Today’s Life Science organizations expend significant resources to capture and hold the attention of patients and healthcare providers (HCPs) in the digital ecosystem. In 2022, the average U.S. consumer spent more than eight hours a day consuming digital content. Physicians are among the busiest employees in the US, as well as consumers— some survey findings suggesting they only have 30 minutes a day to read or check online sources for information.
It’s then likely not a stretch to say, much like consumers, provider audiences are equally overwhelmed with branded content and have even more limited bandwidth to engage, giving marketing teams a growing challenge to create, target, and deliver pharmaceutical messaging that will penetrate through the “noise.”
But, we know the challenges of a brand marketer’s job does not end there. They work to ensure patients and providers see and hear the brand’s messages, and work to break down incredibly complex products into simple, compliant and balanced risk/benefits messages that resonate in the proper channels– at the right time – even when marketing directly to highly knowledgeable HCPs.
All of these constraints require brands to be strategic and efficient when allocating marketing and sales resources to target, engage, and convert high-value HCPs.
When you only have 2.5 hours of time to access an HCP each week, how can a brand ensure that they are delivering the most relevant value to the best and most likely customer to make their time worth a read?
The Intersection of Real World Data & Growth Marketing
To improve engagement rates with high-value HCPs, brands need the ability to combine growth marketing tactics with an overall omnichannel strategy using real-world data (RWD). But what does that mean in practice?
In the traditional sense, growth marketing refers to a marketing discipline where companies experiment with different marketing tactics and strategies and then use the data they gather about their target audience to drive future growth. When applying this approach to Life Science marketing, however, brands have a unique advantage.
By leveraging RWD such as medical, pharmacy, specialty pharmacy data insights, pharmaceutical brands have access to extremely detailed information to identify and target the highest-value HCPs for their brand. RWD exposes dynamics about the patients the targeted HCPs treat, payer mix for their patients, referral patterns across networks, and so much more.
RWD insights can be turned into actionable opportunities for successful conversion by enhancing the HCP targeting approach with RWD, enabling marketers to deploy targeted messaging to high-value HCPs across multiple channels in a holistic, connected way.
A 7-Step Approach to Drive HCP Omnichannel Engagement
At PurpleLab, our HealthNexus platform offers Life Science teams the most efficient way of defining and creating a targeted audience for digital media. By considering this 7-step strategic process, brands can execute their online strategies to engage with high-value HCPs identified with higher confidence using HealthNexus insights.
1. Define what “high value HCP” means to the brand or organization, in terms of the outcome it’s trying to achieve. Typically, this comes down to understanding which HCP’s are treating specific patients and writing prescriptions for a category, but also can include who is referring patients to specialists for an indication, and who is treating the most newly diagnosed patients for a condition, (or potentially whether services are being rendered in an office or other facility type..)
KEY TAKEAWAY: Being able to house/manage your initial benchmark data is extremely useful for instituting continuous improvement of campaigns. Partner with agency partners to develop a measurement plan and meet to measure performance regularly, with a commitment to have incremental content adjustments as KPIs are realized.
2. Organize HCP targeting data in a way that makes it actionable for an omnichannel strategy. Many clients leverage their CRM insights and HCP engagement history and communication preferences to craft an omnichannel strategy, combining personal and non-personal tactics. With HealthNexus, clients start with their targeted list of National Provider Identifiers (NPIs) of interest, and then determine which additional criteria from the HealthNexus RWD attributes can enrich their approach, such as additional patient demographics or HCP attributes defined by clients specifically.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Whether the metric of interest is related to adoption of new treatments, prescription metrics and referral patterns, or specific health equity and diversity patient profiles, consider all aspects of RWD to leverage for segmentation considerations at the HCP-level.
3. Converting HCP targets into a media segment requires an assessment of match rates across channels (can they be reached on mobile, online display, CTV?). Further analysis can be layered into the segments based on the behavioral data and RWD results that might include patient and treatment insights, regional influences, and more.
KEY TAKEAWAY: RWD enhances traditional segmentation to enrich media engagement and further defines the brand’s messaging strategy.
4. Audience activation is typically done by partners integrated with demand-side platforms (DSPs), like HealthNexus. This approach to audience creation and activation for Life Science media agencies and media buyers enables the most targeted and efficient approach available today.
KEY TAKEAWAY: As campaigns are deployed, ongoing optimization can be achieved simply by refining and adding segments to the campaign set up in the platform of your choosing.
5. Campaign results will be visible immediately upon activation. Depending on the channel, and your targeted outcome/desired key performance indicator (KPI), often expressed as a “lift” in brand performance, you may be tracking opens, clicks, request for Rep, or other Call-to-Actions (CTAs) within the message, ensuring that the entire omnichannel strategy can be measured.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Coordinate channels and tactics together, ensuring the KPIs are aligned and optimization across audiences and channels can be synchronized. Measurable results are typically not realized within Rx data until 4-6 mos post exposure.
6. Measurement Planning can be managed by establishing advanced measurement KPI’s, and establishing benchmarks, while ensuring pre-exposure data is stored and accessible. If you’re working with a data partner who, clients should be able to get feeds of Rx activity that can be integrated into a privacy- compliant environment to analyze variance from the benchmark.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Measurement is ongoing, it doesn’t just happen at “the end”; in order to realize the benefits of a true omnichannel approach, a comprehensive measurement plan has to be established before, and occurs during the entire process.
7. Ongoing measurement and optimization requires the synthesis of measurement data: initial targeting set, refreshes of the source targeting data exposure, KPIs established such as NRXs must be integrated efficiently to continuously reprioritize and shift strategy when needed.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Measurement is ongoing, it doesn’t just happen at “the end”; in order to realize the benefits of a true omnichannel approach, a comprehensive measurement plan has to be established before, and occurs during the entire process.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Audience refinement and enhanced targeting in the digital ecosystem is an evolving and ongoing process. To experience and build a fully integrated omnichannel engagement strategy across the broader commercial enterprise, organizations must be committed to streamlining systems and processes.
To take the next step, organizations integrate audience segments into a field sales and/or inside sales outreach model that ensure any engagement captured within the digital ecosystem is responded to and captured through another channel. to round out a go to market that gets results through processes such as:
- BI/Hub Services will be automatically alerted when HCPs meet predetermined criteria that qualify them as a “high-value segment.” Then, your brand’s drug reps can target these HCPs for enhanced engagement in case of an incoming service call.
- Clients can leverage the platform to further amplify brand awareness with the target patient segment. Based on past prescription performance, you can generate modeled audiences that reflect the characteristics and geography of the brand’s leading indicator, which can then be distributed to the DSP network for further targeting.
HealthNexus provides speed-to-insights enabling rich HCP audience segmentation in minutes
In today’s competitive environment, Life Science brand teams need the ability to turn real-world insights into strategic engagement opportunities quickly and efficiently. HealthNexus makes that possible, allowing organizations to access and leverage PurpleLab RWD to create modular, “media-ready” content approaches and next-best-action sequences more efficiently than ever before.
Using tested, proven content frameworks for various channels, agencies and the brands they support can take an omnichannel approach to growth marketing, adapting and iterating brand awareness and engagement campaigns over time to outpace and get ahead of their competition.
Get in touch with the PurpleLab team today to get us on your brand planning calendars, and we will start the process of mapping out your omnichannel strategy!