How to Estimate the Actionable Market Share of Digital Point-of-Care Media Vendors
With the rise of point-of-care digital marketing, there is a growing need for BioPharma to understand the electronic health record (EHR) advertising landscape. Let’s say, for example, your brand is focused on a specialty cardiovascular therapeutic area, and your goals are to deliver promotional messaging to ambulatory cardiologists during their EHR workflows. How do you know if the point-of-care media vendor you are working with can reach your target audience with your approved messages?
You should be equipped to ask insightful questions to uncover what solutions are available and who you can reach with those solutions. When you do that math, you should be able to estimate the actionable market share of that vendor.
Explore what solutions are available.
As with many products and services, different vendors can have different offerings, and depending upon your campaign objectives, you should be sure you are working with a vendor who can deliver the types of messaging – in the relevant places – that align with your campaign.
There are two primary types of messaging that can be displayed within EHRs – promotional messaging and financial messaging.
Promotional messaging
This type of messaging is designed to drive brand awareness among your target audience through banner advertisements in their EHR workflow. It can be hyper-targeted toward a specific provider specialty or providers with certain patient population characteristics. The banner advertisements can link to a variety of destinations including your brand’s website, promotional materials, educational materials or to another landing page of your choice. Importantly, this type of messaging appears during the physician EHR workflow, often before any prescribing decisions are made. With promotional messaging, metrics such as ad impressions, prescription analytics, and physician level data can be reported on.
Financial messaging
Financial messaging is not necessarily intended to increase brand awareness, and unlike promotional messaging, does not provide links to promotional materials. It is purely financial in nature, and most often provides HCPs with either printable or electronic coupons that they can pass along to their patients. Unlike promotional messaging, financial messaging does not appear during the EHR workflow. Financial messaging appears after a medication is selected. It is not as targeted as promotional messaging, and key performance indicators (KPIs) are typically limited to the number of coupons printed or redeemed.
| Promotional messaging | Financial messaging | |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Drive brand awareness among HCPs | Pass on savings to patients |
| Description | Banner advertisements linking to brand’s website, promotional materials, or other landing page | Printable or electronic coupons |
| Targeting | Hyper-targeted toward specific provider specialty or providers with certain patient population characteristics | Minimal targeting |
| Location in EHR | During EHR workflow, often before prescribing decisions are made | At the end of the EHR workflow, after prescribing decisions have been made |
| Key performance indicators (KPIs) | Impressions, prescription analytics, physician level data | The number of coupons printed or redeemed |
Both promotional and financial messaging have value, depending upon your campaign goals. You also may want to consider using both types of messaging to deliver a robust, well-rounded campaign. For example, you may want to consider driving awareness around the coupons using promotional messaging during the EHR workflow.
The critical thing to understand, however, is that once you have a campaign goal in mind, be sure to find out what solutions your point-of-care media vendor has available and how they align with the strategic imperatives for your brand.
Determine who can you reach with those solutions.
There is a great deal of confusion in the marketplace around the EHR market share landscape. BioPharma marketing leaders typically receive information on EHR market share numbers from their point-of-care media vendors. In many cases this overall market share number may not be truly representative of the segment of the total pool of prescribers you are attempting to reach.
Let’s revisit the example we outlined in the introduction. If, for example, you are a marketer at a BioPharma brand focused on a specialty cardiovascular therapeutic area, and your goals are to deliver promotional messaging to ambulatory cardiologists during their EHR workflows, it is critical that your point-of-care media vendor can reach that specific target audience with your approved promotional messaging.
If a potential EHR vendor reports that their network can reach 30% of all HCPs in the United States, that may very well be true. However, once you begin to ask some questions you can begin to figure out who among the 30% you can reach with actionable tactics.
Estimate the actionable market share and validate with a third party.
Asking a series of questions will help you begin to peel back the onion to estimate the actionable market share of a potential vendor. Some vendors will provide you with a top line market share number. If there are roughly 1 million prescribers in the United States, and your vendor claims they can reach 30%, you start off with a reach of around 300,000 HCPs. That number is not the bottom line, however, and is not reflective of the actual number of HCPs you can reach with pharma sponsored programs.
Asking a series of follow up questions will reveal the estimated actionable market share of that vendor. You want to know:
- How many are using media accessible EHR platforms?
- How many within the media accessible EHR platforms are media accessible EHR users?
- How many of the media accessible EHR users fall within your specialty or therapeutic area?
What you are left with is the portion of the original top line number who can receive, and may be interested in, your brand’s awareness messaging.
While your digital point-of-care media vendor should be forthcoming with their capabilities, it is always a good idea, however, to validate any market share numbers you receive with a third-party. There are several EHR market share reports available in the public domain to assist with validation.