A question I hear over and over from Mobile Health firms is:
“How do I get started telling my marketing story… how do I tell a marketing story that works?”
In addition to getting clear on your why, and understanding and following a proven, winning storytelling structure, you also need to adopt a realistic mindset about how the process of storytelling and marketing really works.
In this episode of mHealth Marketer, let’s look at getting your head around how the storytelling process impacts your marketing… and how you must take an agile approach to your marketing story
About This Show
Each Wednesday, Sam Stern, founder and Chief Marketing Technologist at Modallic, an mHealth marketing and brand development firm reveals his winning Mobile, Digital and healthcare IT marketing strategies, shares real life Mobile Health marketing success stories, and offers breakthrough marketing tips and tactics so you can lead the field with your Mobile Health and healthcare IT solutions.
Discover how to craft compelling stories to open doors with key health care system decision makers. Understand how an agile marketing mindset and approach positions you to create a profitable, sustainable business.
Gain insights into Mobile Health and healthcare IT marketing strategy, how to tell your unique mHealth and healthcare IT marketing story, creating your mHealth buyer personas, how to integrate an agile marketing process, mobile health and digital health brand development and market positioning, and learn what really works in attracting and landing mobile health and healthcare IT clients.
Show Notes:
Marketing isn’t an event. It’s an ongoing process.
Unlike a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end, your mHealth marketing and brand story never stops. Your story is organic and continuous. Allow audience participation and encourage your prospects and clients to share across platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Invite others, such as journalists, industry thought leaders, and peers to play a part in your story to carry the momentum to move your business forward.
No shortcuts to crafting a compelling mHealth story.
It takes a ton of creativity as well as time, patience, planning, and polishing to give your brand’s story sparkle and make it shine. If you don’t think you have the necessary objectivity, ability, and dedication to achieve that, then get help and get help early.
Why get help early?
Listen closely here… this is a key part of your marketing mindset. Many mHealth start up efforts are misguided because they have the wrong perception of the importance of the story and when marketing truly begins.
Your content, your marketing, your story is NOT a secondary part of your product.
It IS your product.
What your potential client experiences first about your product/service is your story… long before they actually experience the product or service itself. How your potential clients experience your message, your marketing, your story directly shapes the ultimate success or failure of your product.
Are you product and service focused- deep into the technology solution- in your Mobile Health business?
Lots of Mobile Health businesses believe if they develop a breakthrough product or service they can then simply “bolt on” marketing to turn the innovation into a viable business.With all the uncertainty in the health care market and many perceptions of viable solutions shaped by policy makers- the government, journalists, industry spokespeople, health care leaders- you’re working to introduce your product into an eco-system you don’t control.
But you do control your story and how you shape it based upon feedback. Today, with digital media, you can get feedback fast about your product idea fast… almost instantly and at low cost.
Realize this, a start up is defined as something new that faces uncertainty. Until you get your Minimum Viable Product out there, test it, and gain feedback, and respond to the feedback, you’re stumbling around in the dark. If your marketing, your story is out of alignment with your product, you’re out of alignment from the very beginning.
Where does your story begin?
Think about where you introduce your story and where your potential clients are first exposed to your story…
Is it a blog post?
Is it a presentation at an industry conference?
Is it a comment on a relevant Linkedin Group?
Is it a book?
Just as you test, gain feedback, iterate, and re-introduce your product to the market using an agile process, the same applies to the process of testing, gaining feedback, iterating, and re-introducing your marketing story. It’s important to edit and test your story as your build, in fact even before you build your product. Expose your story. gain a Minimum Viable Audience. Discover the pains, frustrations, fears, and desires of your potential clients. Test your story and message to gain feedback about the solutions you feel you can deliver.
You simply can’t afford to waste people’s time building something they don’t want.
Start your marketing story with something simple. Realize that your story will need improvement. Get fast feedback. Make improvements to your story quickly.
Keep doing this feedback, iterate, re-launch loop through out your marketing to continue to improve your marketing.
Armed with an agile storytelling mindset, you’re not starting with a minimum viable product. First you’re simply looking to build a minimum viable audience using the same lean principles of iterative and incremental development, so that you understand how to grow the audience further and better understand what they want to buy.
Next week… how to get into the hearts and minds of those who want to hear your mHealth story.
Items Mentioned in this Show:
Find out if you have a Minimum Viable Story… reserve your spot in my Friday Afternoon Storyboarding Brainstorms. Every Friday, between 1-3 PM Eastern, I have 4 25-minute slots to hear your story. Visit the Modallic website for more information and to grab your spot today.
Modallic Friday Afternoon Storyboard Brainstorms
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