Gaining the Upper Hand

Session: Move beyond channel selection and gain a deeper understanding of how and where your customers gain their information

Presenter: David Reim, Chief Product Officer, DMD

David Reim, Chief Product Officer at DMD, has been a leader in the digital marketing of healthcare products since he led the team that launched the first branded pharmaceutical website in 1995.

To make that initial leap beyond digital channel activity and actually receive information about your digital channel visitors, David Reim, Chief Product Officer, DMD, suggests the following master plan:

• Refine your digital marketing strategies based on insights into the online behavior data of opted-in HCPs.
• See the categories of websites an individual HCP visits across our digital medical ecosystem.
• Combine data about the types of medical websites individual HCPs visit with keyword data about the content they read on those sites.

As Reim explains, imagine getting a report that actually supplies information about people coming to your digital property, including such data as individual npi, medical specialty, and state of residence.

“What can you do with that information?” Reim asks. “You could say, ‘I recognize Dr. Smith. He’s one of our key opinion leaders, and he came to read about our new clinical trial.’ Or, you could say, ‘There’s Dr. Jones. She’s a high prescriber, and I can pass that information along to the sales rep who calls on her.’ Or, you can step back and look at a higher level and say this segment of our physician target list tends to be doing this or that in our digital properties – so let’s do more of that and appeal to them more often.”

Without knowing who you’re talking to, it’s hard to be relevant”

In this way, you can introduce “identity” into what is typically blinded traffic information, which helps you be much more relevant in your marketing. “Without knowing who you’re talking to, it’s hard to be relevant,” Reim says. “Without relevancy, it’s just best guesses.”

To avoid “guessing”, an opt-in data set, which includes more than 380 medical websites, helps healthcare professionals slice ‘n dice data, provide more relevant content, and boost marketing efforts.

In Reim’s words, he describes three areas where this data comes from.

WEBSITE: You give us the website you own, and we tell you the identity of the people coming to this website. That’s your proprietary information.

JOURNEY: You give us an npi number, and we’ll tell you where this person goes within the medical ecosystem as well as the type of content he or she reads. Is this a person who focuses on medical publishers or turns to social areas? Are they active pharma website surfers? This is valuable information about the content they look at – so you can build a story relevant to their journey.

TOPIC: You give us a topic and we’ll tell you who’s reading about that topic. This is essential information for launches or announcements. So, for example, you give us the topic pediatric cystic fibrosis and who investigated this topic within the last 90 days. We’ll give you all the npi numbers that read about that topic in the ecosystem during your timeframe.

Based on this collected data, Reim reports four surprising facts.

• Two thirds (63 percent) of identified physician traffic starts on the consumer side of a brand’s website and the physician never leaves the consumer side.
• 57 percent of identified physicians visit brand websites outside of their targeted specialty. “So you may have a psoriasis product and you see cardiovascular physicians showing up.” Reim says. “Why is that? We don’t know. But we can provide data that helps a brand understand who they’re communicating to and how to best market to this population.”
• Another surprise, Reim stresses, is that 68 percent of the content that a physician is reading seems to have nothing to do with their medical specialty. “A psychiatrist may be reading about high blood pressure or oncology treatments. Why? I personally believe it’s because medicine is a learning profession and these are active learners. They don’t necessarily pursue only topics they are experts in. So brand teams with this insight now have a unique way to reach their target audience in a different way.
• Finally, after looking at data it becomes clear that email remains the best way to drive a physician to a professional site. Conversely, the consumer is more prone to an organic search, meaning they are more likely to simply put a brand name in the search area.

As “Move beyond channel selection and gain a deeper understanding of how and where your customers gain their information” came to a close, the final slide said it all!

Knowing where the HCP goes and how to communicate with this population leads Reim to spin a famous quote attributed to the French statesman and military leader Napoléon Bonaparte, “War Marketing is 90% information.”