How to Excel at Women’s Health Engagement

Building meaningful relationships with women is a key priority for healthcare organizations, and with good reason: As the CEO of the household, women drive healthcare decision-making for the entire family. They propel revenue for service lines beyond women’s health, including access care services, such as pediatrics and urgent care.

At True North, we believe effectively engaging women requires understanding what they need from a brand in a way that’s inclusive and sensitive to their diverse health journeys. As a marketer, you can’t affect the quality of care women receive, but you can help ensure they find the information they need. That’s where content marketing is valuable.

You can positively influence the patient experience by identifying your audiences and offering content that meets everyone’s needs. A crucial step for building relationships with women is developing an intentional persona strategy that’s aligned with your business goals. 

Taking Personas Beyond ’Wellness Wanda’

When designing your persona strategy, look beyond “Wellness Wanda”—a one-dimensional stand-in we hear referenced frequently when talking to marketers. Personas should be created with intention and nuance and match the needs of your specific audience. As a result, strategies and content should look quite different across common business use cases. For example:

• In the OB-GYN space, recognizing diversity is crucial. Not every woman hoping to start a family is a healthy 30-year-old who understands prenatal care. Many women decide to have children later in life, have struggled to get pregnant or find themselves pregnant with little understanding of prenatal health. Your content needs to reflect this constellation of journeys to motherhood.
• In the access care realm, look to simplify the patient journey. Women want to get care in a timely manner, so be intentional about what you promote. If you’re promoting primary care, for example, ensure the relevant providers or services are available and that the scheduling process, whether online or by phone, is seamless.
• When it comes to healthy aging services, conversion is the focus. Women need routine screenings, specialty care and treatment for menopause symptoms. Sharing meaningful content in an effective format can help women find the care they need as they navigate their unique aging journey. Seminars and events, for example, can help create a sense of community and a connection to your brand.

Aligning Marketing With Business Strategy to Guide Persona Development

To start developing your personas, you first need to define the audience with whom you need to build a relationship. Using the market research available to you helps you understand who you’re seeking to engage with, which, in turn, can help you tailor your content to your audience’s needs.

It’s fine for your content to take a one-size-fits-all approach at the bottom of the funnel. But with middle- and top-of-funnel content, you have an opportunity to educate and engage women in a more targeted way. Use patient stories representing diverse experiences—unique pregnancy journeys, for example—to relate to women and offer interactive content, such as guides and quizzes, to address specific health needs.

Blog content can align with specific personas in a way that is not transactional. Blogs can build connections and answer some of the many health-related questions women have every day. While there are other websites and resources that provide the same answers, many are selling products. A local healthcare organization can offer the same information backed by the trusted expertise of its providers. You can enforce this credibility with quotes from your medical providers.

In addition, blogs are versatile, especially when it comes to speaking to moms. Short-form blog content can answer narrow, urgent questions, such as what to do for a 3-month-old who has a fever in the middle of the night. Long-form blogs, on the other hand, can equip moms with the information to make difficult decisions, like how to talk to their teenager about sexual health.

Creating Your Women’s Health Engagement Campaign

Once you’ve settled on your business goal and campaign and persona strategies, it’s time to design a women’s engagement campaign that connects with consumers at key points along their journey.

• At the top of the funnel, blogs and social media build awareness and engagement. Blogs, for example, answer questions about nutrition trends, heart-health tips, sunscreen and other health-related topics while building an affinity for your brand. Instagram is the ideal platform to promote women-focused, lighthearted health content, whereas Facebook may be a better choice for more serious content.
• The middle of the funnel is all about education. Here, two effective tools are quizzes and care guides. Quizzes work well for conditions or services that apply to women across the board, such as mammography. They allow you to build a relationship, capture first-party data and follow up a few days after they take the quiz. Care guides work best for complex, specific conditions, such as how to navigate a high-risk pregnancy.
• The goal at the bottom of the funnel is conversion. Ensure you provide a clear call to action to make it easy for women to schedule an appointment or get the service(s) they need from you.

Moving From Funnel to Ad Channels: Prioritize Paid Search

Working with a partner agency allows you to translate the decision-making funnel to ad channels and determine how to structure your budget. You may want to focus first on paid search because it will generate an immediate business impact. 

Ideally, you want a 50/50 breakdown of paid search and other channels, but that’s not always possible—at least not right away—with limited healthcare marketing budgets. If you only have enough dollars to get a 10% impression share with paid search, you’re probably not going to perform well. So, at True North, we work with our clients to map out paid search first, and then, with the remaining resources, determine where to deploy social and display advertising and more as we prove value.

The Value of Gated Content

Most content should be free of charge to the public. However, in some cases, hospitals may want to “gate” or protect content by requiring users to provide some form of information (such as an email address and name) before they can access it. 

If you’re wondering whether to gate your content, ask yourself: Is this type of content free elsewhere? If the answer is “yes,” then your content should be free, too. To be gate-worthy, your content should be unique, proprietary, helpful and meaningful to the consumer.

For example, a downloadable guide about your hospital’s obstetrics services likely doesn’t need to be gated. A more appropriate asset to gate would be a care guide about navigating a specific pregnancy condition, such as gestational diabetes. You want consumers to find value in the asset and give them a reason to stay connected to your brand.

Getting Creative

Partnering with a top-notch creative team can help ensure your women’s health engagement campaign delivers the high impact and revenue you need. You want your efforts to:

• Ensure the individual assets you use align with your business goal
• Reflect a consistent brand strategy across disparate campaigns, channels and service lines
• Take risks to help your brand stand out in the market

Taking risks with creative isn’t easy. It can be difficult to look beyond what you’ve done in the past or what’s prevalent in the market. A high-quality team can bring a fresh perspective and arm you with data to present to the C-suite to defend your risk-taking.

Don’t Overlook Digital Compliance

There are many ways to personalize engagement strategy and leverage first-party data that satisfies the Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) guidance for HIPAA compliance.

You need to be able to trust your partners to execute within a compliant environment. True North led the way in the healthcare industry in HHS OCR compliance by developing an identity-masking solution for ad platforms and organic traffic analytics.

Exemplifying Empowerment

Ultimately, by engaging with women, you want to empower them to achieve their healthiest selves. An example of a campaign that does just that is Beaufort Memorial’s Easy Peasy, a play on the well-known Know Your Lemons initiative.

True North partnered with Beaufort Memorial on Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy, a twice-per-year coupon campaign for a $99 screening mammogram. Beaufort Memorial has used this clever campaign to sell vouchers for affordable mammograms to women in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the community has responded strongly.

Crafting the Right Campaign at the Right Time

Effective women's health campaigns, such as the Easy Peasy initiative, make mammography affordable and accessible. They break down barriers to critical health services and foster a sense of community among women. The positive response highlights the power of such campaigns in empowering women to prioritize their health. As we explore innovative engagement methods, our work serves as an inspiring example of achieving through creative outreach and genuine care.