Are you ready for it?

It’s the beginning of calendar Q4, which means pharma marketers can expect to receive questions/offers/invitations from senior leadership for how they would spend incremental advertising/media budget.

Here are 5 quick strategies to help maximize your chances of capturing the available incremental budget to grow Rx scripts and revenue, agency billings and maybe even do some innovative work that makes the world a better place by improving patient lives.

1. Understand where incremental budget comes from.

Incremental budget typically originates from senior leadership’s need/desire to show top-line revenue growth or market share gains. If those numbers aren’t being hit organization-wide, media is often the fastest way to ramp up. For example, it can take months to scale a sales team, whereas ramping ad spend is fast and doesn’t potentially bloat the company’s head count.

Did you know that among the 551 Rx brands that PranifyRx tracks, 367 made payments to physicians totaling over $3.1 billion in 2020 for things such as research, meals, travel, gifts, or speaking fees. For certain categories (e.g. Oncology) this can mean up to $300 million in annual HCP payments by a single brand. The average amount per brand declined 20% in 2020 to $8 million per brand. That’s a healthy-sized potential bucket of incremental media budget to tap into.

(Note: while this HCP spend data can be found in CMS Open Payments database via the Sunshine Act, it’s a huge dataset, and you can’t filter by category or condition. If you want a simple interface that enriches the data and that you can actually use on a regular computer or even your phone, PranifyRx users can login to their dashboard and click the HCP tab to get physician-level data segmented by category, condition, brand etc.)

2. Prepare and request your incremental budget before it’s offered.

Have your search strategists and display planners include incremental budget opportunity in their bi-weekly reporting throughout the year. Incremental can become available at any point in the year, and it often goes to the agency teams that already have a clear idea of how much they can spend effectively.

3. Estimate ROI using an Rx-script lift partner

Crossix, IQVIA and Lasso can all help you measure script-lift from your paid media campaigns, so that you can confidently forecast ROI before the next round of incremental budget is up for grabs.

4. Know how your brand stacks up to the competition, and where the gaps are.

You can use solutions like MediaRadar, Pathmatics, Kantar etc. to estimate competitive ad spend. While this spend data isn’t always accurate and requires time and resources to get the data in a usable format, directional data may be all you need, and your team might have the time and resources to make these tools work for you. If so, use them!

5. Have fun with it.

If you’ve done the work to set-up script-lift measurement and you’re tracking competitor creative across channels so you can identify gaps where your brand is falling short, then now is the time to give your team the opportunity to take a leadership position. Don’t just heavy-up on high ROI activities. Also use the incremental request to include innovative pharma-first tactics, since you’re already a pro at engaging in strategic conversations that empower your client and PRT to collaborate effectively.

What’s your perspective?