Jack Winter: Digital strategist at Orchard
Australians with rare and complex diseases are talking more about their health. This is most evident in search behaviour and online conversation. And it’s the analysis of this online behaviour that provides insights key to elevating marketing effectiveness and increasing a brands value to patient groups.
How can you go about uncovering these insights? Through the combined power of social and search listening.
Social listening uncovers what people say, by process of gathering publicly available data from audience conversations across social media platforms, blogs and forums, all in real time. The most valuable social listening however, is when you combine it with search listening. Where social listening uncovers what people say, combining it with search listening provides insights on what they actually do.
Online searches truly represent people’s minds, interests & hidden desires. Search engines are the mirrors of the world. Through analysing a user’s queries, we can uncover an individual’s whole point of view – removed of bias, deduction or restraint. Search listening uses similar platforms to that of social listening tools, to compile what relevant keywords or phrases related to your chosen category that people are searching for, which in turn helps increase marketers understanding of their audiences’ behaviour.
What are the some of the insights you might be able to uncover using this combination of listening?
Patients need guidance on what they should share with their healthcare professional.
Across a range of disease areas, we have seen time and again that patient community groups struggle to respond to questions by their healthcare professional (HCP) about how they are doing.
People turn to patient community groups online, explaining their situation to others asking for advice on how to approach their HCP. In more anonymous channels, such as Reddit, patients will be incredibly open with what they share to strangers in seeking advice – what is more valuable to them is hearing how other patients in similar situations have approached conversations they are uncertain about.
Whilst it is extremely positive that patients have a place to go, it appears the current ways of support seeking is turning to the keyboard and social media. Identifying ways to help prompt conversations in-clinic, between specialist and patient, and getting the specialist to consider what might be going ‘unanswered’ in-clinic, are worthwhile endeavours brands should explore.
Patients are seeking personalised healthcare to manage their life with a disease.
During the last two years of my time in health advertising, I’ve seen an increase in patients’ desire to cut the bull and understand the true realities ahead of them when it comes to living with complex diseases.
Particularly in the search behaviour of the HIV and Multiple Sclerosis categories, where a large proportion of searches are focused on how a patient can live with their condition and navigate life, family and romantic relationships with their disease.
There could be a multitude of potential causes behind this behavioural change – perhaps it is the changes to the social media landscape, where the masses have increasingly come to value people and brands being authentic and ‘real’ about who they are. Or it could be the pandemic forcing us to reassess and consider the many aspects of our daily lives.
Whatever the cause, this does not appear isolated to one patient group. A content strategy that personalises the message to different patient needs should be explored by healthcare in 2023.
Patients search for, and use, other’s experiences to understand how severe their own symptoms are.
This is where combining search and social listening has proven incredibly powerful in Orchard’s approach to research. In analysing these two data sets, we’ve found across patient groups that people extensively research and seek advice in social forums about ways to manage the more severe symptoms of their disease.
Symptoms such as flare ups, or how to assess the severity of a flare, become part and parcel of a patients search and social forum behaviour. The fact that patients are acting this way online suggests it is often a question unanswered for them on how best to manage as well as to identify when they need expert help, which identifies problems that need to be solved for patient communities.
We’ve seen in other areas that patients aren’t prompting conversations with their HCP, posing two key questions to the medical industry – why do patients feel they can’t have these conversations? And how can we help facilitate them in clinic, so they don’t reach for their keyboard.
These discoveries through the combined power of social and search listening indicate patients aren’t passively navigating their disease. Patient groups are likely spending significant time researching and socialising with other patients, in order to improve their own understanding and their daily management of these diseases.
However, the insights we have seen suggest this online behaviour isn’t translating into in-person behaviour – conversations aren’t being had with their HCP in the same way they’re occurring online.
To develop truly meaningful resources for people living with rare or complex diseases, healthcare marketers need to tap into the opportunities that social and search listening provide. This will not only help patients understand conversations that are happening online, but will naturally reveal ways to prompt these conversations to occur in-clinic too.
Without unpacking social discourse and search tendencies, we’ll continue to miss valuable cues in evolving our marketing material for these audiences. And if there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us – it’s that people want their voices heard.