2024 healthcare marketing outlook: Priorities and opportunities

2024 healthcare marketing outlook: Priorities and opportunities

Post-COVID, healthcare companies are becoming more strategic about reaching their target audiences. In this TrendTalks session, 2024 Healthcare Marketing Outlook: Priorities and Opportunities, sponsored by Swoop, pharma marketers discussed how they are increasingly segmenting their target audiences and which channels they’re prioritizing to reach them.

Peter Kane, director of growth marketing at Swoop, stressed how identifying a target audience is critical to the overall success of a marketing plan. “The higher the audience quality, the more confident you can be that you’re reaching your ideal target,” he said. The goal is to “be as refined as possible while ensuring the ability to scale.”

Although MM+M’s 2023 Healthcare Marketers Trends Report indicates that marketing budgets fell 8% last year, attendees felt that using sophisticated targeting tools still allows them to get a significant return on their marketing investment.

MM+M’s research also shows that marketers are devoting more of their budgets to reaching HCPs. Direct to consumer broadcast has become less of an overall focus, while more specialized platforms, such as Connected TV, are gaining favor because they allow marketers to connect with their target audience in more efficient ways. In fact, digital and video (which includes programmatic and CTV) were some of the fastest growing channels, according to MM+M’s research.

Social media is expected to become an even more prominent channel for pharma marketing as a new generation of physicians entering the workforce are digital natives. In a market that has changed dramatically, pharma marketers are finding new ways to deliver messaging to audiences accustomed to encountering and processing information through less traditional means.

“One of the best channels to crossover consumer and HCP is social media,” noted Stephanie Garrison, former head, U.S. digital marketing at Idorsia. “We even had an HCP contact our sales team referencing a paid consumer ad they saw on Instagram.”