Drive physician engagement with creative healthcare marketing

Marketing is always a consequential endeavor, but in the field of medicine, its effects can be particularly significant for suppliers, doctors and patients. As medical practitioners must take steps to enlist patients to be engaged in their own care, healthcare marketers must encourage physician engagement with the suppliers those doctors rely on so they can support their patients.

Creativity can inspire the motivation that individuals need to remain engaged with a topic, or with an organization.

When it works, it can save lives.

Google found that a creative video campaign from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was associated with an increase in related searches. In fact, they claimed that viewers who saw the CDC videos were more than 46% more likely to search terms like "opioid."

This metric is a first step in terms of raising awareness about an issue, and sustained support is paramount. Overall though, this campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of creative advertising to spur engagement, especially in the field of healthcare marketing.

Creative healthcare marketing can help drive physician engagement.

The special role of creativity

If you think about a marketing campaign as having two primary dimensions, you might determine that those dimensions are media and creativity. The media category could include the targeting of a message, its reach, its timing and other attending factors. Existing brand reputation will also have an effect on the results of the campaign.

When Nielsen Catalina Solutions teased out these factors, they found that creative quality was the most essential factor for driving sales.

To put it simply, the quality of your advertisement is probably more important for driving action than where it's placed or how it's discovered. A creative ad can perform well in most circumstances, and an ad with low creative quality can squander prime advertising real estate.

In order to be truly effective, however, the creativity of the advertisement should not completely overshadow the brand name or the product being advertised. The CDC example is a bit of a different case, but the rule still applies. If, after watching the video, viewers searched for information about other addictive substances, that would not necessarily indicate success.

How do you market creatively to doctors?

One of the most important takeaways from the CDC example above is the special role that creativity played in this medical campaign.

The campaign consisted of short videos that centralized first-person narratives delivered by people who have experience with opioid addiction. This wasn't a straightforward explanation of the mechanisms by which addiction functions, or the neurochemical properties of opiods. These were real, human stories, and they raised engagement by encouraging people to research the facts for themselves. Clever taglines drove the point home.

This illustrates two important principles of how to effectively use creativity in healthcare marketing.

Creative healthcare marketing campaigns should:

• Appeal to emotion.
• Leave some questions unanswered.

If the appeal is successful, and if the research is compelling when the physician follows up on their own, then you've successfully engaged that doctor and earned their interest. Physicians, like most people, are motivated by their desire to help people, so they are likely to be receptive to an emotional advertisement.

Let's say your direct-to-physician healthcare marketing campaign effectively targets the type of medical professional who's best positioned to recommend your product to their patients. If you  are a trusted vendor, and you can help them palpably appreciate the emotional impact that your product will have on quality of life for their patients, they will be more likely to remember your product, research it on their own and engage with you.

If you need help driving physician engagement among medical professionals in your field, tell us about your healthcare marketing needs today.