Galapagos
The Challenge
Our client, Galapagos NV, tasked us with educating their target audience of Gastroenterologists about their work within the indication of Ulcerative Colitis. Underpinning this objective was investment across a number of platforms both physical such as exhibiting at the UEG Congress, and digital across their websites and dedicated landing pages.
Our challenge was to ensure the success of these initiatives, amplifying their presence at the congress, and drive a high volume of quality HCP traffic online, whilst mitigating the traditional challenges of marketing within pharma and maximizing their campaign budget.
Our Approach
Our approach would focus on challenging the traditional approach to pharma marketing and its reliance on medical journals. Typically, budget can be rapidly diluted due to the volume of journals available, in turn leading to less efficient media buying due to direct buys. For this campaign we would balance the tried and trusted with technology and data led opportunities pioneered by Space & Time.
Channel Mix:
A number of channels were employed in the digital environment to engage with our target audience. Paid Seach would feature a combination of keyword targeting to reach in-market relevant HCP’s, whilst strategic negative keyword target was applied to remove the risk of reaching patients. Paid social on LinkedIn and Twitter gave us an excellent platform to speak to HCP’s both pre, during, and post congress, leveraging job title targeting as well as event hashtags.
We also took advantage of a number of medical journals and gated environments, to ensure compliance with a mixture of branded and unbranded content leveraging their audience via display, hosted content, and email comms. Furthermore, to guarantee maximum visibility and amplify their congress presence, we executed highly visible OOH formats at commuter hubs such as airports across a day-part period to reach attendees en route to the event.
PrecisionM:
Congress promotion is just one objective that perfectly lends itself to our proprietary technology PrecisionM. Leveraging individual device ID’s from mobiles, tablet, and laptops, we are able to geo-fence areas to within 1sqm accuracy, both real-time and across custom time periods.
We were quickly able to ringfence an target group by pooling data across relevant industry events, places of work, and key locations to guarantee a highly relevant and engaged audience. These devices were then served ads at key moments pre, during and post congress with sequenced creative, with the ability to also trigger messaging when devices were in proximity of digital OOH sites to further amplify our messaging.
Our Solution
Performance media and mass-reach ads gave Galapagos unprecedented reach and engagement with its customers across the week of congress. By planning a diverse mix of channels, the campaign enabled us to balance reach and frequency with precision and efficiency across the pre, during and post congress phases of activity.
The joined-up approach between mobile display and OOH ensured that Galapagos’ presence at UEG Week was widely seen while ePDFs in key medical journals and paid search delivered efficient traffic driving.
Overall the campaign generated greater than expected reach delivering a total of 8,434,647 impressions. Engagement was equally impressive, totalling 14,686 clicks generated from email, display, and social activity, as well as 1,923 tracked sessions on the dedicated pre and post event pages.
I am really pleased with the team at Space & Time and Syneos for their performance and approach, especially around our congress marketing activity. They are highly collaborative and work extremely well with our agency partners to help deliver well thought out and executed media plans that make the most of the creative assets available. They are an invaluable addition to our business operations, and we look forward to working with them on future campaigns.
Yacin Marzouki Campaign & Event Lead at Galapagos NV
