5 audience segmentation tips to fine-tune your HCP marketing messages

Marketing pharmaceutical products to healthcare providers requires a deep understanding of two distinct sets of needs, those of the prescribers and those of the patients. However, not every ad can appeal to every individual. Needs can vary among HCPs in different regions and health networks, for instance. 

Audience segmentation can help pharma marketers to develop nuanced messages that appeal to distinct cohorts within a broader market. This can improve audience engagement and increase conversion rates. Here are five tips to help you segment your audiences:

1. Keep your buyer personas in mind

A buyer persona is a fictionalized representation of a typical customer used to help marketers position their messages. They often include information such as personal information, job titles, content preferences and professional challenges.

Niche pharmaceutical marketing campaigns can use personas and segments interchangeably. A therapy for a specific form of cancer may only be used by neuro-oncologists, for example. Other campaigns may lump several distinct personas with similar professional challenges into the same segment. For instance, an asthma medication may appeal to allergists, ENTs and respiratory therapists.

2. Use psychographic and demographic data

Effective audience segments add value to marketing campaigns by boosting engagement rates. If your ads directly and specifically address a segment's shared pain points, members of that segment will be more likely to absorb that message. So how do marketers pinpoint these needs?

Defining psychographic and demographic data can create useful insights. Demographics include information related to the gender, age and income level of audience members. Psychographics tend to include the personal interests, desires, attitudes and values of an audience. For example, a psychographic consistency among interventional cardiologists could be the desire to reduce unexpected hospital readmissions.

Audience segmentation ensures marketing messages align with customer needs.

3. Research customer behavior in digital channels

Audience engagement analytics make it easier for marketers to understand customer behaviors online. Most notably, website analytics can tell marketers where visitors are coming from and how they engage with web content.

To illustrate, imagine a pharmaceutical manufacturer that creates a subdomain for its new therapy. The marketing team could place display banners on relevant websites that drive traffic back to the new subdomain. Over time, analytics can reveal demographic data such as geographic location (based on IP address data), as well as psychographic data (based on the type of content with which readers engage). Finding trends in this data can help marketers better align their messages with customer needs.

4. Ask questions to define your target audience segments

When marketers know their products and understand their customer needs, good things happen. To develop impactful audience segments, marketers should ask questions that define what makes a segment unique.

Useful questions include:

• What problems does the product solve?
• Which demographics influence the purchasing decision?
• Which psychographics determine the type of content the audience prefers to consume?
• How does the audience interact with similar brands?

5. Understand when to segment

Sometimes, a buyer persona will be sufficient to inform a marketing message. It's essential to know when to segment an audience rather than to segment every audience. If audience slices are too small, for example, the ROI of the campaign will suffer. Likewise, if segments appear too similar to one another, it defeats the purpose of running multiple campaigns.

By segmenting your audience using psychographic and demographic data, you can develop targeted content that engages valuable readers. This approach necessitates multichannel marketing strategy, because some segments may prefer print content, while others choose digital channels. To learn more about how to deliver your messages to an engaged audience of HCP readers, contact a trusted Elsevier consultant today.