The key to cutting through the noise in healthcare marketing is optimizing customer and user experience. Bynder’s CMO, Andrew Hally, explains why creating more visual branded content relevant to customers and using social media to promote it is the secret. Â
Healthcare brands have arguably had the most challenging year in recent memory. From needing to pivot marketing strategies amid COVID-19 to having to figure out how to cut through the noise as the market quickly became oversaturated, it has been a year for the books. Unsurprisingly, healthcare ad spending has surgedOpens a new window and is projected to make up 10.4% of all B2B digital ad spending this year.
This rise in spending is a direct result of healthcare companies trying to carve out their identity in a crowded space. In fact, recent data from Bynder shows that 38% of healthcare marketers see brand awareness as their number one concern, so it’ is clear that many are struggling to get people thinking – and talking – about their brands.
The report also found that nearly 35% of healthcare marketers think user experience is the biggest brand differentiator in 2020, and nearly 40% plan to differentiate their brand by optimizing their user experience. This follows trends we have seen across other industries, too, where marketers are constantly tasked with the challenge of making every customer interaction count. In healthcare specifically, branded educational content and human-focused social content can go a long way in driving an exceptional experience that achieves brand awareness.
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Building a Simple, Branded Customer Experience
The first step to creating a captivating customer experience is developing content that customers enjoy engaging with. Research from Forrester shows millennials read an average of 11.4 pieces of contentOpens a new window before making a final purchasing decision. So, whether it is a whitepaper outlining the technology specifications of a new MRI machine or a blog from a hospital CEO discussing their plan for COVID-19, interesting, branded content is key. Nearly 50% of healthcare brands plan to increase their investment in branded visual content year over year, which shows that they are on the right track, and an additional 40% plan to increase their overall content production by up to 50%.
To further improve user experience and to meet content demands, healthcare marketers may want to consider user-generated content (UGC) in their marketing efforts. UGC is more memorableOpens a new window than traditional marketing assets and proves that real people support or use products and services from a certain organization. For healthcare companies, this could look like re-sharing a video that a satisfied patient shares on their Instagram story to discussing their positive experience with your hospital in a marketing campaign.
UGC is often found on social media, which is also where many buyers first engage a brand. So, it is no wonder that 42% of healthcare brands see social media as having the biggest impact on their brand visibility and perception. It is imperative for healthcare brands to take advantage and reach their audience in ways that feel natural and helpful, particularly as social platforms have started introducing new features that make content more accessible and digestible, like LinkedIn Stories.
Serving consumers with relevant content tailored to their interests is the best way to get them to click and move further down the funnel. What is even better is if that content is consistently branded – that way, consumers will associate your brand with content they like, which will improve brand perception overall.
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How Creative Automation Can Help
Creating a seamless customer experience is no small task and involves creating different versions of the same marketing asset to ensure relevancy to varying target audiences. While this can be achieved by having creative teams develop and test these variants, they will burn out quickly if it is all they have time for, decreasing their creativity and impact of the materials they are crafting for marketing purposes.
But, marketing technology is advancing to help solve this problem. According to Bynder’s survey, 35% of healthcare marketers think automation can be used to create and scale branded content faster and get it to market more quickly without burning up valuable creative hours. Creative automation can alleviate the burden of taking the same banner ad for your company’s medical equipment, for example, and resizing it to fit the specs of each social media platform.
Allowing creatives to focus their energy on developing engaging branded content and leveraging social to promote it will make for a more positive customer experience, which is essential to making a healthcare brand stand out. 2020 is not over yet, so it is still possible to integrate these strategies into your marketing mix and start prioritizing, driving an exceptional customer experience. As consumers now have multiple ways to interact with brands, it has never been more critical to get this right.