being said by key opinion leaders. This will mean being alerted immediately when one of your priority influencers mentions a topic you’re interested in.

Competitor intelligence

Rebrands, mergers, and new or emerging companies are continuously changing the pharmaceutical landscape.

Once you’ve identified your competitors (and this should be an ongoing process), choosing the right metrics to monitor is next. As Evelyn Castillo explains in our guide to competitor analysis, this is about going beyond simplistic measures like share of voice.

Top tips for great competitor intelligence:

• To find emerging brands, search broadly in your category. For example, searching for generic terms for feminine care products will help you surface lesser-known brands garnering attention online.
• Use historical data to track changes in perception and behavior over time. The beauty of a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research is that it can look at online conversation all the way back to 2010. This will help you see how competitive brands are rising and falling in your measurements over time.
• Go beyond simplistic measures like share of voice. As Evelyn mentions above, action that helps your organization is the most important thing. If you want your brand to be seen as sustainable, ensure that that’s an attribute you’re measuring against when looking at the competition.

Conference and event tracking

It’s unlikely that industry events are going to go ‘back to normal’ any time soon, especially when they bring together high profile experts from all over the world.

For that reason, monitoring online interaction with online conferences is more important than ever.

Top tips for great event tracking:

• Real-time tracking will ensure you’re on top of fast evolving conversations. This will enable rapid responses to potential issues (perhaps a broken conference link) and opportunities (positive online engagement from a key opinion leader).
• In your monitoring of online conversations around an event, remember to include event hashtags, links, and different variations of how someone might refer to it. For example, a conference called Vaccine Event could be referred to in many ways, even if hashtag signposting is clear (think #VaccineEvent, #2020VaccineEvent, #CompanyVaccineEvent).
• Set up monitoring in advance so the data is ready for review when wrapping up a conference. This will make the reporting phase easier, giving analysts more time to dig into areas of interest they may have missed during the event.

Crisis management and adverse events

Crisis in the world of pharma can mean lots of things, from drug pricing controversies through to adverse events that could shut a product line down.

Information flow is vital in any crisis scenario – crisis response teams must know exactly what’s happening in real time to give them the best chance of responding appropriately and on time.

Partnering with the right data providers can help crisis management processes run much smoother, from training data partners on adverse event processes through to dealing with rapidly evolving real-time conversation around a perceived scandal.

Top tips for effective crisis management:

• Get alerted early. A tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research can notify key stakeholders in real-time about potential crises through Alerts (which pick up on pre-defined incidents in online conversations, like a news outlet mentioning a particular word) or Signals (which monitor changes in the data analysts can’t plan for, like sudden increases in negative sentiment).
• Minute-by-minute tracking is vital. Especially when a crisis is in full swing, real-time analysis of the situation is so important for stakeholders to remain agile and enact their plans while reacting to the latest information.
• Review and plan. Once the crisis has subsided, take all the data gathered and incorporate learnings into future crisis plans and processes.

Expansion and exploration

The most exciting thing about online data is how much insight can be unlocked.

While ongoing brand health and crisis monitoring are standard use cases that rely on online data, there is far more that can be done.

Going beyond regular reporting

Louisa East, Customer Success Director at Brandwatch, looks after many of our largest pharmaceutical clients. She says that those which take advantage of regular reporting on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, as well as ad-hoc exploratory reports, get the most out of Brandwatch.