Healthcare marketers have more tools to ensure their advertising is reaching patients who are most likely to seek the advice of doctors and pharmacists. Data-driven targeting can help to raise awareness among those consumers and improve the return on investment (ROI) for the makers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
For InStep Health, the biggest point-of-care media network in the U.S., privacy-compliant patient data provide a competitive advantage to healthcare advertisers that seek to reach high-propensity audiences. The company hosts marketing programs for over-the-counter and prescription drug brands in 30,000 pharmacies and 190,000 physician offices.
“We get them in front of patients and then providers — physicians, pharmacists, other types of healthcare professionals — to make sure that they’re educated about our clients’ healthcare solution,” Dan Wilmer, chief product officer of InStep, said in this interview with Beet.TV
InStep has access to data about three quarters of all the prescriptions in the country, helping its advertisers target specific kinds of patients with marketing programs in the highest-indexing drugstores. To improve targeting, InStep also collaborates with DeepIntent, which has developed patient-modeled audiences based on health information that complies with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) privacy standards.
“About a year before we met the DeepIntent folks, we started to create a digital overlay on top of our in-pharmacy and in-physician-office programs. We immediately started to see that that added media layer was getting good results for our clients,” Wilmer said. “What we wanted to do and what we came to DeepIntent for is, particularly on the pharmacy side, those marketers are looking for more and more specific groups of patient sub-populations.”
InStep has seen positive results from the collaboration, including a pharmaceutical that experienced a nine-to-one ROI from a campaign.
“It was a complete home run because we had the right footprint, the right in-store and in-office tactics, and then also, this great digital campaign happening on top of it,” Wilmer said. “We had this great result for the campaign, overall, and then we were showing the client that the digital portion was blowing away everything else on the media plan.”
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