Healthcare Market Matrix

Why Studio CMO Exists

HealthTech marketers are on a rare pilgrimage. The overall industry is one of the most robust economic forces in our society and HealthTech solutions are leading the way in innovation, patient connection, and much more. We created Studio CMO so that you could:

• learn ways to refine your market positioning
• build better and more successful demand generation programs
• understand your audience more deeply
• see the healthcare ecosystem more clearly
• meet some of the greatest experts in marketing theory and technology

Our Hosts

On this special episode, we also want to introduce you to our team. John Farkas John has always worked to bring creative projects together. After working nearly two decades as a creative director for two large organizations, he turned his focus toward leading Golden Spiral. John reflects: “Great stories cut through our defenses and imprint us at our core. Tell someone a great story—at the least it will leave an impression—but it could change the course of their lives.” John enjoys creative writing, exploring the outdoors, building and remodeling houses, spending time with his family, and riding his bicycle. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in Theatre and English. Anna Grimes Anna serves as an account director at Golden Spiral helping shepherd our clients through their demand generation programs. Anna is a public relations expert with stints at some of our nation's most prestigious PR firms: Atkinson and Paine Pomeroy. She grew up with healthcare conversations around the dinner table because her father was one of the architects of Nashville's robust healthcare industry. Anna is a graduate of Kenyon College, tells the greatest stories from her career, enjoys watching the journeys of her adult children, and enjoys being a part of the Nashville community. Mark Whitlock Mark produces Studio CMO and serves as marketing manager for Golden Spiral writing content and helping run the agency's demand generation program. Mark has produced for terrestrial and talk radio and worked as an acquisitions editor in traditional publishing. He is the author or co-author of eight books including one that reached Amazon's overall top 25 in 2003. Mark graduated from the University of Georgia. He is striving to overcome a 2019 injury to run his fifth marathon. He volunteers in a community for men and enjoys a full calendar of events for his children and step-children. Explore our episode library by clicking here.

Does Your Positioning Set You Up for Greater Success?

Positioning is the art of articulating your unique value proposition in such a way that you begin a conversation with a potential customer. Both Golden Spiral and Newfangled are experts at helping companies define their market positioning for greater success. On this edition of Studio CMO, Newfangled's CEO, Mark O'Brien, looks at the pitfalls and benefits of good positioning, how companies win, and the single most important factor to marketing after you release your positioning—patience.  

Show Notes

Positioning is the foundation, because without it, you're going to waste so much money. — Mark O’Brien

Are You Addressing the Wrong Audience?

Are you speaking to your peers? Stop trying to impress your competition. Awards are a waste of time and money. Your peers and competitors don’t grow your business. Your audience does. Are you speaking to your internal audience? Your employees know what you do and what you make. So, changing the language around may sound unique to them but means the same thing. The only audience that matters is the buyer audience.

The Curse of the Technical Founder

Golden Spiral sees this curse time and time again. A company is so in love with their technology—their chassis—they can’t talk about anything else. They don’t even talk about the problem that originally inspired the creation of the technology. Often, when a company’s marketing is focused on the technology, the marketing actually talks over the heads of the customer. Companies can be so bound up with the minutiae that they miss the big picture. John Farkas recently published an article about technical founders.

Positioning must be focused on a real problem that real people have. It must start a conversation. —John Farkas

The Three Stages of Marketing

Mark O’Brien outlined the three basic stages marketing plans go through. Energy You’re spending the time, energy, and money to create a marketing strategy based on your research. Everyone is excited and can’t wait to see what happens. Marketing Launch Time slows down. It’s worse than watching grass grow. How long will it take? What is the TTR—time to result? During this stage, only those who stay on the plan, remain disciplined to follow the strategy, and continue to believe will win. Success or Death This is the fun stage. If you’ve stayed committed to the strategy, you will see results and can throw more fuel to grow the results. If you gave up during the doldrums, you’ll feel the death and wonder why you started in the first place.

The Power of Focus

Mark offered two powerful examples of focus and how they apply to marketing. The Gaja Winery After a long and storied history, Angelo Gaja inherited his family winery. After he studied the finances, the business, and the actual assets—vines and nutrients—in the ground, he ripped out and destroyed more than half of the vineyard. Many thought he was crazy or hatching an insurance scheme. Instead, he maximized the wine. They produce much less, but it is much higher quality, better tasting, and produces more profit for the winery.  The Hedgehog Concept Jim Collins in his famed book, Good to Great, outlines a way of thinking, “What do we do better than anyone else?”

Two Approaches to Positioning

Positioning is the art of articulating your unique value proposition in such a way that you begin a conversation with a potential customer. Mark O’Brien outlined two successful approaches. Exclusive Positioning “We do X for Y.” When you encounter a company with exclusive positioning, you know within five seconds on any page on their website whether or not you are a fit for their product or service. They exclude all others outside of their focus. Open Positioning This is an 80% approach. When visiting a website, you know what the company does and what sets it apart, but the company is purposefully vague about the niches they serve. If visitors feel like they might fit, they can continue in the stream. Most companies who pursue this approach, change to exclusive after about 18 months.

Books Mentioned On This Episode

American Dirt Good to Great

About Our Guest

Mark O’Brien is a forward thinker helping clients see a better future for themselves while helping them take risks to pursue their vision. He now serves as CEO of Newfangled, a digital marketing agency that gets leaders out of their own way to develop the programs needed to grow their businesses. He grew up in the ranks at Newfangled first as a developer and then as a sales executive.

Our Theme

Our theme is created by some of Nashville's greatest musicians. Bigger Story Music is born out of a longtime friendship, a deep, talented community, and a real love for what they do. Whatever story you’re trying to tell, they have the perfect music to make it better.

Is HealthTech Podcasting Worth The Investment?

Should your company start a podcast or not? If so, how much will it cost, how much time it will take, and what can you expect from it?

According to Podcast Industry Insights, there are 2.1 million podcasts, but only 36.5%—or 773,258—have released an episode in the last 90 days. Only about 423,000 have released more than ten episodes. Those numbers may seem daunting, but consider the number of blogs in existence—more than 800 million. Would you ever advise a company not to have a blog?

Peter Birch, Company Director (Asia Pacific) for MetaOptima Technology and the creator of the "Talking HealthTech" podcast and community, joins us to talk about his podcasting journey and how he's advising HealthTech companies to investigate podcasting.

Skip to Transcript

Show Notes

Starting a podcast isn't a matter of deciding you want to and hitting record. There's a lot to consider before you even nail down a topic for episode 01. Here's everything you need to ask yourself:

How do you know if you're ready to start a podcast?

If you've got something to share and questions to ask, you're ready to start a podcast. If you're looking to make a lot of money or expect an immediate stream of new leads, you're only going to waste your time and money.

Who is your audience?

At the end of every episode of Studio CMO, we remind you to "understand your buyer's problems, lead with an empathetic understanding, and make your buyer the hero." Our three core tenets assume that you know who your audience is. To carefully define your audience is more defining a persona in the way marketers have been instructed for years. A persona isn't deep enough. Work through our Buyer Matrix process and consider what our producer had to say in this video presentation. (Note: Special offers and weblinks mentioned only pertained to conference attendees.)

What's your vision? What's your message?

Starting a company podcast depends on a clear understanding of your vision and nailing down your messaging. What do you want to communicate to your listeners week after week? Who are your core listeners? Who are the perfect guests your listeners want to hear from? Who's on your podcast team? Next, you need to consider the team who will produce your podcast. Who will host it? Who will edit and produce, book guests, promote new episodes? Will you rely on your internal team or hire an outside organization? What does the time commitment look like?

What are your time and resource commitments?

Plan on spending between 10 and 15 hours per episode. Remember there are expenses associated with the people involved, production, distribution, and promotion. There are many resources online about how to do a podcast as cheaply as possible, however, you will save time and frustration by setting aside a budget and spending strategically—microphone(s) and software first. Mark Whitlock, our producer, wrote an informal memo about these issues to address a few questions from others. You can read his thoughts here.

Where will you host your podcast?

There are many hosting platforms, the web service that distributes your podcast to all of the services including Apple. We highly recommend Libsyn and PodBean.

Podcasts Talked About on This Episode

• Freakonomics
• 99% Invisible
• Sway
• David Runciman’s Talking Politics | History of Ideas
• Pirate Monk Podcast

Further Reading

• The Real Market Value of the Soul of Your Brand
• "Talking HealthTech"

“Collaboration starts with conversation” — Peter Birch

About Our Guest

Peter Birch serves as the Company Director (Asia Pacific) for MetaOptima Technology in Sydney, Australia. A career-long veteran of the healthcare industry in Australia, Peter’s voice will be instantly recognized by many of you as the host of "Talking HealthTech," a podcast focused on technology companies, specifically in Australia, but listened to around the world. He hasn’t just built a podcast, but a community of technologists, practitioners, developers, and others in the HealthTech space.

Our Theme

Our theme is created by some of Nashville's greatest musicians. Bigger Story Music is born out of a longtime friendship, a deep, talented community, and a real love for what we do. Whatever story you’re trying to tell, we have the perfect music to make it better. Really. Check out their production library and explore their custom options at biggerstorymusic.com.

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About Our Guest

For the last four years, A. Chris Turner has guided our clients and our agency to organic and paid victories online as our Senior Director, Digital Strategy & Performance Analytics. He is a true SEO helping make websites work for companies for the last 15 years. Chris is a veteran of the United States Air Force and a lifelong entrepreneur who knows the value of a dollar and how to stretch it.

Show Notes

Do you need an objective set of eyes on your SEO work? Do you have questions or concerns you’d like to bounce off someone? Click here to schedule your no-obligation meeting with John Farkas and Chris Turner.

Mentioned on This Episode:

McKinsey’s B2B Marketing Report

Three Key Elements to Set Reasonable Expectations for SEO

SEO is Organic People interact with this information in their own ways. If people don't do searches, there is no SEO. SEO is based on people, human interaction, and human need. SEO is Not Magic; It is a Scientific Activity It may be mysterious, but you can instigate certain activities to change your results. SEO is Common Sensical On a basic level, if it doesn’t make sense, don’t do it.

Questions to Ask About Your SEO Efforts

• What is the context of your SEO efforts? What company needs are you trying to meet and how well are you meeting them?
• Is your SEO aligned with your company goals?
• How do you operate from a digital marketing perspective? How do you use content?
• How old is your keyword audit? Do you have a contextual understanding of your keywords? What suggestions for future content does your audit make?
• Does everyone involved in marketing and sales have a clear and harmonious understanding of who your customer is?

Is your SEO relevant, timely, and credible? — A. Chris Turner

Three Mistakes Marketing Leaders Make Around SEO

1. Going fast and dirty.
2. Set it and forget it.
3. Not understanding how SEO ROI works.

A Recent Example from Search Engine Journal It is easier for business owners and decision-makers to invest in paid marketing because it offers clear returns on the investment (ROI); for X dollars you received Y visits/calls/forms. Nevertheless, with proper tracking and systems in place, organic optimization can offer clear ROI along with conversion optimization when SEO is done with the intent of matching the right consumers, with the right pages of your website for the right results. For example, a B2B computer repair company in Manhattan has an average sale of $10,000. They close leads at a rate of 30 percent and have a conversation rate of 5 percent. In your ROI model, you project 500 clicks for them a month. To calculate potential revenue, you would multiply 500 (clicks) x 5% (conversion rate) x 30% (close rate) x $10,000 (average sale) = $75,000 per month. To gain a greater understanding of SEO for your company, download A. Chris Turner’s eBook:

Additional Reading about SEO

• Golden Spiral’s Insights into Google Algorithm Changes
• 12 Reasons Why SEO is Important for Businesses
• Google’s Resource for SEO
• Google’s Reference for Hiring an SEO

Show Notes

The Five Keys to Building Better KPIs for Your HealthTech Company

1. Define your goals
2. Ensure clarity of definitions
3. Build a Culture of Attribution
4. Remember: Data Tells a Story
5. Make Informed Decisions

John discusses content from his article, "When What You Know Can Kill Your HealthTech Marketing."

Peter outlines the entire process in detail in his excellent ebook, "A Step-by-Step Guide to Building KPIs for HealthTech Companies."

Show Notes

Nicole Williams outlines several aspects of targeting the healthcare provider.

"We must walk a mile in the patient's shoes." — Nicole Williams

Remote or virtual healthcare has been adopted by less than 20% of Americans. RRD has created "Care Kits" to address the wide gap in digital adoption and the problems of many Americans who don't have a smartphone, high-speed internet access, and a webcam. As a HealthTech solution provider, your solution likely hits one major issue in the life of a patient. How do you address all of the peripheral issues your end-user will face? How do you help your customers meet the needs of their patients? Social determinants of health have become the largest indicator of how well providers can serve their patients, the success of wellness, and to what extent the patient will recover when sick. Those include (in no particular order):

• Economic Stability
• Neighborhood and Built Environment
• Access to Digital Tools
• Race
• Healthcare Access and Quality
• Education Access and Quality
• Social and Community Context

"The ZIP code a person lives in has a greater impact on their health outcome more than anything else." — Nicole Williams

The "60 Minutes" episode which aired April 18, 2021 addressed these factors.

Nicole believes the three most important marketing tools in HealthTech are:

1. Addressing the outcomes of your solution. What is the ROI? How did you improve patient outcomes?
2. Gaining provider and/or payer testimonials.
3. Real-life testimonials from endusers

Nicole and RRD have developing thought leadership materials and built a strong content engine for their work. Content is essential to digital marketing, education, and more.

About Our Guest

Laura Yecies is an entrepreneurial leader, strategist, and marketer. She has had a long background in tech including stints on Netscape and Yahoo. She has been consulting with Bone Health Technologies for the last year and was recently named CEO. She was a marketing consultant for Fabric Genomics, helmed SyncThink as CEO, led Catch until they were acquired by Apple, and had tremendous success at SugarSync, a data synchronization company, as their CEO up to their acquisition by J2.

Show Notes

Laura Yecies covers a number of unique factors that you may be facing in your HealthTech marketing.

• Targeting your end-user so you can market to your buyer
• How B2C marketing is influencing B2B marketing
• How brand plays itself out in the combination of wearable and software tool
• Why sometimes, the most compelling story to tell is the economic one

https://vimeo.com/485297519 Communities, like these Facebook groups, are important to Bone Health Technologies overall marketing efforts

• Osteopenia and Osteoporosis Support Group
• Better Bones, Better Body: Osteoporosis & Osteopenia
• Living with Osteopenia & Osteoporosis
• Naturally Better Bones Osteoporosis Group

Custom photography can showcase how your solution meets a critical need for your buyer. An example from Bone Health’s website. Laura discussed how content has assisted their efforts on the clinical side and the consumer side.

Samantha Bergin is the chief marketing officer at 98point6, an on-demand digital primary care service founded in 2015 and headquartered in Seattle, Wash. Sam's nearly 25-year career centers around building and growing technology brands. Prior to 98point6, she served as vice president of marketing at Cozi, Inc., which was acquired by Time Inc. and is now owned by Meredith Corporation. Under her leadership, Cozi became one of the top 10-grossing productivity apps in both iTunes and Google Play. Sam also worked in product management at Amazon, Microsoft, and Visio Corporation. She holds a BA in business from the University of Maryland and an MBA in marketing from Wake Forest University. She was a member of a three-person panel presenting their companies’ new products at the 2020 Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit. Sam is originally from Brazil and is a competitive equestrian in the sport of three-day eventing.

Show Notes

The pandemic accelerated the need for people to have access to care when they couldn't get it in person. That acceleration of comfort and awareness catapulted our category into a completely different stage. And it's been really a privilege to be able to serve so many in a time of heightened need. —Sam Bergin

How 98point6 Differentiates Itself Against Other Telehealth Solutions

• Address the friction in the market—98point6 is not traditional telehealth
• Talk about the elephant in the room—less than half of millennials have a relationship with a primary care physician.
• Find a way to answer the pressing questions—content can win the day.

Samantha mentioned the COVID resource page they developed as part of their content strategy. Scroll to the bottom to view the PDF collection we discussed.

Breaking Down their Three-City Test of an Upper-Funnel, Demand Generation Campaign

98point6 cooperated with a media buyer to develop a B2B campaign targeting C-level executives in three cities with a high concentration of large employers. The express purpose of the campaign is to get the executives to ask the question, "Are we talking to 98point6 and, if not, why not?" The media assets drive inbound traffic. The campaign includes:

• connected TV
• NPR
• cable advertising on news programs at highly targeted dayparts
• talk radio

The Episode in 60 Seconds

How well do you know your customer? Is your knowledge limited to a single sheet of paper with a fake name and some socioeconomic and psychographic data or have you taken a deeper dive? Joshua Oakes has spent his career helping companies understand their customers at a core level. He calls his approach, "Who First." On this edition of Studio CMO, we will walk through the four steps of Who First:

• Audience Discovery 
• Audience Understanding 
• Serving Your Audience
• Measurement and Collaboration

About Our Guest

Joshua Oakes is the creator of Who First, the framework that helps companies develop and apply an understanding of their customers to serve them more effectively and drive outcomes. After years of consulting for organizations with product marketing or customer acquisition challenges, he decided to help them solve the root problem he kept finding: Companies that don’t understand their customers could never hope to acquire them effectively or serve them well. His background is half technology, half marketing. He’s worked with companies in SaaS, higher ed, healthcare, music licensing, non-profit, social media, entertainment, telecom…lots of industries and every stage from pre-seed to enterprise. He gardens extensively for the fresh produce and for the metaphors. He makes jams and wines (mostly to give away) as well as salsas and hot sauces (which he won’t give away without a serious warning).

Show Notes

The way that you understand your customer is very similar to the way that you understand any other human being that you're in a relationship with: you talk to them, you try to relate to them empathically, and you spend time with them. — Joshua Oakes

The Who First Methodology

1. Audience Discovery - talking to customers
   • Guided interview—"Learn Who Interview" (at least 10)
   • Be an active listener
   • Where did they begin the journey?
   • What was your vision of the future when your problem was solved?
   • What were the signposts that told you that you were on the way to success?
   • What traps did you fall into at work?
   • How did you experience us as an organization and as an individual?
   • And many more
2. Audience Understanding - distilling what you learn
   • Analyze the content of the recorded interviews
   • What trends do you hear?
   • What information emerges that is shared, actionable, validated, and measurable
3. Serving Your Audience - application
   • The Who Plan - a break down of what your customers experience at each stage of the journey
   • Whoa - a formula for deciding what content to create
4. Measurement and Collaboration - improving your systems, processes, and your teams’ ability to work together
   • The "Know Who" Measurement — put audience metrics into your weekly and quarterly reporting
   • Audience-Focused Teams

80% of our decisions are fundamentally emotional and that's even true in healthcare, HealthTech, and B2B. And in fact, the emotional component of decision-making is more important in B2B scenarios because there are more people with emotions involved in that decision-making process. — Joshua Oakes

The Episode in 60 Seconds

How do you build a company that always puts the customer first? Sarah Acton, VP of Sales and Marketing for Athos, has done so by building a synergistic organization that shares customer stories, digs into customer needs, and listens to each other. On this episode of Studio CMO, Sarah discusses:

• How to Listen to Your Customer and Each Other
• How to Build Internal Synergy for the Benefit of the Customer
• How to Cultivate a Company's Culture and Values
• Tips for Hiring the Best HealthTech Talent
• What it Takes to be a Good Client for an Agency

About Our Guest

Bethany Hale is the Head of Marketing at Cedar, a data-driven patient payment and engagement platform. She brings 15+years of experience across marketing strategy, brand development, content and performance marketing, and customer experience design to this role.  Prior to joining Cedar, Bethany spent 7 years at IBM, most recently as a product manager on the healthcare team where she created an AI-enhanced, pre-configured marketing automation platform, in partnership with Adobe, that enables healthcare & life sciences marketers to drive improved healthcare consumer experiences, increased revenue and more effective marketing campaigns. Bethany is a creative storyteller and thought leader who has worked with other notable brands including American Express, Samsung Electronics, Hertz, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Chevron. She has an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School and a B.A. in Journalism from Michigan State University.

Cedar closed a round of funding worth $200-million on March 9th. 

Cedar was mentioned as one of the fastest-growing HealthTech companies in 2020, second only to Amazon. Find out more in this report from KLAS and this study co-sponsored by Forrester and Cedar. Hear the story at 25:40.

Show Notes

"It always confounds me the fact that my daughter, who's six years old, can figure out how to find her favorite show on Netflix, by herself. Yet I, with an MBA and someone who works in healthcare, still can't decipher my own medical bills. That's the real gap in that consumer experience. People expect to understand how to pay a bill. That's what we're trying to accomplish at Cedar." —Bethany Hale

Why to Carefully Consider Brand

Brand is important for:

• your company
• talking to potential clients and buyers
• recruiting potential talent
• communicating with the community at large
• establishing yourself as a thought leader

Coming out to the market, you want to know who you are first, what your position is, and why you're different. —Bethany Hale

Bethany Hale wrote this article about the story behind Cedar's rebranding.

Golden Spiral's VP of Design, Luke Farkas, breaks down how to build a Brand's Visual Identity System in this article.

Keys to a HealthTech Company Gaining New Business

• Can you prove that you can do the work?
• Can you demonstrate your success with a health system like your prospect's?
• How do you work with and/or integrate with the key electronic medical record providers?
• How do you integrate with other leading healthcare systems?
• Do you understand the patient populations you've worked with in the past and of the prospect's?

Good brands are consistent, differentiated, and clear. — Bethany Hale

How Brand Helps HealthTech Companies Recruit Talent

You will not be able to meet your financial goals nor touch the number of lives you desire without the right talent.

• Does your brand demonstrate your diversity in all ways?
• Does your brand reflect the patient population of the US?
• Can potential employees understand your vision, values, and mission?
• Do your recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding practices communicate how your company works and how you meet your goals?

Cedar's Recruiting Portal Listen to Studio CMO host John Farkas discuss the importance of brand for recruiting the right talent at 20:43 and following.

Your Prospect's Experience Matters to Your Brand

Cedar's mindset is: "You can't miss this!" Curating a VIP event over a virtual platform is challenging because naturally occurring conversations that happen at a live event don't happen—without intention—online.

• Cedar is thoughtful about its online events:
• How do we inspire conversation?
• How do we gain engagement?
• How do we include the right people?
• How do we build communities?
• How do we create a "white glove" experience?
• How do we cut through the clutter?

Ashton Kutcher is an investor in Cedar. Read about a recent "white glove" event he hosted.

Virtual Events Can Be Stronger than Live Events. An article from Golden Spiral

Chelsea Clinton's presentation

Paul Ryan's presentation

Telling Your Brand Story

"When you're telling a clear story that sets above the rest, that's going to create a confidence. That's going to create something that people are not accustomed to seeing in the space. Because what they're accustomed to is very confusing, multidimensional messages that are hard to make your way through. And if you can hold something up and say, 'Clearly, here's our value. Here's what we look like. Here's what you can expect when you relate with us. If you can set some of that forward in a way that is clear and comforting, it inspires movement. —John Farkas

Brand building: First, build trust with your stakeholders, then build relationships, then provide value. — Bethany Hale