43 per cent pharma marketers prefer programmatic messaging platforms in India: Doceree

Amid the chaos recurring waves of the pandemic have created, pharma marketers are shifting their focus to newer and innovative solutions to engage physicians, which is apparent from the phenomenal rise in programmatic messaging technologies.

The latest report by Doceree suggests that around 43 per cent of pharma marketers in India now prefer programmatic messaging platforms to reach out to physicians, utilising its ability to segment healthcare experts and align their communication for optimisation and better business outcomes.

To understand how programmatic is evolving, Doceree delved into inventory and campaign behaviour trends of its multiple partners, studying over 1,100 campaigns. These were run on a mix of 165 physician-only publisher platforms via Doceree by 102 advertisers – consisting of consumer healthcare and medical devices companies, life sciences brands, hospitals and diagnostics, covering over 100 specialities.

The report – ‘Programmatic Trends in Pharma HCP Marketing 2022’ – points that pharma’s digital ad spending has risen considerably worldwide and the trend is expected to grow further on the back of programmatic fueling its growth.

Harshit Jain, MD, Founder and Global CEO, Doceree, said, “The trend looks promising as we see pharma brands earmarking a significant budget to programmatic marketing. We are seeing five out of ten dollars spent on digital being set aside for programmatic messaging.”

Besides, the report captures the popular trends that are shaping the programmatic pharma physician marketing space:

• Programmatic gains prominence among endemic publishers  

In 2021, there was a jump up to 53 per cent in the exposed programmatic inventory of endemic publishers – HCP-only digital platforms such as medical education sites, HCP networking sites, medical associations and medical journals that HCPs visit to advance their professional knowledge or to connect with their peer group – on the back of their partnership with specialised ad exchanges.

• First-party data makes contextual marketing valuable

Piqued interest of pharma brands in the first-party data and significant surge in performance campaigns on endemic walled-garden and point of care platforms – e-prescribing (eRx), telehealth and Electronic Health Record (EHR) platforms – where data is collected directly from the physicians via log-ins. There has been a 39 per cent year-on-year increase in the usage of such platforms.

• Big opportunity in physician’s clinical workflow

Point-of-care networks are valuable assets for pharma marketers to enrich communications during a physician’s workflow from lab test to the stage of diagnosis going to the point of writing a prescription and deliver informative messages at decision-making moments while they are in a professional mindset.

Further, 29 per cent of marketers globally are mulling boosting budgets for trigger-based campaigns on point of care channels as they are in dialogue with partners for planning and activation.

• Account-based marketing creates a buzz 

Brands are eager to keep up their spending across secondary-based institutions like hospitals, nursing homes and research institutes going into 2022 when targetting physicians of a particular speciality.