Reaching the Right HCPs: What We Learned from Testing Sermo in Europe

When it comes to HCP marketing, the instinct is often to cast a wide net. But what happens when you flip the script and prioritize verified reach over raw volume? We recently put that question to the test, and the results made a strong case for quality over quantity.

A New Channel Worth Watching

Sermo is an HCP-exclusive social platform that has been around for over 20 years and spans more than 150 countries. Unlike LinkedIn or Meta, where healthcare marketers have to layer in exclusions to filter out non-clinical audiences, Sermo requires every member to be triple-verified as a licensed healthcare provider. If you’re on the platform, you’re the real deal.

For a long time, HCP marketers have relied on LinkedIn and Meta to reach clinical audiences. But even with careful targeting, you’re never guaranteed a purely medical audience. We saw an opportunity to test something purpose-built for HCPs and went to work.

How We Set It Up

We ran an awareness test targeting healthcare specialists across four European markets. The campaign ran for one month, using a video ad format and included a contracted engagement goal. For the purposes of this test, an engagement included a click, a complete video view, or an extended view of more than five seconds.

The Results Surprised Us In a Good Way

Results were impressive, exceeding our engagement goal by 47%. But the number that really stood out was video completion. Watch-through rates ranged from 48–79% across all market segments, significantly outperforming our benchmark of 46–51%. That’s an audience that stopped, watched, and stayed engaged, rather than passively scrolling.

A few other standouts worth noting:

• 6 out of 7 market/specialty segments met or exceeded their individual engagement goals, with one market leading at 480% of goal.
• One speciality outperformed the rest across markets, with engagement rates of 56–59% compared to 32–54% for other segments.

What This Tells Us About Verified Audiences

There’s one major trade-off when you advertise on a platform like Sermo. You will pay a premium. The cost per engagement was meaningfully higher than what we see on Meta or LinkedIn. That number deserves context.

What you’re paying for is precision. Every impression was served to a verified, actively practicing HCP, not a healthcare-adjacent professional, not a lapsed clinician, not an algorithm guess. For healthcare brands where reaching the right clinician matters more than reaching a large audience, that’s a fundamentally different kind of value, and we believe the quality justifies the cost.

For healthcare marketers already running HCP campaigns on broader platforms, Sermo offers something those platforms structurally can’t: certainty about who’s on the other side of the screen.

What Sermo’s Physician Connect Form Could Unlock Next

An awareness test tells you whether an audience is reachable and engaged. This one told us both. The next question is what we can do once we have their attention.

Phase 2 will focus on mid-funnel engagement using Sermo’s Physician Connect Form, essentially the platform’s equivalent of LinkedIn Lead Ads. HCPs can complete a short in-platform form to download gated assets like clinical guides or whitepapers, keeping the experience native to Sermo and reducing friction. According to a Sermo-provided case study, this format has generated an 8.7% conversion rate versus a 2.9% industry benchmark, roughly 3x higher.

The ability to identify HCPs who are actively raising their hand for more information is a meaningful step forward in moving from awareness to prescribing intent. Phase 2 is planned for Q2 2026 across the same four markets, with lead form submissions as the primary KPI.

The Bottom Line for HCP Marketers

Clinicians are inundated with HCP marketing messages every day, so simply increasing reach isn’t the answer. What matters is reaching the right audience in the right environment. Platforms like Sermo exist because HCP marketing requires more than scale. You need to get in front of verified HCPs in spaces built specifically for them. The premium may be real, but when the audience is qualified and the attention is genuine, the value speaks for itself.

Phase 1 validated that we can reach and engage European HCP audiences at scale. Phase 2 will tell us whether we can convert that engagement into something measurable and actionable. We’ll share what we learn.