Reaching Rare Disease Audiences at Critical Decision-Making Moments
Key takeaways: Smarter reach drives impact
- Rare disease campaigns require extended reach to manage high acquisition costs and connect with smaller populations.
- Intent can signal motivated sufferers and caregivers, turning actionable insight into readiness and engagement.
- Smarter, privacy-safe audience creation translates into stronger ROI and ensures vital messaging connects with the audiences who need it most.
Extending reach in rare disease pharma marketing
Brand marketing in rare disease is uniquely complex. Customer acquisition costs are high, and populations are small. With accelerated therapy development and growing orphan drug designations, multiple therapies often compete within the same patient populations. For these reasons, every ad impression comes with higher stakes, and campaign spend has a greater opportunity cost.
Within traditional audience building, campaign audiences were broadly defined and unable to identify nuanced consumer needs. In today’s world, healthcare consumers are more proactive in researching symptoms, treatments and support options online. This has created an entirely new landscape of digital intent signals and, along with it, the capabilities to capture and use those signals.
Identifying high-intent moments that signal readiness
Consumers researching health conditions on endemic health websites are providing powerful intent signals that go far beyond general interest. In rare disease communities, this research tends to go deeper. These digital behaviors — what topics they read about, which treatments or symptoms they explore — reveal a level of readiness to engage with a brand and act on the information available. In this context, missing the moment when a consumer is looking for information on conditions or treatments can mean lost opportunity.
It’s important to note that these signals include a wide range of stakeholders, like caregivers and family members — care partners who may play decisive roles in navigating a loved one’s health journey. By engaging across these consumer segments early (sometimes even before diagnosis), brands can establish a degree of awareness and trust that will carry forward and help guide these consumers’ future decision-making. These insights help ensure that critical educational and brand messages appear online during times when a consumer’s curiosity and motivation are at their peak.
Intent-based audiences, therefore, offer a breakthrough approach based on extending reach to the highly engaged: connecting with people who indicate strong interest through specific online research, at exactly the right time to be receptive to brand messaging in their journeys.
The benefit: Efficient spend and maximized ROI
In rare disease marketing, efficiency is critical. Campaign success depends not only on audience creation but on the ability to respond to meaningful behavioral insights at scale. By activating these high-intent, research-driven audiences, brands can achieve measurable impact without putting more pressure on spend.
IQVIA Digital’s Consumer Intent Audiences provide this advantage, identifying consumers and caregivers actively researching rare conditions. Using timely behavioral data drawn from 6,000-plus endemic health sites, IQVIA Digital captures these high-intent moments, creating privacy-safe, non-identified audience segments that are also high-performing.
With IQVIA Digital’s open and privacy-safe ecosystem, these audiences can be used across major demand-side and social platforms, ensuring scalability and flexibility without ignoring compliance demands. Given its non-identified data and frequent updating, campaigns can stay current with shifting patterns of consumer research while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy and regulatory integrity. The result is higher ROI, lower customer acquisition costs, smarter allocation, and more meaningful brand interactions at crucial points within patient and caregiver journeys.
Looking ahead: Where reach meets possibility
In rare disease communications, the ability to reach the right consumers and caregivers at the moment of intent can transform awareness into action and action into impact. Intent-based audiences make that possible by replacing guesswork with real behavioral insight, ensuring every impression serves a purpose.
As marketers look to do more with less, intent data offers a smarter, more human way forward, one that extends reach and relevance, meets privacy standards, and accelerates meaningful engagement. With IQVIA Digital’s Consumer Intent Audiences, brands can connect with people who are not only ready to learn but ready to take the next step — turning digital signals into real-world outcomes that improve lives.
Ready to learn more about how high-intent audiences can boost your campaigns? Contact us today.
