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Carilion Clinic (Campaign: #YesMamm)
Twitter is a fantastic social microblogging platform for advancing a good cause. Carilion Clinic was aware of the “Twitter power” and tapped into it for its “Yes, Mamm” marketing campaign.
The Carilion Clinic, a healthcare facility based in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, aimed to answer questions about breast cancer. In addition, the clinic wanted to spread its wings and really help people in their city and across the country.
Using the hashtag #YesMamm, the Twitter campaign has garnered a lot of attention.
The campaign is interactive, and as a result, more Twitter followers engaged with it. This created a worldwide awareness of breast cancer and helped many people keep their hope alive. The campaign achieved a huge success and resulted in thousands of visitors to the Carilion Clinic website and conversions of bookings.carilion_healthcare_nogood_marketing
Healthcare Marketing & Advertising Regulations
In addition to FDA regulations, the FTC's general rules and regulations apply to healthcare promotional activities, which must be substantiated before being conveyed to consumers. The FTC has established a three-part standard for the determination of whether an advertisement is deceptive: the ad must be truthful, not misleading, and its intent must be good.
A practice that may mislead consumers is making false or misleading claims about the price of an item. For example, if a store advertises a product as being on sale for 50% off, but when you go to buy it the price is still $10, this would be an example of a misleading price claim.
The FTC examines representations and practices from the perspective of consumers acting reasonably in the circumstances. If a representation or practice affects or is directed to a particular group, the FTC looks at reasonableness from that group's perspective.
A material representation, omission, or practice must be likely to affect the consumer’s conduct or decision with respect to the product or service.
Pros And Cons Of Available Advertising Platforms
Facebook
Pros
Facebook is the leading social media channel and has now become an essential part of the overall marketing plan. It offers a variety of options to show your ads to people visiting Facebook or Instagram. The biggest advantages of using Facebook marketing are microtargeting and the ability to retarget previous visitors. There is a chance that your content could go viral when you’re advertising on Facebook. When people share your ad with their friends, this increases the likelihood of your ad going viral. Facebook advertising focuses heavily on the advertiser’s bid, ad quality and relevance, and estimated amount of actions.
Facebook’s advertising platform will optimize your ad to use the best-performing advertisement, so you can gain valuable information about what type of advertising content works and what doesn't.
The platform is user-friendly. Facebook offers ad solutions for every skill level.
In the Ads Manager, you can automate various campaign steps by letting Facebook set your audience, daily budget, and ad delivery. As you become more experienced with Facebook Ads, you can fully customize your campaigns and dive deeper into performance reporting to gain insights that matter to your business. The ability to create advanced reports with the data points that matter most allows businesses to implement critical insights from their data.
Cons
Facebook marketing is only good as long as you are paying for it.
Facebook is all about making money and getting as much investment from users as possible in order to increase the visibility of content.
While mid-sized and larger businesses should have little to no issue paying for ads, small businesses may feel left out due to budget limitations.
Facebook has come under fire recently for its handling of user privacy, and this raises a number of challenges in terms of understanding the audience to which our ads are being delivered.
Due to the increasing privacy concerns among ad creators and platforms, neither the advertiser nor the advertising platform is allowed to collect new information about individual users.
Google Advertising
Pros
Google Ads is a platform that allows you to bid on keywords.
When a customer Googles a product, Google will provide them with the most relevant and authentic results possible.
To get your website to the top of the search engine results pages, you will need to advertise or/and be good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google Ads lets you measure every detail of your ad and be very detailed when measuring your advertising results.
Testing new ideas is essential to keeping your business growing. You can test what keywords you want to generate traffic for, what landing pages work, and learn a lot about your customers. Testing can be budget-friendly or expensive, depending on the level of research you want to do.
Google Ads is a great way to promote your small business. You can set up a targeted campaign and profit from it without spending too much money. You can specify how much you are willing to spend and set your maximum cost per click for your keywords, and then you only pay for clicks.
Cons
When using Google ads, you are charged for each click leading to your website. That means that whenever someone clicks on your ads, you will be charged even if the user does not convert or if they convert to a different product or service.
As a result, you might get clicks from users not interested in your product or service. Additionally, the healthcare industry is a competitive industry with higher costs per click.
If you're looking to get ahead of your competition and improve your campaign's chances of success, starting your own ad campaign may be the best option.
Additionally, Google Ads are limited by the number of characters allowed. There are three 30-character headlines, two large 90-character description lines, and a customizable display URL.
Google looks at the quality of your landing pages in order to decide if they are relevant to the search query.
Pros
LinkedIn offers a variety of audiences to businesses, including business owners, corporate sharks, influencers, and others. If targeted correctly, this diverse group can make a significant impact on your business by reaching the right people with specific backgrounds and attitudes.
LinkedIn Ads is a great advertising platform because it supports remarketing and lookalikes. This means that brands can reach their target audience more effectively through LinkedIn Ads. Additionally, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which makes it an advantageous platform for using social audiences in other Microsoft Advertising platforms (like Bing Ads).
Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn is not a place for posting cat videos, cheeky GIFs, or political jokes and comments.
The platform is designed for professionals who want to showcase their best work to the world.
People approach it with a business mindset, rather than an entertaining pastime.
LinkedIn is often seen as a less biased place for advertising than networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This is because LinkedIn does not allow posts from companies that are considered offensive or negative.
Cons
LinkedIn is a social media platform that offers access to a high-value audience. However, it comes with a higher price tag than other social media platforms. Compared to other platforms, LinkedIn is one of the most expensive options. The overall costs for using LinkedIn are higher than usual, so it's important to keep this in mind when setting your budget. Additionally, LinkedIn is not recommended for companies with low available capital because of the high costs associated with using this platform.
When designing your LinkedIn campaign, be sure to keep in mind who your target audience is. Some people only use the site for job opportunities, so don't waste your time advertising to them.
YouTube
Pros
YouTube advertising is highly targeted and cost-effective as you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Apart from this, you can also choose exactly how much you are willing to pay when someone clicks. This means that you will never waste money on advertising space. Additionally, YouTube is highly relevant as it allows users to target an audience based on demographics, customer match, similar audiences, video remarketing (custom), affinity audience (in-market), and life events.
Ads on YouTube are more likely to be noticed due to the high dwell time. Additionally, YouTube allows users to track the performance of their ads and videos. This information can be used to improve ad campaigns and viewership.
Cons
YouTube offers sophisticated targeting options, but these can sometimes be inaccurate. Additionally, the follow-on content produced by users can be unrelated to what you are advertising and difficult to engage within 5 seconds or less.
Ads that can't be skipped are a great option for brands because they can hope people don't find their brand suddenly annoying. However, YouTube's algorithm gives viewers the kind of videos they want to see which increases advertising revenue but the downside is that competing content is displayed in the sidebar while a prospect is watching your video. This inadvertently gives your competitors extra attention.
One disadvantage of YouTube is that it does not allow users to customize the site with their own branding or interactivity features, such as a logo or strong call-to-action button. This limits engagement by up to 500%.
Native Advertising
The debate over native advertising's place in the marketing sector continues to intensify as more and more people become savvy consumers who are able to differentiate between paid advertising content and content that was created with their benefit in mind.
Native advertising is a type of advertising that is meant to look like part of the content on the page where it is displayed. While this might initially seem worth avoiding in favor of content marketing, there are a number of both pros and cons to consider before making a decision.
Pros
The placement of the ad. Native advertising is a form of advertising that appears in places where readers are already looking, such as on websites they visit frequently. Many internet users avoid certain types of content and specific locations on web pages to avoid being bombarded with advertisements, but native advertising bypasses those habits by catching the reader's attention.
They're effective. Native ads are more effective than traditional mobile ads and attract three times as much attention.
Brand appeal. Native advertising is a type of advertisement that is designed specifically for the reader. It must adhere to specific rules in order to be effective, and it can be more successful than other types of advertisements. However, native advertising does have one downside: it must be created with the reader in mind and with the goal of promoting a brand or product.
They fit right in. An increasing number of marketing professionals are choosing native advertising. By 2020, it's predicted that as many as 63% of mobile display ad spending will be made up of native ads.
Cons
Readers can feel taken advantage of. When you've created poor content or you haven't clearly disclosed the nature of the content (that it's an advertisement) you can make readers feel taken advantage of.
The potential exists to create negative brand awareness. If the experience with the native advertising content is a bad one, the negative feelings translate to the brand.
Reasons Why You Should Choose Performance Marketing
Performance marketing has five key benefits over traditional marketing strategies:
6 Benefits of Performance Marketing
There are many benefits to performance marketing, but it has its own set of challenges as well. Advertisers need to be willing to invest in tracking and measurement tools, and they must also be prepared for a higher level of engagement from their target audience.
Healthcare marketing strategies need omnichannel, highly-segmented, and targeted online and offline tactics to drive engagement and accelerate enterprise growth.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is what it sounds — marketing based on performance.
This is an online marketing and advertising model where the advertiser only pays when a certain action occurs, such as a click, sale, or lead to a potential sale.
Marketing has become incredibly effective and efficient with the advancements in technology. Brands can now optimize their marketing campaigns in a better way and maximize the derived benefit. Thanks to performance marketing, companies can now measure their brand reach and figure out which customer to target.
Performance marketing is a combination of paid advertising and brand marketing but only paid out once the completed desired action takes place.
Consumers want to have the same experience in healthcare that they have from other businesses. And they are and will continue to disrupt healthcare.
One of the key benefits of performance marketing is that such marketing campaigns can be measured in more detail.
Even though performance marketing involves some risks, they are shared between the brand itself and the marketing campaign publisher, respectively. In a scenario of cost per impression, the brand would take all the financial risk. The publisher and the brand share the risk of cost per download, application, or lead.
Similarly, in the case of cost per acquisition, the publisher is at high risk. However, this risk also works as an incentive so that the publisher does the job right and targets the right audience.
Performance marketing allows you to expand your reach by working with a large number of publishers. This can help you target niche markets and different audiences that may not have been possible before. Additionally, increased revenue is typically seen when advertising is tailored by publishers to their loyal audience.
In order to increase brand awareness, many advertisers use various methods such as social media campaigns, native advertising, content marketing, and more. Some of these methods may fall under the umbrella of performance marketing because they are measurable and advertisers only pay for specific actions.
In order to win over consumers, medical and healthcare brands will need to find new ways to reach them. This means developing innovative marketing campaigns that appeal to people's interests and needs.
How Does Performance Marketing Work?
Performance marketing consists of four groups: Retailers, Affiliates, Affiliate Networks and Third-Party Tracking Platforms, and Affiliate Managers.
Retailers: These companies sell products to the general public. They use performance marketing to track and optimize their sales efforts.
Affiliates: These are companies that work with retailers, providing them with a commission for each sale they generate. Affiliate networks help affiliates find new retailers and manage their relationships with these partners.
Third-Party Tracking Platforms: These platforms collect data from all of the groups mentioned above and provide detailed insights into how each one is performing. This information is used by affiliate managers to optimize campaigns and drive better results for their affiliates.
Let's dig into each of these a little more:
Make a Plan
One way marketing agencies guide their planning is by using the SMART acronym, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. By clearly defining objectives and expectations and keeping the focus on achieving goals that are relevant to a given timeframe, this methodology helps agencies stay on track.
Challenges & Performance Marketing Solutions in the Healthcare Industry
In a changing healthcare environment, businesses must take advantage of performance marketing to stay afloat. Healthcare professionals need to create value for their target market online in order to compete. Word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, and phone book listings are no longer as relevant as they once were in the healthcare industry. Performance marketing is an important way for businesses to communicate with healthcare professionals and provide value to their target market.
One of the main challenges in marketing healthcare products is that it is a highly regulated industry, marketers must navigate industry-wide regulations and complicated health systems that are often slow to take on new ideas. However, there are many tools available to help marketers overcome these challenges and reach their target audience. These include performance marketing techniques like tracking conversions and measuring results.
Challenge: Personalized Messaging
Any marketer worth their salary knows that consumers appreciate a personalized approach. People want to engage with products and services that address their needs. This gets tricky in healthcare, where privacy laws pose a challenge to capturing, storing, and using patient data. It’s important to make sure you’re marketing to consumers who actually benefit from what you have to offer, but how?
Solution
To market to consumers who actually benefit from what you have to offer, it's important to make sure you're targeting those consumers in the right way. By understanding their needs and taking into account their privacy concerns, you can create a personalized marketing strategy that benefits both your company and the consumer.
Personalized marketing is a trend in healthcare that focuses on helping patients live healthier lives. As the industry shifts towards a greater focus on helping patients live healthy lives, there's an opportunity for marketers to provide more broadly applicable lifestyle-focused advertising. Personalized communications on topics like healthier eating, preventative screenings, and chronic disease management are becoming increasingly more useful and beneficial for both marketers and consumers alike.
Challenge: Insurance-Focused Marketing Structure
There is a lot of control that doctors and insurance companies have over what healthcare services and tools patients have access to. This can make it difficult for healthcare marketers to design campaigns that appeal to both consumers and industry gatekeepers. Yet, it's not impossible, after all, both the medical provider and payor should want a healthier, less costly patient.
Solution
Build relationships with healthcare providers and payers, instead of just patients. This is a strategy that pharmaceutical companies have been employing for years, and it can be beneficial for others in the industry as well.
Healthcare marketers must make sure to maintain valuable and necessary relationships with the systems that connect patients with their products in order to reach potential customers. By using content marketing, and direct mail marketing, healthcare marketers can reel in leads and establish strong connections that would otherwise be ignored, deleted, or forgotten in the digital realm. Utilizing innovative direct mail tools like dimensional mail and personalized gift boxes, healthcare marketers can reel in leads and establish strong connections that would otherwise be ignored, deleted, or forgotten in the digital realm.
Challenge: Building Trust
Despite healthcare consumers' increased savvy, providers need to focus on personalized service in order to keep customers happy. High costs and strict regulatory requirements make it difficult for providers to gain consumer trust. In addition, confusing policy and high costs often make it difficult for consumers to afford healthcare services.
Solution
Be transparent about your pricing, ease of access, and other important details in both print and digital ads. Share testimonials to showcase patient satisfaction and successful relationships. Use NPS scoring to see where you stand; your customers’ expectations are high. If they don't trust you with their ratings, an NPS survey will clue you in.
Challenge: Making the Connection
To reach your target audience, you need to understand consumer behavior and predict where they will go to learn about brands. This can be a challenge in the broad audience of healthcare.
Solution
In order to connect with your audience, it's important to understand their behavior. Are they more likely to respond to print ads or digital ads? Are they doing most of their browsing on a desktop or mobile device? Are they responsive to direct mail? What about email newsletters? Or are they more receptive to social media engagement? The more you can define where your audience is looking, the better you can make sure that you're found there.
The key is knowing what data is relevant and what is just a distraction. When it comes to connecting with your audience, look for data around their behavior.
Challenge: Higher Costs
As healthcare costs continue to rise, the general public is looking for ways to cut costs. One way that people are choosing to do this is by looking for less expensive methods of accessing healthcare. This has put pressure on patients to find options outside their insurance network, which could hurt the Healthcare industry but also presents an opportunity for brands in the industry.
Solution
To increase the awareness of your healthcare brand, you need to make sure that you have access to what patients are reading about your brand. Referral programs, impressive guest content, and local partnerships can help with this.
To make sure that your healthcare brand shows up first in people’s minds, you need to make sure that you have access to what a patient reads about your healthcare brand.
Challenge: Insurance Business
Patients are looking for ways to receive healthcare services without having to deal with a contracted network, high deductibles, and copays. Hospitals, on the other hand, are more focused on getting insurance companies to compensate them for providing services. This is one of the reasons why people have little control over what healthcare services they can access through their insurance networks.
Solution
The explosion of healthcare data requires a new ecosystem that is beneficial to both the healthcare brand and patient. While keeping the importance of the doctor-patient relationship in mind, it is essential that marketers develop strategies that are affordable and accessible for all.
One way to get a more personal connection with healthcare businesses is by sending customized messages. This hyper-personalized approach will help the individual become the focus of their health and wellness.
Healthcare marketing challenges are different than those in other industries — even when they appear similar.
It’s a complicated space to navigate, and fraught with rules and regulations.
Healthcare marketing can be a complex and challenging space to navigate, but there is also immense potential for success if you can identify and address the challenges early on. By understanding what obstacles may stand in your way, you'll be better equipped to come up with innovative strategies that will help you overcome them.
Challenge: Digital Hindrances
Many innovative solutions are changing the way patients interact with healthcare brands. Healthcare brands are usually assessed by patients based on their reviews that are available on the internet, and most of the patients fully rely on those reviews. A large number of patient populations choose their doctor based on past patient ratings, which gives the patient room to be pickier and sets back healthcare brand business.
Solution
Brands of the healthcare industry need to be more aware of the technological advancements that can help them bring more business.
By using the right channels and tools, healthcare brands can project a positive image and increase their customer base.
Challenge: Data Privacy
Marketing professionals know that it is important to market to consumers who will actually benefit from the product or service. This can be difficult in healthcare, where privacy laws make it challenging to collect, store and use patient data. It's important to make sure you are marketing your product or service towards consumers who will actually benefit from it.
Solution
Personalized marketing is becoming more important in healthcare, as the industry moves away from treating symptoms and illnesses and towards helping patients live healthier lives. This opens up opportunities for marketers to do broader lifestyle-targeted advertising, through performance marketing and working with lifestyle-focused affiliates. Personalized communications on topics such as healthier eating, screening, and managing chronic disease are becoming more useful and beneficial to both marketers and consumers.
Challenge: Public Perception of Healthcare
Many people do not like the healthcare industry because of recent controversies over health insurance, COVID, and the polarization of healthcare. Marketing healthcare is difficult because consumers are skeptical and cynical.
Today’s consumers are bombarded with sometimes outlandish drug ads. It can take a lot of effort to win over a skeptical – even cynical – audience. Fortunately, medical devices, apps, biotech, and healthcare services can accomplish a lot through performance marketing.
Solution:
To create a more authentic and positive relationship with your audience, you can partner with influencers or publishers that are trusted by their audience. This will help you send out humanized messaging that is likely to be more persuasive to them.
Challenge: Level of Expertise Required
There are many terms specific to the healthcare industry that you need to be aware of in order to write marketing copy that will engage physicians and other healthcare providers. Additionally, health literacy and patients' use of and understanding of terminology differently can make it difficult for marketers to create a message that is effectively communicated.
A good marketing strategy for health care relies heavily on creative messaging, which can be difficult when patients use different terms. Further aggravating the problem is the fact that a good marketing strategy for health care relies heavily on creative messaging to attract the right patients.
Solution
In order to create more persuasive marketing materials, marketers need to understand the treatments and conditions on a much deeper level. This can be done by working with experts who understand the terminologies and how treatment works.
Summary
Healthcare marketing is a complex and challenging space, but there is immense potential for success if you can identify the challenges early on. By doing this, you will be empowered to employ more innovative marketing strategies that will overcome these difficulties.
How Leading Healthcare Brands Adopt Performance Marketing
There are a number of healthcare brands that are already successfully using performance marketing. Here are a few of them:
UnitedHealthcare (Campaign: We Dare You)
“We Dare You” by UnitedHealthCare is an award-winning campaign that encourages its patients to take part in its “dares” and quizzes to win prizes on the website. This campaign engages its patients in making one small change every month and motivates them to share it on social media.
This interactive campaign proved to be a successful strategy that brought significant change and led to healthier habits in patients while also promoting a community of loyal patients.
