How Healthcare Providers are Meeting Changing Consumer Needs with Patient-Centric Experiences
The CTV/OTT Advertising Imperative for Reaching Local Healthcare Consumers
Author: Peter Jones, Head of Local Sales, Premion.
With open enrollment upon us, healthcare is top-of-mind for many. This is an opportune time for consumers to re-evaluate the types of benefits and care options that are most important for them. Most notably, the pandemic has heightened the focus on the patient-centric experience and accelerated the shift on the consumerization of healthcare — from the convenience of scheduling, payment, and reimbursements to the care itself. For instance, prior to COVID-19, just one in 10 consumers had tried telehealth. Now, Forrester predicts virtual care visits will soar to more than 1 billion this year, and nine out of 10 patients that have tried virtual visits said it was more convenient than other ways of getting care.
Beyond convenience, today’s consumers have greater health awareness and are more focused on self-care. This also coincides with more millennials that are aging to start families and becoming healthcare decision makers —a cohort that’s technology and data-driven. They tend to value convenience and cost savings over continuity and are more likely to visit a retail clinic instead of their primary care provider (PCP). Moreover, this has implications for the boomer generation as millennials may opt to enroll their parents in faster, convenient outpatient care and are also more likely to embrace telehealth services.
With patients demanding better services from healthcare providers, healthcare businesses are investing in new innovations to enhance patient services—to be safer, more efficient and convenient. In fact, a PwC survey found that positive experiences have a greater influence on consumers’ healthcare purchasing decisions than other industries. The future of patient care is about connecting with consumers to fully understand their needs by leveraging technology and human connections to create efficient and personalized experiences.
As such, healthcare marketers must rethink their media mix and evolve their message to emphasize how they’re improving the patient experience to stay relevant and drive growth. With the acceleration in streaming TV viewers, healthcare marketers are increasingly vying for the attention of this highly engaged audience with connected TV (CTV) / OTT advertising.
CTV viewing surged during the pandemic and it’s now the universal form of TV viewing. According to a recent Leichtman Research Group study, there are now nearly 400 million CTV devices in the U.S. Eighty percent of U.S. TV homes have at least one CTV device and 64% of U.S. TV households have three or more CTV devices. As advertisers shift even more dollars to this medium, eMarketer projects that U.S. marketers’ total ad spending on CTV will reach $8.8 billion this year and will grow to $14.12 billion in 2023.
And, akin to the consumerization of healthcare spurred by tech-savvy consumers, the CTV/OTT consumer is similarly tech-forward, and now make up a wide home-bound consumer base. According to a recent MRI-Simmons study, 83% of OTT viewers actively look for health information so they can choose from different healthcare treatments and 82% of OTT viewers actively seek information about nutrition or healthy diet.
Furthermore, healthcare is a highly localized business. Healthcare marketers need to reach consumers where they live and work (albeit remotely these days), and ads need to be contextually relevant and well-targeted. The addressability of OTT enables healthcare businesses to target local audiences at scale. They can target by designated market area (DMA), states, zip codes, and combine this geo-targeting with interest categories.
Healthcare marketers need a trusted CTV/OTT advertising partner that can execute locally in reaching the right consumers at the household-level, track conversion, and reduce wasted impressions. Premion is a proven partner in driving measurable outcomes for many healthcare brands. We run a multitude of campaigns for local, regional, and national health and medical services businesses.
To dig deeper, click here for The Premion Advantage: Healthcare Advertising and the OTT Audience
