By Becky Robinson, CEO at Wrapped Agency
There’s a lot to think about when you’re marketing healthcare in the UK. Take that across multiple countries and it gets complicated very quickly.
You’ve got different regulations, healthcare systems, languages and cultures to think about, as well as different rules around who you can target and how you’re allowed to reach them. Then there are the audiences themselves. You might be talking to healthcare professionals in one market, patients in another, or perhaps commissioners, procurement teams, clinicians or investors.
I’ve worked in digital marketing for over 20 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that the more complicated the brief, the more important it is to get the right people involved from the start. Global healthcare is a really good example of that.
It’s also one of the reasons I’m such a big believer in the full-service agency model. Not because I think every client needs every service an agency offers – they absolutely don’t – but because when you’re dealing with something this complex, it’s very difficult to separate strategy, creative, digital, content and technology and expect them all to come together perfectly at the end.
The decisions we make in one area almost always have an impact somewhere else.
It starts with understanding who you’re actually trying to reach
We quite often start with a seemingly straightforward brief: we want to reach this particular group of healthcare professionals across these countries.
Great. We know the audience. Now we just need to work out how to reach them.
Except it isn’t always quite that simple.
Healthcare advertising comes with restrictions, and what you can and can’t do will depend on the platform, market, product and audience. Sometimes we can target the audience a client has in mind very specifically. Sometimes we can’t. In some circumstances content needs to be gated, and in others we might need to rethink the route to that audience altogether.
This is exactly why I want our paid media specialists involved early. There’s no point in us spending weeks developing a strategy around a particular audience, only to hand it over to the PPC specialist at the end and discover that we can’t actually target those people in the way we’d planned. I’d much rather have that conversation at the beginning, because their knowledge should help shape the strategy in the first place.
It works the other way too. Our PPC and search teams are sitting on a huge amount of useful information about what people are searching for, the terminology they’re using, what they respond to and how they behave online. That insight shouldn’t only be used when we’re setting up campaigns; it can tell our strategists, copywriters and creatives something really useful about the audience we’re trying to reach.
And when we’re looking at several countries at once, that becomes even more valuable, because we shouldn’t assume that what works in the UK can simply be rolled out everywhere else.
Great. We know the audience. Now we just need to work out how to reach them.
Except it isn’t always quite that simple.
Healthcare advertising comes with restrictions, and what you can and can’t do will depend on the platform, market, product and audience. Sometimes we can target the audience a client has in mind very specifically. Sometimes we can’t. In some circumstances content needs to be gated, and in others we might need to rethink the route to that audience altogether.
This is exactly why I want our paid media specialists involved early. There’s no point in us spending weeks developing a strategy around a particular audience, only to hand it over to the PPC specialist at the end and discover that we can’t actually target those people in the way we’d planned. I’d much rather have that conversation at the beginning, because their knowledge should help shape the strategy in the first place.
It works the other way too. Our PPC and search teams are sitting on a huge amount of useful information about what people are searching for, the terminology they’re using, what they respond to and how they behave online. That insight shouldn’t only be used when we’re setting up campaigns; it can tell our strategists, copywriters and creatives something really useful about the audience we’re trying to reach.
And when we’re looking at several countries at once, that becomes even more valuable, because we shouldn’t assume that what works in the UK can simply be rolled out everywhere else.
A global campaign isn’t just a UK campaign in another language
I think this is probably one of the easiest traps to fall into with international marketing. You’ve got something that works well in one market, so the obvious thing is to translate it, change the targeting and take it somewhere else.
Sometimes elements of that approach will work, of course. But there’s a lot more going on underneath it.
Healthcare systems are different. The way people access treatment is different. The role of the healthcare professional can be different. The language people use to describe a condition or treatment can be different, and the things that matter most to the audience might not be what mattered to the original UK audience.
Technology has obviously made global marketing much easier. We can create, translate and adapt content far more quickly than we could even a few years ago, and AI is only going to accelerate that. I’m really excited about what that allows us to do, particularly when we’re working across multiple markets.
But healthcare is also one of those areas where I wouldn’t want us to rely on the technology alone.
If we’re translating a fairly general piece of content and a phrase isn’t quite perfect, it might not fundamentally change its meaning. If we’re talking about a medical condition, treatment, device or piece of clinical terminology, getting a word slightly wrong can be a much bigger problem.
You could quite easily have a translation that looks absolutely fine to somebody who doesn’t speak the language, but isn’t the terminology a clinician or patient in that country would actually use. Worse, an automated translation could change the medical meaning altogether.
And actually, translation is only one part of it. What we really need to think about is localisation: whether people use the same terminology in that market, how patients or healthcare professionals search for information, whether the imagery is culturally appropriate and even whether the proposition itself will resonate in the same way.
That means your copywriter needs to understand the strategy, your search specialist needs to understand how people actually behave in that market, and you may need medical or in-market expertise to make sure what you’re saying is accurate and appropriate. A translation plugin can be a useful part of the process, but it can’t be the process.
Sometimes elements of that approach will work, of course. But there’s a lot more going on underneath it.
Healthcare systems are different. The way people access treatment is different. The role of the healthcare professional can be different. The language people use to describe a condition or treatment can be different, and the things that matter most to the audience might not be what mattered to the original UK audience.
Technology has obviously made global marketing much easier. We can create, translate and adapt content far more quickly than we could even a few years ago, and AI is only going to accelerate that. I’m really excited about what that allows us to do, particularly when we’re working across multiple markets.
But healthcare is also one of those areas where I wouldn’t want us to rely on the technology alone.
If we’re translating a fairly general piece of content and a phrase isn’t quite perfect, it might not fundamentally change its meaning. If we’re talking about a medical condition, treatment, device or piece of clinical terminology, getting a word slightly wrong can be a much bigger problem.
You could quite easily have a translation that looks absolutely fine to somebody who doesn’t speak the language, but isn’t the terminology a clinician or patient in that country would actually use. Worse, an automated translation could change the medical meaning altogether.
And actually, translation is only one part of it. What we really need to think about is localisation: whether people use the same terminology in that market, how patients or healthcare professionals search for information, whether the imagery is culturally appropriate and even whether the proposition itself will resonate in the same way.
That means your copywriter needs to understand the strategy, your search specialist needs to understand how people actually behave in that market, and you may need medical or in-market expertise to make sure what you’re saying is accurate and appropriate. A translation plugin can be a useful part of the process, but it can’t be the process.
Then all of that has to work on the website
This is often the point where another set of questions starts to appear.
If we’re creating a healthcare website for multiple countries, how are we going to structure the different territories and languages? How will search engines understand which version of a page is intended for which audience? What happens to the design when a beautifully concise English headline becomes considerably longer in another language? How are we handling consent, privacy and data? And does the experience actually work for the people who need to use it?
Accessibility is a particularly important part of this.
For healthcare organisations, your website could be used by people with a very wide range of needs and abilities. Accessibility therefore can’t be something we remember to check once a site has already been designed and built. It needs to be considered in the design, content and development from the beginning.
That affects things like typography, colour contrast and navigation, but it also affects forms, video, imagery, content structure and the way the site itself is developed.
This is where having the developer involved earlier makes a real difference. I don’t want our designers creating something and then finding out later that it can’t be built in an accessible way. Equally, I don’t want the copywriter writing pages without understanding how somebody will navigate and consume that content, or the search team being brought in just before launch and being asked to “SEO it”.
We’ll get a much better website if those conversations happen while we’re creating it.
If we’re creating a healthcare website for multiple countries, how are we going to structure the different territories and languages? How will search engines understand which version of a page is intended for which audience? What happens to the design when a beautifully concise English headline becomes considerably longer in another language? How are we handling consent, privacy and data? And does the experience actually work for the people who need to use it?
Accessibility is a particularly important part of this.
For healthcare organisations, your website could be used by people with a very wide range of needs and abilities. Accessibility therefore can’t be something we remember to check once a site has already been designed and built. It needs to be considered in the design, content and development from the beginning.
That affects things like typography, colour contrast and navigation, but it also affects forms, video, imagery, content structure and the way the site itself is developed.
This is where having the developer involved earlier makes a real difference. I don’t want our designers creating something and then finding out later that it can’t be built in an accessible way. Equally, I don’t want the copywriter writing pages without understanding how somebody will navigate and consume that content, or the search team being brought in just before launch and being asked to “SEO it”.
We’ll get a much better website if those conversations happen while we’re creating it.
Search is changing the conversation again
The way people find healthcare information is changing incredibly quickly too.
Google obviously still matters enormously, but it’s no longer the only place people are looking for answers. They’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI tools to research organisations, products, treatments and conditions, and I think we’re only at the beginning of that change.
For healthcare organisations, that makes the quality, accuracy and authority of the information you put online even more important.
If we’re publishing something about a medical subject, who wrote it? Who reviewed it? What expertise sits behind it? Is it supported by credible evidence? Is the organisation itself recognised as an authority in that particular area?
Those aren’t really just SEO questions anymore.
They bring together content, PR, brand, development, technical SEO and the wider digital strategy. Your PR team might be building authority that ultimately improves your search visibility. Your specialist copywriter might be creating the content that helps an AI platform understand what your organisation knows about. Your developer might be responsible for structuring that information in a way that search engines can properly interpret.
The lines between all of these disciplines are becoming much less clear, which I actually think makes the conversations between specialists more interesting.
Google obviously still matters enormously, but it’s no longer the only place people are looking for answers. They’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI tools to research organisations, products, treatments and conditions, and I think we’re only at the beginning of that change.
For healthcare organisations, that makes the quality, accuracy and authority of the information you put online even more important.
If we’re publishing something about a medical subject, who wrote it? Who reviewed it? What expertise sits behind it? Is it supported by credible evidence? Is the organisation itself recognised as an authority in that particular area?
Those aren’t really just SEO questions anymore.
They bring together content, PR, brand, development, technical SEO and the wider digital strategy. Your PR team might be building authority that ultimately improves your search visibility. Your specialist copywriter might be creating the content that helps an AI platform understand what your organisation knows about. Your developer might be responsible for structuring that information in a way that search engines can properly interpret.
The lines between all of these disciplines are becoming much less clear, which I actually think makes the conversations between specialists more interesting.
Regulated doesn’t have to mean boring
This is something I feel quite strongly about.
Healthcare marketing has rules. Lots of them. And when you’re working internationally, there are even more to understand.
But I don’t think being regulated means the work has to become bland, corporate or forgettable. If anything, understanding the boundaries properly should give the team more confidence to be creative within them.
The problems tend to come when compliance is treated as the final stage of the process.
You create the campaign, write the copy, design the assets, build the landing page and get everything almost ready to go. Then it goes through medical, legal or regulatory review and one sentence needs to change.
That sentence happens to be in the advert, the landing page and six translated versions. The new copy is longer, so now the design needs changing too. Then those changes need to go back through approval.
Anyone who works in a regulated sector will probably recognise some version of that scenario.
Of course, there will always be changes and approval processes to work through. That’s the nature of healthcare marketing. But if the people creating the campaign understand the regulatory parameters from the beginning, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary work later.
I also think it makes for better creative. When the team knows where the boundaries are, they can spend their time working out how far we can push the idea within them, rather than creating something in the dark and waiting for somebody else to tell them what they can’t do.
Healthcare marketing has rules. Lots of them. And when you’re working internationally, there are even more to understand.
But I don’t think being regulated means the work has to become bland, corporate or forgettable. If anything, understanding the boundaries properly should give the team more confidence to be creative within them.
The problems tend to come when compliance is treated as the final stage of the process.
You create the campaign, write the copy, design the assets, build the landing page and get everything almost ready to go. Then it goes through medical, legal or regulatory review and one sentence needs to change.
That sentence happens to be in the advert, the landing page and six translated versions. The new copy is longer, so now the design needs changing too. Then those changes need to go back through approval.
Anyone who works in a regulated sector will probably recognise some version of that scenario.
Of course, there will always be changes and approval processes to work through. That’s the nature of healthcare marketing. But if the people creating the campaign understand the regulatory parameters from the beginning, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary work later.
I also think it makes for better creative. When the team knows where the boundaries are, they can spend their time working out how far we can push the idea within them, rather than creating something in the dark and waiting for somebody else to tell them what they can’t do.
So what does full service actually mean?
“Full service” is one of those agency phrases that gets used a lot, and I’m not sure it always means very much.
For me, it isn’t about having the longest possible list of services on our website, and it certainly isn’t about trying to persuade every client that they need all of them.
It’s about having specialists with genuinely different expertise who are used to working together.
I want our brand strategists talking to our digital strategists because the brand needs to work in the real world. I want our PPC specialists challenging the strategy if they know the proposed targeting won’t work. I want our search team sharing what they’re seeing with our copywriters and creatives, because that data can change how we talk about something.
I want developers involved while we’re thinking about the experience, rather than simply receiving a finished design to build. I want our social team to understand the wider brand and campaign strategy, and our content and communications people to understand what the search team is trying to achieve.
And sometimes that collaboration will change the direction we take.
Our PPC specialist might tell us that PPC isn’t actually the right answer. Search data might show us that the language the business uses internally bears very little resemblance to what its audience is searching for. A developer might spot an accessibility issue that changes the design. A specialist copywriter might ask a question about the terminology that makes us rethink the proposition.
I think that’s healthy. I’d much rather we challenged one another internally than blindly followed a brief and discovered the problem once the campaign was live.
For me, it isn’t about having the longest possible list of services on our website, and it certainly isn’t about trying to persuade every client that they need all of them.
It’s about having specialists with genuinely different expertise who are used to working together.
I want our brand strategists talking to our digital strategists because the brand needs to work in the real world. I want our PPC specialists challenging the strategy if they know the proposed targeting won’t work. I want our search team sharing what they’re seeing with our copywriters and creatives, because that data can change how we talk about something.
I want developers involved while we’re thinking about the experience, rather than simply receiving a finished design to build. I want our social team to understand the wider brand and campaign strategy, and our content and communications people to understand what the search team is trying to achieve.
And sometimes that collaboration will change the direction we take.
Our PPC specialist might tell us that PPC isn’t actually the right answer. Search data might show us that the language the business uses internally bears very little resemblance to what its audience is searching for. A developer might spot an accessibility issue that changes the design. A specialist copywriter might ask a question about the terminology that makes us rethink the proposition.
I think that’s healthy. I’d much rather we challenged one another internally than blindly followed a brief and discovered the problem once the campaign was live.
It becomes even more important when you go global
Take all of those moving parts and multiply them across five, ten or twenty countries and you can see how quickly things become complicated.
You have different audiences, languages, cultures, platforms, search behaviour and regulations to think about, but you still need the organisation to feel like one brand.
There’s a huge role for technology in helping us do that more efficiently, and particularly for AI. I think we’re going to see enormous changes in how agencies research markets, create and localise content, analyse data and personalise digital experiences over the next few years.
But I don’t think that removes the need for specialist expertise. If anything, I think it makes good specialists more valuable, because we can spend less time on some of the manual work and more time asking whether what we’re producing is actually right.
Is it right for this audience? Is it right for this market? Can we make that claim? Is that the terminology people actually use? Can we reach those people on that platform? Does the website work for them? And does all of it still feel like the same organisation?
I suppose that’s what full service has come to mean to me. It isn’t about having a huge list of things we can sell to a client, and it certainly isn’t about every client needing every service we offer. It’s about having people with genuinely different areas of expertise who are used to working together.
Particularly in global healthcare, I think that matters. There are too many moving parts for strategy, creative, digital, content and development to happen independently and then be stitched together at the end.
Sometimes our PPC specialist will spot something that changes the strategy. Sometimes a developer will ask a question that changes the design. Sometimes search data will completely change how we think people talk about a condition. And sometimes our job as strategists is simply to recognise that somebody else around the table knows more about a particular problem than we do and bring them into the conversation.
For me, that’s the point of being full service.
It’s not that we all do everything. It’s that we don’t do anything in isolation.
You have different audiences, languages, cultures, platforms, search behaviour and regulations to think about, but you still need the organisation to feel like one brand.
There’s a huge role for technology in helping us do that more efficiently, and particularly for AI. I think we’re going to see enormous changes in how agencies research markets, create and localise content, analyse data and personalise digital experiences over the next few years.
But I don’t think that removes the need for specialist expertise. If anything, I think it makes good specialists more valuable, because we can spend less time on some of the manual work and more time asking whether what we’re producing is actually right.
Is it right for this audience? Is it right for this market? Can we make that claim? Is that the terminology people actually use? Can we reach those people on that platform? Does the website work for them? And does all of it still feel like the same organisation?
I suppose that’s what full service has come to mean to me. It isn’t about having a huge list of things we can sell to a client, and it certainly isn’t about every client needing every service we offer. It’s about having people with genuinely different areas of expertise who are used to working together.
Particularly in global healthcare, I think that matters. There are too many moving parts for strategy, creative, digital, content and development to happen independently and then be stitched together at the end.
Sometimes our PPC specialist will spot something that changes the strategy. Sometimes a developer will ask a question that changes the design. Sometimes search data will completely change how we think people talk about a condition. And sometimes our job as strategists is simply to recognise that somebody else around the table knows more about a particular problem than we do and bring them into the conversation.
For me, that’s the point of being full service.
It’s not that we all do everything. It’s that we don’t do anything in isolation.
