Influencing Your Audience Is All About Timing

In the traditional promotional journey, the calendar of a new brand might have looked something like this: 

• Engage with payers six months prior to approval 
• Engage with physicians upon approval  
• Begin outreach to patient population six months after approval 
• Add in outreach to additional prescribers (NPs, PAs) and patient advocacy groups (PAGs) 

Today, just about all of that would get crossed off. Here are three ways this is different for modern marketers. 

• First, it’s no longer a linear, “first this, then this, then this” approach. A successful brand must engage multiple audiences simultaneously and seamlessly.  

• Second, different audiences need to be engaged at different times.  

• Third, the number of decision-makers and influencers, and the connections between them, is ever-increasing.  

One situation in which it’s important to address some groups earlier is in the case of rare diseases and/or orphan drugs. It’s imperative to build relationships with PAGs long before contacting them to inform them about a recently approved drug. Increasingly, patient advocacy leaders are indeed the leaders in expertise on a condition. Recently, we met with a woman whose child had a rare disease. She built a community of patient families, and got NIH leadership to meet with them in order to advocate for research. In addition to advocating for funding, highly educated PAGs also help researchers determine appropriate clinical-trial endpoints that not only pass regulatory muster but also represent meaningful change to patients. Then, they can help spread the word about recruitment for those trials. And, yes, they often share information about approved treatments. PAGs are increasingly professionalized, informed, multi-faceted organizations making great change happen.  

Another situation in which the “order of operations” might change is a recent case we handled. In it, a new brand offers an alternative to a traditionally dreaded health screening. Increased use can help to address the backlog of years that still exists post-COVID, and could save lives. Unfortunately, some physicians are less than amenable to a patient using this screening instead of the traditional one, which they administer. So, in this case, this brand is a patient-first product, and the goal is to help them become aware of an alternative to something they dread, so they’ll be willing to get checked out.  

The priority audiences for a brand to consider might indeed include patients, caregivers, prescribers, payers and PAGs – but it might also include health systems, allied health professionals who are not direct prescribers, and micro-influencers on social media. Sometimes this is because it’s a complex disease with multiple stakeholders, like oncology, where tumor boards can include not only oncologists, but geneticists, pharmacists, pathologists, surgeons, and more. Other times, as noted above, other factors are at play.  

The traditional continuum – if there ever really was one – is gone. Influence is coming from all angles, and at all times. It’s more rapid and dynamic than ever before, and requires that same rapidity and dynamism from marketers. 

This can be unsettling news for a brand that was preparing its sales and marketing approach with more sedate primary-and-secondary-target, or three-segment, approaches. Talking to everyone at once seems impossible. But this is where omnichannel shines, making it possible to do the “impossible.” We let the condition, the market, and the population dictate our approach. Because, at the end of the day, one-size-fits-all usually fits no one.