When it comes to reach, does audience size really matter?

Maybe… but what really matters is the quality of the audience… Successfully reaching and engaging the optimal physician and often more importantly, potential consumer/patients, is becoming increasingly critical to the success of a brand.

Pharmaceutical marketers face special challenges going into 2024, including a complex and an even more highly regulated commercial environment, heavy competition within certain therapeutic areas, physicians increasingly difficult to access, healthcare inequity and payer access, just to name a few.

More than ever, finding and marketing to the right set of consumers requires specific insights about your audience, including what they’re looking for and the best ways to reach them along their healthcare journey. One approach is to use a look-alike model built on diagnosed patients or HCPs within a specialty of interest requiring consumer demographics and attributes as the features to help the model “find” the right targets. While this technique can be effective, it can run awry. These audiences often degrade quickly when scaled because the data used to create the model may be correlated, but not actually related, to the actual condition or treatment of interest. As a result, additional CPM costs are spent on consumers (even you!) who have no interest or need for your brand and may be over-exposed to ads for products of little value or interest to them.

A newer, more effective approach is to use real-world healthcare data to build your audience, but how do you do this in the most privacy-safe way? At Medicx | An OptimzieRx Company, we advise our clients on audience quality with a proven process.

• Profile and segment your customer to understand key characteristics and drivers that will help to describe the customer, where they are in their diagnostic and treatment journey, and what channels and content will be most engaging. Using a combination of de-identified healthcare claims integrated with consumer data from a large representative dataset can form the basis for this analysis.
• From the audience profile/segmentation, build your media audience using key diagnostic, treatment, co-morbidities and consumer features such as diagnosis of interest, severity of disease, prior therapy, favorite channels and programming content.
• Additionally, predictive modeling using a combination of healthcare and consumer data can be applied for later line therapy, more complicated or ill-defined diagnostic or treatment criteria. These models can add an extra layer of validation to the right patient type at the right time.
• Finally, the audience can be activated through Medicx | An OptimzieRx Company's patented Micro-Neighborhood technology that provides a deterministic alternative to more common approaches with a level of granularity down to ZIP-9. Rather than targeting patients based on look-alike audiences based on consumer data, brands can leverage Micro-Neighborhood targeting and our patent-pending deterministic ID resolution technology, MX#. It’s a powerful combination that ensures ads reach and engage a diverse set of patients, regardless of where they live (think access) or their preferred media. This results in activation of nearly all available patients of interest in the database as well as the right level of scaling to protect privacy but without an unnecessary increase in spend.

So, does size really matter when it comes to reach? Medicx | An OptimzieRx Company can prove it doesn’t. You don’t have to rely on an unsustainable, spend-more-to-reach-more advertising model. Instead, build your omnichannel marketing campaigns on a foundation of integrated and diverse high-fidelity data. This ensures that the audience you are targeting and the messages you are delivering are engaging and helpful in getting the right treatment to the right patients at the right place along the patient journey.