Best practices for a healthcare promotional campaign

The Illinois Health Insurance Marketplace, the official body in charge of promoting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the state, surpassed federal expectations when it enrolled more than 622,000 residents in its first year, despite widespread political opposition and the magnitude of the effort.

This success was in part due to its multipronged “Get Covered Illinois” campaign. That push inherently had an educational component because of the new system's complexity, but it was ultimately about selling state residents on Obamacare and getting them to enroll.

“This is the largest change in the history of our healthcare system,” said Jose Munoz, the state's chief marketing officer for the Get Covered Illinois campaign. “There were a number of challenges.”

Top among those obstacles was that the campaign promoted a completely new brand aimed at a broad audience.

“The brand didn't exist yet, there was a lot of confusion about it and our target market was the whole state,” said Dan Consiglio, creative director at Downtown Partners Chicago, which worked on the campaign. That target audience was also highly diverse, especially in terms of ages and ethnic backgrounds.

Then there were the typical hurdles associated with using marketing to promote healthcare, which needs a different approach than traditional campaigns used to sell cat food or shoes. Healthcare is a very personal topic that many consumers simply want to avoid.

Some best practices to help make a promotional healthcare campaign successful include:

Don't hesitate to let the experts talk. When SPM Marketing & Communications worked on the “You Have Us” spot for Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center in Boston, a key part to building the campaign was talking to healthcare specialists from the hospital to understand what they do and how they do it. The agency found these oncologists so enthusiastic about their practice that SPM decided to let them talk in the spot. “We needed to convey that passion in our campaign,” said Patti Winegar, managing partner at SPM. “It makes it less scary.”

Be understandable and relatable. With healthcare, it's always important not to get lost in medical jargon but to make it easy to understand for the target audience. “We used analogies,” Winegar said, adding that the agency was careful to make sure that words weren't too technical. “You need to talk to the audience like you would talk to your neighbor, rather than focus on statistics and science.”

Focus on the positive. Instead of showing the dark side of an illness, a campaign should focus on patients feeling better thanks to healthcare. “Healthcare is a very personal decision and a very emotionally charged issue,” said Cynthia McCafferty, senior vice president and senior partner at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which worked on the “Cover Missouri” campaign to enroll state residents in the ACA. She added that focusing on the positive in this campaign meant promoting the opportunity to obtain healthcare rather than pointing to the penalty faced by those who didn't enroll.

Use a variety of channels. There might be a temptation to lean on digital media to cut down promotional costs, but it can't be expected to have the same power and produce the responsiveness as when used with other channels such as TV and radio. This is especially true in the case of the ACA since so many different audiences had to be reached. “Get Covered Illinois” used digital media, including YouTube videos, to reach millennials, as well as specialized media such as satirical newspaper the Onion. To reach the different ethnic populations, it turned to more traditional media and community-based channels. In Missouri, some digital media proved to be effective with those in their 40s and 50s, while millennials wanted to talk face to face with people who could explain the new law and how it could benefit them. “You need to have multiple channels,” said Nancy Kelley, program director at the Missouri Foundation for Health, noting that they also used fliers at grocery stores. “It's a repeated exposure.”