Faced with finite budgets and demanding timelines, it continues to be challenging for marketers to engage HCPs with personalized content effectively and connect marketing efforts directly to new prescriptions. This is often compounded by siloed data and slow performance reporting, leading to a frustrating sense of bloated digital spend and underwhelming results.

Traditionally, pharma marketing has relied on a static model of audience affinity data as a starting point for campaigns. We’ve all meticulously crafted audience personas, leveraging historical data to understand channel preferences, media consumption patterns, and other real-world actions that guide those personas. Data offers insights beyond demographics into the affinity, or preferences and behaviors, of different members and segments of a target audience. And this data also serves as the foundation of the annual media planning and buying cycle.

But this approach has a critical flaw: it’s just one snapshot in time.

In this model, your entire media plan might center on data collected months or even a year ago. This “one-time” affinity data offers a baseline but quickly becomes outdated in our fast-changing digital world. HCPs’ information consumption habits, professional interests, and preferred channels are in constant flux. 

Sometimes this reflects broader landscape shifts. The chaotic impact of policy decisions around TikTok made headlines throughout Q1 2025 and caused rapid dips and spikes in user (and advertiser) activity. Sometimes fluctuations are narrower on industry-specific platforms. From 2024 to 2025, for example, a HealthLink Dimensions survey showed steep declines in HCP social networks. HCP usage of Doximity plummeted from 43% to 9% and usage of SERMO dropped from 18% to 8.5%.

A physician intensely focused on an HCP-only social network four months ago might now instead be monitoring clinical trial results from a recent conference being shared via email from their favorite endemic news site. If your affinity data isn’t keeping pace and your campaign isn’t optimized quickly, your targeting and messaging will miss the mark. This leads to wasted spend and suboptimal campaign performance.

According to a SERMO survey, 73% of physicians are more likely to engage with communication when it’s personalized. But EPG Health data reveals that less than half of HCPs report that most or all of the content they see from pharma is personalized or relevant. 

Static data contributes to this gap for HCPs, and it also contributes to common pain points on the marketer side of this equation: feelings of inflated digital spend, disappointing performance, and frustration with partners. 

Static data contributes to this gap for HCPs, and it also contributes to common pain points on the marketer side of this equation: feelings of inflated digital spend, disappointing performance, and frustration with partners.

If campaigns target HCPs based on what they used to be interested in, rather than what truly resonates now, your impact is diminished.

Enter dynamic affinity data: The real-time revolution in pharma marketing

Imagine a world where your marketing campaigns aren’t just informed by audience affinity, but evolve in real time based on where HCPs are most likely to engage right now. This is the transformative power of dynamic affinity data, and it’s a game-changer for pharma marketers.

Dynamic affinity data moves decisively beyond historical snapshots. It continuously collects and analyzes real-time signals across a vast network of advertising and marketing channels, media publishers, professional communities, and digital touchpoints. 

This constant influx of information uses millions of data points and machine learning algorithms, allowing advanced marketing platforms to identify shifting interests and rapidly adjust to new engagement opportunities. This helps at the cohort level to understand segments better, and it can help in engaging individual HCPs more effectively as well. 

The ability to process and act on data in near real-time is a key differentiator. It takes you far beyond traditional approaches that often introduce delays of weeks or months through manual data analyses, back-and-forths on proposals, brand approvals, and contracting updates.

Here’s how dynamic affinity data elevates marketing effectiveness:

• Precision targeting that evolves: Static personas don’t account for the fluid nature of HCP behavior. Dynamic affinity data enables hyper-segmentation and targeting that can adapt to deliver on an individual HCP’s go-to channel today. This empowers you to engage physicians based on their personalized interests more effectively than ever.
• Enhanced content personalization: Deliver content about efficacy directly to HCPs who have just searched for that information. Engage an HCP with an email from the specialty media platform they tend to open most often. Dynamic affinity data makes this level of precise personalization a reality.
• Richer data for cross-functional integration: Amplify personalization by going beyond just channel-level preferences. Advanced affinity sources even reveal HCP affinities toward field, digital, and peer-to-peer engagement. You’ll know if a rep call will be essential to complement nonpersonal efforts or if it’s a poor use of resources.
• Real-time insights and optimization: Dynamic affinity data delivers real-time control and visibility. By understanding what HCPs are actively engaging with at this moment, campaigns can be optimized on the fly. This means confidently reallocating spend to high-performing channels, adjusting messaging to reflect current interests, reaching HCPs when they are most receptive, and updating future content journeys based on insights from their current interactions.
• Sustainable competitive advantage: Outperform competitors by consistently being one step ahead in understanding and engaging your target audience. Some dynamic affinity solutions even offer competitor intelligence monitoring, using the same integrations that deliver sharper audience insights to also uncover what media and messages competitive brands are investing in.

Advanced affinity sources even reveal HCP affinities toward field, digital, and peer-to-peer engagement. You’ll know if a rep call will be essential to complement nonpersonal efforts or if it’s a poor use of resources.

The future is now: Turn comprehensive data into action 

Technology and AI are unlocking new opportunities that have never existed before. Advanced automation solutions can now deliver live data to identify, target, and engage audiences far more effectively across all channels and publishers. PharmaForceIQ, for example, relies on more than 100 million data points on the engagement and behavior of over 7 million HCPs across thousands of touchpoints to power a high-impact, real-time orchestration engine. 

Ultimately, your work aims to connect more HCPs and patients to the therapies that matter. Dynamic affinity data empowers you with real-time control, transparency, and the confidence to invest marketing dollars that truly deliver ROI and drive those better outcomes faster.