How Digital Marketing Is Impacting The Healthcare Industry

As you all know, Healthcare is a complex industry. Between HIPPA compliance and FDA regulations, there is a heavy restriction on DTC marketing. Also, according to reports, in case of Digital Marketing, health care industry lacks by about two years when compared to other industries One of the main reasons for this could be the difficulty in selection of ad-words. 

For example, Google AdWords team has a restriction on healthcare related content. There seems to be a lack of clarity on the what is allowed and hence, certain AdWords my be flagged for no reason. Additionally, the Ads needs to follow the health care regulations laid out by the various governments while advertising and hence, the content need to vary from country to country. This makes it very difficult and time consuming for the Pharmaceutical industries to design a suitable Ad campaign.

In my opinion though this is tedious from a business PoV, this is required for protection of the patients. A large number of folks today have access the internet today and can be influenced by the online advertisements. Unrestricted and unregulated content can result in unethical promotion and hence, restrictions are a necessary evil. 

However, this should not deter the health care companies from making use of this astonishing medium of communicating with its consumers. According to recent studies, 72% of internet users looked online for health information within the past year. In fact, searching for health related information is the third most popular online activity.

Hence, I would like to end with a quote from Michael Bloomberg - "Taxes are not a good thing, but if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them"

http://www.fathomdelivers.com/blog/healthcare/challenges-marketing-healthcare-online-google-adwords/