Four Proven Lessons on How to Reach Healthcare Patients

Today’s healthcare consumer has access to a wealth of information about their health and treatment options. Audiences consume media, including medical and wellness content, across a wide array of platforms. This is a boon for consumers, but also presents challenges for healthcare providers trying to reach potential patients who may be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content.

As a result, healthcare marketers are trying new and more targeted ways to break through the clutter. Multiscreen attribution grants insights into consumer behavior, helping healthcare providers and brands create strategic and effective campaigns that drive results.

Over the course of two years, Spectrum Reach has been studying audience responses to multiscreen TV campaigns, analyzing what drives consumers to take action and visit an advertiser’s website after seeing a message. Across more than 250 campaigns, over 14 industries, and more than 150 accounts, Spectrum Reach has identified several major takeaways for healthcare providers and brands who want to drive traffic to their websites.

Here are four key learnings:

Primetime is home to the highest profile lean-in content, but analysis shows that audience response rates in the healthcare category are actually highest outside of prime—with daytime leading the pack.

Of the campaigns analyzed during our study, Spectrum Reach found that nearly 46% of website responses for healthcare providers came during the daytime daypart, with a nearly five times higher response rate than traditional primetime.¹ Increasing spending outside of prime can boost responses/response rate for healthcare providers.

Sports content provides advertisers with highly engaged viewers, helping them break through the noise to connect with audiences. In 2023, viewers spent 1.7 trillion minutes watching the most-viewed U.S. sports leagues.² Spectrum Reach found that advertisers on sports networks generated 24% higher response rates than average.³

Sports programming also offers an opportunity for healthcare providers and brands to target precise audiences. Using impressions-based measurement, advertisers no longer need to rely on broad demographics, and can precisely target households more likely interested in certain healthcare products, devices, or treatments.

Spectrum Reach can layer its aggregated and de-identified first-party data with privacy-focused third-party data. By doing this, we help brands further narrow down customer segments for more precisely targeted addressable healthcare campaigns.

Across all of the industries analyzed in our study, clients who leveraged the power of Spectrum News saw higher website responses on average than those advertisers who did not.⁴ Spectrum News is a 24/7 channel delivering local news, politics, sports, and weather, including in-depth reporting on issues concerning the communities it serves.

In our analysis of a healthcare industry campaign that included 63 networks in the media mix, we discovered that Spectrum News delivered the most responses—135% more than the next highest network.⁵ Investing in Spectrum News, which is now measured nationally with Comscore, delivers more consumers to healthcare provider and brand websites.

What day of the week you advertise on matters, too. Across industries, different days of the week vary in terms of consumer response rate. It’s important to know when your audience is most likely to engage.

Data shows Mondays drive a 37% higher than average response rate for the healthcare category.⁶

Consumers have never been as plugged-in and invested when it comes to their health. Healthcare marketers can make sure they are reaching the right audience with an audience-based, data-driven campaign strategy. Spectrum Reach can help. Read more about how we support healthcare marketers.

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