Everyone knows that insights are vital to effective marketing, but the level of competition and the financial stakes involved in healthcare marketing demands the highest level of attention to user intent data as well as healthcare marketing trends. Staying up-to-date with the latest trends is an essential requirement to gain—and maintain—a competitive advantage in the healthcare arena alongside other pharma, CRO, biotech, and medical device companies.
Healthcare marketing trends offer invaluable insight into how key stakeholders are interacting with other providers and patients. The best insights shed light on what types of information these audiences seek, how—down to the device or channel level of detail, as well as seasonality and timing—they try to access this information, as well as their perception of individual healthcare brands.
Good Apple keeps you one step ahead of your competition at all times. We serve you by staying current on all healthcare marketing trends while performing thorough market research in order to understand every step of the healthcare marketing journey. This work gives you the ability to anticipate approaching trends and get ahead of them, so that together we can create custom advertising strategies that are insights-driven.
The Importance of Gaining Insights from Marketing Trends
Every modern marketer has access to copious amounts of data sets around engagement patterns. Where many fall short is in staying deliberate with “why” this data matters. Data for data’s sake can not only be useless, but can actually hurt a business’ marketing efforts. Asking strategic questions and focusing on data that accurately answers these queries is the way to pinpoint meaningful trends.
In the competitive arena of healthcare marketing, companies must remain flexible with their approaches. Successful healthcare marketing comes with continuing to adapt strategy to meet evolving consumer trends, regulatory issues, and changing consumer behaviors. Staying on trend empowers healthcare companies to maximize their ad effectiveness, and improve marketing ROI.
The good news is that in 2021, digital is paramount. The breadth of built-in data insights we can access together via digital marketing means we can quickly sharpen any advertising strategy to maximize its efficacy. Together, we can keep a finger on the pulse of the industry—and your consumers.
Good Apple handles the work of identifying where the company’s target audience is most accessible. We pinpoint which specific approaches, platforms, and techniques will prove the most rewarding, and incorporate this into every advertising strategy we develop.
For example, say your audience is very tech-savvy and prone to online engagement, but your marketing efforts neglect mobile in favor of traditional means. This means that you are not using your marketing dollars as effectively as you could, and it is causing you to directly miss out on conversions.
Good Apple advertising and multichannel strategies are constantly evolving to keep clients not just relevant, but on the cutting edge of healthcare marketing trends. We use ad strategies that are customized for each specific client’s target audience, unique objectives, brand, and market.
Key Healthcare Marketing Trends of 2021
In order to be competitive, companies in the healthcare space must tackle these four marketing trends that have emerged in 2021.
Mobile-Optimized Experiences
A major change came back in 2019 when Google announced mobile-first indexing, where it would begin to rely on mobile websites for indexing and ranking instead of the previously standard desktop website experience. This was a direct response by the world’s biggest search engine to long-term changes in consumer behavior. In fact, 2020 data points to a global majority of website traffic coming from mobile devices. More conservative estimates point to about half of all website visitors coming from mobile devices, but this number is only expected to continue to grow.
As a result, ad formats must be both responsive and accommodating for mobile users. This can create interesting problems for both designers and copywriters, who must optimize brand messaging to fit extremely limited real estate.
Google is not just letting marketers size down their ads and call it a day. Google has been developing metrics to evaluate user experience, which has culminated in its Core Web Vitals panel of quality signals that it measures for every website. One way to think about Core Web Vitals is that it is no longer enough for a page to technically rate as loading fast, but rather it must consistently feel fast to every website visitor. The relevance to mobile optimizations is that they must be thoroughly executed in order for Core Web Vitals to rate well.
Reviews and Patient Testimonials
Local SEO is another realm of marketing that has taken off in recent years. Users are looking for results that are relevant to their everyday life. Browsers and devices have been evolving to bear more sophisticated abilities to track user details such as location, opening the door for target automation.
In parallel, users are getting savvier with the information they seek. For example, they want to check reviews from other humans before they purchase a product or service. Patients are no exception to this, turning to online third-party resources to read reviews and research the overall reputation of a practice and its providers before committing to an appointment.
For Google, reviews are the third most important ranking factor in local SEO. This means that businesses need to get smart and systematic about how they collect and publish patient feedback, including how they facilitate positive reviews—and how they address any negative ones. Management of online reputation is set to remain a key part of every digital marketing effort.
Video: Marketing, Telehealth, and Telemedicine
In the digital marketing world as a whole, video has been an emerging trend over the last couple of years. Uploading video content and incorporating it into site experience is one way to stay current and put out positive signals to Google. In fact, brands are now creating entire channels to address consumer questions, share trends, and promote company visions and policies. But another critical visibility play is to create short ads that play before YouTube videos.
Video advertising is beneficial in several key ways. For brand awareness, video helps add a personal touch while providing a platform where healthcare professionals can talk about who they are, the work they do, and all of their experience. Video can also serve as a powerful educational modality, informing both patients and healthcare professionals on medical conditions and how they are treated.
Within the realm of healthcare, video has a unique opportunity to directly impact service through telehealth or telemedicine offerings. Telehealth has actually become one of the fastest-growing integrations in the healthcare landscape, with the CDC reporting that the number of telehealth visits had grown over 150% in Q3 of 2020 alone.
Telehealth is efficient, convenient, and beneficial for virtual doctor visits, radically increasing access to care since medical appointments may be available for everyone—no matter their work schedules, socioeconomic status, or even mobility.
In the present day, telehealth offerings can very well be a central consideration that determines whether a patient selects one provider over another. Every HCP must stay on top of this trend in order to protect their practice in the long-term, both offering telemedicine options and also making it very clear to all patients that these options exist. Yet again, this is a powerful advertising opportunity.
Multi Channel advertising
The number of platforms available in the realm of marketing—even just digital marketing—continues to rapidly grow across both social media and paid search. Healthcare companies must be aware of these platforms and whether their target audience is present on them. If so, a portion of marketing efforts must be directed to actively advertising on them in order to reach this audience.
The modern consumer leverages a multichannel experience. Advertising in the present day requires more than a single channel approach. Simply put, you cannot rely on traditional advertising alone.
Multichannel marketing in Pharma may seem to cost more, but it is important to remember that each of these platforms comes with its own particular set of data offerings. The most competitive businesses ignore no data points, but rather consider all data gathered from various channel perspectives to paint a more accurate, holistic picture of their target audience.
How Good Apple Can Help
Healthcare marketing trends are constantly evolving. Addressing current trends while also striving to get ahead of upcoming trends can prove daunting. Good Apple is your partner in tackling both of these efforts and offloading the bulk of the legwork that goes into collecting insights and developing strategies. A core part of our work is to stay present and listen to the ongoing conversations in healthcare advertising. We stay current on recent techniques and methods, which we implement and optimize for you.
Anything that offers a distinctive user experience and facilitates user engagement is key to the success of a healthcare marketing campaign. Good Apple does the research on your specific target audience’s behaviors, removing any guesswork around where or how to reach this audience. Part of this work involves doing the research to pinpoint exactly which platforms to use, as well as what messaging to develop and how to personalize it around each demographic of interest.
One key metric we always factor in, from social ad strategies to programmatic campaigns, is the efficacy of ad spend. In order for marketing to be its most effective, business dollars must be allocated effectively. We work closely with everyone of our clients to create a custom strategy that maximizes budget. As plans evolve, we revisit this spend to make sure it remains effective, and ensure we’re measuring advertising impact effectively.
Through years of experience, marketing innovations, industry firsts, successes with established companies, and extensive industry knowledge, Good Apple is the expert partner that can maximize your ad effectiveness as well as overall return using proven ad strategies that work. For anything that we don’t handle ourselves, we partner with other award-winning agencies to provide a full-service experience that meets all of your healthcare marketing needs.
In order to be effective at promoting your business in the face of rapidly changing technologies and evolving healthcare marketing trends, you need access to the latest insights and targeted guidance. Adapting to the latest marketing trends and getting ahead of upcoming ones is what we do. Our experience and our focus is what makes us the ideal partner for every healthcare company out there.
