CASE STUDIES

KOL Mapping Facilitates Cross-franchise Opinion Leader Identification for a Primary Healthcare Services Provider

Apr 5, 2021

What is KOL mapping and how does it benefit healthcare firms?

KOL identification and mapping serve as an effective means of marketing healthcare services and products. Also know as key opinion leaders, KOLs are mostly healthcare service providers who are considered experts in their fields and influence how their peers carry out their medical procedures.

If you are someone who operates in the healthcare and pharma industry, you’ve probably heard the term ‘KOL mapping’. It is a methodology that many other sectors could benefit from if leveraged appropriately. KOL mapping can help businesses create a business strategy that focuses on specific therapy areas or demographics rather than adopting a holistic view. 

Conducting in-depth KOL research can help you enhance business success by identifying the right opinion leaders.

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Business Challenge

Our client, a healthcare services company, wanted to establish a reliable approach to KOL mapping across all therapeutic areas covering different commercial, clinical, and sales aspects. By leveraging Infiniti’s KOL mapping and identification expertise, the client wanted to identify and profile regional and global KOLs within each therapeutic area.

The client also faced challenges in:

  • Developing a database base for easy querying of KOL data
  • Creating and mapping KOLs
  • Conducting primary market research and developing KOL profiles

KOL research isn’t just for the healthcare industry. It applies to many other sectors including, retail, automotive, and luxury goods. However, identifying the right person to collaborate with can be tricky and if not performed correctly, your KOL mapping strategy could negatively impact brand growth. Request a free brochure to find out how we can help you overcome this challenge.

Our Approach to KOL Mapping

Identifying key opinion leaders can be an uphill task and is not simple as finding someone influential in your industry. There are several essential steps to devise an effective KOL mapping strategy. It involves conducting in-depth market research, understanding the viewpoints of KOLs, and creating an action plan that explains how you will engage KOLs, making it a complex process requiring expertise and market knowledge.

Also, with the rise in data available for analysis, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to KOL identification and mapping. This means that effective KOL identification and mapping can serve many purposes but requires businesses to adopt the right approach to drive value.

To help the client, we adopted a comprehensive five-step approach that included the following phases of research:

Step 1: Defining the business landscape and objectives

Step 2: Identifying KOLs by conducting in-depth primary research

Step 3: Segmenting KOLs into categories based on interests

Step 4: Mapping and prioritizing KOLs based on the data obtained

Step 5: Creating a strategy to engage with KOLs

Infiniti’s robust five-step approach helped the client identify, analyze, map, prioritize, segment, and validate key opinion leaders using in-depth primary and secondary research data. Our unique approach to KOL mapping combined qualitative and quantitative research as per various KOL activities, including clinical trials, guidelines, committees, company affiliations, and advocacy groups.

Our experts also profiled KOLs based on demographics and involvement in clinical trials to help the client identify and prioritize the right KOLs based on their requirements. This, in turn, helped create much buzz around new therapy services, helping them improve treatment outcomes.

Business Outcome

The KOL mapping engagement offered granular insights that aided the client in numerous ways bringing about a positive impact on commercialization plans and tactics that enabled them to use their resources more efficiently.

KOL mapping and downstream decisions enabled through Infiniti’s KOL research solutions include:

  • Tactical planning for KOL management
  • Innovative product development
  • 32% improvement in treatment outcomes
  • Development of targeted therapies
  • Identification of key influencers

Request more information for more insights on our approach to KOL identification and mapping.

KOL mapping involves analyzing several information sources to determine each KOL’s activities and influence level based on various industry benchmarks. It also offers the benefit of integrating multiple factors simultaneously into the KOL mapping process, providing businesses the ability to target KOLs who offer well-rounded experience in specific therapeutic areas.  But with the KOL landscape evolving constantly, new alliances are constantly being formed, making it challenging for businesses to identify and profile KOLs. Infiniti Research helps tackle this challenge by providing you with responsive and scalable solutions.

With over 17 years of expertise in KOL research, including KOL identification, KOL mapping, and KOL profiling. Our solutions offer unparalleled insight into how experts rank professionally, their work in specific areas, and their professional networks, enabling clients to make the right decisions to drive business success.

We help our clients make smarter decisions to achieve rapid business growth

Our strength lies in the unrivaled diversity of our international market research teams, innovative research methodologies, and unique viewpoints that merge seamlessly to offer customized solutions for your every business requirement.

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