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Health and wellness, pharmaceutical, and medical-device providers must navigate an ever-evolving and consistently complicated healthcare landscape. Agencies (and corporate marketers) serve a key role in helping their clients problem solve, understand their challenges, and identify critical success factors.

How is this best accomplished? Through the power of thorough, intuitive and intentional listening, and strong engagement – with both the client and consumer.

It’s critical to tap into that certain something that bridges the gap between what agencies (and corporate marketers) think they know and what a client (or brand manager) needs to understand. The reverse is equally true. What does the client (or brand manager) and consumer know and what do we as agencies need to understand? It can only be arrived at through intentional, deep listening. And from that, valuable insights result. Answers rise to the top. Incredible ideas and campaigns are born. If you're an in-house marketer, this means listening to your team and to your end consumers.

I’d argue that much of the best creative work and constituent engagement is accomplished by listening to, understanding, addressing, and integrating human emotion. You need to know what consumers feel to know how to reach them. It’s critical in today’s competitive marketing landscape, a chilly land of technology and data.

Listening Builds Communication

Communication builds patient, caregiver, and healthcare professional engagement. Engagement is the new currency for building sustainable brands.

Good communication, brought by attuned engagement, is a giant step away from frequently asked questions and data-driven answers. It is not time-consuming, but rather a deal closer. It is what sets you apart from the competition and, ultimately, what builds the bottom line.

Listening Builds Trust

Trust is as important as price for today’s patients. When we understand that today’s patient is motivated by trust and that it is just as important as price, we see a level playing field. We understand that, when all things are equal, the deal breaker could be due to a lack of trust resulting from our own inability to effectively tune in.

“The Art and Value of Good Listening” – an article published in Psychology Today – declares that listening is an art, but that good listening also depends on gauging the mood (and mindset) of your audience. Is the patient / caregiver upset? Are they fearful? If tapping into human emotion requires listening, it also requires compassion and understanding.

Beyond Listening: Emotional Branding

Effectively listening to our audiences on an emotional level involves knowing what to listen to. We need to identify the aspect of the consumer's life that requires a solution. Then we need to understand the emotion behind this and link the product or service in a way that is emotionally relatable.

Emotional branding insists on forging an emotional connection between products or services and the consumer. Those connections can create brand loyalty among consumers. The emotional connection has to be positive and it always has to be relevant. It is either identifiable to consumers or represents something they believe in.

• “This medication helps migraines,” for example, is not as emotionally connected as, “This medication will help your migraine, so you will be able to spend more time doing the things you love.”
• UPS does not simply deliver packages. They deliver happiness and dependability.
• Nike insists that we aspire to greatness – that we just do it. We may not always see greatness in ourselves, but it is something most of us would like to aspire to. Therefore, we identify. With health and wellness, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices, we are inviting people to regain health, to take back their livelihood, and to feel better.

A medical device may keep a patient out of the hospital, which falls in line with the new, value-based care initiatives and the merit-based incentive payment system. And a physician or medical office manager may have an emotional response to this type of marketing – better patient care and adhering to government regulations in a single move.

Branding: What Science Says About Engaging People

According to research and information gathered by The New York Times and Content Marketing Institute, 92% of consumers respond to advertising that feels like a story. Additionally, the human brain can process images or graphics 60 times faster than words. Taken together, this information suggests that a story with disruptive images is our best bet when marketing to potential customers. If we can tap into human emotion using these two mechanisms, we have an excellent starting point.

We gain trust by listening and good communication. We learn where consumers are on their respective journeys, and we deliver what they have asked for or what they need to go forward.

We learn to bring consumers in by allowing our brand to tap into human emotion.

Businesses that effectively engage also do so through value creation, rather than revenue extraction. They provide their audience with something meaningful beyond a sales pitch – an emotional appeal, a smart end-to-end experience, great content that is relatable on an emotional or real-time support level.

Six Strategies to Help Build Trust & Engagement

Relating to your audience begins with understanding them and how they differ from each other. Take the time to see the differences in your audiences, segment them, consider what drives each of them to “raise their hand,” customize your message, and take action. Then engage with them. Our marketing must be organic and customizable to reflect a personalized approach.

Remember, we no longer live in a business-to-consumer world. Given today’s digital landscape, it is a consumers’ market, and they hold all the power through engagement.

Here are six basic strategies to help you improve engagement:

1. Understand your audience through segmentation and persona development to gauge where they are in their journey. Customization is key. We cannot merely market a package. We have to market customized solutions. Further, we need to make it obvious to the patient, caregiver, or healthcare provider that we are tuned in to their specific requests. We understand that their goals or needs are unique and deserving of our laser-focused attention. Remember, no broad strokes! Segmentation is probably as broad as we can go. In other words, optimal marketing strategies must categorize patients, influencers, or clinicians by demographics and behaviors.
2. Create educational value as defined by each audience; there is no such thing as a successful “one-size-fits-all” approach. Education means it is our turn to speak. We have heard what the patient, caregiver, or healthcare provider has to say. We understand the need. We are not merely providing a customized solution. We are educating on how this solution will work and how it will propel them forward and closer to their goal(s). Clients and product managers – AND CONSUMERS – want solutions. They also want to understand how things work. They demand one-on-one connection, and each connection will be customized to run parallel with their need.
3. Become trusted advisers by looking out for our audience’s needs. When we accurately and consistently address our audience’s needs, not just the product or service's attributes, we do a better job of reaching consumers. Take the time to draw strong connections between a patient's or healthcare provider's needs and desires and your product's or service's offerings. Act in their best interests by providing quality information. Your communications will resonate better and be more appreciated.
4. Develop content that anticipates questions and be in many places. Develop branded and unbranded communication, including non-personal promotions through an omnichannel approach. This affords audiences multiple opportunities to connect and communicate with your brand and the people behind it. We are easy to find. We are everywhere. Try to make sure your solutions fall before the consumer's eyes. Analyzing your segmentation demographics is an excellent way to anticipate potential inquiries and put forth the information before it is asked for.
5. Identify, engage, and connect with consumers via social media. Do not be afraid to reach out. Do not be afraid to study a patient’s or healthcare provider’s journey from the beginning and meet them where they are (both in their lifecycle and online) with real solutions. At the same time, we must make our presence known and our solutions easy to find. Stand out by standing everywhere – including on social.
6. Keep asking what consumers need, including how you can improve. We should be on a continual journey to better understand what consumers want and how to improve the solutions we offer. We can never improve if we do not engage and ask our respective audience how we're doing.

Through surveys and tuning in, we may discover that a service or product is confusing or that our campaign's messaging is lost. When we are very close to an idea – from the drawing board on – we may think that our understanding is translating well to the audience when it is not. By asking, learning, and adjusting our communications, we also improve our consumer relationships.

The Bottom Line

Everything comes back to listening, understanding, and effective communications. To discover what consumers need most, you must fire up your listening skills and pay attention to their requests and concerns. Understand where they are on their journey and what is preventing them from reaching the next level.

Through attuned engagement and understanding, we can address consumers’ needs in more effective ways and bring our brands greater success. By carefully listening, we can tap into human emotion and imbue our marketing solutions with a greater chance of penetrating.

It is incumbent on us as marketers to help each healthcare practitioner, patient, or caregiver feel like we are speaking directly to them. Through smart segmentation and marketing customization, we can improve our ability to establish emotional connections and drive engagement.

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Click on the infographic below to view full size. Learn how you can prepare for the digital health consumer with insights from the MARS Consumer Health Study.

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Personalized Smart Recommendations in social networks

What if Amazon was in charge of patient activation? Personalized, data-driven healthcare solutions would up-end patient activation as we know it. Some biopharma marketers are already doing this today, leveraging social networks to anticipate and address patient needs proactively. Here’s the formula for how they are doing it.

First, think about what Amazon does right after you’ve put something in your cart — like, for instance, band-aids. You see this message: “Customers who bought this item also bought… Neosporin, Children’s Tylenol” etc.. We at MyHealthTeams do something similar in chronic health.

For example, when one of our MyMSTeam members posts about her frustration with memory loss and concentration problems, we automatically surface relevant information that has proven popular among other members facing similar challenges.

First, a member — “SuzanneM from San Jose” — posts about the fact that she’s having a hard time remembering things, finding the right words or concentrating.

We then automatically surface for her relevant information that other members facing similar cognitive challenges have found useful. We call this a “Smart Recommendation.”

Which makes it easy for her to quickly get to content that addresses her concern and is likely to inspire action. In this example, that content is from the “MS & Cognition” Resource Center we created in partnership with Biogen after research among MyMSTeam members revealed that cognitive dysfunction is a top symptom impacting quality of life and often starts early in the progression of the disease.

We introduced Smart Recommendations with select partners in our social networks earlier this year to personalize patient education and inspire action. They are “smart” in that they are served up contextually based on what a member shares in her post or profile. They are “recommendations” in that we are surfacing information (not medical advice) that others going through the same thing have found helpful. It’s the power of community at work. This is a new way to drive activation.

Fueled by natural language processing and machine learning, Smart Recommendations are possible because our members share information, resources and support every day — for 7 years now. With millions of members, 90% of whom are diagnosed patients, across our 32 growing social networks, we see both the challenges people living with a chronic condition face and the information that proves most useful to them — at a personal level and at scale.

This enables our pharma partners to approach Patient Activation differently and truly empower diagnosed patients with timely and useful information.

The click-through rates on Smart Recommendations are through the roof — north of 20%! This shows how hungry patients are for directly relevant, objective information to help them manage their condition. Today’s healthcare consumer is empowered and motivated to play an active role in managing her health. Pharma companies looking to activate patients don’t have to rely on just the doctor channel anymore — in fact, they can’t. By engaging patients where they are in social networks, these companies have started to deliver more of an Amazon-like consumer experience.

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Many people associate weather conditions with their health and wellbeing. Perhaps you have family members claim to be able to sense changes in the weather because they feel a migraine coming on, friends who swear they can forecast rainfall better than the meteorologists due to increases in pain levels within their joints, or even co-workers who claim to be allergic to certain types of weather. Observations about the interactions between weather and health are not a modern phenomenon. People have been making them for almost 2,500 years—since the writings of Greek physician Hippocrates—and correlations between weather and wellness, if proven, are potentially valuable information for organizations and companies across the healthcare economy.

Today, researchers are working to validate observations about the weather and health, like those above, in novel ways. Biometeorology is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary science that studies the interactions between living organisms, including humans, and atmospheric conditions such as temperature, humidity and rainfall on a seasonal basis. This emerging discipline joins meteorologists with epidemiologists, biologists, computer scientists, and technologists to approach these persistent but difficult to verify connections in new and interesting ways.

Studying the impact of weather on human health and wellbeing is a challenging endeavor. Modern researchers are using data collection and technological tools that weren’t available in the past, including smartphones, cheap and plentiful sensors, complex computer simulations, and platforms that make aggregated data available to the general public as well as researchers.

Arthritis patients very frequently cite the weather as a factor in their condition. But joint pain, morning stiffness, fatigue and mood are very subjective factors, making it difficult to gather large-scale, standardized data about them. This is why the Cloudy With a Chance of Pain study conducted by the University of Manchester in conjunction with other arthritis and governmental organizations in the United Kingdom, is so fascinating. The researchers asked 13,000 participants, all of whom had long-term pain conditions, to record symptoms via a smartphone app each day. Using participant’s phone GPS signals and time stamps, researchers are evaluating correlations between participants’ symptoms and weather conditions. As if that weren’t cool enough, the researchers have made the aggregated data available to anyone online, via an analytics module on their website that allows people to see symptom levels by day and weather condition. You can bet that patients and biometeorologists alike will be paying attention when the University of Manchester researchers release their results this spring at https://www.cloudywithachanceofpaindata.com/

Mobile technology and cheap, ubiquitous sensors are enabling similar advances in the study of how weather conditions affect asthma and respiratory health. Companies including Propeller Health have developed sensors that attach to asthma inhalers and gather data on dosage, inhaler type, and time and location of usage, which can be synced with corresponding weather conditions. Once sufficient data is available, analysis may reveal how different weather conditions worsen or relieve asthma symptoms. The ultimate goal of such research is to reduce the risk of individual asthma attacks though proactive engagement and intervention with patients.

The flu is another illness impacted by the weather being studied in a novel manner. Researchers at leading institutions including University of Virginia’s BioComplexity Institute and Initiative are developing unique flu forecasting methods that use advanced computer simulations to assess flu risk at a highly granular level across the United States. The BioComplexity Institute’s innovative flu forecasting methodology uses a simulated population to model interactions that may lead to the spread of flu. Their model factors in census population data, mobility data (including commuter data and airline travel data), and historical vaccine coverage and efficacy data. When combined with AccuWeather’s weather forecasting expertise and data, these AccuWeather derived localized flu forecasts provide powerful insights at the US county level. To date, the researchers have seen evidence that low humidity and low temperatures allow the flu virus to survive longer, which promotes its transmission. However, more people stay inside during cold and/or inclement weather, which suggests a reduced risk of flu transmission—unless you happen to be stuck inside within someone who is already suffering from the flu.

AccuWeather provides historical, current and forecasted weather data and weather data insights to leading brands, agencies, retailers, medical device companies, analytics firms, and research institutes to help them understand important connections between the weather and wellness. This includes providing weather data and insights to:

• Research institutes and medical device companies, which want to understand how weather impacts the development and spread of illness and disease;
• Brands, agencies and retailers, which want to understand how weather influences the demand for products such as cold medicine, tissues and orange juice;
• Distributors of critical healthcare goods, which need to anticipate logistical disruptions caused by weather events such as snow, hurricanes, and flooding; and
• Advertisers, which want to boost awareness of products and services at contextually relevant moments to consumers, either on AccuWeather’s digital platforms or their own, e.g, showing ads for hand sanitizer and throat lozenges to consumers located in areas with higher than average flu risk.

Every day, researchers are enhancing our understanding of how weather impacts our health and wellbeing. AccuWeather is proud to work with companies across the entire health care spectrum to ensure that the world’s most accurate weather data can be used to make peoples’ lives better, whether it’s helping a manufacturer develop more effective medical devices or helping advertisers reach AccuWeather users with products and services suited to the health issues associated with the weather they’re experiencing.

About AccuWeather: AccuWeather is the largest and fasted-growing weather media company and global leader in weather-related date, business and predictive analytics.

Disclaimer: AccuWeather is not affiliated in any way with the University of Manchester, Cohero or Propeller Health.  The views expressed by AccuWeather are its own and the studies referenced in this article are solely offered as examples of how weather and wellness are being researched; AccuWeather in no way endorses the outcome of any study.

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Healthline Insider Q and A: A series of conversations with experts from the digital, health and marketing industries. Why? Because different perspectives enrich us and make us smarter, stronger, and more aware.

Healthline Insider's Ingrid Eberly sat down for a conversation with our SVP of Media Strategy & Revenue, Dante Gaudio, on the topic of narrative and the power of narrative in health. In his role, Dante spends a lot of time thinking about ways he can help health brands build powerful stories to change people’s lives.

1. What do you mean by narrative? How is narrative different from “brand”?

While “brand” refers to how a product is represented in a person’s brain, “narrative” is the series of connected events, experiences, and stories that get it there. If brand is the destination, narrative is the pathway to it. Narratives are usually about the people who use brands and are communicated in spoken or written words or visuals.

An example of a brand with strong narrative is Whole Foods. What’s your experience with Whole Foods? I’m pretty sure you all have consistent responses: “helps me live more naturally,” “brings the local community together,” “happy and helpful employees.” Even your negative responses are likely consistent: “expensive” and probably “crowded parking lot.” It is these experiences that form the Whole Foods narrative, which feeds the Whole Foods brand.

2. Why is narrative important in healthcare?

Healthcare is at its core science, which can be dense, complicated, and full of unfamiliar language. Narrative helps make healthcare more understandable, approachable, and human.

Whenever I speak to someone who is anti-vaccine, instead of talking about the public health benefits of vaccines, I tell them about my grandfather who had polio: how he struggled every day and lived in an almost constant state of pain and discomfort. I may not convince the anti-vaxxer to change their convictions, but through my personal narrative, I’ve probably opened their eyes to the benefits of vaccines and how they can far outweigh the risks.

And I’ve learned a lot from the editorial team at Healthline about using narrative in healthcare. In a world where health is full of misinformation, isolation, and stigma, we stand against needless complexity, approach the whole person using human stories, and empower transparency. So, instead of genericizing parenting advice for new parents, they show a day in the life of a new parent in all its chaos and confusion. And readers “get it” and connect to it.

3. How does narrative drive consumer behavior?

There’s a ton of research that shows that the human brain interacts with the world via narrative. Think about how you dream: Do you envision bullet points? Or statistics? Probably not. When you dream, your subconscious brain creates a narrative… sometimes really weird narratives, but a series of connected events nonetheless! So, I don’t think narrative drives human behavior… I think it IS human behavior. It’s literally our operating system for interacting with the world around us.

“IF YOU DON’T TELL YOUR STORY… THEN SOMEONE ELSE WILL”

4. What’s an example of narrative driving a product or category?

The best examples are brands that build their narrative around a shared purpose with their customers. So, for example, if you’re a pharmaceutical drug, you don’t just talk about the efficacy, safety, duration, speed of onset, etc. of the drug. You also show how the condition doesn’t allow patients to be there for life’s important moments. You compile real-world coping mechanisms and share them with compassion. You facilitate social support, maybe even humor if appropriate. You show people that you are living the same reality as them, a shift from what a product can do FOR someone to what a brand can do WITH someone. That’s the power of narrative.

5. How does one build a narrative around a health topic or a health brand?

First, you have to be grounded in facts: who is affected, what obstacles they face, and how you can be an ally. You need to bring empathy and understanding to this knowledge. And if you can, personalize it. Think about how to adjust or update your narrative based on the experiences and expectations of the different audiences you’re engaging with.

With these insights, be deliberate about developing the narrative with key stakeholders. Commit to what you stand for, how you want people to feel, and what change you want to make (be) in this world. Then train your advocates, partners, employees, and agencies to stay consistent.

Once you’ve created your narrative, you need a plan to disseminate your stories internally and externally. Tell them in many ways — on your website, in your ads, through your brand advocates and partners. Put them out there, and let them build their own momentum.

Pharma marketers probably get nervous when they hear things like “put them out there” and “build their own momentum.” Sure, pharma brands can’t go organic with their brands, but they can around conditions or patient situations. And if they can’t do it themselves, they can rely on partners to build the narrative on their behalf.

6. How do you distinguish good content from not-so-good content?

My criteria are simple. Did it engage or inspire me? Did it surprise me? What did I learn? And what am I going to do after engaging with it? Hint: Content grounded in a really good narrative is likely to hit on all of the above!

I’ll close by stating an old PR and communications adage, “If you don’t tell your story… then someone else will.”

Are you tasked with sparking real conversation and brand stories? Come talk to us about leveraging narratives to build brands. Contact us at corpmarketing@healthline.com.

About Healthline
As the fastest growing health information source, the Healthline property engages 77 million unique visitors per month (comScore, January 2019). We provide real health information with a real human approach.

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What’s the best pharma ad you see running on TV right now? I bet you could sing the jingle, but do you remember the specific brand? I’m the odd one that uses my DVR to skip TO the commercials – but you and I are not the average healthcare consumers. That’s why, despite the strength of TV, when it comes to messaging to patients, you have to pull that message through when they are going to be most receptive – in the doctor’s office.

There are a multitude of rationale for your TV-driven media plan to include POC to complement it. Here are a few important points:

• Add POC to the mix, and every other channel benefits. Evidence shows POC can help lift the returns of not only TV, but other media in a plan as well. A recent Crossix study found net conversion rates and new patient starts were significantly higher for those multichannel plans that included POC. (For the full data, check out our white paper mentioned at the end of this piece.)
• Show patients a deeper side. Beyond traditional TV commercials, POC gives brands the ability to showcase longer, in-depth videos that will resonate with a very specific and sought-after audience. Think testimonials, patient savings, and clinical trial recruitment messages.
• Secure more face time with patients and HCPs at the doctor’s office. There is no seasonality when it comes to visiting the doctor; patients will go throughout the entire year. Each $1 million spent on POC affords more months of in-market presence than what it buys in primetime TV.
• Target the right patients in the right locations. Reaching the right audiences based on their viewing, reading, listening, or online habits can be a challenge with other media channels. POC enables you to hyper-target to condition and treatment status while individual office level targeting allows for tailored messaging to these specific audiences.

With media planning, an “either/or” mindset isn’t necessary. Tradeoffs don’t necessarily have to mean excluding an entire medium; you can add POC while not compromising the effectiveness of your TV plan. With a long and proven track record of success, POC has the power to maximize the overall effectiveness of your entire multichannel plan. Even if your plan already generates a high return, it’s worth adding POC to realize even higher ROI and incremental revenue.

Read an industry expert’s point of view on why TV and POC make the perfect pair here: www.patientpoint.com/dtc