Understanding HCP marketing micro-moments
Understanding HCP marketing micro-moments
By Jiten Jain, Doceree
Effectively engaging healthcare professionals (HCPs) hinges on a deep comprehension of their behavior and specific clinical paths. The surge of digital avenues in the healthcare marketing landscape has brought about a substantial transformation in how lifescience marketers interact with HCPs.
HCPs now actively visit medical sites in search of relevant specialty-related information or engage with their peers to enhance their knowledge. Likewise, their digital footfall has increased on EHR, EMR, and telehealth platforms with patient engagement rising on these channels. With the landscape changing fast, marketers need to adapt to the evolving landscape at the same pace.
While high-speed broadband, faster and smarter devices are the universal standards, AI-enabled digital technologies are now becoming the new norm, redefining and reshaping the patient-HCP dynamics. This has led to the emergence of micro moments in the HCPs’ professional journey, opening opportunities for lifesciences marketers to tap into them to effectively engage their target audience on the digital medium.
How marketers can cash in on the HCP micro-moments?
Digital HCP gateways have made it necessary for lifescience marketers to explore physicians on online channels over and above their traditional in-person interactions. Both mediums have to complement each other to derive a meaningful HCP engagement strategy. Gone are the days when face-to-face interactions were the only way to educate physicians about drugs, therapies or to update them with the latest research materials.
Depending upon where HCPs are in their professional journey, adequate information can be served to them programmatically. Programmatic technology takes into stock the digital behavior of physicians, their demography and specialty, among other critical parameters, to accordingly provide HCPs with contextual information.
Endemic sites – online medical journals, medical education/news platforms, HCP networking platforms – that HCPs visit to enhance their knowledge base are best for life science marketers to reach their target audience. This could be done with the intent of getting a whitepaper or a case study downloaded, getting the physicians to participate in polls and surveys or visiting a landing page.
Engaging HCPs on endemic sites can help marketers take them to a landing page, encouraging them to fill in their personal details before they indulge in an action such as downloading some information. This is a great way to generate leads for future interactions. Endemic engagements are a part of the upper and lower marketing funnels, which are ideal for awareness and re-targeting efforts.
On the same lines, point-of-care channels have many HCP micro moments when physicians are in their clinical journey. These channels – EHR, EMR, eRx, and telehealth platforms – are those when they are tending to their patients. Providing them patient-centric information at these moments can trigger them to either prescribe a brand’s drug or could enable them to pass on patient affordability messages to patients.
Lifesciences companies have patient affordability programs for patients to bring down the cost of therapy so they don’t abandon their treatment. Medication adherence is the first step towards quality treatment, but expensive therapy becomes a roadblock to it. To counter the same, life sciences brands run co-pay and medication adherence programs to make patients stick to their full treatment course. The micro moments when HCPs are in conversation with their patients are when brands can provide information to HCPs which they can utilize to improve the health outcomes of their patients.
The kind of tactic used to reach physicians on point-of-care channels, driving them to take desired actions for improving a patient’s health is part of the lower-funnel activity that aims towards conversion. Targeting HCP micro-moments can be done well to cover the entire marketing funnel for engaging physicians effectively – from the stages of awareness to conversion.
Jiten Jain is VP & general manager (UK & EU) at Doceree.
