3 Strategies for Audience Targeting Success

Jul 07, 2025 | Cecilia Zhu

In today’s fragmented media landscape, health brands are increasingly taking an audience-first approach to direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing. At Crossix, we’ve seen a 45% YOY* increase in health audience targeting impressions across campaigns measured in both 2023 and 2024.

Effective audience targeting requires a data provider with massive amounts of high-quality health data. More data means better segments. This holds true whether you are targeting rare disease patients or common conditions with vast, diverse patient groups. More data also unlocks greater customization options, such as targeting newly diagnosed patients not yet on treatment or specific caregiver segments.

Once you have a strong data foundation, how do you stand out and make your audience strategy a true competitive advantage? The most successful customers consistently follow these key strategies:

Know your patients

Understand the audience you’re trying to reach, including their clinical profiles, psychographics, and what influences their path to care.

Embrace a bias for precision by zeroing in on exact moments in the patient’s journey. For instance, if an RSV vaccine brand’s strategy is to reach at-risk patients, it shouldn’t just target by age as anyone ineligible would be irrelevant for the message. You can do this by looking at underlying conditions or recent physician engagement.

Determine the right segment size to deliver brand outcomes. For example, campaigns targeting large patient populations may use 10M to 22M segments, while rare disease campaigns may use segments as small as 2M in size.

Unify activation

Unify your audience targeting across your entire media plan, from programmatic and social channels to streaming video and data-driven linear TV. While each platform has unique requirements for privacy, scale, and measurability, your focus should be reaching your audience wherever they consume media.

Every media partner has its own activation requirements and Crossix segments are privacy-approved on 150+ platforms. To simplify the complexity of privacy and activation for our customers, Crossix creates versions of each segment so they comply with each platform’s privacy requirements.

In the context of balancing precision and scale, it’s important to pay attention to how platform settings such as cross-device and data overlays can impact audience quality. We worked with a prostate cancer brand that adjusted its DSP settings with the goal of prioritizing precision over scale and saw a 43% improvement in audience quality in reaching actual diagnosed patients.

Implement a clear test-and-learn strategy

For continuous improvement, implement a measurement plan before activation and know your metrics of success for each segment. Apply the same rigor to your performance metrics as you do to your audience strategy — target what you measure, and measure what you target. Test audience segments on smaller, biddable media like programmatic display. Then, learn from the results and apply them to large-scale media like social and TV.

We have seen customers transform their audience strategy by adopting these best practices. One top 20 biopharma company took a precision-focused approach to defining audiences, unifying activation and aligning audiences with measurement. Across the portfolio, it saw over a 260% improvement in audience quality for digital display media and over 400% for online video, which culminated in a 400% increase in conversion impact.

By focusing on these best practices, you can turn data and health audience targeting into your competitive advantage. Please reach out if you would like to discuss ways to implement these best practices for your campaigns.

*Source: Crossix Media Buying Trends, 2025