5 Things Healthcare Marketers Need to Consider During RFP Season

With RFP season fast approaching, I’m reflecting on my years on the agency side. Reviewing potential partners, we always looked for the typical asks: data-driven technology, reach, audience composition, innovation, measurement. After scouring RFPs, we would seek partners that really took time to understand the brief and come back with comprehensive recommendations.

This RFP season, I’m on the other side of the business. In fact, everyone on DeepIntent’s Strategy team has a media agency background, working with pharma clients. We understand what agencies experience during RFP season because we’ve been there ourselves.

As our teams collaborate on RFPs, we promise to keep our proposals data-driven, supported by cross-platform activation, and measurement and optimization. We will respond to the “ask” first — and go beyond when we believe there is a right opportunity for your business.

To stand out from the competition, here are five things you can expect to see from DeepIntent this RFP season:

1. Transparency

Transparency is a huge consideration during RFP season. When DeepIntent creates RFPs, we’re clear about data, pricing, and measurement. When an RFP is clear about the recency of data — such as unique patient counts for modeling, HCP match rates over the last 30/60/90 days, inventory, and timing for optimizations and measurement readouts — you’re less likely to need to come back with additional questions. Our strategic audience creation also gives you confidence that we’re going to help you reach who you’re looking to reach.

2. Unification Within One Platform

DeepIntent built the first and only DSP for healthcare marketers to plan, activate, measure and optimize campaigns toward business outcomes, all within a single platform. Our unified platform is one of our biggest differentiators and even more so during RFP season. Why? If you’re running campaigns across multiple platforms, that means receiving RFPs from even more vendors. According to research from Canadian RFP software company Loopio, the average enterprise organization responds to a whopping 266 RFPs every year.

Another benefit of a unified platform is the ability to integrate healthcare provider (HCP) and patient media. In fact, coordinating campaigns helped one top pharmaceutical company increase script lift by 35% during the beta testing period for DeepIntent Outcomes™.

3. Optimization and Measurement at the Core

Marketers are frequently so focused on planning and activation that they don’t think of measurement until later. “We’ll get to it later” is the wrong attitude toward measurement, which should never be missing from an RFP. At DeepIntent, measurement is at the forefront of everything we do. A strong measurement and optimization solution is the key to driving real-world business outcomes and ensuring you’re investing wisely. That was exactly what we had in mind when we launched DeepIntent Outcomes.

4. Plans for the Cookieless Future

Google’s delay in deprecation means we can all breathe a bit more as it relates to our cookieless future. However, we’re still preparing and testing for it, and we’re taking a partnered approach, as we do with everything else. While every marketer stays on top of the hottest technologies, we also make a point to innovate in an actionable way. We will partner with our clients to build out roadmaps, test and learn plans, and more to secure early reads on what the future might look like for HCP and patient media.

5. Innovations With Healthcare Marketers in Mind

We know agencies want to see innovation when reviewing an RFP. However, innovation has many different meanings to healthcare marketers, who have unique challenges given the highly regulated pharma industry. Innovation should solve problems, fill gaps, drive efficiencies and performance, and future-proof organizations. At DeepIntent, our innovative solutions address these issues. For example, being able to identify and reach HCPs prior to a clinically-relevant patient visit or the ability to trigger messaging based on a client’s Next Best Action system.

RFP season will be here before you know it and you’re likely already thinking about 2022. We are, too. Let’s plan it together.

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