The Secret to Reducing DTC Media Waste? Integrated Audience Profiling

As competition for patient attention and engagement from both pharma brands and other healthcare “influencers” rises, there’s no room for uncertainty in omnichannel media planning. Brand teams and their agency partners need more confidence that every media dollar is directed to a channel where brand-eligible patients are known to be active and engaged. So how do we get there? 

Between 2020 and 2025, the total amount of global healthcare data is projected to increase from 2,300 to 10,800 exabytes – an annual growth rate of 36%. But despite the seemingly endless data available to marketers, precision insights remain elusive, so media plans often rely on assumptions and disconnected information. That’s because most “data-driven” strategies run into at least one of the following limitations: 

• Disparate data types: Determining the right media channels for a pharma brand ideally combines both patient health data AND consumer behavior data – the former to create a clinically brand-specific audience segment, and the latter to analyze the channels on which they most likely to engage. But many popular methodologies incorporate just one type. 

• Limited dataset size: Even when media planners have access to both patient and consumer data, the specificity of many brand audiences can limit the number of consumers available for primary research.  This results in difficulty in extrapolating insights to the wider brand-eligible population. 

• Pay-per-variable models: It’s hard to know from the outset which datapoints are most meaningful for a given patient population, and in an effort to manage costs, brands may decline to purchase all the data or analyses they actually need for precision planning. 

• Over-reliance on Audience Quality (AQ) scores: AQ assesses the extent to which brand-eligible patients can be reached through a given channel, but fails to reflect how interested those patients are in that channel. 

The result is a data landscape that favors qualitative, directional insights to support omnichannel media planning, where inferences from various disconnected data sources are synthesized to make the best assumptions possible. Then, as media performance data trickles in, brands optimize their channel mix based on observable results. But this approach means that brands are likely to spend substantial advertising dollars on under-performing channels – and miss engaging eligible patients – while they wait for the data they need.  

Rethinking Data-Driven Media Planning

A better path to omnichannel direct-to-consumer marketing starts by tackling the challenges above directly, not working around them. And it starts with a truly integrated, clinically-specific patient audience profile – your true competitive advantage for reaching the right patients and driving better media impact.  

Whether your brand is planning for initial launch, a line extension, a competitor market entry, or just trying to improve DTC marketing performance, an integrated audience profile is the ticket to more efficient spending, higher engagement, and more empowered patient audiences.  

Here’s what your integrated profile should include: 

• Brand-Specific Cohorts: Segmentation based on the exact clinical profile(s) of your target patients – not just patients with the same indication, demographic profile, etc. 

• Audience Characteristics: The social context and opportunities/challenges your patients face in obtaining treatment, including geographic concentrations, demographics, and healthcare access 

• Media Behavior Breakdown: Actual channel engagement preferences for TV, display, social, etc. as well as their granular platforms, content, and behaviors within channels – e.g., Hulu vs. Peacock, instead of just TV preference. 

• Engagement and Motivations: Insights on favorite hobbies, interests, comfort with technology, health and risk profiles, etc. that can support brand messaging and imagery development. 

Unlocking this level of insight shows brands exactly where the best opportunities are for reaching their target audiences, so media is planned and placed based on concrete, quantitative, and specific insights. It also reduces the risk of budget waste while waiting for enough actual channel performance data to become available – so each dollar goes further to help patients become aware of and benefit from improved treatment options. 

Better Planning Leads to Better Patient Support (and Outcomes) 

It’s easy for patients to be overwhelmed by health information or confused by irrelevant sources. That’s why it’s so critical that brand advertising reaches patients where they are most apt to act, and accurately reflects their situations, treatment needs, and lifestyle. Media planning, whether agency-driven or in-house, is a key part in getting reliable, trustworthy information into the hands of patients. But to be effective (and cost-efficient), media planners need the right, integrated audience insights. Otherwise, advertising may fail to engage the patients who need it most. 

Ready to know your patients better, and shift to truly data-driven media planning? Discover how OptimizeRx is giving pharma brands a new perspective on consumer audiences.