The future of healthcare marketing lies at the crucial intersection of data and context. It’s no longer enough to rely on data to just know who your audience is, or even where they might be—you must also understand when and why they’re most likely to act. All are critical components in the marketing equation. For marketers, adopting this mindset requires a shift in strategy. Combining these factors—deterministic data and contextual relevance—will unlock a new level of patient marketing effectiveness, paving the way for brands to more meaningfully engage patients and improve their healthcare experience.
Why guess when we can know? Hyper-targeting is here.
Personalization is no longer a luxury, it’s an expectation of the modern, tech-enabled consumer (and patient). Historically for healthcare marketers, this has been a challenging demand to meet due to regulatory complexity and the sensitive nature of protected health information (PHI). We can more easily determine with readily accessible consumer data if someone has purchased a new car than if they have specific medical condition. As a result, pharma marketing has relied on assumptions or proxy data to identify potential patients—estimations or predictions based on probabilistic data models. But demographic profiles and online behavior can only approximate a person’s health needs, and personalizing healthcare experiences based on these types of educated guesses is a gamble that marketers can’t take.
Advancements in secure data sharing and anonymization, however, have entirely changed the game. Patient information sourced directly from Electronic Health Records (EHR) offers the most deterministic targeting information available to marketers today. This data, including everything from prescription history to insurance carrier to diagnosis codes, is a cheat code advantage that even less-regulated industries would struggle to match.
With EHR data, approximations are replaced with absolute precision. Marketers can now find the exact patients who need their message most based on real-world health information and then use that deterministic data to craft more impactful and relevant campaigns. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Context Is the New Currency
The right message served to the right patient sounds great, but even that pairing loses its power if it's served in the wrong context. How many people trust the healthcare content that appears in their Facebook feeds? How many people seeing ads on TV are considering making critical health decisions while watching their favorite show? To be truly effective, healthcare marketing messages must appear when and where people are actively thinking about their health and wellness. It’s what patients want: According to a 2023 MediaTrials survey conducted in partnership with PatientPoint, 84% of patients said they want to see pharma messages in the doctor’s office versus on TV (27%) or on social media (26%).
The importance of context has been the missing link in Precision Patient Marketing efforts to date. New platforms are now emerging that give marketers both access to patient-consented health information and the opportunity to serve ads directly to patients within them. Evolving beyond interstitial ads at the end of a digital intake form, the capability now exists to more holistically integrate ads and health content into the entire HCP-patient digital communication experience. Solutions like PatientPoint Precision™, for example, deliver this capability not only within intake forms, but patient portals as well.
This addition of the patient portal opens a world of possibilities when you consider the timing and context of that setting. Marketers can now reach and engage patients not only while checking in for doctor appointments, but also when receiving test results, messaging their physicians, scheduling new appointments, paying medical bills and more. These are precisely the moments we should be coveting as healthcare marketers—when patients are in a trusted healthcare setting, interacting with healthcare professionals, already in a healthcare mindset and primed to act.
Relevant content there, where it makes sense to receive medical advice, has the potential to go far beyond good marketing. Timely personalization in this context could play a crucial role in enhancing the patient's experience, driving engagement, and ultimately better outcomes.
Unlocking a new competitive advantage
Marketers now have the opportunity to find their patient audience more effectively and serve them more relevant content at proven points of change in the patient journey. It’s a new era of precision patient marketing, and the brands who embrace it will have a clear advantage over their competitors.
To learn more about Precision Patient Marketing, visit https://patientpoint.com/life-sciences/patientpoint-precision/.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.