Targeting patients on social media: key principles
May 2
Social media is a powerful tool for reaching patients, but only if your targeting is done right. Here’s how to build an effective targeting strategy when running paid campaigns on social media.
Now, we’re getting a bit technical here as this is aimed at marketers who have paid campaigns on the go. If you want to build your knowledge in this area visit our Mastering Paid Social Media course.
Tip: Check out the link at the end of the article for your freebie download "Guide to ad optimisations"
Start with disease specific terms before expanding out to affinity interests
The first step in targeting patients is to find disease specific targeting options, such as keywords or influencers that patients are engaging with on social media. However, for some health conditions, you may find patients are engaging less around their disease on social media so there are fewer targetable criteria available. Or their health condition is not a targetable criteria available on the social network that you want to use. In this case, it can be helpful to create a broader targeting strategy. You could look for non-disease specific affinity interests or influencers that are popular in your patient group and can be targeted on social media. For example, you might learn that young people living with haemophilia also have a high interest in gaming and cycling, and that those most receptive to your message have recently moved out of home - these would all be targetable options for a broader audience.
Individuals reached via broader targeting will begin to self select if they are interested in the content, and then you can home in on targeting that audience through custom engagement audiences (retargeting people who have engaged with your ads or website).
You can also create look-alike audiences of the people who have engaged with you. A look-alike audience uses an existing custom audience, such as people who have watched one of your videos, for its source audience. The social media networks leverage information such as demographics, interests and behaviours from your source audience to find new people who share similar qualities. When you create your look-alike audience, you can use a percent range to choose how closely you want your new audience to match your source audience. Smaller percentages more closely match your source audience, but larger percentages create a bigger, broader audience. This is generally a controlled and effective way to expand your audience. See an example in the diagram below (illustrative purposes only, not actual audience numbers).
Test targeting options
You should go into your social campaigns with the mindset that you will create targeting and test which aspects of this are most effective for reaching your audience. Plan for your agency to review targeting, gather learnings about what works and optimise your targeting criteria over time.
Look for opportunities to build custom audiences and retarget people across channels
To help deliver a more personalised journey for your patient audience look for opportunities to gather audience data, for example via a website pixel or CRM sign-up, that you can use later for building custom audiences and sending retargeted ads across social media. Your agency will be able to guide you on the best way to do this in your digital ecosystem.
Work with influencers and utilise the paid partnership features
If you are working with influencers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter, then you can also link up your paid advertising accounts with their profiles allowing you to promote their content with paid media spend. If you are working with an influencer who has a strong following in your patient audience, then this can be a great way to increase reach with their followers and expand the reach further to your paid audiences.
Patient targeting options
Below are some examples of targeting that can be used for reaching patients. This is not an exhaustive list, but is here to provide some inspiration.
Demographics:
There's a broad range of demographic and life stage targeting options that can help to home in on your target audience.
Example: If you wanted to reach new mums with educational content about childhood vaccinations, you could target people on Facebook who have a baby under 12 months. You could also couple this with interests that indicate they are a first time parent.
Interests:
This is where you can dig into the interests that are specific to a patient's disease. Or look to expand to affinity interests which are non-disease specific but targetable on social media.
Example: You could look to target ads to people who have engaged with specific conversations on X (Twitter), such as targeting #psoriasis or #psoriasiswarrior to reach psoriasis patients.
Location:
You could target in broad areas, like your target country. But you could also get quite specific to cities and postcodes.
Example: Target social ads to run around your out of home advertisements or key locations your audience frequent.
Example: Create hyper-local ads that are specific to one community, such as ads featuring local patients or community services.
Past behaviour:
You can build custom audiences to retarget people who have already engaged with you in the past. This can be an effective way to narrow down a broader audience to focus in on a smaller pool of interested people.
Example: Promote a video about the symptoms of heart failure on Facebook. Retarget only people who watched the video with follow up adverts driving to a symptom checker tool.
Look-a-like audiences:
You can build look-a-like audiences where the social networks try to find people with similar characteristics to an audience of people who have already engaged with you.
Example: drive traffic to a website symptom checker tool. Using the Facebook website pixel, build a custom audience of people who completed the tool. Create a look-alike audience of the individuals who completed the tool and serve them adverts.
Want to learn more?
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