Marketing to healthcare professionals isn’t the easiest task, which is why understanding effective strategies in pharmaceutical marketing is crucial. This group is composed of medical experts that can’t be won over with empty slogans or flashy branding.
If you are looking to get the greatest return on your HCP marketing campaign, continue reading for an in-depth breakdown.
Effective HCP Marketing & Advertising Channels
HCP Marketing is promoting or selling products to Health Care Professionals (HCPs) with the goal of enhancing patient outcomes. It’s important to companies in the pharmaceutical industry who want to sell to HCPs.
There a variety of approaches HCP marketing campaigns can take to deliver their advertisements:
• Out of Home (OOH) Advertising
• Digital Out of Home (DOOH) Advertising
• Digital
• In-person
• Social media marketing
The most successful HCP campaigns utilize a combination of these advertising channels because they can synergize with one another and create a cohesive brand experience. For example, a billboard with a QR code can take consumers to a landing page or your social media marketing content.
If you are looking for one of the best channels to reach healthcare professionals, it’s hard to beat wellness billboards. These billboards prominently feature brands above a sanitizing wipe dispenser and can be installed in places like pharmacy wait areas or store entrances.
Terraboost is a leader in this advertising medium, and studies have shown that 94% of people have a positive opinion of the company featured on sanitizing billboards and 88% of shoppers take a wipe. This advertising medium is especially great for targeting health conscious consumers–which healthcare professionals inherently are.
Targeting Your Ideal Audience
To ensure that your advertisement is being seen by your target audience, the first step is to establish an ideal customer profile. Here are some important characteristics of your ideal customer that you should nail down:
- Job title: Take a look at the products your company offers and consider what sort of healthcare professional would be most interested in them, whether that’s nurses, cardiologists, physical therapists, etc.
- Age: It’s useful to analyze your existing consumer base and find out which age group predominantly purchases your product. Different age groups are exposed to different advertising mediums at a higher rate, like how young people see more online advertising than older people who see more cable TV ads.
- Typical work day: It’s important to consider where your ideal audience tends to work and what locations they may frequent throughout their day so you can reach HCPs during their “blue jean moments.” This will let you place ads near their workplace and locations they must go to like pharmacies, hospitals, or corporate offices.
Once you’ve outlined your ideal customer, you need to strategize on how to best get in front of them with ad targeting. There are three key ad targeting metrics to consider.
Location-based targeting
You’ll want to target areas with high concentrations of healthcare professionals, and ideally, healthcare professionals that are most likely to use your product. Once you’ve found the best region to advertise in, you can use geofencing tools through a variety of advertising mediums to limit your ads to that specific region.
Time-based targeting
Buying advertising space for times your target audience won’t be exposed to them is a waste of money. That’s why it’s important to consider when your target audience will be on their lunch breaks, off work, or shopping. The best way to ensure your ads are visible at these times is through programmatic DOOH advertising. With this medium, you can select a specific time of day you’d like your ads to be shown and digital ad space owners will only feature your brand at those times.
Audience-based targeting
Audience-based targeting is accomplished by creating ad content that directly appeals to your ideal customer and is delivered in a way that’s most likely to reach them.
OOH advertising can be a great way to reach your ideal audience when they are outside and engaging with their surroundings. For example, you could use a billboard display on a highway exit near that leads to a hospital.
This audience-based targeting can be even more precise through programmatic DOOH advertising. Through the vast amounts of data collected by ad vendors, you can have your brand displayed only when there are specific audience demographics or contextual events present, such as store foot traffic or a nearby medical conference.
When it comes to reaching your target audience, Terraboost has both non-digital and digital ad displays that can be placed in a variety of locations near your ideal consumer, such as supermarket store fronts, mall kiosks, pharmacy wait areas, or even gyms. Through programmatic ad placings, you can be sure your target audience is present and engaging with Terraboost wellness billboards.
Content & Personalization
Creating an advertisement that directly appeals to HCPs takes some hard work and deliberation because you are targeting a group that stays up to date on the latest medical solutions. So, it’s your job to advertise your brand as innovative and knowledgeable in the medical industry.
Some HCP marketing campaigns utilize direct mail, emails, or even blog posts to personalize their content and impress prospective customers. However, it’s not easy to build a list of leads and similar targeted content can be distributed via out-of-home advertising.
For example, wellness billboards that display an advertisement above a sanitizing wipe dispenser can also feature brochures or QR codes. This allows you to catch the eyes of HCPs with your advertisement and then impress them with your informative content.
Measuring Performance Of Campaigns
One in depth way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign is through a match panel study. In a match panel study, you compare a group of people exposed to your advertising to a control group (those not exposed to the ad campaign). You’re looking to compare metrics between the two groups, such as brand awareness, purchase intent, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). You can deem your marketing campaign successful if these KPIs significantly increase in the test group.
If you don’t have the time, funds, or desire to perform a match panel study, that’s okay! The most basic way to measure the effectiveness of your advertisement campaign is to evaluate its performance throughout its duration. To do this, simply assess your sales numbers before the campaign begins and evaluate the rate your sales increase during the campaign. Ideally, the increased sales from your marketing campaign will surpass the costs of advertising. However, if you just break even, that’s good too because increased brand recognition will lead to a continued sales increase.
HCP Advertising Case Study
A major pharmaceutical company launched a campaign with the goal of raising awareness among seniors about the shingles vaccine. The pharma company chose in-store wellness billboards in December 2021 – January 2022 and September 2022 – October 2022 at CVS and Walgreens pharmacies.
The results from this were a significant increase in awareness and performance within 8 months, verified by IRi research:
- 273% increase in awareness of the shingles vaccine from retail signage
- 85% recalled that the main message of the ad was to talk with the pharmacist about shingles, and 55% saying they intended to talk with the pharmacist about shingles.
- 70% wellness billboard engagement overall, and 100% engagement among consumers age 50 and above
- 157% increase in ad recall
- 90% positive brand opinion
There are plenty of approaches to vaccine marketing, but wellness billboards provide some of the best levels of best engagement and returns on investment.
How Pharma Marketers Can Capitalize
The best forms of advertising, often devised by leading pharmaceutical marketing firms, form a lasting connection with consumers and tend to utilize contextual settings or interactive elements. When targeting healthcare professionals, an interactive sanitizing billboard is one of the best advertising mediums to use since it shows your brand cares about public health.
Implementing an advertising campaign can be tricky, so don’t be afraid to reach out to one of our expert Terraboost agents who can walk you through some of the key steps and offer you a free personalized quote. Your brand could soon be displayed across stores like CVS, Walgreens, or Kroger through our over 120,000 wellness boards that deliver 8.8 billion monthly engagements.
