Healthcare organizations have to comply with HIPAA regulations. This article revolves around developing social media marketing campaigns using programmatic advertising that complies with HIPAA laws.
How did people buy or sell online ads in the past? It was a complex and physical process. But thanks to the advancements in technology, we now use artificial intelligence and machine learning in many aspects of digital marketing.
Programmatic advertising is one of them. It has automated and optimized buying and selling advertisements in the digital space.
Businesses can reach out to a vast network of pertinent programmatic advertising platforms and have complete vigilance over their campaigns.
Programmatic advertising is a fabulous way of running paid ad campaigns. But it can be difficult for medical facilities due to HIPAA limitations.
If this is your case, you are in the right place. We will tell you how to remove this limitation and use programmatic advertising campaigns on your desired social media platforms while staying within the limits of HIPAA.
What is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic digital advertising is the automatic selling and buying of ad space across thousands of apps, websites, and other online properties.
Brands in every vertical can leverage this advertising approach to market their products/services to prospects online.
Benefits of Digital Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising helps you view exactly where your ad shows up, who is viewing it, and how lucrative they are in real-time. Press Ganey revealed in their 2021 survey that 51% of thousand participants researched online and chose a new primary care provider. This number has boosted in the last 3 years.
Programmatic marketing lets hospitals, multi-location medical facilities, and rehabilitation centers scale their ad campaigns easily. It removes all physical work in conventional direct buy marketing, saving costs and time.
Yes, you still have a lot to manage, including campaign optimization, strategy, creative, performance monitoring, ad placement, media purchasing, etc. But you can make a single advert, register with a DSP, pick your target customers, and allow the platform to run your campaigns.
Your hospital or clinic in the USA can use this marketing technique to elevate brand awareness, attract more visitors to your pages, increase engagement, and flourish your practice.
It informs your marketing team about who has looked for or engaged with content related to specific services your clinic provides. This way, you get user behavior patterns that smart marketers can use to show relevant ads to audiences.
A Few Tactics to Use in Programmatic Digital Advertising
- Target users based on age, gender, hobbies, salaries, etc
- Geo-targeting or location-based targeting
- Cross-device targeting’s like laptops, desktops, and smartphones
- Behavioral targeting like buying habits, product interests, page engagements, etc
- Contextual targeting, which means topical ads with related content
- Retargeting, which means pertinent ads depending on previous landing pages or site visits
Key Players in Programmatic Advertising
Advertisers
Advertisers are businesses that buy available ad space on DSPs or demand-side platforms. Companies use DSPs to set up their ad campaigns.
They first upload the creatives and ad campaign to the DSP, then the platform hunts within its network of publishers for applications and websites that match the advertiser’s criteria and offers an instant bid for placement.
Once the publisher gives a go-ahead, the advert is served to the website or app of the publisher.
Programmatic advertising allows businesses to choose the right visitor, the right time, and the bidding price in real time to show curated ads.
Publishers
Websites and applications want to generate revenue to keep providing services to people who benefit from their content. And for this purpose, they allow brands to put up ads on their site/app.
Publishers use software called SSPs or ad exchanges to make money from the space they have assigned for online advertising.
Businesses buy this digital ad space to promote their products or company. The SSP uses algorithms and data insights and dishes out the most relevant ad to the visitor using the criteria set by the advertiser.
When the user clicks on the ad, it produces revenue for the publisher and propels fresh visitors to the advertiser’s page.
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA stands for health insurance portability and accountability act. President Clinton signed it into law in 1996. HIPAA has changed over the past 27 years and includes securities for online patient data in the healthcare industry.
Healthcare is expensive in the US, and medical insurance is crucial. The US government developed this law to allow employees to take their healthcare and insurance rights when switching from one job to the other.
Developing HIPAA-Compliant Programmatic Advertising Campaigns
1- Contextual Targeting
Contextual targeting is a modern and super popular way for advertisers to decide to whom they should show their ads. You can contextually target in many ways, commonly used are:
- You directly choose what creative your advert shows adjacent to, or alter the material of ad creative, depending on the content and search terms on a website
- Your target with your DSP programmatically and purchase an ad whitelist that matches keywords
Through contextual targeting, your healthcare organization tracks a visitor’s activities, such as articles interacted with, pages visited, and searched key phrases and words.
Then your Demand side platform shows ads to a user that align with their liked content. Here are a handful of ways you can leverage this incredible technique to target an audience in real-time
- Topic targeting deals with grouping pre-set audiences by the subject of interest depending on web activities
- Whitelists deal with focusing on areas that are contextually relevant to each other and then display ad solely to that group
- Custom browsing segments deal with curating sets of visitors depending on keywords fully tailored and super specific to the business that puts up the ad
For example, your healthcare business wants to focus on people with back pain. You will apply contextual targeting by whitelisting sites such as Mayo Clinic or using a bespoke browsing portion of search terms that users with back pain interact with, like “back pain relief” or “back pain in pregnancy,” etc.
2- Geo-Fencing
Geo-fencing means creating a virtual boundary around a physical location that is attached to GPS technology that alerts managers whenever a person with a smartphone sets foot in or out of the geo-fenced location.
HIPAA attempts to protect people’s information and privacy therefore, it regulates geo-fencing. All healthcare systems and related businesses are not allowed to use this location-based technology without limitations.
Geo-fencing lets businesses that use programmatic advertising create a digital fence around a particular brick-and-mortar area. Then their ads retarget visitors after entering that building.
Geo-fencing may not adhere to HIPAA regulations based on the category of your healthcare services.
Some hospitals offer specialized medical services for diseases/disorders considered medically sensitive. Geo-fencing such facilities could be more restricted because of the patient confidentiality rights saving them from being retargeted with unauthorized ads after exiting from a certain location.
HIPAA doesn’t allow its approved organizations to disclose patients’ protected information to anyone who isn’t allowed to have them. Healthcare organizations use the services of marketers to run their ad campaigns, but these vendors may not be allowed to access the patients’ information.
HIPAA allows geo-fencing certain locations and running ad campaigns based on the data gathered, provided the advertiser obeys HIPAA’s limitations.
These restrictions depend upon the medical sensitivity of your services, the message and creatives in your ad, and the location to be geo-fenced.
Situation Number 1
Suppose your healthcare practice treats a deadly illness like cancer. You want to create and show ads that speak directly to users who have breast cancer. You also want to reach out to cancer patients who visit other cancer hospitals in the city by geo-fencing their buildings to target people looking for a second opinion.
Cancer centers are highly medically sensitive, meaning the ads are highly specific to the users. In this case, geofencing may not be permitted.
Situation Number 2
Suppose your product/service targets couples trying to conceive, and you want to push ads with messaging highly focused on trying to have a baby. For this purpose, you can geo-fence fertility centers within a 1-mile radius around the location. HIPAA can object if you increase the radius of your geo-fenced area more than that.
Situation Number 3
Suppose you manufacture over-the-counter medicines and want to increase their sales. So, you geo-fence medical stores and public places to target users who may need those drugs.
HIPAA limits geo-fencing when the advertiser, geo-fenced location, or both are medically sensitive. As it is not the case in this situation, you can easily geo-fence those locations without overstepping HIPAA rules.
How to Design Healthcare Geo-Fencing Campaigns?
1- Medical Clinics
How do you spend time waiting for the doctor at a healthcare center? Most of us take out our phones and start using the applications. It is why geofencing is the best bet for businesses that want to target people who come to those facilities.
Most people bring their smartphones to a hospital or clinic to see a doctor. As soon as they enter the geo-fenced location, you can push a targeted ad to them.
It won’t violate HIPAA rules as you are not using someone’s private information. Can you still show them ads after they leave the location? It is not a clear HIPAA violation, but the location is no longer an aspect of their targeting after they leave.
Active GPS calling can be a solution to ensure you adhere to HIPAA rules. Active GPS calling offers you fresh data authorized by satellites and not by less trustworthy mobile phones and tower triangulation. This extra step saves you from coming under the restrictions of HIPAA.
Geo-fencing doesn’t use protected data if the limitations on medically sensitive areas are steered properly.
3- Site Retargeting
Site retargeting means targeting a visitor and showing them your ad after they visit your site. Marketers in all industries use this incredible technique to drive hot leads to the specific landing pages in which they showed interest.
However, it becomes complicated when it comes to the healthcare industry’s programmatic marketing. Why? Because you can’t possibly identify that a device used by a certain visitor is used by the same person when you display your ad to them. The same goes for shared IP addresses.
Suppose someone read an article on your medical center’s website on Deviated Nose Septum from their desktop/laptop and closed it. Then someone else who shares their computer opens the device and searches for the best smartwatches and sees your ad about “deviated nasal septum. ”
You just disclosed an individual‘s private information to someone they haven’t permitted to have that data. Now you understand why HIPAA doesn’t permit site retargeting in medically sensitive areas in a conventional manner.
But don’t get disheartened that your healthcare system can’t use this highly formidable marketing avenue to boost your sales and brand awareness.
You can certainly retarget your audience provided you meet specific conditions. Firstly, the images and text used in the advertisement should be generic enough to not reveal or hint that the visitor can have a particular disorder/illness.
Secondly, the landing page that leads from your ad should contain non-particular content, meant for all or most people regardless of their medical situations.
And you can use site retargeting if your domain doesn’t involve medically sensitive information. Make sure you understand the HIPAA standards fully and obey them wholeheartedly regardless of the ad platform concerned.
4- Creative and Messaging
We have talked about creatives and messaging used in the advertisements above. They are a crucial part of the extent to which your ads maintain HIPAA compliance.
HIPAA compliance means your ads can’t indicate they are strictly meant for a certain audience. It’s your duty as a digital marketer to devise a strategy to make generic ads while sending your message across effectively to the viewers.
The rule of thumb is not to make the content of the ad or/and landing page suggestive of a specific medical illness or condition. The requirement for the ad’s content to be more generalized increases as the targeting gets more specific.
We suggest keeping your images and the ad copy super generic when using extremely focussed tactics like site retargeting, geo-fencing, and search term targeting. Stay on the safe side to confirm that you don’t defy HIPAA regulations.
Casting a Wider Net
What if your healthcare business needs to convey a more specific message in some of your ad campaigns to achieve some critical goals? Then we suggest you throw a wider net using more broad-spectrum techniques such as pre-curated audiences or whitelisting from among contextual targeting approaches.
So, you ditch site retargeting and geo-fencing for pre-curated audience targeting to get more freedom to make your creatives and messaging more focused.
Pre curated audience is a group of people who have similar demographics, behaviors, or intentions. Yes, pre-curated groups of users could be specific too, but they are still broader than other tactics.
Businesses collect information from various resources like credit bureau data, census data, or users’ web activities. Your healthcare organization should organize this data obeying HIPAA guidelines to easily use them in medically sensitive campaigns.
For instance, an OBGYN center can use pre-curated data of women in the age range of 20-30 or married women aged below 40. They can target their ads to these users to get new patients.
Programmatic digital advertising is more about creating awareness about your brand or products/services. Your creatives can be HIPAA compliant but still appeal to the top-of-the-funnel customers.
Here, the prowess of SMM services in the USA gets tested as they need to develop ad campaigns that are compliant and achieve the objectives.
FAQs
1- What is programmatic marketing?
It is the practice of utilizing automatic bidding and placement channels that purchase and sell online ad space instantly.
2- What are the four major parts of programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising is made up of these basic components.
- A demand-side platform
- Data management platform
- Supply-side platform
- An ad exchange
3- What is the difference between pay-per-click ads and programmatic ads?
PPC lets businesses target the demographics (age and gender) within their campaigns. On the other hand, programmatic advertising allows a digital marketer to amplify the process of buying and displaying ads online.
4- Can I use self-service options in programmatic advertising?
Yes, some agencies and demand-side platforms offer self-service models in programmatic advertising. Some companies let businesses choose half and half. They train the business’s in-house team to employ their self-service platform while providing support when needed.
5- Does my brand lose out if it doesn’t run a programmatic ad campaign?
Yes, if you are a massive brand with a huge budget. Programmatic advertising offers you a leg up in terms of premium ad inventory, granular audience reach, etc.
6- Are programmatic advertising and real-time bidding the same?
No. These are different from each other but often used interchangeably online. RTB (Real-Time Bidding) is a type of programmatic media purchasing, while programmatic advertising is the selling and buying of ad space utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Run HIPAA-Compliant Programmatic Advertising Campaigns for Your Healthcare Facility!
HIPAA aims to secure the protected health information patients provide to medical practices. PHI is the data hospitals and clinics record for the personal identification of an individual or created, utilized, or revealed while providing medical treatment or diagnosis.
Digital Gravity Agency is a renowned social media marketing agency that can create and run ad campaigns for your medical practice to boost your ROI while avoiding any violation of HIPAA rules.