In healthcare marketing, brands need to walk a fine line between taking advantage of modern advertising technology and staying compliant with both platform-based and legal health privacy restrictions. They also need to reach prospective patients along a decision-making journey that deviates from a standard sales funnel.
That challenge forces health marketers to deploy each marketing channel a little differently than a regular eCommerce brand would. For instance: an eCommerce brand can aggressively sell its products on Meta Ads with hyper-targeted (or retargeted) campaigns that can promise any number of benefits about its products. Healthcare brands, on the other end, are limited in how specifically they can target or retarget and what claims they can make about their offerings.
While health brands can still use social media campaigns in a lower-funnel capacity, restrictions—including some new platform-based ones—may make things complicated for brands who are trying to use social strictly as a conversion driver. It’s healthy to also deploy it as an awareness-driver by offering ad content that educates potential patients about your services. Although these campaigns may not generate immediate conversions, their effectiveness can be measured through engagement metrics, audience growth, and their ability to create compliant retargeting opportunities.
In this blog, we’ll discuss using social media campaigns to build awareness and measuring success in those efforts.
Creating Health Service Awareness With Paid Social
For healthcare providers, social media isn’t just a tool for direct conversions—it’s a platform to educate, build trust, and remain top-of-mind for potential patients. Paid social campaigns can be structured to align with the early phases of the patient journey, prioritizing awareness and engagement before a decision is made.
Leveraging Video and Educational Content
Video-based campaigns are one of the most effective ways to introduce healthcare services while driving meaningful engagement. Meta and TikTok, for instance, both offer strong emphasis on video content, making them prime platforms for these campaigns.
- Educational Explainers: Short, digestible videos covering common health concerns, symptoms, or available treatments help position a healthcare brand as a trusted resource.
- Patient Testimonials: Authentic patient stories can build trust and credibility, showing prospective patients what to expect from the service.
Empathy-Driven Healthcare Marketing Creative
Since healthcare decisions are often deeply personal, ad creative should focus on understanding and addressing patient concerns. The most effective campaigns prioritize:
- Relatable Storytelling: Ads that depict real-life scenarios and patient experiences help potential patients see themselves in the content.
- Compassionate Messaging: Copy should focus on reassurance, support, and accessibility rather than urgency or pressure.
- Visually Approachable Design: Soft colors, clear text, and friendly imagery make healthcare services feel more welcoming and less intimidating.
Evaluating Engagement in Awareness-Related Healthcare Marketing
Once you’ve developed and begun to deploy your awareness creative, you need to judge effectiveness off of the right KPIs. Unlike in other industries, where engagement metrics often directly drive conversions, healthcare campaigns may use these metrics as tools to navigate longer patient journeys and strict compliance requirements. Because awareness campaigns are usually upper-funnel, it’s unwise to make decisions about them based on lower-funnel metrics like conversions. Instead, focus on:
- Video Completion Rates: Measuring how many users watch 50%, 75%, or 100% of an educational video shows how effectively the content holds attention.
- Social Interactions: Metrics like comments, shares, saves, and likes reflect how well the content connects with the audience.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): High CTRs indicate that the content is sparking curiosity and driving users to learn more, laying the foundation for further engagement.
Healthcare decisions often require more trust and consideration. Metrics like video completion rates and social engagement help measure how well ads educate and connect with potential patients.
For health brands running larger-scale campaigns, brand lift studies provide deeper insights into campaign effectiveness:
- Ad Recall: Gauging how well users remember the educational content.
- Brand Favorability: Measuring shifts in how the audience perceives the brand.
- Future Intent: Identifying whether the campaign influences users to consider the service or product later.
Engagement metrics are particularly important for understanding patient behavior, optimizing creative, and creating compliant audience segments.
Using Awareness Results to Inform Future Creative
In healthcare campaigns, engagement metrics do more than just indicate performance: they’re the backbone of compliant audience-building and creative refinement. How an audience is responding to your ads is always an indicator of whether you’ve hit on the right messaging and style or if you need to do more creative testing to appeal to prospective patients.
Though the nature of healthcare advertising is quite unique, creative testing protocols remain fairly universal. For example, if a video is delivering a high rate of complete or 75% views, it’s likely resonating with the audiences it is reaching, and it should serve as inspiration for future creative strategy.
A high volume of comments or shares on a particular ad would also indicate that your messaging has stuck a chord, though the nature of those comments can be a tell. If they’re all negative, there’s a lesson to be learned there, too.
By focusing on metrics like video throughplays and social interactions, healthcare brands can build trust, educate their audience, and drive results while adhering to the highest standards of compliance.
Turning Awareness Into Compliant Retargeting
In healthcare marketing, it’s vital to remain compliant with both platform policies and, most importantly, HIPAA. Combining a health-related conversion action (like an appointment signup with a health specialist) with identifying information (like someone’s name and location from their Facebook profile) would constitute protected health information (PHI). Collecting and using that information in a marketing campaign would likely run afoul of privacy laws.
That means retargeting is a trickier application for health companies—but it isn’t out of the question. But there are social interactions—like a video view or a like on a post—that don’t imply health intent. Engagement metrics become critical for creating audiences that are privacy-safe yet highly targeted. Metrics like video throughplays and social interactions allow us to reach interested users without using sensitive data.
- Video View Audiences: Platforms like Meta and TikTok allow us to create audiences based on users who watched a specific percentage of a video.
- Social Engager Audiences: Users who interact with ads or organic posts – by liking, sharing, or commenting – can be included in retargeting campaigns to continue the conversation and move them further down the funnel.
If users are responding well to educational or trust-building content, such as a video explaining how your health services work or their benefits, they may also respond well to lower-funnel messaging.
Staying Effective and Compliant in a Changing Healthcare Marketing Landscape
As time goes on, awareness campaigns and their related metrics are only becoming more important to healthcare organizations that advertise on social media. Earlier this year the biggest force in paid social advertising (Meta Ads) announced key changes that are impacting how health and wellness brands can deploy campaigns and track conversions. Many lower-funnel conversion actions may be more difficult for these companies to register, meaning even lower-funnel campaigns might have to be judged based on upper-funnel metrics going forward.
To keep running compliant healthcare marketing programs, health brands need to focus on understanding current policies and finding strong marketing partners. That can include partnering with compliance-focused customer data platforms like Ours Privacy or Freshpaint, which help brands ensure that they aren’t collecting and transmitting PHI to outside sources like Meta Ads and Google.
If building a robust, compliant digital marketing strategy is too tall a task for internal teams to handle, it can be useful to partner with an experienced healthcare marketing agency that has been through these processes before. If you’re looking for one of those, you’re likely in the right place—don’t hesitate to reach out to the ADM team to discuss our portfolio, strategies, and successes:
