4 Emerging Marketing and Creative Operations Trends in the Healthcare Industry

Getting patient engagement has long been a challenge for healthcare professionals. That’s why they’re relying more than ever on creative teams like yours to help attract and retain patients.

Unfortunately, many healthcare companies are still weak on marketing. For example, only 28% of healthcare marketers have a clearly documented content strategy.

If that describes you, where can your healthcare marketing strategy start? A great launching pad is considering the attention-grabbing trends in creative operations. Take a look at four of the top ones.

1. Increased Personalization Wherever Possible

As a creative professional, you already understand that marketing can’t be generic anymore. That’s doubly true for the healthcare space, where service is as personal as it gets.

How To Use Storytelling

However, healthcare marketing presents unique challenges. You have to navigate a minefield of compliance and privacy regulations. This limits how much you can share about patient experiences when trying to tell compelling stories.

As a result, you may feel tempted to avoid personalized stories altogether. Instead of dropping any hopes of personalization, think outside the box.

Find fuel for engaging stories in your demographic and persona research. With a clear picture of your audience, you could create characters that fit their profile. (The insurance industry mastered this with Flo, the Gecko, Jake, and Mayhem.)

These narratives can construct compelling and memorable throughlines that build brand recognition and credibility. This allows patients to view your organization as a reliable, safe, and positive choice.

How To Find the Right Stories

How do you determine which messaging to focus on and get stakeholder buy-in? Rely on actionable data that shows what’s working.

However, you can’t use data that you aren’t tracking or can’t access. The easiest way to stay on top of that information and share it with your team is by using a creative operations platform.

The software doesn’t just simplify workflows for creative teams. The tool also facilitates discussions about which materials and marketing to use. All assets and key performance indicators sit in a single interface everyone can refer to, whether or not they’re part of the marketing department.

The platform also lets you:

• Create assets at scale while enforcing brand guidelines
• Handle digital rights management while satisfying compliance requirements
• Track performance with an intelligent asset manager so you can reuse the most effective content

Then constantly evaluate your content and overall messaging to make it more personal and empathetic. Everything you can do in service of personalization is “good bedside manner” that attracts more patients.

2. Consistent Omnichannel Marketing Across the Full Funnel

Some people hesitate to engage with healthcare organizations because of a stuffy or uncompassionate image. Digital interfaces in apps and websites might contribute to that poor characterization. A lack of user-friendliness and even inconsistent branding can make an institution look out of touch.

Coordinate with your creative and content teams to ensure consistent messaging across channels. For example, the experience on your app shouldn’t be wildly different from your website, social media, or podcast.

This omnichannel marketing supports a full-funnel approach. The strategy addresses patients at each stage to lead to greater conversions, such as pulling in more booked appointments.

Image Source: 2024 Healthcare Marketing Trends Forecast: Balancing Compliance and Performance

Still, keeping messaging and branding consistent across channels is challenging with multiple stakeholders in the process. Simplify things with a dedicated creative operations platform to save time and energy. The software lets you:

• Quickly build a strategy using proven project templates
• Keep priorities and assignments in a location the whole team can see to ensure accountability for on-time deliverables
• Provide greater visibility into projects to avoid obstacles and prevent budget creep

Another area where creative operations software really shines is digital asset management. No one will be constantly clicking through nested folders to find the correct file for a campaign.

With everything in a single unified location, keeping assets organized (as well as compliant and consistent) is easier than ever.

3. Greater Impact of Influencers and Customer Advocates

Social proof will always be powerful in marketing. Naturally, social media is the perfect platform to display it.

The endorsement of an influencer may feel more real than that of a celebrity. In turn, the messaging can be more personal and, well, influential than other types of advertising.

Sometimes that influencer should be a healthcare professional. This gives your audience a friendly face to put with potential care or treatment.

At other times, patient influencers or customer advocates will be more appropriate to demonstrate positive outcomes. Then, you can send a glowing testimonial from a happy patient or client to lookalike audiences. These targets will closely identify with the message and maybe even spread it further.

Such strategic partnerships allow you to tell better stories and strengthen your connection to your audience. Working with influencers is especially helpful in capturing younger demographics. They are the most likely to put their trust in this type of messaging.

Image Source: Dr TikTok? Why younger audiences are turning to influencers for healthcare information – The Media Leader

Of course, working with external parties presents the challenge of properly aligning those communications with your brand and remaining compliant with regulations. That requires rock-solid systems for review and approval of these materials so your organization can verify that everything is accurate, helpful, and motivating.

Your creative operations platform speeds up those review cycles with real-time collaboration. Customized approval routes make it easier for those higher up the chain of authorization to clear content while preserving version control.

4. Greater Adoption of Artificial Intelligence

The genie is out of the bottle with AI. It’s time to either get up to speed or get left behind. Automation can enhance and simplify every part of your creative work. It can also keep your teams in sync.

Carve out time to examine the benefits and drawbacks with fellow stakeholders. For example, you can use these tools to rapidly analyze the effectiveness of campaigns.

AI also helps you track assets to prevent unauthorized use. Other tools ensure your audiences only see fresh, relevant content.

On the flip side, you have to be careful with generative AI in the creative process because of the legal and ethical implications. Your brand might not actually have ownership or authorship of AI-generated images. Mimicking someone else’s style too closely could lead to copyright infringement.

Likewise, you could lose that personalized human element. You must also verify that data collection and processing don’t unintentionally contribute to biases.

Keep working out how to implement AI without dehumanizing your creative work and patient interactions. You can get a leg up by sticking with software from teams that stay at the cutting edge of these issues and concerns, such as Lytho. We provide helpful guides and reports about how to manage AI in creative work.

Get Ahead of These Creative Operations Trends with a Platform That Streamlines the Work

All of the noise in the digital realm means healthcare institutions have greater challenges in making meaningful connections with patients. Part of building those relationships is effective marketing and education through creative materials.

Keep the quality of your creative operations high through efficient production and collaboration. You can do that by streamlining workflows inside of a single, uniform platform with Lytho.

Schedule a demo to learn how this solution helps you share the kind of story that lands with your patients.