Helping Health Brands Achieve Creative Effectiveness Across Digital

Marketers in the healthcare industry exist in a unique environment. High-regulation and complex approval processes involving multiple stakeholders lead to a variety of challenges – especially in the area of creative.

Barriers such as slow production speeds, countless revision rounds, unoptimized assets, and a sea of creative sameness all stand in the way of health brands being able to maximize performance across digital.

Shuttlerock helps health marketers overcome these challenges. This article explains how.

1. Remove friction from complex approval processes

Challenge

Creative production speeds and agility for healthcare brands are typically slower than for other categories. This stems from strict medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) requirements. This creates complex layers of compliance and approval processes that creative must navigate through. 

In the fast-paced digital landscape, this is a major drawback. Success hinges upon being able to serve audiences with the right creative, at the right time. If you’re operating with manual, disjointed approval processes (as is the case with traditional agencies), it takes a long time to aggregate and action feedback. This blocks agility, limiting performance. 

Therefore, the challenge is to find ways to remove as much friction as possible from compliance and approval processes. By doing so, health marketers will be able to move faster and get more creative out the door and into the market.

Shuttlerock solution

Our technology, ShuttlerockCloud, provides health brands with a unified platform where all stakeholders are given workflow visibility and the ability to collaborate on every creative project.

The platform helps streamline MLR feedback and approval processes by removing manual feedback loops, eliminating discrepancies, and expediting speed to market. 

ShuttlerockCloud also has multiple integrated AI tools that learn over time, helping us understand the specific legal and regulatory requirements of a given brand, and proactively use these learnings to optimize, and streamline content creation.

2. Significantly reduce revision costs (vs. traditional agencies)

Challenge

Annoying as they may be, revisions are an unavoidable part of the creative production process. For health marketers, revisions are typically more frequent compared to other categories due to the layers of regulatory feedback that creative needs to pass through. 

Not only does this create more friction in the production process; it also leads to unforeseen incremental costs that can quickly stack up and place a significant strain on budgets. 

For health brands, the root of this challenge comes from their creative agencies not being structured in a way that enables fast, cost-effective revisions at scale. The traditional time and materials fee model simply isn’t suited to the needs of modern content production. 

To achieve these goals, health marketers need to look for alternative solutions.

Shuttlerock solution

Shuttlerock enables fast, cost-effective revisions in two key ways: (1) fixed-cost pricing model, and (2) dedicated technology. 

1. Fixed-cost pricing

With Shuttlerock, you pay on a fixed-cost plan where revisions and variations are unlimited. This leads to it being 3–4x less expensive than traditional agencies on average.

With a traditional agency, if you have to make revisions to your messaging or visuals, you can quickly rack up thousands of dollars in costs. With Shuttlerock, your costs remain fixed, no matter how many rounds of revisions you require. 

2. Dedicated technology

ShuttlerockCloud also offers sophisticated technology that helps process revisions faster and leads to fewer rounds of revisions being required. Our revision tool enables users to provide clear, concise feedback, helping to remove ambiguity and unnecessary back-and-forth. ShuttlerockCloud also enables automated quick-fixes, allowing simple revisions to be actioned quickly. 

3. Fuel your omnichannel strategy with the right creative 

Challenge

The ability for health brands to activate a true omnichannel digital strategy is often hamstrung by the fact that they are running matching luggage (the same assets used across multiple placements). By doing so, the creative lacks the nuance and context for different platforms, audiences, and stages in the customer journey. 

This occurs due to traditional creative production methods unable to deliver creative diversity and scalability in a cost-effective manner. 

To achieve maximum performance across digital channels, health marketers need to avoid simply cutting down TVCs, and focus on developing creative that is both platform-optimized and tailored to specific patient and HCP audiences and journeys.

Shuttlerock solution

At Shuttlerock, we enable health brands to scale the creation of platform-optimized and audience-tailored creative. And we make it affordable through our fixed-cost plans.

This delivers creative diversity, enabling health marketers to run a true omnichannel strategy where the right messaging is being delivered to the right audience, at the right time. 

This is facilitated by ShuttlerockCloud, which makes it easy for health marketers to order all of the deliverables they need. They can order creative variations for each of the platforms, placements, audiences, and stages of the marketing funnel that they require.

4. Innovate to stand out in a sea of sameness

Challenge

There is very little differentiation between the social creative being produced by health brands. Formulaic storytelling makes it hard to distinguish one brand from another. This is compounded by the fact that experimentation is stifled due to health being a heavily regulated industry. 

To improve engagement on social – especially with younger generations – health marketers need innovative creative strategies that will help them stand out in the sea of creative sameness. Those who make creative innovation a priority will be able to get an edge over their competitors.

Shuttlerock solution

There are two main ways that Shuttlerock helps health brands stand out on social through innovation: (1) platform-native ethos, and (2) innovative formats. 

1. Platform-native creative

It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to stand out on social is‌ to blend in. Instead of running TVC cutdowns that stick out like a sore thumb when placed in a social feed, health marketers need to adopt a platform-native ethos where the goal is ‌to reflect the look and feel of organic content.

When done right, your creative will add to the audience’s experience on the platform, rather than disrupt it.

2. Innovative formats

Another way health brands can stand out is by leveraging innovative ad formats. Each digital platform offers a range of innovative formats beyond the standard video and image offerings. A common thread between many of these formats is interactivity. For example, Meta offers Instant Experiences, Polling Ads, and Spark AR. TikTok offerings Interactive Add-Ons and Branded Hashtag Challenges.

Health brands have been behind the curve when it comes to adopting these formats. Therefore, there is a big opportunity for health marketers to get a jump on the competition by bringing these formats into their creative strategy.

Elevate your health creative, with Shuttlerock

If you’re a healthcare marketer looking to produce compelling creative in a scalable, streamlined manner, please feel free to request a demo to further explore how Shuttlerock’s solutions can help your brand. Alternatively, you can get in touch with one of our crew members.