Building Online Health Audiences Starts With Building Community
Published Sept. 25, 2024 | 4 Minute Read
By Kelly Miller, MPH
Media Strategy Director
Health Union
Every person managing a health condition has a story. Some stories describe the impact of symptoms on daily life, others detail complex diagnosis journeys, and many recount the ups and downs of treatment.
At Health Union, our online health communities provide information, validation, and support to patients and caregivers—in a safe space built for them and by them.
I thought I was the only one
I know the power of online communities, personally. Until I read patient stories from others living with chronic hives, I thought I was the only one who carried an emergency scarf to hide a spontaneous break-out.
I had no idea that an allergist could help me. I had no idea there were prescription drugs that could help me. I had no idea what I could be doing to empower myself as a patient. I learned these things through Health Union’s chronic hives community.
Relevant signals on the patient journey
My uncontrolled symptoms, eventual diagnosis, and step therapy experiences go hand in hand with the content I consumed and how I engaged with the online community. My online actions were aligning with my real-life health decisions.
Before I went to the doctor for the first time, I searched for patients’ tips on what to expect at that first visit. How would the appointment go? What questions should I ask the doctor? What treatment options might be offered?
Then, after I was diagnosed, I dove into everything I could about others’ treatment experiences. Here were other people living with my same condition, and I could read their stories and hear their first-hand experiences. I felt more confident with each doctor visit, and for the first time in years, I felt in control of my condition.
In addition to feeling more informed, the chronic hives community also gave me the simple validation and emotional support that was hard to find among family and friends. The community was a constant in an uncertain time in my life.
Real-time support
For many, just like me, Health Union’s online health communities are a reliable source of information and support throughout the patient journey. Whether seeking a diagnosis, newly diagnosed, or living with a condition for years, community members will find relevant and engaging content written by and for patients just like them.
They are coming to Health Union communities because they are looking for answers or validation. This may be at some of the most important moments in their health journey. These are moments of frustrating symptoms, of unknown prognoses, of confusing treatments.
Real-time segmentation
Every day, patients and caregivers engage with hundreds of meaningful behavioral and contextual triggers across Health Union’s 45+ communities. This includes robust content offerings, weekly curated newsletters, and patient-friendly engagement tools. Depending on where someone is at with their condition, the community offers customized content to meet them where they are. And most importantly, this is in a privacy-first environment that always prioritizes consent and transparency with our users.
It’s this breadth and depth of Health Union communities that sets us apart. Ultimately, the richness of these on-site audience signals allows our team to build modeled audiences for programmatic. With this foundational understanding of the patient journey, our team is able to develop segmented audiences with more precision that can reflect every point along a disease progression journey.
Our ability to include treatment experiences, brand sentiment, and predictive behavioral signals in audience building takes customization to a new level.
It all begins with the right audience
Programmatic advertisers are reaching audiences in activation channels and on devices via ever-evolving technology. But connecting the right person with the right information at the right time requires the right audience. It all begins with the audience.
At the core of who we are, patients come first. We pride ourselves on taking care to select the most relevant and reliable signals for audience segmentation because meeting people where they are is the key to driving more positive health outcomes.
Learn more about how Health Union is evolving the programmatic landscape with our Amplify+ audience solutions: health-union.com/human-side-of-data/#program
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