The audience data that healthcare marketers need today is scattered across media channels and platforms. For instance, streaming now represents 45% of TV usage, and most of the top streamers operate their own self-service ad platform. This fragmentation complicates almost every aspect of a marketer’s job, from identifying the consumers and healthcare providers (HCPs) they need to reach, to effectively engaging these audiences and evaluating campaign performance.

As marketers seek to create more personalized engagements and human experiences, they need precise audience data to be readily available, no matter its source. Greater integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into marketers’ daily activities also hinges on having high-quality audience data available on demand, because AI is only as good as the data it gets.

This is why marketers must embrace a new kind of data and marketing infrastructure: one that is open and unified and gives them seamless access to consumer and HCP audiences based on high-quality data sources while also supporting secure AI integration. This can help marketers create more relevant cross-channel campaigns at scale that are personalized for the audiences they need to reach. By transforming how they access and use precise data to connect across the healthcare journey, marketers can ultimately engage healthcare providers and consumers in ways that impact health outcomes.

Realizing an open, omnichannel future

Industry progress has created an infrastructure that pulls data together so healthcare marketers can plan, activate and measure campaigns for consumers and HCPs in one place. This infrastructure spans the full spectrum of digital communications capabilities and data inventory, including email, social, and programmatic and connected TV (CTV), to help marketers personalize their engagements at scale.

However, large volumes of audience data remain outside this infrastructure, spread across multiple places like demand-side platforms (DSPs) and owned-and-operated streaming platforms. As a result, not only is audience data fragmented, but the owners of this data also use varying identity graphs and calculate reporting KPIs in different ways, making it at best inconsistent to marketers and, at worse, unreliable. This undermines the effectiveness of campaign personalization, resulting in decreased performance, and makes measurement more difficult, leading to lower impact of ongoing campaign optimization.

Recognizing these challenges, leaders, experts and innovators in the healthcare industry are collaborating to remove barriers to the data and channels that marketers need. Through new technology integrations, for instance, the DSPs that provide access to premium video inventory and new audiences are no longer walled off from the infrastructure that many marketers use for their campaigns.

This expanded infrastructure is purpose-built for healthcare marketers to give them data that maintains privacy and compliance. And it can unlock significant benefits for healthcare marketers, including:

Improved reach and relevance:

A unified data and marketing infrastructure can improve who marketers reach and how they reach them.

For example, the integration of previously walled-off DSPs into this infrastructure can help marketers leverage CTV inventories without needing to jump into other platforms or reconcile different datasets. And by tapping into capabilities like real-time identity resolution, marketers can be confident they’re using high-fidelity data to define the audiences they’re reaching.

As healthcare marketers expand AI adoption, they can also benefit from AI agents combing the expanded data in this infrastructure to uncover useful audience insights that they may otherwise miss. AI agents offer an opportunity for better audience optimization. For example, combining professional identity data (e.g., continuing education history) and behavioral data (e.g., researching a new treatment on medical sites) can create a more complete picture of HCP audiences. This can help marketers communicate with all HCPs — including those who may be difficult to reach or aren’t being reached today — and do so less generically and more effectively, based on factors like their personal habits and interests.

Having one infrastructure that serves as a launchpad for activities across email, programmatic, social, endemic and CTV — all using the same dataset — can also empower marketers to create more harmonized personalization strategies across channels. This can help them bring greater consistency and depth to their campaigns for more humanized marketing experiences.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Kevin Shectman, Senior Director of Product Marketing @ Braze

Greater agility:

In today’s fast-changing market, healthcare marketers are under pressure to operate with greater speed and agility.

With a unified data and marketing infrastructure powered by AI, marketers benefit from a single control layer for the entire lifecycle of their digital marketing activities. They can plan, activate, measure and report all in one place if they prefer. And instead of waiting potentially several months to see the results of their campaigns, they can see results in real time and quickly make changes based on performance insights, audience behaviors or market conditions.

A unified infrastructure can also help marketers more easily embrace AI-driven changes. For example, AI agents are increasingly being used for media planning and buying, and using AI to automate these activities can help improve audience segmentation, bidding and personalization. But marketers could fall behind if their infrastructure isn’t built to integrate AI agents or only has limited access to audience data.

Improved and expanded measurement:

Unifying audience data in one place means that marketers no longer need to monitor marketing activities in multiple platforms that have different interfaces, different interpretations of data and possibly different identities for the same person.

Instead, they get one version of the truth to accurately track campaign performance. They can be certain that the Dr. Smith they’re targeting with ads on Netflix is the same Dr. Smith they’re contacting via email. And they have a clear and consistent understanding of KPIs like clicks, opens and exposure because those measurables are now calculated the same way across channels.

But healthcare marketers can also do far more than measure traditional KPIs with a unified data and marketing infrastructure. They can measure how they’re advancing healthcare for the people they’re trying to reach. They can see, for instance, whether their marketing activities are initiating treatments, improving patient access to care or connecting physicians with insights like clinical data to optimize care plans.

This can help marketers make sure their activities resonate where it matters most — in people’s lives.

Transforming healthcare with better data

Healthcare is becoming more personalized, and healthcare marketers are embracing data and digital innovation to follow suit. By unifying data and marketing activities in one place, marketers have more flexibility to make their campaigns more human-centered and relevant to consumers and HCPs. And not only can healthcare marketers better understand the effectiveness of those campaigns and optimize them based on measurement insights, but they can also enable better care for the people they’re reaching.

Marketing Technology News: Marketing’s New Mandate: Lead Through Change or Be Left Behind