The Power of Authenticity: Why Follower Count Doesn’t Define Success

A common question we hear is, “What if a Patient Leader doesn’t have a huge following?” And our answer is always the same: that’s only one aspect of it. 

In fact, our sweet spot lies with nano- and micro-influencers, who have smaller organic follower counts, but often boast engagement rates up to 10 times higher than their macro counterparts.

Why? Because they cultivate more intimate, one-on-one relationships with their audience, fostering a deeper sense of trust and relatability.

Our selection process for patient leaders goes far beyond a quick glance at follower numbers. It’s a rigorous, multi-step vetting process that ensures brand alignment, safety, and genuine influence:

• Comprehensive Review: We analyze all social media profiles, blog posts, and recent social content for neutrality, non-competition, and appropriate tone.
• Alignment with Client KPIs: Ultimately, we select patient leaders who are best positioned to help our clients achieve their specific goals, regardless of their public follower count.
• Certification and Training: Our Patient Leader Certification Program, developed in partnership with the Society for Participatory Medicine, ensures patient leaders are well-versed in responsible patient leadership, including FTC and DTC regulations. This professional training further enhances their credibility and their ability to partner compliantly with pharmaceutical brands.

Bringing It To Life: Our Recruitment in Action

To illustrate the depth of our process, consider a campaign where a client needed to reach a highly specific demographic: Black women aged 50+ living with lupus. This is a demographic often underserved by traditional campaigns. While a simple search might highlight macro-influencers with broad reach, our team understood that genuine impact required a different approach.

Instead of focusing solely on follower counts, we dove into our network and meticulously vetted Patient Leaders based on their specific content, community engagement, and direct lived experience. We identified a nano-influencer who, while not having millions of followers, was a respected voice within multiple online lupus communities for Black women. Her content consistently addressed the unique challenges and nuances of living with lupus within that specific cultural context. Her “Relevance” score was off the charts.

To dramatically increase the reach of this nano-influencer and achieve the necessary scale for desired impact, Health Union leveraged our proprietary first-party audiences in the targeting of the ads. We went beyond the influencer’s organic followers and typical platform audience segments by building look-alike models based on our extensive data on influencers within the condition and our community members. This allowed us to precisely match the right audience with the authentic voice of the Patient Leader. 

The result? This Patient Leader, featured in the campaign creative, resonated deeply with the target audience. The campaign, leveraging our proprietary audience data alongside her authentic voice, drove 3.5X qualified leads over other sources and a 7% increase in registrations from Black patients to the program. This success wasn’t about her public follower numbers; it was about her authentic influence and our precise ability to match her with the right audience.

The Right, Trusted Patient Leaders – Everytime.

In pharmaceutical digital health marketing, the era of relying solely on superficial follower counts is over. True influence is a multifaceted construct, deeply rooted in the reach, relevance, and resonance of authentic patient voices. 

By partnering with Health Union and embracing the power of our meticulously vetted and highly engaged network, married with our unrivaled first-party audience targeting, brands can transcend mere visibility and achieve truly impactful, compliant, and measurable results that drive real change for patients.