Where Healthcare Businesses are Finding Marketing ROI

A conversation with Alex George, Head of Marketing at Hint Health

In this edition of M*A*S*H* (Marketing Advice for Startups in Healthcare), we sat down with Alex George, the Head of Marketing at Hint Health, the operating system for direct primary care. Before joining the Hint Health team, Alex founded and led Mountains Wave Marketing, a purpose-driven marketing agency with a service-centric business model. Originally started as a passion project, Alex scaled the business into his full-time job during the pandemic, where he was eventually introduced to the Hint Health team. What marketing and communications KPIs do you think have the biggest impact?When it comes to marketing KPIs, there are six that are the most important to me. 1. The first is website traffic, which is extremely useful in understanding whether our message and content are resonating. We're regularly keeping an eye on it and see how it changes based on what we're focused on at the moment. 2. Second is the number of marketing-qualified leads that are coming in the door. As long as our funnel stays full I know that our various campaigns are working. 3. From there I like to dive into landing page conversions, which are a key indicator to understand the organic and paid campaigns are having success. 4. For any paid campaigns there is a bit more focus on showcasing ROI, so we keep a close eye on that at all times. 5. Historically email open rates were a great indicator or how our emails were landing, but with recent changes to some email browsers, it’s harder to determine open rate accuracy. Instead, I like to keep set benchmarks around clickthrough rates to ensure our content is landing.6. Lastly, social media engagement is vital to understand who engages with our content across our various distribution channels, so we like to keep metrics around ongoing social.What do founders care most about in marketing their startups? How do you show the ROI of marketing and communications?At my agency, we specialized in tech-forward startups across healthcare, renewable energy, sustainability, and finance, and at the highest level, most of the founders were sales-driven. They wanted to see lead conversions, they wanted to see Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and they wanted to see ROI on spend.Many CEOs are focused on optimizing their spending and want to know the point of diminishing returns. Once we figure it out and crack the nut on the conversion rates and what content is converting, we're looking at how high we can crank that up with spending to maximize the ROI. Often that led to a bit more flexibility in testing our new concepts and campaigns. What strategies are working now that didn't work a year ago? Conversely, what strategy worked great a year ago but is getting diminished returns?A year ago, paid social was working really well, and throughout the back half of the pandemic, I saw a lot of success with it across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Now, however, I've seen that ROI diminish quite a bit. Most of the clients we serve through my agency are shifting the majority of their spend to Google search and YouTube, where we are seeing a lot more value there.On the non-paid side of things, we're finding the most effective conversions in high-quality content. We are lucky to work with passionate startups and founders who want to share their stories. We'll often work with them to hone in on a topic they are passionate about, record them speaking on it, transcribe it, and then use the content across many different facets. That kind of “from-the-heart” content is incredibly powerful.One of the hot trends we're seeing bringing in a lot of conversions right now is live streams. Our favorite platform to manage these live streams is StreamYard, which allows you to host a live webinar across all of your social channels and YouTube, and allows people to engage in real-time. Afterward, it will enable the content to stay front and center for up to 24 hours, maximizing viewership. Within these livestreams, we aren't necessarily bringing on subject matter experts but rather customers or clients that are having a lot of success using the product. We give them the space to speak through what those successes look like and let them educate folks trying to replicate it. These livestreams are one of the more powerful tools right now and I’d highly recommend considering as part of a marketing program. You target your messages to medical clinics. Walk me through that persona. Who are they? What do they care about? What influences them? What do they want to hear and where do they want to hear it?At Hint, we look at two different personas for targeting. - First, we're focused on the small business clinics that are curious or already moving over to the DPC model from a general fee-for-service practice or as they begin their medical careers. - Second, we're thinking about the DPC clinics that have been in business for a while and are looking to switch from one technology to another.Often, we're speaking to the physician and owner of the business at each of these. These are people who are trained in medicine, not necessarily running a business, but have developed an impressive understanding of business over the years. InfluencesOne of the biggest influences on physicians is other physicians who speak honestly about their success using our technology. At Hint, we're proud to have an extensive network of customers willing to stand up and say, "Hey, Hint is awesome. We love working with them," and will jump in to provide testimonials or live stream content, sharing their experience in building their practice around Hint. What they want to hear and whereWe're finding that doctors love to engage on social platforms and within their own private networks. Facebook groups where doctors learn from each other play a big role here, and we're constantly looking to have content shared within them. These groups are private, so you need to have those product evangelists willing to stand up and say, this is the tool to use when the question arises.In terms of what they want to hear - physicians are looking for solutions to the pain points in their business, and a lot of the time, this means easy-to-use, all-in-one products that can grow with them. Through the DPC Accelerator at Hint, we’ve built out a library of growth-oriented content that really helps to attract clinicians and consider our products.What's the most successful campaign you've ever run and what lesson did you learn from it?CampaignThis is probably influenced by recency bias, but one of the most successful campaigns we've ever run was when we had an announcement about the acquisition of an EMR solution called AeroDPC. It was a comprehensive campaign that kicked off with a press release from VSC and had legs that allowed it to carry itself for about three months. This generated interest from existing and new clientele and continued to drive business around the AeroDPC product, which was acting as a separate company.TakeawaysThe biggest takeaway from the campaign was to play out every aspect of your announcement. Utilize all of your different marketing assets and ensure that you have a well-thought-out plan. That means leveraging PR, CS, and your sales team to ensure you effectively announce on every channel.One of the other lessons I learned was to utilize the subject matter experts within your organization to speak about your news. Much of the success we garnered from the announcement came from a live stream with the CEO of Hint Health and the CEO of AeroDPC, where they allowed folks to engage with them and ask questions in real time. Combining the marketing push with VSC's media push, made for a very successful campaign. What advice would you give to an early-stage healthtech startup that wants to begin marketing? What's the best place to start?The most important thing to consider when you are an early-stage startup is to invest in your corner of the internet (aka your website). In most cases, your digital presence is the first impression for any prospective buyer, and it needs to do three very important things. - Provide a clear value proposition for your product or service- Easily able to navigate through- Give visitors a clear path to purchase (aka convert)The second thing is to put money aside for paid advertising, both social and search. You're paying for awareness, and it's worth it! You may not see a turnaround ROI right away, but it's all about keeping an eye on how many clicks you're getting, how many page views are happening, and whether or not you're reaching the right target audience. That’s why ensuring your corner of the internet is doing those three very important things above. ##A big thanks to Alex for sharing his wisdom and insights. You can follow him on Twitter and connect with him via LinkedIn.To learn how VSC Adrenaline combines strategic media relations and surgical digital content marketing to empower startups to build credibility and awareness while adhering to regulatory and industry standards, visit us at https://vsc.co/adrenaline/