How specialties impact doctors' reception to medical advertising

Marketing to doctors requires much more market research than other professionals because each medical specialty faces unique challenges. The daily work life of a podiatrist is quite a bit different from that of a pediatrician, for instance.

Meanwhile, traditional marketing challenges such as inter-brand competition are augmented by medical-specific hurdles such as HIPPA compliance.

At first glance, marketing to doctors can seem challenging. But with targeted research, your marketing efforts can succeed in attracting and engaging with the right demographic.

Think all clinical specialties are the same? Read on to learn a few things that may surprise you:

Consider the numbers

Physician specialties vary greatly by the number of professionals that make up each population. For example, there are an estimated 19,000 dermatologists and over 30,000 anesthesiologists in the U.S., according to the American Academy of Dermatologists and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, respectively.

The more training a specialty requires, the fewer members it's likely to contain. This is extremely important for pharmaceutical and medical device marketers to consider because it affects ad spend, market penetration, messaging and more.

Further, the more niche the specialty, the less physicians and allied healthcare professionals provide consultations and treatment. For these specialties, it is more important to understand and leverage niche publications and online resources, including social media platforms where members likely correspond with each other frequently.

Address gender ratios

Some medical specialties attract more people of a certain gender over another. For example, Becker's Healthcare found that 58.1 percent of pediatric physicians are female, while 94.2 percent of urologists are male. Practitioners of geriatric medicine, on the other hand, have a roughly even split.

Using generalizations based on gender is just a starting point, however. Depending on your current marketing campaign, you may develop buyer personas based on other differentiating factors such as differences in income or typical work/life balance.

Seek out specific challenges

As mentioned above, the day-to-day lives of medical professionals are far from homogenous. Dermatologists, urologists and neurosurgeons - to name only a few specialties -  all have wildly varying work environments, professional experiences and educational backgrounds.

Successful products solve problems and successful marketing campaigns make it easy for decision makers to understand how a product can help the user achieve its end goal. For medical marketers, that means you'll need to have a thorough understanding of your target audience's most prominent challenges.

"Specialty-specific challenges should inform your messaging."

For example, let's say you are marketing a new asthma drug that reduces the time it takes for a patient to breath easily again. Family practitioners who prescribe asthma inhalers rarely actually see their patients use the medicine - the patient is more likely to need an inhaler at home. Therefore, the advertisement needs to convey that the product will help doctors indirectly - i.e. their asthma patients will be happier.

But what if you're marketing the same asthma medication to a hospital nurse? Nurses directly administer asthma medication in stressful situations. For these professionals, a fast-acting medication is helpful, because it means they can provide respiratory relief quickly and move on to the next patient in the queue. The product is the same, but the messaging is quite different.

Remember the unifying factor

No matter what kind of medicine a clinician practices, he or she likely reads medical literature in peer-reviewed journals and corresponding websites. This is a major unifying factor for medical marketers.

Once you've tailored your advertisements to a unique specialty, you need a channel for distribution. Specialty-specific digital and print editions of journals are perfect for this kind of targeted advertising to medical professionals.