A bitter pill to swallow? What Facebook's targeting update means for healthcare communications

By Charlotte Turner, Account Director at Ogilvy Health [email protected] and Dimitri Cologne, Head of Media at Social.Lab [email protected]

The healthcare industry is facing major changes when it comes to paid promotion on Meta (formally known as Facebook) due to the recent removal of interest targeting relating to health causes.

The background

Towards the end of 2021, Meta announced that it would be updating its detailed paid targeting options from January 2022. In one swift move, a major way of targeting disparate demographic groups connected by a healthcare topic – be it cancer survival or rare disease research – was taken away.

This purge was focused on ‘topics people may perceive as sensitive’. This included key words related to health causes, such as awareness days, therapy areas, as well as charities and health and patient organisations.

It was a move that consciously addressed the current state of personalised advertising and was, in the words of Meta, a move to ‘help prevent advertisers from abusing the targeting options we make available’. As personalised medicine becomes more of a tangible reality, personalised ads may be on the way out.

But all is not lost. Healthcare brands can use this change as an opportunity to re-engage with the ‘social’ part of social media. Health is a deeply personal topic, and the way it is communicated should be as well. So, what does this mean for healthcare communications?

Change is natural and unavoidable:

For many, this shift away from detailed keyword and behaviour, interest-led targeting will not be completely unforeseen. Meta has made similar purges in the past with keywords being added and removed seemingly at whim, making healthcare terms inconsistent at best.

The platform itself has pivoted its marketing guidance to focus more on deeper engagement via ‘custom audiences’ rather than keywords and interest traits. This means that you can capture users that have been scrolling across your website, engaging with video content, or getting in touch with your brand through direct messaging, allowing you to continuously optimise campaigns and inspire more meaningful action.

Using custom and lookalike audiences is a natural progression in a brand’s social maturity, and staying close to the evolution of the technology available is the best way to ensure success for your social media communications activity, no matter what sector you are in.

Healthcare communicators must let go of the misconception that social media targeting on Meta offers a direct link to specific groups. Meta and its apps—Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—have over 3.6 billion active monthly users. It’s a big pool in which to fish so casting your net wide and using the bait of high-quality content is key to attracting the right audiences. This approach requires trusting the algorithm and understanding that success is seen by generating your results at the highest rate for the lowest cost-per-result. This will tell you if you’ve found your right audience.

With that in mind, it’s time to…

Give the people what they want:

With content claiming the centre stage of your social media ‘targeting’, an audience-first mindset is key. Social is a crowded landscape, and healthcare content sits right alongside the rest of the media vying for your audience’s attention.

In an arms race controlled by algorithmic ranking, content needs to work hard and provide value to gain traction. If used correctly, social media content is where healthcare communications can flourish, whether by sharing personal stories that inspire and reassure, or by educating with the knowledge and authority of the medical scientific community.

For healthcare communicators, investing in social-first content that uses the platforms to their best effect is a good starting point. This involves testing, learning, and iterating to answer your audience’s evolving interests and needs. Mimicking the same strategy across different platforms might seem like a cost-efficient approach at first but will most likely result in algorithmic downranking and poor delivery of social content. What works on Instagram may not work on LinkedIn, which is why we recommend prioritising certain platforms before moving into posting.

Because the truth is…

Your audience is multi-faceted:

We, as healthcare communication experts, can revisit our audience’s identification. There have always been limitations in identifying and reaching paid audiences through key health terms because it is so personal and the use of highly targeted advertising divides opinion. Removing the explicit terms means that we have no choice but to perceive our audience through a wider lens and as more than just their related disease area or personal healthcare condition. The challenge is for advertisers to properly grapple with what else unites their target audience; they are not just a cancer patient but a father, a foodie, a Spurs fan.?Experiment with finding them through what they enjoy.

And whilst doing that, it’s important to note that…

Other social media platforms are available:

Even though Meta and its apps remain the largest meeting space online in terms of active users, this is your sign to diversify your social media channel strategy. Different platforms offer different opportunities to target, reach and engage your audiences, and offer a deeper set of possibilities for testing assets, optimisation and scaling.

• Twitter has recently finessed its approach to website audience retargeting, allowing advertisers to more easily duplicate the approaches used with Meta custom audience and lookalike retargeting and tracking. Its substantial investment into the social audio landscape with its Twitter Spaces feature means that as a platform, it offers the possibility to reach and engage audiences.
• YouTube offers a wealth of healthcare targeting opportunities and has the largest advertising reach of any social media platform. It has the strongest growing inventory and is the best fit for a push and pull strategy. Brand-led hero content can be pushed through pre- and mid-rolls, while more contextualized content can be served in keyword and search-led formats.
• TikTok spent last year on a phenomenal trajectory, becoming an app with over a billion users worldwide across age ranges. Healthcare topics flourished and the #Healthcare tag has 5.2 billion views to date. This platform could be used to reach younger viewers and to share quick video content with a wider audience.

Social media is continuously evolving and is constantly offering new and exciting opportunities to reach and engage with audiences. The reality is, even with its recent decline, Meta isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Unlocking new ways to leverage the platform, and other social channels, to serve your healthcare communication needs remains imperative for advertisers in this sector. Although we have lost detailed targeting options, we still have many other opportunities available to explore.

Want some more information or looking for inspiration? Contact: [email protected]