How to Market Oncology Without Scaring Patients Away

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Alex: All right, first with introductions, we got to introduce, I am very pumped about this because there is an institution here in America that is known as the best kind of its institution in America. That is very fun. It’s the place where we’ve all highly regarded. If we had a very serious case of anything, we’d probably want to go there. We have one of the leading marketers from that place that she’s going to talk about. This is going to be really fun. We’re going to talk about the near and dear subject to my heart, which is oncology, which is going to be really cool. Mindy has done some phenomenal things with modeling and trials and education and websites and activation. This is going to be fun. Mindy, I already told them your name. Tell them where you are and where you most recently applied your trade and what were you doing there?

Mindy: I have spent the vast majority of my career in healthcare marketing, whether that’s with destination marketing centers, community cancer, nonprofits, med device, those kinds of places. Most recently, though, I have led cancer marketing with Mayo Clinic, where my team was responsible for demand generation, clinical trial accrual, as well as community outreach and engagement.

Alex: Did you all hear that word accrual, clinical trial accrual? I had never heard that word before. That’s interesting. Probably why I know Pharma has reached out to Cardinal, because we don’t even use the right words. That’s very interesting. You had all of the oncology stuff from accrual to activation and screenings and all of that fun stuff. That is a lot. How do you even know where to start focusing? You came into the gig. How did you know where to start? What was the highest priority?

Mindy: For clinical trial accruals or-

Alex: For now, activation. Activation.

Mindy: For activation, let’s see. The way that I like to approach it is where do we have capacity as well as what are the biggest revenue generators? If you are driving in regionally, which we were because there are very specific skillsets, services, needs at each of the different sites, whether that was with Mayo Clinic or Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, looking at what do we need to do? How do we drive the revenue? I know everybody gets uncomfortable when we start talking about ROI and revenue generation for oncology because they’re like, “Wait a minute.”

Alex: Hey, no margin, no mission.

Mindy: Exactly. That’s where I would start.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. I love that. That’s marketing readiness, which we’ve talked about a lot. Mindy, I promise you did not steal any of our recent blog posts. I believe her. We talk about it all the time that people are advertising in places with no capacity, doctors that are not ready. All of the greatest marketing in the world just ends up not driving more demand. Then some CFO one day comes and says, “I gave you $100,000 last month. What did you do with it? I don’t feel a lift.” You don’t feel a lift because there were no available appointments. Marketing cancer, let’s just call it. It is marketing cancer. It is very different than dermatology or dentistry. Why? It’s not people are terrified. Like how you approach it differently.

Mindy: I do approach it differently because when you think about how many different devices people are on watching TV at night, they say that people are on two to three different devices all at the same time. What I can guarantee is that nobody is sitting there Googling cancer for fun. What you find is that when somebody has been diagnosed with cancer, they and their loved ones start Googling their very specific diagnosis in order to figure out what this is, and they’re terrified. They feel like they need cancer care now. When I was diagnosed, the first thing that you think is like, “I want it out. How do I get in tomorrow, and how do we make sure that they’re cutting everything out of me?” It is a different type of care that people are looking for, and something that they know nothing about.

Alex: Yes, and it’s very cool that you’ve been through it. That’s not what I meant. It is awesome when the marketer has lived what their provider group or health system is selling. Let’s just call it that. I think having gone through it, you were an incredibly compassionate market. You understood what a person is going through and what their family is going through. It’s interesting. You made a remark to me that cancer is so serious; people are okay with not great bedside manner. I had never heard that before. They want the best provider in the country to work on them. That’s interesting.

Mindy: It’s been so weird to see that happen. If there is a provider that has the best outcomes, somebody is willing to forego the bedside manner so that they can survive. If I have a primary care physician or an OBGYN that is treating me horribly, not listening to me, I’m going to walk. There’s nothing that’s going to keep me there. There are significant or can be significant differences in the outcomes of providers for oncology. People not choose the best.

Alex: My family has been through; everybody’s family’s probably been through a lot of the cancer stuff. They just want it out. How do you stop them from making the wrong quick decision on just getting it out and going to their local health system that may not specialize in adrenal cancer, tumor removal? How do you stop that? How do you get the right message? Mayo has a brand. Does the brand alone win? Talk to me through that.

Mindy: It’s interesting that you bring that up because it is actually something that’s very difficult, whether that’s when I was at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers because they do treatment only. It isn’t necessarily where somebody is being navigated to. If they start at a health system or if they’re screened somewhere, they’ll have a nurse navigator that’s directing them. Then Mayo Clinic, with it being a destination medical center, people need to understand at what point they should be looking for additional information, whether that’s when they’re first diagnosed, or if it’s time to get a second opinion. There’s a lot of discussion about at what point do we need to start giving information about the customer journey in order to make sure that they understand when and how they should be looking for care. When I first started at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, I was thinking, “I just do treatment.” I just need to talk about what happens during treatment. What I found was that if I wasn’t talking to them prior to that, if they didn’t have any awareness about the services that we offered, then I wasn’t going to catch them at all. The same could be said for Mayo Clinic, needing to inform them throughout the entire journey, giving them the information that they need, even at the time before screenings. Because normally, so a mammogram is something that a woman would typically do anyway, but other screenings like colon cancer isn’t something that most of us are sitting around like, “Oh, I’m going to go in and do my colon cancer screening.” Getting people in for the screenings, making sure that people understand the signs and symptoms prior to the need for care, creating that awareness prior to, and then creating customer journeys along the way where we are still seen at the time in order to what I would call a nudge so that they understand to start looking, not just where they’re being navigated.

Alex: You had a pretty sophisticated system for modeling out who needed to come in for a screening. Is that right?

Mindy: Yes. I was using some predictive modeling to better understand who might need cancer services within the next six months. We were looking at de-identified data that looks at what has happened previously in a person’s journey that might predict that they will be diagnosed with cancer soon. Part of the problem, though, again, both places that I’ve been at, they don’t do screening. I needed to be able to say, “Hey,” and not in a, “Hey, Alex, I think that you might have colon cancer. You should go in and get a screening.” Needed to be able to push people, though, in order to go in to get their screening. Then we also did this push-pull campaign where we were also then talking to providers within primary care so that if somebody came in, they had already heard about the company itself. Then the referring provider also had information about our services so that they were more likely to refer in.

Alex: You hit it both ways. You used some audience provider, and so you were marketing to the patients, but you also went to the ACPs and you said, “Hey, we’re going to have these campaigns going. FYI, being prepared for the influx, keep the appointments open and know when they’re coming in that this is what they’re coming from.” Four, and this is the messaging they’ve received. That’s an important point because some of us just go right to marketing. We forget to inform the providers that we’re sending marketing to. That matters. Did you use a specific audience provider? Everybody likes to know which audience provider, special tactical stuff you used.

Mindy: Or like a company.

Alex: The audience building. You said the predictive model. Was that one of these third parties, definitive healthcare type things?

Mindy: It was, but you know what? I want to say that the company was bought out two or three times in just from the time that I started talking to them. Now, I think that they’ve changed names yet again. I’m like, “I don’t even know what they’re called today.”

Alex: Audience provider, that’s what we’ll go with. Guys, obviously, in the high-acuity, the L-systems, I’m in my own audiences for a long time. It’s something that we’re talking to low-acuity retail healthcare with as well, as long as they have something that’s more than just dentist or Botox or mental health. There’s all these kinds of indications. Once you’ve started maxing out the Google search and things like that, that’s the bottom part of the funnel, you have to go start buying audience, importing them into meta, and all that stuff can work, not just for cancer screening. Healthcare marketers, what’s up? It’s Alex from the future. Guess what? Scaling Up, the healthcare performance marketing summit is back. Scaling Up is focused entirely on driving patient acquisition to your group. You’re talking the largest provider group, health system leaders, everything it takes to drive a patient to your practice or health system from Media, BI, Analytics, Performance Creative, SEO, AI, because we’ve got to have that acronym in there. October 28th and 29th, thousands of healthcare marketers are going to be showing up to this. It’s virtual, and it is free. That’s the best part. Last two years, we were charging for it this year. I want every healthcare market to come. We need to connect more patients with care. We all do. We all need to do it together. I’ll see you there scaling up. Mindy, back to the task at hand. You had to not just offer treatment and say, “We’re the best at treatment.” You had to educate, write message, write base, share at the right time, all of that stuff. How was AI, how much of that went onto the website? How much was ads matching to the website? AI change any of that for you guys of how you’re doing all that? What’s the story there? Where do I start? I’m wondering, where do I start with my educational stuff? How much should I have on the website versus treatment focus, because I need to convert patients?

Mindy: We do need to convert patients from the very beginning, that customer journey when people are looking for signs and symptoms. It needs to be the entire journey, and looking at website and AI built into it in order to create the conversations, but also with whatever information you have as a first party to better understand where they are in their journey. Are there other indicators of the things that they’re doing on the website that indicate where they are in order to serve up the next best action? Those are the types of things that we were looking at. Then what else can we build in there? Whether it’s downloadables, emails, drip campaigns past that. How do you get them to the website, next best action? Then how do you create that relationship?

Alex: You got to nudge them into the next best action. Dude, we’re just quoting Mindy. I told you how Mindy was brilliant. I talked to her two weeks ago. I said, “You got to be on this podcast. You are too good to suffer in silence.” AI changing the way. I think you had some really good takes when we last talked about if people are getting their answers. A lot of people are probably going to chat GPT when they get their diagnosis. What do I do? Who are the experts? All that stuff. If they’re getting their information there, what are we putting on our website at this point? It’s funny, Mindy, because I’ve interviewed a lot of people on here that say, “We don’t want to do the educational stuff anymore because you can’t compete with Mayo and Cleveland.” It’s funny. You’re like, “We also want to put the education.” This is too funny. What do you do with all of this credit and credential? What needs to be on the website? How do you stand out with this new AI SEO nonsense going on?

Mindy: Yes. With AI especially. Even if you’re just doing a Google search today, AI is coming up at the top. Making sure that you have your schema in order so that it’s pulling the information in. For us, it’s also been community organizations because they are incredible third parties. Making sure that AI is pulling up the information that you need them to see. The idea that we’ve had, though, is you’re only going to get snippets. There is also more information that you need to include. How can you get the important information into the AI-generated content to still want them to go deeper and still bring them into the website?

Alex: Patient communities. What does that mean? Sponsoring local high school team? Is that showing up on the Redis? When you said patient communities, what does that mean? Third-party content. I said, what do we mean?

Mindy: For cancer care, it is whether that’s advocacy organizations, but it’s also about the communities and support groups because I own chickens. I can find Facebook groups to talk about chickens all day.

Alex: I’m on the chicken things. I’m on Backyard Chickens, the Facebook group, dude. See you on there. Disgusting pitch people put on the sick chickens. Anyways, I get it. Yes, groups with cancer survivors and stuff. Yes.

Mindy: Exactly. There is a community group for every single type of cancer.

Alex: AI is pulling from that.

Mindy: AI pulls in from different groups, credible sources. How do you make sure that you are seen within those community and support groups as well? Because when I first started in oncology marketing, I kept thinking like, “Yelp. Who is going to go to Yelp and orient to find oncologists?

Alex: Hopefully no one.

Mindy: Hopefully, no one, but they do. It’s not necessarily Yelp, but it is different community-based organizations or groups, these kinds of things because people talk. How do you make sure that you have a good name within these community organizations where you aren’t in control of that content?

Alex: Yes. It’s cool. It’s like PR and reputation are back in vogue and running a good business is really paramount now because AI is pulling from it. Things like Glassdoor, even what your employees say about you is factoring in. That never used to be a thing in SEO. Maybe you’re spot on. Your third-party credentials, your patient communities, your local advocacy, all that stuff helps with AI. You’ve got to find the balance of educating on your website versus what you can’t not educate on your website because then AI has nothing to pull from. It’s like you’ve almost done it. You’ve got to educate in both places anyway. It’s interesting.

Mindy: Education isn’t enough. I think that this has been a big discussion at the place where I’ve worked because what is the role of the website? For me, especially because I do demand generation, I think that the website needs to be about demand generation. Just like you talked about, if there is a patient volume, then there’s no mission. You just can’t have one without the other. For me, especially because most of my KPIs are all about demand generation, but the website needs to be about how can you book appointments? How can you take that next best action? How are you creating conversations within the website? How are you driving them into your organization? Because it doesn’t do me any good if they come out and they get into any of the information, then they go to the healthcare system down the street. Why would I want that?

Alex: I just recorded a walking and talking, this is weird, where we talked about you’re doing all the awareness and then they’re going to another shop that you paid for all the awareness on. It’s so wild. All right, get out of my podcast stuff that I’m doing. Oncology is an interesting thing because you’re not looking at LTV. You don’t want recurring patient. That’s so interesting.

Mindy: Ideally, no. My goal would be to have them in, we treat them, we cure them, and then I never see them again. Again, back to this whole community groups. We have word of mouth. For me, that’s really how we judge how we’re doing, because as people talk, more and more people drive in or at least drive them to the website in order for us to start creating those relationships. No, I’m not measuring lifetime value like you would.

Alex: It’s so crazy. I love that you were, it’s all of our– it’s at least my dream job to be in marketing for cancer at Mayo. Come on, nothing better than that. If you believe in healthcare marketing, I’m sure, dude, you know what’s crazy? Look at this. Probably not supposed to do this. This is going to mess the whole podcast up. Look, you’re like my dream interviewee. I only had a few other ones on here, but look. We did it. We did it, LinkedIn family. We did it. We did it. We did it. We got them. All right, back to what I should have been doing. It’s interesting. You can’t measure word of mouth, I assume. Not a thing. You just hope that you’re getting more referrals and stuff like that. The thing I’m most excited about with AI is that it may cure cancer soon because it feels like there’s no hope with humans just tackling it. How many years and how many billions of dollars have we put into it? The treatments are better and people are living longer, but we haven’t gotten to cure yet. I’m very excited about the AI, about AAI, and maybe we get to AGI and it solves this thing once and for all. How does marketing keep up with all of those clinical innovations?

Mindy: Marketing needs to keep up, especially with understanding how to talk about the advances and the innovations that are happening and bring it down to a level that everybody else can understand, because you and I are not going to understand genomics. We’re not going to understand immunotherapy. We’re not even going to understand formal therapy and how that works. We need to be able to distill these complex science innovations in a way that people can understand them. The best way that I’ve seen to be able to do that is through video, actually, if you think video is king. It’s able to do animation of how some of these different sciences work so that people can understand what’s actually happening through these different therapies.

Alex: You would use whiteboard animated videos. That would help a lot because trying to read stuff. We’ve all had people get diagnosed in our family, and I’m trying to understand which clinical trial applies and all this stuff. It’s a nightmare trying to figure out everything and how it applies. You’re using videos. That’s very interesting. I guess if you’re in anything else, high acuity, it’s a lot of educating the patient in a very layman’s term way. I got to imagine somebody gets diagnosed, they’re immediately going to chatGPT and Google and trying to get a doctorate in all things their type of cancer. It must be so scary. I’ve not had it personally happen to me. I just cannot imagine how scary. You’re trying to get a PhD in two nights when you decide on what surgery. It’s so scary. That was scary.

Mindy: For breast cancers, they’ll tell you it’s HER2 positive. You’re like, “So what?” People are Googling, “What is HER2 positive breast cancer?” That’s where you can actually so Point Across Media is the company that I was using for the animation. They’re able to break down what it means on a cellular level, HER2 positive. Then what you do in the treatment and why that kind of treatment actually works on that type of breast cancer. Again, people are Googling their specific types. If you think about triple negative, it’s different than HER2 positive, different than all of the other types. People need and want specific information, not generalities.

Alex: Yes, they want, and they’re scared, and it’s hard to understand. They just go with their surgeon, and you should not just go with whatever that oncologist said. I’ve actually seen that go wrong, seriously wrong. Go back and do your own research. The more groups that have nice educational easy to understand content, the better and the more likely you are to win that patient, I assume. Mindy, this is a performance marketing podcast. What type of performance marketing stuff? What kind of media mix were you generally going through? What worked best? Was it all about the screenings? Was it general treatment? Was it brand? You know what’s crazy to me also? Did Mayo run brand advertising? You don’t need to. You don’t need to. I would think you don’t need to.

Mindy: There is brand advertising.

Alex: That’s why.

Mindy: We do. Yes.

Alex: That’s why. What worked best? What kind of media mix? A lot of the Google, a lot of Meta for screenings, importing audiences. What was a good mix?

Mindy: Brand, separate. My group was specifically doing demand generation. We would look a lot, yes, at the PPC, not big believers in programmatic. We would do some, but not much. We would do a lot of the PPC in the moment because, of course, that’s when somebody is looking for it, specifically driving them to landing pages and then converting from there.

Alex: Screenings are general, I have a breast cancer. Was it treatment, screenings, all of it?

Mindy: Diagnosis because of the screenings.

Alex: Oh, okay. Got you. Then you all’s predictive modeling was based on, yes, who’s going to be screened. That’s awesome. That’s really interesting. One last question. One last question. One last question. If you were given 20% more budge, what would you do with it?

Mindy: This is where I would drive people to clinical trials. It’s not that I wouldn’t want more for a PPC campaign, but I think that with clinical trials, unfortunately, what I have heard from consumers is that they think that they’re just going to get the placebo and they’re like, “No, no, no. I need treatment.” It’s like, “Okay, you would still get the standard of care based off of NCCN guidelines. That isn’t the issue, but you might not get the investigational treatment.” Driving more people in for clinical trials for people to realize that that is what drives innovation, better therapies, getting us closer to cures. Without that, we will be, I don’t want to say stuck because that isn’t the right word.

Alex: Oh, well, yes. If we don’t test, we don’t improve. Yes, you’ve got to get people in there.

Mindy: Yes. This is the best way for me thinking about future generations and cancer care as a whole. I would put it towards clinical trial fuel.

Alex: When you go for a trial, you also will get immunotherapy, chemo, radiation, like that’s okay, and you can take the trial, or do you get whatever the trial drug is, but you’re not going to go through the other thing, or is it all of it?

Mindy: Okay. What you get will be based off of the type of cancer that you have. Immunotherapy, hormone therapy, radiation, all of these things aren’t necessarily for each different type of cancer.

Alex: Got it. You get the experimental drug.

Mindy: Right. If the normal guidelines for a type of breast cancer says that you would get immunotherapy and radiation therapy, you would still get whatever the NCCN guidelines say is the standard of care for that type of breast cancer today, but you might not get that investigational drug.

Alex: The best thing to do when you get a diagnosis is try to find a trial.

Mindy: In my opinion, yes.

Alex: I agree, dude. I agree because a lot of times when you start the standard of care, you’re not allowed into the trial, right?

Mindy: Once you’ve started a treatment, most likely you’ve farmed.

Alex: They just have their good friend’s mom, and I said, “Don’t start the treatment. Look for the trials first because once you start, you can’t get the trial.” We haven’t talked about marketing at all. If you’re into healthcare marketing, then you’re into healthcare. Maybe we saved one person. We only have five listeners, so I’m going to have to have 20% get diagnosed to save any lives here.

Mindy: One in eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Hopefully, of your six listeners, are they all women?

Alex: Generally, healthcare marketers are women. Yes, they’re better people. It’s not a lot, guys.

Mindy: All right. Maybe we’ve saved.

Alex: Maybe we saved one. I started. I went in for the screenings. Now that I’m over 40, I get all of them. One other thing that’s not marketing-related at all, but I would love to have this client. The malaria tests, every six months now, I’m taking the blood test. I was going in for the MRIs, full body, but they can detect false positives, and you’re dumping tons of MRIs juice into your body. I wasn’t sure. I’m doing the blood test every six months, but it’s not cheap, and I understand not everybody can do it. Anyways, cancer is near and dear to all of our hearts. Mindy, I’ve kept you over time. There’s a million more questions. I want to have you on more content if you’re open to it. This is so cool. You’ve been a dream candidate for a long time. Thank you, Mindy.

Mindy: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

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