Rare Disease Marketing: 4 Media Strategies for Reaching Patients and HCPs

“It’s important to understand your audience, your target providers, where those inflection points are, and the moments that your marketing can make an impact that might change a patient outcome,” says Stephanie Gross, senior manager, digital marketing at Immunocore. Gross, along with Rachel Aldana, VP, head of marketing and commercial excellence strategic initiatives at Takeda, and Andrea Zide, senior director, digital and omnichannel strategy at a commercial-stage biopharma, discussed the complexities of rare disease marketing at the 2025 Veeva Commercial Summit. Despite the unique challenges of their therapeutic areas, they all need to reach targeted and often smaller patient populations, balance disease state awareness with branded media, and prove the impact of their media investments.

To support these goals, they work with Veeva Crossix to measure their strategic, data-backed marketing and tie it back to health metrics. This approach allows their teams to better understand the impact of media investments and improve campaign performance. Here are four strategies they use to effectively reach small patient populations, as well as the specialty HCPs that treat them.

Craft targeted media strategies

Forming a thorough media strategy for a rare disease brand involves a range of considerations. The brand’s lifecycle and competitive landscape will dictate what channels you should use to reach your goals. Brands that are first to market will likely focus on disease awareness and education. Those entering a more competitive market may have less budget for direct-to-consumer education and put more focus on driving users to a specific product.

Zide agrees with this approach and emphasizes, “When you are in rare disease, there’s no right strategy,” she says. “It’s all about test and learn and asking different questions based on your therapeutic area, competitive space, product lifecycle, and where you are in the launch process.” She advises starting small and building over time.

As part of your media strategy, it’s important to balance precision and reach. Custom-developed health audience segments can help you reach smaller, hard-to-find populations across digital, social, online video, and connected TV channels. Conversely, you might also need to think about how to generate larger scale awareness. Although linear TV is not a channel historically used for rare disease marketing, activation on TV has increased for rare disease brands. It allows brands to efficiently build awareness and provide broad disease education. In 2024, one out of three linear TV campaigns that Crossix measured was for rare disease therapies.

Measuring audience quality to ensure you’re reaching the right patients is crucial for linear TV campaigns, especially when taking a test-and-learn approach in specific markets. Zide adds, “Before investing in linear TV or CTV, we’ve started testing online video to learn quickly and determine if a further investment in a broader video activation makes sense.”

Leverage the right data

While the ultimate KPI is new patient starts, it’s especially important for rare disease brands to leverage leading indicators like audience quality. Although it may take months to see media-driven conversions, an increase in overall patient diagnoses or doctor visits can validate that media is driving more patients to the right HCPs.

Zide and Gross agree that agility is key to campaign success, which translates to analyzing in-flight data for making strategic optimizations in a timely manner. “In Crossix HCP Digital, we can confirm that we have the right HCP media partners on the plan. We want to reach the right providers and validate that these HCPs are indeed seeing and treating relevant patient populations,” says Gross. “With this information, we refine our media plans accordingly.” Zide reinforces this idea, “Make sure that you’re gathering learnings and applying them quickly to make the right adjustments.”

Align digital media and field force strategies

Digital HCP advertising reinforces brand messaging outside of field activity. Given persistent challenges in HCP access, complementary touchpoints become especially important. Data from Crossix shows that synchronization — the close and timely coordination of field engagements and digital advertising — boosts campaign effectiveness by 23%.

Gross looks at digital media as providing essential “surround sound” for key HCP audiences. “It’s not just what we do with non personal promotion (NPP), but also how the field force is activating against those same HCPs.” She and her team can see the data around the overlap between media and field engagement which is leading to more strategic conversations. “We can make the right optimizations across both the field and media to reach our target HCPs and drive business change more effectively.”

Validate media impact

Tying insights to actual health outcomes is paramount for rare disease marketers. With Crossix, Zide is confident that she has the right data to tell the full value story of digital, especially to senior leaders. “I’m arming myself with more than just impressions, clicks, and website visits,” she says. “We look at conversion to diagnosis, conversion to therapy, and we can start to evaluate how effective our NPP is at reaching our targets.”

Learn how a rare disease brand leveraged marketing analytics to improve campaign performance, resulting in a 48% increase in diagnoses.