With the falling leaves and morning chill in the air, it certainly feels like summer is over. For all you pharmaceutical marketers, whether you are agency-based or in-house, your environment is however hotting up. With offices full to the brim with job bags and emails about everything from stand plans to speaker briefs, to the colour of fruit smoothies, it can only mean one thing; it’s conference season!
Conferences are indisputably an integral part of many healthcare professionals’ year, offering an arena for discussion and continued education, as well as interaction with their peers...and industry. In principle, with your key target audience under one roof, it seems like a highly relevant environment to maximise your engagement with HCPs. The big question is whether this maximisation requires spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a top of the range stand and expensive, interactive digital experiences, or whether there are more cost-effective ways of achieving the same thing? With everything for us at Mash beginning with a why, it seems pertinent to ask: why this specific conference? What do you want to achieve? Are you really reaching the HCPs who will be prescribing or recommending your products? And are you reaching enough of them to make it worth the expense?
A fresh look at why you are attending a conference is vital, especially if you are attending “because we do it every year” or “our competitors are always there”. Not attending a conference does not necessarily do a brand a disservice, especially for products that are market leaders in their field. If you are confident that there are alternative means of communicating to your target audience, or reaching more of the change-activators within your target group, then there’s no need to be intimidated that your competitor is attending and you are not.
Once you make the decision to attend, the next point to consider is how to maximise your investment. What are you hoping to achieve and what will your return look like? For example, if you have a £30,000 outlay on a UK conference attended by 1,000 HCPs, you would hope that 500 of those attendees will visit your stand: a cost of £60 per HCP. Not too bad, I hear you say, but if you drilled down into the number of truly change-activating conversations held with those stand visitors, then realistically, this could be as low as 25. Working out at a spend of £1,200 per positive HCP connection, it begs the question, is this a reasonable return on investment?
But then you could argue that this calculation is missing a trick as conferences aren’t just about engaging HCPs on your stand. Conferences often act as catalysts for change and what is happening off-stand, in the symposia, in the poster presentations and on your competitors’ stands, is just as important as what takes place on-stand for your brand. It could also be argued that face-to-face interactions with your target audience enables you to build a deeper understanding of their issues, needs and preferences, which is invaluable in helping you shape your future communications.
