Balancing DTC and Referral Marketing Strategies

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Lauren Leone: Hey everyone, welcome back to Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast, back with Rich Briddock, our Chief Strategy Officer, to continue a conversation that we started last time when talking about third-party audiences. We talked a lot about third-party audiences when it comes to targeting and finding the right patient population, but there’s a whole other world of using these audience partners to target providers. A growing conversation with a lot of our client base is how do we tap into or wrap around sales teams, BD teams, that are out in the field forging relationships with healthcare providers to drive referrals, or perhaps they’re looking at standing this up for the first time.

As the consumer becomes more expensive to reach, it’s a good idea to balance with, can I also foster relationships to drive more referrals? That halo of trust hopefully has a one plus one equals three effect. Rich, I think I just spoke about the whole topic, and we’re done here.

Rich Briddock: Okay, great. That’s made my life a lot easier today. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Lauren: I’m just kidding. Just to recap, if anyone did not listen to our podcast episode last week, I recommend you check it out. Might not have been last week. I don’t know when my team publishes these things. If you did not listen to our last episode, definitely go check it out. Rich, quick summary, third-party audiences for everybody listening before we talk about use case.

Rich: Third-party audiences is just a whole host of data providers out there that allow you to build audiences, and as you mentioned before, that target patient populations or target provider populations based on specialty on the HCP side, based on referring behavior on the HCP side, script writing behavior, et cetera. The great news with all of the stuff on the HCP side, which I’m sure we’ll get into, is it’s not governed by the same restrictions. It’s not governed by the same HIPAA privacy, all that fun stuff that we have to deal with on the patient side, which takes all the shackles off in terms of what you can do from a marketing perspective and a targeting perspective. We can be as creepy as we like with these people, which is what [crosstalk].

Lauren: I hope the providers aren’t listening. Just one more setting the foundation bit, a lot of this really came out of some of the learnings we got from working with one of our PT groups. I know we work with quite a few verticals where referral still plays a really big part in what they’re doing. What did we learn or see as the consumer behavior with our PT client that really told us we needed to be tackling this from both sides?

Rich: I think what we’ve seen on specialty providers that are reliant on referrals from providers as part of the patient journey is that it’s not this clear-cut thing of you’re either direct-to-consumer or you come through a provider referral. Oftentimes, that patient journey looks like maybe I started to notice some symptoms, or I myself started to feel some symptoms. I went online, I did some initial research, then I went to see my primary care physician. I already had an idea of the type of treatment that I was going to go get, whether I asked them for their opinion or their evaluation, they then gave me a referral.

Then I went back online, looked at some providers who offer that type of treatment, and then I made a decision. In that case, is it a referral or is it a direct-to-consumer digital acquisition lead? We see that a lot in PT, but also in ABA therapy, for instance, where these are really high-consideration healthcare decisions that people are making, and it’s just not clean. Oftentimes, what we’ll see is you’ll actually get this friction internally between marketing teams and BD teams where the marketing team is saying, “Oh, no, I drove that lead.”

Lauren: “That’s mine. No, that’s mine.”

Rich: A BD team is saying, “No, I drove it, there’s a provider attached to it.” In reality, both teams played a part in driving that lead. Referrals was contributed, and so did the digital front door as well. That’s what we found with this PT provider is that they get a lot of referrals or they get a lot of patients who have a referral, but oftentimes they’re not direct referrals. That’s the other trend that at least we’re noticing with our clients is it used to be that you would go to a provider and they would oftentimes give you a direct referral.

Lauren: “Here’s the name of this guy, go see him.”

Rich: “Here’s the name. Go see Dr. Smith, they’ll sort you out.” Now what you’re seeing, and we’re seeing this especially on the ABA side, is they will give you a list. Sometimes that list might have 100 providers on it. Again, you’re getting a referral technically, and maybe when you come through the door, you’ll say, “Oh yes, I got a referral,” but the chances of someone selecting that referring provider from that list of 100 options without doing any digital research is practically nil.

Lauren: I know PT traditionally referral-based percentages were 80% plus.

Rich: 80% plus, but 99% of people had a referral, and of those 99%, 80% did not have a direct referral to that specific provider group.

Lauren: They used digital to narrow the field and make their final decision.

Rich: Make that final decision. Yes, exactly.

Lauren: Having that context out there, I think then we talked a lot about going direct to the patient, but knowing that 99% might have a referral, and that’s going to vary by industry, also tapping in and supporting that audience is really important. Reflecting back on our deterministic and probabilistic audience vendors, we talked a lot about who they were last time. Let’s talk about NPI targeting, the types of targeting we do, potentially some use cases on where we’re seeing this right now.

Rich: You can go broad to very narrow in terms of HCP targeting. You could take a specialty group. Obviously, with referrals, one of the main targets is primary care physicians. They are the front line of a lot of referrals to specialty groups. You can target all primary care physicians within a geo that you operate in just to try and get the broadest possible brushstroke, or you can get down to targeting individual NPI numbers.

That’s where I think it’s more a case of working with the BD team or the PL team, however you refer to it inside of your organization and saying, “Listen, we really need to get into this provider group and specifically in front of this provider, because we know they’re incredibly high-value in terms of the number of referrals that they do a year. We need to target them, but we can’t get past front desk. We cannot get past the various layers from a PL side. Let’s make sure that we expose them to digital content that talks about how awesome a specialty group we are, how we can help their patients, the outcomes that we can drive, how easy we make it for them to make a referral directly to us, the tools that we provide to help them with that,” so that we can at least get in the conversation.

Then once they’ve engaged with that content, if you have PLD, physician-level reporting, you can actually then liaise with your BD team and have them work that lead.

Lauren: “Hey, we’ve been serving impressions, getting some signals of engagement.” Maybe they watched a video. They stopped their scroll. We can get that type of viewability.

Rich: Yes, “This doctor just went to the website. Maybe now is the right time to reach out to them.”

Lauren: We went from super broad to super narrow. Give us some examples of more common use cases, maybe narrowing based on their prescribing behaviors, their diagnostic behaviors.

Rich: I think that’s the key piece. Typically, when we think about a digital campaign that’s targeting providers, we might break them up into different groups. We might target a set of providers that already has a higher referral volume to a specific specialty that we’re advertising for, but is not referring to a provider group.

Lauren: We can see their referral behaviors.

Rich: We can see their referral behaviors in the claims data. For that audience, it’s about getting on their radar, “Hey, we’re an option,” and then differentiating ourselves from who they’re currently referring business to. Then you’ve got another group of, they’re in the right specialty, they should be seeing the right patients, they should be seeing people that they can refer to for behavioral health, for instance, but they’re not. Then that group is more of a long-term play. It’s around education, primary care physicians, if you’ve got people coming in and they’re displaying these types of symptoms, maybe they need therapy. This benefits of therapy, et cetera.

Lauren: Maybe there’s a hesitation from that provider to try to continue or be involved in their care.

Rich: Right, or to step into behavioral health and play a role there. It’s just more education around how proactive behavior on that provider side might help their patient. That’s more of a long-term play. Then there’s also targeting providers who used to refer to us, but are not referring anymore, or might be referring to a different provider group, again, to try and re-engage them.

Again, you’re not going to be as creepy as saying, “Hey, I know you used to give us business,” but just trying to, again, remind them why you’re there. Maybe speak about how you’ve matured or evolved as a specialty group, things that you’ve been doing recently, so they can say, “Oh, okay. I didn’t know you were doing that now. Maybe I want to refer to you,” because I think a lot of the time with referrals, these referring providers, certainly when it comes to more complex specialties, are often looking at the spectrum of services that these groups offer. They’re trying to push patients towards groups that offer the wider spectrum on a one-stop shop.

Oh, if you go here, they offer speech therapy, they offer ADA, they offer occupational therapy. It’s all under one roof. You can have all your needs met by this provider. Maybe having a campaign where you now say, “Oh, I now do this, I now do that. We now offer this service.” That could help in re-engaging providers through a formal business by a team, but that’s just an example.

Lauren: The same model with using these audiences to push into programmatic DSP social platforms to halo around these providers, when we’re not talking about pushing them into doximity or their social networks, we’re talking about the halo around them when they’re maybe not sitting at their computer where they’re engaging as a civilian who’s just doing their everyday thing on the weekends and the evenings consuming contextual content, whatever.

Rich: Yes. Twofold though. Absolutely, you can push those audiences to meta, you can push them to programmatic. Primary care physicians are incredibly busy. Maybe it’s a digital audio campaign that you run where you’re targeting them on their podcasts, when they’re on their morning run or just trying to find any downtime. I’m sure they love getting advertised to, and they’re trying to find downtime. Then you can also get in situ. Now there are EHR-specific ad placements where you can serve an ad to the provider while–

Lauren: In their day-to-day.

Rich: In their day-to-day, while they’re seeing the patient, and you’re serving them a contextually relevant ad for that. You can reach them in the workplace, but you can also reach them outside of the workplace as well.

Lauren: For everybody listening, I’m sure you know this is not a last-click drive referral conversion type campaign. It is really meant to sit around a well-functioning physician liaison function, an initiative that you already have running. We’ve seen success. You might get traffic viewability, reach some of the KPIs, but maybe also using it to invite them to an event, to listen to a podcast, to attend a webinar, or download something. A little bit more of those softer mid-funnel events.

Rich: Yes. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding in the claims data. Are you seeing in your first-party data, but also do you have access to third-party claims data? Are you seeing the referral volume go up with those providers that you’re reaching through digital? Is your PL team seeing doors open?

Lauren: Better engaged.

Rich: Are they able to engage with these providers where before they were not? Ultimately, that’s what you probably want to look at, to try and understand if these tactics are working. To your point, direct conversion like you see D2C, that’s not what you’re going to see here.

Lauren: Yes. You’re not going to be measuring it on a CAC basis.

Rich: Yes. It’s much more of a causal relationship, much more of a correlation between, I’m running media in this market, targeting HTPs, and I’m seeing an uplift in referrals. That’s something that should be in your design, is we run these, we tend to do a test market and a control market, or we’ll hold back MPIs. We’ll have an MPI holdout group and then target maybe 80% of that relevant MPI audience just to see how the exposed [crosstalk] perform different to the control. Again, something to think about when you’re thinking about how you set these campaigns up, but really validate if they’re working for you.

Lauren: Just bringing it back full circle, I think we hear groups that are referral-heavy and fearful of getting into direct-to-consumer. The story really being, from that early PT example you shared, that they are working together. To do one without the other, you might be leaving a lot on the table or leaking from that effort when they go to search and pick someone else. Same with the counter. If the provider is part of the experience, having the halo there as well can be beneficial.

Rich: Yes, I think about your typical interaction with a provider. A patient may often say, “Oh, I’ve been looking around, I did some research. I saw this provider group, a specialty group. What do you think of them?”

Lauren: “What do you think?” Yes.

Rich: If they have no idea who you are or they just have no opinion whatsoever because we’ve not engaged with them, the feedback that they get from the provider might not be as positive to help drive that acquisition at the end of the day.

Lauren: That wraps this, Rich. I know we’ve got to run to a meeting. I’m looking at your watch. Thanks, everybody, for listening to Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. We’ll be back soon.

Rich: Thank you.

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