Competition can be healthy - it helps us strive to be better and create more value for our customers. But what happens when there are too many competitors and targeted audiences feel overloaded by the increase in information coming at them from every direction? Healthcare professionals and consumers have been experiencing this increase in information and are overwhelmed. A newly published Accenture survey revealed that 64% of HCPs said they’re getting too much digital content from pharmaceutical companies.
A recent article from PM360 expanded on this by emphasizing the difficulty many brands face in not knowing where or how to best reach their desired audiences. This lack of direction can result in more confusion and less action, creating an obstacle for marketers trying to get their media in front of the right audiences, on the right channels, at the right time. In an industry where every click, impression and second count towards better patient outcomes, it can be tempting to think that an every-channel-all-the-time approach would be beneficial. However, this quantity over quality ideology is potentially resulting in the opposite effect for healthcare brands. In fact, the above study revealed that almost 60% of all doctors now feel that they have been recently spammed with digital messaging by at least one pharma company. The first step in avoiding being labeled as “spam” is making sure you have the right target audience in your sights.
Reach the Right Audience, Every Time
In an effort to overcome this obstacle and ease the task of finding ideal target audiences based on a number of factors, Lasso built Blueprint™, a first-of-its-kind HCP and DTC audience builder for healthcare marketing. Now healthcare marketers are able to identify audiences based on any combination or exclusion of diagnoses, medications, procedures, insurance data, demographic information, and much more. Once an audience has been created, marketers are able to see counts in real-time in addition to the estimated cost to reach those audiences across every channel (banner, video, CTV, social, email, etc.) By understanding campaign scale and investment before spending a dime, marketers are able to find and target the right audience every time. These audiences can then be immediately activated in Lasso or any other platform.
Narrowing down the ideal target audience that will best resonate with your campaign tactics is key in out-marketing an ever-expanding list of competitors. The healthcare industry is growing with more competition and bigger marketing budgets year-over-year. The pharmaceutical industry specifically has skyrocketed in recent years with consistent growth in both sales and spending. Statista.com provided some deeper insights into this growth, noting that pharmaceutical sales revenue in the United States accounted for nearly half of the global market and had surpassed 500bn USD in both 2020 and 2021. Big pharma collectively spent 5.78bn USD on traditional DTC media in 2020. It's easy to throw money at an anything-and-everything approach to targeting HCPs and consumers. However, this is precisely what has led to over-targeting and resulted in audiences feeling overwhelmed.
As important as it can be to focus on staying on-budget, an equally important task is optimizing that budget to spend marketing dollars wisely. If competitors are also attempting the same thing, what is going to set you apart? Focus on the message you are trying to send, who you are trying to target and what you want the outcome of that interaction to be. Quality media to the most relevant audience will produce more favorable outcomes than a blanket statement aimed at a general audience.
Perfect Your Omnichannel Strategy and Your Timing
Quality media is partially design and content, and partially correct placement on the right channels. Speed to insights and campaign refinement is key in making sure every marketing dollar is spent intelligently. Optimizing your media campaigns with Lasso Levers™ allows for the real-time modification of bids and budgets at the most granular levels and optimizations based on device type, supply type, viewability rate, site lists, etc. Within the Lasso Platform, marketers can re-allocate their budget and pivot to their highest performing tactics based on campaign feedback in-flight, delivering great experiences on the channels that resonate best with their audiences.
Another important aspect in converting your audiences is getting the most pertinent media in front of them. More than 8 in 10 (83%) HCPs say the content they're getting from pharma companies is more relevant now than it was before COVID-19, and they likely have more time to read it. This offers encouragement to marketers to re-focus on creating the best experience and perfecting the timing and frequency of the messages audiences are receiving.
Brands and agencies have been taking advantage of Lasso Triggers™ to target audiences through precise and methodical campaigns. Offering true omnichannel sequential messaging, Triggers allows the user to tell a story across all channels, including banner, video, audio, CTV, email and social media. Campaigns can be customized using deterministic data, specific user actions or any combination of both. For example, a banner ad could be shown to an HCP on LinkedIn and depending on the response, could be followed up with another banner on a different website or a direct email to that HCP. In one instance, campaigns where a click on a banner ad triggered an additional banner ad to be served, Lasso saw 5.75x higher engagement on the second banner and more than 15x higher engagement on the third, on average! Rather than publishing content and hoping for the best, Lasso offers a way to make informed targeting decisions and avoid spamming potential customers.
The right partnership can make the difference between being labeled as spam and providing insightful value to your target audiences.
Lasso provides this key partnership by closing the circle between audience, activation and measurement. The data from our curated audiences or custom segments built by you, omnichannel media activation, and real world insights all live in the same place. This reduces the loss of data and generates more speed to activation and optimizations, leading to better outcomes. With Lasso, marketers can target the right audiences on the right channels at the right time, every time!
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