HCP and DTC marketing may get executed in silos, but everyone intuitively knows the impact on patient health is cumulative. As healthcare marketers learn to implement more sophisticated omnichannel campaigns, they seek new approaches to reaching healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients. Maximizing the relationship between provider and patient marketing connects audience and measurement data to deliver increased patient outcomes — like script lift, for example — by targeting both audiences within a single campaign.
Let’s dive into several common questions about integrated campaigns and highlight some best practices.
What are integrated campaigns?
Most health campaigns focus only on reaching healthcare providers (HCPs) or prospective patients. An integrated HCP/DTC campaign is different; it’s a coordinated campaign designed to target HCPs and potential or current patients simultaneously with ad creatives containing specific messaging for each audience.
When should integrated campaigns be used?
Health brands can use integrated HCP/DTC campaigns for various reasons, including launching a new product or a competitive conquesting campaign. However, integrated campaigns designed around labs data or campaigns for prescriptions should be used sparingly, as they may not generate enough conversions (e.g., actions taken by doctors or patients) to provide statistically significant results.
When HCP and DTC campaigns run independently, it’s harder to gauge the difference in action taken by patients and their doctors after being exposed to similar ads. Integrated campaigns help to increase the likelihood that both audiences will see your ads within the same timeframe.
How do integrated HCP/DTC campaigns work?
Healthcare marketers can initiate an integrated campaign from either the HCP or DTC perspective. From the HCP standpoint, it would involve a specific NPI list of doctors a brand wants to target, while DTC would start with a specific action taken by the consumer, resulting in a visit to their HCP.
Depending on that decision and the outcome the advertiser seeks to measure and optimize, the campaign is configured either with HCP parameters and the corresponding DTC parameters or vice versa.
Integrated HCP/DTC campaigns can utilize any DSP settings that a standard healthcare campaign may incorporate, including specific channels, devices, locations, inventory, brand safety, frequency, and creative setting.
What factors might impact the success of running an integrated campaign?
A primary challenge in running integrated campaigns today is the authorization to spend dollars from both HCP and DTC marketing budgets. Manufacturers often divide the responsibility for these two budgets between different agencies. To help educate manufacturers, healthcare marketers may have examples of integrated campaigns from other clients they can blind and share. There have also been reports from endemic ad tech companies showing that running integrated campaigns to both HCP and DTC audiences can yield 10-15% higher script lift compared to a single-audience-only campaign.
A second factor to note is that campaign spend for DTC advertising does impact the quality and quantity of the data generated. As spending increases, results for these campaigns can be generated more quickly. If larger spend isn’t a possibility, don’t worry. It will simply take longer to generate a healthy dataset for measurement and optimization across both audiences.
Do integrated campaigns perform better than standalone campaigns?
With integrated campaigns, additional analytics are available that help brands understand which patient cohorts saw their ads, which doctors saw their ads, and which doctors with patients both saw them. At DeepIntent, our powerful claims dataset maps the incremental changes in script performance for these cohorts.
For a leading migraine medication, DeepIntent ran an integrated HCP/DTC campaign optimized toward script performance (the HCP goal) and audience quality (the DTC goal). Compared to a standalone campaign, the coordinated campaign generated superior results: patients exposed to the campaign were 29% more likely to go on script, while HCPs were 19% more likely to prescribe the brand.
Want to ensure your integrated campaigns are reaching verified patients and HCPs? DeepIntent Outcomes™ provides fast, transparent, and actionable measurement based on clinical data.