Both patient groups and patient influencers can have an impact on healthcare decisions. However, patient influencers are growing in popularity. How can #bigpharma work with both, patient organizations and patient influencers?
Similarities between patient groups and patient influencers?
- Both aim to raise awareness
- Both have the knowledge or experience the condition and can provide information on what it is like to live with that condition
- Both can present patient challenges
- Both exchange insight for future research
- Both address unmet needs of patients
- Both are looked to as a most trusted source of information
Difference between patient groups and patient influencers?
Patient groups:
- Patient groups are well known non-profit organizations or NGOs experts in their field
- Have an excellent grassroots approach
- Networking is through face to face approach
- Have a more structured hierarchy of an organization, for example, president and board members and approval processes in place
Patient influencer:
- Is a person
- Has a lot of followers and engages online
- Creates and shares content on social media platforms
- Provides information and insights online
- Has a broader reach of audience
Why the growing popularity of patient influencers?
- People are online
- Mobile technology
- The internet and social media
- Social media has made it easy to find and research information
How to better connect and reach audiences through both patient organizations and patient influencers?
- Find patient organizations and patient influencers and build a relationship with both
- For patient influencers know which platforms they are on and learn more about their audiences
- Define expectations – both can be involved in different sectors of your marketing or research plan
- Integrate and coordinate offline and online strategies that link both