Healthcare brands have a unique opportunity to use digital content to help people understand what good health outcomes can look like for them, but successfully achieving this requires a structured approach that knows when to introduce brand choice at a time when people are making that decision.

Writing in the current issue of Admap (topic: digital strategy in healthcare marketing), Michael Leis, chief content strategy officer at Publicis Health, argues that an approach that focuses on simply optimising ads via programmatic solutions may be efficient but doesn’t drive engagement.

“When brands use ad units differently by furnishing stories worth sharing, they succeed beyond every expectation,” he reports: in this way, Publicis has achieved CRM lift of 76:1 over traditional digital, cost savings of 2800% per qualified lead, and script lift of 6:1.

“Brands have the research knowing what happens at every step in a successful healthcare journey, but people do not,” Leis points out in his article, How to create radically relevant healthcare content that transforms campaigns into engagement systems.

“Content affords brands the ability to give people a sense of what comes next, and how to prepare for the conversations so vital to better health that many patients have never experienced,” he explains.

Relevant content also encourages people to connect to each other and learn from each other in meaningful ways about good health outcomes – creating a network effect that paid media alone doesn’t deliver.

“Once this engaged scale and sorting happens, brands can introduce their solutions at times when people are highly motivated to take that step,” Leis says – but most lack the connective strategies to know what kinds of content will propel business metrics in ways that their audience also find valuable.

Publicis has developed a framework to address this, beginning with a strategic foundation that covers purpose, personas, platforms and pillars before moving on to focus on behavior.

“In our case, creating content that centers on the easiest behaviors to perform, anchored in strategic insights, quickly developed communities in social media that scaled along with engagement,” he reports.

“Across communities as diverse as those focused on HIV, cystic fibrosis, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis, we started to see that when we distributed content that was representative of the larger group, along with a specific prompt to a simple behavior, it led to multiple viral and trending posts."

WARC subscribers can register here for a WARC webinar this Thursday (16th January), presented by Michael Leis. In Creating Healthcare Content that Matters, he will discuss the repeatable, strategic guides that can be built to clarify decision-making and drive the world’s largest, most engaged therapeutic-area audiences.

The ten articles in January 2020’s Admap examine how digital is fuelling innovation in the health and wellness sector globally, from the emergence of new sub-categories like connected fitness, to AI-fuelled diagnosis. In addition to the articles, WARC subscribers can access a deck summarising the expertise and insights from all our contributors.

Sourced from Admap