Telehealth provides the highest audience quality available in media.
When compared with other forms of patient engagement opportunities, telehealth is one of the most important and valuable tools available to
marketers. From a media perspective, it reaches the most highly targeted condition-specific audience possible across any media format. Marketing in telehealth provides an opportunity to reinforce your brand at the last possible moment, before a patient speaks to a physician. From an activation perspective, it creates an opportunity to connect a patient directly to an HCP to encourage discussion and prescription.
In today’s environment, ensuring that every dollar works hard for your brand is dependent on superior audience quality. Being precise in targeting people that are suffering from a condition is often more valuable than traditional
reach and frequency. It is important to recognize how imprecise typical audience targeting using propensity models and segmentation really is. While companies like Crossix or IQVIA create targeting profiles, they actually do not use any healthcare information when building their models. Their target groups are required to consist of at least 10-25 million US adults based upon HIPAA and NAI guidelines. That is hardly a precise and targeted audience.
Within a telehealth consult however, patients are not targeted as individuals, and there is no violation of HIPAA or NAI. Marketing within telehealth consists of an advertisement in a specific therapeutic consult based upon a condition and does not target people directly. This provides the ability to reach a defined patient audience without violating individual personal privacy.
It’s also important to understand telehealth’s value and utilize the medium in an effective way that leverages its strengths, rather than comparing it to other media tactics that function differently. A telehealth media-buy functions as a means to reinforce and support other media tactics by reminding the patient of the brand just before they speak to a physician. The way the medium is utilized needs to reflect the value of the tactic itself. A telehealth campaign’s success shouldn’t be based on clickthroughs for example, because to take a patient away from a physician consult defeats the entire purpose of what is ultimately trying to be accomplished. A better use would be to leverage rich media to provide a discussion guide so that value can be provided to the patient and the brand can remain present throughout the entire consult.
Another way to leverage telehealth is to connect consumers directly to an HCP through existing media strategies in other media channels. This allows for a higher ROI by ensuring that viewers are going to speak with a physician immediately upon seeing an ad. Regardless of the individual approach, it is critical to leverage the power of telehealth in a way that is meaningful and takes advantage of its strengths and the quality of the audience that it can bring to bear.
Populus provides a platform which ensures your brand is reaching the most targeted patients possible, by connecting your brand with individuals who are known to have a condition, immediately preceding a conversation with a physician. Further, the platform allows you to maximize the value of your marketing spend by connecting patients directly to a physician when they have demonstrated interest in your product.
For more information on how to leverage the increasing use of virtual care to positively impact your marketing reach, visit Populus!