Over the last few years, Space & Time have worked with two very different healthcare businesses that have crossed the divide of the Over-the-Counter convention into the Direct-to-Consumer space.
Our Head of eCommerce, Jeff Humphries discusses the unique challenges brands doing this face and how Space & Time consider their competitive advantage to not be just a simple case of ‘spend more, get more’.
I tend to look at brands growth through the lens of eCommerce. Given my role at Space & Time, that should not come as a shock to anyone.
Reflecting on the last decade, growth in eCommerce was relatively straightforward. Find an audience. Build a media strategy. Improve conversion rates. Increase spending to scale and increase brand demand to take a greater share of the effort, while retaining an edge over the competition’s paid strategy.
At Home Healthcare is somewhat different.
At Home Healthcare sits at the intersection of commerce, regulation, trust and personal wellbeing. The tactics that accelerate growth in fashion or homewares, for example, can become liabilities when consumers are making decisions about their bodies, their health outcomes or their long-term quality of life, for themselves and their families.
That reality is becoming even more pronounced as we become increasingly aware and have access to the wide variety of health solutions that can support or desire for ‘living better’.
Consumers are more informed than ever. Regulators are paying closer attention to health claims, advertising and patient safety. Search engines are scrutinising health content more aggressively. Competition is increasing. And customer acquisition costs continue to rise.
Yet despite these challenges, we’ve been working with some health brands who are achieving remarkable growth.
Not because we’ve discovered a new marketing channel or improved efficiency by the addition of AI to account optimisation, but because they’ve fundamentally changed what they mean by ‘scaling’.
When health brands encounter slowing commercial fortunes or find it difficult to scale into the next phase of their eCommerce growth, the instinctive reaction is usually to ask:
“How do we generate more demand?” – Increasingly, I feel that is the wrong question.
For many mature health businesses, demand isn’t the primary constraint.
The real question is:
Can the business convert, measure, retain and scale that demand without weakening the very trust that helped build it in the first place?
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with two very different healthcare businesses.
One is an established international natural health brand with a large content footprint, multiple product categories and ambitious expansion plans.
The other is an increasingly online healthcare provider operating in one of the most heavily scrutinised sectors of modern healthcare who want to take clinical excellence and diversify into more D2C health solutions.
On the surface, they appear very different, but in reality, they’re solving the same problem.
How do you scale trust?
Is regulation a barrier to growth?
The most successful health businesses increasingly see it differently.
Regulation creates constraints. But constraints often force better business decisions and trust signals. That’s what they are there for.
Consider what’s happening across healthcare advertising.
Public expectations around transparency continue to rise. Regulators are increasing scrutiny around medical claims, treatment promotion and healthcare communications. Consumers are becoming more sceptical of exaggerated promises. The term ‘snake oil salesman’ sits at the very centre of these concerns.
For health brands, this creates a simple reality:
You can no longer ignore or market your way around regulation, credibility and trust.
You have to build it.
The most effective health growth strategies today are often the ones that create greater alignment between what a business says, what it sells and what it can genuinely prove.
The brands that embrace this reality tend to move faster over time than those constantly trying to navigate around it or simply trying to compete on price or claims.
One of the other common assumptions we challenge at Space & Time is that additional budget automatically creates additional growth.
In reality, an isolated view like ‘more is more’ and manifesting that as adding budget usually does something else.
It can expose systemic issues and amplifies them:
Adding budget before addressing these issues is often like pressing the accelerator harder to get rid of an engine noise, when the problem is that the car needs servicing.
To take that analogy back into relevance, customer acquisition costs often appear sustainable when viewed through a first-purchase lens.
But healthcare businesses don’t succeed because of first purchases, they tend to succeed because of lifetime relationships, subscriptions and repeat purchase because of trust.
We always advise looking deeper at the data and beyond simple ROAS calculations and instead ask:
Historically, many health businesses focused on solving an immediate need; Acquire customer. Sell product. Do it again but do it more.
Sustainable growth requires us to do something fundamentally different and that is to create a ‘trust ecosystem’ throughout the relationship:
And critically, how are we building value and trust onto every one of those journey points?
Winning at building trust increasingly goes to those brands that can support customers throughout an entire health journey rather than a single transaction.
The commercial power of this is in building longer, trusting relationships that create significantly stronger commercial outcomes than aggressive acquisition ever can.
For years, content was viewed primarily as a means of attracting organic traffic and ticking the ‘key word’ box. More a hygiene exercise than an aligned strategy.
In health sectors, content increasingly functions as part of the product experience itself.
Consumers use educational content to evaluate:
The truth is that publishing more content is not necessarily a growth strategy. Publishing better content is.
We’ve found that many health organisations accumulate significant content libraries over time, but fewer maintain a rigorous process for reviewing, updating and validating that information.
As health guidance evolves, so too should content. The strongest health brands increasingly treat content in the same way as product development.
Space & Time believe that this requires ownership. A time-bound and theme-bound plan. A strategic approach to content deployment, library management and continued optimisation based on search data across conventional search engines and particularly across LLMs, where symptom-based search is becoming the standard.
One of the most fascinating things in our industry is how we evolve to meet the challenges of how consumers find, react and act on information. What seems like a moment ago, the answer to this was personalisation.
Now, consumers of At Home Healthcare solutions require more. They require ‘on point’ expertise at every stage of the relationship. That is how the brands we work with preserve human trust while growing, scaling services and introducing new products.
Moreover, founders, clinicians, practitioners and HCPs create powerful trust signals in healthcare. We have designed our growth systems and content strategies to capitalise on this group of deep conversion potential, throughout our content strategies.
The health and wellness market continues to expand.
Consumers are increasingly proactive about managing their health.
Technology is reducing barriers to access.
Healthcare is becoming ever-more digital.
But these trends alone won’t determine who wins.
They will be the organisations that understand something fundamental:
In most eCommerce categories, removing friction increases conversion. In healthcare, anti-trust IS the friction
Space & Time understands that trust is not a by-product of growth, it’s the foundation of it.
We’re scaling trust.
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How do we reach the HCPs who never attend congress?
📍London | 8th October
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