PHILADELPHIA — October 15, 2024 — Health Union, the recognized leader in condition-specific online health communities and patient engagement, is excited to announce a suite of innovative direct-to-consumer marketing product enhancements for 2025. Building on emerging market trends, Health Union’s latest innovations will capitalize on the company’s industry-leading network of real patient leaders, unparalleled content capabilities across 45+ community websites, and differentiated first-party data to drive improved audience quality, efficiencies, and conversions for pharmaceutical advertising partners. Expanded influencer marketing solutions, new exclusivity opportunities, and content integrations that focus on diverse and underrepresented voices in health provide life science brands with a unique opportunity to align their messaging with patients actively seeking support, validation, and information in the moments that matter most, while driving measurable results against their KPIs.

Health Union’s transformative solutions and new product enhancements for 2025 include:

Elevating Diverse Voices: Health Union is proud to launch Distinctly Me, an initiative designed to help advertisers reach and activate diverse and underrepresented consumer health audiences through culturally relevant messaging and patient influencer partnerships. This comprehensive editorial content sponsorship package on Health Union’s communities highlights the unique experiences of different cultures as they manage chronic conditions – offering tips, information, and authentic advice to help underrepresented patients advocate for themselves. Sponsorship for this offering includes 100% share of voice for contextual ad placements alongside tailored resources addressing the challenges faced by diverse patients, discussions of health inequities, and tools for combating health disparities.

Additionally, by integrating stories from real, diverse patient leaders into the experience and promoting content via influencer social posts, the program engages multicultural audiences who are actively seeking support on a deeper level – building trust and relevancy for advertisers while also inspiring patient action. Health Union has proven that influencers who candidly discuss their diverse backgrounds can drive engagement rates 12 times higher than Facebook benchmarks, illustrating the demand for authentic representation in social health discussions. Sponsoring this comprehensive package enables brands to showcase their commitment to elevating underrepresented voices and combating health inequities, while also driving increased engagement and high value actions among key audience segments.

Custom Influencer Marketing Program Engagements: Health Union’s Pharmaceutical Grade Influencer Marketing (PGIM) solution is recognized industry-wide for providing best-in-class, fully branded or unbranded patient influencer marketing services. With a full-service approach that maximizes impact for brands by leveraging the authenticity of inspiring patient leaders, PGIM has driven up to 5X more engagement than typical social programs, as well as high value onsite actions (such as video views, patient support program sign-ups, and survey completions) that significantly exceed advertiser benchmarks. By partnering with Health Union to achieve influencer marketing goals, advertising partners receive an unparalleled end-to-end service that includes patient influencer recruitment and training, creative services, legal and regulatory process management and pharmacovigilance, social media campaign planning and delivery, data-driven reach to Health Union’s first-party condition audiences, and performance analysis. In order to support FTC and FDA compliance for patient influencer activities, Health Union launched a Patient Leader Certification Program, in partnership with the Society of Participatory Medicine, to educate patient leaders about responsible social media marketing and advocacy. For 2025, Health Union is now enhancing the reach and diversity of its industry-leading PGIM solutions by expanding capabilities across TikTok, with new creative guidelines to authentically engage TikTok audiences.

Influencer Audience Segments for Programmatic Activation: Also new for 2025, Health Union has launched patient influencer-based audience segments that can be activated programmatically across any channel. By analyzing the first-party onsite behaviors and actions of Health Union’s Social Health Network of 100K+ patient leaders and creating “influencer personas,” the company now builds condition-specific, modeled audience segments that are more likely to influence the behavior of others. These segments amplify advertiser messaging among key content curators and patient leaders actively providing tips and recommending resources to loyal follower audiences, driving the conversation for brand partners among patients whose voices have the largest reach and impact.