Galapagos Health is the portal for healthcare professionals in the field of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Colitis Ulcerosa, offering relevant medical information, expert insights and information on events in these fields.

They are a fully integrated biotechnology company focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing innovative medicines. Galapagos are committed to improving patients’ lives worldwide by targeting diseases with high unmet needs.

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 Solution

Strategy:
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.

Key Tactic – 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.

The Results

>100% improvement in Net Promotor score vs. previous campaign

427% increase in impressions vs. prior campaign at equal budget

60% Increase in clicks YoY vs. UEG 2021

CTR target exceeded by 113%

“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, Galapagos NV