Changing the Conversation on Women’s Health through Next-Gen Social Intelligence

Today’s social intelligence helps brand and marketing teams capture far more than just trends, sentiment, and rising influencers. It’s a vital tool to help manufacturers understand their customers more authentically – to see and hear customer perspectives that might otherwise stay hidden and “just below the surface” with traditional market research.

For anyone working in women’s health, this kind of intelligence is essential. Below, Britt McKone and Allison Marshall, two of Real Chemistry’s social intelligence experts, share their perspectives on the crucial role social intelligence can play in the broader mission of improving women’s healthcare outcomes.

Women’s health disparities compel us to be more inclusive in our approach to social intelligence.

Two harsh realities in today’s healthcare landscape make it starkly clear that, at least in the near term, clinical innovations alone won’t close the gaps in women’s health.

• Women globally spend 25% more of their lives in debilitating health than men do.

• In 2020, only 1% of all healthcare research and innovation focused on female-specific conditions beyond oncology.

As a life sciences community, we need to do more to listen, learn, and truly understand how women – as well as family and caregivers – experience health, diagnosis, disease, treatment, support, and recovery.

Social intelligence can help. But to challenge our assumptions and go beyond what we think we know today – we need a more inclusive “next-gen” approach:

• We need to expand our reach to include social media platforms favored by women and minorities. At Real Chemistry, our work pushes beyond traditional text-based platforms like X (Twitter), Facebook, and Reddit to also incorporate more visual media like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.

• We need to support the use of AI in more sophisticated and integrated ways. With AI, we can synthesize greater amounts of information and accelerate time to insight — leveraging tools like natural language processing, linguistic analysis, and image-based analysis.

A more inclusive social intelligence model can help address health disparities by shining a light on things we might otherwise miss.

The work we’ve done alongside our clients showcases how next-gen social intelligence helps brand leaders see what they might otherwise miss – empowering their teams to use those insights to inform specific choices about customer targeting, campaign execution, and strategic partnerships addressing important and underserved areas of women’s health.

• Using a multi-platform analysis of both video and image-based content, we helped a client better understand the challenges that women with post-partum depression face. That deeper understanding informed a more comprehensive influencer identification and engagement strategy.

• By integrating social intelligence with other forms of research, we helped a client identify advocacy groups and programs that may serve as strategic marketing partners in their effort to educate more Black women about cardiovascular disease risks and positive health actions.

• With a robust social intelligence effort, we revealed the unseen realities facing women with endometriosis. The insights propelled our client to shift more of its outreach and education toward women who were earlier in their treatment journeys than they’d been focusing on previously.

The resounding theme: investing in tools to look broader and deeper across social media will illuminate the kinds of actionable insights that can meaningfully change the way all parts of the healthcare industry – manufacturers, providers, payers, and patients – talk about women’s health.

Dynamic, reoccurring social intelligence can help manufacturers understand and adapt to how their efforts are influencing important conversations about women’s health.

Every marketing leader knows the importance of measurement – both to gauge performance against expectations and to support the kind of active learning that allows teams to adapt and pivot. But too few marketers realize how social intelligence can enrich measurement programs as well.

Most leaders value it as an upfront research and planning tool. But reoccurring social intelligence can help teams understand their campaigns’ impacts over time – truly helping to answer the question “are we effectively changing the conversation about women’s health?”

Dynamic social intelligence can also help brand leaders anticipate trends or customer behaviors – especially in rapidly evolving markets like obesity or menopause. The more we can monitor and predict, the easier it is for brand leaders to anticipate and stay one step ahead of customer needs and expectations.

Ready to change the conversation about women’s health?

We offer you three simple imperatives that are critical to our collective efforts to improve how we understand and seek to improve women’s health.

1. Always cultivate an inclusive and curious mindset.

2. Make sure your social intelligence is tuned in to the right voices.

3. Use insights to shape strategy for better engagement with women.

If you’d like to learn more about how our expansive, dynamic approach to next-gen social intelligence may help your brand’s customer engagement initiatives, we’d love to chat.

Contact Britt at BMcKone@realchemistry.com or Allison at AMarshall@realchemistry.com.

Together, we can all help change the conversation about women’s health – for the better.