The Challenge
A preventative healthcare startup approached me while they were still in the early stages of developing their beta. Conceptually, the app seemed like a home run as it provided members access to a network of vetted health and wellness providers across the spectrum.
These providers advise members based on their own health profiles (comprised of their health records and wearable data) and personal goals, offering a great service. However, the startup faced four primary challenges:
Confirming market validation.
Building community and trust.
Establishing their brand as authoritative and reliable.
Creating an excited, qualified pool of potential users pre-launch.
Due to budgetary concerns and the development timeline, they needed to overcome these challenges in one fell swoop, without showcasing the app since it was still in pieces.
Starting With The Basics
Every business worth admiring has a kinship with its core audience rooted in shared values and shared goals. My starting point was to link the goals of the target audience with the fundamental brand promise of the company. To wit:
The target audience wants to fully understand their health and take action to reach their goals. Unfortunately, the prohibitive cost and confusion surrounding healthcare are hindrances.
The company’s brand promise is to enable people to master their health and make smart decisions for themselves.
This was a perfect marriage of market concern and brand positioning. The next step was to allow this fusion to guide our strategy.
Stitching The Pieces Together
Since we couldn’t showcase the app, I decided it was best to create a free piece of content that approximated what the target audience could expect from it.
The app features medical doctors, certified personal trainers, registered dietitians, and mental health professionals. So I collaborated with providers from each of those fields to produce a comprehensive health guide.
The guide was designed so our target audience could easily digest and apply what they read.
Objectives And KPI’s
This strategy was meant to address the major challenges the company was facing, specifically:
Confirming market validation.
Building community and trust.
Establishing their brand as authoritative and reliable.
Creating an excited, qualified pool of potential users pre-launch.
In light of that, we hosted the guide on the company website so we could measure the quality of incoming traffic.
Our target audience included men and women ages 30-75 who owned wearable devices (Apple Watch, Fitbit, etc.) and had an immediate interest in improving their health. The app is iOS only, so our visitors also had to be iPhone users.
This is one of the most expensive demographics to advertise to. So I decided to space out the ad spend and cap the app opt-in target at 1000.
I collaborated with my team of copywriters, designers, and video producers to hash out ad copy and video content. Our messaging needed to appeal to the general group and its subsets.
The basic funnel methodology was as follows:
Drive traffic to the guide page via targeted Instagram/Facebook and Google/YouTube campaigns.
All potential visitors had to fill out a survey requesting their name, email address, wearable of choice, and their health goals. This extra step went a long way to ensure we had qualified visitors reaching the guide.
Once on the page for a certain length of time, we'd ask visitors to join the waiting list for the app. This took the form of an unobtrusive prompt.
Invite them to join a private group where the could get to know each other and talk about their goals.
Results:
Page Views: 31,830
Average Time On Guide Page: 10 mins (industry standard is 2 mins)
Bounce Rate: 20% (industry standard is 60%)
Paying Subscribers Gained: 2,865
Conversion Rate: 9% (industry standard is 2.6%)
Timeline: 4 weeks
Closing Summary & Key Takeaways
I utilized a combination of Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Active Campaign to track the success of the campaign. With Hotjar, I watched actual visitor sessions on the guide page to gauge their interactions. Using Active Campaign, I set up email flows and tracked sign-ups, etc.
Each person who signed up for the app waiting list also joined the private group and were excited to share their goals.
Our guide viewers visited the page at least twice and stayed for an average of 5 minutes (an eternity in web time). This, coupled with the extremely low bounce rate, suggested that our target audience found the content engaging and valuable.
Add in the high opt-in conversion rate, and you have confirmation of an interested market.
In the end, we achieved every major target we set out for.