Getting a 40% response rate from notoriously hard to reach, time poor Health Care Professionals was a real achievement.
Finding ways to add value, create brand differentiation and capture ‘share of voice’ ahead of a virtual medical congress.
An interactive platform experience which created an HCP community and provided access to tailored content and education.
The Client
UCB is a global biopharma company, focusing on neurology and immunology. The business turns over €5 billion and employs more than 7,000 people globally. UCB’s ambition is to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases. They focus on neurology and immunology disorders and put patients at the very centre of they do. As they say themselves, they are inspired by patients and driven by science.
Like the majority of pharmaceutical companies, their sales and service model is rep-driven, with specialists across their different drugs and therapies engaging with customers and prospective customers onsite at hospitals and clinics. The pandemic has severely challenged this approach as has GDPR and the need to gain consent from HCPs to get in touch with them. Similarly, large events and congresses — a significant channel through which to engage HCPs — are now virtual.
With this context in mind, UCB approached Journey with a series of questions: How could they find a new way to engage with the HCP community? How could they gain a better ‘share of voice’ in the run up to a large, virtual congress? How could they create additional value for their customers and in doing so, gain their consent to continue the conversation?
Working with the UCB team and their comms agency partners, we worked to re-imagine the Congress experience. Given the need to create value for the HCPs, such that it would help gain consent and differentiate UCB from other Congress sponsors, we looked to extend the experience through Interface — an interactive platform that provided a channel for the HCPs to engage with each other and get value in the form of non-medical content and education.
A digital channel for Health Care Professionals (HCP) engagement. A series of diagnostic questions helped to shape and define the themes and topics addressed within Interface — and provided UCB with invaluable insights into needs and motivations of the HCPs themselves.
Polls and social functions were used to help create engagement, open up conversations to connect and network ahead of the Congress itself. In addition to podcasts and videos, Interface was built to accommodate a series of live events too, with HCPs able to join presentations and talks in the run up to the Congress.
40% of the HCPs invited to the Congress engaged in Interface, with 1000s of views and interactions in the run up to the event itself. These in turn have presented UCB with 1000s of data points and key insights with which to tailor their HCP communications moving forward.
The platform also achieved more HCP consent that achieved in the previous six months, and presented their sales teams with a series of opportunities to engage with their customers. This approach will be replicated for future events, with Interface being evolved based on the feedback and data from this pilot.
