Bayer – Case Study – Nitin Rawat

OVERVIEW

Bayer, a pharmaceutical company, launched a pill, to prevent pregnancy. The company was committed to raising awareness of this new product, as it can help millions of people worldwide.

Bayer’s pill, Yasen, is a safe and effective way to prevent pregnancy. It works by delaying ovulation, preventing the egg from being fertilized.

CHALLENGES

Pills are harmful and taking them is not a healthy option as it may negatively affect their period cycle and other effects in the long term. This is different for many products in the market.

3 MAJOR CHALLENGES

The lack of awareness of contraceptive options.

Many people in society still feel insecure talking about pills and contraceptives. Especially not aware of safer options like Yasmine. Which not only helps to prevent unwanted pregnancy but also has other benefits related to periods.

Direct ads are not allowed in the healthcare industry.

The healthcare industry prohibits direct advertising. This means you need to be creative and find ways to educate consumers about the medication without making it sound like you are selling it to them

B2C marketing of I-pills and contraceptives without direct ads.

I-pills and contraceptives are sensitive products, and many people may feel uncomfortable seeing direct ads for them. This can make it difficult to market these products to consumers, especially in conservative societies.

APPROACH

To introduce a new contraceptive to the market, a two-pronged approach was adopted by Bayer, working online and offline simultaneously.

The offline team introduced the contraceptive to doctors and chemists, while the online team raised awareness of the contraceptive among the general public and alleviated their concerns.

The online team’s work was to use social media, and other online channels to reach a wide audience and generate interest in the contraceptive.

We created educational content, to answer common questions about the contraceptive and address any concerns people might have.
Like what type of medication is suitable for them, precautions and side effects of various pills.

WHAT DID WE DO?

I was the head of the marketing team. I worked closely with my entire team to ensure that our marketing strategies were aligned with the product roadmap and that we were effectively communicating the value of our product to our target audience.

We broke down the process into 3 distinct phases to ensure a smooth and efficient workflow.

PHASE 1 - OFFLINE CAMPAIGN

The team of Bayer’s medical representatives were asked to introduce doctors to the company’s new contraceptive option. They would explain to the doctors every detail of the pill, including its advantages and potential precautions.

Like the advantages of pill that it will put an end to the period cramps and will also help in healing and removing acne.

The company organized various events to engage and inform doctors about the company’s pills. At these events, they provided complete information about the products, including their efficacy, safety, and side effects.

While the events were necessary to raise awareness among doctors, they did not reach the target audience of actual customers. To address this, an online campaign was launched

PHASE 2 - ONLINE CAMPAIGN

My team and I decided to take on online marketing for the product.

We were inspired to create an online community with a chatbot that could act as a friend to all those who want to learn or just want to know about pills, contraceptive methods, or any other related topics. We wanted to create a chatbot that would make people feel comfortable asking about their doubts, no matter how awkward or embarrassing they may seem.

And with this vision, we created Ask Tanu.

Tanu: The name of an avatar who will answer your doubts about contraceptives.

It is a friendly and informative chatbot that is always there to answer your questions about contraception. She is trained on a massive dataset of information about contraception, including all the different methods available, their effectiveness, and their side effects.

Ask Tanu chatbot was designed after taking 1000+ surveys of people. Which we asked many questions to understand their common queries and behavior, the pattern of hesitation. Especially for youngsters who sometimes are too shy or embarrassed to ask their parents or doctor about contraception.

We used Ask Tanu as our model for a campaign to promote contraception awareness and education.

There were two parts to the online campaign.

Ideation
Implementation

Ideation of chatbot

There was a lot to the ideation part.

Building a chatbot from scratch is a daunting task, but it can also be advantageous.

The team and I started the ideation process by brainstorming a list of potential names for our chatbot. We wanted a name that was both unique and memorable, and we also wanted it to reflect Tanu’s friendly and approachable personality.
After much discussion, we ultimately decided on the name Tanu.

We then turned our attention to Tanu’s outfit.

The goal was to make her look as humble and relatable to the people as possible, so we decided to give her a minimalist look. We also wanted Tanu to have a friendly and welcoming facial expression, so we worked closely with our designers to create a face that was both expressive and engaging.

Ideation of chat

Automating the chat was a critical task, requiring careful consideration of the sequence of texts to be sent to the user, the important topics to be covered, and the appropriate tone of language.

The team needed to decide what information was most essential to convey to the user, and how to best present it in a clear, concise, and professional manner.

Every detail was carefully scrutinized, from the opening greeting to the closing farewell, ensuring that the chat experience would be both informative and engaging.

IMPLEMENTATION

Organic - SMO

To increase awareness of our Ask Tanu chatbot, we created a Facebook page and became active by posting engaging SMO posts and running ads to increase page likes.

Our strategy was to increase page likes and bring engagement to our posts, which would increase page visits, and attract people to interact with the chatbot. This would ultimately increase awareness of such products, leading to indirect advertisement of pills.

We saw a significant increase in the number of people interacting with the Ask Tanu chatbot. We were getting 4 new user interaction initiatives in the first week only.

In addition to the online marketing campaign, we also conducted an offline marketing campaign.

Inorganic - SMM

To increase reach and engagement, we ran SMM ads on our posts and collaborated with various companies and pages.

A variety of ad formats and targeting options were used to reach our target audience. We also created engaging and informative content that was relevant to our audience’s interests. Our collaborations with other companies and pages helped us to reach a new audience and build relationships with other brands in our industry.

To optimize our campaigns for tier cities, we divided the budget accordingly and created ad groups at the city level. This allowed us to track performance and see which cities were generating the most likes, our target conversion.

RESULT

30K page likes in 3 months across tier 1,2 and 3 cities.

And an average of 8 new chatbot interactions per day. Which leads to awareness at the macro to micro level.

MY PART

Being the head of a marketing team, my duties were:

Strategist

Created a LinkedIn media plan for awareness and lead generation.
Prediction of the strategy outcomes with respect to the timeline.

Designed the strategies as per the stakeholder requirement and targeted audiences.

Make sure to deliver the deliverables and meet KPIs within the timeline.

Performance optimization across the different parts of strategy like creatives, content, UI/UX, ad account hierarchy, etc.

Drive the team in the same direction with the strategy we have created. Starting from branding to legal so that everyone is in sync.

Operation Lead

Leading the operation team and setting the KPIs metrics to records for optimization.

Designed ad account skeleton and set nomenclature rules.

Troubleshooting if any team member faces any trouble like ad getting disapproved.

Led the automated process like bidding, data filtering, and conversion tracking.

Set budget limits across the platforms.

Analytics and data engineering

Managed the analyst and data engineering team.

Choose the data visualization tool and data warehouse and model.

Created UI/UX of the dashboards as per strategies and stakeholders.

Selected the API connections across the platforms for a smooth flow of data.

Setting up the documentation structure.

Growth Consultant / Performance Marketer

Made important interconnected decisions across the strategy, operation, analyst, and data engineer teams. Like choosing and finalizing the best landing page, creative, content, etc.