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Having the knowledge to create innovative solutions in the healthcare IT space isn’t enough. Without effective product marketing, healthcare IT companies are shorting themselves in regard to profitability.
This is especially true of startups. Even in its youth, Illuminate quickly realized it needed a trusted marketing partner to elevate brand awareness, spotlight the problems Illuminate’s solutions resolved, and ultimately generate leads.
1. Client Company Overview
Illuminate was created by software engineers who are passionate about partnering with physicians to develop solutions that make their jobs easier and optimize patient care.
As their website states, “Your EMR data is valuable. Let’s put it to work.”
Illuminate’s solutions drive superior patient outcomes via administrative efficiencies. With the company’s innovative technology, clients have seen more than:
- 6,000 radiologist hours recovered annually
- 7 Billion documents processed by client searches
- 130,000 aneurysms identified lost to follow-up
- 47,234 lives saved
With such impressive results, it was crucial to expand Illuminate’s target audience reach.
2. Challenges
An integral challenge of small healthcare IT startups is awareness. Not just awareness about who the company is and what it can do, but also getting healthcare entities to understand they might be experiencing a problem they have no idea even exists.
For Illuminate, lack of awareness among the medical community was stunting growth. Complicating this even further was the fact that the CEO/Founder was also the company’s technical expert and spent a significant amount of time on product development. Any time or energy left for marketing strategy development and implementation was piecemeal, at best.
Plus, the referral network the CEO brought to the table initially began to dry up. The few healthcare sites Illuminate had success with early on continued, but organic expansion in the market was happening slowly.
At this point, the CEO knew he needed a marketing strategist who could develop a plan to accelerate the sales effort by building awareness, by both creating awareness about the problem it solves and the company’s capabilities. Because they were anxious to get this effort started they chose Healthcare Service Consultants (HSC), they were intimately familiar with this challenge, having helped companies with this in the past.
3. How We Helped
Upon performing an initial assessment of the company’s current marketing activities, we discovered there were essentially zero. In one way, this provided an opportunity to build a marketing strategy from the ground up—a unique place to be in, rather than coming in to “fix” a broken marketing machine.
As such, we developed a number of educational content-focused marketing initiatives, including:
- White Papers
- Case Studies
- Press Releases
- Website Content
- Social Media
- Earned Content
- Customer Success Stories
We also built an email marketing program—growing their email database, optimizing messaging, and engaging in reporting activities. Contacts arose from trade show attendees, LinkedIn networking, a Definitive Healthcare subscription, and eventually via gated content on the company website. Reporting became an essential part of the email marketing process, because it prompted the sales team to follow up with prospects who had opened and read an email. Without that knowledge, those prospects very likely would remain cold.
Trade shows represented another key piece of marketing strategy development and implementation. As many in healthcare and healthcare IT know, there is a dedicated focus on trade show networking. We helped grow the company’s trade show presence by deploying pre-event promotional messaging and optimizing the effectiveness of booth materials.
4. Results
All of our strategic efforts, from October 2021 to March 2024, were driving towards company growth. Through improving marketing messaging, expanding upon the number (and quality) of marketing activities, and providing top-level educational content, we were able to achieve that goal.
Softek Illuminate has acquired new customers and continues on an upward trajectory. The company has deepened its team with dedicated sales and customer support professionals. In the CEO’s eyes, the value of a structured, consistent, high-level marketing strategy—one rooted in healthcare expertise—cannot be understated.
5. Let Us Help You
Contact us if you feel your company could also benefit from improved positioning and a strategic marketing approach.
6. Customer Testimonial
Illuminate was at a point where we recognized we had achieved product market fit and needed help establishing our marketing department. We needed someone who had supported all aspects and could be flexible scaling up a marketing department to support an ever-changing set of needs as we matured as a company. HSC was instrumental in helping us educate the various market segments and support
our sales efforts as we went through significant organizational change. Dean provided a product marketing mindset on key initiatives and helped manage our entire marketing team to ensure we executed against our strategic projects.
