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While upfront investments in demand generation are necessary in any new product introduction, a static approach may not be enough to drive changes in behavior. Real-time data on consumer engagement with digital content provides an opportunity to learn quickly, adjust content and messaging, and streamline the user experience. In March 2021, DISC launched a behavior change ecosystem—a multi-channel campaign designed to encourage uptake of contraceptive self-injection (SI). Since then, the team has focused on using real-time data to optimize the communications campaign across various media channels and digital health tools.
DISC’s campaign inspires and engages women to commence—and to progress—through the various stages of the SI user journey. It intends to overcome key identified barriers, such as lack of knowledge about SI, lack of confidence to SI due to fear of pain or needles, and a desire to hear about real experiences from relatable sources, including peers. Incorporating research findings highlighting the theme of power and control, campaign messages focus on women’s stated goals for their lives, and the potential for SI to support these goals, aiming to affirm women’s decision-making and confidence around self-inject.
In Nigeria and Uganda, where knowledge of self-injection is low, our first core challenge is fostering awareness and supporting women’s movement from awareness to intent to use—the first key doorway to uptake. As DISC continues to evolve and grow the consumer ecosystem, we are using data dashboards to track the performance, spend, and productivity of our demand generation campaigns and to continually maximize impact. So far, DISC campaign metrics offer a promising story.
Key digital metrics: Impressions and reach: Driving mass awareness, multiple exposures over time for a large number of consumers to increase recall, understanding and interest.
Click Through Rate (CTR): A higher click through rate suggests consumers are interested in our message and want to learn more.
Awareness – reaching the right consumer at the right time with the right message.
DISC’s digital campaign leverages a mix of digital banner advertising on popular websites, Facebook, and Google Search. Through June 2021, the campaign has garnered over 25 million impressions and reached over three million consumers within our target consumer segments across both countries. Initially, the campaign focused on driving broad awareness, so impressions ramped up quickly. After two months focused on impressions, we shifted our media buying strategy to drive more clicks through to our digital companion and ‘Discover Your Power’ landing page—to more actively support women moving from awareness to interest.
DISC’s adaptive approach has proven to be effective in maintaining consumer interest: our campaign click through rates (CTR) are between 100-300% higher than industry standards across channels and countries. This gives us confidence that our content—with video content driving the highest level of engagement—is piquing the curiosity of consumers who are actively asking questions about the product in response to our posts. For our target consumers, digital searches for health information and links to services are still relatively new behaviors and the performance data collected by DISC is also helping us understand the potential of this channel and set more relevant benchmarks.
At this stage of the user journey, DISC focuses on a digital ‘companion’ (an automated chatbot), which provides a ‘one stop shop’ of product information, training support, and signposts to access points for SI through a clinic locator.
When we launched, we identified a large drop off between those who were clicking through to learn more and those who signed up on the digital companion. DISC focused on strategies to optimize user flow and make the journey as streamlined as possible namely by simplifying the registration process and making it easier to access the digital companion. The digital companion is now available on WhatsApp, Facebook, and web browser versions, and consumers can access it with fewer steps.
Facebook Messenger: The majority of people in our countries use Facebook Lite. This meant adapting the links to our companion to ensure that consumers don’t have to download a different version of Facebook. We also set up the conversation to autofill with our Avatar as a way to welcome consumers onto the chatbot.
WhatsApp: Regulations require that users initiate conversations on this platform—as a way to avoid companies sending them unwanted communication. However, our consumers are not always aware of this. In response, we optimized the chat bot to autofill the consumer’s chat box ready for them to send the message to initiate communications.
These optimizations paid off: throughout the month of June 2021, the number of daily visitors increased from a low of 29 to a high of 255 unique users per month across the two countries. The total number of unique users (those who complete registration) increased by 135% compared to the entire period since launch. To date DISC has over 6,000 unique users registered.
Amongst our active companion users, engagement with the key features is strong. 57% of active users are accessing the ‘Learn more about SI’ feature. Of these, 64% are meaningfully engaging—i.e., reading through almost all the content available in this feature. This demonstrates that a) the majority of people are being guided appropriately to learn more; and b) the information is compelling.
DISC looks closely at visits to the clinic locator, as this is a proxy indicator for intent to uptake SI. At the mid-year mark, 24% of active users were accessing the ‘clinic locator’ feature. Of these, 92% were meaningfully engaging. Unfortunately, there are many people accessing the clinic locator who are still unable to find a clinic close enough to them. We are working hard to add all partner clinics information to this clinic locator to give our consumers more options once they transition to the initiation phase.
DISC’s initial data suggests a growing interest in SI, and that our information campaign is translating into action. DISC will continue to use real-time data to drive continuous optimization of our behavior change ecosystem and create as frictionless a journey as possible to SI uptake. Ongoing priorities for the coming months include:
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