Pharma is joining the programmatic party, and the good times are just beginning. The compliance and privacy worries are lessening and pharma is catching up to other industries, where 50-75% of marketing budgets today are used on programmatic.
HCP Engagements with Online Advertising
While it’s not likely we’ll see pharma invest 50% or more in programmatic advertising to HCPs, increasing investment aligns to current HCP online engagement behaviors. In fact, the 2016 Adobe Digital Insights U.S. Digital Health survey found that 49% of HCPs spend 4 to 5 hours a day on their devices conducting research or engaging with their peers. MedData Group’s own research echoes similar themes. In our 2018 survey, we found 80-90% of HCPs are using sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, and 75% are open to advertising from pharmaceutical companies.
Confidence in Digital Targeting
These engagement behaviors are matched with another strength of programmatic campaigns: their ability to target specific HCPs with tailored messaging on non-endemic sites. This ability is 100% fueled by knowing, with absolute confidence, the digital identities of the HCPs that are being targeted. At MedData group, our proprietary methodology allows for deterministic identity match on 1.5M US physicians, NPs and PAs to multiple cookies, social media IDs and device IDs. Simply put, our customers can be sure their ads are being seen by the exact HCPs that they are looking to target.
Measuring the ROI of Programmatic
In any success metric analysis, and especially in return on investment where every dollar needs accounting, linking HCPs to engagement with the given tactic is essential. We expect that marketers will evaluate programmatic campaigns to HCPs as part of their attribution analytics, where its percent contribution to brand growth will be calculated relative to other tactics. The contribution percent is then applied to sales, where it is monetized, then at last, compared to its costs. In the programmatic campaign space, this brings us back to MedData Group’s ability to link digital identities to HCPs and doing so as accurately as possible. After all, the better the identity link, the better the insight into who was exposed, when the exposure happened, and how many times the exposure happened. All of these data points make for a precise ROI.
If you’re interested in programmatic advertising to HCPs, contact us today to learn more about our digital ID data for HCP targeting.
