Thursday, February 02, 2017

The Marketing Value of Health Care Professionals

The average brand spends a few hundred dollars a year reaching their target customer with marketing messages. On average, it works out about $700 per customer per year ($200b total US ad spend for 300 million consumers). In contrast, the pharmaceutical industry spends $25,000 per year for their target customer (i.e., physicians) promoting their drugs.  This disparity is due the enormous economic influence of physicians. In the US, 1 million physicians are the decision makers for $400 billion of drug spend. Because it is not possible to spend $25,000 per physician on digital ads (there is not enough ad space), marketers end up deploying this ad spend in non-traditional ways (e.g., hosting conferences). A consequence of this supply-constrained marketing dynamic is that new digital marketing players are manufacturing new opportunities to deliver ads to physicians online. For example, companies like Crossix are assembling proprietary lists of physicians that can be targeted online even when they are consuming non-healthcare content (e.g., checking the weather).



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