HCP marketing strategies are crucial to compete in the healthcare market. To stay ahead in this dynamic environment, organizations must engage HCPs with a data-focused approach that leverages the power of insights.
Managing Partner at Adfire Health, Lillia Tse, states, “A data-focused digital marketing strategy is a must for success. In an era where information is power, harnessing the insights derived from data is not just an advantage; it is a necessity.”
This article will explain how to build data-focused HCP marketing strategies that deliver measurable results.
What is a Data-focused HCP Marketing Strategy?
A data-focused HCP marketing strategy is an approach that places a strong emphasis on leveraging data and analytics to drive marketing decisions and activities. It involves:
- Setting measurable goals at the onset of a campaign and identifying metrics that will improve campaign performance.
- Delivering hyper-targeted marketing campaigns to HCP audiences segmented by license type, specialty, prescribing behavior, demographics, location, and more.
- Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from various sources to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and market trends.
A data-focused marketing strategy aims to make informed, data-driven decisions that result in effective targeting, messaging, and campaign optimization.
Setting Measurable Goals
Setting measurable goals is the first step in creating a data-focused HCP marketing strategy. Goals provide clarity, accountability, performance evaluation, resource allocation, ROI measurement, continuous improvement, and effective communication. They help marketers stay focused, measure success, and optimize their efforts to drive meaningful and measurable outcomes for the business.
Amberlee D’Alois, Director of Account Management at Adfire Health, explains, “You need to determine why you are running a campaign – otherwise, the campaign will fail. And it’s not always easy. Understanding ‘the why’ requires extensive communication and alignment among various departments.” To set measurable goals, identify essential business objectives and how marketing can contribute to those objectives.
A healthcare marketer’s goals vary depending on the organization, target audience, and overall marketing strategy. Whether marketing for a rare disease, reaching HCPs at medical conferences, or attracting patients to a randomized clinical trial, healthcare marketers set goals such as:
- Increase brand awareness with HCPs
- Provide patient & HCP education
- Enhance HCP digital engagement
- Generate qualified leads with critical decision-makers
- Drive sales growth or achieve script lift
Measure Marketing Goals with KPIs
Establishing clear and quantifiable metrics is the next step in building a successful campaign. Data-focused measurement allows for optimizing marketing strategies, better decision-making, and the success of broader business objectives.
Depending on healthcare marketing goals, KPIs will differ. Here are some metrics to consider when establishing KPIs:
- Impressions: The number of times an ad is displayed to the target audience. This metric indicates the reach and visibility of a campaign.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of users who clicked on an ad after seeing it. A higher CTR indicates that an ad is compelling and engaging to the audience.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as filling out a form, scheduling an appointment, or making a purchase. Conversion rate helps assess the effectiveness of a campaign in driving desired outcomes.
- Cost Per Action (CPA): The average cost incurred to achieve a specific action or conversion, such as acquiring a new patient or generating a lead. A lower CPA indicates more efficient campaign performance.
- Viewability: The percentage of ad impressions that are viewable to users. Viewability is particularly relevant for video ads.
- Engagement Metrics: Metrics such as average time spent on the landing page, bounce rate, or pages per session indicate how well a campaign engages users and drives deeper interactions.
- Audience Reach and Frequency: The number of unique users a campaign reaches and the average number of times they are exposed to an ad. Reach and frequency metrics provide insights into campaign saturation and audience exposure.
- Cost per Thousand (CPM): The cost per 1,000 impressions served. CPM helps assess the cost efficiency of a campaign in reaching the desired audience.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. ROAS helps assess the financial impact and profitability of a campaign.
Target HCP Audiences with Quality Data
Once goals and KPIs are determined, hand-crafting targeted HCP audiences is the next step in building a successful HCP marketing strategy. Targeting the right HCP audiences allows healthcare marketers to allocate resources efficiently by delivering relevant, personalized messaging. Ultimately, this creates a more effective and impactful campaign, improving healthcare organizations’ and patients’ outcomes.
While almost every healthcare marketer would agree about the importance of targeting HCPs, most have significant challenges in overcoming data obstacles. Data may be scattered across different systems, departments, or platforms. Organizational resources may be limited, and teams need more expertise to build technology infrastructures and segment data. Finding and trusting the proper partner can also be challenging.
When looking at your data, or when choosing a data partner, it’s essential to understand the quality of that data. Ann Kozanecke, Director of Programmatic Operations at Adfire Health, exclaims, “Take pride in the quality of your data! A rich first-party database of HCPs is a unicorn. Any organization harnessing this power will disrupt the marketplace because they can allocate their spending toward the right audience and minimize waste with 1:1 targeting. I’m lucky to be part of a company that understands this.”
Here are a couple of considerations when determining the quality of HCP data.
Understand HCP Data Collection Processes & Assure Accuracy
A reputable HCP database should have comprehensiveand reliable data sources, such as partnerships with trusted healthcare providers or direct data collection from reliable sources.
Look at sample data sets at the onset and check for inconsistencies, errors, or missing information. High-quality data should have minimal inaccuracies or missing values, ensuring reliable and actionable insights.
Assess HCP Data Segmentation Capabilities
Determine if the segmentation criteria capture the characteristics or attributes needed to reach and engage desired HCP audiences. You should be able to target specific HCP segments by NPI, license type, specialty, prescribing behavior, location, and more.
Check if the database offers customization to further align the segmented data with specific HCP marketing strategies. Determine if you can refine the segmentation or add additional data attributes. Customization allows you to tailor the data to unique marketing objectives.
Data Validation and Verification
A reliable database should have robust methods in place to validate and verify the accuracy and reliability of its data. Methods include data cleansing, verification against trusted sources, data quality assurance procedures, or high match rates.
Match rates refer to how many user identifiers in a database match with the user identifiers in a demand-side platform (DSP). Seeing a high match rate provides an extra layer of validation that the users in a database are real-life people identified by the media activation platform. Put simply: the higher the match rate, the more people you can reach.
Measure & Optimize Campaigns
Measuring and optimizing campaign performance is the last step in creating a data-focused HCP marketing strategy. Measurement and reporting include a complete breakdown of HCPs engaging with marketing materials, which creatives they are engaging with, where they are engaging, at what time, and more. Segment results by specialty, license type, location, address, and even engagement-level metrics such as device used, time stamps, and the exact number of impressions and clicks. Nick Agboyani, Adfire’s Director of Sales, explains, “Comprehensive reporting enables marketing teams to take the next best action and drive HCPs from awareness to conversion.”
Determine What is Working
What works on one campaign might not work on another, mainly because the campaign performance depends on many factors, like the audience, the message, the landing pages, the product itself, or a variety of other factors. Ann Kozanecke says, “Optimization efforts rely on what story the data tells us.” While historical data can curate standard best practices, the best healthcare marketers will go a step beyond by deep diving into individual campaigns to understand what is working and what isn’t.
When optimizing HCP marketing strategies, consider industry benchmarks to gauge performance. Look at the KPIs you developed at the campaign’s onset and determine the results. Reduce spending on strategies that aren’t working and increase spending on strategies that are working.
Takeaway: How to Build Data-Focused HCP Marketing Strategies
Data allows your healthcare marketing strategies to be targeted, accurate, and cost-effective. Start by aligning critical stakeholders, setting clear campaign goals, and establishing measurable KPIs. Develop targeted HCP audiences for your HCP marketing campaigns. Ensure your database, or your data partner, is transparent in their data collection processes, segments HCP audiences, and has a proper data validation process. Measure and optimize your campaigns based on your goals and what works.
At Adfire Health, we work with healthcare marketers to create optimized, highly effective, data-based digital engagement strategies. With Thumbprint™, our segmented data ecosystem of over 8.2 million healthcare professionals, we can offer direct access to healthcare professionals nationwide.
We bring our years of hands-on experience to every new campaign and work with you to bring the best results possible. Contact us to learn more about what we can do for your business.
Sources
- Nolan, M., & Coffed, K. (2021, June 23). Life reimagined: Mapping the motivations that matter for today’s consumer. Newsroom. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-report-finds-consumer-values-and-buying-motivations-have-fundamentally-changed-shifting-away-from-price-and-quality.htm
