Navazon’s Complete Healthcare Advertising Guide

If you are a healthcare company looking for new patients, expanding your practice, or recruiting clinical trial participants, you will quickly find that your ads may be getting turned off or rejected, or even your accounts are getting shut down. There are many rules to follow, depending on your healthcare business type and the services you provide. As a healthcare company, it is crucial you follow the correct rules and regulations and, as healthcare advertising experts, we are here to help. Keep reading to learn more about our healthcare advertising tips in our complete healthcare advertising guide and the best ways to get started ASAP.

Make Sure You’re Following Their Rules

As with everything else in the healthcare space, it is essential that you follow every platform’s advertising policies. Failure to comply with their policies can lead to:

• Ads getting rejected or turned off
• Account suspension with up to a 7-day warning
• Immediate account suspension without warning
• Inability to advertise with the platform again
• Inability to reinstate your account if suspended

The penalties you face will depend on the policy that was violated, as they all carry different consequences.

It can feel daunting to advertise as a healthcare provider, as all the rules and regulations can seemingly “suck the life out” of all your creative and fun ideas. Every time you have a great idea, you may find that it hits a wall and you’re not able to use it.

Luckily, there are still many ways to be creative, fun, different, have a competitive edge, and stand out from your competitors—even with all the rules and regulations that go along with healthcare advertising.

Advertising and HIPAA Compliance

If your website allows people the opportunity to share health information on your website, it needs to be completely HIPPA compliant. This usually refers to websites that include forms and live chat features which, most likely, includes your website.

Here are some tips for making sure your website is HIPPA-compliant:

1. Choose the right host. When finding a host for your website, find one that understands HIPPA compliance. Ask whether they have hosted healthcare company websites before and their experience with it. They should be able to provide you with an SSL certificate, firewall management, antivirus protection, website backups, and much more to comply with data safety standards.
2. Include data encryption. If you ask users for medical information on your website, HIPPA requires end-to-end encryption.
3. Follow the three categories of safeguards. To satisfy HIPPA compliance, you must prove administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. These refer to the behaviors of your employees (administrative), the physical hardware of workstations (physical), and having the correct technology protecting your website (technical).

How Do I Know If I Am HIPPA Compliant Online?

If you are not sure whether or not your website is HIPPA compliant, there are two major questions to ask yourself when reviewing your website:

1. Am I asking patients, or potential patients, for medical information?
2. Do I need to follow HIPPA compliance in other areas of my practice?

If the answer to one or both of these answers is yes, then you must have a HIPPA-compliant website.

According to the HIPPA Guide, here is the HIPPA compliance checklist to ensure whether your website is compliant:

• Do you have a valid SSL certificate?
• Is the website hosted by a HIPAA-compliant hosting company?
• Have you encrypted data at rest and in transit?
• Are you using HIPAA-compliant web forms?
• Have you set access controls?
• Are you recording and monitoring logs?
• Are you maintaining an audit trail?
• Have you got signed business associate agreements for all vendors?
• Are you backing up all PHI?
• Have you developed policies and procedures for restoring and deleting data?
• Have you obtained consent from patients before publishing testimonials on your website?
• Does your website include a notice of privacy practices?

Again, working with a host or marketing agency that has experience with healthcare companies and HIPPA-compliant websites will alleviate your concerns and ensure satisfaction with the checklist.

Agency of Record (AOR)

An “agency of record” (AOR) refers to a marketing or advertising agency that is officially designated as the primary partner responsible for managing all marketing and advertising initiatives for a specific client, essentially acting as the “go-to” agency for all marketing needs, including creative development, media buying, and strategic planning; meaning a company chooses to work with only one agency for all their marketing efforts instead of multiple agencies.

As a healthcare company, it is super important to make sure you have an AOR to help guide you throughout your advertising journey. This way, we can make sure all of your branding is cohesive, everything works together, and there are no hiccups along the way.

Telehealth Companies

If you are a telehealth company, you must adhere to a special set of standards and certify your compliance using a company called LegitScript. The same goes for pharmacies and medical offices selling (or even just talking about) drugs on their websites.

LegitScript is a merchant and market intelligence platform – combined with the industry’s largest team of regulatory experts – that helps internet platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, and payments companies evaluate, mitigate, and manage third-party risk.

They ensure the following safeguards:

• Merchant monitoring
• Merchant onboarding
• Marketplace monitoring
• Ad monitoring
• Compliance solutions
• Website change detection

Applying for LegitScript can take several months to process, so it is important to jump on it as soon as possible when creating your website. If you’re behind the ball or want to fast-track this process, they offer an option to speed it up for $2,500.

After you’ve received your LegitScript certification, Navazon can submit the certification to Google Ads and Facebook Ads to ensure that your advertising account is qualified to run healthcare ads.

MedSpa and IV Clinics

If you run a medspa or IV clinic, you may run into some issues with advertising unless the service you provide is FDA-approved. Here are some of the things you cannot include on your website:

• Promotion of speculative and/or experimental medical treatments
• Biohacking
• Do-it-yourself (DIY) genetic engineering products
• Gene therapy kits
• Promotion of cell or gene therapies
• Stem cell therapy
• Cellular (non-stem) therapy
• Gene therapy and similar forms of regenerative medicine
• Platelet-rich plasma

If any of the above list appears on your website, it is important that you remove it or talk to a healthcare marketing company to help you with ad compliance. You will find it very difficult to advertise and run into many issues and penalties, including an account suspension.

The good news is that Google allows ads for cell or gene therapies that are exclusively educational or informational, regardless of regulatory approval status, such as academic papers and tickets for medical conferences.

Clinical Trial Recruitment

If you are a clinical trial site that is recruiting participants, you have some good news. You only have to follow two crucial rules, and you do not need LegitScript certification. Those rules are:

You may not advertise your clinic at all if you are not in one of the following countries:

• Australia
• Belgium
• Canada
• China
• France
• Germany
• Indonesia
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Korea
• Malaysia
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Philippines
• Singapore
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Vietnam

If your country is on this list, you are good to go. Just make sure you follow this next rule, as well:

Your ads or website may not promote the prescription drug. They may also not create misleading expectations, create misleading effects, or suggest that the product is safe.

Even though the clinical trial process is thoroughly monitored for side effects and the safety of the participants, it cannot be suggested that the product is safe, just in case of an unlikely event. Instead, make sure you stress that the product is seeking FDA approval, is investigational, and lists all of your clinic’s safeguards and safety standards.

If you’re a clinical trial recruiter, click here to read our blog specific to you and your industry.

Addiction Treatment

Google Ads and Facebook Ads put restrictions on addiction treatment services that are recovery-oriented. This includes:

• Clinical addiction treatment providers
• Recovery support services like sober living environments and mutual help organizations
• Lead generators or referral agencies for addiction services
• Crisis hotlines for drug and alcohol addiction

Addiction treatment services require LegitScript certification and addiction treatment advertisers must be certified by Google to serve ads. Google does not allow ads at all for addiction treatment services in countries outside of Australia, France, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States.

If you are an addiction treatment provider, click here to read our blog specific to you and your industry.

How to Get Started Advertising

Whether you’re an addiction treatment provider, telehealth mental health service, clinical trial recruiter, or anything in between, healthcare companies need to begin their marketing strategy in the same way as all other brands.

Kicking off your marketing strategy and eventual advertising ideas includes understanding your target audience and honing in on your branding. Once these have been done, you can start getting into the nitty gritty of HIPPA compliance and following the rules of the major ad platforms.

Understanding Your Target Audience

The first step to creating the best advertising for your company is to understand your target audience inside and out. Of course, you want to get as many new patients as possible; however, “everyone” is not your target audience.

Some simple questions to kick things off while brainstorming include:

• Who, most often, sets appointments with you?
• Where do people find you?
• How far do people travel to come to you?
• Where is your nearest competitor?

Empathy mapping and audience persona building are two important exercises that marketers use. Through these processes, we can build a specific “person” to target, which dictates how your ads will look and sound. You wouldn’t talk to a potential plastic surgery patient the same as a person who has a diagnosed dermatology condition; they are two different languages, and you need to find what yours is.

Honing In On Your Branding

Once you’ve established your target audience, it is time to start honing in on your branding. This includes:

• Color schemes
• Logo treatments
• Fonts and typefaces
• Photography and imagery
• Templates for emails, social media, and print

A professional marketing company will help you completely build your brand kit, and—trust us—this is one of the most fun parts of working in marketing! Getting to help create or redesign a brand’s look and feel is always fun. Creativity with a side of research and data? It’s what we love!

Heathcare Advertising Done Right with Navazon Digital

Ready to start advertising without fear of being shut down? We are experts in that.

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency.

This is accomplished through:

• Targeted graphics
• Videos
• Websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics

This approach has proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.

We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on their unique goals and philosophies. Thinking through those goals with our analytics-based approach, we study not only their tendencies but also those of their competition and the market as a whole.

Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a robust plan, test it, and then roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.

Navazon does not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.

Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.