This is the first of a five-part series on marketing to doctors. In this post, we’ll look at the some of the reasons marketing to doctors is so hard. In future posts, we’ll examine segmentation and messaging, tactics you can use, how to measure and optimize your results, and understanding your audience.

Everyone wants to market to doctors.

Doctors are so popular because they control a ton of money. By many calculations, your average doctor in the U.S. controls about $2 million per year in healthcare costs. In general, specialists control more than that and family physicians somewhat less.
Another way to think about it is that doctors control roughly 80% of all healthcare spending in the U.S. The U.S. spends nearly $3.5 trillion on healthcare, with those costs expected to increase about 5.5% every year to reach $5.7 trillion by 2026.

However you look at it, it’s a big figure.
As a result, doctors are popular people. An endless stream of pharmacy reps want to give them samples, piles of free magazines stack up in their mailboxes, and most physicians have at least one or two people employed full time just to keep people they don’t want to talk to from reaching them. Doctors are both jaded from all the marketing aimed at them and are also very well screened from most of that marketing.

Doctors are busy and hard to find.

Most of the people reading this post are marketers. They’re reading this article on their laptop while sitting at a desk. Marketers are pretty easy to reach:
• Big screens mean lots of real estate for display ads plus multiple tabs to explore the odd advertisement that catches a marketer’s attention.
• Most publications aimed at marketers are unsurprisingly very ad-friendly.
• Marketers are busy but generally still have time for a quick side excursion here and there if you make them curious.
• Marketers control a fairly large amount of budget but nothing compared to 25% of the U.S. GDP that doctors control. Despite how it might feel to the Adtech companies out there, competition for marketing eyeballs in not really that fierce.
Compare that to reaching doctors. If any doctors dropped by to read this post, they’re almost certainly reading it on their iPhone (and no, I don’t mean their “smartphone”) or iPad while on the run. But small screen real-estate is just part of the challenge:
• Most of the publications doctors frequent are professional journals that are either decidedly unfriendly to ads or crazily expensive, with banner ads costing $80–120 per CPM (or about 40X the typical “premium” consumer banners).
• The increasing ease of ad-blocking on iOS is going to disproportionally impact marketers seeking physician eyeballs.
• When doctors are working, they’re …