In the age of hyper-personalized digital marketing, many brands are experiencing a surge in their efficiency. The healthcare sector has been slow to join the data-driven programmatic advertising craze for fear of breaching (or being accused of breaching) HIPAA regulations. As more and more healthcare marketers find ways to use data in compliance with HIPAA, they are quickly discovering the advantages of programmatic advertising. Still, as our ability to drive efficient campaigns gets easier, healthcare marketers should remember the importance of effective and efficient advertising.
The Importance of Effective Advertising
1. Effective Advertising is Humanistic
Effective advertising puts products and services in front of those who need or want them and not in front of those who don’t. It shows that the company understands its customers and their needs. Programmatic and data-driven advertising can accomplish this by segmenting and targeting specific audiences. Adfire Health helped a top ten pharmaceutical and medical device company target a segmented group of over 31,000 cardiologists to spread awareness about their new cardiac medical device.
2. Effective Advertising Uses Creativity to Educate and Drive Action
By using data and customer insights, marketers can craft intelligent and well-researched ad campaigns that value the knowledge of the audience and add to it. By fostering creativity and education in the digital marketplace, companies can influence the market and improve consideration in the long-run.
3. Effective Advertising Builds Brand-Loyalty
Effective advertising doesn’t focus on simply getting a turnaround immediately, but rather invests in the quality of the brand and its space in the market. This helps companies achieve their long-term awareness, consideration and brand-loyalty goals.
The Importance of Efficient Advertising
1. Efficient Advertising Saves Money
Programmatic advertising is one of the biggest advantages that marketers can capitalize on to get the most for their spend. It cuts out human error and, as each ad is highly-targeted, there’s very little waste involved. Adfire Health optimized a #1 branded Rx drug’s ad performance with programmatic technology by continuously analyzing campaign trends to determine which factors were increasing performance (i.e. ad placement, devices targeted and timing) and adjusting them accordingly.
2. Efficient Advertising is Fast
With data and artificial intelligence (AI), you can now reach your segmented audience instantly, with little human input. You can then quickly make small tweaks in campaigns as they run to maximize your spend. For example, Adfire Health used AI to monitor over 9 million impression opportunities every second to bring invaluable insights during a top tier marketing agency’s campaign to continuously increase the performance of the campaign.
3. Efficient Advertising Builds Business Performance Quickly
Efficient, highly-targeted campaigns drive immediate, short-term responses that are easily trackable. They lead to fast ROIs and build business performance quickly.
Which is more important? Effectiveness or Efficiency?
Quick inflation in business performance is the main reason many companies are making the mistake of valuing efficient, short-term response campaigns over long-term effective ones. However, Les Binet, head of effectiveness at adam&eve/DDB, told Raconteur recently that “Businesses that put efficiency first are businesses that are heading for disaster…It’s advertising effectiveness that matters most. Only once you’ve got effectiveness should you worry about efficiency.” The acclaimed study that Mr. Binet co-authored, “The Long and the Short of It: Long Term and Short Term Marketing Strategies,” recommends that companies dedicate 60% of their spend to brand-building and 40% to short-term direct response. This blend of effective and efficient advertising is highly important in meeting long-term and short-term advertising goals. As the healthcare sector advances their marketing strategies by using highly-targeted programmatic and data-driven advertising, we should be careful to maintain our balance, building strong, creative campaigns that build brand-loyalty while at the same time utilizing all our digital resources to be as efficient as possible.
