Entrepreneurs are not marketers, but they must know best the problem they try to solve

“Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is a significant pain point for all businesses, and mainly for early-stage entrepreneurs. While it’s very frustrating knowing deep inside that you have a winning offering and people don’t dig it, We must focus on ways to explain things quickly to other people, here’s a business use case that proves this point.

Ohad, a healthcare professional made a digital healthcare service providing online coping methods to people with COPD. He developed it after years of treating people in their homes, relieving their condition, and improving their well-being.

Even thought he did it great one-on-one at people’s homes, The founder experienced marketing challenges. People couldn’t understand his offer online. He’s very passionate about increasing his patients’ well-being but doesn’t have any marketing background, surely not for strategizing one.

Unable to launch a POC campaign, We both thought it was worth having some guidelines for marketing.

I wrote a documented user-centric marketing strategy, providing a clear roadmap with OKRs and measurable steps, and tested the new strategy with a small landing page resulting in 90% of leads understanding the service and what’s expected from them.

To sum it up, Ohad, the client, challenges were:

• Potential prospects don't understand what is the service.

• I receive irrelevant leads and invest a lot of time explaining the product.

• I'm currently developing my website and application with technical professionals, they aren't marketing professionals.

The end-User problem, Mature 50+ years old

• “I suffer from a medical condition, the hospital's next available appointment is in 2 months, I wish there was an easy self-care service online”.

Here’s a retro for the project with Ohad (Hebrew only for now…)

What to do about Ohad’s challenge?

1. Write a marketing strategy based on a user-centric approach.

2. Design and launch one-pager for prototype → Watch here👈

Skills Used:

• Marketing Strategist.

• UX Research

• UX Writer

A guide for validating a business idea online

Part 1 - Write a content marketing strategy

Writing a marketing strategy is the execution of your messages online. Understanding components of a marketing strategy may change from industry to industry and focus points such as branding, SEO, or business.

The product with 7ps methodology and document the defined product. Try writing it in simple words so you can explain what you do both to your grandma and your little brother.

Research 3 active customers and conduct interview - included defining interview questions, applying follow-up questions, documenting their interview, and summary of key findings from each participant for adapting the users' terminology.

Great resource on how to interview from nngroup

SWOT model analysis - Defining the product, company, or person strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Defining marketing personas. Its describing different people that suits exactacly to a certain ‘type’ of potenial audiance and its motivations.

Branding briefing: one-liner, vision, values, differentiation - the purpose is preparing the founder for future branding needs.

Map and streamline the content process - including internal and external factors

Write a few months to maximum 1-year achievable marketing roadmap with actions to do, best practices, and tips.

Part 2 - Design a landing page as a prototype

1. UX writing

2. Lo-Fi wireframe.

3. Define lead qualification form.

4. Curate images.

5. Graphics design - in our case, my in-house designer.

6. Provide marketing professional freelancer to program landing page including qualification form + execute PPC campaign.

Part 3 - Test Campaign

We ran a small-scale campaign just to get the idea of the marketing figures, and conversion from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads.

The outcome of this business case was positive with 90%+ of the leads understanding the value proposition and wanting to learn more before they pay.

How do I know that? Ohad personally called each lead to get feedback.

At this phase in order to reduce sales friction with potential prospects strategy suggest developing inbound marketing with long-form articles and resources providing self-learning and in time, turning active clients with less contact with sales.