Multi-Channel Digital Content is Key to Health Care Marketing

Regardless of whether your health care marketing efforts target consumers or physicians, it’s likely that your marketing strategy is due for a refresh. Consumers are facing thousands of brand messages per day yet have decreasing attention spans. And access to physicians is becoming increasingly scarce. We can’t necessarily count on face time with doctors and physical leave-behinds.

This doesn’t mean health care marketing should be less successful. It simply means we as marketers must adapt to our audiences’ media habits and build campaigns accordingly. In fact, these trends could be considered an opportunity – your audience hasn’t gone anywhere, they’re still out there – so the savviest marketers will win by reaching them strategically. Through digital channels and effective multimedia content, health care marketers can break through the noise with targeted campaigns that communicate their key messages.

Adapt or Die

Even if in-person physician access is harder to come by, there is still a largely untapped opportunity to reach these physicians through digital means—62 percent of physicians and other health care providers prefer email to direct mail, phone calls, and in-person visits, and 75 percent of physicians use a mobile device for professional reasons. Most physicians who use social media are doing so as content consumers, looking for information that will help their patients or practices.

And yet, health care marketers shy away from social, using regulatory concerns as an excuse. From a paid media perspective, the health care and pharma industry make up an extremely small percentage of digital ad spending compared to other industries. These efforts can be very effective in reaching the physician (or consumers), so why are marketers only making these small parts of their communication plans or leaving these tactics out altogether? The time is ripe – right now – for a more creative marketing strategy centered around content, particularly from a digital lens.

Engage with Multimedia

An aggressive digital ad campaign, or developing a video or infographic, will be more resource-intensive than a sales sheet. But those investments will be worthwhile, because in the current climate you’ll see strong returns in generating customers.

Not only is video content performing well overall, but audiences are actually craving more video content from marketers. People will distribute your content more readily too (for example, infographics are liked and shared 3x more often than other forms of content).

With these types of multimedia content, we shouldn’t think of ‘distributing’ solely as somebody hitting a ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ button. Advocacy and nonprofit groups who share a mutuality of mission with your organization would likely appreciate the opportunity to be leveraging multimedia content more often (for all the reasons shared above). Build these partnerships into your overall promotion strategy by developing informative and compelling content that can be hosted by pages outside your own company.

Our team at Padilla strongly believes that multimedia content marketing – reaching the audience where they are, and how they prefer to consume media – will be key to standing out in a crowded health care market. In the coming months, we will be releasing a wide variety of health care content (ebook, infographics, videos and more). Subscribe to the Weekly Buzz to check out these materials when they are published!