Transforming Rare Disease HCP Marketing

Originally published on IQVIA Digital

For pharmaceutical companies specializing in rare diseases, implementing effective omnichannel marketing may seem challenging. However, with the right approach, any company can harness its benefits regardless of size or budget. In fact, omnichannel strategies can be particularly powerful for rare disease brands, where reaching opportunity healthcare providers (HCPs) at the right time can have a critical impact on improving diagnosis rates and patient outcomes.

Together, Reingold and IQVIA Digital are helping rare disease companies achieve impressive omnichannel results despite the challenges within this space. Here are five steps marketers can take to elevate their HCP marketing efforts without taxing their team or breaking the bank:

Step 1: Design the HCP experience based on dynamic engagement

“By harnessing advanced behavioral insights to identify unmet informational needs, we can achieve personalized and humanized digital engagement with HCPs, ensuring that rare disease treatments reach the most relevant providers.” — Nicola Partridge, Commercial Strategy, IQVIA Digital

This step is especially crucial in rare disease marketing, where HCPs often need extensive education about disease state recognition, accurate diagnosis, and available treatment options before they can effectively identify and treat patients.

• High-value actions (HVAs), such as website visits and resource downloads, serve as checkpoints across each stage of the marketing journey. For rare diseases, these might include downloading diagnostic criteria, requesting genetic testing information, or accessing patient case studies.
• Evaluating engagement against these actions helps you understand when, how, and why an HCP interacted with your outreach, allowing you to move each HCP forward in their educational journey at their own pace.
• Assigning HVAs and building an analytics program to support their use won’t break your budget. Incorporating this step primarily requires thoughtful upfront planning and the integration of a multi-channel program.

With a clear framework for tracking engagement in place, the next step becomes identifying which HCPs to target with your carefully designed program.

Step 2: Identify your highest opportunity HCP segments

“In rare disease, identifying and engaging the right healthcare providers is crucial – both to ensure efficient use of resources and to maximize the number of patients who can benefit from treatment.” — Kristopher Morris, Senior Digital Marketing Director, Reingold

Reaching all relevant HCPs at an ideal frequency and with an ideal channel mix is often a challenge for rare disease brands. Relying on traditional datasets like specialty and clinical data (prescribing and diagnosing behavior) is rarely enough to find those needle-in-haystack opportunity HCPs who are likely to be treating rare diseases. You’ll need to harness the power of advanced insights and datasets to build HCP audiences of the most relevant providers for the brand, for example:

• Clinical Behavior: Identify HCPs prescribing competitor brands (if any) or diagnosing conditions that are commonly mistaken for the rare condition.
• HCP Digital Behavior: Find HCPs actively researching the disease state, specific symptoms, or treatment options – and engage them before they might show up in traditional prescribing data.
• No-see or Low-see HCPs: Reach providers who are not typically engaged by pharma sales reps and therefore need to be engaged via digital channels.
• Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs): Engage thought leaders in the therapeutic category who can influence diagnosis and treatment patterns.
  Other Attributes: Consider the full care team for a specific disease state, including specialists who might see patients before diagnosis.

By utilizing these insights to build targeted audiences, you’ll be able to focus your media spend on those HCPs most likely to engage with and act on your outreach — all while optimizing spend within the brand’s budget.

Step 3: Develop a creative playbook

“Creating relevant, highly tailored and engaging creative is crucial for exceptional brand experiences. This is particularly true in rare disease, where educational content must bridge significant knowledge gaps and motivate action.” — Kat Hennessy, Vice President, Reingold

For rare disease brands, developing effective creative requires special attention to educational content and disease awareness:

• Create a foundation of educational content that helps HCPs recognize disease patterns and symptoms they might otherwise miss.
• Develop materials that address common misdiagnoses and highlight key differentiating factors.
• Build a modular creative framework that allows for personalization based on specialty, current knowledge level, and previous engagement.
• Use your creative playbook to generate tailored assets quickly and at scale while ensuring medical, legal, and regulatory affairs compliance.
  With your creative foundation established, you’re ready to put these assets to work across multiple channels to reach and engage your target HCPs effectively.

Step 4: Put the “omni” in omnichannel

“Creating well-timed, relevant, and engaging messaging is crucial for exceptional brand experiences, as audiences quickly lose patience with frequent or irrelevant outreach. Pharmaceutical companies and agencies must collaborate to deliver personalized, data-driven omnichannel experiences, leading to better relationships, broader adoption of therapies, and improved clinical outcomes.” — Andrew Burkus, Sr. Principal, IQVIA Digital

In rare disease marketing, an effective omnichannel approach is essential for reaching and engaging specialists who may only see a handful of relevant patients per year:

• Start with programmatic retargeting: IQVIA Digital’s solutions deliver personalized ads to each HCP at the most important moments of interest and intent, based on their engagement profile and digital behavior
• Using physician-level reporting based on impressions delivered, expand your reach with email and/or social media retargeting to reach HCPs who prefer different channels
• Don’t forget that you can integrate personal touchpoints in your retargeting strategy — with IQVIA’s Media Operating System you can design trigger programs incorporating business rules where an HCP message is based on recent or forthcoming field interactions

With your omnichannel program now fully activated, the final step is to ensure you’re measuring its impact effectively and using those insights to drive continuous improvement.

Step 5: Improve campaign performance over time with better measurement

“Continuous measurement and optimization of campaigns, along with swift reactions to data insights, are essential for delivering personalized messaging and improving marketing impact.” — Andrew Burkus, Sr. Principal, IQVIA Digital

For rare disease brands, measurement requires special consideration of longer patient journeys and complex diagnostic pathways. Best practices include:

• Assess campaign performance across combinations of factors, including ad creative, physician-level data on specialty, geography, channel, and on-site engagement
• Test your theories based on your assessments, particularly around the impact of educational content on diagnostic rates
• Track metrics specific to rare disease marketing, such as:
  • Time from first engagement to patient identification
  • Impact on diagnostic testing rates
  • Changes in referral patterns
  • Adoption of diagnostic criteria

Several factors are critical for success in rare disease omnichannel measurement. First, focus on metrics that directly impact patient identification and diagnosis, as these provide the clearest picture of your program’s effectiveness. Maintaining uniform data collection and analysis methods ensures reliable results that can guide decision-making over time. Given the sensitive nature of rare disease data, implementing robust privacy measures to protect patient information and comply with regulations is essential. Finally, close collaboration with analytics teams helps refine measurement methodologies and uncover deeper insights that can drive program improvements.

Ready to transform your rare disease marketing through omnichannel excellence? Connect with the rare disease marketing experts at Reingold and IQVIA Digital today to find out how our solutions can help you customize and implement an omnichannel strategy that accelerates diagnosis and improves patient outcomes. Our specialized experience in rare disease marketing ensures you’ll get the focused support you need to succeed.

Schedule a Free Consultation