Evolving Health Landscape Calls for Need to Recalibrate Consumer Marketing

Evolving Health Landscape Calls for Need to Recalibrate Consumer Marketing

By Bryen Pittner, a Strategic Planner for FCB Health New York

 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the simplest actions have become the most important. We’re critically assessing how we eat, work, play, and ultimately, how we stay healthy. As Direct to Consumer (DTC) marketers, this means our audience’s behavior has shifted and health systems have tumbled into an accelerated evolution, leaving us to address the present and plan for the future.

Since health is in the individual’s hands now more than ever, people will make decisions differently as they navigate paths from diagnosis to treatment. Let’s expand on how healthcare brands can reach patients meaningfully at three key touchpoints in a simple transactional journey.

1. Patient-Initiated Research

No longer just ‘doctor’s orders. It’s doctor’s recommendations mingled with a scattering of social media crowdsourcing, caregiver conversations, and internal resolve, amplified by the current traffic jam. Additionally, the process of making health decisions harkens to our consumer mindsets: A trend of demanding instantly gratifying, convenient services and products has bled into managing our health. So, assess the factors that might influence how your audience obtains, absorbs, and relays information. Brands need to meet patients early in their search journeys with click-worthy answers. Prompting auto populate Google results about “brand x” is a cursory test that can help uncover common concerns and guide messaging. For instance, Vyleesi does an exemplary job of balancing slick creative with intentional features (i.e. FAQ page, chat bot, dosing video) that allow the end user to delve as deeply as she wants to without overwhelming.

And on a deeper level, are we designing for our diverse audiences by considering their first languages and cultural backgrounds? Make it easy to hear your brand out and act on it. It’s proven that engaged patients have better health outcomes and reduce costs at a systemic level¹. Which leads us to:

2. Patient-Centric Counseling

Teladoc² reported 15,000 patient visits a day in March 2020; a 50% increase month over month, indicating a critical mass movement to telehealth. But it leaves some interpersonal (and technical) aspects of in-person care behind, making it all the more important for patients and healthcare providers to have collaborative discussions. Provide tools with which patients can map out some beliefs and attitudes versus simple treatment preferences (i.e. oral over injection) to prep them for consults. That way, healthcare providers can assess and focus on a patient’s broader misconceptions and goals from the start so that counseling is more productive and empowering³.

3. Inter-Patient Connection 

Sure, doctors can deliver and contextualize information about conditions or treatments, but patients are hungry for more than a 15- or 60-minute conversation can afford. So, they’re turning to social media to find patients like themselves. The result is multi-fold — it creates highly personalized content and builds relationships that emit positive⁴ emotions and influence actions like staying on treatment.

Brands can add to interactions by connecting people to credible consumer stories. We all know it, but few brands serve up truly customer-serving content. So, consider allocating space to the topics that patients are craving even if it feels like you’re lifting the curtain a little too high. It is what they will seek out, whether it’s coming from you or not. Employing real patients’ experience and advice not only provides them with a platform but will also improve brand authenticity and impact. Could brand ambassadors be the key to discussing delicate content areas like cultural barriers? One example stems from FreeStyle Libre which released testimonials that utilize patient ambassadors who are social media influencers in their own right. This satiates a consumer’s desire to gain a fuller sense of the ambassador as a person. That way, going down the same treatment path is normalized and less ambiguous.

COVID-19 has temporarily reframed our lives around health and safety. We are in the midst of a collective shift, and though we don’t know the magnitude, it’s an opportunity to revisit how DTC brands can empower patients to take action as the new normal emerges. Resources like FCB Health Network’s YuzuYello can help brands kickstart patient outcome-driven support. Careful planning can help ensure we are better equipping patients with the tools they need to give them the confidence to manage their own personal health, and that healthcare providers and patients have the opportunity to build stronger relationships, no matter if they’re virtual or not.

 

Sources:

1: https://www.wegohealth.com/2018/10/30/patient-empowerment/

2: https://khn.org/news/telemedicine-surges-fueled-by-coronavirus-fears-and-shift-in-payment-rules/

3: Kaplan S. Patient activation. Washington, DC: 1997. Presented at Royal College of Medicine symposium on Doctor Patient Communication.

4: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3998153/