Healthcare marketers seek to target both doctors and consumers. To effectively reach those audiences in the digital realm, they can employ the services of a digital marketing company which claims healthcare expertise: DeepIntent, for example.
DeepIntent’s CEO and co-founder Chris Paquette came in with a background in healthcare, having worked as a data scientist for Memorial Sloan Kettering, using AI to find patterns predictive of patient outcomes. Prior to that he worked at a search company. DeepIntent’s approach, is built on a combination of the two fields, as he explained in an interview.
DeepIntent has two primary offerings. One is their “verified healthcare professional offering.” The other is their “direct to consumer offering .market scripts and OTC brands.” DeepIntent works primarily with large agencies for healthcare marketing to “inform their understanding of who their customer is, Paquette said.
Pharma marketers need to gain the benefit of such insight, he said, because they “are four to six years behind the broader marketplace in marketing.” Despite coming from behind, though, he believes that it can achieve “party with market or even get ahead, if it leapfrogs over what others have learned about programmatic space.”
One of the reasons pharma marketers are behind is because many have opted to play it safe by sticking to a “very old, antiquated model” of placing ads with endemic publishers. The downside of that is that there are only “a small handful of endemic publishers” which translates into higher costs for healthcare marketing.
Though he acknowledged that endemic ads do have still have a place — they do offer “captivating content” — he identified a need for healthcare marketers to have other economical and effective way to deliver targeted content to their audiences. Accordingly, when they talk to someone at an agency, they point out how technology can allow them to reap the “benefits of audience-based buying.”
I asked what distinguishes DeepIntent from other companies working in the audience-buying space. Paquette explained that they not only “partner strategically with data companies,” but draw on their “own first person data” to identify the target audience. Working with that, as well as technographic identifiers like cookies and IP addresses, they can identify the device used by a doctor or a person with interest in particular treatments.
“We don’t buy our data from anyone else,” Paquette declared. “We own the data” and update it in real time. That gives them “a lot more flexibility and confidence that it’s the right user deterministic data.”
They analyze web traffic and the content that users look at to identify where they can reach their target audience. “Through data partnerships,” he explained, they can identify a person who frequents sites about disease treatment that relates to the brand promoted. With that information, they “can prioritize that device and user to show the ad most relevant to them.”
He summed it up this way: “DeepIntent allows brands to build contextual campaigns to deliver ads that fit the specific sentiment around the brands, people, places, and things of interest to your audience.”
