Five tips for understanding the patient journey isn’t the answer; it’s the starting point
By: Brad Yale
Tags: Content Marketing, Website Development, Pharmaceutical, Patient Engagement, Digital Marketing

All too often, across condition type, we see that patients rarely make the right choice until the end of the tunnel is close enough to touch. When it comes to treatment, only a small percentage of patients within certain condition types take the proper steps to reverse course for the better.

This is a health issue, sure. Yet in terms of marketing to this population, how do you construct and leverage a rock solid patient journey with the full understanding of that journey being inconsistent for a wide variety of patients by way of their own behavior? More importantly, how do you build digital assets based on a patient journey given the fact that the patient journey is inconsistent due to natural human behavior?

The answer: smart content marketing. As patients fall off their treatment plans, steer away from them or choose to go with the path of least resistance, all you can do as a digital marketer is plan accordingly with content.

Maybe that means creating an opt-in CRM program which takes into account different illogical patient course of actions.

Maybe you create a SEM campaign designed to reach patients looking for more “natural” forms of medication.

Maybe you build an organic social media campaign across multiple platforms which prompts patients to tell their stories and how on treatment plans helped them reach health stability.

Whatever that tactic is — whatever that plan is — you have to base it in the reality that the patient journey is a construct aligned for the best case scenario. It isn’t a catch all.

3. Touch points on touch points on touch points

When you think about your own healthcare, what do you think about?

For me, I think about exercising normally, eating a healthy diet and visiting my PCP and dentist two times a year for routine checkups.

If this holds true for the majority of the populace, the vast majority of people only have a handful of medical treatment touch points during the year however for the remaining 361 days, they still live their lives.

Question: if the only medical treatment touch points most people have during the year can be counted on one hand, how do we, as digital marketers constructing a patient journey, reach them?

The answer: understand where they play and hit them there.

Of all the complexities the digital landscape presents marketers with, the one major benefit of that multi-channel ecosystem complexity is how many touch points we can actively engage the patient on.

Off the top of my head I can think of the following:

Organic search

Paid search

Banners

Native content

Sponsored content

Email

Social media

Retargeting

Sponsored linked content

Product review platforms

Treatment review platforms

Information awareness platforms

Blogging platforms

User driven forums

Landing pages

Local search

There are many touch points wherein we, as digital marketers, can reach the patient. The trick isn’t understanding how those touch points work to drive conversion/interest.

The trick is understanding which touch point, driven by patient journey, is the right set of touch points to produce actionable results.

4. Tap into something universal

The patient journey map can only go so far. It is a strategy document leading to tactics. One of the strategies housed within the patient journey map, used to underwrite all tactics, is tapping into emotional resonance.

As noted in PharmExec by Pamela Walker, PhD in 2015:

“ The emotional sell is more critical than ever before. With a wealth of treatment choice in most therapy areas, what will make a physician prescribe one brand over another? Rationally we often want to believe it is the data, however, in reality this is just getting brands through the door. To secure the sale, the physician needs to connect with the brand on an emotional level…”

Remember, creating a conversion within your target market of patients is all about understanding their needs, their wants and how they relate those needs and wants within their daily lives. It means taking a pretty vanilla subject like eating a healthier diet to prevent vision loss and transforming it into an issue with emotional resonance.

For example:

The raw data shows the number one leading cause of blindness in adults from age 20–74 is diabetic eye disease.

Moreover, the raw data shows 45% of people with diabetes, within their life, will develop diabetic eye disease.

And yet, given the right treatment course (medication and lifestyle changes) it is possible to reduce the risk of diabetes-related blindness by 95%.

This data is nice for HCP’s yet for patients it is just that, raw data. It doesn’t tap into something deeper. It doesn’t intrinsically illicit an emotional connection beyond the notion of, “one day, way off in the future, I might lose my sight”.

If, for example, that data is transformed into great visuals with emotional pull like…:

Translating raw data to emotional relation is key to actionable results

or:

Use your content to tell a connective story, rather than raw stats and cold figures

…your health related marketing stands more of a chance to grab the patient by correlating data to emotional needs and understandable daily stakes.

The raw data laid on top of the patient journey often isn’t enough for conversion. The smarter bet is layering emotion on top of the journey to truly grab the patient driving actionable results.

5. Strategy vs. tactic

Finally and simply, the patient journey map and all that leads up to it, is purely strategy.

Even though the patient journey map is guided by rounds of medical treatment research, patient and HCP interviews, digital ecosystem discovery and competitor analysis etc., the journey is a strategic map whereupon tactics can be built to accomplish the goal set out by that map.