Intent Matters, Especially for Healthcare Marketers

• by Adam Cohen , 2 hours ago

Intent matters, and advertisers need to fully grasp the needs of both patients and healthcare providers at precise moments of their health journey. For us to understand this, we need to know the intent of their search, visitation and actions they are taking.

According to Forrester Research, more than 85% of companies harnessing intent data have achieved business benefits.  It seems obvious, then, that marketers would harness this intent data to understand audience behaviors and moments that are ideal to engage. The challenge is, in health, such granular consumer intent information is not automatically tracked by mainstream syndication and research tools. This is the case even despite the increasing need to meet consumers more squarely in the oft-shifting landscapes of their healthcare journeys.

Healthcare decisioning involves a much more complex journey that can evolve as individual patients learn to navigate their own changing conditions. Chronic conditions especially call for keen attention to their shifting nature, with marketers needing to demonstrate an understanding of the distinct audience journey that wormholes between symptom presentation, diagnosis, treatment decisioning and overall condition management.

Not only is the audience journey in health nonlinear, it’s marked by much higher stakes than other industries. Health marketers can’t afford to squander the nanoseconds available to make an impression; getting it wrong isn’t just digital waste. Getting it wrong is a huge missed opportunity to provide critical information the consumer needs at this exact moment of time.

A misplaced health message can cause confusion, missing the chance to educate patients and HCPs and potentially slow a patient’s path to meaningful action. As such, health marketers need to have media planning tools available that match this level of complexity in their operating sophistication.

In health, we need to be able to uncover digital destinations audiences are visiting, and to know the purpose of those visits with more clarity. Why? Because understanding the intent of a website visit allows us connect digital destinations across the healthcare journey — to the mindset and overall needs of particular audiences, in each distinct moment of time as patient needs evolve.

We need to get the right messages to audiences in the moment it matters most. We need to be able to find the patient who is waiting for their test results. Or we need to be able to appear in niche communities where those with shared diagnoses are supporting one another. Imagine how much more we could help healthcare audiences if we place more tailored, relevant and useful content for them each step of the way.

According to the 2023 McKinsey Future of Wellness Survey, 67% of consumer respondents found health and wellness media within the healthcare journey to be helpful and interesting. The marketplace need, accordingly, is to improve media placements at each journey inflection point.

Net-net: Opportunities abound for brands that intelligently harness data to meet audiences across their healthcare journeys.

Today, marketers rely on syndicated research tools to look at where audiences are going. There are limitations, though, with many of these tools when it comes to understanding why audiences got to where they were going in the first place. Instead, we must engineer better tools to rise to the occasion of meeting healthcare consumers where and when they need empowering health content.