Sermo and Everyday Health have combined access to more than 800,000 physicians, which they say represent more than 80% of physicians in the U.S. 

A new partnership allows Sermo access to Everyday Health’s physician audience for research in exchange for providing exclusive advertising to Everyday Health on the social network for physicians.

Under the terms of the deal, Everyday Health said it will not grant access to any other market research company the right to recruit from the digital media company’s physician panel, and Sermo will not work with any other partner in the monetization of their promotional inventory. The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.

The partnership is effective until the end of 2017, with the chance to extend as “both parties are viewing this as a long-term endeavor,” said Peter Kirk, CEO of Sermo.

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Sermo is responsible for all market research projects across the combined Sermo and Everyday Health Professional panel, its HCP platform. According to Everyday Health, approximately 70% of the company’s advertising revenue comes from pharma companies. As part of the deal, Everyday Health Professional will handle all advertising on Sermo.

“The focus is allowing them [Sermo] to have access to our physician audience for recruiting for market research,” said Greg Jackson, president of Everyday Health Professional. “In exchange, we have access to their physicians for delivering our marketing programs.”

The executives said the partnership is about reach and scale. The companies have combined access to more than 800,000 physicians, which they say represent more than 80% of physicians in the U.S. Kirk said they are also able to reach about 120,000 healthcare professionals, including nurses and pharmacists, through the partnership.

“They [Everyday Health] can do ad technology and scale, and we can focus on unique social products for promotion for pharma,” said Kirk.

Those include products like Sermo Conversations and Pages, which are much like Facebook Pages and now features more than 100 pages developed for commercial companies, nonprofits such as Doctors Without Borders, and government bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he explained.

“[With the partnership,] we are able to do targeted advertising and identify messages that are targeted to specific physicians and their interests, and allow our pharmaceutical customers to reach their target audiences at scale that they’ve never been able to do before,” added Jackson.

See also: Sermo opens up platform to healthcare marketers

Sermo has an international audience of 2 million physicians and healthcare professionals from 80 countries, which Everyday Health can now reach, said Kirk. And Sermo can increase the reach for its research initiatives with Everyday Health’s audience, which include the 700,000 surveys the social platform conducts per year.

Everyday Health has several partnerships with medical associations such as the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said Jackson.

“Partnerships are an important part of our business,” said Jackson. “We’re partnering with them and providing content to find incremental ways to engage with physicians and our customers.”

Everyday Health has announced several acquisitions and partnerships in the last two years, including acquisitions of Tea Leaves Health, a hospital marketing firm, and rare-disease agency Cambridge BioMarketing, as well as a partnership with Videology.