Digital Health Adoption and Consulting

August 11, 2022 |
DeliverHealth
 |
August 11, 2022
DeliverHealth

You’ve built a beautiful, award-winning, mobile-first Digital Front Door. It’s live on the Apple and Google Play stores. You just know it will raise brand awareness and send your patient experience metrics into hyperspace.

So… why aren’t you getting nearly the number of app downloads you expected six months after launch?

The problem for most healthcare organizations isn’t in the product itself. Instead, it’s the lack of a clear product adoption and promotion strategy.

Let’s explore what product promotion strategy and adoption is, why it matters, how it differs from traditional healthcare marketing, and why the right strategy can help you take downloads and user activation for your new Digital Front Door and other digital products to new heights.

 

Product adoption: It’s probably not top-of-mind

I recently created this poll on LinkedIn. The results confirmed my gut feeling: that most companies don’t think about product adoption that often, and even if they do, they probably don’t have a strategy in place:

The problem: When you fail to create a product adoption strategy, you undermine all of the time and effort you put into building a fantastic product and adding amazing new features. No matter how great your mobile app is, you can’t afford to just hope that your patient consumers will stumble upon your app. You must drive them there.

 

Isn’t product adoption just like service-line marketing?

No. They’re two distinct types of marketing that require two completely unique skill sets.

Most healthcare organizations already do service-line marketing fairly well. It’s a linear process. You push leads through a funnel to convert leads into patients, running campaigns based on consumer research, CRM data, SEO content, marketing automation journeys, digital advertising, remarketing, and other inputs.

A mobile journey, however, is anything but linear. The features of a digital product that matter most to one health system’s patients may not matter to another organization’s consumers. That makes product promotion and adoption for mobile applications far more nuanced. It’s also why most healthcare organizations don’t have the marketing talent in-house to develop a successful product promotion or adoption strategy.

 

The secret sauce: A promotion strategy and adoption consultant

An ideal product promotion and adoption strategy will begin with a set of outside eyes—an expert promotion strategy and adoption consultant who can help you identify how your customers want to interact with your digital product and the features they will likely use the most. This discovery process will give you a rock-solid foundation for a strategy that will ultimately increase user downloads and activations.

Here’s how this worked for two DeliverHealth clients using our Digital Front Door solution.

For one client, we learned during the discovery process that their patients shared a common “on the way” pain point: Trouble finding a place to park. Armed with that knowledge, the health system worked with a valet company that offered an API for valet parking. The organization then integrated that API into their Digital Front Door and grew adoption as patients began using it to make their parking experience easier.

For another client, strategic discovery uncovered an internal need to acquire new patients. As a result, we worked with them to ensure their Digital Front Door included “pre-visit” features like appointment scheduling and health risk assessments, content that was most important to new movers and others seeking their healthcare services. Once again, focusing on these features helped boost user adoption and activation.

 

The importance of personas

Once you identify the most important aspects that will drive digital product adoption, the next step is building personas that represent specific segments of your audience. You can create several personas to understand how different types of users may interact with your mobile app. These personas will also help give you direction on key messaging when you put together your product marketing plan.

 

Don’t forget the data

Another important aspect of a winning promotion and adoption strategy is determining all the tools and resources your healthcare organization leverages. Sharing this information with your product strategy and adoption consultant will help you develop a more robust strategy and

identify potential ways to grow adoption into the future. When you engage with DeliverHealth, a product strategy and adoption consultant will ask you:

  • Do you have access to patient and consumer data or a CRM?
  • Do you use a marketing automation tool?
  • Do you have a team responsible for paid or organic media?
  • Do you have blog content?
  • Do you work with any agencies?
  • Do you have a call center?
  • Do you use a surveying tool?

 

The right adoption partner should also take a deep dive into your current marketing efforts. They’ll want to know about your website, current and planned campaigns, blog content, and organic social media content on channels like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. They’ll also ask about any paid media campaigns, email marketing campaigns such as patient journeys or newsletters, webforms, and more.

Once your promotion strategy and adoption consultant has a thorough understanding of all this information, they will construct an extensive go-to-market plan. The best plans will break down three key GTM phases: implementation, go-live, and ongoing. Each phase should include additional goals and objectives, which may include:

  • Increase user engagement and product use of key features
  • Introduce new features that align with increased patient needs
  • Increase user engagement and product use of new features
  • Develop and consult to set up clients for success

 

Ready. Set. Drive adoption!

No matter where you are in your Digital Front Door journey, our Product Promotion Strategy and Adoption team at DeliverHealth can help you learn more about your patient consumers, identify the features they want to use most, and help you create a strategy that will take your downloads to new heights and satisfy your users and the C-suite.

If you want to learn more about how I can help you, let’s talk.