The Performance Creative Playbook for Healthcare Marketers

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Today, we have a very fun topic, something I’ve become super passionate about, performance creative. What is performance creative? How is it different than just the general concept of brand creative? How are we using it? How are we going to evolve? I have Rich here to talk to us about it. Welcome, Rich.

Rich Briddock: Hey, Lauren. How are you?

Lauren: Good, good. I guess let’s take a half-step back and discuss why we’re even talking about creative today. I know you and I discuss this all the time. You might come work with Cardinal or be running internally and you are very media-focused. We’re talking about what platforms are we on? Where are we spending? What levers are we pulling? How are we targeting? All of that is really great. If we’re not enabling then those buys, the media plans that we build across programmatic and social, are we saying the right things to the right people? It’s really all for naught. The dollars are wasted. Rich, when we talk about performance creative, I want to really make the distinction on the word performance. Can you talk to me like what that means to you?

Rich: Yes, I think the lines are getting more blurred as the patient journey becomes more complex. As we start to do more full-funnel marketing strategies, oftentimes, performance creative serves a branding and an awareness element. It’s essentially building creative to achieve the campaign objective. To put it another way, if you had a budget where you could run middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns, then you would want creative that spoke to that need in the middle of the funnel, both from a campaign objective point of view, which might be traffic to the website, but also talk to a middle of the funnel audience in terms of where they’re at, ie, trying to differentiate your solution from another five or six solutions that they might be considering.

Then you would want strong creative at the bottom of the funnel, which is to get them to take that action that you desire at the bottom of the funnel, ie, to become a lead, to become a new patient, to take that next step in their journey with you. That might be very transactional, that might be very direct messaging, that might be a why-now messaging. It’s essentially building out a creative library that helps you to achieve the objective of the campaign, and that is focused on improving the performance of those campaigns more so than this is a great video that explains what we do and helps people to remember the brand, which again is oftentimes or makes the brand seem more favorable in the eyes of the consumer, which is more where branding creative plays.

Performance creative still plays a heavy role in driving awareness for that brand, especially if you’re spending at the top of the funnel because it’s typically still going to be a 30-second video where you’re trying to build an emotional connection with that end user, get them interested in what you do, what problem you solve, what solution you bring, and get them to move down further into the funnel, into the middle of the funnel. The byproduct of performance creative is often branding. It’s just not the end goal. It’s to build that–

Lauren: That’s a great distinction, and I get asked all the time, where does creative fall in, Lauren? What does Cardinal do? What do we need to provide to you? In instances where a client might say, “Well, I have a creative team. We have assets. You guys are media. That’s great. I’m going to contract you for that, and I’ll send you the assets.” Sometimes what you receive is not creative to enable a full-funnel media buy. It’s creative, a concept, a “this is who we are. Here’s a two-minute video.” While that’s a great starting point, the difference being, “Here’s my brand. Here’s what I’m about,” versus, “Here’s what this person needs to hear. They fit into this specific audience bucket, but we’re going to pull them through this journey or this many touch points.”

Rich: Yes. Oftentimes, performance creative has to be more segmented because audiences tend to become more segmented the further that you go down the funnel. They tend to have more specific needs. In the middle of the funnel, you might want your performance creative for if you’re a behavioral health provider group. If you know that someone has got depression and is seeking out therapy, you want your performance creative to be very different for someone who is looking for ADHD services and are seeking med management because it’s a totally different message.

Whereas at the top of the funnel, you can probably get away with a much more generalized creative that speaks to how you help patients who need both med management and therapy and you treat depression, anxiety, ADHD. Yes, you have to get a lot more segmented, a lot more specific, a lot more relevant with performance creative than you necessarily have to do with branding creative. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Lauren: We use the word performance and we very much start with what is the media plan? What channels are we going to be on to reach what audiences? Audience first, then where are we going to find those people? Where are they spending their time? What type of inventory is available to reach them there? Then you get into this, “Well, what do I need to say to every single segment I’ve just defined?”

The backside of that, we can do all of that and have a really great, what we believe is the plan is the data. How are we assigning or understanding performance at a creative level versus just, “Well, here’s my paid traffic. Here’s my campaign traffic. Here’s my ad set, but really, truly, is this the creative that is performing best? How am I going to use creative to perform better, not just media buying and bids and algorithmic learning?”

Rich: I think two ways going back to the sort of discussion of what is my objective at those different funnel stages. There’s the, which creative is outperforming others in that funnel stage. At the top of the funnel, if I’m trying to deliver a 75% video view to push down into the middle of the funnel, you’ve spent 22.5 seconds with my brand or whatever that 75% threshold is, depending on the level of the asset, which of my three 30-second videos has the highest engagement rate is actually getting the highest 75% view rate, which has the lowest cost per view as well to get me that confluence of the lowest cost per 75% completion. That’s one way to look at it. The other way to look at it-

Lauren: Comparing it against [crosstalk].

Rich: -is comparing A, B, C, and which is helping me meet that objective at that funnel stage in the most efficient way or scales the most effectively. The other way to look at it is to look at the impact on the actual whole funnel. Which combination of assets is actually helping me drive a user from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel in the most effective way, whether that is efficiency or whether that’s volume? What is the most efficient touch points to bring someone from that top of that patient journey to the bottom? I think that is a better way to look at it because that’s more holistic. The patient journey is not like, “Oh, I need to say this to you now, and then this to you after that, and then this to you after that.” It’s one-size-fits-all–

Lauren: You like to think it’s linear but it’s not.

Rich: It’s not linear. You might be surprised at the combination of assets and the different iterations of messaging that the results that they provide. Being able to look at it holistically across the whole funnel is the more valuable way to look at it. It’s much easier to look at it at the different funnel stages though, and say, so you’re doing a bit of both. I think in particular, when it comes to replacing your poorer performing assets and swapping in new creative, it’s much simpler to identify the weakest link at the individual funnel stage and say, “Yes, no one’s really watching that video. Something’s wrong here. We can’t get them past the first five seconds. We’re not leading with the right messaging. Let’s just swap that one out.”

Then we already know it’s dud because no one’s even getting to the middle of the funnel from that top-of-the-funnel ad.

Lauren: Therefore, clearly, from a propensity standpoint, it’s not doing much.

Rich: Right. Therefore, from a full-funnel view, it’s not going to be delivering either. Swapping that asset out and then seeing how that impacts not only that asset’s performance in that funnel stage, but also the full funnel performance as well.

Lauren: In terms of informing the performance creative, and I know this extends a little bit into like audience research, but what are you looking at to understand how much segmentation you need, how many variants you need, what helps inform that, if anything?

Rich: There’s generally two ways to go about that. You can go with a research-led approach, like an audience research-led approach whereby you are going to the business, to the client, and saying, “Okay, who are my personas? Who are my ideal customer profiles? How different are they? How do their needs differ?” If you’ve done some client surveys, if you’ve done some client interviews if you’ve done the same thing on the provider side that gives you some insight into different client needs, if you’ve talked to your admissions teams on the ground and got an understanding of how people’s needs vary.

If you have very distinct buyers, that’s definitely a good place to start. That’s the segmentation that I need. There’s also a data approach where you can look at your first-party data and understand, “Okay, I have this type of buyer and then I have this type of buyer based on the traits that I capture about those folks. Also just looking at in-platform performance.

Lauren: A little bit of like get in market and let the data tell you.

Rich: Exactly. I’m running an ad where the hero of my story is a 50-year-old male, like middle-income male who lives in the suburbs. Maybe all that can be conveyed from the creative. You see that in his story and it just doesn’t resonate. Platform will also tell you, “Oh, hang on a minute, from a broad targeting or a general audience approach, this creative is not performing well. Maybe I need to segment my campaigns further.” I test this targeting 50-year-old males who live in the suburbs, but I don’t use it to target women or younger men, et cetera.

I think there’s just different ways that you can get to that. Likelihood is you start with the former, you start with the knowns, and then you use data to fill in the unknowns, the gaps between the nodes.

Lauren: Then I think one of the things that I’ve seen our team do really well is really being meticulous about UTM parameters and the way that we tag to know what elements of the creative are working? Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I honestly hadn’t, even in Cardinal’s past, seen it done quite in a way that allowed us to truly draw insights.

Rich: Yes, so your previous guest on this podcast would have been helpful in this scenario.

Lauren: Gene and I, if you’re listening, I have an episode with Gene, I think maybe published back in December, where we got into this a little bit. Just quickly from a data point of view, how important is that piece of it?

Rich: I think a lot of the time now, marketers want to understand how are you impacting all the way through the patient journey. The way to do that, to your point, is to send information around from the ad, ie, query parameters, downstream into your system. If you’re using a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, even if you’re using an EHR, although that becomes more difficult to do, but as much information as you can send downstream, we do it in two ways. We do it in UTMs. For some clients, we’re using all the UTM parameters that are available to us.

We also do it via ad names as well. We’ll include the full ad name in the URL. The ad name might contain things like the target audience. It might contain information about the style of the ad, whether it’s animated, whether it’s video, the format type, but even if it’s like illustration versus stock photography, the colors that are used, the style in terms of an overlay versus a non-overlay ad, heavy text, the length of the video, all of that is contained. You get these monstrous ad names that then end up in the URL, but then on the backend, we can pass all of those elements out and do some pretty robust creative reporting where we can say-

Lauren: What’s driving–

Rich: -what’s actually driving new patients? The other thing that you can do too as well if you’re very smart about your funnel structures is in those ad names at the bottom of the funnel, you can also list the different funnel stages, the different touch points that that user has had in the middle and the top of the funnel as well. Because sometimes, we’re going full funnel versus just a bottom-of-the-funnel strategy. That’s a great insight as well that you can draw out. That’s more on the audience targeting side and the funnel side, but long story short, the more you can convey, the more you can pass through, the better analysis that you can do.

Lauren: Rich, we get asked this question all the time. You’re in market with all this performance creative, we’ve got good testing, we’re tagging and tracking what’s happening. How often should you be making swaps to creative?

Rich: Yes, it’s going to depend on the size of your audience. It’s going to depend on the amount that you’re spending. Ultimately, it’s going to be frequency. Where does my ad start to see fatigue? If you’re targeting a very narrow audience and the message does not need to be consumed at a high velocity. If you truly only need to see three ad exposures of that same ad on social before, as a user, you really understand what you’re trying to sell and you’re not going to make any movement on me if you show me a fourth or a fifth impression and I’ve got a small audience and I’m spending a lot, then you’re going to need to refresh your creative a lot.

In fact, going into those scenarios without some type of creative journey is not a good idea. If I’m just saying the same thing and I have a small audience and there isn’t some type of iterative creative approach, you’re probably going to hit creative fatigue very quickly. Then if you’re doing top of the funnel where it’s very broad and you’re using something like advantage plus placements on Meta, you could probably get away with running that same video for months because your frequency might be–

Lauren: The audience, you keep [crosstalk] and through.

Rich: Yes.

Lauren: You’re refreshing.

Rich: Your frequency in that campaign might be a 1.2. You might even want to think about, “I need to make this audience smaller. I can hit them more often. Because I can’t actually get any brand lift because I’m only hitting them with one ad and they’re not really paying attention.” It’s really going to depend on the circumstance that isn’t– I know people probably just want to refresh it every eight,-

Lauren: Six weeks.

Rich: -every six weeks.

Lauren: I say the same thing.

Rich: It’s not that simple. Again, similar to the previous question around what kind of segmentation should I do? Just let the data guide you and be aware of the lead time in terms of producing creative. Don’t just, don’t be saying it’s too late when it’s already fatigued if it’s going to take you three weeks to produce new creative.

Lauren: [crosstalk] You might find that out your first one or two cycles through. Then maybe, like you said, you get a good, establish your cadence. Know that for you, it’s every six weeks on this relative funneled flow that we’re trying to push people through. Unless we open up geography, we layer in third-party audiences, we have some other mechanism to grow.

Rich: Yes, and just be aware that there’s a higher likelihood that you have to refresh different pieces of creative in different funnel stages on different cadences.

Lauren: Yes. All right, Rich, well, it’s great to have you talking about performance creative to enable good media. We will continue to have ongoing discussions here on the podcast about what good performance creative looks like, how to develop it, some of those types of conversations. Join us back here soon for one of those topics. Thanks, Rich.

Rich: Thanks, Lauren.

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