Accelerating Growth in Long-Term Telehealth Partnership By Adopting a New Full-Funnel Strategy

The Context

ADM’s partnership with NOCD, an innovative telehealth startup, began shortly after they received their series A funding in 2019. Over the last three years, we’ve steered their marketing efforts past a series of aggressive marketing goals while maintaining a distinct focus on new patient acquisition and scalable growth. Their Series B round, which opened last September, raised over $30 million. 

Telehealth usage was already on the rise prior to the emergence of COVID-19, but the pandemic accelerated that trend into an outright boom. With our expertise in direct-to-consumer healthcare marketing, ADM had the tools to scale NOCD’s marketing efforts and capitalize on growing telehealth demand. From December 2019 through December 2021, NOCD increased their monthly search engine marketing (SEM) investment by over 2100% while ADM worked to make that money operate efficiently to drive new leads.

The Solution

The idea was to arrange the keywords as closely as possible to NOCD’s sales funnel. That structure would enable us to prioritize bottom-of-funnel keywords that were likely to deliver the most offline therapy signups—which we referred to in our data as “customer acquisitions.” With HIPAA-compliant audience data provided by the client, we could upload those offline conversion results into Google Ads for continual campaign optimization. 

To address these challenges, we needed a deeper understanding of how our existing account structure reflected the NOCD customer journey. First, we took a deep dive into NOCD’s entire keyword strategy and began labeling every keyword in the account based on how it related to consumer intent, and where that intent fell along the customer journey. Each stage was labeled as high, medium, or low customer intent.

Once our labeling system and offline conversions were in place, we set about defining our target average cost for long-term therapy signups across top, middle, and bottom-funnel keywords. That metric was represented by customer acquisition cost (CAC). We then launched entirely new campaigns organized by funnel placement, which allowed us better real-time control over the cost of our online conversions—in this case, initial consultation signups.

The Challenge

For telehealth businesses like NOCD, success is measured in new patients. By the end of 2021, NOCD was pursuing its 10th straight quarter of patient acquisition growth. But to maintain that momentum, its SEM efforts needed to become even more granular than they already were.

Developing long-term patient-provider relationships can be a challenge for any healthcare provider. It’s easy to get people through the door once, but harder to keep them coming back. NOCD offers free initial consultations, and those signups serve as straightforward, traceable web-based conversions to build an SEM campaign around. Long-term therapy signups, however, are offline conversions and are thus trickier to optimize for. Our challenge was twofold: find new ways to drive more customers to a bottom-of-funnel offline conversion, and continue to optimize for that offline conversion over time.

Client Background

NOCD is a telehealth company specifically for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). NOCD works to connect OCD patients with licensed therapists who specialize in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective OCD treatment. Their mission is to create a world where anyone can access effective OCD therapy no matter where they live or how much money they make.