Growth marketers understand they need to move beyond Google search in theory, but execution falters when channels like TV and radio require upfront investment without immediate attribution clarity. In this episode, Neil Walker of Oar Health reveals how he shifted from search-dependent growth to a 70-80% media mix from TV and radio. Neil details the targeting, creative cadence, measurement, and SMS integration required to make upper-funnel channels work in stigmatized healthcare categories where intent simply doesn't exist at scale.
💡 Episode Summary
Growth marketers understand they need to move beyond Google search in theory, but execution falters when channels like TV and radio require upfront investment without immediate attribution clarity. In this episode, Neil Walker of Oar Health reveals how he shifted from search-dependent growth to a 70-80% media mix from TV and radio. Neil details the targeting, creative cadence, measurement, and SMS integration required to make upper-funnel channels work in stigmatized healthcare categories where intent simply doesn't exist at scale.
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⏱️ Episode Timestamps
*(01:08) - Why intent channels aren't enough in healthcare
*(04:39) - How TV and radio became the growth strategy
*(09:02) - Budget, timeline, and creative approach
*(14:39) - Day parting: Reaching the right audience at the right time
*(19:05) - SMS as a call to action: Nurturing TV-driven leads
*(27:39) - Leading indicators and business outcomes
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💬 Quote
“ If you're spending a lot of money in Google and a lot of money in Facebook, when you turn on tv, it's going to have a more muted effect. Within the channel, if you're not going to get that immediate oomph, you're probably looking for the cost per view, like how cheaply are you driving traffic and on what volumes. And then probably a second or a third order is what's happening with your brand search? We had brand search, it was 20% of our total Google spend. It's now 70%. We now have 8X the brand search. Dominance in brand search, having your brand become the defacto one, which is what we're both experiencing and trying to create. You'll see growth in brand search quite quickly, I would say within a couple of weeks if you are doing it right.” – Neil Walker
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🔗 Links
Connect with Neil Walker on LinkedIn
Connect with Ray Mina on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
[00:00:00] Neil Walker: The reason we deployed SMS was to try and find a compliant, alternate way to begin the conversation with somebody who might be interested but not quite ready to change their life in and of that moment. So the way it works is the ads no longer said, go to the website. They said, text keyword and we use different keywords.
[00:00:31] Neil Walker: Sometimes it was the network's name, sometimes other keywords to a short code. And then from there we responded with an automated SMS. And at first we had five messages over a period of time. And we since from that to, I think we send 13 now over a period of Wow, three, three-ish months. Because what again, we found like someone might be wanting to change but not quite ready, and just because they're not ready today doesn't mean they won't be in 2, 3, 2 weeks or even three months.
[00:01:07] Ray Mina: So I talk a lot about lifting your head out of intent channels like Google search and and page search. And it's really about generating demand, which is something I've always had to do as a B2B marketer. Like I, there's never been enough intent in a, in a Google search keyword to build a business off of, and I can't think of a better example in healthcare than what my guest has done.
[00:01:30] Ray Mina: Neil Walker is the Vice President of Growth at Oar Health, and he's gonna join me today to break down the playbook on this is a real number on how he went from heavy search to a 70% media mix from TV and radio. Neil, thanks for joining me on the, on the podcast.
[00:01:47] Neil Walker: Thank you, Ray. Yeah, great to be here.
[00:01:49] Ray Mina: I think maybe as a starting point, just to frame it, because what Oral health does may be a little bit different from some of our other customers out there.
[00:01:58] Ray Mina: I know in certain categories like alcohol use disorder, you, you've told me that just relying on things like. Just double down on Google Ads or just double down on search is not really a growth strategy. Can you just put that into context for all of our listeners, especially as it relates to your business?
[00:02:17] Neil Walker: Sure. Oar Health provides access to medication that treats alcohol use disorder. It is a widely unknown offering. The treatment itself, the medication's been around since the sixties. FDA approved for alcohol use disorder since the nineties. But if you were to ask a thousand people on the street or even a thousand primary care practitioners, most won't have heard of the treatment.
[00:02:40] Neil Walker: So it's very, it's very under prescribed. It's very un unheard of, and it's unlikely to generate a whole ton of paid search or any kind of search in inbound interest. You might get some higher intent or higher funnel searches, such as, how do I solve this problem? But people aren't, they're not necessarily looking for our solution.
[00:03:02] Neil Walker: So when Oar Health launched, Google was the first channel to stand up. It was highly efficient. It did all the things that Google does in the beginning, but then as your, as you start to get competitors costs rise, you start to reach a ceiling. And when I joined, growth had been stagnant for at least six months and there was a real head scratch, like, how do we get out of this?
[00:03:27] Neil Walker: For us, we had an extra constraint. Alcohol use disorder is especially stigmatized. I worked at Ro, I saw the stigma with weight loss and with erectile dysfunction. Alcohol use disorder has its own particular set of challenges. We were actually barred initially and, and until and in fact. Until recently from using Facebook, so we weren't even able to do the normal second channel step of going from Google to Meta.
[00:03:54] Neil Walker: So we had to kinda leapfrog what you would normally do in this, in that situation. And we went straight into upper funnel channels.
[00:04:03] Ray Mina: Yeah, we talk about how things are always harder in healthcare, but the part that really resonated with me, because B2B SaaS, a lot of the startups that I've been a part of.
[00:04:13] Ray Mina: We're innovative startups like that, they're just, there was a problem, but no solution had existed. And so this is a fresh paint story, like when, when a lot of these privacy concerns happen, there wasn't a huge bucket of intent that we could go after from a keyword strategy. We had to go out and, and generate demand before we, I know we're gonna get into talking a little bit about the deep dive into the, the strategy and the tactics, but before we do that.
[00:04:39] Ray Mina: Can you give us a quick version? 'cause you mentioned Ro. I think you've, you've faced the same challenge twice now at Ro and Oar Health. How did you even end up strategizing around channels like TV and radio? Like how, how did you even get there?
[00:04:54] Neil Walker: The Ro, the, the lead product was ED in the, in the early days, and that had an explosion.
[00:05:02] Neil Walker: There was, I think they'd been live six months. They put some dollars into postseason baseball, MLB. If you buy clever, if you buy linear tv, smartly, cleverly, you can get some incredible deals. Particularly then, although it's still the case, and that worked so well that it led Ro. Then Roman to end up doing a four year deal with MLB to be a shield or badge sponsor.
[00:05:30] Neil Walker: Same thing for GLP-1s. We'd actually been trying to launch. GLP-1s when it first, when it first came out, won the clock back. So of two-ish, three years, we were launching into YouTube and it, it wasn't making a dent. We were trying to drive the demand. Spent a couple hundred thousand dollars over a couple of weeks and weren't getting the results.
[00:05:49] Neil Walker: So we were like, listen, TV worked for Roman. Could it work for GLP-1s? And yeah, immediately it, I, we immediately saw the impact. So we, we used to cha cha chart cumulative hourly conversions in Mixpanel. It's a great cha chart that you can build and they're all over the TVs of the, of the, of the shop. And you could just see when TV turned on, it was beating the day before, beating the week before.
[00:06:13] Neil Walker: And every day it, it just built. So when you get it right, when you turn that channel on, you can, you can see the oomph straight away.
[00:06:23] Ray Mina: When, so you, you had the advantage of, of seeing that clear success when you were at Ro. When you, when you came over to, or health and you pitched this investment in TV and radio, what were the biggest objections initially that you, you, if, if you received, maybe, maybe it was received with open arms, but for a lot of marketers they're like, whoa.
[00:06:43] Ray Mina: Like, how do we measure this stuff? How do we know it's gonna work? Yeah. What, what did you confront?
[00:06:48] Neil Walker: So I think almost the constraint was a blessing 'cause there really wasn't a great deal of choice because we didn't have the natural secondary step. Plus my founder at all brought me in in part because of the background I had at at Ro.
[00:07:02] Neil Walker: So I didn't have a great deal of pushback. I won't say there was no nervousness. Because we were gonna be investing a relatively large chunk of the budget on a weekly basis from the get go. So sure there was some nervousness. We were lucky though. It's a funny story. We actually, TV went live a week early.
[00:07:20] Neil Walker: One of the networks, I won't name them or shame them, but they accidentally set our spots live. So it was the middle of July and I was like, why are we having the best day we've ever had? And I. When things go poorly as a growth marketer, you are asked for a reason. You are asked for the same reason when they go well, and you always want to have a good answer, and I, I didn't have a good answer.
[00:07:41] Neil Walker: It took me a full day to figure it out and I was like. Someone said, I think I saw you on tv. And I was like, that can't be. We don't, we don't launch till next week. The oomph was clear. We got, we got the results, and thankfully we didn't even have to pay for that week. So that, that definitely helped get us going.
[00:07:57] Neil Walker: But even, even if we had of it, the results were great. We, we saw a volume lift of about 150% month on month. CAC went down 20, 30%. The channel it, it did what it needed to do out of the gate. That was lucky. I think the way we set it up probably made things a little easier for ourselves, but yeah, it was a, it was a win from the start.
[00:08:21] Ray Mina: I'm just reflecting on that and thinking about the 500 times that the experiment went the wrong way and I gotta figure out why it's not working, and the two or three times it went the surprise way. So I wish it was, I wish it was the other way around sometimes, but that's, that's all, that's where the learnings come from.
[00:08:40] Ray Mina: For people who are listening to this podcast 'cause we're gonna, we're gonna dive into this, but I think a lot of people get a little bit stuck on how do I even get started TV, radio. This is gonna be a lot of dollars. And what if, if I don't get the results, I'm wrecking unit economics along the way. What if they wanna try that? If they wanna try this out just for, just so we don't scare them off before we dive deeper.
[00:09:01] Ray Mina: What does a smart, smart launch look like from, say like a budget and timeline standpoint? Like how much money can someone start with and how long does it take for them to see results?
[00:09:14] Neil Walker: So I can tell you what we did and, and almost certainly what I would do for most people in the same situation, our audience for people with alcohol use disorder, the median and the mean age for our member base is 43.
[00:09:28] Neil Walker: They're usually higher income than average, higher educational than average. A lot of stress in their life. So we, we knew we would find them AM and PM drive for radio and then news, businesses news, sports news on tv. So we knew we would find that audience there. And Roman for ED and then GLP-1s, similarish audiences.
[00:09:51] Neil Walker: So we knew they were still on linear tv, not everywhere, but in limited places, linear tv. Also, if you buy it correctly, you can get it. We, we get CPMs around a dollar. We also buy 15 second ad units, so that traditional ad unit. And the reason for all this is that means you, for a smaller budget, you can have more ends.
[00:10:16] Neil Walker: You can try more networks, more day parts, maybe as we did where we ran two different creatives off the bat. So even at a $30,000 a week budget, which is how we started, you're still able to get enough ends that in one or two weeks you, you, you can look at the data and say, oh, I can see not just whether it's working overall, but like what?
[00:10:39] Neil Walker: Bits of it are working better or worse. So as an example, we ran two ads straight off the bat. One focused first on the problem and then on the solution, and the other one went right into our solution. And it was very clear within a week or two that the, the problem led. That was literally what we call the ad was doing better.
[00:10:58] Neil Walker: And so by then optimizing it, you get an extra 20% gain in efficiency because you're using the right message. So we got started. $30,000 a week. I think if you do it right, as I said, 15 second units, buying it in a certain way, that's enough to get you enough signal. And then for the creative, I spent, I think it was around $25,000 on a freelance animator, someone I'd work with at row.
[00:11:27] Neil Walker: We, we ran, we ran a lot of ads at Ro and I did quite a lot of analysis and it, the good animated ads were just as effective as the highly polished live action ones. As long as you get the message right, especially for that first foray into tv. As you, as you develop and you put your brand into the market, you might wanna mix it up, but just a simple message can work off the bat.
[00:11:51] Ray Mina: Neil, people get intimidated. I, I did a small panel discussion at our House Call event, and people are intimidated when they move out of Google. Pretty easy. It's you once you know your keywords, you, there's only so many variations of the text ad you can, you can create and you really don't need to pay anyone to do that.
[00:12:10] Ray Mina: You could, you could do it yourself in ChatGPT nowadays, but they get intimidated when they start to think about TV, radio display, like, how am I gonna build all the creative assets? I love how you said you didn't need much to start, like you kept created two, two ads. But you did mention that as you start to invest more, I, I got the sense that you'll wanna test different types of creatives.
[00:12:32] Ray Mina: How well, how would you communicate to people who are scared that I'm not gonna be able to keep up with the creative needs? Like how, how have you solved for that?
[00:12:40] Neil Walker: One of the best things about TV is that it doesn't work like Facebook and TikTok. It does not need to be fed creative constantly. In fact, most, most people worry about creative wear-out in tv.
[00:12:54] Neil Walker: Really, you want to be thinking about wear-in ads tend to get more effective over time before they get less effective. Now, obviously there's, there's the variations to that. Humor can wear out sooner. Poorly made ads wear out sooner, but at Roman we ran an ad called, we called it Roman Ready. It was the first time we'd actually pictured two people enjoying the act of the relationship before it had been very matter of fact, we ran that I think for 18 months at a pretty heavy rotation.
[00:13:27] Neil Walker: Easily over a billion impressions. And it, as you, as I said before, it, it's effectiveness built before it waned. So if you, if you make a good ad, you've got at least six months before you need, before you need to start worrying about another
[00:13:45] Ray Mina: That's so different than like paid social. I remember doing a really aggressive spend, like quarter million dollars a month in, in paid social.
[00:13:54] Ray Mina: And the hardest part besides getting approval for the budget was refreshing the ads because you blow, you blow through the, the, the, the reach and the, the, the number of views per just blows through so quickly. So you're rotating like weekly, almost six months. That's incredible.
[00:14:11] Neil Walker: Oh yeah, and well, it, it could be longer.
[00:14:13] Neil Walker: Obviously there's variables. If you're spending very heavy, you don't have any other creative and rotation, then that could be shorter. But you are, it's not a week, you're not, you're not having to refresh weekly that, that's a certain.
[00:14:27] Ray Mina: That's powerful. You, you used the word a few minutes ago, and I wanna dive a little bit deeper, but if you, if you don't mind, just because I know some people don't have experience on tv, you use the word day parting.
[00:14:39] Ray Mina: Can you just explain what that means as it relates to your strategy?
[00:14:42] Neil Walker: Sure. When you're buying linear tv, so traditional over the air, you, you are buying into a window of time, so you can buy a specific program, but it's more cost effective to buy into just a a day part. So primetime is one that everybody's aware of.
[00:15:01] Neil Walker: Different networks have their own way of cutting up the 24 hour clock, but generally there's usually a day, part for the morning, one for the daytime. Maybe one for the early evening, one for the primetime. Then depending on the network you might have late night and then overnight. So usually four or five different ways to chop up the clock.
[00:15:21] Neil Walker: For us, that was important at Oar Health. Dealing with people who have alcohol use disorder, their motivation is not constant throughout the day. Their, their motivation to change. It's not constant throughout the day and it's not constant throughout the week. Usually there's a moment earlier in the day or earlier in the week when they're more willing to take a leap.
[00:15:44] Neil Walker: If you look at our website, you can see conversion rates are highest in the mornings. They're highest on Mondays or maybe the day after a big drinking holiday. So the day after Halloween is usually a big day for us. So you, you can draw your own conclusions as to why that is. So initially we were big into buying in the morning.
[00:16:02] Neil Walker: So unlike Facebook or other digital channels, you can concentrate your time into the part of the day. Now, for us, that was important. That might not be important for everybody, but it was super important for us. It, funnily enough, it seems so obvious now, but going in, I didn't, I didn't know that mornings were gonna be the right time.
[00:16:22] Neil Walker: 'cause it's certainly, that was certainly not the case for Roman for ED or Ro for GLP-1s. The timing was immaterial. Or I didn't see any trends. But for this, there was clear mornings were great. You, you do pay a different price, your CPMs will vary. Prime time is often the most expensive. Usually when the eyeballs are most concentrated, the price per eyeball goes up.
[00:16:46] Ray Mina: How did you, like how did, 'cause you, you mentioned that at at ro, this is where you have a little bit of diversion in the learnings because this wasn't as important. How were you able to pick up on that signal?
[00:16:58] Neil Walker: So we use an agency partner called Sitari. Not only do they buy the media, they measure its performance.
[00:17:06] Neil Walker: I use them at row. I'm a bit of an evangelist for Sitari. If anyone's thinking about linear tv, very good place to start your adventure. The way they do it is they know when a spot has aired and then they. Look at the traffic to your website. Website in the five minute window post that. So you get to see uplifts in traffic versus what the, the expected baseline would be.
[00:17:30] Neil Walker: And that means per every single ad you get a website lift score. And that means you are able to compare what network, what into the individual debt show itself, the day part, obviously, and then the creative. So you get a, uh. A much more granular performance readout than you might expect.
[00:17:55] Ray Mina: Did you start like, on a bit of a, of a, of a broader time of day and then over time based on that data, you're just starting to narrow it down so that you're getting more and more impact out of your advertising dollars?
[00:18:07] Neil Walker: Yeah. We, when we started, we did a bit of a, I wouldn't say a scatter gun approach, but we took a, we were deliberately running an experiment again with as many ends as we could afford. So we ran overnight, we ran some daytime, we ran some morning. I, I don't think we did any prime time 'cause it is a bit more expensive.
[00:18:24] Neil Walker: Your dollars get gobbled up faster, and so to get going, we avoided that, that that came in later. And then when you download the data from Sitari, you can build yourself an hour by hour graph and you can, you can see response rates rising and falling with the time of day or if you want the day of the week.
[00:18:45] Ray Mina: The other part that you mentioned, which I think is like any, this is where marketing, it sometimes misses, like you could have everything right. But if you don't have the right call to action or the right logical next ask, then your ad dollars are, you might get some byproduct of the motion, but you're not being intentional.
[00:19:04] Ray Mina: And I think one of the things that you tied in that we haven't talked about yet is you tied in SMS as a call to action within your TV strategy. Can, can you talk a little bit about what that means?
[00:19:17] Neil Walker: Absolutely. We, we were running our day parts and there's only so many people watching in the morning and there's only so many people watching overnight.
[00:19:25] Neil Walker: So we were trying to scale, so we were trying to deploy more money and we'd relatively saturated those efficient day parts for us. So the natural place to go was into new areas of the 24 hour clock. Prime time is where most people watch tv, and so there we started to spend there. And we found the level of interest was very strong.
[00:19:48] Neil Walker: We were getting strong people, strong PPVs, strong cost per visits, strong dollar deployed to website visits, but they weren't converting. And so I was scratching my head and, and of course thought about the patient. Thought about the member, thought about the, the audience. And the sort of hypothesis we had was they were interested in the evening, but they weren't.
[00:20:10] Neil Walker: They weren't intent enough that they did not have a desire to change in, in that moment. And maybe it's because we were reaching them at a moment when they had a glass of wine in their hand or a beer, or at the very least, they weren't suffering the following morning from having done something that they wish they had done less of.
[00:20:31] Neil Walker: So that was a problem for us. We, it was a good place to reach them, but it, we weren't able to capitalize on it. Now because we're healthcare and all those constraints, we, we've made a decision not to deploy retargeting. So we couldn't even do the one-two punch of driving to the site in the evening and then use paid media to, to retarget.
[00:20:55] Neil Walker: The reason we deployed SMS was to try and find a compliant, alternate way to begin a conversation with somebody who might be interested but not quite ready to change their life in and of that moment. So the way it works is the ads no longer said, go to the website. They said, text keyword. And we used different keywords.
[00:21:18] Neil Walker: Sometimes it was the network's name, sometimes other keywords to a short code. And then from there we responded with an automated SMS. And at first we had five messages. Over a period of time, and we've since lengthened that to, I think we send 13 now over a period of three, three-ish months. Because again, we found like someone might be wanting to change but not quite ready, and just because they're not ready today doesn't mean they won't be in 2, 3, 2 weeks or even three months.
[00:21:54] Ray Mina: I was curious when you mentioned about the kind of, you got up to like a nurture sequence of like 13 text messages over time, how many of, like what percentage of of your consumers needed that kind of nurturing versus are ready to like convert right away? I'm just curious what you've learned in the data.
[00:22:14] Neil Walker: We, I would say 70% of people who come in convert within a month. But then we definitely see another 30% convert. The half-life is about four months. After four months, you're not getting meaningful conversions. They still trickle in, but you know, you, the, the, the curve kind of like plateaus after four months.
[00:22:36] Ray Mina: And just just so we understand, 'cause everyone a conversion is different for every one of everybody in healthcare, but what is a successful conversion? What, what is the thing that you're trying to help consumers get to?
[00:22:48] Neil Walker: So somebody comes to the website and they fill out an initial set of questions to sort of gauge whether or not they're a good fit for the medication.
[00:22:56] Neil Walker: If those questions are answered in a particular way, they suggest they are a good fit, they will then pay for a consultation with a doctor, an asynchronous consultation. So that's effectively a paid, a paid treatment request and that's the marketing KPI.
[00:23:13] Ray Mina: Can you walk us through, I'm just curious, like end-to-end TV ad to the text, to what the kind of nurture sequence is.
[00:23:21] Ray Mina: Like what, what is, what is that? What does that campaign look like if for me, as a consumer.
[00:23:26] Neil Walker: So someone will see a TV ad, let's say for the sake of argument, it's Fox News, and the ad will invite them to text 710710. So they'll, they'll take out their phone and they'll, they'll type Fox News and they'll, it'll be addressed to the short code 710710.
[00:23:43] Neil Walker: And then immediately they'll get a reply from us, which introduces who we are, and then invites them to qualify for treatment on the website. A day later, they'll get a follow up. Then a day later they get another follow up. And then I think we start to get into, I think I called it the Fibonacci Plus. So it's, it goes out on a fib.
[00:24:03] Neil Walker: I've been experimenting with different cadences, like, 'cause you don't wanna annoy people, but you, you know, they are struggling with something important. And so a little bit of a reminder is worthwhile. So the, the cadence then becomes less frequent with each and every SMS that they get. The, the, the text itself directs them to the website to go through the digital signup flow.
[00:24:29] Neil Walker: So we haven't yet deployed any AI text chat agents. That is something we have considered. Although in healthcare, I think we're, we're experiencing some feedback that people don't want to talk to an AI bot. So that's, that's not something I'm rushing to deploy.
[00:24:51] Ray Mina: Yeah, I could see that given, given the sensitive nature of the thing that you're trying to help people with, I could see that being tricky.
[00:24:59] Ray Mina: Right. Like the, and not knowing it's not human being on the other side. Yeah. That's interesting. I'll be curious to stay in touch with you as you, if you ever experiment there and what you learn.
[00:25:10] Neil Walker: When you become a member, we offer live human coaching to help you adjust to the medication and sort of begin this new journey.
[00:25:19] Neil Walker: We use a product called Intercom that has tried to add more AI features to it. So sometimes the AI features will try, will get in the way of our, you know, real person and people, I don't like you, I think you're a robot. They'll type. So we actually just today finally managed to switch off all the AI features, these AI features that Intercom are so desperately trying to build.
[00:25:40] Neil Walker: So stay relevant. Whereas we are like, no thank you. People don't want that. So, you know, I'm, I'm curious, I'd like to do some research into AI and healthcare, but on my hypothesis based on this data is no one's crying out for it.
[00:25:55] Ray Mina: When you, obviously, you know, twice this has worked for you at Oar Health, like you got to a place that it's working, how do you think about, how do you think about scale now?
[00:26:05] Ray Mina: Like once it's working, how do you scale it? Is it finding more times of day? Like is it just increasing spend? I'm just, I'm just curious like how you're thinking about things going forward.
[00:26:17] Neil Walker: So within linear, uh, there's a shockingly large myriad of ways that you can buy media. You can buy it from the network.
[00:26:27] Neil Walker: You can buy it through the cable distribution companies. You can buy it nationally, you can buy it locally, you can buy it semi nationally. So I'm experimenting with all those particular buying mechanisms just to try and find pockets of value. The other big area is to make streaming work.
[00:26:46] Neil Walker: We've dabbled with streaming with CTV. Unfortunately with CTV, the way that we're able to buy it, you have to run a 30-second ad. So, and, and we, I, we experimented with this at Ro as well, and what I found was, per impression, it was usually about six times more effective than linear. But the CPM was usually more like, it's called it 10 times more.
[00:27:09] Neil Walker: So it was, it was less efficient per dollar deployed. I think most of that was because of the time length. If you could buy CTV. Exactly the same way for a 15-second. I think that would be much easier to scale. So one of the things I'm working on is trying to make 30-second ads that are twice as effective as the 15-second in order to pay, in order to pay itself back.
[00:27:32] Ray Mina: When you started rolling out this strategy earlier in the, in the conversation, you kind of touched on some leading indicators, but what specifically were the leading indicators you were watching for to make sure that it was working as expected?
[00:27:45] Neil Walker: With Oar, we really didn't have that many other channels live and so there was an immediate boost conversion so that that was a, as I said, we didn't even realize it was live and we, we saw the signal.
[00:27:58] Neil Walker: If you had a bigger channel mix, you're probably gonna get less of an oomph. Especially if you're spending a lot of money in Google and a lot of money in Facebook. When you turn on tv, it's gonna have a more muted effect. When I speak to other people about their experiences, that's, that's typically what's happened.
[00:28:16] Neil Walker: So within the channel, if you are not gonna get that immediate oomph, you're probably looking for the cost per view. Like how, how cheaply are you driving traffic and in what volumes. And then probably a sort of a second or a third order is. What's happening with your brand search? We've, we had brand search.
[00:28:38] Neil Walker: I was sort of like 20% of our total Google spend. It's now 70% and you know, we were comparable to our nearest competitor. We now have 8X the brand search and one of our smaller competitors. Google recently said, oh, you have like 28 times more. So dominance in brand search, having your brand become de, you know, the defacto one, which is what we're both experiencing and trying to, trying to create.
[00:29:07] Neil Walker: That's a pretty you. You'll see growth in brand search quite quickly, I would say within a couple of weeks if you are doing it right.
[00:29:14] Ray Mina: I love that you called that out because that's one of my favorite. Measures of a true demand gen strategy working is like, are you getting a lift? Are people querying Oar Health or Freshpaint?
[00:29:25] Ray Mina: And if they are, and it's increasing over time, you know that, that, you know, this is not in a vacuum. You know, there are things that are correlative to that result.
[00:29:35] Neil Walker: The other, the other, the other thing is you start, well, I've seen this a couple times now. You start to see weird mixed signals. So Roman. Many people thought Roman was an alternative ED medication to Viagra or Cialis.
[00:29:49] Neil Walker: They thought Roman was, 'cause they're not, no one's paying as much attention to things as you are. Right? You know, we're busy with our own lives. You see an ad, you hear ED, you, you, you are not diving deep for all health Google. Sometimes it's confused and thinks that our brand name is. Essentially it, if you were doing broad search, it would start muddying for the medication name and our brand name are getting lumped together because it's becoming synonymous.
[00:30:15] Neil Walker: So we're not quite at the point where we're Uber, where we have like, you know, a prototypical brand like that. But you know, we're inching towards being synonymous with the category, which again is a big win for demand gen.
[00:30:30] Ray Mina: I mean, this is the archetype story of like, you know, stop renting on intent channels and build, build a brand and, and build brand recognition that lasts.
[00:30:39] Ray Mina: Like, you know, beyond that, so, love that. What have been the ultimate business outcomes, like when you report back to executives on bottom line outcomes? Like how, how impactful has this been?
[00:30:52] Neil Walker: So first of all, growth, being able to get out of the doldrums that we were in, you know, sort of monthly volume had plateaued.
[00:31:02] Neil Walker: It immediately started to, to rise. Doing so in a way where you, you're not overpaying on CAC is also important. So those are the kind of bottom line metrics. We, we haven't measured this, but at row we measured LTV. By in inbound channel with, so we were using the Heidi. How for those you don't know the, how did you hear about us post-purchase survey and there was a clear differentiation or lift top upper funnel channels had much higher attention and therefore much higher LTV.
[00:31:40] Ray Mina: If you're, if we were like in a room together and we were talking to like another CMO or, or VP of growth in healthcare, and they're like, yeah, I love this story. I wanna, I wanna crack the upper funnel in, in, in a way that you have, like what, what would you, what would be your guidance on the step-by-step, like getting started?
[00:32:00] Ray Mina: Like, how much money do they need to, it's the minimum amount of money they need to allocate. Like where, where should they start? What questions should they ask before they even go down this path that you've already gone down?
[00:32:14] Neil Walker: I think a lot of it would depend on where their audience is. Like if they're trying to target very young folks, then you need to start thinking about, you know, the right type of environment to show up in.
[00:32:27] Neil Walker: We target holder folks, so you know, that's a different challenge. The question would be. What's the patient or consumer journey? Like I said, we, we changed the hours. What's yours? If you drive, if you drive interest, what's the, what's the follow up? Are you going to rely on brand search? Are you gonna do retargeting for people who are listening?
[00:32:49] Neil Walker: Some of them will be able to do that, some of them won't. If you're not able to commit $25,000 a week, it might not be a channel you're quite ready for. If you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week though, then maybe you should deploy more because you want to give it enough, enough dollars for it to, for it to show up in, uh, in a, for there to be a signal.
[00:33:13] Neil Walker: And yeah, and I think thinking about what the message is, you know, can you distill it into something simple? And can you, can you make sure that people leave wanting your brand and not that service generically?
[00:33:27] Ray Mina: Yeah, that's so right. Were, when you, when you started this at, or were you, were you spending in paid search and you took budget from that or did you get approval for net new budget from leadership?
[00:33:41] Ray Mina: I'm just curious like how you structured testing this out initially.
[00:33:46] Neil Walker: So, we were only five people at Oar Health, five full-time employees, so. It's the, there isn't a great deal of going to upper man, like there's just five. So, but to answer your question, it was net, it was net new money with, with the goal that it needed to drive incremental growth within the month that it was deployed and not blow up CAC.
[00:34:11] Neil Walker: So. You know, if, if, if you track things on a monthly basis, you might wanna think about deploying the test earlier in the month because if you, if you added in the last week of the month, it may not have it. You may put, because all the dollars will live in that month, but maybe not all the benefit.
[00:34:27] Ray Mina: I love that you, you gave a time box like this has to work within, you know, the month that we're testing to show results.
[00:34:34] Ray Mina: And then you have a unit economic constraint, which is you, you know, this, this has to, at least CAC has to stay steady. We can't like wreck the unit economics for the business. Do you generally take like a blended cac or do you try to break it down by, you know, campaign or channel?
[00:34:50] Neil Walker: Yeah, so that's maybe the, one of the most important things with TV is you have to see its impact on blended cac.
[00:34:57] Neil Walker: So we do track conversions that eventually come through TV generated. SMS the same thing for radio. Uh, you know, we haven't talked a great deal about radio. It's a, it's a similar beast and if you look at it solely on that, you would never, you would never spend, you could deploy a ha a Heidi How. I'm sure there are people listening who have a Heidi How, I have used them.
[00:35:18] Neil Walker: I find them. I find them not to be all that helpful or accurate. So I, we have not deployed one. So yes, I take a blended view and, and so yes, in the first month you deploy this upper funnel channel, you're probably looking at the blended CAC. Maybe you give yourself a two month window to say, Hey, maybe not all the, depending on like the.
[00:35:39] Neil Walker: Consumption and decision cycle of your product. You know, thinking about house calls, there was someone, the gentleman from the Carolinas, I think he was, he was, they were offering surgery. I don't know what the time decision horizon is on surgery. It could well be months. I don't know. Maybe it's like, Hey, I need this today.
[00:35:59] Ray Mina: Yep.
[00:35:59] Neil Walker: But that's, that's gonna be an important factor as to like whether or not it shows up in CAC. In the month, you deploy the dollars maybe for them, they have a, you know, they're all about a CPL basis. And so as long as the CPL's good in the month, you know that conversions will come later.
[00:36:16] Ray Mina: I think what you just said is one of the biggest unlocks.
[00:36:19] Ray Mina: You said if you, if you don't, if you're not willing to look at it from a blended cat perspective, you're never going to invest in some of these channels, and that's because like when you're addicted to conversion focused channels like a, like an intent channel, like Microsoft Ads or Google Ads. You can oftentimes literally track the, click the GCL to the actual conversion and like measure it one-to-one.
[00:36:45] Ray Mina: But when you do like linear TV and radio, even event marketing, it doesn't always work this way. It's like lifting, it's lifting the output through the branded search as an example or through some other piece. That's the dilemma that people get stuck in. Right.
[00:37:00] Neil Walker: So, I mean if you are looking for signals of that, the, the impressions for your brand search, not only the clips, but have the impressions risen.
[00:37:09] Neil Walker: You're looking at in ga am I seeing more direct traffic? Am I seeing more organic traffic? If you have a blog, are more people going into the blog. Those are the kinds of things.
[00:37:21] Ray Mina: One last question for you Neil, because you did, you did mention when we were giving this advice to another marketing leader. It really came down to understanding your audience, like who is it that you're marketing to?
[00:37:34] Ray Mina: Because in some, for some organizations like this may not be the best strategy. There may be, there may be other channels that are gonna reach that audience more effectively. Did, did, was that something that you used an agency? Is that something that you did a lot of work internally? Just curious the work that you did to really deeply understand your audience.
[00:37:55] Neil Walker: Oh, well we have member data.
[00:37:58] Ray Mina: Yep.
[00:37:58] Neil Walker: So that gives us age, gender, and then sort of where they are in their sort of alcohol use journey. We then paired that with some syndicated data from GWI. They did not have data on people with alcohol use disorder. So we use people who the, the highest drinking, you know, they ask people how much they drink, and so we selected the highest drinking.
[00:38:23] Neil Walker: So it was a, it was a proxy, but it married pretty well with the data that we already had. And then we continue to refine that with surveys, you know. Some are ongoing, some are ad hoc. We tend to find that they're incredibly consistent, which gives us all the more sort of feeling that, you know, when you know the data sets are, you know, honing in on the right, the right folk.
[00:38:48] Ray Mina: Neil, thank you for joining me on Marketing Rounds. It's been a, it's been a great conversation. I loved, I love hearing how you've dug in and, and solved some of these challenges.
[00:38:56] Neil Walker: Thanks, Ray. Thanks for having me.
[00:38:58] Producer: Today's episode is brought to you by Freshpaint. If you're a healthcare marketer, under pressure to do more with less fresh paint helps you stretch fixed budgets, prove what's working, and protect the strategies that drive growth. Freshpaint brings performance and privacy together in one platform, so you can see real outcomes across channels and double down where ROI is highest. With Freshpaint, privacy becomes your performance advantage. Turn better data into smarter decisions, find more high value patients, and keep your growth plans on track. Learn more at freshpaint.io.