Here’s what you need to know about new personalized marketing methods for buying and targeting healthcare media so you can optimize your brand campaigns.
Key Takeaways:
- Find your target audience, then prioritize, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.
- Contextualize your messaging to reach the right audiences.
- Learn how segmentation can have greater reach, then hone your messaging strategy to appeal to the right readers.
- Discover how to measure results for true optimization.
Healthcare marketing has changed a lot, and the marketing ecosystem continues to evolve as the internet provides both opportunities to reach the right target audience and the tools for strategy-driven, personalized marketing.
The future of it is digital, and requires innovative methods for accurate targeting and campaign optimization. The challenge with rare disease marketing is the small population of health care providers (HCPs) and patients, making targeting the right audience extremely important. Prioritization is just as essential.
You might prioritize doctors who are writing scripts on competitive brands, HCPs in a particular geographical area, or at a practice in a particular specialty, for example. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants often play a significant role in rare disease management as well. Are they on your list?
In this article, we’ll empower you with the knowledge and strategies you need to effectively use healthcare media, target your ideal audience, and optimize your brand campaigns for maximum impact.
Targeting strategies in personalized marketing
The first step in developing a targeting strategy is to understand the care team ecosystem. Collaborate with the client to build and/or review current target lists to further identify the high-priority segments. If relevant to the disease condition treatment, the next step is to add those all-important physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Leverage your customer relationship system.
From the patient side, identify the opportunity targeting strategies. For example, contextual targeting reaches patients actively leaning in to find more information about the disease condition. To stay HIPAA-compliant, you can’t reach out one-on-one. But, anyone with a rare disease will do online research. You can build out your audience by offering not only information about the disease but also about comorbidities and side effects.
You can leverage the HCP target list to geo-fence offices and treatment centers to potentially reach patients. A great opportunity is to build lookalike audiences based on your CRM database of patients who have opted in to get more information. With all these targeting strategies, it’s imperative that the right message suits the behavior and the environment.
Using segmentation to optimize your personalized marketing campaigns
Your targets will determine the marketing channels you use, but remember: It’s not necessarily about the channels but about the strategy. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- If you already have high awareness, you can use channels that drive frequency and quickly increase exposure and reach.
- Going beyond awareness is a short-form educational strategy that uses emails and newsfeed integrations to increase awareness and provide a little education.
- Deep education offers more complete information and even broader product knowledge.
You might have a great website, but that isn’t going to be the first place a potential customer goes to get information about your product. They are going to do their research using their own choice of media, such as online medical journals and research publications.
Different people respond to different things, so you must break your audience down into smaller segments based on needs, interests, and behaviors. This personalized marketing effort will allow you to tailor your marketing campaigns and online ads to specific groups to optimize both your marketing operations and your marketing spend.
Audience segmentation drives efficiency with time, money, and resources. It allows you to learn more about your customers’ needs and wants so you can tailor campaigns that meet the objectives of those likeliest to purchase your medical intervention.
Prioritization that meets overall company goals is important in segmentation to ensure customer needs are met in a way that benefits your organization. Don’t get too granular, though: Five to eight segments is plenty, and always keep your key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind.
Your messaging strategy and its impact on personalized marketing
What is your narrative? What are you trying to communicate to your target audience? A simple message can be simply delivered, but you’ll want to use educational tactics (shallow or deep) and add the appropriate channels if your message is complex.
Remember, everything has to tie back to your overall strategy, and the channels you use have to match your audience’s consumption behaviors. HCPs use LinkedIn and Facebook to follow other practitioners and get clinical information, for example, and Doximity and Sermo are private platforms for HCPs that allow them to assess scientific and professional information.
Your strategy might include some, all, or none of these options, depending on the campaign.
Leveraging programmatic advertising for personalized marketing
Programmatic is a buying approach that’s all about the audience. It gives you the ability to leverage user behavior to display relevant ads to anyone who has either searched for or interacted with content that’s related to your product or service.
The technology involved in programmatic advertising is an enabler for highly targeted campaigns that make ad-buying and selling more efficient. It also finds your target audience wherever they are, rather than being limited to health or medical websites to match media consumption behaviors.
Programmatic can build frequency and awareness at a reasonable cost to keep your product top-of-mind, and your target customer can be retargeted if they don’t take the action you want. This starts a loop of continuous engagement that reinforces your messaging.
It’s important to invest in different types of messaging for different stages of the buyer’s journey:
- The awareness stage is when your target is looking for information because they have a problem. They aren’t looking for solutions but for context. This is where you can establish trust and show yourself as an authority.
- The consideration stage is when your target has defined the problem and is researching ways to solve it. You want to educate them on the pros of your product.
- The decision stage is where the target starts compiling a list of potential solutions and makes a final decision.
Serving up the wrong message during the different stages of the buyer’s journey will detract from overall campaign performance. Not all channels are going to perform equally, either, so optimize using the best-performing channel(s).
Tracking campaign performance across channels
You’ve embraced new methods for buying and targeting healthcare media, honed your audience-targeting techniques, and worked on optimizing both disease education and brand campaigns with personalized marketing. Now it’s time to use media metrics to evaluate how your campaigns are doing.
Here’s a quick overview of what to know:
- The standard KPIs include impressions, clicks, and click-through rates.
- You should always measure the standard KPIs because many advertising programs are contracted based on guarantees, usually regarding pacing.
- If you have a six-month program and guaranteed pacing has been achieved in two months, your program should continue throughout the contract.
- A great way to assess campaign performance is to use the National Provider Identifier (NPI) to allow providers to be targeted using NPI-level data (to understand how Underscore can use its proprietary data-driven solutions to help you uncover new insights, click here) .
- You’ll also get more insight into the audience that has been exposed to your advertising, who has engaged, and who has clicked by analyzing physician-level data.
- Your sales team can close the loop with interested parties, and those on your list who did not take action can be discussed – are they still viable targets?
Measuring word-of-mouth is always tricky, for example, because it is largely anecdotal. At the end of the day, you want an HCP to be interested or a patient or caregiver to talk about your product with a doctor. Your ad points them to a doctor discussion guide on your website; is it being downloaded?
Closing the loop with real analytics
If your targets are not taking the actions you want them to take, it’s time to refine your strategy and/or your approach. A smart approach could be using standard front-end metrics and then looking at what happens on the back-end to get the audience insights you need to improve your marketing.
Marketing can be a real challenge in the rare disease space, largely because of the small audience size and stringent HIPAA regulations. But with the right partner, tools and a robust & compliant data platform, you can find your target audience, service their genuine needs, and spur them to take desired actions. From here, the key to a successful campaign is continuous monitoring and applying lessons learned to fully optimize your messaging.
Get help setting up personalized marketing that makes a difference
Underscore Marketing provides nimble, data-driven media solutions and best-in-class analytics platforms that empower life sciences brands of all stages and sizes to work smarter in reaching patients, caregivers, HCPs, and Payors. We are the media agency of choice for emerging and start-up pharma, biopharma, medical device, and biotech companies commercializing new product(s).
Our media experts help launch & grow healthcare brands through strategic solutions even the most niche audiences notice. Nuanced disease education and branded campaigns empower our clients to reach and engage their target cohorts cost effectively, while delivering repeatable, tangible value back to the business.
Learn more about us at: https://www.underscoremarketing.com.
