Unlocking the Power of the Full Funnel: How St. Elizabeth Healthcare is Transforming Consumer Marketing
In 1969, the Rolling Stones captured the zeitgeist as they sang “you can’t always get what you want.” But today, with advances in technology and business processes, it’s never been easier to get what you want, or need. We can summon an Uber to our beck and call in seconds, and order anything from toilet paper to garden furniture on Amazon for instant delivery. As these frictionless experiences have become ubiquitous, they’ve also become an expectation. Consumers today demand services across all industries to be seamless and personalized, regardless of whether or not those industries are digitally-native.
This creates a problem for healthcare marketers. How do you use technology to provide a modern consumer experience, comparable to that which consumers have come to expect from the likes of Uber and Amazon, while also supporting the strict data regulations unique to healthcare?
Furthermore, with the rise of D2C services and telemedicine creating more competition, how can healthcare providers deliver a premium digital experience while also protecting profitability?
In this article we’ll break down how St. Elizabeth Healthcare, a leading Cincinnati-based provider, is leveraging their customer data foundation to deliver a full-funnel marketing program that drives growth while also maintaining regulatory compliance.
Full-funnel marketing: The foundation of a modern consumer experience
Most people in the United States are not in imminent need of medical attention at all times (luckily). Rather, we usually only think about getting to the doctor just after we’ve sprained our ankle or come down with a nasty cold. In fact, Americans visit the doctor just three times per year on average.
Similarly to how we consume non-medical products, we develop varying levels of intent for healthcare services based on time and circumstance. At first, we may be blissfully unaware of the services in our region. Over time we may become informed on available options, until suddenly something happens and we’re in need of an appointment–like, yesterday!
Many healthcare marketers build their digital programs around paid search, using Google Ads to convert those high-intent potential patients into appointments. And with good reason–paid search programs are effective at capturing bottom-of-funnel demand, are easy to measure, and can be directly attributed to revenue.
But for healthcare brands to grow, it’s important for them to expand their marketing programs beyond paid search, for two reasons:
- Increase conversions while protecting ROI – As healthcare marketers scale paid search investment, they quickly capture all available high-intent consumers, at which point incremental spend leads only to increased CPL or lower quality conversions. Full-funnel marketing increases intent across your entire audience, making it possible to scale your bottom-of-funnel campaigns while protecting ROI.
- Meet consumer expectations – Recent Salesforce research reports that 79% of consumers expect consistent, connected experiences throughout the customer journey, and 65% expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. To meet consumers’ rising expectations, healthcare marketers need to orchestrate experiences throughout the funnel and engage each consumer with messaging that’s relevant to their buying stage. Full-funnel marketing programs allow healthcare marketers to leverage a variety of channels to reach each audience with the right messaging at the right time.
Leading healthcare brands, such as St. Elizabeth, understand this, and are delivering full-funnel marketing programs that engage consumers strategically at different points of the buying journey. But if full-funnel marketing is such a no-brainer, why isn’t everyone doing it?
The secret to full-funnel marketing
The biggest challenge healthcare marketers face as they develop their full-funnel marketing programs is increased complexity. If optimizing a single channel is the equivalent of playing a game of catch in the backyard, executing a full-funnel marketing program is like coordinating an entire football team on gameday. For organizations to succeed at full-funnel marketing, they deliver a consistent patient experience across multiple channels—including display and broadcast media, social, paid search, and more.
To make sense of this complexity and optimize programs over time, marketers need a foundation of high-quality data, as well the tooling and expertise to make sense of that data. Specifically:
- Segmentation capabilities to control how different audiences are targeted
- Analytics tools to understand how users are progressing through the funnel
- Attribution tools to understand which channels and campaigns are driving users to convert
As every healthcare marketer knows, however, leveraging user data without the right privacy guardrails in place is hazardous. Healthcare privacy regulations, such as HIPAA, restrict healthcare marketers from sharing protected health information (PHI) with third-party platforms and require healthcare organizations to sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with any vendors handling patient data. To run an effective full-funnel marketing program, healthcare marketers need a data foundation that allows them to leverage user data without compromising regulatory compliance. Few providers have been able to do so more successfully than St. Elizabeth.
Inside St. Elizabeth’s full-funnel marketing program
When Stephanie Downing joined St. Elizabeth Healthcare as Manager of Digital Communications, she knew the organization had an opportunity to accelerate its digital transformation and deliver a more consumer-centric experience. Without access to high-quality data, however, Stephanie worried her team would be operating “in the dark.”
The first step was to establish a reliable privacy foundation. Stephanie implemented Freshpaint, which enables St. Elizabeth to collect user engagement data and control what gets shared with third-party platforms. “Freshpaint is like our strainer,” explains Stephanie. “We’re picking and choosing what is safe and proper data that these vendors need.” Instead of sending their website data to Google Analytics, for example, the team blocks PHI from being shared and de-identified information related to geolocation and IP address.
Additionally, St. Elizabeth leverages Freshpaint’s web tracker management tool to monitor tracking technologies across their site. At any time, Stephanie is able to review which tags are on their site, what they’re collecting, and why they’re compliant. This information can also be exported and presented to St. Elizabeth’s Chief Security Officer and legal team, which helps Stephanie build trust with key stakeholders.
With a reliable data privacy foundation in place, St. Elizabeth is empowered to run coordinated consumer experiences throughout the funnel. At the top of the funnel, St. Elizabeth leverages Connected TV and Display platforms to reach a broad audience and increase brand awareness. At the middle of the funnel, the team focuses on driving engagement, favoring channels such as social media and YouTube to deliver educational resources. Finally, paid search campaigns are deployed at the bottom of the funnel to capture intent and drive conversions. As Stephanie describes, “All of these aspects work together to drive people through the funnel. At the top of the funnel we’re inspiring demand, and at the bottom, we’re capturing that demand. The goal is you want data to help you pull all those strings.”
But St. Elizabeth's data foundation doesn’t just allow the team to control which experiences their audiences receive, it also enables them to understand how well their full-funnel marketing program is working. Stephanie’s team reports on consumer insights to understand consumption habits, operational analytics to understand ROI, website analytics to understand performance errors, and attribution to understand campaign performance. Furthermore, St. Elizabeth’s is able to leverage data to test creative in different channels and optimize their programs over time.
By inspiring and educating potential patients in the early stages of the funnel, St. Elizabeth have been able to increase intent across their target audience and improve bottom-of-funnel performance. And the results speak for themselves—Stephanie’s team has achieved an impressive 92% improvement in paid search conversion volume since launching their full-funnel marketing program. Let’s take a deeper dive into what one of St. Elizabeth's full-funnel marketing campaigns looks like.
Campaign Deep-Dive: Supporting Women’s Health
St. Elizabeth wanted to launch a campaign focused on supporting pregnant families in their region. Pregnancy is often one of the most special moments in a family’s life, and many couples take their time in making decisions about pregnancy-related medical services. St. Elizabeth therefore wanted to make sure they were engaging patients appropriately throughout the patient journey.
Stephanie’s team employed a combination of channels to engage their target audience across the funnel, including display media for brand reach, social media, owned webpages, and youtube for education, and finally paid search for booking conversions. With a high-quality data foundation, St Elizabeth was able to understand how well each channel was driving potential patients to engage. And by testing creative across social media and Youtube, the team was able to identify which variants were most effective at each point of the funnel.
As with any healthcare marketing program, St. Elizabeth knew that safeguarding patient privacy during their women’s health campaign would be of utmost importance. In addition to the data privacy foundation in place, St. Elizabeth implemented a process to codify any URL parameters that could reveal sensitive health information. Instead of using “womens health” or “family birthplace” in their UTM parameters, for example, the team substituted “WH” and “FBP1”, allowing them to track campaign results without compromising privacy.
Launching Your Full-Funnel Marketing Program
Consumer expectations will continue to evolve—likely at an even more rapid rate. To meet those rising expectations and drive revenue, it’s critical for healthcare brands to engage patients strategically throughout the buying journey. Stephanie recommends that providers looking to develop their full-funnel marketing programs start by laying a robust data foundation.
“Make sure you’ve got a healthcare CDP and BAAs in place with your partners,” Stephanie explains. “The more sophisticated you get in your approach, the more vulnerability you have. You need to make sure that you have the right partners in place.”
Leading healthcare providers trust Freshpaint to bridge the gap between patient privacy and digital marketing. If you’re ready to take your data-driven marketing program to the next level, you can connect with our team today.
