The greatest companies in the pharmacology industry are committed to bettering lives through healthcare innovation, and what better way to alert the public than through modern communication technology?
The issue is, when so many pharmacology companies are attempting to get the attention of the public on social media, how do you separate yourself?
This was the question VAYA Pharma faced last year.
The pharma market
Based in Baltimore, Maryland, VAYA Pharma is a research-based, specialty pharmaceutical division of Enzymotec LTD, dedicated to the discovery, development, manufacture and marketing of innovative, clinically tested, effective and safe lipid-based products.
One of its products is Vayarin, a non-drug, prescription medical food for the dietary management of ADHD in children. While VAYA Pharma wanted to market the product to parents whose children had been diagnosed with ADHD, it didn’t know the best platform to target such a niche audience.
Adapt and overcome
In 2016, VAYA Pharma met with Adaptly, a technology marketing company that enables advertisers to scale campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest through tech and services.
“Because we were targeting a niche group of users who were parents, but also had children who suffered from ADHD or were generally interested in ADHD, we needed to be cognizant of audience scale and the accuracy of our targeting,” says Yuri Hoshino, account director at Adaptly.
The companies decided the best course of action was to launch a marketing campaign across Facebook, targeting males and females – who were parents aged 35 to 54 and had children with ADHD or were generally interested in the condition, by leveraging keyword interest categories.
The campaign would require a two-fold approach: Facebook link ads and Facebook Audience Network. The Facebook link ads were designed to optimize towards link clicks. The Facebook Audience Network (FAN), on the other hand, was an ad placement to boost scale against a niche targeting group and optimize towards download actions.
“The goal for this campaign was to generate downloads of a consumer-targeted infosheet about Vayarin and to drive site traffic to the Vayarin blog, which featured additional original content,” says Shervin Esfahani, a marketing manager at VAYA.
Best approach brings best outcomes
From May to July 2016, the VAYA Pharma marketing campaign ran on Facebook to great success.
The marketing campaign generated more than 271,000 downloads of the Vayarin infosheet and about 98,000 website visitors.
The FAN approach generated the best cost efficiencies, beating the goal cost-per-link-click by 48%.
“Qualified and accurate targeting, coupled with great content, and testing additional placements like Audience Network, really helped this campaign succeed,” says Hoshino. “Facebook Audience Network is a great way to garner qualified, incremental reach.”
Additionally, the campaign drove a strong 5.28% engagement rate, when hundreds of people in Vayarin’s audience shared stories and discussed their personal feelings on the product (and life with ADHD) within the comments section of the Facebook ads.
“Our Vayarin promotion was successful due to a combination of leveraging past campaign insights, relevant targeting, optimization strategies, and the Facebook Audience Network,” says Esfahani.
