A Rare Disease Brand Uses Marketing Analytics to Improve Campaign Performance

Rare disease brands, especially those with small patient populations, are challenged to ensure they can reach patients who can benefit from their therapy while reducing media waste. Learn how a rare disease brand partnered with Veeva Crossix to see a 58% improvement in targeting efficiency, a 48% increase in diagnoses, and a 52% improvement in the cost per qualified patient reached, all without increasing media spend.

Challenge

An emerging biotech offers a treatment for a rare disease that is frequently misdiagnosed and affects 1 in 50,000 people. The brand launched a media campaign to promote this treatment among a relevant audience. The campaign aimed to drive new diagnoses by targeting symptomatic patients who had not yet been diagnosed. Due to the small patient population, the team focused on the upper funnel audience quality metric to reach relevant patients.

Measurement goals

With Crossix Consumer Digital, the brand gathered insights to make data-driven optimizations and measure the effectiveness of its campaign. The goal was to use media dollars effectively to increase awareness and diagnoses and get patients started on the right treatment as quickly as possible.

Determining which publishers and tactics most effectively reached qualified patients was a key part of the measurement and optimization strategy. Getting access to these insights early and often was critical to making the right changes.

Campaign insights and optimizations

The brand and agency teams partnered with Crossix to evaluate performance throughout year one and determine different tactical reallocations to improve targeting efficiency. Knowing that it takes longer to see post-exposure to advertising metrics such as doctor visitation and conversion with a very small patient population, the brand focused its optimizations on improving audience quality, which is highly correlated with down-funnel behavior.

Crossix data enabled the team to understand how to best shift budget away from poor-performing tactics and increase investment in higher-performing media. In year two, the brand introduced health audience targeting to further improve targeting efficiency.

Results

Optimizations based on early insights improved media effectiveness. By reallocating the planned media budget, targeting efficiency improved 58%, diagnoses increased 48%, and the cost per qualified patient reached decreased by 52%.

Access to marketing analytics tied to health data enabled the brand to monitor campaign performance, increase awareness among its target audience, and make its marketing dollars work harder.

Learn more rare disease marketing tips from experts at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, and Teva Pharmaceuticals.