As more and more pharma companies are making the move towards digital marketing, video is one of the most enticing options out there. As the average adult in US now spends more than 100 minutes per day on video (with tendencies for growing), it’s clear that video is getting bigger by the day.
However, besides a pure rise in the number of viewers, pharma marketers are interested in something else. What is the ROI of video marketing? How do you calculate return on investment in any type of marketing, let alone in an industry as specific as pharma? It is actually not that complicated – and here’s how to do it.
Set clear objectives
Before starting any video marketing campaign for pharma, you need to know what you want to accomplish. For pharma companies, you can have a number of different goals:
- Promoting your latest scientific publication
- Spreading awareness about a disease
- Add-on for your product launch
- Keeping physicians up to date
- Etc.
Only by establishing what your objective is can you measure your success. For example, it could be the number of physicians who viewed your video, the number of emails/calls inquiring about a new product.
Establish the channels of promotion
As we’ve written before, video really is a multichannel type of content that works well in many different marketing strategies. However, before you even start creating a video for your pharma marketing purposes, you should think about the channels where you are going to promote it.
Email is the preferred channel for many physicians, and you could suit your videos to be embedded in emails. Some other channels include your website, LinkedIn, webinars, ebooks, etc. If it’s properly structured, you can also use your video for presentations on medical conferences as well.
We’re particularly fond of animated medical explainer videos, as they can be presented across every channel. In this way, they present the highest return on investment of all video types that pharma companies can use.
Calculating ROI of video marketing
Once you’ve established your goal and channels, it’s time to get to the heart of the problem – calculating the return on investment of video marketing in pharma. There are three main ways to measure ROI:
- Absolute ROI
- Relative ROI
- Attribution ROI
Absolute ROI is the simplest and most effective way of measuring return on investment from your pharma marketing videos. Depending on the goals and channels you’ve selected, you can calculate it in one of these ways:
- Cost per email subscriber
- Price per view
- Cost per product inquiry
Calculating absolute ROI is fairly simple, as you can take the total amount spent on creating and promoting the video and divide it by the number of subscribers/views/emails sent about a product.
Relative ROI allows you to calculate your video marketing spend in comparison to other marketing efforts. For example, if you use videos and reprints at the same time in promoting a new brand, you can stack the two up against each other. In this way, you’ll have a clearer idea of where to best spend your marketing resources. However, calculating relative ROI takes more effort and calculations to do right.
Finally, the attribution model allows you to track the marketing influence of video on each of your pharma marketing channels. In this way, you’re able to see exactly which video is responsible for which conversion in your funnel. This type of calculation provides you with the most accurate and actionable data for your pharma marketing efforts.
The right type of video to start your digital pharma marketing
If you want to commit to a video format that gets the highest return on investment, you should check out animated medical explainer videos. We have tried our PubExplainer with more than 50 pharma companies across the globe, with significant marketing success. If you want to find out what we can do for you as well, feel free to contact us for more details.
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