If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’ve heard Jenny say loud and clear that remarketing is off the table in healthcare. But this week, we’re adding an asterisk. Heidi Hammond, Senior Paid Media Specialist at Hedy & Hopp, joins the show to explore the very specific ways healthcare marketers can still ethically and compliantly remarket to audiences, even in a post-pixel world.
From Meta’s platform-owned signals to the storytelling power of ad sequencing, Jenny and Heidi break down what’s possible when you rethink remarketing through a privacy-first lens. They also cover what’s absolutely still off-limits and how new platform tools are shifting what compliance-friendly performance looks like.
Connect with Heidi:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiehammond
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Further your understanding of what compliance means for healthcare marketing and get certified for it here: https://wearehipaasmart.com/
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Jenny: Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host and the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am very excited today to have our very own Heidi Hammond. She’s the senior paid media specialist here at Hedy & Hopp, and she is joining us to talk about HIPAA-compliant retargeting.
So I have told you all on prior podcasts over and over and over. Retargeting is absolutely out of our life at this point. Right. In health care, it’s no longer allowed. Well, there’s actually a big asterisk to that statement. And Heidi’s here to walk us through what that asterisk entails. And what you actually can still do within healthcare marketing when it comes to retargeting.
So, Heidi, I’d love if you could start us off by explaining retargeting in a broad sense for anyone who perhaps isn’t super involved in paid media, and then dig in and explain how healthcare is different.
Heidi: Yes. So retargeting is basically where you’re able to take signals, from people, typically on your website would be your non-healthcare industry favorite.
And you target them based on having visited your site or even a certain section of your site. And it’s really powerful, and it often performs super well when you’re outside of healthcare. And that’s where I’ve come from for most of my life. Is not being in healthcare. This is I’ve just joined the healthcare industry in the past year.
And so, I’ve typically had my full funnel strategy of okay, I target, I have my top of funnel, mid funnel and I work them down through retargeting. And I came into healthcare. And that is, you know, I’ve had to sit and cross off a bunch of those items. So, but the thing is not everything is crossed off.
There are still options for helping people to move down that funnel.
Jenny: I love it. So one thing that I will say first before I get on to my next question is I used to work at Amazon. And what’s really interesting is when I was at Amazon, they actually started getting tons of consumer pushback because Amazon was ruining people’s Christmas.
So moms would hop on the family laptop and buy a present or go shopping for a present, and then the kids or the spouse would hop on later and they’d get retargeting ads for those items she was looking at. So even though it still is legally allowed in other industries, there’s still a little bit of consumer ick around it.
Right. Around, like, maybe we don’t feel so great about it. So even outside of healthcare marketers are trying to be smarter about how tightly they remarket or retarget and what the message is and how closely aligned it is. But it’s I’m so glad that, you know, we’re talking specifically about this in healthcare because there’s so many additional legal ramifications.
So let’s talk about, in platform retargeting. Right? Because that’s kind of what we’re left with. If we can’t target folks based off of going to our website and leaving and not doing the action, what we do have left is actually retargeting them within a specific platform. So, Heidi, how can you maximize in platform retargeting? And can you explain the tactic called platform owned signals?
Heidi: Yes. So platform-owned signals are anything that’s owned say by Meta. So if somebody is coming and interacting with your page or with your ad, or watching your video, you can create audiences within Meta targeting those people. And this is HIPAA-compliant because this isn’t based on any it’s not anyone’s been on your site. This is kept within Meta aggregated, anonymized, and usable.
So, as long as you also keep your messaging compliant as well. So there’s that. We’ll get to that in a little bit. But, you’re basically this is super powerful. So, a few examples are video watchers. And that’s probably my favorite because you can say, hey, if someone has watched 25%, 50, 75 or 95% of my video, you choose which one over however many days, the last 60 days.
Now, say this video was, okay, here’s who we are. This is what you know, these are our values. This is you know, I’m thinking of this in a hospital. You know, I have a lot of healthcare clients in hospitals. So, you know, these are our values and how we care for you. Well, if they’ve watched 95, 75, or even 50% of that video, there’s a good chance that they’re ready for the next message, a little bit more about you.
Maybe if you’re doing something with labor and delivery, it’s like, hey, here’s an actual tour, here’s a testimonial, here’s some of these value propositions that are just going to be a little bit lower funnel, answering those frequently asked questions. And, you know, they’re ready for it. So you’re remarketing. It’s just using it, doing it in a safe way.
Jenny: Yeah. I always talk about the walled garden philosophy, where basically your website and all of your first-party data really is in a walled garden with really high walls. Right? Everything like Meta lives outside of that walled garden, so you cannot take data from them and use it for marketing campaigns. Like for targeting. And they can’t do the same back.
Right? We don’t want Meta to have any information about what happens on our site, but if it sticks within Meta’s ecosystem, then it’s allowed again, as long as you are compliant from the lens of messaging.
Heidi: Yes. And that’s a really good way to describe it. And there’s actually there’s honestly so many more audiences within Meta’s walled garden. Like, I think we forget about it sometimes, even as a marketer.
I go back in there and I’m like, there are actually like video watchers, is just one of them. You can target page viewers, like your business Facebook page or engagers or followers, just to your page. But the same goes for Instagram and for all of your ads. So now you have a ton of different, platform owned signals and audiences that you can target and test against each other.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we’re going to, you know, continue talking about content throughout this. But again, having a good content strategy sure makes paid media team much easier, right? If you have something engaging to share. Because if you don’t have a video that they’re engaging with, then you certainly aren’t going to have those watch signals to market back towards.
Heidi: Absolutely. Yep.
Jenny: Perfect. So what about ad sequencing? Talk about that a little. Yeah. So this one is another method that is worth testing. It’s again not direct or probably like real remarketing, but it’s a way to maybe kind of hack the system a little bit and try to get people through the stages of the funnel, without obviously fully retargeting them.
So this is available. You can do this in Meta just with the way that you target. But there’s actually like an official ad sequencing, ad type within YouTube ads. So this applies to both. But basically what you’re doing is you’re storytelling and you’re saying, okay, I’m going to take this audience and I’m going to saturate them with this message, which is your awareness message.
And once you’ve and that actually is, I find in healthcare, a lot of times we have, we kind of like tight goes around different hospitals. So you can really like saturate that audience and then say after a few weeks or concurrently, then say, okay, you’ve heard this message, you’ve heard who we are. Now we’re going to show you the next one.
So you’re not narrowing that in normal remarketing. It’s kind of narrowing the people as you go. This one, you’re going to keep saturating that full audience, but you’re just going to kind of say, okay, you’ve heard the first message, now you’re going to hear the next message. Now you’ve heard this message, let’s get you to book that appointment.
So, that’s how it would work in Meta. In YouTube, they actually you can create a sequence where you say, okay, this is the order. I want someone to see these videos, and it’ll just feed. And that’s nice because it’s at the individual level. So it’ll just feed them the videos one at a time. So that’s another way to kind of work around.
And I never used it before because I was like, oh, I can just retarget them. Like, why do people use this ad sequencing? And you know what? Turns out it’s really helpful for us in healthcare who have our hands tied a little bit.
Jenny: I love that, and one call out I want to have. And Heidi, I know you and the team do this.
I just want to make sure our listeners understand this each some states have, targeting requirements or exclusion. So for example, some states don’t allow you to do radius targeting like so trying to target folks a certain number of miles around a hospital system, thinking about like drive time, and the choices they would make based off of that.
So sometimes you can do that, other times you have to do a zip code or county-oriented targeting. So, do make sure our team, when we do our media plan, we always dig in. One of the first questions is what are the state laws we have to comply with related to messaging, privacy and platform, geography, etc.?
Do make sure that you’re doing that as well. Whenever you’re looking to implement any of these tactics.
Heidi: Good caveat.
Jenny: Okay. Perfect. So, one of the things that I feel like I have this and blinking red letters and all the presentations that I do is lookalike audiences are dead. Stop doing lookalike audiences. That is the biggest problem ever.
But, what’s an alternative to lookalike audiences?
Heidie: Okay, the key to lookalike audiences is who the seed audience is based off of. So it’s because we always base those off of site visitors that it’s like, yeah, don’t do that, don’t do that. But you can create lookalike audiences in Meta based off of video watchers. You can create lookalikes based off of page engages all of those audiences I talked about before.
And I’ll be honest, I think that especially and maybe we can touch on this in a second. AI with all of that, it’s worth just testing and seeing what’s better. And lookalikes haven’t been doing as well in my test lately, but it’s worth testing because it’s an option that we have and we’re limited in our options, so it’s always worth testing and seeing what’s going to perform best for you.
Jenny: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And, just for the audience’s sake, we have found that in healthcare, whenever we’re doing our privacy audit, there have been a lot of our clients that have actually directly uploaded client list to Facebook patient list to make lookalike audiences. That is such a big, big, big red flag. So just to hammer in Heidi’s point a little bit more again walled garden, you can’t take your information and give it to Meta to create a or YouTube to create a look like audience, it has to use their signal and engagement points only.
So no data is being shared between platforms.
Heidi: And when you go into the audience section in Facebook, I mean they have it split out like that, platform-based and user-based. So just ignore that section. Anything. Don’t click there, don’t upload anything or add anything and stick to the platform based.
Jenny: Excellent, excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about AI.
I know Meta has a new Advantage Plus feature. Let’s talk about it. Can you explain it to our listeners?
Heidi: Yeah. So basically, it’s their AI targeting method. And it’s a big, broad box where you don’t really put anything in. You can suggest signals like an age, and I think gender. But it’s a suggestion. And basically they’re going to use their AI to react to how people basically looking at how people are reacting to your ads, and they’re going to optimize based off of that and find people for you.
This is a huge, powerful tool for us who in Meta, all of our audiences have been taken away, and know that you can’t target based off behaviors. I mean, I think of ten years ago and like how lovely it was to say, you have this thing, we know you’re exactly who we want to target.
But this is honestly, it’s been outperforming a lot of my other audiences, where you kind of give them the power and say, find me the best people for this message. And basically, in terms of remarketing, like, how could that work as a remarketing strategy. Feed it, different messages. You can have one that’s focused for your top of funnel ads, but then have one that’s, you know, for your consideration and remarketing and, and it will optimize and get used to.
Oh, okay. We’re used to these types of ads and it’ll find kind of people, for that. So it’s worth testing for remarketing, to see if it could do better than like video watchers or, page engagemers.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely worth adding to, you know, your testing schedule over the next couple of months for all of the paid marketers listening.
So we’ve talked a little bit about content and creative. Let’s talk a little bit about creative best practices. What should marketers keep in mind as they’re building out their strategy.
Heidi: Yes. So applicable to all your campaigns and healthcare. Just avoid being specific. And that’s any of these tactics can kind of be ruled out if you’re starting to be like, do you have alcohol addiction? Like, no. You know, that’s kind of that’s invasive and getting too personal. Right. And so no one wants to see an ad like that.
So keep it broad. Addiction recovery services. Are you oh are you having you know, general pain. You know, just kind of like broad sweeping. You’re not going into very specific.
Jenny: Symptoms or diagnoses.
Heidi: Yes. You know.
Jenny: Yeah. Those are the two areas symptoms and diagnoses are the two areas you want to steer clear of. But you’re exactly right.
So broad versus specific.
Heidi: Yes. Keep it broad. And that keeps everything that we just talked about compliant.
Jenny: Yeah. One great example. Like if we’re thinking about OB for example, you could perhaps promote like your new facility and come and tour it. Right. Versus saying, I know you’re an expectant mom, you need to come, you know, here before you give birth in nine weeks because you have no way too much information about them, so hire broader, etc.
Heidi: Exactly. That’s a good example.
Jenny: Yeah. Perfect. Okay, so let’s wrap up with just some quick do’s and don’ts. So as folks are thinking maybe okay, Jenny saying remarketing and retargeting isn’t totally off the table, we can ease our way back into it. What are some big picture do’s and don’ts of what they should avoid and what they should do as they’re moving into this?
Heidi: Yes. So, avoid any site-based, retargeting, CRM uploads, any pixel-based conversion actions, stay away from gathering any PHI in that regard. And retargeting based off of that. Do you use platform-approved audiences? Do rely on engagement signals, use ad sequencing, and test your advantage plus products? I would say that’s the best summary I can get from this.
Jenny: I love it, Heidi. That is perfect. Well, listeners, I hope this gave you some new ideas about different things you can add to your paid media arsenal as you’re working on enhancing and building out your program. Know that we’re always here to chat. Our team of paid media, including Heidi, we have a wealth of knowledge around healthcare s pecific campaign strategy, development, messaging and creative build out.
And then of course tactical and measurement plan implementation. So if you have questions, give us a shout. We’d be happy to chat with you. And thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Please be sure to like this episode and subscribe so you’ll be notified of future episodes as we drop them, and have a great day!
Cheers!
