Facing intensifying competition, Quest Diagnostics, the world’s leading provider of health diagnostic services, hired Flynn to strengthen and scale its fledgling consumer-initiated testing business, at the time known as QuestDirect. While our client’s immediate priority was acquisition, their core business is physician-led testing. We had to balance the two and drive DTC sales without alienating Quest’s loyal HCP base.
Category
Health & Wellness
Services
Audience research Campaign development Creative testing CX strategy Media management Media strategy Reporting & optimization Video production
The results
14x
DTC revenue growth to $70 million
5x
revenue growth in base consumer testing business
Bridging the data chasm to ramp up DTC
To drive the level of DTC growth Quest was looking for, we first needed to close the gap between their front-end marketing activity and back-end sales data. So, we dug deep into Quest’s patient and HCP customer journeys, as well as the client systems that impacted them, in cross-functional workshops with key stakeholders. Working from these detailed maps, our CX team analyzed the problem areas and built out new channel infrastructure. Then, we layered on Quest’s 12 million patient records. This not only made bolder acquisition efforts possible, but also measurable and attributable—a massive leap forward.
Before scaling up spend, we also built custom performance dashboards across Quest’s many patient audiences and service lines, allowing our clients and our own internal team to easily see the impact of spend at the national and market level—in near real-time.
Maximizing marketing program efficiency
To increase media effectiveness and eliminate waste, we collected, segmented, and activated Quest’s first-party data, and also analyzed their 2,250 patient service centers to focus media spend in the 25 DMAs with the highest ROI potential. Finally, we launched hyperlocal branded and non-branded paid search campaigns across their full DTC product portfolio.
“Flynn has been instrumental in providing strategy and performance marketing for our business, and we wouldn’t have been as successful without them.”
—Sr. Director, Performance Marketing, Quest
Testing and optimizing—hundreds of times a year
Quest Diagnostics serves diverse patient populations across a broad range of specialties, with our DTC campaigns selling lab tests to each subset (e.g., food allergy or sexual health). To maximize ROAS, we frequently ran structured ad tests to pinpoint the strongest concepts, visuals, messages, ad units, and targeting—testing roughly 200 unique versions in an average year.
Responding to the COVID pandemic quickly and effectively
As a medical testing company, Quest was suddenly center stage during the worst healthcare crisis in more than a century. They needed new creative and media in market ASAP. Using our internal sprint process, we concepted, built, and launched a COVID campaign in just three weeks—helping Quest maximize a partnership with Walmart to offer drive-up testing at stores nationwide.
While the pandemic would dominate headlines for the next two years, we didn’t sleep on Quest’s legacy business. We simultaneously ramped up B2B-focused performance marketing programs that helped Quest reach niche HCP audiences across numerous specialties.
Optimizing and justifying our way to 14X DTC revenue growth
Throughout our relationship, we regularly (often daily) collaborated with Quest’s internal marketing and finance teams to help them earn executive buy-in, requiring us to prove the impact of media on both near-term and lifetime revenue.
We also built a custom forecast model to solve for “what if” scenarios—a tool that played a critical role in helping unlock funds for ongoing tactical expansion and testing. In proactively managing their budgets, we also helped our client avoid the worst impacts of a steep drop in demand post-pandemic. Overall, our work delivered a sustained 5X revenue growth in their base consumer testing business.
“Flynn has helped me gain peace of mind in my marketing decisions so many times,
I can almost not count them anymore. They have supported me and my team in countless ways, from creating very complex and long-term strategy, to building new business lines, to creating new audiences and delivering new products to those audiences, while meeting revenue goals the whole time. They are an agency that I truly believe is top of their class when it comes to the quality of their work, but also their partnership.”
—Global Customer Experience Lead, Quest
