Jenny is joined by Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Paid Media, Miranda Ochsner, to break down the top paid media trends for 2025. They discuss insights from the 2024 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report, including why 72% of marketers plan to boost their ad budgets despite economic uncertainty and the importance of balancing performance marketing with long-term brand building. TikTok’s growing role in healthcare marketing and its impact on cross-platform ad strategies also takes center stage.
They also share some reminders when it comes to remarketing and retargeting strategies including the shift away from website pixel-based retargeting, as well as Meta’s restrictions on healthcare advertising and Google’s new AI-driven bidding tools.
Connect with Miranda:
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandamochsner/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we’re very proud to be the producers of this podcast.
Today, I am joined by our very own director of paid media, Miranda Ochsner, and we’re going to be talking about some of the paid media trends that are happening in healthcare right now, especially as we’re going into 2025. There’s a lot of moving pieces, new platforms, and lots of changes to existing platforms.
So let’s jump right in. Miranda, to get started, I know that Nielsen released their annual marketing report on the 2024 report. I’d love if you could walk through some of the key insights and trends that Nielsen shared.
Miranda: So, every year, Nielsen releases these reports at the end of the year, just kind of what they’ve [00:01:00] seen over the course of this past year.
But as we’re looking into the future, and it really, helps paid media teams just truly understand what to kind of look out for, especially in our very fragmented media landscape things to your point are constantly changing. So we, you know, we want to make sure we’re staying abreast of all of the topics.
So, there were 4 key insights that we really pulled from that. Really the 1st 1 being an increase in spending. I know there’s been. Some pullback over the last couple of years on paid media budgets and how we’re dispersing those funds and whatnot. But based on this report, about 70, a little over 70 percent of marketers are planning to increase their budgets and a majority of that really being prioritized in digital channels specifically social, but also the retail media network space just from an effectiveness standpoint, really maximizing.
All levels of the funnel with that, whether you’re in the awareness, you’re in that interest phase, or if you’re in the conversion phase speaking of conversion, the 2nd key insight was really focused around performance marketing versus brand building. You [00:02:00] know, we, as marketers always want to aim for that holistic ROI.
But many have been prioritizing those short-term performances which, you know, really leaves this opportunity and potentially miss, you know, this is for brands to do those brand building initiatives. So we really need to make sure we’re focusing on both in that full funnel because we don’t want to risk that.
Really don’t want to risk that long-term brand equity that brands take so long to build up, right? We can’t, we don’t want to, we don’t want to miss those opportunities. And third, the insight we found was just some media strategy challenges. To your point, the channels are constantly changing, targeting, especially in healthcare. You know, the healthcare space, we’re really having to find this balance of traditional and digital media, but we need to truly understand that optimal reach.
What should we, you know, what should we be under investing in and really truly understanding what that balance is. And that all [00:03:00] comes down to audiences and goals and how we’re measuring them across the board. Which leads into the fact that fit, or excuse me, the fourth insight measurement gaps, you know, there are a ton of tools out there.
And marketers really aren’t utilizing tools that are evaluating both traditional and digital channels at the same time. It’s very siloed of looking at the traditional very upper funnel, but knowing that they can trickle down into that lower funnel. And same on the, you know, on the digital side, really focusing on the more bottom-funnel.
And that’s really missing holistic insights. And, you know, when you’re looking at these effective media campaigns and strategies. Especially around messaging and channel placement. You want to make sure you’re looking at everything holistically and how everything is affecting one another.
Jenny: Yeah, I will say those last two points. I feel we saw really strongly with a lot of our new clients coming over from working with other agencies. Over-reliance on digital and not really having a strong traditional. Media strategy in place, which at heady and hop, we do both traditional and [00:04:00] digital. So we’re able to really provide that holistic strategy for them.
And then the lack of measurements and effective reporting is still something we’re seeing every single day. Folks just aren’t really receiving those comprehensive ROI reports to understand what impact their media is having on them.
Miranda: Right. And with those reports, Jenny, you really, you don’t want to just do a data dump. You want to provide some actionable insights and recommendations of what we’re seeing. Because, you know, paid is only one piece of the puzzle, right? There’s it can affect very many different things, right? So we want to make sure that we’re using those advanced analytics, but also Continuing forward with a diverse media mix and not just relying so heavy in one channel or the other.
Jenny: Yep, absolutely. The next topic I would love to talk about is TikTok. So, a lot of our clients and just in general, we, you know, we were at SHSMD and HCIC and we were just lots of chatter around folks beginning to use TikTok through the lens [00:05:00] of course, organic, you know, content creation and posting, but really starting to start looking at the paid opportunities within TikTok.
So I’d love if you could chat a little bit about the platform in general, and then also about their new partnership with Nielsen to enhance the cross-media ad tracking capabilities.
Miranda: Yeah. So, you know, TikTok is still relatively new in this, the social space, if you want to call it that that they, you know, they are listening to they are listening to the folks that are utilizing their platform, whether they’re just scrolling for hours, engaging with content or from the paid advertising side of it, you know, depending on kind of what video you want to put out there.
And you know, you have the option to have a six-second video. You have the option to have a three-minute video. You have the option to have a 10-minute video. So it’s really kind of dependent on from an organic as well as paid, what kind of campaign you’re going after and what kind of audience you’re going after.
Really love the adaptability of the platform as it continues to grow. [00:06:00] Now there are still some limitations specifically around targeting, especially in the healthcare space. But. You know, just there’s the overall privacy concern with TikTok as well as there’s still a new platform and trying to figure out those balances to remain compliant and whatnot.
So, specific and, you know, specific and healthcare you know, TikTok does have a role in health education you know, that the hashtag healthtalk is a big one. I know that there’s hundreds of millions, if not billions of views with that hashtag in place you know, so TikTok, you know, TikTok does trust influencers over medical professionals a little bit more, but, you know, that opens up that misinformation and we really want to be mindful of that if you are a brand that wants to move forward within the TikTok platform you know, healthcare providers, so HCPs in their specialties, as well as pharmaceutical companies, are really leveraging TikTok because TikTok Thinking of it potentially a little bit more, a little bit more upper funnel with that, just from the standpoint of educating and engaging audiences you know, [00:07:00] they’re making leaps, you know, they’re making giant leaps and how they do this targeting and whatnot, but from a healthcare standpoint and from a literacy standpoint in healthcare, we have to be really careful about the management to make sure it is that reliable information.
So there’s still this kind of a balance of, you know, yeah, TikTok’s a great platform, especially for millennial and Gen Z audiences but also understanding to have a trusted professional and make sure that we’re not pushing out misinformation.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And A couple of just general things.
I feel like we have to acknowledge TikTok is still facing a potential ban in the United States in January. Everything that I have read basically indicates that it won’t be an overnight shutdown. But in general, our advice to clients has been. To really leverage more bottom-funnel tactics before you begin spending money on TikTok.
So TikTok definitely can have a place in a strategy, but you need to make sure that you’re really capturing folks who are looking actively, you know, for [00:08:00] the services, the procedures your specialty and the areas that you provide before we start, you know, digging into TikTok. And really also, we generally recommend that you need to have a strong content marketing strategy in place holistically, and then paid on TikTok can support that versus just moving forward with TikTok ads.
Miranda: Right. And with TikTok you know, from what we’re seeing, audiences don’t want to see an overproduced message. They want it to feel very, organic and just very natural, just not so overproduced, which is very different than what we see on CTV and Linear and whatnot. So truly understand that platform and those nuances.
I would recommend before any kind of investment in TikTok, really having a clear content plan in place because it’s not just one video you have to put out there. It’s multiple different videos because with how consumers are consuming media, especially in TikTok and engaging with it, they want fresh messaging all of the time, which then goes into production.
So it has a, you know, it has a trickling effect when it comes to those ad budgets.
Jenny: Absolutely. [00:09:00] I’d love to move now to Google. So Google is constantly evolving, constantly rolling out new products to be able to get all of us to spend more. I saw that for the first time their search share of search ads is going to be dipping.
I think it was below 50%. And let me pull this article up real quick. I want to make sure that I am referencing it correctly. But it’s really going to be dropping. So what they’re actively trying to do is yep. So, let’s see, it was AdWeek launched an article and they said that Google is going to be dipping below 50 percent as far as their share of the search advertising market in the US by 2025 for the first time in a decade.
So they’re kind of in hustle mode, right? Like, what can we do to innovate? What can we do to kind of get some of that market share back? I think it’s interesting. Some of their AI-powered results are beginning to compete with their search results. So the innovation they’re doing for consumers is also [00:10:00] hurting them on the search side, because they’re actually providing zero-click content.
So you can get that information without clicking through to the person’s website who provided that content. So one of the things that they announced was an AI power tool called search bidding exploration as part of its smart bidding suite. And I’d love for you to tell us a little more about what we know about that so far.
Miranda: Sure. So it’s still, you know, it’s still in the testing phase, but you know, it’s interesting. AI is just really you never know what you’re going to get with all of these new AI tools coming in. So, with this specific tool, it’s part of their bidding suite, their smart bidding suite. So it’s, this is really designed to help those larger advertisers optimize campaigns towards TROAS.
So, obviously our return on ad spend, but specifically, there’s this new phrase with the T in front of it. So that’s adding the target return on ad spend as well as those broad match keywords. So, you know, the tool will identify low traffic yet very [00:11:00] valuable search queries and then it adjusts that target row as anywhere 10%.
And then it just kind of expands that reach beyond those traditional search terms. So it’s opening an opportunity of things. You know, we potentially missed in a stride. Your agencies have potentially missed whether it’s content strategy, keywords social listing, are there certain things that folks are talking about that we might not have in messaging, just really, truly understanding how it gives that opportunity to expand what’s currently being searched for.
Jenny: Yeah, and this is a trend that we’ve seen not only with our clients but then also we heard lots of buzz about it at SHSMD and HCIC is agencies seeing traffic volumes changing for their search campaigns. So, for example, those bigger, broader buckets that are more educational and more upper funnel, less traffic coming in there because folks don’t have to click through to understand what a knee replacement surgery is.
Miranda: It’s right there in front of them.
Jenny: And so, I think this is a great [00:12:00] reminder for folks that as they’re thinking about their strategy for 2025, really make sure that you’re beginning to incorporate some AIO so an I optimization and old kind of thing and SEO that an I O and your overall strategy to really compliment that media strategy because, as we all know, everything works in cohesion together.
Miranda: Yeah, it’s just not a set it and forget it anymore. You constantly have to be shifting and pivoting to see kind of what your consumers and whatnot are really going to get, you know, going for when they’re doing their searches what they’re sharing what they’re engaging with.
There are some concerns with this. You know, it’s just it’s restricted to advertisers with very large budgets. So if you have a 5,000 or 10,000 a month budget, this might not be an option for you. But this is definitely some of those bigger ones. Those bigger ad spends as well as the concern just around transparency.
As well as those very granular insights. To your point, folks are seeing performance dip, which goes into that larger concern [00:13:00] of like, how can we optimize? How can we do X, Y and Z? So really what is that balance as we implement this tool?
Jenny: Absolutely. I’m going, I’m saving our favorite. For last, the one that everybody’s freaking out about—Meta.
But I have one other topic that I want to throw into the mix and that’s retargeting. And I’ve talked about retargeting and through the lens of privacy, but for folks that have been ignoring those podcasts because they don’t want to think about privacy, I’m going to mix it into this media conversation.
So you’re going to hear it a general reminder that you can no longer do retargeting or remarketing based off of your website visitors. So we can do in platform retargeting. If somebody has engaged with your ad within Google, you can retarget them in Google or within Facebook. You could retarget them using Facebook’s own targeting platforms or targeting capabilities, but you can no longer put pixels on your website to target them if they visited your site and did not convert.
Miranda: Yes, just remarketing hurts a little bit, but you know, just stay compliant. It’s what you have [00:14:00] to do.
Jenny: Yeah, exactly. So if you’re still doing retargeting or remarketing, you need to cut it out. Stop uploading lists, stop using retargeting pixels. If you’re in healthcare, general reminder. Yeah, now I’d love to end talking about some shifts that we have seen with Meta.
They’re constantly changing. They were one of the main reasons all of this, all of the class action lawsuits happened around pixels and folks being accused of sharing data through the lens of considerations to the sharing user data with Facebook and in return for receiving conversion information, lots of podcasts on that.
But made an announcement that they are going to be really restricting a lot of data specifically for healthcare organizations starting in January. 2025. Now we are really excited about this because our clients aren’t really going to be affected based off the way that we set up campaigns. I’d love if you could give a general overview of what the announcement was and then why our [00:15:00] clients don’t really have anything to worry about.
Miranda: Yeah. So Meta, you know, I believe that came out about two weeks ago, a week and a half ago. It’s still very fresh. And I think to your point, folks are like, What are we doing? What is going on? What do we need to shift and whatnot? You know, so these, I believe these restrictions are going to start January 2025.
So 3 weeks. So it’s coming quick. These you know, these changes are really going to include the data sharing for specific. Healthcare related websites and apps. So, fully restricted properties like condition-specific sites will lose access to conversion campaigns. Mid restricted properties, you know, are really facing limited optimization for those lower funnel activities.
So really anything that is mid low to low. we, you know, recommend rethinking. Like, how are we going to utilize Meta within our strategy? Because it really needs to be a little bit more. It doesn’t need to be. It has to be a more upper funnel. You know, really [00:16:00] recommending as we move into 2025, those healthcare advertisers.
Whether it’s the agency you work with, whether you’re in-house, whatever that looks like, really advise to audit those data sources. You know, we want to make sure that we’re doing our checks and balances to make sure there are no pixels in place, none of, you know, nothing of that lives on the site to remain compliant and really adapting those strategies to focus on those private, you know, those privacy-friendly methods.
Jenny: Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the changes we made. What a year ago, the way that we set up campaigns with Meta and why we’re pretty confident that our clients in a great place going into 2025.
Miranda: Yeah. So we, you know, you never know what you’re going to get thrown with some of these platforms.
So, you know, Hedy & Hopp really took a proactive way of approaching how we’re utilizing Metta, both Facebook and Instagram in our strategies. And it is really focused on those upper funnel engagement metrics versus the lower funnel. We’re really [00:17:00] thinking awareness, really thinking engagement when we are utilizing those placements.
So making sure we’re tracking those metrics properly while completely having nothing to do with pixel placements on the website and whatnot. And if we see those through our audits, we’re raising the flag of like, nope, we don’t recommend using this. We’re going to shift our focus here and really outline those as we go through the media strategy as we’re walking through benchmarks, whether it is more a very upper CTR metric, whether it’s a video view, or if it’s just some kind of engagement within the ad itself.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the things they specifically call out is you can no longer do audience creations for retargeting or lookalike audiences. Thank goodness we’ve been reaching this for so long. Like we shouldn’t be doing this in healthcare friends. Right? So I think the general summary is if you’re using meta and you haven’t really thought about how you’re using it, how you’re tracking conversions, and you’ve kind of been on autopilot now is the time that you need to really take a good look at [00:18:00] your campaigns, the structure, how you’re tracking conversions the kinds of functionality that Facebook offers that you are or are not using to really make sure that you’re going to be in a good place.
Miranda: They’re either going to shut your campaigns down or not let you set them up at all. So it’s better to be proactive. But I know we’re three weeks out till the new year, but really start thinking through that, you know, immediately as these are part of larger, you know, strategy conversations that are starting in January.
Jenny: And even thinking about worst case scenario, if you need to turn meta off or plan on massively restricted spending for the first month or two as you really clean everything up in your account and set to get into a good place. It’s better to be proactive and know that you’re likely going to see massively reduced volume in Meta, you know, then be midway through the month and start looking at reports and, you know, then be just like, what is going on?
Miranda: You know? Let’s be four steps ahead and not six behind.
Jenny: Exactly. Exactly. Well, Miranda, thank you for coming [00:19:00] on today. I think it has been every year in healthcare. 1 of our core values that Hedy & Hopp is pivot with positivity because we’re constantly thrown new things, which all of us find really fun.
It’s fun to find ways to continuously allow our clients to evolve effectively reach folks that need that care. And help them, you know, find the resources that they need to be able to schedule that appointment. So thank you for coming on today to be able to provide a summary of what folks can expect as far as 2025 media strategies for listeners.
If you are kind of unsure. The things you heard today are new to you. Your internal team hasn’t been talking about them. Your agency hasn’t been proactively bringing them to you. Give us a call. Our media capabilities are one of our strongest within our organization, and we work with providers and payors all across the country to help them reach their acquisition goals.We’d love to chat with you. So with [00:20:00] that, thank you so much for tuning in. In please like, and subscribe this episode, send it future episode ideas my way. If you have any, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
