Why Your Healthcare Paid Social Isn’t Engaging (And How to Fix It)

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 back to Ignite. My name is Lauren Leone. I am your host, and I have today a new guest that we’ve never had on the podcast before, Lisa Fischer, who is our social media advertising expert. Lisa is an associate media director here. She is heading up our social and programmatic team.

So happy to have you here, Lisa. I always speak with Rich and Evan. They’re broader, so it’s really awesome to have focus today on social. Thanks for being here.

Lisa Fischer: I’m happy to be here.

Lauren: Today, we’re going to be talking about the social world has changed. We know a lot of organizations might be struggling with tracking pixels, cookies. Maybe they’re rolling out a CDP, but still only getting partial data fed back into platform once they strip out all the PHI and PII.

We really want to focus on, how can we maximize engagement on social, given the limitations that we have to operate in? Lisa, I want to start by asking, can you contextualize what you believe the role of social media is for healthcare specifically?

Lisa: Social media really helps health institutions build credibility. People go to social media platforms to engage with their friends, their family, their community. It’s really a place where we can establish trust and start a real personalized communication back and forth with patients and to really start to nurture those relationships in a more organic environment.

It’s not a sterile environment. It’s very interactive and it’s collaborative. There’s opportunities for some really fun and engaging creative. I think overall, social media presence for healthcare institutions helps to build trust. It shows the patient that they are interacting with a real human being.

They can also get insight into other patient testimonials. They can share provider stories and it just really makes the healthcare provider more relatable and trustworthy.

Lauren: Yes. We’ve actually started to see with the rise of AI search and AI optimization that the perception of a brand is one of the three pillars of how you get discovered and how you might show on top result for some of the prompts that people are putting in today.

In years past, I might have told organizations, your organic social brand and how much you do with it might really be for your existing patients, your providers, your employees. We use the advertising side to reach net new.

While your organic content itself may not show up in the feed of someone who has no awareness of you, it certainly is playing a major role in how much you may be viewed in other channels, too. A critical part of maybe that fact-checking process as well that people go through even once they’ve made a decision.

Lisa: Yes. It plays a huge part in brand discovery. Just that very initial top-of-funnel first interaction where brands are generating demand and going after net new audiences who may not already be aware of them. Paid social is really where it’s at when it comes to that level of interest and engagement from the audience.

Lauren: Yes. It’s great to build a funnel. Before we get into what to do, I also want to discuss so that everybody listening can feel like, “Okay, they’re in it with me and I’m not alone.” What are the challenges everyone’s facing when tracking? What are you seeing?

I know January, we saw big shifts in how Meta positioned themselves relative to healthcare advertisers. Just give us the where-are-we-today statement.

Lisa: Even outside of healthcare, there’s so many issues right now going on with tracking. Google has gone back and forth a million times on whether they’re going to allow cookie tracking. It’s a struggle to all marketers.

Specifically for healthcare, we need to always adhere to HIPAA, which regulates and protects the privacy of health data. Because of that, we are not able to leverage any conversion tracking such as a website pixel. That’s huge.

As any marketer will know, the pixel is really a central pillar to building a marketing strategy for most marketers. It allows you to have visibility into site interaction, what people are doing and engaging with once they get to the page. It creates some of those warm audiences that are then later retargeted.

Without that website pixel and the conversion tracking, it’s really on us as the marketers to find a way around that, to target those interested audiences without having visibility into the pixel tracking. We need to essentially find a way that’s not website engagement to get users to engage within the platform, within Meta, or within whatever the social media platform is.

Start that engagement process on the platform where we do have visibility, and then we’re able to generate and foster those warm leads and make sure that we’re not wasting any ad dollars and that we’re targeting the most interested audiences and eliminating waste.

Lauren: Let’s talk about the native side of audiences first. We know there’s a whole world of third party. When it comes to building the native audiences, what are your top three tactics? What do you like to do? Where do you start, and then as you build the funnel, what are some of the right signals?

Lisa: I usually start with awareness as a video play. Really, it’s all about reach. It’s about establishing brand understanding, having a video show the brand name within the first three seconds, starting that very first touch point with patients where they’re understanding and experiencing what the brand is all about.

With the first phase of this in awareness, I like to target very broad so that you’re not eliminating anyone. I think that everyone has an idea of who their consumer is, but with awareness marketing, it’s essential not to accidentally exclude anyone from this.

What you do is you start with a broader layer of targeting where you’re making sure that you’re expanding your unique reach as much as possible. You also want to make sure that your frequency is good so you’re not hitting the same person over and over again.

You really want to go after unique reach. You’re reaching unique users within your market and you’re hitting them with video. That is the first step of the storytelling process, however you would establish your brand. That’s the type of creative that you want to use in this portion of the funnel, and then from there–

Lauren: Lisa, before you move on, when you say broad, geographic, of course, you want it to be relevant to where you can service people. Are you doing maybe basic age ranges, like based on who your typical user is? Are you starting with Advantage+? What is your basic start top-of-funnel strategy?

Lisa: With broad targeting, we don’t just want to be blasting every single human being on Facebook or on whichever social platform. You can start with, and should start with, any geographic restrictions and targeting that you have and any age restrictions. You can also potentially target gender or any of that, but I just want to caution against too narrow targeting.

Lauren: Unless you’re a women’s health group, right? Of course, it’s your audience. As broad as you’re able to go where it still is the core and maybe then some and then around that core. Yes.

Lisa: To your point about Advantage+, that is a hugely successful tool and I absolutely utilize it in the awareness phase. It is Meta’s AI algorithm that analyzes user behavior online. Where we do not have visibility because of HIPAA into any external sources that people are ingesting, other pieces of content that they’re looking at, Meta is able to see and understand what each individual user’s behaviors are online.

Lauren: The sneaky app on your phone and all those things you don’t know, but they’re happening in the background.

Lisa: Right. It’s allowing for a more tailored audience experience and ad experience for audiences. It’s determining for us, using AI, who to go after based on the propensity of that user to ultimately convert. It’s AI targeting that we tell Meta we want.

Now, this is somewhat new, you can direct AI a little bit. One of the tools that you can utilize with Advantage+ is that you can take hashed lists of CRM data and it can be utilized for some modeling of certain segments.

Lauren: Got you. Not necessarily, hey, here’s person A and their email and all their information, and reach them specifically, but more so a mechanism to build lookalikes off of.

Lisa: Yes. It’s just a modeling tool for understanding behaviors and for finding new people.

Alex: Healthcare marketers, what’s up? It’s Alex from the future. Guess what? Scaling Up, the healthcare performance marketing summit is back. Scaling up is focused entirely on driving patient acquisition to your group.

You’re talking the largest provider group, health system leaders, everything it takes to drive a patient to your practice or health system from media, BI, analytics, performance creative, SEO, AI, because we’ve got to have that acronym in there.

October 28th and 29th, thousands of healthcare marketers are going to be showing up to this. It’s virtual and it is free. That’s the best part. Last two years, we were charging for it. This year, I want every healthcare marketer to come. We need to connect more patients with care. We all do. We all need to do it together. I’ll see you there, Scaling Up.

Lauren: Then I had one more question, because I always like to give people very specific takeaways. You mentioned that the top-of-the-funnel frequency is something that you really need to keep an eye on. Do you have any guidelines or guardrails you would recommend to people? What’s a good frequency at the top?

Lisa: You really don’t want to be too aggressive. Usually, the rule of thumb is anywhere from one to three impressions per week. You don’t want to be aggressive. As a consumer, I can say you don’t want to be hit with the same ad over and over, especially if you haven’t expressed any interest. Then as you move further down the funnel, you can get more aggressive up to seven exposures within seven days for retargeting.

Lauren: Once they’ve shown you all this, I’m interested. I have intent.

Lisa: Yes.

Lauren: Speaking of that, let’s get into next level down. I know we’re talking about building signals. You’ve got your video viewers. You’ve cast it fairly broad, but it was also very cheap to do. We’re looking to do what? Build lists of video engagers?

Lisa: What we’re doing with the strategy is creating touchpoints with patients within Meta so that we can foster engagement and then nurture our leads who have expressed some form of interest.

From the video perspective, you can create custom audiences based off of viewers who watched a certain percentage of the video. Really, I like to go after 50% or more of video viewers just because it shows more of a qualified engagement.

You can even go after only people who completed the video. Then from there, you’re generating additional touchpoints to ultimately get them into a retargeted campaign at the bottom of the funnel.

Lauren: Rather than typical retargeting, which would be they went to my site and now I want to serve them a follow up, they watched my video. That’s a strong signal. Nowadays on social media, stopping for seven seconds, which might be half of a 15-second video, that’s a lot of time in the digital world for someone to give you. Using that as a mechanism to say they’re worth spending more money on.

Do you continue to keep those non-engagers in the top of your funnel? I’m sure after a certain point in time, hey, they’ve been on our lists for a few months. It’s time to refresh that audience and continue to feed into that top.

Lisa: Yes, especially if you’re utilizing Advantage+. Meta’s targeting is smart enough to eliminate someone if they are exposed and they don’t take any action. It’s not going to keep going after them if they’ve expressed that they’re not interested.

Lauren: Yes. In terms of what people often get wrong, which is building this nice funnel and then just serving everyone a bottom funnel call to action across every stage of the funnel, can you talk a little bit about design best practices, UX? What should we be saying to these people? What should we be delivering them once we’ve engaged with them?

Lisa: There are so many fun creative formats on Meta that can be utilized. I think a lot of people just default to the static ad or the video ad. There’s additional mid-funnel objectives that we can run with some really fun and engaging creative units.

You can retarget people who watch a certain percentage of your video. You can then also, from there, determine I’m going to take people who watch 50% of the video and I’m going to serve them an instant experience.

An instant experience ad is a static image or a video that opens up into a mini landing page. We do have visibility and tracking on that because it’s still within the Meta environment. You can engage people who are clicking into the instant experience. You can engage people who’ve moved around on it. Any action that someone takes with an instant experience, you can retarget.

There’s also instant articles, if you wanted to promote any blog content, although it will live again. The instant article lives within Meta, so you’re not having them click off to the site. You’re keeping them within the Meta ecosystem, so again, you can target them in lower funnel messaging.

There’s also quizzes, which we do for a lot of clients. Just interactive quizzes to see if you even are the right person to consider a certain product or need. Then we can also create some sort of lead form where we retarget those users later.

I think that it’s important to consider what the user journey is for your particular vertical and what you’re marketing. If it’s something that’s a little bit more turnkey in terms of customer acquisition, where you have a shorter sales funnel, for instance.

Lauren: For example.

Lisa: That’s exactly what I was going to say, like general dentistry. We tend to have a shorter path to conversion. When we have that shorter path to conversion, we don’t need to nurture the uppermost funnel as much because we’re really able to focus more on going directly into the mid and lower funnel, driving people to call for an appointment or to schedule online.

If it’s something that they need to research more, or a specific procedure, or in this case of dentistry, something like orthodontics is a little bit more requiring of research and just different providers, different opportunities and pricing and things like that.

We’ll want to layer in more of that traditional awareness that brings leads and nurtures them down through with various touchpoints. Really, when it comes to UX, understanding what the ultimate user journey is going to look like ahead of time and understanding how long we think it’s going to take, what types of–

How strong we need to be with some of that awareness messaging, or if we think people already have a general baseline understanding of the brand. Then from there, creating really engaging and fun content that is native to the platform.

If you’re running in Meta, make sure that you’re designing your ad for Meta. If you’re running in TikTok or Reddit, those are totally different ecosystems. You can technically use some of the same sizes. Meta and Reddit have similar sizes. TikTok and Instagram have similar sizes, but I would definitely say you want the creative to speak to the platform that you’re in.

Especially with something like TikTok, that content is completely different from what you see on another platform. It’s very user generated and it’s very lo-fi. Making sure that your content matches the thematic points of the platform that you’re going to be running in.

Lauren: That’s a perfect transition. I was just going to ask you, we always talk about the Metaverse because it’s the most established, has by far the most robust targeting capabilities, and historically the most users. How are you testing into these other channels?

A couple Reddit clients now. I know TikTok is tough because of the content requirements to really have an authentic presence as a brand. Just talk me through a little bit how you see groups using non-Meta social channels.

Lisa: I think it’s extremely important to diversify your portfolio of social media presence outside of just Meta. There’s a lot of expansion in the social media usage world and different demographics, different types of audiences are utilizing different platforms for different things.

Meta is the default that marketers go to because it does drive really strong awareness through down to lead, direct leads, and direct bookings. I would say that you want to consider other platforms to increase incremental reach.

There are audiences that are not on Meta or Instagram that you may be excluding. You want to make sure that you have a strategy, or an approach, or understanding of at least what the other platforms do in order to potentially go after those different channels if different audiences become important to you.

For TikTok, the audience tends to be a bit younger, although it really runs the gamut. My mother-in-law is using TikTok on a daily basis in her late 60s. It could be anyone that’s on TikTok, but the attention span is a little shorter. There’s a lot more persistent scrolling through.

The engagement on TikTok is really more so for awareness. It’s for planting that seed of brand name recognition and again, establishing that authenticity and trust in the market that you are dealing with real patients. You can share patient stories.

For dentistry, you can show a before and after transformation. TikTok is really useful from an awareness perspective. People also use a lot of TikTok search capabilities now. TikTok is slowly becoming a competitor almost to Google search. People will go there to search for things. It’s important to consider TikTok from that perspective outside of just running on Meta.

Another one is Reddit. Reddit searches index really high from an AI perspective. When you’re using generative AI through Google, which is anytime you search for something, it’s going to show these AI-informed links at the top.

Reddit often is towards the top of search results now. If you search for anything, you will see most likely a Reddit link within that first page of Google that’s bringing you to a conversation that people are having related to the topic you’re investigating.

I’d say Reddit is very important from a consideration perspective and an education perspective. People are going to Reddit to really dive into something that they’re already probably aware of. That’s why it’s a little bit less of an awareness play, although it can still be used for that.

People on Reddit tend to already have some established notions and leanings. On Reddit, it’s really more of that education. Why are we different? What differentiates us from the competitor? Educating on specific price points, specific procedures, and that ultimately driving down to a conversion.

Lauren: Yes, awesome. I know there’s so much more out there. There’s the Snaps, and the YouTubes, and the verse is growing, I think, just staying on top of– Again, it always comes back to the audience. Where are they spending their time? If they’re spending their time on those platforms, it’s certainly worth testing it in.

Lisa, I know that we’re just at time here. Any final thoughts you would leave the community with, words of wisdom, or– I know you just spoke about where you think the universe is going, but final words?

Lisa: I know we rely a lot on channels like paid search to capture leads, but I think paid social is so important in influencing decisions. It’s where people go to engage with their community, and it’s really a place to establish brand recognition, to discuss other patient testimonials, to foster communication back and forth with a real person. You’re humanizing the experience.

I think having an evergreen layer of awareness or site traffic is really important to any ultimate marketing objective. We often get into this mindset of direct leads, paid search, only having conversion campaigns running all the time.

Having a blanket campaign or an always-on campaign that’s always running with some layer of awareness in paid social is going to keep fresh audiences coming in and generating demand so that we can then foster users and have those warm leads that we would have had otherwise if we were using a website pixel.

It’s also going to drive website visitation, not just directly from the ad, but paid social users a lot of times will see an ad and then they’ll come back organically to your page. Paid social is not just impacting click through and view through attribution to your website. It’s also able to move the needle on organic and establishing that seed, who your brand is, and ultimately nurturing those most qualified leads.

Lauren: Yes. I know that’s so hard to measure and so hard to make the case for sometimes to the CFOs of the world, but I think looking for that causal implication of A on B is always a good way to think about it.

Lisa, thank you so much for joining. This has been another episode of Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Everybody, like, subscribe, follow us, keep listening. We’ll be back in a few weeks. Thanks, everybody.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.