It’s Time to Integrate Your HCP Programmatic and Point of Care Media

Omnichannel, “surround sound” marketing is the gold standard for life science brands and their agencies-of-record to drive more meaningful, lasting physician engagement. Yet despite carefully crafted, well-intentioned brand strategies, media buying still overwhelmingly focuses on impression cost and audience reach, missing the potential of channel integration. The result is media placements that deliver a disjointed journey and decreases the likelihood of brand conversion. 

But what if there is a smarter way to buy media? One that maximizes audience reach, cost efficiency, and targeting precision to deliver a consistent, seamless brand experience to your audience? There is – and it starts with integrating programmatic and point of care media placements. 

Programmatic and Point of Care Are Natural Complements 

Integrating programmatic and point of care media combines the strengths of digital precision targeting with the relevance and immediacy of in-clinic engagement. And there are even more synergies to consider: 

• Strategically timed, sequential messaging: Programmatic campaigns can introduce new therapies or clinical data to physicians, while point of care media expands on and reinforces these messages when physicians are meeting with brand-eligible patients in a clinical setting. 

• Broad reach and focused engagement: Programmatic media allows pharma brands to amplify general awareness across a large physician audience, while point of care placements highlight a specific treatment option to more focused audiences when care decisions are being made for eligible patients. 

• Cost effective, prioritized placement: Integrating these channels means higher-cost point of care impressions can be deployed to physicians when they are seeing eligible patients, while lower-cost programmatic impressions provide coverage between patient visits. This is what we mean when we say surround sound – the right balance of channels set to the ideal timing of the treatment journey. 

• Cross-channel analytics: By integrating data from both programmatic and point of care media, pharma marketers can gain a more comprehensive and realistic view of HCP engagement. The benefit is a better understanding of how different touchpoints contribute to the prescribing journey with the ability of optimizing messaging and targeting strategies across the campaign lifecycle. 

So how can pharma brands and their marketing agencies capture these benefits? It starts by grounding both channels in a shared audience – but not the audience you may be thinking of. 

Shifting to an Integrated, Patient-Centric Channel Approach 

True programmatic and point of care channel integration thrives through a communal, dynamic patient audience, not just an NPI list. By predicting future patient care milestones, pharma marketers can build a “living” audience that links patients at or approaching brand eligibility to their treating HCP(s). This provides the insight needed to seamlessly segment and prioritize HCPs based on their future prescribing opportunities – so high-opportunity HCPs can receive high-value point of care impressions, and lower opportunity HCPs can remain in the wider, lower-cost programmatic pool. 

On their own, programmatic and point-of-care media are foundational pillars of HCP engagement strategies. But when they work in tandem, they create a cohesive channel set that combines general brand awareness with conversion touchpoints, and automatically “knows” which type of impression (and message) each physician should receive (we said smart!).  

The result? More effective HCP marketing that reaches and engages physicians throughout their decision-making process, helping more patients benefit from your brand’s treatment or even life-saving therapy earlier in their journey.