Webinar Recap: Patient-Centricity is Evolving on Pace With Pharma Marketing

In early December, I had the opportunity to join marketing colleagues from Genentech and Argenx on a Fierce Pharma webinar titled "Targeting with a Purpose: How Patient-Centered Strategies are Shaping Pharma’s Future in 2025." The discussion was highly engaging and wide-ranging, but ultimately highlighted how the evolving landscape of pharmaceutical marketing is influencing patient-centered marketing practices. 

Patient centricity should be at the heart of every pharma marketing strategy, and now the increasing availability of data alongside the computing and generative power of AI are making it more possible for manufacturers to not only start with the patient but execute against their goals of privacy-safe and more personalized information-sharing. 

What made the panel excited is that the opportunity to segment and engage marketing audiences with increasingly granular real-patient experiences and preferences is at our fingertips, and the barriers are being removed by technology innovation. 

An Age-Old Adage, Revisited: Right Person, Right Time 

One of the key takeaways from the webinar was the emphasis on how the ability to target the right person at the right time with the right content is changing for the better. While this is the ultimate goal of every marketer, its execution requires a nuanced understanding of patient needs and behaviors. In particular, pharma marketer Nikki Frantzen, of Genentech, shared that sometimes people just don’t want to hear from the brand and are more receptive to other influences. 

Many major brands spend significant resources on serving ads through owned properties, such as social media. This can be effective, but it’s most potent when paired with other approaches. Patients often prefer to hear from people who are like them rather than directly from pharmaceutical companies. This is where influencers and grassroots campaigns come into play.  

For example: consumers early in the patient journey are often seeking information via social media, using channels like a search engine. But they’re not necessarily looking for information from pharma. This means they’re not often choosing to look at information shared through a brand’s owned properties. Partnering with health influencers can help brands reach new and existing patients in a more authentic way than simply pushing accurate information at scheduled times or via sponsored ads.  

Consumer media habits are always changing, and media itself continues to diversify and grow. Because of this, it can be challenging for brands to prioritize where and how to invest in media, particularly influencer strategies besides KOLs. 

Erin Echter, of Genentech, stated that brands have to be willing to experiment with different channels. Her experience has found that doctors have reported getting patient referrals from platforms like Next Door. For some healthcare consumers, advice-seeking and sharing platforms are becoming an alternative for traditional search engines like Google when they are researching health topics. 

My main point on the webinar is that employing data and analytics to navigate the media landscape according to the unique needs of a brand’s patient population is more achievable than ever before when brands follow these three best practices: 

Join the Conversation 

To create and deliver content that truly resonates with patients, all the pharma panelists agreed that a crucial element to market research includes asking them what they want to hear. 

According to Frantzen, patients are specifically interested in many topics that relate to their individual experiences, including but not limited to: understanding disease management, when to seek treatment, what treatments can do, what to ask their doctors, and when to contact their doctors for additional help.  

To pharma-marketer Katrina Gary of Argenx, effectively leveraging this approach means building a sense of community as part of your marketing strategy, even co-creation of content with patients. Rather than talking at people, it's more effective to join the conversation. People want to hear the emotional side of the story, but from other patients, not from the pharma companies themselves. They seek information that resonates with their daily lives. This requires creating different cuts of a message tailored to specific channels and platforms. 

None of this can happen, of course, without precision in market research and audience data. Frantzen referred to this as Health Media Targeting (HMT). She described HMT as the compilation of patient journey healthcare data compiled for the express use of targeting. The very definition of precision targeting. This is a growing portion of the strategy and investment of pharma marketing. The drawback of today – which won’t last long – is the fact that this approach can’t be leveraged across many of the channels that consumers use most when they are engaging in the treatment decision-making process (such as social media or linear TV). 

The Evolving Role of TV 

Gary indicated that the concept of ‘joining the conversation’ can even be achieved on traditional channels such as TV, when you look beyond linear approaches.  

For Gary, personalization is paramount given that her market is for a rare disease. TV remains an innovative medium for rare diseases because of precision targeting limitations. However, those limitations are disappearing, and when a rare disease patient sees a fellow patient on what is perceived as ‘national TV’ it can validate and legitimize the treatment message a manufacturer is trying to deliver. 

According to Echter, Addressable TV is delivering the level of targeting precision needed to increase patient reach beyond Linear TV. Even still, given its ability to deliver broad awareness, pharma continues to expand its reach even on linear platforms, particularly for brands with highly competitive or common disease areas. 

While we’ve been making strides in healthcare precision targeting, patients are not the only consumers at stake; caregivers are also an important audience. There’s a key gap in precision targeting when it comes to reaching relevant consumers who are not patients, and therefore pharma will need to remain committed to some level of broad awareness tactics. This will, of course, vary by brand. 

Measuring Precision Targeting 

The caregiver dynamic described above also highlights a major drawback in measurement. Today, the industry standard for measuring how well a consumer marketing campaign may perform is Audience Quality (AQ), but the panelists agreed that it’s becoming less useful as a leading indicator of success, particularly for precision targeted campaigns. 

The reason it falls short is because it only considers diagnosed patients in its calculation. It doesn’t leave room for caregivers, family members, pre- and un-diagnosed consumers, or marketing initiatives that use more complex targeting such as predictive targeting. 

For this reason, Frantzen highlights that when buying HMT from data vendors, it's important to couple it with brand health metrics received from channels themselves. Engagement data within platforms can indicate whether your audience is genuinely interested in what you're saying. Metrics such as video completion rates and click-through rates to websites are still valuable leading indicators. 

Measuring Patient-Centric Outcomes 

Finally, when measuring the long-term success of a marketing initiative, patient-centric marketing initiatives continue to strive to meaningfully connect investment with healthcare outcomes, and it’s important to look at both financial and patient journey impact. 

While financial outcomes are easier to measure and quantify, patient centricity is more about what’s considered the softer measures. Gary highlighted that standard outcome measures used by physicians don't always translate to patient communication. It's essential to bridge this gap and increase consumer familiarity with outcome measures, showing how they relate to symptoms and daily activities. In Gary’s experience, there is a correlation between brand utilization and understanding of outcome measures. Patients who grasp outcome measures are better prepared for conversations with their providers and with payers, increasing the likelihood of access and adherence – which lead to better outcomes overall. 

Erin Echter recommended using more patient-centered KPIs such as the number of lives impacted by marketing campaigns. She noted that everyone in the organization must believe in the patient-centered approach, and the marketing team must champion effective measures internally. Patients are pivotal in making their own healthcare decisions, and pharma's role is to empower them to talk to physicians. For this to happen, patients must trust the pharma companies. When pharma shows up, it needs to be relevant and precise, demonstrating an understanding of the patient's journey and enhancing their lives rather than being seen as profit driven. 

Conclusion 

The future of pharma marketing is rooted in patient-centered strategies. By understanding and addressing patient needs, joining the conversation, and leveraging innovative targeting methods, pharma companies can build trust and empower patients. This approach not only benefits patients but also drives business success. As we move towards 2025, the focus on patient-centricity will continue to shape the industry, creating more empathetic and effective healthcare marketing.