By EatMoreFruit Communications
Most healthcare campaigns targeting clinicians start with the product and work backwards.
The most effective ones start by mapping where knowledge gaps, clinical objections, and real-world barriers exist.
Here’s how we approached building an insight-led strategy for a wound dressing when the data didn’t exist in tidy reports.
Marketing directors in medical devices and pharma often face the same challenge. You know your product works. You have clinical evidence. You have an expensive MOA video.
But you don’t have a clear picture of what’s actually stopping adoption among the healthcare professionals you need to reach.
The standard approach is to commission research, wait months for results, then build a campaign.
But there’s a faster way to gather meaningful insights that can inform your strategy immediately. It requires looking in places your competitors might not be checking.
We recently worked on a campaign for a wound dressing used in community settings. The objective was straightforward: validate our competitive advantage in a saturated (…pun intended) market.
The challenge was that we didn’t have clear insight into what clinicians were thinking, what objections they had, or where the gaps in current practice actually were, because the large clinical and comparative data sets we did have access to, make this product choice feel like a no-brainer.
Rather than starting with assumptions, we built an insight-gathering phase into the strategy itself. Here’s what that looked like in practice.
Three sources of insight that competitors might not see:
1. Patient conversations that reveal clinical communication gaps.
We looked at forums like Mumsnet and Reddit where HCPs and patients were discussing their experiences and frustrations. Not for patient targeting, but to understand what healthcare professionals are or aren’t telling patients. When a HCP influencer says “I’d never use this product on a 90-year old patient, the skin is too fragile,” that reveals how clinicians are framing risk conversations, where language needs clarifying, and where clinical objections might exist around patient selection.
2. Professional communication channels that show what clinicians are actually discussing.
We subscribed to every email newsletter from relevant professional bodies like the Royal College of Nurses. We tracked what topics came up repeatedly in their communications. We looked for HCP forums and professional discussion groups. This showed us what community nursing teams are worried about, what guidelines are changing, and what audit data they’re being measured against. It’s also a useful way to see how trends change over a year, and where competitors are making investments.
3. Public data and audit publications that reveal system-level barriers. We investigated what perinatal data is publicly available, what’s missing, and whether we could use Freedom of Information requests to fill gaps. We looked at patient risk factor rates across different trusts and socioeconomic areas. This revealed not just clinical outcomes, but systemic inequalities and risk factors that affect which patients get optimal wound care.
These insight sources cost almost nothing to access, but they require time and expertise to interpret properly. The value isn’t in collecting data, but how we can understand what the data means for your campaign strategy.
Once you have these insights, 3 things become clearer.
We understand the real objections clinicians have, not our assumptions, or even what they tell us
1. We can identify partnership opportunities with professional bodies who are already focused on the problems your product solves
2. We can develop messages that speak to actual clinical priorities rather than product features
For this campaign, the insights led us to engage directly with clinical journalists and plan for partnership opportunities with professional colleges in 2026. We identified that business cases and audit data matter more to adoption than individual clinician preference. We understood that language around high-risk patients needed careful handling because of how it was being received by both clinicians and patients.
There is still a place for market research through official channels, but what this exercise allowed us to do is add questions into that market research that were more unexpected, differentiated, and audience-focused.
If you’re launching a product to healthcare professionals and don’t have a clear view of what’s driving or blocking adoption, the answer isn’t always to commission more research. Sometimes it’s to look more carefully at what clinicians and patients are already saying in places you’re not currently listening.
Speak to EatMoreFruit Communications to discuss how insight-led strategy can inform your next HCP campaign.
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