Is Your Marketing Futureproof? 5 Questions Healthcare Marketers Should Ask

As healthcare marketers start to look to 2023, it’s clear that data privacy has become a critical consideration as it relates to reaching key healthcare professional (HCP) audiences. Technology changes, such as Apple’s iOS 15 update and Google’s plan to remove third-party cookies, are also altering the landscape for digital marketers. How can healthcare marketers ensure their omnichannel marketing efforts can withstand current – and future – turbulence?

Ensuring your approach to HCP marketing is responsive and compliant to the data privacy and technology changes is priority number one. The first step is to evaluate your data strategy and identify any gaps or potential problems. When evaluating current identity data investments and partners, ask yourself the following:

1. Were enough opted-in HCPs obtained under a single privacy policy? Some HCP data sets are collected under monolithic sources, such as Medscape or Doximity, that involve a single website intended to attract as much of an HCP audience as possible. Since there are a limited number of monolithic properties, most data sets are aggregated from multiple sources, with multiple privacy policies, and then sold to healthcare organizations as one data set. Both approaches are problematic. With single source data sets, it can be difficult to achieve more than 80% coverage for an HCP audience. With aggregation, different data sources are going to have different privacy policies, each with its own language and clarity (or lack of) around what exactly an HCP has opted in to. Ideally (but not without some effort), HCP consent should be obtained under a single privacy policy used across many sources, ensuring the broadest coverage of permissioned HCP data. DMD, an IQVIA business, achieves this high-volume of consented data under a single privacy policy through its proprietary Healthcare Communications Network.
2. Do you have permission to report engagement at the individual level? Understanding how each of your physicians engages with your marketing efforts is key to modern healthcare marketing. Physician-level data (PLD) provides the ability to report results of a marketing engagement with a specific physician. It can tell you if an individual doctor opened and clicked on an email, if they clicked on your display ad, or if they’ve visited your website. Therefore, you need to ensure that the privacy policy under which your identity data was collected, specifically allows for the reporting of engagement at the individual level.
3. Is the same identity data used across all business needs? For HCP marketing to work effectively, each channel should use the same identity data to ensure consistent message delivery, HCP journey management, and analysis. But too often healthcare marketers take a scattershot approach when it comes to sourcing data and communicating with target audiences. Dr. Smith got the email you sent – but did the same Dr. Smith see your display campaign? Disparate audience data sets are not as effective as a single source of truth. The consistent use of a single set of identity data across all marketing channels that is the same identity set for marketing as other business uses, such as audience identification, claims data, and prescription data helps ensure the highest level of efficiency and effectiveness when reaching out to HCP audiences.
4. Do you have consent across all your marketing channels? Most marketers would agree there is value in obtaining consent from HCP audiences before marketing to them. The privacy policy under which consent is collected should contain an explicit declaration of each channel the marketer will use to communicate to the target audience. In thinking about your organization’s privacy policy, or the privacy policies of your partners, is consent being collected for each channel being used? Would you feel confident in your media campaigns if the HCPs in your programmatic target audience had only given their consent to be reached by email? Marketers owe it to their healthcare audiences to be explicit about what channels they will use to communicate and to obtain consent across all possible uses. Failure to do so runs the risk that if a physician complains or pursues legal action, the marketer may be on the hook to defend vague or poorly worded consent language.
5. Will your approach pass current and future data privacy laws? Data privacy laws in the U.S. are in flux as several states, such as California, are bringing in more stringent regulations meant to safeguard consumers’ personal information and data – and this includes the data of HCPs. Discussions about data privacy also continue among policymakers at the federal level. Having a strategic data privacy framework that ensures the ability to stay ahead of current and future legislative changes at both the state and federal levels is critically important to your marketing efforts. Reacting to each new data privacy law as they arise will only lead to a stop and start approach with regards to campaigns.

If, after careful evaluation, you find your current approach to data privacy does not fit with the legislative and technology changes taking place, you may want to adopt a Consent At Scale strategy. Consent At Scale is a permission-based framework that supports effective digital engagement with healthcare professionals, now and in the future.

Consent At Scale offers many advantages, including reaching enough of a target audience in a manner that achieves business goals; meeting the industry’s unique need for individual level data sharing; providing a single source of identity data that optimizes marketing activities and data-driven insights; and ensuring that organizations prosper in an evolving legal and technological environment.

To learn more about Consent At Scale, and how it can elevate your digital marketing, please visit us at: www.dmdconnects.com/consent-at-scale.

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