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HealthLevel has had significant success with the teleradiology program run by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The company’s Foundations software platform enables healthcare providers to view and analyze their business operations to operate more efficiently with easy-to-use data visualization tools.
In our first engagement with HealthLevel, we helped them expand their services from the VA into private and public health systems. HealthLevel returned to HSC in 2021 for our assistance in further refining the company’s marketing message as it expanded its market for business analytics software.
In our return engagement with HealthLevel, HSC helped the company:
- Develop and revise new sales collateral
- Revise and revamp thought leadership content, including white papers
- Develop a strategy for email and social media marketing
1. Client Company Overview
HealthLevel’s software solutions include its Foundations platform, which provides real-time clinical, financial, and operational information to healthcare sites. The company positions its offerings as “user-friendly business analytics that align physicians and administrators to make evidence-based decisions to improve hospital and department operations and clinical outcomes.”
Primary market drivers for sales of Foundations include:
- Increasing demand to improve efficiency, performance, and overall health system outcomes.
- Need to have real-time access to clinical, financial, and operational data.
- Better understanding of how each area (clinical/financial/operational) used data to impact outcomes.
2. Challenges
2.1 Need to Update Marketing Material
Market conditions had changed since our initial engagement with HealthLevel, creating the need for updated sales and marketing collateral. The company’s primary challenge continues to be leveraging its success with the VA health system to make sales of Foundations with other public and private healthcare organizations as well as continue to expand their footprint across the many VA health systems.
A secondary challenge is institutional resistance at some providers to having their operations analyzed for their “performance.” These potential customers need to be persuaded of the value of business analytics applications like Foundations.
2.2 Need for Marketing Resources
As a small company, HealthLevel has invested the majority of its resources into engineering and software development, leaving a need for a stronger marketing presence. The company had a lack of general awareness in the market, both at the brand level and with respect to the problems they solve.
2.3 Multiple Buyer Personas
As with our previous engagement, we found that HealthLevel faced a challenge in that there are multiple buyer personas to engage with at each client, and each persona (e.g. financial and operational administration, clinical leadership, clinicians) may prefer a different set of operational metrics. HealthLevel’s message needs to be continually refined to speak to each of these roles.
3. How We Helped
3.1 Created Buyer Persona Specific Messaging and Collateral
We built on our previous experience investigating preferences of the different buyer personas within both cardiology and radiology and revised our work categorizing product/solution benefits for each persona. This messaging captured the complexity and significance of each buyer, while still acknowledging that a team of buyers might ultimately be the deciding factor. We then utilized this messaging to develop sales collateral that incorporated the new messaging.
3.2 Launched and Managed New Email Marketing Campaign
Having laid a foundation for HealthLevel’s success with our initial engagement, in our return contract we built on that success with new marketing campaigns, such as an email campaign that called for consistent messaging every four to six weeks. Content for the email campaigns was tailored for each of the company’s primary markets, VA and non-VA accounts, with separate databases for each type of client.
We managed the company’s email marketing campaign on an ongoing basis, and also amplified HealthLevel’s message through social media accounts like Twitter and LinkedIn.
3.3 Thought Leadership and Earned Content
In our initial engagement, we helped HealthLevel revise its website and set up a blog presence. In our renewed contract, we developed additional thought leadership content, including a white paper and a customer case study that articulated the market challenges they solve and the value of the company’s analytics offerings. We also helped them get published in a radiology trade publication to gain additional publicity and support their thought leadership efforts.
4. Results
In our renewed contract with HealthLevel, we built on our previous success to further advance the company’s marketing strategy. We helped refine its messaging, increased awareness to drive booth traffic at trade shows, and drove leads to the top of its sales funnel. Thanks to HSC’s assistance, HealthLevel continues to enjoy success, both within the VA space and also at other public and private health systems.
5. Let Us Help You
Contact us if you feel your company could also benefit from improving your product marketing and sales.
6. Customer Testimonial
Long before I came onboard, Dean and his HSC team were tasked with driving many of our marketing activities. They implemented an email marketing program, wrote white papers, and delivered in-depth marketing research. Their contributions were essential to maintaining our visibility in the market, with both our customers and prospects. Dean’s detailed knowledge of and experience with the radiology space gave him an edge over other consultants operating in the healthcare market. This translated to critical strategic insights about radiology that informed us about segments, key players, and trade shows. I found Dean and his team to be highly collaborative and service-oriented, often reducing workload for us while they worked directly with third-party vendors on press releases and optimization of marketing stack applications. Dean and his team, through their expertise and quality of service, proved to be excellent partners.
