Andre Bergmann, Key-Account-Manager at Navicon | Industry Era

Andre Bergmann, Key-Account-Manager, Navicon

Conducting marketing activities at the points of sale and permanent sale promotion via partner network require solid investment. How to plan successful marketing campaigns and assess their efficiency? Our answer is in the article of Evgeniy Golubitskiy, Product Head at the Department of Innovations, Navicon.

For a long time work of medical representatives has been the main way of successful pharmaceutical product promotion. However, now pharmaceutical manufacturers have to search additional ways of communication with clients, in particular, trade marketing campaigns (remedy promotion via partner networks and work with pharmacists). Currently in Russia it is one of the largest budget items on the pharm manufacturers’ budgets: large market players spend on sales promotion from 100 million RUR to 1 milliard RUR yearly.

Obviously, as investment in trade marketing increases, top management wanted to understand, what outcome companies receive from their marketing campaigns. Precise assessment of ROI would be helpful to identify terms of partner marketing agreements afterwards. However, pharmaceutical manufacturers faced the problem of ROI calculation for traditional promotion tools due to lack of reliable data. Calculating ROI, marketers usually count only direct cost of the campaign and sales growth at the end that is incorrect. But how can they calculate sales growth as the outcome of a precise campaign if 3 or 4 campaigns were conducted simultaneously via different channels? Which indirect costs were paid by the company including merchandisers’ and medical representatives’ time spent on conducting and controlling the campaigns? What campaigns will give immediate outcomes? Answers to these questions will help to understand how to organize marketing activities with maximum outcome.

Tip 1. Gather data and use it with maximum outcome

In order to make decisions about marketing campaigns or assess their outcomes, a lot of data should be processed and analyzed in a short term. For instance, it is important to define the right time, place and channel, as well as product, which will satisfy the customer. That is why activities should be planned taking into consideration historical and external data. It is important to understand, what time is the best for selling precise remedies, how the consumer buying behavior depends on the season, what channels are the most efficient in terms of sales: exposure, recommendations or specific signs. Previous experience and data from external sources must be also taken into consideration, for instance, marketing research data provided by the agencies.
Automated trade marketing management solutions, such as Navicon Hermes Pharma, help to collect and process a lot of unstructured data (about sales via distributors and pharmacies), taking into account historical and actual data.

Tip 2. Complementary marketing activities must be considered in analysis It is usually impossible to calculate effectiveness of just one marketing activity. Marketing uses a lot of tools, which include advertising, personal sales, public relations, sales promotion and partner relations. Pharmaceutical manufacturer can organize more than 10 activities at the same time using different channels, heading by different managers and each of them will influence growth of loyalty, sales and purchases.

For instance, TV advertising campaign can be accompanied by special signs in the pharmacy. What will be the reason of demand growth then? Maybe a customer has heard about the product by word-of-mouth and went to the pharmacy then. That is the reason why we use the term “integrated marketing communications”. Only analyzing the mix of activities, which includes all company’s marketing activities, we can make conclusions about incentives of growth or decline of sales, which are closely related to current situation.