Trust is vital to all forms of marketing, but it’s especially important in health marketing. People don’t make health-related decisions on a whim: They need to be sure that they are making the right choice for their body, mind, and future.
Paid social media has become an incredibly important tool for healthcare trust-building. Ads need to come across as relatable, personable, and genuinely interested in promoting the care of patients. That tone also needs to convey that a health brand is a reputable source of information and care services.
As an experienced health marketing agency, ADM has helped build trust-building strategies for countless brands in different corners of the healthcare industry. In this blog, we’ll lay out some of the key principles we follow when assisting our clients in making authentic, effective ad content.
The Role of UGC in Healthcare Marketing
User-generated content (UGC) is vital to trust-building in most social advertising—and that applies to health marketing, too. True UGC sourcing and featuring a real online creator with an existing following has additional benefits for sure, but even just emulating the style goes a long way for relatability.
How each brand can deploy UGC will depend on the nature of their health offering. Most digital health brands benefit from straightforward, clearly-explained video creative delivered by a reputable-looking, friendly person talking directly to the camera. The more the speaker looks like they could be the users’ friend, the better.
Effective “patient story” style UGC for digital health brands should feature:
- A relatable patient experience story
- A speaker that resembles your intended patient audience in age, demographic, clothing, etc.
- A non-clinical environment, like a home
- A helpful yet not-overly-salesy or performative tone
More healthcare term-dense messages can be effective when delivered by someone in scrubs-like attire—but typically not in full doctor garb, and usually not in a doctor’s office environment. Overtly formal or clinical content often defeats the purpose of UGC, particularly for digital health brands.
Health clinics can also take advantage of UGC, but with some alterations. For example, the above recommendation on location would be reversed here, where in-office filming is much more effective to familiarize users with the environment they want to drive to, and hearing directly from a doctor or other staff is often humanizing and beneficial.
UGC might not be appropriate for every healthcare business, however. Pharmaceutical brands face strict parameters on claims that can be made in video ads, so the creator would have to also deliver full Important Safety Information in voiceover if they made specific positive claims about the product before—which greatly undermines the purpose of UGC.
Hurdles to Adopting UGC in Health Marketing
Health brands that haven’t fully adopted UGC yet are typically hung up on one of a few issues related to it. Those include:
- Finding the right creators. Finding the right face and voice for your health advertising can be difficult if you don’t know where to start. You can utilize a UGC marketplace platform (like Billo, Trend.io, or Upfluence) to find influencers who align with your brand or independently seek out existing influencers within your vertical to reach out to. Our healthcare marketing agency has established relationships with health and wellness creators, as well as access to resources to find new ones that can be the best fit possible for a particular brand.
- Ensuring compliance. As with everything in healthcare marketing, compliance is always a top concern. You’ll need to ensure that your script is compliant before it’s sent to creators and provide necessary guidelines for any editing requirements or other “no-go’s” so everyone is aware of the policies to stick to—both legal and platform-based (which we’ll discuss later in this blog).
- Balancing paid and organic advertising. Building an organic social presence aids legitimacy and helps your paid ads tremendously. Even if you’re working with an influencer to make UGC, you’ll still want your ads to appear from your own account in most cases. Use tags and partner ads to link to the original creator.
All of these concerns are understandable, but entirely navigable with the help of a health marketing agency that has experience commissioning and deploying care-related UGC.
Other Trust-Building Ad Styles on Social Media
While UGC is vital, it isn’t the only trust-building tool in health marketing. Interactive carousels are particularly useful for educational and upper-mid funnel campaigns because they allow you to show off different service lines, benefits, or even symptoms that the users in that target audience might be coping with. This way, instead of trying to hypothesize which specific aspect of your service would appeal most to your target, you can demonstrate the breadth of your offering and increase the likelihood you appeal to more potential patients.
Other formats offer different advantages. Non-UGC informational videos are great for awareness and recall-building, which can add depth to the personal connection created through UGC.
Static image ads can also be a key cog in your overall strategy. They’re cost-efficient, allowing you to convey a straightforward message or reminder with the benefit of lower CPMs and CPCs. They also allow and offer lots of opportunities for A/B testing, which can be useful for dialing in your most appealing messages (and applying them to other ad styles). For trust-building, however, you’ll want your static ads to show at a high frequency to ensure that their message can aid in recall.
Is Humor Ever Appropriate in Health Ads?
Humor can be a great way to build trust—and it can definitely help make your content more relatable and engaging—but only if it’s appropriate. That will depend heavily on the health condition being discussed. If the joke is relevant to the situation and doesn’t cause patients to feel worse about themselves and their health, it can be a tool for creating new connections.
Humor is a mainstay in some areas of health advertising, like:
- General wellness
- Fatigue
- ED
- Hair loss
But in disease states where symptoms are generally more serious and higher-stakes—chronic conditions like diabetes, heart failure, and other life-or-death internal medicine concerns—humor can be in bad taste. In those instances, empathy should be the first and foremost concern in terms of tone.
Minding Platform Policies
While there are plenty of permissible ways to build trust on paid social media, there are also platform-specific policies that influence what you can and can’t say in health-related marketing materials. These can vary greatly by platform, but generally they forbid:
- The use of before/after side-by-side imagery
- Body/anatomical close-ups
- Unverifiable claims or guarantees
- Language that promotes negative body image
- Emphasis on pleasure or enhancement (for sexual health advertisers)
Some platform policies go further than others. Pinterest, for example, bans weight loss advertising entirely. The strictest rules are once again reserved for pharmaceutical advertisers, which must exercise Fair Balance, have only strictly factually-backed claims, and have any positive claims made be balanced by the inclusion of Important Safety Information, Prescribing Information, and, on their social pages, a Medication Guide.
Paid Social Mistakes Can Undermine Trust
As much work as you put into building trust, it can be quickly undone if you’re not careful. There are obvious mistakes to avoid in any case: things like typos, broken landing pages, and editing errors can undermine credibility for any brand, so it’s important to be stringent in reviewing your ad materials.
But most vitally in the healthcare space, you can’t sacrifice integrity or authenticity. The number one way to lose someone’s trust is for them to detect “BS” in your ads. This can happen via:
- Exaggerated or unbelievable claims about your services
- An overly aggressive pitch
- An excessively performative UGC speaker
- Confusing or overly-general medical information
Health marketing is a very human pursuit, and trust hinges on specificity, accuracy, authenticity in your information and claims.
Building Long-Term Patient Trust
Trust-building isn’t solely the function of individual ads and campaigns. It also relies heavily on your entire campaign structure and full-funnel approach. Health advertisers build lasting trust in their brands when they reach the target audience consistently with relevant and helpful content—starting with the awareness stage and evolving into the consideration stage while increasing ad frequency over time.
To translate good ads into a good strategy, you’ll need a firm understanding of how prospective patients learn about and make health decisions. If you’re looking for more information on building that understanding and aligning your ads to it, it’s worth checking out our guidance on mapping the marketing funnel to the patient journey. And if you’re seeking a health marketing agency that can help you navigate the nuances of marketing in a complicated, regulated industry, don’t hesitate to reach out to the ADM team below:
