The Power of Precision Marketing in Healthcare, ft. AdventHealth

Sharon Line Clary (00:00):
So we had a lot of people, a lot of different cohorts we were targeting with different messaging. And we really found that the key ones that were really driving for that service line, so we were able to drill in. So I think we were refining and optimizing.

Sharon Line Clary (00:13):
All the time. And I think that was a big learning.

Anthony Cadieux (00:17):
I mean, there really is a beauty to knowing who we’re targeting.

Anthony Cadieux (00:22):
So the analysis that you can do post-campaign at a very deep level is unlike anything we’ve been able to do in the past.

Alan Tam (00:41):
Hello Healthcare. As many of you are experiencing and are probably aware, healthcare consumerism is a major driving force in health systems today. Consumers are more savvy than others. And as healthcare marketers, we continue to struggle to reach and engage consumers with fewer budget dollars. Taking on this challenge directly, I have Anthony Cadieux and Sharon Line Clary, both from Advent Health. They seem to have cracked the code on being able to generate transformative ROI from precision marketing to reach these folks. Anthony is the Executive Director Performance Marketing Strategy, and Sharon is the Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Communications. Welcome, Sharon. Anthony.

Sharon Line Clary (01:27):
Yeah. Good to be here with you.

Alan Tam (01:31):
Absolutely. So I think every health system is a little bit different. I’d like to, before we kind of jump in, understand how the both of you work together today.

Sharon Line Clary (01:39):
We work together a lot. I actually like him. Well, I oversee strategic marketing communications, as you said. So that’s everything from more traditional, partnering with Anthony on digital marketing. As well as partnerships, communications, and physician relations. So the work Anthony does in his team is really integral to the success of all that we’re doing as an organization.

Anthony Cadieux (02:07):
So within performance marketing strategy, I’m part of the corporate services team.

Anthony Cadieux (02:12):
So we support any corporate led initiatives, and then we have various divisions within the company. So digital marketing is then an extension of Sharon’s team. So I have team members that are assigned to her team members. We’re fully integrated within their planning and their strategy sessions. And then we deploy digital strategies to support their overall initiatives.

Alan Tam (02:33):
Got it. Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And I love the collaboration that you guys have. I mean, that’s something that’s a challenge for many health systems, so kudos for being able to accomplish that.

Sharon Line Clary (02:45):
He makes it easy. But I would say even though we’re two different teams, two different leaders, it’s all one team. And we’ve really fostered that within our organization.

Alan Tam (02:55):
Awesome. Amazing. So let’s jump into the topic at hand. Precision Marketing. This is the first time I’ve heard the term within healthcare marketing. Obviously I’m very familiar with the term outside. But for many of our audience, what is precision marketing?

Sharon Line Clary (03:12):
Well, I’ll tee it up and then maybe turn it over to you. So it’s kind of inspired, take a nod from Amazon, from Spotify and what we all love about those brands. But it enables us to really approach our marketing efforts with precision, just like the name says. So we’re able to find those people who are very highly likely to need our services. And then talk to them and reach out to them with the services that they need, with the messaging that will resonate with them. And it’s been highly successful. Anthony knows the ins and outs, the X’s and O’s, as they say. So you can go deeper on that.

Anthony Cadieux (03:47):
Sure. I mean, there’s really these three layers that we look at, Alan. So how likely is someone to have a particular condition or need? Then there’s a second layer, which is just because they have that condition doesn’t mean that they’ll actually go and receive care. Right? So how likely are they then to engage in care? And then the third layer is, how likely are they to choose Advent Health? Because even within that third layer, sometimes people might be very loyal to an existing system. So we look at all of that, and then we build segments. And then in addition to that creative that is addressing those specific segments, and we’re connecting with those people directly online. And we do a little bit of direct mail as well. But it goes away from more of the contextual and kind of broad persona type work that we’ve been doing and going and addressing people on an individual one-on-one basis.

Alan Tam (04:44):
Right. That makes a lot of sense. What type of data is powering this kind of from the backend? So you’re telling me that you’re able to identify the patients who are most at-risk, likelihood to respond and so forth. What are you leveraging to get that type of insight?

Anthony Cadieux (05:03):
We work very closely with our partners. So we have two partners, Optum and then also BPD. So Optum, we know who they are.

Anthony Cadieux (05:11):
So that’s the data engine. And then BPD, it stands for…

Sharon Line Clary (05:16):
Brown Parker & DeMarinis.

Sharon Line Clary (05:18):
And so they’re our strategy arm, and so they help to take that data and then translate it into a very consumer-centric approach. So that’s where our teams are lock in step on that strategy, and that messaging and the deployment.

Alan Tam (05:31):
Okay. Okay. So is that data then being harnessed from your EHRs? Or is it from somewhere else, your CRM?

Anthony Cadieux (05:39):
So we’re actually keeping it separate from our EHR.

Anthony Cadieux (05:43):
And that’s all third-party sourced through Optum. They have three different groupings of data that they use to look at the propensity data. Then there’s also kind of healthcare psychographic type data, and then also consumerism data.

Anthony Cadieux (06:02):
Right. So what are people’s individual preferences. Do you like Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks? Right?

Anthony Cadieux (06:08):
So those are the sets of data that we’re looking at to then create this messaging and target them directly.

Alan Tam (06:15):
Right. So I think very few healthcare organizations are actually doing this, and I think what you guys are doing is amazing. Why aren’t more healthcare marketers doing what you guys are doing today?

Sharon Line Clary (06:27):
Well, we like to innovate, so we like to be the first to try things. So I think we have a culture in our organization. It’s part of our DNA, to take risks. So I think we did that. We pilot it, we saw amazing results. I’ll just tease you with that and let Anthony tell you the results. But I think it takes folks doing that. I also think because it’s so hyper personalized, you have to have the right structure in place. You can’t just start this tomorrow and think you can do it easily. You have to have the right structure in place because you’re really creating a lot of different creative. So for our pilot, just to give you a sense, we created six… I’m sorry, a 160 different…

Sharon Line Clary (07:08):
Types of creative that go out based on different criteria. So that’s not an easy lift.

Anthony Cadieux (07:16):
I think the other piece, Alan, is that sometimes we can fall into the trap of something sounding similar to something else. There’s a lot of companies that are saying, “Oh, well, we’re doing propensity modeling and we’re doing segmentation work. And we’re developing creative for these segments.” So it can start to sounding the same.

Anthony Cadieux (07:35):
Precision is not an inexpensive investment.

Anthony Cadieux (07:40):
So I think that’s another hurdle that sometimes healthcare marketers would have to overcome with this type of program. So if they were going to a CFO or a CEO, they would look at this and say, “Well, sounds like these other programs that are less expensive. Why would you spend more here?” So Sharon was able to overcome that hurdle. Then once we did that and we looked at what the ROI was, then it proved itself. Right. Now they wanted to invest more, looking at it more as an investment model rather than an expense model.

Alan Tam (08:11):
Love that. And that’s going to lead my next question is, how do you get your finance partner to sign off? How do you guys prove out ROI? What are some of the core metrics that you guys have come up with to influence your leadership team to continue budgeting and funding for this amazing program?

Sharon Line Clary (08:30):
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s always a challenge, right? There’s never probably enough dollars, so we have to be very good stewards of it. But I would say we partnered. We partnered with them, and we sat down and said, “Okay, what do you want to see?” Because there’s, I think, a tendency for folks to say, “Oh, marketing just spends money.”

Sharon Line Clary (08:49):
We see it as an investment. And so we really talk to them and try to speak their language. And so we actually sat down and partnered with them and said, “Okay, how can we create a dashboard together that meets your needs and our needs, and how do we story tell with it?” Because there’s a lot of data points. But unless it tells the story and threads through to show the impact, I think it’s a fail. And I also, I’ll let Anthony talk about it, but the work we did with precision to really drill down, because I don’t think you can claim everything.
(09:20):
So as much as I would love to claim that we drove every single person through that door, I don’t think that brings authenticity. And I think that starts to break trust with the finance team because they’re like, “Okay, that doesn’t make sense.” But we partnered with them, and you can talk a little bit about…

Sharon Line Clary (09:38):
How we did that.

Anthony Cadieux (09:39):
Yeah. What I saw in this organization, and then previous organizations, there’s this back and forth with marketing and the financial leaders. Where marketing is saying, “Hey, look at everything that we’re doing. And then we’re almost defending or debating with the financial leaders. So a few years ago, Sharon and some other leaders in the company saw that we can’t keep going down this path, right? So lets an attribution model with finance. “Finance, you tell us, what do we need to be looking at. And where can we gain confidence in our models with your scrutiny. And then we co-create this together.” So that’s what we did. And it took us having to take some accommodations around how we would typically report out an an ROI, right? So overall, the ROI looked like less than what we would typically do.

Anthony Cadieux (10:30):
But now we had the stamp of approval from the finance team. So they trusted the ROI that we’re reporting out on. Whereas before, there was always a question in their mind.

Anthony Cadieux (10:41):
So we actually created some pretty sophisticated algorithms. We look across four different types of patients. We’re looking at when they came in, when the last time they engage with the system. Any other service line engagement. We’ve built lift models. This is across every single service line within every market. So we spent about 18 months just creating the financial models with my analytics team. And then also a BI team within the company. So once we had that, the finance leaders trust what we’re reporting out on.

Alan Tam (11:16):
So are you guys focused on multi-touch attribution as well? So obviously you can’t claim full credit, but every touchpoint, every interaction, I want to take a little bit of credit for that based on the campaigns and the outreach and the programs that you guys are doing.

Anthony Cadieux (11:33):
Absolutely. So right now we’re using two methods. We’re looking at a last touch attribution for something like Precision. But then we’re also layering in MTA, so multi-touch attribution. So we’re looking that across all online and offline channels.

Alan Tam (11:48):
Okay. And which one resonates better with your finance team?

Anthony Cadieux (11:55):
I mean, I think people are looking for…

Anthony Cadieux (11:56):
The silver bullet, but there isn’t one. It has to be more sophisticated than that. So that’s why we look at multiple data points. But MTA has really shined the light on some of these other channels that can’t always be directly tracked. Like out of home…

Anthony Cadieux (12:14):
And TV and a radio that typically people don’t understand what the impact is. MTA is now showing that more clearly.

Sharon Line Clary (12:21):
But there’s an art and a science to how they all work together, and I think that’s the real power of this data.

Alan Tam (12:28):
Okay. Now if I had to drill down on the specific metric though, that really resonates with your finance partner, I’m going to assume it’s revenue. Is that the ultimate metric?

Anthony Cadieux (12:36):
Net revenue.

Alan Tam (12:37):
Net revenue. And then how do you map what you’re producing to that net revenue? What is the, I guess, the core deliverable that marketing has to generate for that net revenue figure? What do you mapping to that on your side? What metric?

Sharon Line Clary (12:55):
I mean volume through the door. I mean…

Anthony Cadieux (12:56):
That’s it, yeah.

Sharon Line Clary (12:58):
Bottom line, I mean, the simplest form. I would say the other core metric that plays a big role in all that we do is just awareness and preference too…

Sharon Line Clary (13:08):
With the macro level.

Anthony Cadieux (13:09):
Yeah. From a revenue perspective, it’s return on marketing investment specifically. Yeah.

Alan Tam (13:14):
Right. Okay. I do want to go back to a little bit to something Sharon you talked about earlier, which is hyper-personalization. And I think that is one of the key pillars of precision marketing. Many health systems I’ve talked to before, they’re on the opposite end of the spectrum of where you guys are. And they fear kind of the creep factor of like, “Whoa, this is going to be too much for the healthcare consumer.” How do you guys balance that from creepiness stalking to, “Hey, this is really relevant for me?”

Sharon Line Clary (13:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think some people do have a reaction like that, but we have not found that. I mean, the entire campaign, no matter what we do, looks like our brand. And it’s very approachable. I don’t know. We just really have not faced that.

Sharon Line Clary (14:02):
It’s almost speaking to the consumer with the messaging and what they want. So they see it as a real benefit. I mean, the same way Spotify serves up all the songs that you love. Or Amazon says, “Hey, you bought this, I think you’d like this.” We love that. Right? It’s actually making it easier for our lives. I think that’s the same scenario that we’ve found.

Anthony Cadieux (14:23):
Yeah. And the data backs that up.

Anthony Cadieux (14:24):
That consumers more and more want to be spoken to directly. They want personalized communication. They want us to know who they are and speak to them on that level. But on the same side of that, I think it’s, the last data point I saw on this was 70%. It was either 60% or 70% of consumers don’t trust that healthcare systems know enough about them. So I think it’s actually quite the opposite. I think we’re holding ourselves back by and large as an industry when consumers expect this. Every other retail touchpoint is speaking to them on that level. So when they don’t get that, it’s such a contrast.

Anthony Cadieux (15:02):
And we’re like, my gosh. And if anybody should know them, it’s us.

Alan Tam (15:04):
Right. You should be in my seat because these are the same exact questions and same exact analogies that I talk to some of your peers who aren’t doing this, because that is my expectation. If it’s not relevant to me, then it’s like, “What are you doing? You should know me better than me.”

Sharon Line Clary (15:22):
One of the things we did with Precision that I was really excited about was during Covid. The Concern Index around being fearful. About coming into healthcare to the emergency room or other healthcare offices and that. So we actually took that into consideration as well on how we approached our messaging and our marketing. So again, there’s all different layers that you can add into the work that you do.

Alan Tam (15:49):
Right. So what are some of the common pitfalls that you guys have come across in building this program up?

Sharon Line Clary (15:55):
I mean, I’d say probably the biggest one is that you’ve got to invest in it. So it is going to take an investment of dollars, resources, setting up that structure, like I mentioned. But also you’ve got to do it for a certain duration.

Sharon Line Clary (16:08):
So we tried being in market three months, a quarter. We really found that a minimum six months to start seeing the return. You’ve got to really lay track there.

Anthony Cadieux (16:19):
Yeah. The longer you can let it run, the better. Now with that, we’re contacting a finite set of individuals. And so again, we’re not doing contextual. It’s not channel-based, necessarily. So because the same individuals are being reached out to, you have to change the creative quite a bit. So the creative can get stale very quickly, and we learn that.

Alan Tam (16:44):
Right. Okay. So I would love to have more of your peers, more healthcare marketers, do what you guys are doing. But obviously, as you guys talked about earlier, it’s a significant investment, and there’s a lot of work that goes into getting this off the ground. So how do I start? Where would you recommend I start? How do I go about this?

Anthony Cadieux (17:08):
You want to just give him your cell number?

Sharon Line Clary (17:13):
We come as a package. Gosh, that’s a really good question. I mean, I think it starts with finding the right data partner.

Sharon Line Clary (17:22):
And partners to help you, because you’re going to need the right folks at the table going on this adventure with you. It’s exciting, though, I mean we see it as a real pivot. Our pilot ended up now being the gold standard across our company. And Anthony’s really led the expansion of that. Which is, I mean, yielding amazing results. The best results we’ve ever seen with any strategy.

Anthony Cadieux (17:46):
Yeah. And the other thing I’d say is that at some point, you’re going to have to take a risk. Sharon took a risk on this program. She invested a significant amount of money, shifted that from somewhere else, and it paid off. So at some point, risk is in play.

Alan Tam (18:02):
Right. Yeah. Risk in healthcare. Shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. So I do want to go back to ROI a little bit. What were some of the challenges that you guys faced working with your finance partners in terms of calculating the ROI? You touched a little bit on last touch, and you touched a little bit on MTA. But in terms of helping them understand, what were some of the challenges and obstacles to get them to align?

Anthony Cadieux (18:33):
Yeah. I think what we hear most often, less so now since we’ve built the models. But from before, is if we’re saying, “Okay, these patients came into the system.” Be them new or existing patients, the common response is, “Well, how do you know they wouldn’t have come into the system anyway?”

Sharon Line Clary (18:50):
Number one comment.

Anthony Cadieux (18:51):
The number one comment, right?

Sharon Line Clary (18:52):
Number one. Number one, bar none.

Anthony Cadieux (18:53):
So that’s where we had to make some accommodations around, in the past, we probably would’ve claimed more than what we claim now. So to be honest, I can’t get into all the criteria of how this is all mapped out.

Anthony Cadieux (19:05):
Because that’s proprietary. But we do look across multiple data points to determine these people are in versus these people are out, based on engagement within the system and other service lines and the marketing. There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s probably an hour long presentation in and of itself, but that’s where we co-created that together.

Alan Tam (19:25):
Got It. Makes sense. What have been some of the biggest lessons that you guys have learned from your precision marketing programs?

Sharon Line Clary (19:33):
Oh gosh. I mean, there’s so many. I mean, that…

Sharon Line Clary (19:39):
Yeah, it definitely works. I mean, I think we talked about the duration of being in market. That was critical. I think you have to have really clear, strong call to actions too. That might sound like 101 in marketing, but I think there’s better call to actions than others. Especially when you can tailor those to the audience. That was key. What else would you say?

Anthony Cadieux (20:02):
We talk a lot about integrated campaigns. So developing creative that’s end-to-end. What I’ve seen in the digital landscape is that systems will sometimes just repurpose landing pages and things like that. So where we’ve seen some success is actually fully building that out. Even through the landing page experience, through CRM, like our email follow-ups, everything is following through at that segment level. And we’ve found some success with that.

Alan Tam (20:32):
Yeah. No, that’s amazing to have that really consistent and complete journey for the consumer. Very similar to how other industries are actually doing it now.

Sharon Line Clary (20:44):
You know what else we did is… Remember we originally started, we had 11 cohorts.

Alan Tam (20:47):
Wow.

Sharon Line Clary (20:49):
So we had a lot of people, a lot of different cohorts we were targeting with different messaging. And we really found that the key ones that were really driving for that service line, so we were able to drill in. So I think we were refining and optimizing…

Sharon Line Clary (21:02):
All the time. And I think that was a big learning.

Anthony Cadieux (21:06):
I mean, there really is a beauty to knowing who we’re targeting.

Anthony Cadieux (21:11):
So the analysis that you can do post-campaign on a very deep level is unlike anything we’ve been able to do in the past.

Alan Tam (21:21):
Right. Okay. So another question I have is really around your partnership with the finance team and CFO. And you guys touched on this a little bit.

Alan Tam (21:32):
What I’ve learned is that oftentimes healthcare marketers have some trouble building the relationship and trust with the CFO. What are some of the recommendations and tips that you guys have for your peers who are going through the struggle with building that relationship?

Sharon Line Clary (21:49):
Yeah. I think sometimes they don’t understand marketing. We speak kind of different languages. So really connecting, like Anthony was saying, and partnering with them to talk about, “Okay, where are your hot buttons? What resonates? How can I tell the story so that it really fits within in what you’re doing. And you see us as an investment.” Again, a lot of times they see it as an expense.

Sharon Line Clary (22:11):
But once they understand what we can do and how we do it. Because sometimes we make it look really easy. And there’s actually a lot of science and art behind it, and I think that educating them and bringing them in as part of the team, has really been a game changer for us.

Anthony Cadieux (22:32):
I would say too, that we have some marketing leaders on our side that really speak financial language. And so in our experience, getting out of some of what could be perceived as the marketing woo-woo fluffy and into the data and the science, and speaking on that financial level helps gain trust. This might seem obvious, but I think both sides just laying down their arms. Well, this isn’t a battle. Let’s do this together. Having some humility on both sides can go a long way.

Sharon Line Clary (23:04):
Well said. And we have a tendency to want to show here’s the creative. And that’s probably not where we need to start with the conversation, right? We need to speak to your point, their language. I’ve even recommended to some of my team, it does doesn’t come naturally, right? They’re more on the creative side, to actually find someone who can help mentor them. And to even run conversations by them to make sure that they are really resonating when they have those conversations with the CFOs. Yeah.

Alan Tam (23:33):
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So besides finance. In other folks within marketing, who are some of the other partners that need to be involved as they’re getting precision marketing off the ground?

Sharon Line Clary (23:47):
Business development. We work a lot with our strategy arm. Operations. So we started with emergency rooms. So our emergency team was very involved in ensuring that the messaging we were saying was clinically sound.

Anthony Cadieux (24:07):
That’s really it. Yeah.

Sharon Line Clary (24:07):
I think that’s it. We tried to streamline it because when you get so many people, the beauty with precision is you want to be really nimble. So you want to be constantly optimizing and learning from the data. So you got to identify the key people who are going to be rapidly kind of approving things. And do as much as that upfront. Because you’re not going to have time. I mean, if something’s not working, Anthony and his team, they’re flipping it out.

Alan Tam (24:30):
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I think a lot of the challenge across various different health systems is sometimes finance is the only partner. Sounds like in your case, the main partner. But oftentimes healthcare marketers need the support and the champion of, say, service line heads or medical group folks…

Alan Tam (24:48):
To help drive that as well. But it’s good to hear that you guys have that level of influence and authority just to work with your finance team to get it off and running.

Sharon Line Clary (24:56):
Yeah. I think once we kind of got everyone on the same page, it was like, “We’ve got to go. And here are the guardrails. Here are the triggers. This is when we’ll come back to you. If not, we’re going.”

Alan Tam (25:06):
Right. Yeah. Makes sense. So give me an example of one of your most successful campaigns so far.

Sharon Line Clary (25:14):
Precision marketing

Alan Tam (25:16):
Precision marketing campaign. Yeah.

Anthony Cadieux (25:18):
So, we have tried quite a few of them. Some worked well and some didn’t. But by far the most successful has been our ER campaign.

Alan Tam (25:26):
Your which one? Sorry?

Anthony Cadieux (25:27):
ER.

Sharon Line Clary (25:28):
Which we thought was going to be the hardest.

Sharon Line Clary (25:31):
And it actually ended up being… I wouldn’t say it was easy, but I would say it was, there’s just a large catchment area, right?

Sharon Line Clary (25:37):
When you start to drill down into certain diagnoses or certain pain points, I think that’s when the market just narrows.

Alan Tam (25:46):
Okay. So from that particular campaign, what were some of the results that you guys can share in terms of this is why it was so effective?

Anthony Cadieux (25:56):
We’ve returned 100 to one.

Alan Tam (25:58):
Wow.

Anthony Cadieux (25:59):
ROI.

Anthony Cadieux (25:59):
On our ER Campaign.

Sharon Line Clary (26:01):
And that’s the conservative number.

Anthony Cadieux (26:02):
We’ve really drilled it down.

Sharon Line Clary (26:02):
We have taken like… I mean, our finance team, were like, “Throw it at us. Think we shouldn’t claim that. We’ll take it out.” We took out every single line item, and it’s still a hundred to one.

Alan Tam (26:15):
Wow. That’s amazing. Would it be okay if we explore and double-click on that campaign in terms of what was the call to action on that campaign? What was the objective of that campaign?

Anthony Cadieux (26:24):
Yeah, I mean, it’s ER awareness, right? So ER awareness.

Anthony Cadieux (26:28):
So the call to action is, come to the ER at the end of the day. But that’s customized to each segment. Sharon talked earlier about there being the 11 segments that we started with, but that’s at the highest level. So then within each of those segments, we’re layering communications and creative and content specific. So maybe it’s based on geo, it can be race, could be gender, it could be family composition. There’s a lot of things that we’re adding within those segments.

Sharon Line Clary (27:02):
Language was another one. We even tried to look at the market. So if you live in a different area of town, we want it to feel like it was your community. So.

Alan Tam (27:13):
Right. Right. Okay. That’s amazing. Hundred to one, never heard of that type of ROI.

Alan Tam (27:20):
Especially in healthcare and that being a conservative estimate. So what were some of the key, I guess, lessons and best practices from that campaign that you guys were able to tease out for hopefully future campaigns?

Sharon Line Clary (27:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re continuing to learn as we go. I mean, Anthony mentioned some campaigns have been more successful. ER, very successful. I think we learned that areas like OB, we tried an OB. But we only did it for three months. Yet that is not the cycle of someone who is looking to get pregnant or pregnant. And so it just wasn’t long enough in market. So that was one of, I think, our biggest aha moments kind of early on. We knew we had…

Anthony Cadieux (28:04):
That one always makes me laugh.

Sharon Line Clary (28:05):
I know. I know. We were a little naive.

Anthony Cadieux (28:07):
If we could predict that, then…

Sharon Line Clary (28:09):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think finding the right places to use precision is critical. And again, some are, they’re going to yield different return based on what the strategy is.

Anthony Cadieux (28:20):
So the best practices that we talked about earlier really were derived from this campaign.

Alan Tam (28:27):
Okay. So amazing job. What’s next? I mean, you guys are off running the races and just sounds like you guys are catapulting forward. What’s next for precision marketing.

Sharon Line Clary (28:39):
Well, we’ve just expanded it. So the pilot ran for, I mean, multiple years. Because it was through Covid and that. And Anthony’s been leading to really expand it across our whole company.

Anthony Cadieux (28:51):
Yeah, that’s really been the big push. And that campaign just ended, I think a week and a half ago now.

Anthony Cadieux (28:58):
Right. So it’s still too soon to determine what the impact of that is. But that’s really been the next big push for us.

Alan Tam (29:04):
Right. So I don’t think we covered kind of when you guys started. How long ago did you guys start this?

Sharon Line Clary (29:09):
We started our pilot…

Anthony Cadieux (29:11):
October 2019.

Sharon Line Clary (29:12):
See, he remembers exactly. I know it was 2019, but I didn’t know the exact date. Well said,

Anthony Cadieux (29:18):
Yeah. Thank you.

Alan Tam (29:19):
Okay. So right before the pandemic, as you’re getting it off the ground, I think the pandemic officially hit. We’ll call it March 2020.

Alan Tam (29:28):
How did you guys go through that challenge, I guess? I’m going to assume budgets were affected. There’s a lot of obstacles, I think, as the country shut down during that time. And your campaign with just getting started up and running. How did you kind of navigate through that to see it through?

Sharon Line Clary (29:48):
Gosh, we’d done all the investment and the planning up front, so it was really in motion.

Sharon Line Clary (29:52):
We didn’t pull back, as I recall.

Anthony Cadieux (29:56):
We had a small pause. We did take it out of the market a couple of times with some of the surges. Because obviously we weren’t trying to drive more folks to the ED during that time. But as things leveled off, one of the things that we did was… So Sharon talked about that Concern Index that we had layered on. So what’s the degree of people’s fear about coming to the ER. We were also doing some proprietary research around people’s overall level of comfortability with going to healthcare facilities and ERs. We’re not the only system who dealt with this. Right?

Anthony Cadieux (30:29):
So even as volumes kind of leveled off, we then needed to address individuals to say, “It’s safe to come in.” Right. So that’s the psychographic level that we were speaking to them on. Some people feel very comfortable. Some people were very risk averse. There was no way that they were going to come out of their homes. We’ve heard about this.

Anthony Cadieux (30:48):
So then we were able to actually address those specific, kind of psychological concerns that they were having with our messaging through precision marketing. So it ended up helping level our volumes during a time where some of our competitors weren’t experiencing the same thing.

Sharon Line Clary (31:03):
Actually it [inaudible 00:32:35] too, us to be innovative around clean and safe. So we created this whole consumer campaign as well inside our facilities, externally with the clean and safe badge. That we then added on to all of our precision efforts, as I recall.

Alan Tam (31:18):
Yeah. Right. That’s amazing. I really enjoyed learning about that case study. And I’m just still flabbergasted with the hundred to one ratio. Especially coming from healthcare on the non-clinical side. So I really enjoyed this conversation. Sharon, Anthony, thank you so much. I’m sure many in the audience would love to continue this conversation with either of you. What’s the best way for folks to kind of get a ahold of either of you to pick your brain and learn a little bit more about how they can deploy precision marketing?

Sharon Line Clary (31:48):
Yeah, I think email is the best bet. Yeah.

Anthony Cadieux (31:51):
Yeah. I was going to say LinkedIn, but yeah.

Sharon Line Clary (31:53):
Oh, LinkedIn too?

Anthony Cadieux (31:53):
But yeah. We get email too.

Sharon Line Clary (31:55):
Yeah, we’re both on LinkedIn.

Alan Tam (32:02):
All right. Well thank you again. Thank you so much, Anthony, Sharon, really appreciate it. For those of you who are listening, please do give Sharon and Anthony a connect on LinkedIn. Or feel free to reach them via email. Until next time. Hello.

Outro (32:19):
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