A Winning Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy: Why Endemic + POC Drive Real HCP Engagement
Healthcare digital marketing is a crucial component of brand marketing strategies for pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations, with digital ad spends in the United States alone expected to reach $23.11 billion in 20251. However, irrespective of the importance of digital tools for driving healthcare professionals (HCPs) engagement, making them perform to potential requires marketers to use them strategically to deliver value, foster trust and trigger meaningful action.
A sound digital marketing strategy for healthcare must recognize that scattergun approaches seldom work. Engaging HCPs digitally requires structured digital journeys that flow naturally from awareness to action. Focused strategies built around the traditional marketing funnel - awareness, interest, action, lead to the right digital tools being used at each stage to create curiosity, fuel interest, drive engagement, and improve brand recall. This is where solutions like endemic messaging and point-of-care outreach come in.
When deployed strategically across the marketing funnel, endemic and point-of-care solutions form the backbone of focused and effective digital marketing strategies for healthcare providers. Let’s explore how these solutions deliver value across the HCP engagement journey.
HCP digital journeys and the marketing funnel
The most effective approach for healthcare & pharma marketers who seek to deepen engagement with HCPs is to support them throughout their digital journeys. The idea is to identify the various stages of the journey and render exactly the assistance they need at each stage. From a brand perspective, these stages together comprise the healthcare digital marketing strategy funnel and include:
- Awareness
At this stage, you focus on visibility for your brand, ensuring your attempts are directed at meeting the right HCPs on the right channels. - Interest and consideration
This stage involves providing relevant content to HCPs that makes them feel interested, fostering trust and enhancing engagement. - Action
This stage focuses on encouraging HCPs to act, which includes reaching out for information, engaging with a rep, or simply making an informed choice that leads them to prescribe a treatment.
HCP engagement through the various stages of the funnel requires you to focus your digital marketing strategies for healthcare on context-aware and deeply relevant support—academic, clinical, or otherwise—throughout the journey and within the HCP’s digital clinical workflow. Let’s find out how this unfolds.
Awareness stage: The endemic advantage
Endemic messaging, which involves reaching out to HCPs with relevant contextual content on HCP-only platforms: healthcare-specific websites, online medical journals, online learning portals, and doctor-networking platforms—is the smart way to ensure visibility for your brand.
HCP outreach: Why context matters
Reaching out to HCPs in a professional context fosters credibility and increases the likelihood of your messages being received well—in other words, it ensures high visibility for your brand.
To understand how endemic messaging ensures visibility, imagine a new drug you want to promote to critical care specialists. Now, suppose your competitor has a similar molecule to promote, and as part of his digital outreach, he reaches out to these specialists on Facebook as they socialize with friends.
In contrast, you contact specialists on specialized CME platforms for critical care specialists. It requires no leap of imagination to understand that your message, delivered in a trusted clinical context, will be found more relevant and resonate better with the HCPs.
Endemic messaging is context-aware and ensures high visibility and recall for your brand. It is, therefore, one of the cornerstones of effective digital marketing in healthcare. The effectiveness of endemic messaging can be further enhanced by targeting HCPs based on geography, specialty and behavior in highly relevant contexts.
For instance, the average email open rate of 34.6% for HCP-targeted campaigns2 can be significantly improved through personalization. In being personalized, endemic outreach maximizes the visibility and impact of your message and ensures high returns for your healthcare digital marketing spends.
To dive deeper into how endemic messaging works effectively for healthcare brands, check out our guide to endemic marketing in healthcare.
Building interest: The consideration stage
At this stage, HCP awareness transforms into intent, a critical inflexion point for brand engagement. Engagement involves building HCP interest through personalized messaging that addresses their specific content needs—in other words, articles, studies, webinars, patient outcome statistics, and any other content support they may require. Brand messaging can be reinforced through email campaigns, programmatic ads and mechanism of action (MOA) videos that deepen their understanding of the brand.
Why HCPs trust partners, not promoters
All the content support you provide HCPs at the consideration stage helps position you not as an advertiser but as a valuable partner who delivers in-depth information whenever they need it—this means you have their attention, and they will engage with the content you share. HCPs who saw your brand messages at the awareness stage are now interested in the follow-up content you share to further their understanding of your brand. All this helps you reap the benefits of digital marketing for healthcare.
Personalized messaging
An effective healthcare digital marketing strategy requires personalized messaging to be based on behavioral data, which can boost HCP interest in your content further. For instance, HCPs who’ve shown interest in the key benefits of a specific treatment regimen may be served with more content on the dosage and adverse effects.
A structured approach to digital marketing for healthcare that is context-aware and emphasizes continuity evokes HCP interest, builds trust, and sustains HCP engagement with the brand.
If you're looking for an even more advanced method to engage HCPs at the right moment, read our article on the programmatic POC messaging for valuable insights.
Driving action at the point of care
The third stage—the bottom of the marketing funnel—is where all the action happens.
Being present when treatment decisions are made
The final stage of digital marketing in healthcare represents the moment healthcare is being delivered at the ‘point of care’ (POC). It is the moment of clinical decision-making—of treatments being prescribed, patients being enrolled into trials, and patient support programs being initiated. For brands, these are moments of unmatched relevance and being present at the point of care in a compliant, contextual way—when treatment decisions are being made—presents them with the opportunity to create a win-win situation for everyone—clinical assistance for HCPs, affordable healthcare for patients, enhanced patient outcomes for health systems, and maximized returns for themselves.
Driving impact and scripts through POC solutions
POC solutions, such as EHR messaging, are direct calls to action and, therefore, of vital importance to strategies around digital marketing in healthcare. Script generation is known to be three times greater on POC channels than on other online channels, with script lift being 32% higher in the case of trigger-based messaging3.
Operating within the HCP digital workflow, POC solutions support the HCP experience and are accordingly perceived not as disruptions but as tools that render valuable assistance to HCPs. With POC solutions, therefore, the benefits of digital marketing for healthcare are evident for brands—enhanced HCP engagement, measurable actions like improved script lift, and significantly improved business outcome,
Powering successful digital marketing strategies for healthcare: The POC-endemic combo
Endemic messaging and POC solutions make for a powerful combination. Working together as a part of an integrated digital marketing strategy for healthcare, they support HCPs through their digital journeys, ensuring brand visibility, building HCP interest, and driving action at the moment of clinical decision-making—simultaneously creating a seamless HCP experience across the marketing funnel.
Endemic messaging—best placed to build brand awareness and sustain HCP interest—and POC solutions—powerful tools that drive measurable action—epitomize the immense benefits of digital marketing for healthcare. With metrics like impressions, clicks, and script lift, optimizing ROI and refining future campaigns become possible.
Learn how data-driven strategies can enhance your POC messaging campaigns by reading our article on planning data-driven POC strategies.
Conclusion
A successful healthcare digital marketing strategy is contingent on a range of factors, the most important of which is the ability to reach out to HCPs in the right context with relevant and actionable messages.
Endemic messaging and POC solutions span the entire digital healthcare marketing funnel and can together handhold HCPs throughout their digital journeys from awareness to action.
Digital marketing for healthcare that combines the strengths of endemic and POC solutions delivers measurable HCP engagement and improved patient outcomes—powering significantly higher business returns. Brands would be well served if they integrated POC solutions and endemic messaging into their healthcare digital marketing arsenal. In an era where it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain HCP attention, refusal to adapt means risking invisibility. As it is, investing in context-aware HCP engagement is the best way for brands to stay ahead of the curve—endemic and POC solutions might be their best bet.