062 | Integrating B2B and B2C Marketing under Your HealthTech Roof | Jackie Vinyard | Debbie Fimple | Priya Kindara | Studio CMO
More and more HealthTech companies must support both B2B and B2C marketing efforts to meet the needs of their end customers. Companies must sway the minds and habits of medical professionals.
Sometimes, the most efficient way to do so is to educate the patients so they, in turn, pique the curiosity of the doctors. At other times, both doctors and patients must be exposed to new research and solutions. Addressing both is the most expeditious way to succeed.
To view a transcript of this episode, click here.
About Our Guests
Jackie Vinyard joined Kindara, the parent company of Priya, after hearing the CEO speak at an event. Her passion for working with those struggling with infertility lights up the room wherever she is. She has invested her career in fitness and women’s health at companies like Telespine before joining Kindara. She runs the B2C marketing efforts.
Debbie Fimple runs marketing on Priya’s B2B side. She is an in-demand communicator with experience in B2B and B2C marketing in professional services, healthcare, and public sector industries including a stint at the Colorado Department of Healthcare Policy.
Resources Mentioned on this Episode
For webinar resources, check out this article and this podcast episode.
The eBook, How to Not Waste Another Month While Trying to Conceive, grew out of one of their more successful webinars.
Get Closer to Your HealthTech Buyers by Getting Rid of Technology Bias
Is the Enterprise Healthcare Buyer Set up to Win on Your Website?
The Complete SEO Guide for B2B Tech Marketing
Transcript
John Farkas (00:01):
We live in a world where increasingly in the context of marketing, integration is essential. And many healthcare organizations have two sides of the house. They might have a B2C side and a B2B side. And making sure that there’s some really good, strong consistency, and that each side is working well together to create uniform synergy in a consistent story that pulls through all the way is really essential. And that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about today on Studio CMO.
Mark Whitlock (00:47):
Welcome to Studio CMO, I’m Mark Whitlock, and you’re listening to the podcast where HealthTech companies can come to figure out how to improve patient outcomes, how to be empowered, to communicate their solutions in ways that capture attention, and motivate change, and speed improvements. We’re talking, positioning, we’re talking demand generation, we’re talking marketing HealthTech. John Farkas is the CEO of Golden Spiral, the agency, which brings you Studio CMO. And I’m also joined today by Anna Grimes, one of our account directors and a woman who has forgotten more about healthcare than I think I’ll ever know. And one of the things we always talk about, Anna, on Studio CMO is that empathetic understanding, getting to know who our customers are and ultimately who the patients are. And I can’t think of a deeper topic where empathy plays a huge role than the conversation we’re going to have today.
Anna Grimes (01:38):
Agreed, and I totally agree about the healthcare piece and the need for empathetic understanding. My litmus test always is, in talking to a healthcare company, if they don’t start talking about the patient and the first three sentences, they’re not in healthcare.
Mark Whitlock (01:55):
Good point. So who do we have on the podcast today?
Anna Grimes (01:57):
Well, I’m really excited for this conversation. Jackie Vinyard is with us from Prima-Temp, as is Debbie Fimple. Jackie Vinyard joined Prima-Temp after hearing the CEO speak at an event. (I want to hear about that.) Her passion for working with those struggling with infertility lights up the room, wherever she is. She works on the B2C side of Prima-Temp.
Anna Grimes (02:20):
Debbie Fimple runs the B2B side. Her past work for the Colorado Department of Healthcare Policy makes her a formidable communicator. Debbie and Jackie both have spent their careers in marketing to that healthcare market. So we’re really glad you’re here today.
John Farkas (02:40):
Jackie. Debbie, I would love to hear more about your organization. Why don’t you just kind of give us the thousand foot view of what you all are doing and what makes you excited about.
Jackie Vinyard (02:49):
Prima-Temp is our parent company. Prima-Temp owns, uh Kindara and, uh, the Priya Fertility monitor and Prima-Temp is so exciting because it’s, it really is about empowering women to make informed health decisions through science-based digital health technology. But what’s really exciting about Prima-Temp is it’s the first time that a medical device is able to wisely communicate with a smartphone. And this has never been achieved outside of a laboratory or a NASA before. And this gives the customer the ability to have data that isn’t impacted by environmental factors. So it enables them to really be able to make healthcare decisions important to their goal.
John Farkas (03:35):
So tell us about Priya.
Jackie Vinyard (03:37):
Just recently launched Priya. We’re so excited that Priya is here today because Priya is a, um, fertility monitor that measures continuous core body temperature and by measuring continuous core body temperature, uh, we’re able to detect hormonal patterns that can predict oscillation. And the really exciting part about this is that everything else that’s available in the market is a single data point and hormones don’t sleep during the day. You know, they don’t sleep during the night. Your, your body may have, for example, a luteinizing hormone surge, which is, um, how your body’s saying that I will obviate any, you know, really any time. And by measuring continuous temperature monitoring, we’re able to detect hormonal patterns that haven’t been able to be achieved outside of a laboratory previously. And this is a game changer for women because now they have a window inside of what’s happening inside their body.
John Farkas (04:42):
There was some big news in that when we think about opportunities, especially for women, for understanding for really beginning to take control of their care in that realm, that kind of visibility and understanding would be pretty front and center. I would think, I would think because I wouldn’t know, but I would think, and so tell me what kind of response you’ve been getting to. Some of that what’s been going on in the market.
Jackie Vinyard (05:07):
Our current customers are we get continuous feedback from them. We, you know, we asked for a survey that they’re just so excited to have this effortless, that they get to have their cake and eat it too. They get both that it’s effortless and the data that they need to figure out, you know, why, why they’re not getting practice.
John Farkas (05:29):
Yeah. Obviously some pretty new advents in your world, bringing all those elements together under the company banner, talk to us a little bit about how that has happened and, you know, Debbie, I’d love to hear your perspective on, you know, watching that move just in this last season, what has been some of the challenges? What have been some of the learnings and takeaways that you all have had as you thought about how you’re bringing this picture to market? One
Debbie Fimple (05:56):
Thing I’m a comment real quickly on from the healthcare provider perspective, why this is so exciting for them up until now, the general recommendation. When you go to your OB GYN and say, I want to get pregnant, they say, okay, if you’re under 35, go try for a year. And if you still can’t get pregnant, then come back and see me. And we’ll do some tests. If you’re over 35, that drops down to six months. And so, but with no other instruction or tools or anything else to help the woman. So she goes off. If she’s 36 years old, she tries for six months, she comes back and says, I can’t get pregnant in the office. They can do a couple of tests, um, to check her ovarian reserve, a few kind of diagnostic lab tests. If that doesn’t show anything, then she’s offered the fertility specialist and that healthcare professional, who may have been seeing this woman since she was 18, 19 has just lost a patient with Priya.
Debbie Fimple (07:02):
The OB GYN can say, well, you know, you can go try, but if you want to start tracking and have an easy way to track your cycle and see if some things might not be lining up, like you might not be, if you’re not ovulating or different phases of your cycle are off, we can get that data sooner and you can take this Priya device, use it for a few months. And then we can look at that data together and determine if something is off. And perhaps it’s an easy solution. And that physician does not have to refer the patient out. So from my perspective, that’s super exciting to be able to offer this to OB-GYNs, to share with their patients, to help them retain their patients and strengthen their relationships.
John Farkas (07:49):
I know that this is a passionate issue for a lot of people. There’s a lot associated with infertility and what it means for women, what it means for families and the inherent challenges that exist in trying to figure out what’s going on and why it’s going on and what can happen about it. I’d love to hear, just from your perspective, what has you excited about being part of this mission and what have you seen? You know, what, what has been exciting for both of you is solving for this.
Jackie Vinyard (08:24):
He, you know, here, you can know when your pizza is going to be delivered when your package is going to be delivered book an airline flight online and see, you know, when your departure is, but we’re still using methods to achieve one of the most important goals in our life. If that’s what you want, if you want to have a child, you know, with methods that are just so outdated and inaccurate and hard to collect, and what continuous core body temperature does is it’s bringing what technology is out there for the first time and making fertility now catching up to where we are with other areas in our life is just crazy to me, that one doctor equated and fertility diagnosis with an HIV diagnosis, the stress of being infertile is all-consuming. And to be able to be working on a product, you know, it literally is giving a woman a window into what’s happening inside her body, but it doesn’t stop there. You know, continues providing temperature is a marker of circadian rhythm patterns and circadian rhythm patterns is what’s happening with your hormones. You can only begin to imagine that where you can go with that with diabetes and polycystic ovarian syndrome and your hormonal patterns change before you might even have a symptom. So now we are entering the world of preventative health, right? In addition to also helping treat issues,
Anna Grimes (09:53):
You’re not leaping to the, “Okay, let’s put her on medication.”
Jackie Vinyard (09:57):
Correct. Absolutely.
Anna Grimes (09:59):
You’re offering something other than, as you said, Debbie, oh, come back in six months and here take this medicine and it might work.
Jackie Vinyard (10:10):
We don’t know. Yeah. We did some customer interviews and we had two stories that are just incredible, where they had gone to a doctor and one just kept having recurrent miscarriages. And they said, okay, well, we don’t know what’s happening in your body. So let’s just, um, do surgery to see what’s happening, basically open you up and see what’s happening. And she wanted to get a second opinion. And she did. And her, the second opinion is like, have you been charting anything at all? So here are you gonna start charting your temperature? And she didn’t have enough progesterone during her lose her the second phase of her cycle, the luteal phase. And that’s all she needed. She took a over the counter progesterone supplement and her pregnancy lab survive. She avoided IVF and unnecessary surgery.
Mark Whitlock (11:00):
Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah.
Anna Grimes (11:02):
That’s a very moving story
John Farkas (11:04):
And way too common, I’m afraid.
Mark Whitlock (11:07):
Jackie, it’s interesting hearing you give us an education on this over the last few minutes, just reminds me that, that you’ve been a content producer for a number of years. And I can only imagine that what you’re facing with Priya is there’s a ton of education that must go on in the marketing process for Priya.
Jackie Vinyard (11:26):
The education is incredible, but here I’ll let Debbie expand on that. It’s not only for customers, it’s also for healthcare professionals.
Debbie Fimple (11:34):
One of our biggest lessons that we’ve learned as we’ve been exploring the market with, especially OB GYN MDs, is that they do not get any education associated with tracking cycles. The benefits of tracking, um, you know, even just using a basic temperature, um, tracking for health during their formal medical education. We’re discovering that on the alternative medical side, um, natural paths acupuncturists, they do get that education and they’re using those tools, but that’s been one of our biggest lessons learned is that as we’re going out and telling OB-GYNs about this great new technology, um, they’re not familiar with it at all. As, as I mentioned, they send their patients away to try, and then they do some laboratory blood tests to identify ovarian reserve, but they are not familiar with the cycle tracking at all. So the getting them to the benefits of even continuous core body temperature over basal body temperature is an education opportunity.
Debbie Fimple (12:43):
So one of the things that we are actively seeking opportunities for is to work with the medical associations, the American college of obstetrics and gynecology and others to develop continuing education accredited programs, to, um, help educate the MDs about the potential for using continuous core body temperature. Because of all of the opportunities, you know, beyond just fertility, we’re doing studies on TCOs, which is an early indicator for diabetes sleep disorders. There’s so many areas of applicability, um, that tracking continuous core body temperature can have on overall health, not just bikini health as reproductive health is sometimes referred to it as a challenge because it’s, you know, as we go out and we’re trying to do direct marketing, we’re realizing that we need to take a step back and really do the education before we can start talking about features and benefits.
Mark Whitlock (13:40):
How have you married the education to your market?
Jackie Vinyard (13:43):
You know, when it comes to the inbound marketing tactics, those are all educational based in fertility. The time that people were in school, they were learning how to not get pregnant, right. By the time you’re trying to get pregnant, you’re no longer in school typically. And now you’re trying to learn all of this on your own on online. So Google is, has become the customers’ primary educational source at this point.
John Farkas (14:12):
So I want to just back up and talk about what you just communicated a minute ago around, okay. We, we have a bridge to cross before we can talk about our solution, you know, and, and that’s the, the core understanding of continuous core body temperature has to be there before people really are going to understand what you’re doing. I think that that’s so common. We talk about the technology bias a lot in our world because when we’re in these companies and we’re laser focused on bringing a remarkable solution to the market, we get really familiar with what that solution is. And we build this set of assumptions of understanding of the market and how easy it is for us to cross the bridge because we built it. We built the bridge, what we get to come to an understanding of. And one of the essential understanding is it’s kind of the emperor’s new clothes in some sense, because the bridge is invisible to the market.
John Farkas (15:10):
They don’t know it exist yet. And until you build that for them and show them that it’s there and put the coat of paint on it, that makes it visible, right? They don’t know. And so it’s really hard for them to adopt. It’s hard for them to get excited. It’s hard for them to, to follow you on your journey because you haven’t done the work of building that initial core understanding. And it’s a challenge for a lot of companies that have technology solutions because they are doing something different. It’s different and it’s remarkable, and the market hasn’t got there yet. And so this is a great example. And especially because what you guys are talking about is really pretty simple, you know, and it’s still not fully understood. And so, because it’s simple, I could see where that bias would form really quickly, and you would have that blocking, but just the understanding that, okay, we’ve got to start back. You know, we call it the from two journey, we have to start it from because that’s where our market is. That’s, that’s where the physicians are. That’s where, where, where our users are. We have, we have to start at from, and build the bridge to, to, and be very intentional about it. So talk to us some about what you all have done to create that bridge.
Jackie Vinyard (16:27):
I agree with that for the top of the funnel customer, there are a group of customers that are ready to buy and they’re looking for solution. So if you really spend time talking with your customer and understanding their problem, that’s where Google ad words are your best friend, because if you can figure out what your high intent keywords are and use them in search ads and also create a good shopping campaign in Google, then your company will be more successful because you’re able to get those early adopters who are, who are ready for your solution, but then also funnel in the awareness. And, but, you know, and that’s where you, they need a lot of education. They need a lot of touch points and where your drip campaigns and lead tactics are going to be essential to be a conversion.
Mark Whitlock (17:28):
Debbie, how are you seeing the from, to bridge on the B2B side?
Debbie Fimple (17:32):
We do have a bit one business development person who has been out hitting the road and spreading a lot of our marketing material around to OB GYN offices in a few different markets. Um, and what we’re finding is that we, we need to take a step back and, um, offering, um, webinars and education and not just, um, free product. So that’s what we’re working on now.
Anna Grimes (17:57):
So it sounds like on your side of the house, Debbie, it’s more top of the funnel, just building out that marketing engine and then for you, Jackie, it’s the top of the funnel feels pretty well supported, but it’s moving folks down that funnel.
Debbie Fimple (18:13):
Yeah. And there’s also a, um, feedback loop, um, between the two markets that we’re working on developing as we build customers, we know, for know, from the B2B side, we are serving end users, but asking them who their healthcare providers are encouraging them to share their data with healthcare providers, because we know that that will be, uh, a very strong credibility, um, point for us and referral point for us, if we can have customers start going to their healthcare professionals and saying, you’re, can I share my Priya data with you? And let me tell you about this. And so we want to work it from both sides.
Anna Grimes (18:53):
Just a great example,
John Farkas (18:55):
Dive into that a little bit with us as we’re getting into that integration piece. So, Jackie, I know that’s been a journey for you guys over this last little bit. Talk to us a little bit about how you are seeing and what you’re doing internally to build that kind of alignment between the B2B, the B to C side and the product component, because I know that that in your world is a really essential integration. What have you been doing to facilitate that? And what have you seen work?
Jackie Vinyard (19:22):
You know, the first step that’s been the most helpful to unify them really goes back to product marketing and interviewing both the customer and the doctor. So I’ve been spending some time, you know, Debbie has been helping me find some doctors that are interested in our product to help their patients and interviewing them. And then also the customer and seeing how, you know, when, when we have a customer, for example, go to her doctor and show her the Priya charts, you know, what is the doctor saying? And then going back to the development team and making sure that we have the right features that the doctor wants, not only the consumer wants, we need to meet both demands. And then, you know, Debbie and I work a lot on videos together, and you would think they would need to be more different than they actually they are. But, you know, they actually can serve both markets, which is pretty lucky with this product.
Debbie Fimple (20:20):
We’re working on a few different content pieces and they’re fairly minor modifications that need to be made to speak to the two different audiences.
John Farkas (20:29):
Yeah, because at the end of the day, you’re talking about giving women the power, empowering them to understand themselves, right. And giving them the tools and people, the ability to easily get that kind of insight. So it makes sense.
Jackie Vinyard (20:42):
And we, we really need both markets because they, they support each other. For example, this is a product, a woman, you know, inserts inside her body and is trusting to help her decide what’s happening inside her body, you know, to reach this goal that she so desperately wants. And I don’t know if, if you can correlate something else in your life. Like I just recently bought shoes for my toddler because it said it was recommended by a doctor. I’m not going to go to my pediatrician and ask them what shoes she recommends. But I liked that they were recommended, you know, the toothpaste I picked, picked it up off the shelf the other day, and it didn’t say recommended by a dentist. So I picked the one that was, this applies absolutely to Priya. So even if she’s not going to a doctor, she wants to know, doctors are recommending it and are supported by doctors. And then doctors have a lot more customer lifetime value for us. So, you know, she may recommend Priya to multiple patients over the course of her career. Whereas, you know, a Priya customer, if she gets pregnant, she, you know, she doesn’t need it anymore. She might recommend it to a few people. So they’re very interlinked and they help support each other.
Mark Whitlock (22:01):
I had a conversation Jackie, before we started recording about some of the challenges that you face from a regulation standpoint, um, language you can’t use in the process of talking about Priya. Tell us a little about that in Debbie. What are you seeing as well from a regulation standpoint, that’s preventing some of your messages from going forward and how have you gotten around that?
Debbie Fimple (22:22):
Or biggest challenge is just the prosection versus contraception. We’ve been FDA approved or registered for Priya for prosection, but obviously for on the consumer side and the healthcare professional side, um, this would be a great natural product to use for avoiding pregnancy as well. We are not FDA registered for that indication, but that’s a leap that consumers want to make healthcare professionals want to make. So just making sure that our messaging is clear. Other than that, I think that the FDA registration is a great credibility piece for us alongside the physician recommendation physician, backing people look at the FDA and they say, okay, this product is safe, but it’s approved
John Farkas (23:12):
As you guys have gone to market. What have been some of the highlights would have been some of the success stories that you’ve seen and things that have really worked well that you’ve put forward, that you’ve been pleased at the response and the efficacy of tell some about what you’ve seen. It’s gone through
Jackie Vinyard (23:27):
From the consumer point, it’s finding key opinion leaders and respected doctors and having them, you know, doing an interview with them and inviting our customers and potential customers to attend the webinars. And then recycling that content has been by far and away. One of the most successful marketing tactics we’ve used, we had 2000 women sign up for our webinar in less than 48 hours and take their emails and provide them answers to the questions that they asked at the end of the webinar. And, you know, it’s wonderful that we have a solution for them that they can use. And so it’s just, that’s been, we actually went even further and created an ebook and a health challenge based off of this one webinar we had is just that inbound education where there’s just that gap right now between the doctor and only having 12 minutes with them, but needing so much more time. And just also just, you know, west there’s, you know, PCs is a new let’s, you know, it’s called, it’s been referred to as the modern epidemic. It’s pretty new it’s it takes a really long time to diagnose. And they, you know, right now we’re not meeting the medical community is not necessarily meeting the needs of these women. And we’re here helping fill that gap
Debbie Fimple (24:58):
On the healthcare professional side. Um, we’re still undergoing several studies to, um, compare Priya to the gold standard of ultrasound to identify ovulation. Um, but we’ve had some really exciting findings that have come out. Um, in our current study that we’re starting to wrap up. We were comparing Priya to the LH strips with ultrasound confirming and, um, when a couple of our subjects, they did not have an LH positive test, but Priya showed that they are related. They had an observation prediction. So were if those women had just been women trying to get pregnant, and they’d been using the LH strips to try to time, um, in our course to conceive, they would have assumed that they had an ovulated that month and Priya showed that they, they had novelization prediction. So we’re really excited about being the I’m a new hire tech tool that is more reliable, more precise than what’s currently out there.
Anna Grimes (25:55):
And I would imagine too, that a big part of this is building trust. There’s any woman who’s struggled with infertility is rapidly losing trust in the medical profession overall in healthcare overall. And so whatever you can bring in terms of a solution to help, you know, re knit that trusting relationship back together can only be beneficial in the long-term not just for the patient, but for that physician,
Debbie Fimple (26:21):
Absolutely supporting that relationship. As I mentioned, that they might’ve had with a patient for 10, 15, 20 years before they started to get pregnant, giving them another tool to support that instead of having to refer them off, um, the super valuable,
John Farkas (26:36):
Yeah, that kind of empowerment, especially in the context of where we are culturally, where what’s going on in the context of healthcare as it’s women, I think it’s just such a great timely issue and opportunity that you guys are in the midst of. So that is really an exciting, yeah, it’s an exciting movement. And, uh, it’s going to be fun to watch as you guys continue to evolve this brand because there’s just such a neat opportunity to be an advocate and to take that place for this market that I I’m, I’m sure that is a lot of fuel in your tank right now. Um, as you guys continue to move in this direction, congratulations on, on what you’ve been able to, to put forward. And, um, I’m excited to continue to watch the story on bail. Thanks
Jackie Vinyard (27:21):
For letting us share it. Thank you so much for having us
Mark Whitlock (27:24):
Where’s the best place for our listeners to go, to find out information about Priya and to see how you do your education.
Jackie Vinyard (27:30):
Priyafertility.com
Mark Whitlock (27:32):
Fantastic. And that will be linked out from the Studio CMO website. So come to studiocmo.com and click on the “integration” podcast episode, and you’ll be able to go to Priyafertility.com straight from there. We talked a little bit about tech bias today, and we have a fantastic article on our website about tech bias and the problems that it brings forth within healthcare. We’ll link to that article from our show notes as well. So when you come to studiocmo.com and click on that integration interview, uh, you can find out more about that.
John Farkas (28:05):
Resist the bias.
Mark Whitlock (28:06):
for sure. Uh, we also heard a lot today about webinars and we have several resources about webinars on our website and previous podcasts guests as well.
Mark Whitlock (28:17):
We’ll link out to that information if you’re looking for information about webinars. And finally you heard the information today about the importance of identifying those correct Google ad words and how that feeds into, um, all the paid strategy, especially in an expensive space. We have a phenomenal resource put together by our digital guru, Chris Turner, uh, that goes step-by-step through both organic and paid SEO. And we’ll be happy to link out to that from Studio CMO as well as we’ve talked all through this interview, that sense of empathy, the sense of understanding your buyer’s problems is such a key thing that you’re seeing Jackie and Debbie at Priya. And that resonates so much with us because we talk about these three core principles on every episode of Studio CMO and every day at golden spiral. And that is that we must, we must understand our buyers’ problems,
Anna Grimes (29:13):
Lead with an empathetic understanding.
John Farkas (29:13):
And make your buyer the hero.
Mark Whitlock (29:17):
We’ll see you next time on Studio CMO.
Mark Whitlock (29:33):
Studio CMO is produced by Golden Spiral: market positioning and demand generation for HealthTech. We are an agency dedicated to help you realize your market potential. Our music is from Bigger Story Music, a BMG music library. Whatever story you’re trying to tell, Bigger Story has the perfect music to make it better. Really. Check them out at biggerstorymusic.com.