Healthcare industry must create content that motivates people to improve wellbeing

November 19, 2018 by Aimee
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The healthcare industry can improve people’s lives and give them the motivation to make positive changes to diet and other aspects of wellbeing by publishing informative, thoughtful and engaging content, a new report has found.

The 2018 Wunderman Health Inertia Study suggests traditional healthcare ads are not doing enough to serve the wants and needs of the general public. While many ads can educate, content often falls short in motivating people to consider their life choices and make changes that will improve their long-term health.

Wunderman used the failure of traditional anti-smoking campaigns to enact change as a case study for “health inertia,” a behaviour pattern that sees people continue with poor health habits despite there being a wealth of information showing the benefits of good health and the steps to achieve it.

Healthcare brands and organisations can address this problem by using content marketing to tap into a person’s hopes and fears. Engaging articles, blogs, videos and infographics can trigger these important emotions, which then prompts the person targeted to become more thoughtful before taking some sort of action.

“People act on motivation, not information, and on content that stirs both negative and positive emotions over a period of time,” Becky Chidester, Wunderman Health’s CEO, said. “The healthcare industry has done a great job educating people about medical conditions and treatments, but it has missed the mark in creating content that truly stimulates action.”

Wunderman found brands can use different content mediums and emotional triggers during a campaign to create a powerful body of work that will push people into making life changes. For example, there was a 239% increase in surprise among smokers when they were exposed to content that showed how their habits are preventing them from leading a healthy life. This then turned to shock and a motivation to quit smoking entirely.

“Marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to break the cycle of health inertia by using new technologies and data to understand more dimensions of their audiences,” Yannis Kotziagkiaouridis, Wunderman Global Chief Analytics Officer said. “By drilling down into why people make the choices they do, and by crafting marketing content that speaks to their hearts as well as their minds, we now have the ability to spur both small and very large groups of people to action.”

Meanwhile, a separate report released by Influencer Intelligence this week found that most young people express a strong preference for authentic and engaging content. The new generation of “digital natives” expect influencers to play a major role in the marketing mix, but many have become disillusioned with how it has been conducted during the last 12 months.

Millennials now expect influencers to display higher levels of authenticity while being more relevant. A staggering 100% of the 1,173 marketers surveyed said “relevance” was the primary attribute for influencers, while 61% of the 500 consumers polled said high quality, authentic content is crucial if it is to have any sway on their buying decisions.

Aimee