Creativity plays a crucial role in healthcare communications, particularly in today’s digital age where attention spans are short and people are inundated with a plethora of health information. The ability to grab attention, engage and inform an audience is a vital aspect of effectively cutting through the noise and making messages land.
Vehicles of creativity in healthcare communications can take many forms – social media posts, ads, websites, visual aids – but the underlying foundation of delivering high engagement is storytelling. As an example, there is a common belief that greater spend on social media translates into greater results: higher reach, higher clicks. However, while you can take a horse to water, you can’t always make it drink. Sure, a greater spend can get your social content in front of more people, but will it engage them? Will it make them click through to read more? Only if the creative resonates with their needs and interests!
Creating engaging infographics, videos and animations can help convey complex health information in a way that is easy to understand and, more importantly, remember. Effective storytelling can be a powerful way to connect with patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs). Sharing true-to-life experiences and perspectives can help to humanise complex medical issues, making them relatable to a broader audience and thereby educating and spreading awareness.
In the pharmaceutical industry, we find ourselves rightly regulated by various codes of compliance. However, our acceptance of this environment shouldn’t be seen as a limitation; rather, it must be viewed as the driving force compelling us to think differently. As Jessica Ronane, Casting Director at The Old Vic Theatre once said: ‘It is entirely possible to create beautiful, clever and compelling work while colouring inside the lines.’ Regulation does not need to hold us back, but can propel us into new, creative, innovative ways to reach our target audiences and deliver messages that resonate.
Patient films provide an authentic and human perspective on healthcare experiences. Films featuring patients sharing their stories, providing insights into their conditions, treatments and impact of healthcare on their lives are an integral part of awareness campaigns. Patient films can help HCPs better understand their needs, experiences, and preferences. Stigma reduction and an increased sense of community for patients and families make films a powerful tool in our arsenal of disease awareness and education. Encouragement to seek medical help and support healthcare initiatives is a regularly repeated call to action. In patient films, this call to action is delivered in an engaging, emotive and human way, thereby authenticating the human perspective, educating and raising awareness, and reducing stigma.
Ultimately, engaging and authentic content will hold audiences’ attention. In creating content that resonates, we must know our audiences and in healthcare communications, this can be patients, caregivers, HCPs and policymakers. It is with this understanding that we can begin to address our audiences’ specific concerns, interests and needs, which can look like symptoms, treatment and the impact on patients’ daily lives. This understanding will further cement our ability to create content that resonates with the target audience – engaging content that holds their attention, instilling empathy, addressing specific concerns and driving action.
There is no doubt that content is integral in communications, but it is the creativity with which we look at the content that sets us apart. In a world where we have too much information, everywhere, all the time, and everything is fighting for our attention, it is the creative that engages and provokes feelings that will hold attention. Creativity in this space creates the content that will win out, and our integration of human perspective, authenticity and lived experience within this content is what underpins the work we create to drive meaningful change.
