The Ultimate Guide To Healthcare Influencer Marketing In 2023

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In today’s fast-paced world, healthcare is one of the few industries that is still largely dominated by traditional advertising methods.

However, this is quickly changing as more and more people turn to technology to find information. 

In response, healthcare providers are turning to healthcare and wellness influencers to help them spread their message and reach new patients. 

Influencer marketing in healthcare is a growing trend that has the potential to improve patient engagement and satisfaction with care.

This article provides everything you need to know about healthcare influencer marketing so that you can start building your own successful campaigns.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a popular marketing strategy that uses influential people, called influencers, to promote a product or brand.

The influencers are people who are known for their expertise in a particular area, such as fashion, beauty, travel, health, etc. 

They can promote a brand by talking about it on their platforms. 

In exchange for their endorsement, influencers may receive compensation such as sponsorships, commissions on sales, or free products.

The goal of influencer marketing is to increase brand awareness by enlisting the help of influencers who can help spread the word about it.

Why Consider Influencer Marketing In Healthcare?

There is massive potential for the healthcare and pharmaceutical brands

as well as fashion, beauty, and fitness.

Audiences are already connecting with healthcare influencers since the internet has changed patients’ methods of managing their health. 

A quick text and email exchange with a doctor’s staff provides the opportunity to obtain information about lingering symptoms, treatments, product lines, as well as other facts about the healthcare facilities.  These research stages of patients are great opportunities for marketing in healthcare.

As a healthcare brand, your social media presence can enhance brand awareness and the image of the brand in general.

In fact, 40% of people said information found on social media affects how they coped with a chronic condition, their view of diet and exercise, and their selection of a physician. Influencers’ voices matter in the minds of consumers, and influencers’ authentic experiences shared on social media resonate with their followers. Taking their engagement with influencers further, 39% of consumers even act on (purchase, research, spread the word, or consider) influencer posts about health and wellness.

In addition to using influencer marketing in healthcare to promote specific products, organizations can leverage healthcare influencers to promote their organizations, including hospitals. People turn to healthcare and medical influencers to evaluate the quality of a hospital.

Research has found that 57 percent of people consider a hospital’s social media presence when deciding where to go for service. Further, consumers associate a hospital’s social media presence with cutting-edge technologies.

How To Find The Right Healthcare Influencers For Your Brand?

Finding influencers that best fit your niche is a critical part of influencer marketing campaigns

Consumers turn to influencers for health and wellness inspiration. With something as critical as health, credibility is everything. Influencers, who have earned their audiences’ trust, come across as more believable than even the most polished messaging from a healthcare brand.

With Ainfluencer, you can discover and invite trusted healthcare influencers, collaborate, and manage your campaigns; all 100% free and super easy to use.

Check out this video to see how this influencer marketplace can help you find medical and health care influencers:

Top 10 healthcare Influencers You Should Follow

We compiled a list of the top health care influencers you can connect and collaborate with below.

1. Dr. Mike Varshavski (@doctor.mike)

Mike is a board-certified FM physician with close to 4.5M Instagram followers based in NYC. If you are looking for local influencers in NY, then Mike is your go-to option. Aside from being a health influencer, he is one of the finest male fitness influencers out there.

Connect with Mike

2. Heather Irobunda (@advisorycervixpod)

Heather is a well-known healthcare influencer who talks about any and everything sex and reproductive health⁣ discussions. 

She is the founder of the podcast by the name of drheatherirobundamd.

If you want to connect with a healthcare nano influencer who knows her job well, Heather is a great choice.

Invite Heather to collab

3. Dr. Ethan Smallwood (@doctorethan)

Ethan is one of the best wellness and health influencers with over 200k fans on Instagram. He is a TV doctor and content creator on social platforms specializing in medicine.

Collaborate with Ethan

4. Sydney and Jess (@sydneykokymedicalteam)

The healthcare macro influencer, Sydney, has to be one of the most popular healthcare influencers on Instagram and TikTok with over 1M followers. She’s won hearts for her fun and easy-to-understand nutrition, medicine, and health-related pictures and videos.

Chat with Sydney

5. Dr. Jake (@jakegoodmanmd)

Jake is an activist, TEDx speaker, and writer based in Florida. With more than 300k IG followers, he is one of the best healthcare and mental health influencers you should follow.

He specializes in areas like psychiatry, medicine, and resident physician.

Talk to Jake

6. Dr. Chris (@dr.chrish)

Chris is a healthcare micro influencer and a family medicine physician with over 40k followers on Instagram and more than 500k on TikTok. He tries to make content in the health and medicine area with the help of comedy. Chris is also one of the best Instagram fitness influencers based in NY.

Connect with Chris

7. Shirlene Obuobi (@shirlywhirlmd)

This Cardiology fellow, Shirlene, creates content with the taste of art. She has over 30k followers, and her colorful and fun layout makes you all interested in health-related topics. 

Invite Shirlene to collab

8. Dr. Sanjay Gupta (@drsanjaygupta)

Gupta is the chief medical correspondent for CNN and a neurosurgeon. With nearly 250k followers on Instagram and over 2.38M followers on Twitter.

If you are running influencer marketing in the healthcare niche, he is one of the best healthcare and medical influencers alive. 

Through his tweets, he covers pretty much everything there is to cover in the healthcare niche, including the latest healthcare reforms. Dr. Gupta keeps his followers updated about the latest reforms and pretty much everything you need to know in healthcare. 

9. Kevin Pho (@kevinphomd)

Kevin is a physician and one of the most distinguished healthcare influencers. A speaker and an author, Kevin is also on the board of contributors of USA Today. He owns the website, KevinMD.com, and has over 157k followers on Twitter. If you haven’t collaborated with him yet, you’re missing out on a lot.

See also  14 Benefits Of Influencer Marketing To Grow Your Business

10. Doug Ulman (@dougulman)

He is the CEO and president of Pelotonia, which is a bike tour that donates all the proceeds to cancer research. He is one of the finest health care influencers in the world, and he competes in this race as well. With over 921k followers, he’s one of the most influential personalities in this industry on Twitter. 

7 Steps To Running A Successful Healthcare Influencer Campaign

Running a successful healthcare influencer marketing campaign can be a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth it if you want to reach a large audience and generate positive change in the industry. Here are 7 steps that will help you get started: 

1. Be Informed About Regulations In Your Area

Of course, there are some significant differences between influencer marketing in healthcare versus fashion that cause no harm to people.

Before going all-in on marketing in healthcare, you should know that there are several guidelines healthcare marketers need to follow to ensure they aren’t misleading the public.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has several guidance documents that detail what medical and healthcare influencers can and cannot say in their social media posts. It also has guidance for correcting misinformation published by third parties like influencers.

Make sure you are aware of the rules and regulations of your niche and region.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Choose a niche that you know well. The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and with it the way that patients are treated. To stay ahead of the curve, healthcare brands and organizations need to identify their target audience and tailor their services accordingly. 

Some factors that businesses should consider when identifying their target audience include age, sex, location, and socioeconomic status. By understanding these factors, healthcare brands can create healthcare influencer marketing campaigns that are tailored to their specific customer base.

3. Decide On Your Specific Marketing Goals

Influencers aren’t one-size-fits-all marketing solutions. The best choice for you depends on your goals.

No one knows healthcare better than the people who use it on a daily basis. That’s why it can be so valuable to tap into the insights and knowledge of health care influencers in order to create marketing campaigns that resonate with their audience.

Here are some things to consider when setting healthcare influencer marketing goals: 

Do you want to promote a specific product or service?

Do you want to develop relationships with healthcare professionals? 

Do you simply want to share your knowledge and experience with others

Once you have determined your goals, it is important to develop an influencer marketing strategy that will help you achieve them.

4. Find The Right Influencers That Align With Your Goals

The healthcare industry is one of the most complex industries to navigate. It’s important to find healthcare influencers that align with your objectives if you want to be successful in this niche.

Do your research, and find out what the influencer’s interests and goals are before you reach out.

This will help you connect with them on a more personal level and build a stronger relationship.

In this step, you can take advantage of influencer marketplaces like Ainfluencer to compare the influencers based on their number of followers, interests, engagement rate, location, quality score, etc.

Find Influencers on the Ainfluencer influencer marketplace

5. Research The Best Platforms To Run Your Campaign On

There are many different platforms available to healthcare organizations when it comes to influencer marketing in healthcare. 

Some of the most popular options include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the one that will fit your brand’s specific needs and goals.

6. Create A Comprehensive Healthcare Influencer Marketing Plan

A comprehensive influencer marketing plan should include an influencer marketing strategy, identifying your target audience, identifying the channels through which they are reached, developing creative content, measurement, and optimization.

7. Measure The Results

measurement not only provides practitioners with valuable insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns but also helps them identify potential issues before they become serious problems.

In order to measure the effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign, it is important to track key metrics such as impressions, clicks, shares, etc.

3 Best Healthcare Influencer Marketing Examples

Healthcare topics are becoming increasingly popular on Instagram. Influencers use their platforms to provide information on their health challenges and offer suggestions to their followers. 

That’s a great opportunity for healthcare brands on Instagram to collaborate with influencers to run healthcare influencer marketing campaigns.

1. StopFlu Campaign

Public Good Projects (PGP), the public health nonprofit responsible for the StopFlu campaign. The goal was to narrow the health disparity gap that showed African American, Hispanic, and Latinx communities get fewer flu vaccinations than their white or Asian counterparts. 

PGP partnered with 120 micro influencers who over-index in African American or Hispanic/Latino communities within Kaiser Permanente service regions. They specifically wanted those whose number of followers capped at 10,000, reasoning that it would make them seem more relatable.

healthcare influencer marketing campaign
Source

PGP was also careful to prep influencers, reiterating that if they receive a medical question they were not qualified to answer, they were to direct followers to resources on the Kaiser Permanente site.

2. AHSM

Some believe the best way to build trust is to turn doctors into influencers. 

The Association for Healthcare Social Media (AHSM), the first nonprofit society for health professionals on social media, started the #VerifyHealthcare transparency movement.

AHSM is slowly building a network of doctors, nurses, dentists, physical therapists, and clinicians debunking false claims by untrained medical professionals and sharing science-backed advice and nursing programs on social media. 

healthcare influencer marketing examples
Source

3. Tata 1mg

Tata 1mg’s vision was to reach that market that was untapped, where the audience was not aware of the health benefits that the brand was providing.

Influencers like Ashwani Neeraj who is an Asian fitness influencer who posts about Health and fitness participated in the campaign. He effortlessly explained how the 1mg product benefited his lifestyle.

The audiences not only took notice of the brand but users were also connecting their influencer’s journey with 1mg and created a powerful impact in terms of brand equity and sales.

healthcare influencer marketing example

Influencer Marketing Campaign Tips for Healthcare

Here are some tips for healthcare influencer marketing that will help you succeed:

#1 Focus on Trust More Than Reach

The healthcare industry has been focusing on increasing reach instead of trust, a trend that is starting to change. Patients are becoming more demanding and looking for quality healthcare regardless of the cost. Institutions need to focus on rebuilding trust with their patients in order to keep them as customers.

#2 Ask Healthcare Influencers To Share Content On Different Social Media Platforms

Influencers are a valuable source of content for healthcare organizations because they have a large following on social media. By asking influencers to share content on different social media platforms, healthcare brands can reach a wide audience.

By sharing content on various platforms, healthcare influencers can build trust and relationships with their followers, which can result in brand reputation.

#3 Have Clear Goals In Mind

While it is important to be mindful of the target market, it is also essential to have specific goals in mind. Before embarking on a healthcare influencer marketing campaign.

#4 Ensure Healthcare Influencers Follow Regulations

There is no doubt that healthcare influencers can have a major impact on patient care. However, if not followed properly, their influence can also be destructive. 

In order to ensure that healthcare and medical influencers are following regulations and helping to improve patient care, it is important for those in charge of regulating healthcare to be aware of their presence and the impact they can have.

Healthcare influencers need to be careful not to give direct medical advice or say anything that violates federal guidelines for pharmaceutical companies. So, it’s essential to work with influencers who can be trusted to stick to your guidelines.

#5 Build A Strong Social Media Following

In today’s digital age, healthcare brands need to be on social media to stay competitive. A strong social media following can help these brands connect with their customers, build trust, and generate leads.

Conclusion

Healthcare influencer marketing can be a great way to promote your healthcare brand. However, it is important to carefully select the right influencers and to create effective campaigns. 

By following these tips, you can create a successful healthcare influencer marketing campaign that will reach and engage your target audience.

1- What is a healthcare influencer?

Healthcare influencers are people who use their social media platforms to promote healthy lifestyles, vaccinations, and other preventive healthcare measures. They may also work to increase awareness of mental health issues or cancers. Healthcare influencers can have a major impact on public opinion, and their work can help to improve the quality of care provided to patients.

2- What is the best way to find healthcare influencers?

Effective methods of reaching out to healthcare influencers include influencer marketing platforms, search engines, and hashtag searches. Additionally, it is important to find influencers who are passionate about the subject matter and have a large following.

Cyrus Nambakhsh

Cyrus is a serial entrepreneur, product-led-growth expert, a product visionary who launched 7 startups. He has built scalable platforms to help businesses and entrepreneurs. Contact: Cyrus@ainfluencer.com