More personalized medicines also means more personalized marketing—and the hyperpersonalization trend goes to extremes. Using advanced data and analytics, marketers can whittle down their targets and tailor messages to consumer audiences sometimes as small as one person.
Marketers gather data from multiple sources, crunch it, and then identify small groups that could be receptive to specific messaging. It’s already beginning to happen in areas like rare diseases, says specialty agency Cambridge BioMarketing.
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“Where we’re going with hyper-personalization is using the systems, the platforms and the technology to allow us to dynamically, and in a predictive manner, serve content to users based on what we’re seeing interests them,” said Annemarie Crivelli, director of digital at Cambridge BioMarketing.
For example, in email marketing, she said, pharma marketers can craft a strategy with a very specific messaging and use segmenting, tagging and targeting to reach each person. Those techniques enable the agency and its pharma clients to “see” what people are doing online in real time and then use predictive and dynamic content to deliver hyperpersonalized emails.
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Of course, real time in pharma requires special care. FDA regulations mean that content has to be prescreened and approved for use. Still, it’s not only possible, but more probable, in the coming year as technology and treatments both advance.
“A lot of consumer brands will do this on the fly, monitoring and writing content on the fly based on what they’re seeing, but that’s harder to do in pharma,” Crivelli said. “For pharma, the success is in the mapping and planning out of what do we need to say and what are all the options, and then getting them pre-approved by regulatory to build a system can deliver as folks are consuming content.”