Piloting a Digital Education Effort about Diabetic Care Technology
Challenge
For the 1.25 million people with Type 1 diabetes in America, daily management of care is no easy task. Finding solutions that fit their lives — and that show the ins and outs of how diabetes affects their bodies — is critical to their long-term health.
Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) are small devices that display a person’s current sugar level and how it’s changing — whether it’s staying the same, going high or going low. This data can reveal patterns over time and help doctors and patients adjust insulin dosage, food intake and exercise routines to improve each person’s health.
We partnered with DiabetesWise, a nonprofit initiative from Stanford University School of Medicine and supported by the The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, to develop a pilot digital marketing campaign to educate more people with Type 1 diabetes about CGMs, including their benefits and how to select and acquire a sensor.
Our Approach
Our pilot approach was set up to determine the most effective online platforms and messages to educate and engage people about CGMs. Our goal was to create a comprehensive digital engagement program to take people who had never heard of CGMs through a series of online interactions that increased their knowledge of and interest in CGMs for their care.
We set up a digital campaign with three parts: a digital advertising program targeting people with Type 1 diabetes in six key markets on Facebook, Google Search, and Twitter; a website that provided concise, relevant information about CGMs; and an email marketing program that re-engaged website sign-ups with further information about CGMs, such as how to talk to a health care provider about CGMs, what types of CGMs are available and more.
Results and Impact
The pilot program was a success. We reached more than two million people across all advertising platforms with the educational information about the value of CGMs, drove thousands of visits to the DiabetesWise website, and encouraged deeper engagement with all new email subscribers, who opened emails at better-than-industry-standard rates. We
learned that, for this target audience, Facebook and Google Search are
the most effective platforms and that messages containing real
testimonies from people with Type 1 diabetes outperformed other
messaging.