Objective

Suffering from a chronic disease is physically and emotionally draining. When that disease is highly personal and rarely discussed publicly, it can be isolating. So, ensuring patients feel seen, heard, and connected is that much more important, particularly in the search for improved care. It’s for these reasons that AbbVie approached FleishmanHillard (FH) to help them reach, engage, and recruit endometriosis patients to join the AbbVie Research Collaborative (ARC).

Prior to this request, ARC had worked with FH on a similar campaign focused on reaching patients experiencing migraine headaches - a campaign that outperformed expectations. Encouraged by this success, the ARC team turned their attention to a high-priority disease state that had been particularly difficult to reach: endometriosis. Campaign investment levels were increased and expectations were high. However, FH knew that such a drastic change in the patient audience population required a new strategic approach, for a few reasons:

• Patients with endometriosis were inherently different from migraine and thus consumed media in different places
• Endometriosis is a significantly more sensitive topic compared to migraine in most social circles, lacking broad public awareness and offering fewer targeting opportunities
• The campaign was approved for a longer flight at a higher initial investment. This led to increased strategic opportunity and more robust planning, including custom creative development and integration.

Considering these elements, the FH team began crafting a unique paid media strategy aiming to drive lead generation and provide endometriosis patients with a sense of connection and community they may have never experienced.

Strategy

The FH team dove into endometriosis patient audience research to better understand the preferences and media channels these patients prefer, while also being effective channels to deliver ARC’s message and content. The resulting analysis led to a media mix leveraging and integrating five different platforms. More importantly, the analysis led to the creation of a custom third-party-data-based audience crafted using OPRG’s (Omnicom Public Relations Group) proprietary tool: omniearnedID™. This tool allowed the FH team to build a singular audience which would be directly activated across all the following platforms to create surround sound:

• Awareness: YouTube
  Due to its ability to target through search, YouTube was leveraged to build awareness of ARC and the disease state – serving videos that provided brief education on what the research was hoping to accomplish.
• Awareness & Quantitative Traffic: Programmatic Display
  Reaching our target patients across the web was imperative to ensuring these messages were exposed to patients regardless of their online activity. Moreover, display drove a high quantity of traffic to the site at a low cost – allowing other platforms to retarget.
• Awareness & Qualitative Traffic: Reddit
  Previous efforts with AbbVie had shown Reddit to drive higher quality users to their websites than almost any other platform. Combined with Reddit’s ability to reach users actively discussing the disease state at a low cost, the platform was integral to success.
• Awareness, Traffic, & Conversion: Meta
  Not only do Meta’s low advertising costs prove valuable in the awareness and traffic states, but its unparalleled algorithm was able to retarget patients and drive highly efficient conversion.
• Conversion: Google Search
  Lastly, to capture patients already seeking resources and/or meeting the new demand of searches driven by the campaign’s awareness push, Google Search directed interested patients to the lead gen form to join ARC.

Results

The resulting campaign showcased the power of first nurturing an audience and then asking for their time/information. As each stage of the campaign launched (awareness, traffic, conversion), registrations increased month-over-month while costs-per-registration continuously decreased (Chart 1).

Key learnings were uncovered that could be leveraged across future campaigns:

• The campaign’s media mix proved effective at-large. Meta, Reddit, and Search proved to deliver the highest quality traffic, while Meta/Search proved to be the two platforms capable of driving conversions at scale (Chart 2).
• Second, cross-pollination of AbbVie efforts was discovered to be highly effective after an opportunity arose in the spring. March is National Endometriosis Awareness Month, and a separate AbbVie team partnered with FH to execute a paid media campaign accordingly, independent of the ARC effort. After that campaign wrapped, the FH team implemented a retargeting audience from those who engaged with that campaign into the ARC campaign. This led to a significant increase in the overall program’s effectiveness on Meta including: 21.7% CPC improvement, 31.4% CTR improvement, 20.6% cost per consented user improvement.

The campaign was successful in driving a high quantity of high-quality leads to ARC – helping build a community of patients for future research and collaboration. More importantly, the campaign facilitated a space and opportunity within organic social media conversations for patients to find others who could empathize with their experience – leaning on them for support. While the lead conversion results were exciting, exchanges like the screenshots attached are what campaigns like this are all about.

Media