Understanding the Hottest Topic in HCP Media: Programmatic Marketing Platforms

According to a report from AccessMonitor^TM, the number of “rep-accessible” physicians – those who grant access to more than 70 percent of sales reps – dropped to 44 percent from 46 percent in 2015 driving marketing outreach to non-personal means. On the other hand, HCPs are willing to look for information online and slowly providing better credibility ratings to pharmaceutical websites. According to a report by the Decision Resources group, 46% of physicians surveyed in 2019 considered pharmaceutical websites as a credible source of information and 37% called them influential. Given that these numbers stood at just 27% and 25% in 2017, we can clearly see that information shared online is exerting much greater influence on physicians’ clinical decision-making and this is where Programmatic Marketing Platforms come into the picture.

If you a marketer focused on delivering your message to the right audience at the right time, then you must have heard of this newfangled tool named programmatic marketing platform. Everyone knows something about programmatic advertising, but no one knows everything. You are right to take an interest in it, because, according to this 2019 forecast by eMarketer, programmatic advertising display is set to rake in $59.45 billion in ad dollars this year, accounting for 84.9% of the US digital display ad market.

You are definitely not alone here. With the spend on programmatic marketing platforms growing apace in healthcare and pharma, all marketers are trying to understand what a programmatic marketing platform can do for them. As these platforms bring in a lot of jargon into the equation, some of the terms used will carry little meaning for the uninitiated. So, let’s look at them first.

Programmatic marketing platforms are fully automated. They are tools, which enable marketers to advertise in real-time by encouraging instant purchases of ad spaces, as in an auction. They avoid wasteful expenditure which is inevitable with traditional advertising practices. Which is why they are increasingly turning out to be the first choice of savvy marketers, who watch their media investments carefully. With a programmatic marketing platform, marketers can buy digital advertising space and target their ads right by using its AI features to analyze the behavior of a visitor to a given website.

schedule a demo

With programmatic advertising, a marketer gets to check the boxes on all the following points on their wish list:

• The tool helps marketers to reach the right audience by targeting specific professionals and collecting precise data about them. It tracks the reactions and behavior of their target audience on any online channel or device in real-time to get useful insights into their behavior and choices. It will then use this knowledge to optimize campaigns to increase your digital reach.

• Built around the display, social, mobile and video ads; programmatic marketing platforms automate the process of buying online ad space. Its targeting techniques segment audiences using data. It can increase audience reach while improving targeting capabilities to achieve increased control, better efficiencies, greater transparency and a lot of real-time data. It reaches the right consumer at the right time and adds potential customers based on their online behaviors. Employing endemic advertising (placement of ads which appear natural and native to the market), it identifies the right opportunity to effectively exploit the context presented to the best effects.

• Programmatic Targeting uses the context of a website or specific keywords to target ads with better accuracy and results. It can reach the target audience using personas, IP tracking, and geo-fencing. It can also use audience targeting, to look for users who would be most interested in a given offering. Using location or language-based targeting is also known as geofencing in programmatic ads. They target people who visited the site once without making a purchase and try to bring them back using ads, which is known as retargeting. It knows when and how to execute a campaign using insights from real-time data, scale and cost efficiencies. It eliminates laborious processes and human error, as it is automatic and data-driven.

• Marketers today use programmatic marketing platforms to leverage the insights from the data to target the right audience and optimize their media buying and placement through bidding for impressions at the right time, literally buying ads by bidding on real-time auctions (or RTB a.k.a. Real-Time Bidding) at the same time as the targeted audience loads a website.

Let’s demystify the jargon around the different platforms associated with programmatic advertising:

• Ad network: This platform connects a number of websites and offers inventory to advertisers.

• Ad Exchange: This is where publishers meet advertisers and agree to display their ad, for a price. An ad exchange connects to a number of ad networks. Most of them handle mobile inventory these days as mobile has practically taken over digital advertising.

• DSP: Demand Side Platforms let ad exchanges know which bidders qualify for certain websites and audiences. They enable an advertiser to place or buy ad inventory on the open market.

• SSP: Supply-Side Platforms are what publishers use to connect their inventory to ad exchanges. They enable a publisher to control their ad inventory efficiently, dictate prices, buyers or channels and to make the most of their exposure to potential buyers.

• DMP: Data management platforms fuel ad-buying decisions by sorting and segmenting incoming cookie data to offer insights into targeting the right audience. Advertisers use them in combination with a DSP but publishers use them along with an SSP.

• CPM: This is the cost of programmatic advertising, usually counted as the cost per 1000 ad impressions. CPM is a highly variable number which varies by the quality of the inventory and the specific level of targeting. Based on the device, format, and placement, this could cost anywhere from $0.5 to $2 CPM.

• With programmatic marketing platforms, you can reduce the overall advertising costs to a fraction of your usual costs by avoiding low performing choices. Increase reach by adopting only the high performing choices, encourage interaction and enhance performance.

• Tracks the costs of each advertisement and also tracks engagement data in real-time to derive applicable insights to appropriately revise campaign parameters – like time of day, geography, audience segments, number of impressions and publishers – to increase engagement and conversion rates.

When used along with email and social marketing, programmatic marketing platforms can ensure an impactful marketing campaign for a brand as they harness deterministic data for each professional targeted. They use probabilistic (aggregates information collected to identify users by using deduplication algorithms to match them with a known user who exhibits similar browsing behaviors) and deterministic (can help identify someone precisely with inputs like their name, address, phone number, and contact information) data to give HCP marketers the ability to target the right audience, by understanding their needs and expectations. This would explain how programmatic advertising can reach 98% of the Internet, including the Google platform, with ‘endemic’ advertisements which improve conversion while bringing the costs down.

Programmatic marketing platforms are now within the reach of companies big and small, making everyone compete on a level playing ground. Small players can eliminate media agencies and middlemen to bring ad-buying in-house. They can manage their campaigns themselves at a fraction of their usual costs, with new AI-enabled programmatic marketing platforms.

Doceree is one such self-service platform dedicated to HCP digital marketing. Talk to us to know more about how you can benefit from our amazing self-service, programmatic marketing platform.