Health is personal. Today’s audiences accept nothing less than support that speaks to their individual health goals. However, they often struggle to find solutions for their specific needs in a sea of health care options and information.
Consider this common experience: You are targeted for a particular health-oriented purchase, such as a fitness watch—but this message comes after you already had purchased that exact watch. The targeting was relevant to you in a sense, but it came too late, wasting impressions and dollars, and certainly not helping you as a consumer.
The principles of relevancy and recency can help health and wellness marketers tailor advertising so that it resonates with consumer needs. On the marketer side, this means reaching qualified audiences that are more likely to convert to your brand. For consumers, this makes it easier to take the healthy actions that are right for them.
Start by understanding audience needs and their health content engagement patterns, to build personas that reflect real people. Go a step further by analyzing audience intentions, revealing users who have a high likelihood of taking an action within a specific product category or health condition area.
Then incorporate recency and relevancy to optimize marketing strategy and messaging for the people you’re trying to reach. Here’s how.
1. Boost relevancy to reach people in the right place and mindset. Ads should appear with content related to your vertical or category. For instance, this might include focusing your ads on the segments of people reading about vitamins, minerals and supplements (VMS).
Your ads will be more relevant if you reach people who currently intend to take action. You could, for example, focus on audiences actively interested in purchasing VMS, or even a specific product like vitamin D. With a robust first-party data strategy that surfaces content metadata and audience intention, it’s possible to actually drill down on these high-intent audiences and optimize relevancy.
Relevancy helps improve the audience experience. Rather than seeing irrelevant ads, people see solutions that are more likely to suit their needs, making it easier for them to take healthy actions.
2. Use recency to make the most of fresh audience engagement. Recency is about focusing on fresh data signals, giving advertisers insight into how recently someone engaged with particular content.
Considering recency can help health marketers avoid wasting ad spend. Reaching people looking for cold and flu remedies within a day or two of their research allows an advertiser to get their message in front of people who are ready to buy OTC remedies for current symptoms. Reaching that same person six months later is too late.
Recency can help you build smarter targeting strategies, distributing ads to a new pool of prospects who are more likely to engage. This doesn’t just improve consumer experience, but can also improve efficiency and ROI for campaigns.
3. Consider when recency does—or doesn’t—serve your particular audience. Health marketers should recognize which health personas are best served by prompt marketing campaigns. A Healthline Media survey shows that half of those who engaged with content or ads about psoriatic arthritis planned to visit their doctor as a result, according to Brand’s PSA Audience Quality¹ study.
Consider: Is your audience at a decision point? Recency is everything if you want to reach someone at a decision point in their health journey. This might include a person living with a chronic condition who is researching medication options with plans to either start or switch their treatment. In this case, you must drive awareness for your brand, either for retention or prospecting, before the person has made a decision.
Another consideration is where your audience is engaging over the long term. Some people, such as those interested in wellness remedies, tend to engage repeatedly over time. While relevancy still matters, recency will be less of a concern with these folks since as marketers will have multiple opportunities to make an impression.
Use recency and relevancy for marketing that resonates
Whether seeking wellness guidance or treatment options, people need relevant support. Health marketers can do more to help while improving ROI for their ad spend.
With the right partner who offers robust first-party data, you can gain a deeper understanding of audience needs and intentions. Then, by applying the principles of relevancy and recency, you can build more effective and efficient campaigns that resonate with your specific audiences, and ultimately lead qualified audiences to convert to your brand.
