Navigating Ad Restrictions in Healthcare Marketing

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to be joined by Lindsey Brown, Hedy & Hopp’s very own director of Activation. Hi, Lindsey. 

Lindsey: Hi, Jenny!

Jenny: We’re going to be digging in today about paid media restrictions in healthcare.

So we had a lot of conversations at Schmitt and Dallas. It was just a couple of weeks ago with folks who were either brand new to healthcare marketing. Many of them had many years experience in other industries, but were new to healthcare or folks who are not new to healthcare but have allowed their marketing agencies to really take the reins over the last five years and didn’t really stay up to date on the regulatory environment shifts, and they’re wanting to get caught up on what’s happening.

So, if this is you, this is a great episode to listen in. We’re going to be talking about why there are restrictions in paid media for healthcare marketers, the big restrictions marketers need to be aware of, and then what marketers can do really to, be aware of the future, but also make their campaigns successful today. So, Lindsey, let’s kick off, give us an overview: Why are there restrictions in healthcare? Why can’t we do the fun things that e-commerce companies can do? 

Lindsey: That’s always the question we get. And you know, as marketers, you have to take your take a step back and really put yourself into the shoes of a patient. As a patient, would you want marketers knowing more about you, about searches that you make on the internet, about health, about pages or videos that you’re watching in regards to very specific health conditions?

There’s a lot of, you know, concern over having that kind of data in the hands of big tech or in the hands of really anyone that you haven’t given consent to. And that’s really the purpose of all of these laws, is to ensure that, you know, patients and how people are trying to understand their health, improve their health, access health care, that that is really remained private and remains, a conversation between their physician and themselves as opposed to, you know, their physician, themselves and all of Google, for example. We really want to make sure that that information is protected and kept safe and secure. So, yeah, that’s really kind of why the restrictions are needed. And again, as marketers, we really have to respect that boundary, especially as for many and have all of our clients are in health care. So we know that they understand this really well.

And so be able to partner with them to ensure that information is being secure while also ensuring their marketing is working, is kind of our sweet spot. 

Jenny: Perfect. Well, let’s dive in to what I’m calling the three big hurdles that health care marketers have to jump over. The first one that we’re going to talk about is privacy and HIPAA.

So Lindsey, give us a rundown. How do privacy considerations and laws and HIPAA impact decisions made within paid media? 

Lindsey: So the biggest thing is, you know, we think about consent and offering consent and someone giving consent to share information. And really at the bulk of that is ensuring that their information isn’t shared with third parties, those that they have not agreed to share that information.

And what that has really turned into over the past couple of years is ensuring that that information is not shared with technology companies, especially like Google, where your analytics likely is, and Meta or other advertising platforms where there’s a lot of, engagement, a lot of information being shared. So really, the reason this is the biggest hurdle is it’s really kind of limited marketers ability to employ tracking technologies the way that they used to, where it’s just gather all the information you possibly can, and then we’ll slice down and figure out what exactly we want to work with.

So that’s really the biggest hurdle is, again, ensuring that from tracking technology perspective or big tech or any tech companies, that that information is kept private down to things like the content that you are reading, the information you’re putting into forms, where you are located down to your latitude, longitude, things to that effect are really areas where we’ve had to be really restrictive and ensure that we’re adhering to those particular laws.

Jenny: Yep. And as we’re thinking specifically about paid media activation, regardless of channel, there are some restrictions that that enforce that allow, forces us to enforce. Correct?

Lindsey: Yes, correct.

Jenny: So talk to us a little bit about like conversion pixels. Right. Used to be the gold standard for paid media is still in some other industries. So across all channels, you know, how should we think about conversion pixels now.

Lindsey: Yeah. So really conversion pixels are off limits unless you have some way of employing some type of private analytics tool using server side Google Tag manager or another private server. Really those pixels are essentially sharing information about that user and what they’ve done on your site back with, those platforms where that pixel is coming from.

So if you have a Facebook conversion pixel on your site, anything that a user does where that pixel is found, that’s going right back to Meta and they’re learning all sorts of things about you. So that’s number one, one thing that’s really important that those really should not be used any more whatsoever. 

The other one is list sharing. So a big popular thing that a lot of other companies do is they take lists that either they’ve purchased or that they’ve gathered on their own website, or that they have partnerships with, like second party data. And they use that, upload that into Google, into Meta, with programmatic partners, all sorts of other media partners, and use that for targeting either directly targeting those folks or using, other technologies, kind of figure out what types of people these are and what other types of people they can find that are like those customers. That’s what we call profiling. And that is something that also, not allowed, especially when it comes to patient information. If you’re using your patient lists in Meta or Google or any other platform that is absolutely not allowed anymore because that is constituting sharing patient information with those platforms, even though you’re using it for targeting or, you know, we know that they’re customers of ours, so it’s ok. It’s not okay from a privacy perspective. That’s another big one you have to watch out for. 

Jenny: So let’s talk specifically about Google ads. There are, first of all, some restricted areas or categories where it’s either not allowed or more difficult to advertise in Google Ads. Can you talk about that?

Lindsey: Yeah for sure. So definitely areas of concern will be health care, health and wellness, specifically around reproductive health. I think, political climate and things to that effect really have restricted the use of reaching out to specific types of people or trying to find certain kinds of people for reproductive health information. Weight loss is another one, especially with the expansion of all the new pharmaceuticals out there and different treatments that are available, GLP-1s, what have you. And honestly, some of the, you know, there are some legitimate advertising for that out there. There’s some not so legitimate advertising around there. So again, it’s kind of Google’s way of protecting the consumer from things that aren’t real or, or things that, really you should work with your health care provider on. 

Prescription drugs is another one. That’s a big one. And Google recently announced that they are actually lowering the restrictions on prescription drugs, which there’s a whole whole community of people that are kind of like on one side or the other of this, where on the one hand, as a marketer, if you’re if you’re wanting to share information with with potential patients or potential users of your prescription drugs, you know you want them to be able to find educational materials. You’re not trying to sell them on a drug. You’re not trying to do certain things. You just want them to know that it exists, or you want them to know, like what it’s used for or something like that. 

And so Google has actually limited, or expanded, the use of that within Google. So, where advertisers previously couldn’t do any kind of prescription drug marketing within Google Ads, now they can, so long as it’s informational or for educational purposes only.

The problem is: Who is making that decision? So from from a marketer’s perspective, we could say everything is about education. I’m not pushing it. I’m just I’m just telling you what it is. Google may have a different story. So that’s kind of where the controversy comes in, where, you know, someone may think that it’s an educational campaign, but Google’s like, nope, no, that feels promotional to me. And they kind of get to make the call. So we’ll kind of see how it all plays out. But, it’s interesting in a time where a lot of restrictions are being made in terms of how we can talk about prescription drugs or other therapies, Google’s actually lessening those restrictions, which again, we’ll kind of see how it plays out.

Jenny: What about the Legit Script certification? 

Lindsey: Yeah. So, a lot of times for, for specific areas, especially in things like prescription drugs, I want to say that reproductive health, weight loss, addictive, addiction, things to that effect that are already restricted, in order to run ads for those specific types of, therapies or for specific types of things, you would have to have a Legit Script certification. And that is something that you get through Google. Now, Google doesn’t allow everyone to be certified in that. So again, it has another layer of complexity where Google might think that it’s okay for you to be certified for one thing, but then another company won’t get certified. So again, the playing field isn’t quite even. But Google does make you jump through quite a few hoops to make sure that, you’re not doing anything that might harm the end consumer, which in theory is a really good thing. It’s just, again, how that plays out and ensure it’s consistent and, balanced for everybody. 

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s pivot and talk a little bit about Meta. Meta has made some pretty significant changes over the last three years to what marketers and healthcare can and cannot do. Give us a rundown. 

Lindsey: Yeah. So really, we’ve lost, very specific health related interest targeting. So previously where you could probably look down to a specific kind of condition or a type of symptom or things that effect. Now Meta isn’t really allowing you to do that. There’s a broad health and wellness category, which if you’re a health care marketer, a lot of things go into that, like yoga is in the same category as, you know, heart attack or a heart condition, which are very, very different things. So that was kind of the first thing. All those restrictions being lifted. 

So what that really forced, marketers to do is to think about their services or think about, you know, what they are marketing or what they’re providing information of, really making sure that that creative is hitting on that message because we could at target as finite or because we can’t target is finite as we want to, or that we are accustomed to in things like programmatic or, other areas like direct mail, you know, we have to be more general and Meta. So it really forced marketers to get more creative, and kind of see what messages were drawing folks in, what messages were not, which actually was kind of fun. I think sometimes as marketers, we get so excited about the possibilities of finding very specific individuals, based on their behavior, that we kind of forget that there’s a lot of people out there that probably fit our audience profile that wouldn’t fit into those interests.

So it’s actually been great for us. We’ve had one campaign in particular where Meta was the top performing conversion. Even though it’s a broad health and wellness category, it was for a very specific service, but it really performed amazingly well for our clients, which was like all due to the creative and ensuring that message was really resonating. So again, some restrictions there, but again, you can be creative as marketers. It’s literally what we do all day. So it’s kind of it’s kind of nice to be able to kind of work around those. 

Jenny: Well, with that, let’s talk then about how marketers can pivot. So you talked about really balancing compliance, creativity and results. Talk a little bit more about what marketers should be keeping top of mind if they’re thinking about developing a paid media campaign.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I think the really important part is to think about, again, this is hard for marketers because we want to be very specific, because it’s important. Specificity is important to see the results you want, but kind of taking a broader step back. And like, what overall do we want folks to do. So those CTAs, using more general CTAs that still are applicable to your target audience. For example, “find a doctor” is very different than “schedule an appointment with this doctor now.” Even though we might want them to schedule an appointment with this doctor right now, saying that might get you into a little bit of trouble from a legal perspective, and also might be difficult for you to, to show results on based on the tracking technology—not issues, but, things that we’ve got to get around, Right? So something as simple as “find a doctor,” “schedule a screening,” “learn more.” These are typically things that as we become more sophisticated marketers, we’re like, don’t use learn more. It’s the worst CTA ever. But that is kind of where we’re at. You can use that still to your advantage because it shows that you’re really providing education.

Same thing, with that message, as I mentioned, education really is important. And at the crux of what health care providers and companies want to do is really educate potential patients on what they should do to kind of take their health care into their own hands, and to be really proactive. So I wouldn’t see this as a negative. It’s like, but we want appointments. Yes, you want appointments, but you’ve got to educate your clients first or potential patients first. So let’s really take that, lean into that, and use that in our created to help get around some of the compliance issues. 

So long story boring, the whole point is make sure that you’re really balancing the compliance and the creativity, and don’t be afraid to make something feel a little bit more, general, again, you’re going to find the right people that are interested in moving forward, and then you’ll be able to see those results on the end, on the back end.

Jenny: So one last question, Lindsey. This has been a fabulous overview. Thank you. One last question: I’d love for you to kind of look into your, magic eight ball and give us an idea of what do you think health care marketers need to be thinking about 12, 24, 36 months down the line? Right, budgets continue to get more and more restricted, compliance continues to get stricter and stricter. If I were the director of marketing at a regional hospital system, for example, health system, what should I be thinking about when I’m specifically thinking about paid media? 

Lindsey: So with so much that we’ve heard in other industries, you are going to see some potential with AI-driven targeting. And so what I mean by that is, in a platform such as Meta, there’s actually, a way to teach the algorithm on who you’re looking for, even though you can’t specifically target them based on interest or something else, like an ICD-10 code.

And leveraging something like that will allow that budget to go a lot further. It also will help you from an operations and efficiency standpoint, because you’re not necessarily spending a lot of time doing A/B testing. You’re teaching the algorithm who to find, and learning about what messages are best resonating with them, without having to do a lot of, you know, analysis and things like that. Because on the back end, if we’re going to struggle a little bit on getting down to the exact measurement that we’ve been used to, right, with conversion pixels and optimizing, automatically, you know, we’re going to have to use some tools to help us manage that most effectively. And so AI-driven in targeting or some areas where, we really think we’ll be leaning into to help us both from an efficiency standpoint and from showing improved performance overall. So very excited about the developments there. 

Jenny: Very exciting. Well, if you tuned in today, hopefully this gave you confidence in the future. All of these restrictions truly aren’t things that you need to be afraid of. You need to be aware of them. But as marketers, one of our core competencies is the ability to be creative and to adapt.

So if you look at this through the lens of pivoting with positivity, which is one of Hedy & Hopp’s core values, so say it often. But if you pivot with positivity and really look at this as an opportunity to work those creativity muscles, you really can still drive really strong campaign performance across all of these different media channels.

You just have to get a little creative—and technical—in the way that you implement them. So but don’t give up media still absolutely a strong channel in the healthcare space. You just have to know how to use it correctly. 

So and with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Please share this episode with a team member that you think may find it useful. And subscribe! We drop new episodes almost every Friday, so we’d love to have you as a subscriber. Until next time, have a great weekend and thanks for joining us on today’s episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Cheers!