Written by: Melissa Fors Shackelford; Managing Director, Evernorth
In health care marketing, a commitment to inclusivity and accessibility is essential. By embracing accessible and inclusive marketing tactics, health care marketers acknowledge and show respect for the diversity within their patient base.
Beyond regulatory compliance, building brand reputation and brand loyalty, one of the main benefits of accessible health care marketing is expanding your potential audience. Nearly 25% of the population is living with a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and would be missed if health care marketing and content wasn’t created to be accessible. This includes people with mobility, hearing, vision, cognitive, self-care, or other difficulties.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination and emphasizes the concept of equal access. Health care marketers should adhere to this when creating and distributing health care content. This includes content distributed via websites, content, social media, email campaigns, and videos.
According to the 2020 Web Accessibility Annual Report by the accessiBe initiative, a shocking 98% of webpages were not accessible per the ADA. Health care marketers have an enormous responsibility, not to mention huge opportunity, to ensure accessibility to the large population that is living with a disability and needs access to health care content and services. According to “The Disability Inclusion Advantage” research study published by Accenture, companies that proved to be Disability Inclusion Champions achieved 28 percent higher revenue compared with other companies.
Some key areas for health care marketers to optimize for accessibility include:
Accessible Websites: Important accessibility features include using alt text for images, proper color contrast and ensuring compatibility with screen readers used by people with visual impairments. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) should be followed in order to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities.
Inclusive Content: Health care information should use language that is easily understandable, clear and concise, aiming for a 6th-grade reading level. This approach ensures comprehension across diverse audiences, including those for whom English may be a second language. Additionally, publishing health care information in multiple languages is an inclusive marketing best practice.
Video Accessibility: Videos should incorporate closed captions and transcripts to accommodate individuals with hearing impairments, reinforcing the commitment to making content accessible to everyone.
Documents: Digital documents such as PDFs should be created with accessibility features, including text descriptions for images to ensure they are compatible with screen readers used by individuals with visual impairments.
Social Media: Social media platforms should follow accessible best practices. This includes providing image descriptions, using inclusive language, and ensuring that videos are closed captioned for a broader audience.
An inclusive marketing best practice is to use individuals in imagery from diverse walks of life. Marketers should also take caution not to reinforce negative stereotypes. Health care marketers should include people in their marketing content that reflects their patients, employees and stakeholders.
Just as marketers should regularly review content for gender, age and racial diversity, marketers should regularly do accessibility audits of their content. The goal of such an audit is to identify areas for improvement and ensure the organization is following industry-standard guidelines. An audit can be done with a number of available automated tools or via expert agencies.
From using alt text for images to including closed captioning and transcripts for video and audio content, accessibility audits help health care marketers address challenges that individuals living with disabilities might encounter when engaging with health care content.
By adopting accessible and inclusive best practices, health care marketers recognize the diversity of their patient, employee and stakeholder audiences and reinforce the mandate that individuals living with disabilities should not have barriers. While ADA compliance in health care marketing reflects a commitment to legal requirements it more importantly highlights an organization’s dedication to providing an inclusive and accessible health care experience for all individuals.