The healthcare industry is rife with challenges. The past few years have seen a global healthcare pandemic with COVD-19, causing people to lose their livelihood or have their lives radically changed. Many employees are now working from home full-time or in a hybrid capacity. With these life changes, the healthcare industry needs a way to revamp their healthcare branding to engage their customers and patients through the use of creativity. This has led to several companies in the healthcare industry, including Merck, Pfizer, and CVS, to rebrand their companies to market new service offerings and reflect how their companies have evolved to meet the needs of their patients. In the not too distant past, a customer might learn about healthcare brands via advertisements found in physical magazines, radio, television, or a physical brochure at their local doctor’s office/health clinic. These methods were efficient at the time, as they tapped-in to existing audiences for a variety of content, including sports, entertainment, and news. However, today with the internet boom of the late 90’s the information age came with it. Physical print materials such as magazines and newspapers were less necessary, and today’s news is delivered to you in mere milliseconds on a blog post or article, rather than the next day (newspapers) and the next week or month (magazines). Television has also been removed from many people’s preferred method of consuming video content, as on-demand streaming platforms often have advertisement-free tiers. Radio is still a strong performer, albeit many users now listen via an application on their smart devices, such as: iHeartradio, TuneIn Radio, Slacker Radio, and Spotify. The newest development in healthcare marketing is that of the replacement of doctor visits with Telehealth. This eliminates physical brochures, posters, and leave behinds as viable healthcare marketing vehicles. With the age of legacy marketing methods becoming less valuable by the minute, companies have adopted digital marketing content that is more scalable and agile. One such method that companies are utilizing is HTML banner ads. HTML banner ads provide companies with dynamic content that catch users’ attention through the use of images, tests, and animations. These dynamic banner ads also collect input from the user in the form of buttons that typically link to a webpage on one of the companies’ web pages. Banner ads come in a variety of shapes and sizes to meet the needs of web developers in-regards to positioning of the ads to organically gather the user’s attention on prominent sections of the page. HTML Banner Ads are extremely popular in the healthcare industry, as global healthcare companies like Merck utilize Google Banner Ads to help promote their products with the help of creative marketing agencies such as ours. Merck’s growth in the healthcare science and technology field called for a rebranding effort. This led to changes to their logo and the birth of the vibrant “M” logo. The “vibrant m” along with the new font is now seen on all of their digital marketing materials. If relying on print materials like magazines or brochures, the previous branding would linger around, and not reflect the growth of the company as the new “vibrant m” logo represents. The HTML Banner Ads helped promote the rebranding by distributing dynamic content that accompanied the “vibrant m” across the world-wide web, rather than being geographically limited to the locations of a doctor’s office or a retail store. A Left-Click for Your Heart How can your brand alone signal to your customers what value your service offerings provide? CVS Health has a long history in the pharmacy business. CVS Health made some significant changes in March 2014, and cigarettes were completely removed from their over 7,700 retail pharmacies. This shift towards a healthy image, over the loss of tobacco sales, was a huge step to supporting the wellbeing of the communities that CVS Health serves. The decision to become more than just a retailer called for a rebrand of the company as a whole. The company decided to highlight its four service brands: CVS/pharmacy, CVS/specialty, CVS/minute clinic, and CVS/caremark. Through the use of new graphic logos, created by brand designers Siegel+Gale, each brand was now represented with their own unique logo, but retained the new CVS Health Heart logo in each of their graphic designs. The logo is displayed on all the dedicated pages for their four major brands. The CVS Health Heart rebrand highlights their service offerings, while still utilizing their signature brand in all of their digital marketing materials through the use of graphic design. Final Thoughts The environment for marketing your healthcare services has changed forever since the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the physical avenues for marketing your brand are less viable because more people are working from home, shopping online, and visiting their doctor’s remotely via tele-heath. Successful marketers see this as an opportunity to beef-up their digital rebranding efforts through enhanced digital marketing. Through the use of following digital healthcare marketing trends, you can promote your brand to the entire world and connect with your patients no matter where they live and work.
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