Liveworld

In November, healthcare, pharma marketers, and media professionals met up at Rockefeller Center in New York City for the MM+M 2022 Media Summit to discuss how the changing landscape will impact the industry over the coming years. After the event concluded three key themes were evident that pharma marketers need to consider to ensure marketing relevance.

1. Social Media Marketing in Changing: Facebook use to be the go-to platform to reach the majority of pharma marketers’ audiences with its robust targeting capabilities and vast audience pools. But, due to Meta’s targeting changes limiting how healthcare and pharma can target on its platforms marketers now need to approach social media buying through a wilder lens to ensure it’s capturing the audiences. Over the past few years, users have left Facebook and found their communities on platforms like TikTok and Reddit. Even with its position as the world’s leading social network marketers now cannot accept the status quo and need to slice the pie with a mix of other platforms being beholden to Facebook will no longer cut it.

How to position yourself for 2023 – Think about optimizing your marketing mix using the audience journey as a framework from awareness to consideration to advocacy to create a 360-degree surround sound program. If your condition has a broad audience, try casting a large net on Facebook to get awareness. Then, retarget users to brand.com and use patient stories on TikTok or Instagram to build Tx consideration for more segmented audience types. Post-patient acquisition, consider including patient support tools as part of your patient support program, like virtual assistants, to aid adherence.

2. Content Needs to Grab and Hold Audiences – TikTok’s exponential rise showed the importance of quick-paced bite-sized content tailored to an audience’s needs and wants. Gen Z and beyond have skipped over the traditional social media networks for the likes of TikTok and Twitch forcing Meta and Google to play catchup with, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts. Marketers need to consider how they use these new content vehicles to engage viewers – either through influencer partnerships on TikTok or how-to videos on YouTube Shorts.

How to position yourself for 2023 – Think about piloting influencer marketing into your 2023 programs. Influencer marketing has some of the highest engagement rates among various content types – on TikTok, influencers get between 4%-18% engagement. Look to Nano Influencers (1K-10K followers) and Micro-Influencers (10K-100K) to reach patients and HCPs in distinct geographies as they have regional influence.

3. Programmatic Marketing Needs to be Tailored – Programmatic ads give healthcare and pharma marketers the power of scale by tailoring and distributing ads by audience personas and online behaviors to help get the correct message in front of the right audience at the proper time. Pharma marketers need to ensure they understand their audiences, ideally through first-party data, to build more targeted personas to feed programmatic media models.

How to position yourself for 2023 – From 2023 and beyond, first-party data will be critical for marketing success. Look at how you can incorporate data capture capabilities on your owned properties (e.g., product website) and then use the data to lead audiences into a CRM e-mail program that ultimately can be used to feed programmatic marketing tactics.

The MM+M 2022 Media Summit showed that brands will be ripe for media optimization and targeting in the coming years. Still, to do so, marketers will need to lay the foundation today to take advantage of these future opportunities.

With 20+ years of social media experience managing 350 social properties for some of the biggest pharma companies, LiveWorld has the skills and resources to help you navigate and succeed in the changing pharma social arena.

Read the Emerging Social Media Platforms for 2023 ebook to learn more about: Selecting new channels wisely, adapting to the changing social media landscape, criteria to analyze social influencers and social platforms to watch.

Reach out to the author, Rishi Kadiwar, VP Strategy – DTC, LiveWorld, to learn more about digital and social agency services for the healthcare and pharma industry – rkadiwar@liveworld.com