Targeting Patients When They Don’t Know You Exist
Gone are the days of relying solely on a primary care physician or specialist to recommend a therapy. Today’s patients are digitally empowered to take control of their diagnostic and treatment journey, and they expect health care to be as accessible as any other consumer product. Pharma companies are largely responsible for creating this dynamic, having spent years appealing directly to consumers (DTC) via programmatic marketing. By contrast, medical device companies have traditionally relied on ways of promoting their brands that generally exclude the patient. To discuss how Abbott reversed this conventional approach, Alex Nepogodiev, Global Divisional Vice President, Marketing, Structural Heart, at Abbott Laboratories, sat down with John Seaner, CMO of Swoop, and Paulo Simas, Managing Partner of Real Chemistry, for a conversation at South by Southwest (SXSW).
Abbott, a company with a deep 150-year history, bucked the norm by directly engaging with patients about a common, though infrequently diagnosed, degenerative heart condition and then activated these patients to seek a ground-breaking procedure using an Abbott device. Education was at the heart of its campaign, which sought to create awareness of mitral regurgitation, aka leaky heart valve syndrome—defined by backward flowing blood caused by a loose valve. Because leaky heart syndrome is often attributed to a non-related cardiac condition, especially among those who suffer from comorbidities, it often goes untreated. Leaky heart syndrome is highly prevalent in older adults, with an estimated 50% of people age 75 and over suffering from the condition.
To ensure Abbott reached the right patients via the right channel, at the right time, with the right message, Swoop created an exclusive, privacy-safe AI-generated digital audience by analyzing 300 million de-identified patient journeys from the past 10 years. To be fully compliant with HIPAA, Swoop’s system of engagement uses tokens to mask personal health information. It also incorporates social determinants of health data, including 3,700+ consumer attributes and 65 billion consumer records to obtain a holistic understanding of the target patient population.
Real Chemistry leveraged the precise segments from Swoop to create messaging for specific groups—for example, targeting separate campaigns geared toward patients with diabetes and those with heart disease. In addition to courting channels that amplify patient voices, Real Chemistry reached key influencers within a health care ecosystem. These efforts paid off, generating tremendous results for Abbott in just four months. Its patient conversion rate is 29%, calls-to-actions are completed, and patients are searching for clinics that can perform the procedure by zip code—a metric that rose 600%.
Going forward, Abbott plans to initiate similar strategies and use real-world data to target patient populations that would benefit from other Abbott devices. By working with Swoop and Real Chemistry, Abbott had the tools it needed to engage and empower patients while introducing a life-saving device.
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