How to Build an Access Care Campaign in 2024

At its core, access care is all about ensuring that patients have access to the care they need, when they need it and where they need it. These healthcare services are typically the first point of contact, or the “front door,” of your organization for members of the community. As a result, access care campaigns are a critical component of healthcare marketing that help your organization reach and engage with patients.

Strategies for launching a successful access care campaign may vary based on the needs of your organization, but one observation runs true: Digital channels are becoming increasingly important in the mix of strategies for running thriving access care campaigns. 

Defining Access Care

Access care aims to promote and provide affordable, timely and convenient healthcare services to patients. The umbrella of access care includes a variety of services and offerings, such as:

• Primary care: As the first point of contact for patients seeking medical attention, primary care providers offer routine medical care, preventive services and manage chronic conditions.
• Family medicine and internal medicine: Family medicine providers offer comprehensive healthcare services to patients of all ages, including infants, children and adults.
• Pediatrics: Pediatricians specialize in the medical care of children, from infancy through adolescence.
• Urgent, express or walk-in clinics: The words “urgent,” “express” and “walk-in” are often used interchangeably to identify care centers that provide convenient and immediate medical attention for non-life-threatening medical conditions that require prompt attention. These clinics provide walk-in access to care for minor injuries; sick visits, including diagnosis and treatment for flu, strep, COVID-19; and offer care for other urgent medical needs. Urgent, express and walk-in clinics are especially important for patients who do not have a regular primary care provider or cannot schedule an appointment with their regular provider. These services are often available on weekends or after traditional doctor’s offices are closed.
• Retail partnered clinics: These health system-sponsored clinics are located in retail stores, such as pharmacies and supermarkets, and offer basic medical services, such as vaccinations, health screenings, and care for minor illnesses or injuries. While these facilities may have services that overlap with some of your organization’s specific service lines, they can be considered access care.‍
• Telehealth: Telehealth refers to the use of virtual technologies, such as video conferencing, to provide healthcare services remotely. Although it has seen a drop in volume from its peak in 2020 during the pandemic, telehealth remains an essential point of care for dermatology, minor illnesses, mental health and follow-up visits with providers. Telehealth has made it easier for patients to access care without having to leave their homes or take time off from work.

Convenience and accessibility are key drivers for consumer choice in healthcare, and patients are now more involved in determining how they access that care.

Channel Mix and Ad Spend for Your Access Care Campaign

Let's discuss channel strategy in marketing. As we map media to the different phases in the consumer journey, we find that certain channels and tactics work better at different stages. When it comes to access care, some channels are critical:

• Paid search is great for capturing high-intent search volumes.
• Paid social is useful when promoting new locations, providers with capacity and seasonal health topics that might drive access visits. 
• Display advertising is effective in promoting urgent care and telehealth offerings.
• Audio and video advertising is great for reaching people who are watching TV, viewing programming via streaming services or listening to the radio. Formats may include various formats, including streaming radio, terrestrial radio, YouTube, pre-roll, CTV and traditional TV to promote urgent care and telehealth offerings.
• Direct mail is useful for targeting new movers and promoting new providers and locations. Direct mail campaigns targeting new movers have been successful in promoting new providers and locations, as less-crowded mailboxes offer an excellent opportunity for well-placed marketing campaigns to connect with potential customers who may need new or continuing healthcare services.

Prioritizing Your Channel Spend for Primary Care

While you want to prioritize primary care if you have the capacity, you want to avoid cannibalization across all access care services since they target the same consumers. Instead, focus on ensuring effective spending by addressing access as an all-encompassing service line, irrespective of the point of entry.

When you prioritize primary care, you have the opportunity to connect with the highest-margin service offerings, such as pathways to more acute services or connection points for the whole family. Typically, the marginality of primary care and family medicine stacks up at the top of the lineup of urgent care, telehealth and health retail clinics.

While this may seem counterintuitive as there is a lot of competition for other layers of service, such as telemedicine or retail offerings, focusing on primary care first can be the most effective use of finite dollars. By doing so, you can avoid giving away or seeding ground on those other layers of care consumption while still maintaining a strong presence in those areas. 

Should These Campaigns Always Be On?

When it comes to primary care campaigns, it's best to keep them running if your providers have the capacity. Urgent care campaigns should also be ongoing as they are an essential entry point for consumers. However, the decision to keep an urgent care campaign running depends on where they fit in the larger system services of your business.

Typically, we recommend some action-oriented spending to be always on, with flights around awareness from a brand standpoint. For telehealth, we suggest flighted campaigns around peak seasons, such as fall for flu and spring for allergies, to maximize ad spend.

It's important to note that this approach may differ for payer clients and urgent care providers. 

Finding the Right Channel Mix

If you are struggling to reach and engage with potential customers effectively, a funnel approach may be just what you need.

• Top-of-the-funnel channels such as YouTube, pre-roll, streaming radio and terrestrial radio are mainly used for brand awareness and building customer affinity. 
• Social media channels have proven to be very effective for engaging with potential customers and driving conversions, making them ideal for the middle of the funnel.‍
• At the bottom of the funnel, Google Ads for high-intent search are crucial for connecting with customers at the moment they need your services the most.

This funnel approach has proven to be a successful strategy for guiding customers from initial awareness to engagement and, ultimately, to taking action. 

When it comes to channel mix recommendations for healthcare services, we suggest allocating roughly 75% of your budget to primary care and the remaining 25% to awareness campaigns higher up in the funnel. For primary care and urgent care services, direct mail has proven to be effective, especially for seasonal or specific services. Urgent care services require a balance between awareness and action, with a 50/50 split being ideal. 

When marketing across all three layers of the funnel, be mindful of ad spend cannibalization and the cost of reaching your audience. From a budget allocation standpoint, we generally recommend 60% toward primary care, 35% toward urgent care, and 5% toward telehealth, assuming there is adequate provider capacity across all layers of care and the consumer experience is taken into account.

Campaign Assets and Content Strategy Tips

Your landing pages and ads are critical for campaign success. The consumer experience should be smooth and informative. Try some of these tips:

• Align landing pages for keyword research. 
• Create content that is genuinely beneficial to users.
• Designate a member of your staff to contact all form submissions so inbound leads are contacted and converted.
• Experiment with ad asset formats such as video and custom graphics.
• Feature locations prominently.
• If you’re using an online scheduling tool or MyChart, connect your vendor with your marketing partner to follow up on lead tracking and reporting.

Organic Content Strategy

In the realm of access care services—much like any other specialized service line—there is a high demand for information. However, the focus here is more on addressing day-to-day health concerns rather than complex clinical information. Therefore, when creating blog and website content and overall strategy, it is important to tailor it accordingly.

• Blog content: A significant portion of your blog content (up to 75%) should relate to access care, including wellness content, to address common questions about minor illnesses and injuries. Drive your blog content strategy based on your target audience and create content that is specific, actionable and written with SEO performance standards in mind. 
• Service line content. Website content should focus more on the services provided, information on conditions and treatments, locations, and providers.

It is crucial to consider these factors while building a successful marketing approach for access care. Blog content often provides the educational information that consumers expect from basic healthcare services that provide access to care.

A Quick Note About Compliance

No discussion on this subject would be complete without a bit of reference to compliance. As of December 2022, the definition of PHI (protected health information) has been expanded. IP addresses should be treated as PHI. Bottom line: A business associate agreement (BAA) should be in place for everything involving your digital marketing efforts.

It's important that you have a way to strip PHI from those work streams, and there are many ways to do this. At True North Custom, we use a consumer data platform that sits between the digital properties and the ad platforms and ensures we're scrubbing and securing all PHI in a way that complies with regulations. It is vital to take action and discuss PHI with your marketing agency or partner if you haven’t already ensured your marketing efforts comply with OCR guidance. 

Launching Access Care Campaigns

By implementing these strategies, you'll be able to create a more effective marketing plan that resonates with your target audience. Remember to continually measure and analyze your results, making any necessary adjustments along the way to optimize your overall performance.