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When it comes to disease awareness campaigns, social media is often lauded as champion of your digital strategy thanks to its broad reach, ability to be tailored to different demographics, and tendency towards digestible content.
While there’s no denying that social media is a fundamental tool for communicating your disease awareness message, it generally lacks the depth to convert interest into action, meaning it cannot carry a successful awareness-raising campaign alone.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to. A well-thought-out landing page can bridge the gap between interest and action by providing an experience that encourages visitors along this journey. But what are the key components that go into creating a landing page that engages or educates a healthcare audience? We’re here to answer just that.
As its name suggests, a landing page is a standalone webpage where a visitor “lands” on your site, generally after clicking on a link from an ad in an email or on social media. Unlike other web pages, which typically have multiple goals, landing pages are focused on persuading your audience to take a specific action, known as a conversion.
For disease awareness landing pages, there are a few different kinds of conversions you may be nudging your audience towards, such as:
A brilliantly executed social media campaign can bring visitors to your site, but if those visitors aren’t converting it’s possible you’re missing some crucial elements that ensure your landing page is working as hard as possible for you. To find out what they are, read on.
To build an effective landing page, you first need to understand who it is that you’re creating it for and the specific action you want to drive from them. In the pharmaceutical or healthcare sectors, an awareness campaign might address patients, healthcare professionals (HCPs) or other stakeholders. Each group has distinct needs, and there will be differentiation even within these groups. This is where taking the time to create detailed healthcare audience personas pays off.
When constructing audience personas, you’ll need to consider all the demographic data you might expect, such as job title, age and location. However, best practice dictates that the more specific you can be, the better. We work with our clients to focus on their audience’s psychographic data – their specific desires, behaviours, interests, pain points and informational needs. Once you have built robust healthcare personas based on this research, you can tailor your landing page to address the unique needs of your target audience.
A successful disease awareness landing page focuses on a single, clear goal, whether it’s educating the public about a specific health condition, or changing ingrained HCP or patient behaviour. Ensure every element on your page contributes towards this singular goal, and remove anything that distracts from it. Your readers should be able to find the information they need quickly and easily without being overwhelmed by too many concepts or ideas. This also means avoiding multiple calls-to-action which may confuse or distract.
Around 70-80% of people never read beyond the headline on any given webpage, meaning your landing page is constantly fighting to hold the reader’s attention.1 This means that penning the perfect landing page headline is crucial if you are to have any chance of funnelling the audience towards the rest of your awareness-raising content.
Research from your audience persona development will provide you with insights as to how to appeal to the specific concerns of your healthcare audience. Use this understanding to communicate the value your audience will gain from engaging with your material and distil it well in the headline.
When competing for readers’ attention, it may be tempting to make your headline as attention-grabbing, memorable and emotive as possible, but this may not be the best strategy for a healthcare campaign landing page. Abiding by healthcare and pharmaceutical industry regulatory compliance generally means avoiding sensationalism in your headlines, and HCPs tend to prefer copy that’s free from emotive language and easy to understand. Focus on clear and concise headlines and cut out the jargon.
On the subject of compliance, there are a number of concerns when it comes to landing pages for healthcare and pharmaceutical audiences that set them apart from others.
If your organisation is associated with a specific drug, you must ensure that your disease awareness content does not promote this drug to the public, while remaining transparent in your organisation’s authorship of the content. Similarly, if you’re creating your page with HCPs in mind, you may need to restrict your content so that it can’t be accessed by the general public.
It’s good practice to consult the ABPI Code of Practice if your audience is UK-based, or that of an equivalent body for any region outside of the UK.
Trust signals are signifiers on your landing page that encourage your audience to feel confident that they’re dealing with a credible organisation or entity. They’re sometimes also referred to as social proof. For healthcare or pharmaceutical audiences, trust signals are arguably more important than ever.
You can ensure your landing page builds trust by highlighting:
These elements can help reassure visitors that both you and your awareness message are credible.
We mentioned earlier that your campaign landing page needs to have a singular focus – a specific action that you want the consumer of your disease awareness content to take. Your CTA is the prompt or button that compels your audience to take that action.
An effective landing page will feature only one CTA, but it’s good practice to repeat that CTA in multiple places. Your CTAs should be visually obvious, and use clear language that guides your user towards the desired action.
The process for completing the CTA, such as filling out a consultation form or opting in to receive medical education, needs to be as simple as possible, eliminating difficulty for the visitor.
Social media is an important tool for driving traffic to your landing page, but it’s not the only one. With Google receiving around one billion health-related queries every day (that’s roughly 7% of its total traffic), you could be missing a huge number of leads interested in your awareness-raising cause if you don’t optimise your landing page for search engines.2
Two fundamental search engine optimisation (SEO) principles to bear in mind when constructing your landing page are:
With this in mind, there’s no point in driving traffic to your landing page if its layout and user experience (UX) is going to deter your audience from engaging with your disease awareness content.
A clean and uncluttered landing page is ideal for keeping the visitor focused. This isn’t to say that visually appealing elements can’t be included where they bolster your disease awareness message, or guide the eye towards the CTA.
Finally, seamless UX is crucial. Navigation should feel intuitive, and provide clear instructions for guiding the visitor towards the desired action. Ensure there are no technical issues, such as broken links or form errors that will discourage the user from converting. You should ensure your landing page works on all devices, and conduct regular testing to guarantee everything runs smoothly.
Now that you have a grasp of the various components that go into building an effective landing page, it’s time to implement them. But before you consider your job done, you’ll want to employ some A/B testing to ensure your page is working optimally.
A/B testing involves trialling different headlines, CTAs, and layout variations to see which elements generate the most conversions. You should continuously monitor and adapt your page based on performance metrics and user feedback.
Even with taking onboard all the above considerations, it’s important to remember that there are unique challenges that come with creating a disease awareness landing page that set them apart from others. Knowing how to navigate these nuances can ensure your awareness message resonates, and help boost your campaign’s success.
If you still need some help getting started, or on optimising your page, contact one of our digital experts today to find out out how we can help.
1. People Only Read the Headlines (and I Might as Well Stop There) [Internet]. Medium. 2024. Available from: https://medium.com/@moresblog619/people-only-read-the-headlines-and-i-might-as-well-stop-there-2083494ee134#:~:text=It%20said%20%E2%80%9Ceducate%20the%20masses [Accessed 24 June 2024].
2. Telegraph.co.uk. Dr Google will see you now: Search giant wants to cash in on your medical queries [Internet]. The Telegraph. 2019. Available from: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/03/10/google-sifting-one-billion-health-questions-day/ [Accessed 24 June 2024].