Until recently, all healthcare marketers could do was “spray and pray” their message reached all those who needed it. Finding consumers with specific medical concerns was a key challenge, especially as media consumption grew more and more fragmented.
Well, it’s now a brave new world, in which programmatic advertising enables companies to hyper-target digital audiences and personalize communications according to users’ digital footprints.
How Programmatic Advertising Works
Reaching “the right person, at the right time, with the right message” might sound like a conundrum, but it’s entirely possible with the use of media-buying software. By accessing and analyzing data, the software uses a combination of behavioral and contextual factors to make ad buys that follow individuals across each stage of their journey and every device they use.
Programmatic advertising presents content relevant to users’ recent searches and purchases, in formats such as video, audio, text and imagery. The program evaluates users’ responses to each and adapts future communications to optimize viewability.
Benefits for Healthcare Marketing
To date, healthcare marketers have largely shied away from programmatic advertising because of HIPAA concerns, but research shows the data does not collect personally identifiable information (PII). And the benefits are simply too good to pass up:
- By using different forms of advertising to tell a “sequenced” story to an individual consumer, marketers present them with a customized message based on behavioral clues. This forms bonds between the company and the audience that help to build patient relationships and trust.
- Programmatic advertising is mostly automated, which reduces the cost significantly in terms of labor and human error. This also results in minimal wasted advertising, which maximizes the ROI on healthcare adspend.
- Expanded reach – with the number of people researching online, the potential for them to see your ads is exponentially higher than ads placed in specific media, targeting specific markets or groups.
- Real-time reporting shows exactly how well each campaign is doing as soon as it’s launched. You can see what sites your ads are reaching, the type of consumer looking at the ads, and the costs associated with each ad impression.
- Attribution enables you to identify where leads come from, which helps improve the quality and efficiency of the advertising.
It’s every healthcare marketer’s dream to be able to reach the right people and monitor advertising results in time to adjust them as needed. And now, it’s finally possible.
Call Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit waxcom.com for more information.
