One of the first and most important aspects of your healthcare marketing strategy is targeting the right healthcare providers for your products and services.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, either. Knowing who could best benefit from your products and services, and how to reliably connect with them is essential.
Understanding and identifying the perfect healthcare audience for your marketing campaigns will help you improve deployments, save time and money, produce more relevant and impactful content, and enhance your overall return on investment (ROI).
Identifying Your Target Market
Discerning what to look for in the right healthcare audience is critical, and you can start by doing some extensive market research. Begin by taking stock of all of the products and services you provide, and familiarize yourself with your ideal recipients.
This will inform the rest of your strategy when marketing to healthcare organizations and physicians of all types. It will also help you clarify exactly what your audience seeks regarding content and preferred marketing platforms—enhancing your individual campaign results and enabling you to more precisely and effectively deploy messaging that resonates with the right people, while maximizing your return on investment (ROI).
This demands researching your competition. Monitoring how your competitors utilize their resources will provide greater insights about where to focus your marketing efforts, and what strategies you should utilize.
Here are some of the most important factors to consider when identifying your ideal HCP audience:
Healthcare Specializations
Understand your market, and the optimal targets for your products and services. Be as specific as you can. Simply identifying “pharmacists” isn’t narrow enough, for instance. If you’re marketing a medication that addresses heart arrhythmia, for example, focus on cardiologists who treat this.
What healthcare specialties are most important to you? What patients do they typically provide care for? Are they high prescribers of medications in this category?
Your content should focus on drawing these HCPs based on their behaviors and specialities.
Prescribing Habits
A healthcare provider’s prescribing habits could be an indicator of whether they’d be a good fit or not. Recognize not only the HCP’s needs, but their patients’ needs, too.
Is the HCP a high-volume prescriber within the therapeutic category you are most interested in? Are they prescribing competitive brands in large numbers? How can your products address their patients’ needs?
Demographic Information
What is your target HCP’s age, gender, occupation, practice type and size, and level of education? What are the demographics of the patients they serve?
Such data will help you customize a campaign that will resonate with recipients and provide meaningful value.
Location
Where are your ideal targets, by country, state, city, metro region, zip code, etc.?
Depending on the market you serve and how widely you plan to distribute, this could be an important factor in identifying the best HCPs for you.
Collecting & Segmenting Your HCP Audience
Whether you’re compiling your own HCP contact lists or purchasing them from a third-party provider, ensuring your messaging reaches the right people is paramount. The right lists will have plenty of details to help determine they are a good fit for your campaigns.
Even within your larger lists, you’ll want to further filter and segment your target audiences for each of your products and services, to produce relevant and informative content and messaging, while encouraging brand engagement and loyalty.
Proper segmentation necessitates that you learn as much about your audience as possible—including their pain points, preferences, and how they search for and interact with your products. This makes it easier to develop effective marketing campaigns with relevant content that leaves positive impressions.
Filter your audience based on considerations such as physician specialties, prescribing behavior, preferred contact method, location, and more. This will help you deliver more accurate messaging to the right audience at the right time.
HCPs value content that is specific, relevant, and overall, informative. More focused, highly targeted campaigns yield greater engagement, and better results. Segmentation enables you to share more specialized messaging with your target audience. This should provide meaningful value, and help resolve specific demands and pain points.
This is not a one-time deal, either. No matter what kind of HCP you’re focusing on, you’ll need to regularly examine your campaign’s progress and adjust your marketing approach accordingly to ensure the success of your entire strategy.
Work With PDQ Communications to Identify & Target the Ideal HCPs for Your Needs!
Now that you know what to look for in the right audience, you should enlist the help of a healthcare marketing partner that can help you attract the perfect HCP in a way that will yield customer conversions.
Working with PDQ Communications will not only give you access to our knowledgeable and experienced marketing team, but we can also expand your audience reach with our extensive and well-segmented contact lists comprising more than 500,000 HCPs from across the industry.
