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Mastering the Moment of Care: The Strategic Importance of POC Messaging for Your Product Launch

Author: Doceree 4 minute read

Reach with relevance is the new catchphrase for high-stakes pharmaceutical product launches. In the rapidly evolving pharma landscape, just reaching healthcare professionals (HCPs) is no longer enough; reaching them with the right message, in the right context, and at the right time is one of the core challenges of HCP marketing. Point-of-care (POC) messaging is one of the best ways to ensure reach with relevance and is a key strategic tool for pharma marketers.  

This blog explores how POC messaging can maximize impact during product launches. Contextual messaging at the right moment with the right content helps build relevance; it also ensures that HCPs seeking information engage with the messages and trust the brand. Relevance and trust can be decisive for launch success, as they are for high-impact digital marketing for healthcare providers.

The Moment of Care: The Right Time to Engage HCPs 

Reaching HCPs with relevant messages as they deliver healthcare ensures brands become a part of the HCP workflow instead of interrupting the flow. POC messaging helps leverage the opportunity the moment of care presents to brands. Delivered within ecosystems like electronic health records (EHRs), e-prescribing tools, and telehealth platforms, POC messages offer HCPs helpful assistance, epitomizing contextual communication and redefining healthcare content marketing. 

The advantages POC offers are in full play during product launches and can give brands a great head-start over competitors who don’t have POC messaging at the core of their strategy. 

POC messaging leaves no room for uncertainty about whether HCPs are ready to engage; relevant, contextual, and timely communication ensures that HCPs are at their receptive best when brand messages reach them. As expected, all this has a significant business impact: Script generation on POC channels is three times greater than on other online channels, with script lift being 32% higher in the case of trigger-based messaging1, a hallmark of POC messaging tactics. POC messaging, therefore, emerges as one of the cornerstones of HCP marketing.

POC Messaging as a Key Driver in Building Trust and Credibility

For HCPs battling cognitive overload, brands that support their clinical decision-making become trusted partners. Useful messages received from such partners in the moments they make clinical decisions, order tests, or evaluate treatment options have their complete attention. The trust HCPs place in messages within their clinical workflow contrasts with the disengagement associated with promotional messages that interrupt workflows.

POC channels help brands build trust through:
  1. Contextual relevance
    Messages delivered in the context of HCP clinical practice and augmented by decision support tools resonate with HCPs
  2. Trigger-based messaging
    Messaging triggered by HCP actions is tied to their immediate needs and renders helpful assistance in real time
  3. Partnership, not promotion
    HCPs perceive messages received through POC channels as information that helps, not as promotional messages that get in their way
  4. Workflow-aligned messaging
    Messages aligned with HCP clinical workflow are well received.
POC is a potent HCP marketing tool. Through POC channels, brands can develop the correct associations, improve HCP brand perception, build trust and foster credibility. Enhanced engagement, efficient conversions and improved business outcomes follow. A 2022 study by the Point of Care Marketing Association (POCMA) and MedFuse revealed that POC was 5X more efficient at driving conversions, responsible for 17% of new brand prescriptions (NBRx) with only 2% of media investment2. In other words, POC messaging is a thoroughly sound healthcare content marketing strategy. 

Brands can use POC messaging to their great advantage during product launches. Let’s examine how brands can do this strategically to ensure launch success.

Strategic Integration: Aligning POC Messaging with Your Launch Goals

To begin with, marketers and brands must integrate POC into their core launch strategy for the channel to perform to its potential. Aligned directly with your HCP marketing objectives, POC messaging offers the following advantages:

  1. Boosts awareness about the launch in the right context and at the most relevant moments
    Being nearly overwhelmed by communication irrelevant to their clinical practice, HCPs often cannot focus on all messages that reach them. Through POC channels, your launch messages can grab HCPs’ attention by reaching them within their clinical workflow—at moments of peak relevance—as they treat patients.
  2. Speeds up trial and adoption
    Overcoming HCP prescribing inertia is as essential as creating awareness about your newly launched product. In ensuring brand presence and highlighting the stand-out features of the product during crucial decision-making moments, POC channels can nudge HCPs toward trial and ultimate adoption—if the product satisfies their requirements.
  3. Enhances brand value by promoting patient compliance and helping improve patient outcomes
    POC channels can be instrumental in helping HCPs improve patient compliance and, ultimately, clinical outcomes. POC helps brands partner with HCPs through timely usage instructions, educational content and tools that promote compliance. All this means content marketing for healthcare is at its optimum best: Great value for HCPs and lasting engagement for brands.

Why POC Messaging Resonates with HCPs

Healthcare professionals are often hard-pressed for time. Evidence-based practice of medicine necessitates that HCPs make clinical decisions based on data, which means they become selective about engaging with marketing messages. Here’s how POC channels stand out in this context:

  1. POC messaging is aligned with real-time clinical decision-making and is relevant and often based on clinical evidence.
  2. POC messaging is contextual, making it relevant to HCP clinical practice.
  3. POC messaging is need-based and supports the diagnostic, clinical decision-making, and research-based needs of HCPs and the educational and affordability needs of patients through them.

POC is one of the most effective HCP messaging channels for all product launch phases in terms of reach, relevance, precision, engagement and brand value. A 2023 study by Healio Strategic Solutions found that 74% of the HCPs surveyed preferred HCP advertising happening in professional environments3. POC helps brands tap into HCP professional environments and is a powerful channel for HCP marketing.

Conclusion: Making POC Messaging a Priority for Your Launch

POC is one of the most effective and high-impact HCP marketing channels. Contextual POC communication at clinical decision-making moments within the HCP workflow helps brands build trust, enhance engagement and improve business outcomes. Apart from these advantages, in the context of product launches, POC helps marketers create awareness, accelerate trial and promote adoption by ensuring brand presence in the right context.

For brands, POC is a powerful tool in digital marketing for healthcare providers. It ensures relevance, trust, enhanced HCP engagement, and improved business outcomes; a stronger case for POC messaging can hardly be made. By making POC a part of their core HCP outreach strategy, brands can drive stronger outcomes and power their way to crowning success—launch-wise, brand-wise, and otherwise.

Ready to make POC the centerpiece of your launch strategy? Let’s talk about how contextual messaging can elevate your product launch. Get in touch today.


References
1.     Doceree 360: 2022 Edition – Point of Care Report. 2022. 
https://doceree.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Doceree-360-POC-Report.pdf

2.    PharmExec. POCMA and MedFuse Release Analysis of the Complete Reach of POC Marketing. November 28, 2022. 
https://www.pharmexec.com/view/pocma-and-medfuse-release-analysis-of-the-complete-reach-of-poc-marketing

3.    HCPs’ Preferences on Endemic vs Non-Endemic Ads,” Healio Strategic Solutions, 2023.