Marketing Mondays_Xuan He: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Andreea Borcea:
Welcome to the Marketing Mondays podcast, where we explore how we can make your offerings stand out in the health and wellness space. Through conversations with thought leaders and innovators in health and wellness marketing, we’ll discuss marketing best practices, case studies, and innovative ideas to help scale your business and grow revenues with impact. I’m excited to be your host. My name is Andreea Borcea. I’m a fractional CMO and owner of the Dia Creative Marketing Agency.
Andreea Borcea:
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Mondays. I’m very excited for my guest today who is Xuan He, the Head of Marketing and Business Development for RoundTrip Health. Thank you so much for being here.
Xuan He:
Thank you, I’m very happy to be here to discuss marketing at the healthcare industry.
Andreea Borcea:
Wonderful, so tell me a little bit more about Roundtrip Health. What do you do?
Xuan He:
Roundtrip is a healthcare technology company that offers non-emergency medical transportation, scheduling, and fulfillment services to health plans, health systems, and health clinics using its SAS platform and navigation center resources. It provides a SAS UI mobile app and APIs, and customer support services.
Andreea Borcea:
Wow, that must be really important. Customer support for healthcare is really tricky. So how did this idea come about or how are you making an impact on customer support and healthcare?
Xuan He:
So our founders actually, as healthcare industry veterans, they really familiar with the pain point for the healthcare. Now, what the hospitals, healthcare systems they experienced, so they created this product. It’s kind of create a new category, because before that, the hospitals or health systems, they maybe just have a list of transportation companies to call one by one. That is very time-consuming and its also no-show rate is very high, but we provide a software solution and also we have a transportation community in to really help the health systems to scheduling …, SAS, UI, and definitely will help a lot of ways ROI and also reduce a lot of no-show rates and improve ROI for health systems, and also definitely improve the efficiency, the human resource efficiency.
Andreea Borcea:
Well, those are three really great sales tactics right there, right, sales promises, when you’re talking. So when marketing this, are you primarily talking to hospital administrators, or are you also working with the transportation industry?
Xuan He:
So as a marketing, we mainly working on the … sides. Basically, we do mainly talking to the social workers, case management professionals, like for example, like a … of case management. We do have a transportation community which is handled by our transportation teams. They help to grow our transportation partners.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s incredible. So when you’re working with social workers, how did you find was the right way to first contact them or first let them know about your solution? What did you use in form of channel or messaging?
Xuan He:
Basically, we test out different format channels to our target persona. That’s through, …, we did a very careful plan, campaign plan, and map up our content to those campaigns from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, and testing the efficiencies and effectiveness through different channels, for example. Maybe LinkedIn, maybe Google Search, or Google display ads, or maybe email marketing, or maybe through professional association services. And through testing we know that, which channel actually works best for us, and then we scale it up to raise a full budget.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, I love that. With testing, how long is the testing process that you found before you feel pretty confident that you found the right message for the right channel?
Xuan He:
So usually testing, at least, is two weeks, because if it’s too short, we won’t collect enough data, and data sample size pool is very important because it’s the data sample is too small, the result may not be accurate, so the time frame will be at least two weeks. How I work, we don’t want too long because we cannot wait too long, like several months for the test. Of course, we continue testing to optimize, but usually, the best of time frame for the initial testing is from two weeks to four weeks, and we got the initial results, and then we have the initial idea, that’s what works. Actually, what may not work, we will continue testing. Testing is always more concept for marketing, but in the meanwhile, we can base the initial test to result, we can scale it up with a bigger budget and a longer time frame.
Andreea Borcea:
Very cool, so how long is the funnel from top to bottom before you get someone to sign up?
Xuan He:
So you mean velocity?
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah.
Xuan He:
So for us, usually about several months.
Andreea Borcea:
During that whole several months, do you feel like people are skeptical or they’re excited to try it out and they just need to get approval? Like where are you seeing the barriers that you have to overcome in the sales process?
Xuan He:
Barrier has several aspects. For example, first is, how we can convince in our champions that this is a great solution for them? Second is even the champion, even though the champions that stay really love the solutions, but they have to overcome internal challenges. For example, we are a software company, right? And a lot of times our users, like case management professionals, they have to rely on the IT team to onboard our product and do the integrations, ways that exist in technology or technology solutions. And whether they can get the buy-in from the IT team, it could be an internal barrier. So that’s, basically, there is a lot of challenges on different aspects in what we need to help our champion is first, we really provide tool solutions for their pain point. And second, what we are doing right now is create content to help our champions to provide information for their internal teams and get their internal team buy-in.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that sales strategy. I think that’s so smart, is first identifying who that champion is and getting them and then using them and leveraging them as like your inside sales person, basically. So you end up spending a lot of your marketing time, empowering your champion, giving them the content that they need, and letting them go and supporting them through that journey. That must be a lot of work to really figure out. Are you finding your champions are excited? They’re like, yes, we’re going to get this live one way or another.
Xuan He:
Yes, definitely, because we actually if, kind of create a new category because before there was no, I won’t say completely no such a solution, but it’s somehow between a mature market and to create a new category. So when people does not have such a solution before, they have to do very manual work and there’s pain, and when they find such a solution, that’s definitely very exciting.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely. Do you have to work on educating them on how the platform works as well?
Xuan He:
Yes, we need to educate them to build transportation strategies. For example, a lot of health systems, they may not even have a strategy or even may not have a department to really handle this pain, but it’s actually is a big pain for them. And we help them, we provide content like transportation blueprint to help them to create a strategy for such a pain and then educate them with the solution, the software solution, together with the services, and help them to overcome the internal challenges.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s huge, I mean, if there are so many health systems where they don’t even acknowledge that they have enough of a problem that someone is dedicated to, that you’re coming in and basically saying, don’t even hire somebody, we’ve got the solution, you just have to incorporate it into what you do. That must be a huge load off. Do you find that hospitals or health systems really like that sort of thing, or are they just like, oh, we didn’t even realize this was an issue? Let’s identify that it’s an issue, start looking into it, and then go down that whole rabbit hole.
Xuan He:
Well, it’s actually pretty common for any tech solutions, software solutions, create a new category, because when a company creates a new category when the product is very new product, a lot of times people don’t realize there is such a product exists, right? And of course, each hospital and health system, they actually running very differently. Some health systems, they are centralized. They do have ownership for the transportation across all their branches, but some health systems can be very decentralized. It’s really a case-by-case.
Andreea Borcea:
So do you work well with both types, the decentralized and the ones that have it organized?
Xuan He:
Definitely, a health system that has an organization or department for transportation, it’s much easier for us. We’re definitely targeting both.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice, so how about you in particular, how did you end up here? Were you looking to get into healthcare marketing originally or tech marketing? How did you get here?
Xuan He:
So I always worked for tech companies in the B2B SAS, in the industry. Previously, I worked for a company cross-industry, basically their products targeting our industry, but their sweet spot actually is healthcare.
Andreea Borcea:
Oh, okay!
Xuan He:
So that’s actually helped me understand healthcare industry a lot. For specific Roundtrip, it’s a long story, that I wrote blog post talking about account-based marketing, and a CRO read the blog, really liked it. She reached out to me and talked to me and we really enjoyed the conversation, and then she introduced this opportunity to me. I think that’s a really good fit for me and this company is mission-critical, so I really like it in … around.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that, yeah, I think that’s why people work so hard in healthcare, is just like solutions are necessary to make the system more efficient, more effective, and if we can open people’s eyes to it by doing marketing for it, then that’s great, right, then, it doesn’t help if you have a solution if no one knows it exists. That’s why you need the marketing. So where do you see healthcare marketing going moving forward?
Xuan He:
I would see that it’s more and more digitalized. That’s, you know, COVID impacted us a lot, both our working style in everyone’s, their search information or they’re looking for information, the style changed, and more and more people got involved, more ways online. So moving forward, I definitely feel that healthcare system gradually more and more digitalized, especially for marketing, and for marketing, need to reach out to their target audience, we’ll cover more channels and specifically those online channels that your target audience have, visit those channels with high frequency, and that’s what works best for marketing results.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely, yeah. How do you go about identifying which channel is where your persona is going to spend most of their time? Because there’s so many channel options right now.
Xuan He:
Yes, so first is, analyze the business itself. That’s every company I joined, the first is, analyze the business, and usually, each business always has its traits. And based on the analysis that, you can identify some great channels that may be a good fit for the business. And second, work very closely with your sales department team, and AM team, account management team, because they talk to your target persona directly. That’s, more closely, then can help you identify the right channels, and third is testing. Once you do a great analysis in a close, more closely base and the AM, the sales department team gathers information, got the initial information, and then test it out, what, which channel actually works best.
Andreea Borcea:
The second step of that, I think, is the one that people miss so much, is actually talking to the customer and actually seeing where they go. But I’m such a, I love testing. I feel like testing is validating it all. It actually proves whatever you thought was right or wrong and you have to be good with it either way.
Xuan He:
And a lot of times you may find some, I know a big difference. I know a lot of times that we really rely on our skill set and experience to carefully plan. But sometimes, no matter how much experience you have and how carefully you plan for it, and after you test it out, you may find some big differences.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely, yeah, and being open to it and adjusting accordingly for that. Do you have any resources or places you like to look to get inspiration for new marketing ideas or magazines or groups or resources or blogs? You write a blog yourself, are there any other blogs that you really like?
Xuan He:
So I always keep an eye on what’s going on because marketing is changing so much from previously very traditional, rely on offline events, rely on print matures, and right now is emerging to more and more digitalized and we have to always, to keep that information. Definitely LinkedIn is one of the very important resources for me because I have a big network on LinkedIn, and a lot of marketing peers share their information and share their ideas, and also the sales, I also have a lot of sales professionals in my network because I’m also leading the sales development team and all those very important help, fill me with new information. And of course, I intentionally keep looking for a lot of information by groups, professional groups, maybe talking about …, maybe talking about healthcare, maybe talking about B2B marketing, and all those groups also share a lot of information, and also actively searching for solutions or trends. Every year we have the top professionals talk about the next year’s marketing trends for 2022, 2023, etc, and it’s always, those, information is always very helpful.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely, yeah, I think the power of networking in marketing is huge, especially like you’re saying, it’s evolving and changing so fast. Moving more to digital, but especially in the healthcare space where it’s been so rigid to change and now it’s open to it. The best information is probably just talking to colleagues and I could see like groups in LinkedIn being really good for that. Well, cool, any last thoughts for any of our listeners about healthcare marketing or where you’re going with Roundtrip, or anything else that you feel is really important that people should know?
Xuan He:
I think I talk a lot that my concept, my main concept is, always carefully design the plan, and then test it out, and then create a sustainable and repeatable process based on the testing results.
Andreea Borcea:
Absolutely, yes, always test. That’s always such a good thing. Well, thank you so much, Xuan He, for being here. You are the Head of Marketing and Business Development for Roundtrip Health. Can you tell us where we can learn more about Roundtrip health? What’s the website address?
Xuan He:
Of course, it’s RoundtripHealth.com.
Andreea Borcea:
Perfect, thank you so much for being here. And once again my name is Andreea, I’m the CMO of Dia Creative and your host for today at Marketing Mondays. Thanks so much.
Xuan He:
Thank you very much, very nice talking to you.
Andreea Borcea:
Nice talking to you, too.
Andreea Borcea:
Thanks again for listening to Marketing Mondays. If you have any marketing questions at all, feel free to reach out to me directly at DiaCreative.com. That’s D I A Creative.com.
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