Marketing a specialty pharmacy to prescribers

A specialty pharmacy fills prescriptions that a retail counter cannot. It also gets them from two directions: a patient who needs a therapy and is looking for someone to fill it, and a prescriber who has a patient in front of them and needs a pharmacy that can take the referral. Most pharmacy ad accounts treat those as one audience with one landing page and one set of keywords. They are not.

We run paid media for a specialty pharmacy licensed in 24 states. The account relies on both patient inquiries and prescriber referrals, and separating the two was part of the rebuild that took it from about fifteen qualified leads a month to eighty or more. This post is about why the two campaigns have to be different and what each one needs.

Patients search for a condition. Prescribers search for a capability.

A patient types the name of their therapy, or their condition, or a question about whether a drug can be compounded. Their intent is personal and often urgent: can this be filled, will insurance cover it, how fast can it ship.

A prescriber, or the nurse or office manager acting for them, searches for something narrower: a pharmacy that handles a specific therapy, ships to a specific state, works with a specific payer, or can take a referral without a fax. They are not researching the condition. They are looking for a partner that will not create work for their office.

Putting both on one keyword list means the patient campaign pays for the prescriber’s searches and vice versa, and neither page answers the question that was asked.

Two campaigns, two pages, one number each

The structure we use:

• A patient campaign organized by condition and by the states the pharmacy is licensed in. Each condition gets its own ad group and its own landing page, with the phone number where a patient looks for it and a plain explanation of how a transfer works. The number is cost per qualified patient lead, with calls tracked.
• A prescriber campaign organized by capability: the therapies the pharmacy fills, the referral process, the states it ships to. The page is written for an office, not a patient: what the pharmacy needs to accept a referral, how long it takes, who to call. The form asks for the practice, not the diagnosis. The number is cost per referral inquiry.
• Separate negative keyword lists. Informational searches from people researching what a specialty pharmacy is come out of both campaigns; in the account we rebuilt, over 40% of search spend had been going to those queries.

Reporting is by campaign, so the pharmacy can see what a patient lead costs and what a referral inquiry costs, and decide where the next dollar goes.

The referral form is the product

A prescriber’s office decides on friction. If the page asks for a patient’s full history in a web form, the office will fax the referral to whoever they used last time. The form should ask for what the pharmacy needs to start a conversation: practice name, contact, therapy, state, and a way to send the prescription. Everything else is a phone call.

The same rule applies to the phone number. In the account we run, calls were more than 70% of conversions and none were tracked before we installed call tracking. A prescriber campaign without call tracking cannot tell which keywords produce referrals, which is the only thing it exists to learn. Call tracking goes in first.

What to expect from each

Patient campaigns are higher volume and cheaper per lead, and the leads vary in quality, which is why the definition of “qualified” has to be agreed before the campaign starts. Prescriber campaigns are lower volume and more expensive per inquiry, and one inquiry can be worth many patients. Judging the two on the same cost per lead makes the prescriber campaign look like a failure and starves it. Judge each on its own number.

If you run a specialty pharmacy

Open your search terms report and sort by cost. Mark each of the top fifty as patient, prescriber, or informational. If they are all landing on one page, the account is answering one audience’s question with another audience’s page. The fix is structural, not a bigger budget, and it is the kind of thing the Marketing Audit is built to find.