Healthcare marketing is changing as a direct result of additional data privacy regulations and shifts in technology. Marketers are being hit with a one-two punch: first from legislators passing new laws to strengthen consumer privacy, and, second, from private sector companies making fundamental changes to digital technologies in support of stronger data privacy. Both changes could set marketers up for trouble if they’re not careful.
In most cases, politicians and business leaders are undertaking these initiatives as a response to consumer demands for greater privacy and control over one’s data. It adds up to an environment that is increasingly challenging for healthcare marketers to navigate, even in B2B communications.
Consent At Scale is Based on Five Pillars
Consent At Scale consists of five strategic pillars that, combined, enable marketers to reach a consented database of HCPs, with transparency and scale.
Coverage: Consent At Scale begins by having enough physicians and other healthcare professionals (HCPs) opted-in to effectively achieve reach and engagement goals. For marketing to be effective, you need to reach 90% of your target audience, but the key is to collect this consent under a single privacy policy.
Beware of aggregating data that has been collected under a variety of privacy policies. This will produce unnecessary complications and could lead to violations of the law.
Physician-Level Data (PLD): Physician-level data (PLD) is the ability to report back results of a specific marketing engagement to a specific target physician. This requires consent from the individual to share their engagement data without blinding it, aggregating it, or otherwise obscuring the attribution. This is in stark contrast to many general consumer marketing efforts, where engagement data is not reported at the individual level.
The Consent At Scale strategy requires the consent framework, and the privacy policy specifically, to be explicit and transparent that engagement data will be shared at the individual level. Without this explicit consent, healthcare marketers will not be able to receive the individualized engagement data that is critical to modern HCP marketing.
Consistency of Identity Data: For effective omnichannel marketing, each channel should use the same identity data to ensure consistent identity resolution. If the email campaign is based on contact data from Vendor A, but the programmatic campaign is based on contact data from Vendor B, it may be hard, or even impossible, to link PLD from the two channels to a single, known identity.
And data consistency extends beyond omnichannel marketing. The leading-edge healthcare marketer will ensure that identity data used for marketing is consistent with identity data used for other business functions: audience selection, prescription data, claims data, clinical data, and more. Ideally, a healthcare marketer would use a single source of identity data across the entire organization to ensure that all insights about a particular HCP can be mapped to that opted-in individual.
Omnichannel Consent: Modern healthcare marketers use multiple channels to target their HCP audience. The Consent At Scale framework specifies that each organization owes it to their customers to be explicit about what channels they will use to communicate and to obtain consent across all possible uses. Failure to do so runs the risk that if the physician complains (or worse, pursues legal action) the marketer may be on the hook to defend vague or poorly worded consent language. To support the basic privacy concept of transparency, healthcare marketers should ensure that the privacy policy under which the identity data is collected is explicit about obtaining consent for each channel which the marketer will be using.
Futureproof: The final pillar of Consent At Scale involves futureproofing marketing campaigns to ensure they remain effective and compliant in the near- and long-term. This requires organizations to stay abreast of two major drivers of future change – legal and technological. Legislatively, California, with 12% of the nation’s physicians, is leading the way by enacting tougher data privacy laws, although other states have new laws taking effect in 2023. On the tech front, Apple’s iOS 15 update and Google Chrome’s deprecation of third-party cookies represent the most significant changes to digital marketing in more than a decade. More changes are likely, as the private sector responds to growing demands from consumers for data privacy protections. Staying abreast of these changes, and their effect on digital marketing, is key to success over the next few years.
Benefits of Consent At Scale
Marketers that take steps now to adopt a Consent At Scale framework will withstand these current and future data privacy-driven disruptions.
With Consent At Scale as the foundation of omnichannel marketing, healthcare marketers can:
- Reach enough of their target audience to positively affect their business
- Meet the industry’s unique need for individual level engagement reporting
- Gain a single source of identity data to optimize marketing activities and data-driven insights
- Thrive during the inevitable changes in the legal and technological environment this year and beyond
Consent At Scale is the best approach to futureproof your HCP digital marketing and ensure that you reach target audiences with messages that have impact, while also achieving a high return on investment. To learn more about Consent At Scale, and how to put its five strategic pillars to work for your organization, please visit us at: www.dmdconnects.com/consent-at-scale.