Thought Leadership

  • KOL Management

    Advocacy: An Indispensable Component Of KOL Management

    Effective KOL management is more than just tracking which activities your KOLs have engaged with. It’s also about tracking the effectiveness of those activities, and the resulting impact on KOL mindset, sentiment, and behavior – in effect their ‘advocacy’.

    Advocacy is an important measure of the ROI of your KOL strategy – it enables you to see how your activities and interactions are ‘changing the needle’ and what impact they are having on KOLs. Integrating such advocacy measurements into your KOL management process can therefore dramatically improve the efficacy of your medical KOL strategy.

    There are multiple methods to gauge, measure, and track advocacy. Typically, we use three different measurement lenses to achieve this in near-real-time as part of the wider KOL management process.

    • “Sentiment” is an assessment of a KOL’s position on key issues as judged by those who engage with the KOL on a regular basis.
    • “Mindset” is the KOL’s own view of their thinking and beliefs and where they stand in relation to key therapeutic issues
    • “Messaging” is the analysis of a KOL’s scientific outputs to identify the messages they are advocating, seen through an objective analytical perspective

    Together these different lenses are combined to give you an accurate, holistic measure of advocacy amongst your KOLs.

    You can then use such advocacy insights to not just measure the impact of your work, but also to identify experts who, for example, are not resonating with parts of your scientific story (e.g. based on their low sentiment scores, low mindset alignment etc). Your strategy should then pivot to focus on this group through engagements and activities designed specifically to build advocacy in specific areas.

    Eventually, with enough cycles of the above, you can get to an n=1 state where a constant flow of rich advocacy insights can help you decide which expert to engage, what activities they should be involved in, and even the type of medical content that should reach each KOL.

    What’s unique about the Superfly KOL management platform is that not only does it enable you to implement and manage all the essential building blocks of a successful KOL strategy – planning your KOL engagements, implementing, tracking, analyzing, reporting, etc – but Superfly also allows you to integrate “advocacy” right into the heart of the process from the very start. You can even integrate your own customized advocacy ladder or matrix to ensure that everything in Superfly is fully aligned with your strategic priorities.

    The measurement of KOL advocacy is fundamental to ensuring your KOL strategy gives you the returns you want. But equally important, ensuring a continual stream of advocacy insights enables you to rapidly fine tune your tactics in response to changing KOLs behavior, thus ensuring your KOL strategy is always relevant, efficient, and successful.

    Learn more about Superfly:
    https://vmlyr-digitalsolutions.com/kolmanagement.html

    Keywords: Superfly, KOL management, advocacy