Ads in the healthcare industry are not like the ones you will find in other sectors. There is a lot more nuance and caution that needs to be practiced here. And yet, the time when you could market your services without the help of health ads is long gone.
Healthcare ads help you establish authority and position yourself as a dependable service provider for patient care. And given the exponential rise in the number of hospitals and private practitioners in the last decade, health ads can help put you on the map.
But creating and running healthcare ads can seem daunting, especially if you don’t have a huge marketing team or experience of doing this in the past. And that is why we’re here to help with this list of the best health ads to inspire your efforts in 2024.
We will begin by showcasing the best video ads in the business — because it is no news that video advertising has taken the world and social media by storm— and then move on to other web-based ideas and offline ideas. If you already have some video ideas that you would bring to life, you don’t have to wait till the end of the article, you do so by signing up for a free account on InVideo.
Here is what we will cover:
1. Play the seasonal card
2. Educate your audience
3. Bust health myths
4. Share personal experiences
5. Get the word out about your free webinar
6. Give your audience something to smile about
7. Testimonials
8. Recipes
9. Advertise a unique or new product or service
10. Encourage the audience to engage and ask questions
11. Flyers with a catchy headline or graphic
12. Direct mail a leaflet or postcard
13. Turn heads with a billboard
14. Widen your reach with newspapers
Bonus: Pro Tips for Creating Health Ads
Video Ads
Fitness brands like Tigerfitness.com have successfully used video to achieve their goals. The brand reveals that video marketing helped them achieve a customer return rate of 60% - 3x more than the industry standard. Evidently, video marketing can drive your online health brand’s success. However, if you’re having a tough time coming up with ideas for your next video ad, we’ve got some ideas you can use as inspiration.
1. Play the seasonal card
A pandemic can put people in panic mode rather quickly. Think about it. How many times since the pandemic started have you been frightened of the flu, thinking it could be Covid? If you’re like me, you also researched terms like cold or Covid on Google.
Why is this information helpful? Well, Google collects your data. When you research cold, it shows you ads with similar keywords. If it’s currently the flu season, there might be a ton of people searching for such keywords, which could give you an opportunity to put your product in front of people.
For instance, here’s how Brillia Health uses this opportunity for running their video:
The ad’s text describes how the product helps ease a seasonal cold’s symptoms, and it’s accompanied by a video testimonial to underpin their claim. However, the video isn’t just a testimonial. Brillia adds the benefits of its products at the bottom of the video and some branding elements. At the end of the video, it adds a CTA to “learn more.”
It’s a simple yet effective ad. If you want to create a similar ad, start by getting raw footage of a customer’s testimonial. Next, use InVideo to add styling elements, captions, and your logo to brand your video. Want to make it more professional? Use a logo reveal template:
For the CTA, you can add text and some images of your product if you prefer. If you want to go the extra mile, you can also add transitions, a low-volume background track, and some animation at the end.
2. Educate your audience
Healthcare can often be complex. Most people aren’t familiar with the technical side of healthcare, which is why everybody gets a second opinion when it’s about their health.
For this reason, it’s important to showcase your brand as an expert. Your audience must believe in you and your product or service so they can feel confident about signing up for your service or buying your product.
Educating your audience is a valuable strategy for positioning yourself as an expert. By answering your audience’s questions, you’re earning their trust and building a community that you can convert into customers down the line.
For instance, here’s how Key Cellular Nutrition how your cell’s health can be key to your entire body health:
The video goes into detail for explaining how a cell works to keep your body healthy rather than saying that it does. There’s a whiteboard, a diagram, and captions—the whole package. However, you can do a lot more to make the video more engaging with InVideo.
Using this template will help you create a video that’s far more engaging and delivers a similar message with more visual elements weaved into the frame:
Add your footage to the template and use the template either as an intro or an outro to give viewers a quick peek into what your video talks about. You can edit the text in the video and change the background footage on the storyboard if you’re creating a video on a very different health topic. You won’t have to jump through a lot of hoops when you use a template. Just select the template, edit text and background, and you’re done. You can always do a lot more with InVideo, like change the background music, add voice-over, or use cool effects.
3. Bust health myths
Health can be a tricky, and often scary, subject for many. There are way too many healthcare myths out there because people are willing to try just about anything to keep themselves healthy. However, some of these can actually stand in the way of your goals of achieving good health.
Providing your audience with the truth and busting myths helps you build a connection. They need accurate information from a healthcare expert, and if you can offer them the truth and evidence, you’ll be taking a step towards building a community that trusts you.
Balance Health & Healing’s ad about your relationship with your body explains why you don’t need to fight your body:
If you want to create an ad similar to Balance Health and Healing, start by writing a script of what you’ll discuss in the video. Aim to keep the script under 90 seconds.
You can choose to speak to a camera directly like in Balance Health and Healing’s ad, create a text-based video, or add voice-over to a video created with relevant images. Speaking to the camera yourself works the best because it lets viewers connect with you.
Next, record a video and put the raw footage into the InVideo editor. Then, add captions to make sure ESL viewers can accurately understand the video and to make it more accessible. Once you’re done, you can also add an intro and outro with your logo to brand the video.
4. Share personal experiences
Healthcare professionals often go through tough times themselves. These experiences can provide viewers with an insight into how they dealt with those circumstances. Similar experiences can become a common ground for building a connection with your audience.
However, it’s best to put your face out there when creating such ads instead of just using voice-over and some slides to make the video more relatable. For instance, Dr. Stephens Cook’s NPO, BayCare, shares a video ad where Dr. Stephens shares her personal experience helping her mom deal with breast cancer:
It’s an excellent example of what a good video ad should look like, and you can create a similar video fairly quickly with InVideo. The video focuses on Dr. Stephens and blurs out the background. There’s a blue stripe on the video with branding elements and captions throughout the video. The room is well-lit, and the video has been shot through different angles.
At the end of the video, there’s a fade transition between the video and the final frame with the logo. You can also get creative with transitions though—they’re easy to add and can greatly beautify your videos.
5. Get the word out about your free webinar
Are you doing a free webinar/seminar? How about getting the word out with a video ad? Even if the seminar is free, you still need to proactively advertise it so people actually show up. A poor turnout at a free seminar can reflect badly on your brand.
It’s important to realize that even though the seminar doesn’t cost money, it does cost time. So, it’s still important to offer people tangible value because they’ll be investing their time. In the context of health ads, you must provide viewers with a direct solution to a problem.
For instance, Orlando Injury & Health Center uses a video that directly highlights the problem they aim to address in a free webinar:
They add the number for RSVPing on the video as well as the captions. However, their video lacks a background track. It’s understandable how editing can often be time-consuming, and that’s exactly why InVideo can be a great asset when you’re running a video ad campaign. In addition to letting you add text easily, it also allows adding text with cool fonts and lets you animate the text to liven up your videos.
To create an RSVP video, use this template. Alternatively, you can also directly start with a done-for-you template and edit the elements to personalize the video ad. For instance, here’s a template you could use for a health video ad:
All you need to do here is substitute the text. The template has transitions and effects built right in, so you don’t need to spend much time on those. If you want, you can also add some branding elements, an intro/outro, and some stock footage.
Image Ads
Video ads earn better engagement, but image ads are far from obsolete. Images are particularly useful when you’ve got little time to shoot for a video. You can take a picture, edit it with a beginner-friendly editor, and upload one or several health ads at once.
It still requires ideation, though. If you’ve run out of ideas, use the following for inspiration and modify them to your preference.
6. Give your audience something to smile about
Healthcare often has a very sincere undertone, and it’s justified. However, you can show your audience that your healthcare services also spread happiness. A person currently experiencing a health challenge might view your post as a source of hope.
Children’s Health does this very well. They share stories from patients who make progress, showing others out there going through a similar circumstance that healthcare provides hope:
The ad shares a short story in the caption, along with a heart-warming picture of a little girl enjoying a snowball fight. If you want to create a similar ad, you’ll first need to find a real story – don’t try to fake a story; people will see right through it.
Once you have a story, take a picture that gives a viewer a preview of what your story is about (similar to the little girl holding a snowball). As a final touch, write a caption that speaks to your audience. Don’t keep it too short or too long; just enough to directly communicate the story succinctly.
7. Testimonials
Static images can be an excellent way to showcase testimonials. There are a couple of ways you can use an image for sharing your testimonials. You can add an image of a happy client, insert an image with a text snippet from the testimonial, or use a high-quality stock image that conveys that this ad shows a testimonial.
NYPT Health and Rehab goes with a stock image and puts the testimonial text in the caption:
If you have several testimonials to choose from, you can turn that into a quick slideshow using a template like this one from InVideo.
8.Share Recipes
Diet plays a big part in maintaining good health. People who want to get in shape, get rid of an ailment, or simply be mindful about what they consume are very likely to be interested in recipes. You don’t necessarily have to be a nutritionist to post health ads that share recipes, though. You can be a mental health professional or even a gym—because diet impacts every aspect of your overall health.
Creating or obtaining an image for a recipe ad might be easy or challenging, depending on the recipes you share. For instance, if you’re sharing a slightly tweaked recipe for preparing a smoothie, you might be able to get away with a stock photo of a similar-colored smoothie. However, if you’ve come up with a unique recipe, you might need to take a picture yourself or use a text-based image.
ONIE Project uses a custom image in their ad since the recipe they share in their image ad isn’t generic:
If you plan on using a stock image, you won’t need to do a lot of editing. However, if you plan on taking an image of the recipe yourself, you should be mindful of a few things. First, try to take a picture in natural light. Second, make sure the food is garnished, and the serving bowls are clean (and the gravy isn’t dripping off the edges). Finally, make sure the table you’ve placed the bowl on has a pleasant but not overpowering feel.
It's okay to use a phone to take the picture, but make sure it’s a high-quality camera. Once you’ve taken the image, put it through a nice editor and fine-tune the image. Finally, make sure that when you write the caption: you mention the name of the recipe, who it’s helpful for, and the key ingredients.
Alternatively you can also create animated recipe ad using templates from InVideo like this one. Given their dynamic nature, they are also bound to perform better.
9. Advertise a unique or new product or service
If you provide a service or sell a product that’s unique in some way or is relatively new, a combination of a compelling graphic and caption could help you grab your audience’s attention. You can also use a stock image if you don’t want to design a graphic yourself, but make sure it supports the subject matter referred to in the caption.
Sonder Behavioral Health & Wellness advertises their NeuroStar Advanced Therapy service with a graphic that shows mental distress:
Alternatively, you can choose to use an image that shows a stressed individual, or even use a stock image, as long as it efficiently communicates the message. If you want to create a similar ad to showcase an innovative product or service, you’ll need to mention your differentiating factor clearly.
Sonder Behavioral Health & Wellness, for example, explains that NeuroStar Advanced Therapy is helpful for patients that didn’t respond to traditional treatments. Then, it lists the reasons why NeuroStar Advanced Therapy is trustworthy and reliable. Essentially, you want to answer all questions your audience might have when they first read about a new treatment or healthcare product.
10. Encourage the audience to engage and ask questions
Sure, you can respond to comments on your Facebook page and respond to messages you receive every day. However, you can also use health ads to actively encourage the audience to engage with your health brand, rather than simply responding to engagement that comes your way through posts.
Note that such ads need a little more leg work because you’ll need to provide your audience some context based on which they can ask questions. For instance, you can schedule a webinar and then schedule a Q&A session at the end. If you want to create something more long-term, create a series of lectures and allow your audience to post questions where they can receive quick responses. That’s exactly what Sanford Health does in its ad:
Print and Offline Ads
Even though digital marketing is all the rage and is believed to be the best avenue when it comes to advertising your services, stats from 2021 show that the offline media spend in the US grew from $14 billionto $196 billion. This means that brands still spend on offline ads because they generate a good ROI and can help you diversify your marketing budget.
If you’re looking to tap into the potential of offline ads for your healthcare business, but need a starting point or just need an idea for your next campaign, we’ve got some ideas for you.
11. Flyers with a catchy headline or graphic
Flyers might look ancient, but they’re still very relevant for your marketing strategy. You can distribute health ads on a flyer through notice boards, mail, or hand them out one by one. A survey by DMA reveals that mailed leaflets and flyers are revisited 3.6 times on average. Those are some good numbers, so if you’re looking to get in on some of that action to put out health ads offline, flyers are an excellent choice.
Creating flyers in the 2020s is more than just throwing some text and a graphic on a canvas though. You need to get your creative motor running to design a flyer that gets people’s attention. The key is to keep the key details crisp, so someone who looks at the flyer almost immediately knows what it’s about.
Here’s a great example of a flyer design that’s crisp and not overpowering:
The ad puts the key message in big fonts at the top, but keeps it crisp and creative. If someone’s interested, they find the contact details at the bottom. Notice how the graphic is also consistent with Oscar’s branding colors.
If you want to create a similar flyer, you can use templates and modify them for personalization. However, suppose you want more control over the elements and flexibility in terms of design. In that case, you might need to either learn Adobe Illustrator or outsource the design to a professional graphics designer.
In any case, you should keep your messaging concise and avoid putting large blocks of text on your flyer. Aim to make it easy for people to read and absorb the information on the flyer on the go.
12. Direct mail a leaflet or postcard
Direct mail is one of the oldest ways of getting your brand’s name in front of people. The great thing about direct mail is that it allows a lot more personalization than flyers. You’ll need to first obtain a list of names and addresses to send a direct mail to, which means you’ll have more details about them than when distributing flyers. Remember, addressing someone by their name goes a long way.
Plus, direct mail has an average open rate of 90%, and 42% of recipients read or scan through the mail they receive. This provides you with a unique opportunity to send across a message for your brand. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all design for direct mail, but creativity and clever design are key.
Here’s a great example of what your direct mail health ad could look like:
The design fits all elements into the design, including the logo, headline, list of offered services, contact details, and even a Google testimonial. If you’ve already earned some credibility online, adding a Google testimonial to your offline health ads can make your brand look more established.
If you want to create similar health ads for sending them through direct mail, you can use the same design as a starting point and make relevant edits. You’ll definitely need to change the headline, logo, list of services, images, and CTAs.
However, if you prefer, you can change the colors on the design to make them more consistent with your branding with a tool like Adobe Illustrator. Alternatively, you can also find ready-to-use templates on Canva, where you can edit templates far more easily than with Adobe Illustrator.
13. Turn heads with a billboard
Billboards have been around for long, but they haven’t become obsolete because of one reason: creativity. If you want to put up health ads on a billboard, go right ahead because you’re likely to earn plenty of brand awareness. However, don’t be thinking that you’ll get away by simply adding some text, an image, and a CTA to your billboard design.
Think about it. When you pass through a road, you see an assortment of billboards lined up across the street. Unless your billboard is brimming with vibrant colors or a design that stands out, you’ll just be another billboard on the street.
Let’s first look at an example of how your billboard shouldn’t look:
You might be able to get away with such generic designs if yours is the only billboard around. But if you’re targeting a high traffic locality with several billboards around, you’ll need more creativity. Here’s a great example of how a billboard can be both simple and creative at the same time:
These billboard health ads by Saint Luke’s Health System are fairly simple and designed on a white canvas. However, they’re creative enough to intrigue people. If you can’t tell the difference between a good and a not-so-good billboard design, ask yourself if you thought about how the design is cool or unique. If you didn’t have any thoughts about the billboard, it’s probably a generic design.
There's no magic formula if you want to turn heads with a creative billboard. It’s all creativity. Once you have a concept that’s creative enough, you can even use a free tool like Canva to design your billboard. It doesn’t necessarily require advanced editing tools because the design’s concept is what you need to focus on.
14. Widen your reach with newspapers
A far smaller group of millennials reads newspapers than previous generations because we’ve got Facebook and Twitter to satiate our urge to stay updated with current affairs.
However, you’ll still be leaving money on the table by not underutilizing newspaper ads because even though relatively smaller, the number of total newspapers is still rather large, with about 20 million+ readers in the U.S. Plus, given that a large portion of newspaper readers generations before the millennials, they’re also more likely to be experiencing some form of health issues. The demographic could potentially be a good target audience for a healthcare professional.
Creativity is still important with newspapers, like with billboards, but you have more flexibility in terms of how much content you can add in your newspaper health ads. Let’s compare two ads as an example.
The following is an ad from the 1950s that adds a creative graphic, a great headline, and some supporting content under it to explain the product:
The ad grabs attention with a creative graphic at the top, immediately clarifies what the ad is about with the headline, and offers a reader more details below if they’re interested. However, newspaper estate is expensive. If you need to create a health ad that will fit in a smaller area, you should consider a minimalistic design that still speaks volumes. Here’s a great example:
The ad manages to communicate its messaging (i.e., focusing on “you”) with a minimalistic design that includes a graphic, headline, logo, and a small block of text—simple, effective, and non-expensive.
If your product is new or complex, you might want to consider buying more estate so you can try to answer all questions a reader might have. However, if your product already exists in the market, you can buy a smaller ad and focus on branding and communicating your core competence or messaging—which could be personalized services, world-class equipment, or accolades your brand has earned over the years.
Now that you have a fair idea of the different ideas you can use to create your own health ads, let’s take a look at few important pointers that you need to keep in mind while creating and running your ads.
Pro Tips for Creating Health Ads
You can’t create health ads on a whim. You need to check a few boxes to ensure your ads are optimized for maximum ROI. Do some research before you start thinking about actually generating leads via advertising. Once you start creating an ad, be sure to keep it succinct. It can become tricky if it’s your first time, but we’re going to help you get familiar with some best practices, so you don’t hit many speed bumps along the way.
Tip #1 - Understand your target audience
Not every product and service are relevant for everyone. Since ads cost money, you want to keep them targeted to a very specific group of people. Facebook and other platforms allow you to target the audience you want to show your ads to by location and age, among other things.
Understanding your target audience is also important so you can design your ads accordingly. For instance, if your health ads show a specialty clinic, you should aim to keep it professional rather than humorous.
Tip #2 - Get the placement right
A search engine ad and a banner ad are two different things. Plus, your target audience might use a computer or mobile phone while viewing your ads. These factors require optimizing your design. However, there’s an easy way out if you’re using Facebook for running ads: Automatic Placements.
Choosing Automatic Placements on Facebook allows you to put the choice of placing choice in Facebook’s hands. In return, Facebook will try to place your ads wherever they’re more likely to succeed.
Tip #3 - Keep everything on-brand
Your ads should fit into your broader marketing strategy. When someone clicks on your ad and is redirected to your landing page—or any other page on your website—you want your branding to be reinforced. Staying on-brand lowers bounce rates and improves conversions, which can directly impact your ad campaign’s ROI.
To keep your ads on-brand, use color schemes that you’ve used in other elements and assets of your brand, like logo and website. When you write the caption, be mindful of your brand’s tone of voice. Do you want to sound helpful, professional, casual, or authoritative? Keeping your ads on-brand makes your business feel more authentic and helps build credibility.
Tip #4 - Use high-quality video or images
Whether it’s a static ad or a video ad, you need to get your visuals right. Adding low-quality, irrelevant, or poorly edited visuals leaves a bad impression and makes you look lazy. If you think editing is time-consuming, you probably aren’t using the right tools.
If you’re creating a video ad, edit your video using InVideo. It’s fairly simple to use but still gives you all the flexibility in terms of the elements you can add to your videos. On the contrary, if you’re creating an image ad, you can use a web-based free tool like Canva to quickly produce good-quality images.
Tip #5 - Keep an eye on the analytics
Digital ad platforms allow tracking your ad’s performance and the audience that’s engaging with your ads so you can optimize them over time.
Since analytics can also give you better insights about the type of audience engaging with your ads, you can use this data to remarket your product or services to “lookalike audiences” (i.e., audiences that closely resemble the audience that engages with your ads).
For instance, you can use the Facebook Pixel if you're on Facebook. It’s a small code that will help you track your Facebook ad’s conversions. Once you have the conversion data, you can optimize future ads based on this data.
Wrapping Up
Digital ads can potentially become a lead gen machine for your business, especially when you’re trying to get some momentum while you’re still working on organic strategies like SEO. However, coming up with ad ideas consistently can feel challenging. Use the ideas we’ve discussed in this guide as inspiration, but don’t forget to choose the right set of tools to make the remaining parts of the process easier. For instance, you might be tempted to use a heavy-duty editor to create a cinematic video. But that’s not how your ad should look and is often impractical because you’ll end up spending a ton of time just on editing. Instead, choose tools like InVideo that make editing a breeze.
To get a better grasp of how you can utilize some of the best marketing strategies for your healthcare business, check out this blog. And if you’ve got questions or would like to learn via video, visit InVideo’s YouTube channel, you’ll find tutorials for everything video related.
This post was written by Arjun and edited by Adete from Team InVideo
