Know Your Audience: 4 Tips for Creating Compelling Sponsored Content for Inspire
Sponsored content or native advertising is advertising that has been integrated into the publisher’s platform so that it does not disrupt the audience’s experience. Unlike banner ads or other advertising, the character of the content matches the native content that the publisher’s audience expects. It has the look and feel of that platform. The result is an almost seamless flow of content for the audience.
Creating content that is smooth and harmonious with native content can be challenging when regulations need to be followed, familiarity with your audience is limited, and the goal is to engage readers with your messaging. To help clients make the most of their sponsored content on Inspire, our Digital Editor, Radha Chitale, shared four engagement strategies she uses to create compelling content for Inspire members.
You don’t have to start from scratch
“Inspire members are likely quite educated about their own conditions, not least due to their involvement in the community. Their presence on the site also means they’re probably pretty motivated to educate themselves about the landscape of treatment possibilities.”
Tailor the content to the audience
“Members ask questions in Inspire communities all the time. They’re a window into people’s concerns at a very basic level from which you can extrapolate themes – treatment options, side effects, drug costs, pain, stress, and so on – to address.”
Show what you know
“Companies should take advantage of their subject matter expertise when developing sponsored content and strive to offer patients information they can’t get elsewhere – that will help people understand why a product might be worthwhile for them.
Be accessible
“Speak plainly and explain technical things simply. Aside from being informative, good communication is important for building trust.”
Understanding the language of patients as compared with “medicalese,” the language of medicine, can make a difference. My colleague, Kathryn Ticknor, Senior Research Manager at Inspire has expertise in linguistics and ethnography. Her eBook How Does Pharma Learn to Speak “Patient”? is a useful tool when creating sponsored content.
Increase Your Click Through Rate
The difference between compelling sponsored content and traditional advertising is remarkable — a recent piece of sponsored content on Inspire had a 29% click through rate, compared to traditional advertising at 0.05-0.1%.
Contact me for more information and read more about Sponsored Content here.
Inspire offers a trusted community to patients and caregivers. Our goal with this blog, this website and our content is to provide the life science industry access to the true, authentic patient voice. In so doing, we support faithful operationalization of patient-centricity. Take a look at our case studies, eBooks and news outlet coverage.
