In the exam room, healthcare providers (HCPs) take a deeply personal approach to care. They consider each patient’s history, lifestyle, values and preferences. So why is it that marketers often take the opposite approach when trying to engage those same providers?
Too often, HCP marketing boils down to job titles and specialties like targeting cardiologists, reaching prescribing oncologists or engaging nurse practitioners. This oversimplified, professional-only view fails to recognize what we all know intuitively: providers are people first.
They’re parents. They’re early adopters. They’re podcast listeners. They’re bilingual. They’re juggling work-life pressures and operating in vastly different practice environments. A rural pediatrician is not the same as an urban neurologist. Yet both may be lumped into a one-size-fits-all outreach campaign. That disconnect creates what we might call an “empathy gap” in HCP marketing.
It’s time for a new mindset that shifts from transactional to transformational, and from job role to whole person.
Why the Professional-Only Approach Falls Short
The traditional method of HCP engagement is, in many ways, a relic of a rep-driven era built for in-person sales visits, direct mailers and broad specialty segments. But today’s reality is different.
According to IQVIA, nearly 80% of HCPs say they experience marketing that feels generic or impersonal, and fewer than 20% feel they are receiving tailored communications. Meanwhile, MM+M and Swoop report that over 65% of healthcare marketers recently shifted budget to non-personal promotion. But without precision and personalization, these investments fall flat.
The result? Lower engagement, higher waste and missed opportunities to build trust with those who directly impact patient outcomes.
A Better Blueprint: People-Based Marketing
What if HCP marketing took a cue from the consumer world? Retail, travel and entertainment brands have long used people-based data to personalize experiences at scale by leveraging insights into not just who someone is, but what they do, how they think and what motivates their decisions.
At its core, people-based marketing is about recognizing the individual behind the identifier. It combines demographic, behavioral, lifestyle and even psychographic data to create a full, humanized portrait of your audience. Now, imagine applying that lens to providers.
This shift doesn’t mean ignoring clinical attributes like specialty or prescriber status, it means adding context and layering in personal characteristics to engage with even more relevance and authenticity.
The Real-Life Provider Personas You’ve Been Missing
When we start seeing providers as people, new possibilities arise.
Let’s say you’re launching a campaign for a new remote monitoring device. Traditionally, you might target cardiologists. But what if you could go further? What if you could identify which cardiologists:
- Are early tech adopters?
- Prefer streaming content over email?
- Work in solo practices where administrative burden is high?
Or imagine a pharmaceutical brand wanting to promote educational resources in Spanish. Instead of broadly targeting family medicine physicians, they could focus on bilingual providers who serve predominantly Hispanic patient populations and have a history of engaging with culturally relevant content.
These are not hypotheticals. They’re real-world insights now accessible through people-based data.
From Clinician to Consumer: HCPs in the Real World
The line between professional and personal behavior is blurrier than ever. For example, Millennial and Gen Z providers are digital natives who spend hours on social media, consume podcasts for clinical updates and expect the same personalization from brands that they get from Netflix or Spotify.
According to Avant Healthcare, 87% of Millennial HCPs use social media, and 4 in 5 get medical news from their feeds. That’s a behavioral signal you won’t find on a credentialing database.
Understanding what providers do after hours in their “blue jeans moments” can help marketers build messages that resonate in the right place, at the right time, with the right tone.
Reframing Your Next HCP Campaign
If you’re preparing for your next HCP-focused campaign, this is your opportunity to pause and reframe your strategy. Before finalizing your segments or choosing a media mix, ask yourself a simple but powerful question: Do I really know who this provider is beyond their profession?
Thinking of the provider as a person starts with curiosity. Consider what might motivate them to engage with your message. Are they time-strapped and digitally savvy, preferring content they can consume passively like audio snippets or short CTV spots? Do they speak multiple languages or serve diverse patient populations, making cultural relevance more than a nice-to-have? Do they work in a high-volume practice, balancing patient care with administrative overload and might benefit from messaging that gets straight to the point?
These kinds of considerations aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re data-driven opportunities to build stronger connections. Layering in information like a provider’s preferred communication channels, likelihood to adopt new technology or even whether they are caregivers themselves can transform how your message is received. It shifts the campaign from “selling something to a provider” to “offering something that fits into their life.”
Start small. Add just one or two people-based attributes to your targeting strategy. Maybe you prioritize reaching providers who are early tech adopters or those who frequently engage with social media and then monitor how those audiences respond compared to your baseline. You’ll likely find that even slight adjustments toward personalization yield outsized returns in engagement and trust.
Ultimately, humanizing your HCP campaigns isn’t about overcomplicating your strategy. It’s about respecting the nuance of the people you’re trying to reach. By asking deeper questions and leveraging data that reflects the provider’s full context, you create the kind of meaningful engagement that today’s healthcare landscape demands.
Rewriting the Rules of HCP Engagement
Healthcare providers are more than their National Provider Identifier (NPI). They’re more than prescribing status or years in practice. They are multidimensional humans navigating a complex, often overwhelming healthcare system.
If we want to cut through the noise, we must first demonstrate that we understand who they are, not just what they do. Human-centered marketing doesn’t just drive results; it builds respect.
Because in the end, connection fuels care. And better engagement with HCPs can ultimately lead to better outcomes for everyone.
Christine Lee
Christine Lee is head of health partnerships for predictive data innovator, AnalyticsIQ. Christine has over a decade of experience in the data and analytics space and has worked with industry leaders across verticals like healthcare, pharma, non-profits and more. Christine lives in Central Florida with her family, dogs, and cats – a house full of love!
