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Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
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EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
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Blog
The New World of Healthcare Professional Targeting
Are you confident in your target audience
May 31, 2022
If you joined our webinar back in April, Making the HCP Match on Social Media - Capture the Right HCP Audience with the Right Identity Data, you might remember that we spoke briefly on the topic of Meta (Facebook) removing some interest-based targeting options. Throughout this blog post, we will explore different targeting options within Meta in greater detail and answer the questions: What do they mean for advertisers targeting healthcare professionals (HCPs) and what we are doing now to make sure we are properly targeting those HCPs?
To recap the news from earlier this year, Meta was required decided to remove health-related ad targeting options. After a back-and-forth battle with GDPR requirements, Meta couldn’t identify the datasets, and were pushed to retire most of their healthcare interest-based targeting options.
This change affected many throughout the healthcare ecosystem – one IQVIA client who was once able to target over 50 categories can now only target one, not only impacting their social media campaigns by their target audience availability but by also their entire planning timeline. Instead of knowing they have the target audience ready within the platform, the agency now has to go to a third-party data vendor who has to build out this audience and distribute to their Meta account which all takes a few days to be complete and ready on platform. Not a huge lift overall by either party, but it is added timeline to their usual process and, of course, adding to the overall budget.
When we consider these interests-based target audiences, can we as healthcare marketers really be confident that we are hitting only physicians or even using the “profession option” from the platform? These options are self-reported by the user while they scroll through their feed and hit the like button on pages as well as when the user originally signs up for Facebook (they might enter in their profession during that process). With that in mind, it is possible for anyone to create a new Meta account and say they are physicians when in reality, they are far from it.
Considering someone can craft their own social media presence to their liking, we as advertisers (without using a third-party data source) cannot be 100% positive that we are targeting only physicians, when only using the platform’s data.
This is why working with a data partner is so valuable. Not only can a data partner create an audience that contains only the professions that you are looking for, but these providers can also help you navigate those muddy waters of privacy.
However, we cannot dwell on the past. We must move forward and find a way to target HCPs on social media in a way that we can feel confident that we are actually targeting those real professionals.
So where does an agency or media department go from here?
Healthcare marketers must turn to a data partner. Not just any data partner, but one with the understanding that your audience is highly specific and one that can help build your target audience or expand on CRM lists that you may have already.
For example, here at IQVIA we can either build your target audience of cardiologists from our own database or we can use proprietary tools (such as diagnosing/prescription data) to find new cardiologists that have either diagnose heart issues or prescribe any medication that might help with those conditions. We also have other tools that allow us to identify new HCPs by analyzing contextualized content consumption. We are able to see behavioral insights such as brands, diseases, and topical keyword search from medical websites and identify HCPs that made those searches and match them against a match list to find new users. Our team can use these products to find any audience based on our client’s key performance indicators for a specific campaign and distribute the segment(s) to various social endpoints like Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, or TikTok.
All in all, we are not saying that you shouldn’t use the interested-based options that are on the platform, but we do recommend that you be cautious when using them for any campaign where the target audience is HCPs. There are data partners out there that can help grow your target audience with privacy-consented data that will have an impact on your marketing campaigns.
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