B:B Advertising’s Holy Grail

Epocrates sells web-based reference guides packed with medical information that doctors can access on their PalmPilots or Pocket PCs. Why it’s growing? More than half of the nation’s 400,000 physicians use Epocrates guides, which the company updates weekly with current information on everything from drug interactions to treatment recommendations.

Here is an older story by Erick Schonfeld on the company.

The revenue mix comprises of subscription and advertising, the latter because pharmaceutical companies find it a very targeted way to reach the eyeballs of the physicians.

This is an interesting, new trend, whereby, B-to-B advertising is seeking out extremely targeted, verticalized channels, rather than the spray-and-pray models that prevailed earlier.

Epocrates is benefitting handsomely. They have a very narrow niche offering which the target audience finds enormously valuable, and hence their viral, word-of-mouth marketing has been superbly successful.

This would, by and large, be true for all precisely segmented, compelling offerings, and Epocrates is a good case-study to learn from.

This segment is a part in the series : B