How to Reach The Right Audience With CTV Healthcare Ads

When it comes to healthcare, advertisers face significant challenges that need to be defeated in order to generate awareness of their services, drive traffic to their website, and reach more patients.

Enter CTV ads! Connected TV devices are where most of the population consumes their content nowadays, and much of the healthcare sector has yet to take advantage. So, now is the perfect time to get ahead of the competition and create an immediate competitive advantage.

According to a Leichtman Research Group (LRG) study, about 80% of households in the United States have at least one connected TV device, and more than half (64%) have three or more. The study also found that almost half (40%) of all adults in TV households watch videos daily on their TV using a connected device. So, In an industry like healthcare, where substantial growth was experienced after the pandemic, CTV is the ideal solution to keeping up with the momentum.

Here is what you need to know about CTV healthcare ads to ensure your business keeps with the industry's growth.

COMMON CHALLENGES OF HEALTHCARE ADVERTISING

Every industry comes with its challenges when you try to reach and resonate with the right audience. The healthcare industry, in particular, struggles with narrow DMAs, targeting limitations, general perception, and tracking. Let’s dive in to learn more:

Narrow DMAs

Competition is often fierce between healthcare providers, forcing advertisers to target highly narrow designated market areas (DMAs), frequently even zip code-specific sub-DMAs. This can be challenging with traditional TV advertising since the reach is extensive but not typically narrow enough to reach localized businesses and residents. 

Targeting Limitations

Targeting limitations are particularly challenging in healthcare since, aside from search engine advertising that targets patients searching about conditions, healthcare businesses cannot target medical conditions outside that channel due to regulations and prohibited marketing/remarketing. In addition, data protection, privacy, and HIPPA are critical in healthcare, forcing advertisers to get creative with messaging and targeting using various forms of data.

General Perception

Depending on your location, healthcare's general perception is often negative, creating an uphill battle during your advertising efforts. Healthcare marketers must combine a sweet mix of empathy and authority in messaging to connect with patients experiencing a host of emotions while conveying confidence in the treatments offered. 

Tracking

Linear TV advertising campaigns offer minimal data tracking capabilities, making it difficult for advertisers to measure the impact of their ads. For the best results, healthcare ads must be regularly tracked, measured, and adjusted in real-time when necessary to ensure the campaign is optimized to its full potential. Unfortunately, these tracking limitations often lead to more wasted ad spend, time, and effort in healthcare.

CREATING AN OTT/CTV HEALTHCARE AD CAMPAIGN

As a healthcare provider, you have to generate awareness of your services to compete with larger hospital groups and healthcare providers in region-specific areas. OTT/CTV advertising campaigns allow you to be a viable competitor and make it easier to track after-ad actions to measure success. 

Steps that a healthcare provider can take to implement an OTT/CTV campaign can be highlighted here:

A regional hospital wants to target viewers in need of various healthcare solutions. To accomplish this, the hospital strategizes a full-funnel CTV brand awareness campaign that utilizes cross-device retargeting and pre-roll video. Here’ is how it worked:

• CTV Audience Targeting: Engage with viewers on their CTV device in the identified sub-DMA using non-skippable advertisements focused on a range of medical solutions.

• Cross-Device Retargeting: Retarget viewers and address their needs on another device using omnichannel pre-roll video that features skippable advertisements.

• After-Ad Influence and Post-View Website Attribution: Track the number of users who viewed the healthcare ad and search for target keywords or visit the hospital's website.

With a campaign similar to this, you can easily target the right audience members, feed them customized, empathetic messages, and track their actions after viewing the ad.

BENEFITS OF OTT/CTV IN HEALTHCARE

OTT and CTV are among the most essential components of any marketing strategy in advertising today. In healthcare, OTT/CTV is particularly crucial to employ for the following reasons:

Impact & Measurement

OTT/CTV campaigns are far more trackable than linear TV, allowing you to use data segments to optimize campaigns in real-time and adjust future campaigns. Since healthcare already faces many challenges in reaching the right audience, having legally-obtained data and insight to back your current and future actions is essential to competing in the industry. 

Targeting

With laws and regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it is becoming challenging for healthcare businesses to get to know their target audiences!

Thus, it's crucial to have a legal way of targeting the right people with your brand message. Fortunately, you can use components of CTV/OTT to optimize the reach and frequency of your advertisements, ensuring you interact with the right people at the right time.

Cost

Cost is another vital area to address in healthcare, especially if you must maximize your strategies and tactics while reducing ad spending waste to compete with more prominent healthcare companies. You can decrease the potential for wasted impressions, ensuring that your ad dollars are not wasted on actionless views when you implement OTT/CTV advertising to target a specific audience instead of everyone.

GET A HEAD START ON YOUR NEXT HEALTHCARE AD CAMPAIGN

The healthcare advertising industry has experienced incredible growth in recent years. According to eMarketer, digital ad spending has grown by 14.2%, reaching as much as $9.53 billion. This makes it one of the fastest-growing industries aside from consumer electronics and computing products!

To ensure you are taking full advantage of the potential of digital advertising with OTT/CTV, you can partner with Strategus. Our team of experts is available to provide more information about the power of advertising on streaming platforms and devices. Enquire today how you can use consumer data to get in front of the right audience in healthcare.