Recently, digital behavioral health companies have significantly shifted their focus from D2C to B2B.
However, when marketing these services, the transition between audiences doesn’t require a steep learning curve.
Virtual behavioral health provider Talkspace (Nasdaq: TALK) is one of those providers that has doubled down on its B2B efforts, prioritizing payer and enterprise relationships.
“It’s not really B2B or D2C, it’s human to human–and that is whether you’re talking to someone paying out of pocket or you’re talking to someone who’s using their behavioral health benefits,” Katelyn Watson, chief marketing officer at Talkspace, said during Behavioral Health Business’ Virtual Sales and Marketing Summit.
New York-based Talkspace provides teletherapy, medication management, and asynchronous messaging. The company has recently ramped up its partnership strategy with youth-focused deals with the city of New York and state of California.
“When we’re talking to an HR leader, an organizational owner, or a CEO, a lot of the things that they care about happened to be, the same things that patients care about: quality of care, outcomes, stories, and so [it’s key to] bring it all of that together and reach them with one cohesive campaign, and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” she said.
Watson suggests organizations have a marketing toolkit to help make the messaging cohesive, noting that “it drives efficiency and simplicity.”
Still, at the end of the day the most important thing is reaching patients where they are–and they may or may not require an enterprise partner.
“It’s almost like marketers do themselves a disservice by creating such a divide between B2B and D2C,” Jenni Friedman, vice president of marketing at Ophelia, said during the webinar. “It’s really my perspective that you just have to get patients where they are. So in the addiction space, if they’re in an emergency department (ED) dealing with overdose, you want to partner with EDs and make partnerships with those kinds of businesses, and that’s classically B2B. But if [the client] is doom scrolling on Sunday night… We want to be there too. It’s just about figuring out how to make sure the patient understands where and how they can get treatment. And then payer coverage is also almost foundational to both.”
Ophelia provides digital medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD). It is licensed to provide care in 36 states and is contracted with Medicaid, Medicare and Commercial insurance.
While it’s essential to keep the end-user front of mind throughout all marketing campaigns, payers are interested in specific data.
“I think it’s about showing how much your members benefit from [the service]. … and then also showing the cost saving,” Friedman said. “We see that a lot of payers want to know that they’re saving money. And if for us, [that] very much makes sense. If we have a really good product, our patients stay with us, they’re less likely to enter the EDs, they’re less likely to have other medical issues…then that saves the payer money.”
Watson noted that Talkspace is pretty far along in their payer relationships with more than 130 million lives now covered. One of the aspects that has helped these relationships is having concrete data to demonstrate return on investment.
“One example is when people get matched with their therapist, the vast majority of them, somewhere over 90%, will stay with the same therapist,” Watson said. “And when you think about that, that’s huge in terms of cost savings because every time in the real world you switch therapists, it’s a pretty high cost to get in and find another one. So we show a lot of those key data points that lead back to cost savings first, but the cost savings result from the outcomes of the care and the prevention as well.”
