Alivecore’s Growth Strategy: Can KardiaMobile overtake Apple Watch in The Portable Afib Monitor Market

In this case study, you are going to learn the power that Alivecor brings to the market by enabling value-based healthcare that will immediately alter the way cardiac patients manage their disease state and potentially add years to their lives.

This case study also includes details on:

• How Alivecor enables consumers to monitor their disease state in real-time, use data to enhance the disease state’s treatment and management, and coordinate care with their healthcare provider(s).
• Alivecor grew its website to 200,000 organic traffic since January 2020 [with a 75% bounce rate] with minimal promotional spending using clinical studies and PR.
• How Alivecor can differentiate themselves, presently, in a remote monitoring space that is indistinguishable, not just in feature-set but also in value-prop. The remote monitoring space is crowded, and difficult to distinguish companies from each other.
• How Alivecor can incorporate content marketing, promoted content, an effective ad strategy (and retargeting ads), email, and event marketing, along with community building to increase website traffic and drive customer retention.

Let’s dive right in. First, some background information:

Alivecor has an FDA clearance for the detection of atrial fibrillation, bradycardia [slower than normal heart rate], and tachycardia [the heart produces rapid electrical signals that quicken the heart rate] on a personal ECG [EKG] device.

For this case study, I am going to focus on atrial fibrillation [afib].

The Advent of Connected Care

Connected care uses readily available consumer technologies to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor’s office. It is the real-time, electronic communication between a patient and medical provider. Examples of connected care include telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and secure email communication between clinicians and their patients.

The full use of patient data — the power of data flowing — decreases patient care costs and cuts down on duplicated services, such as unnecessary lab testing, and leverages information to deliver a higher quality of patient care. It can ideally engage the consumer in their healthcare and healthcare decisions.

Connected care allows a patient to incorporate data and event reminders into the management of their healthcare.

Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote patient monitoring uses intelligent devices and systems that help ensure patients receive proper treatment and detect when patients are stable or in a state of distress, especially with chronic disease management and for seniors aging in place, in their own homes.

Remote patient monitoring is a coordinated system that uses one or more home-based or mobile monitoring devices to transmit vital-sign data or information and be reviewed by a health care professional at a distant site, such as their office. CMS sees the value of remote patient monitoring services in the same way it values other physician services.

The consumers who will benefit the most from digital health may have limited mobility, technology, or understanding of its benefits. As a result, connectivity, data analytics, and patient education are critical. In essence, these vital aspects need to incorporate to benefit the consumer without asking them to become technology experts.

What is Afib:

An irregular and [often] rapid heart rate occurs when your heart’s two upper chambers experience chaotic electrical signals atrial fibrillation. The result is an irregular heart rhythm and fast heartbeat. The heart rate in atrial fibrillation can vary from 100 to 175 beats per minute. Considering that a healthy range for a heart rate is 60 to 100 beats a minute, atrial fibrillation is not always felt by the patient, and many are asymptomatic. Symptoms of atrial fibrillation often include shortness of breath, weakness, and heart palpitations.

This irregular and often rapid heart rate with Atrial fibrillation can increase this risk of blood clots, heart failure, strokes, and other heart complications.

Episodes of atrial fibrillation may be transient or chronic that don’t go away and may require treatment. Although atrial fibrillation itself usually isn’t life-threatening, it is a severe medical condition that sometimes requires emergency treatment.

A significant concern with atrial fibrillation is the potential to develop blood clots in the upper chambers of the heart. These clots forming in the heart may circulate to other organs and lead to blocked blood flow (ischemia) and increase the risk of a stroke by a multiplicity of 5.

Approximately 50% of afib patients are asymptomatic and are unaware of their condition until it’s found during a physical examination or until they develop a stroke or heart failure, which can be devastating.

The ability to assess afib before the development of complications can have a material impact on the lives of affected patients and their families. The goal is to prevent adverse consequences from anticoagulation therapy (blood thinners), prevent strokes, and improve the overall quality of life for afib patients.

Afib increases the risk of ischemic stroke (IS) 5-fold due to the high risk of clotting associated with the disease state. Patients with afib have a heightened risk of stroke severity that leads to increased healthcare costs. The cost of severe stroke has been documented to be 11% to 71% higher when compared with minor stroke.

Additionally, anticoagulation therapy (blood thinners) to prevent IS can increase hemorrhagic stroke risk (HS) in Afib patients. Total direct costs attributable to afib are estimated at $6.65 billion annually in the United States, with approximately 350,000 hospitalizations and 5 million office visits per year.

The societal burden of stroke in the United States (i.e., direct and indirect costs for all stroke types) is estimated at $34.3 billion annually. Depending on the type of stroke, costs can vary between stroke types. A recent analysis estimated the 4-year medical expenditures for IS and HS to be $39,396 and $48,327, just among Medicare beneficiaries.

The CDC data shows that the median age for men with atrial fibrillation is 66.8 years, and for women, 74.6 years. According to PubMed, over 5 million Americans have afib today, and the US population with afib is expected to grow to over 12 million by 2030. Worldwide over 33.5 million people [20.9 million men] have afib with an anticipated market growth of over 50 million by 2050, according to the WHO.,

Your risk of developing afib, a common heart rhythm disorder, increases as you become older. However, atrial fibrillation can occur at any age. When it develops in younger people, it’s usually associated with other heart conditions.

With proper treatment, individuals with atrial fibrillation can live healthy and active lives. Although afib is not considered life-threatening, it can lead to complications such as blood clots, stroke, and heart failure if left untreated.

With increased prevention, coupled with effective care management and patient engagement efforts, Alivecor has taken a value-based care approach and delivers better outcomes for patients — helping keep them out of hospitals and emergency rooms while improving quality of life.

Alivecor

Few companies have developed products that can impact lives as readily as Alivecor.

Launched in 2012, Alivecor has enabled physicians and patients to share real-time health information. Data isn’t just important information; it is the foundation for better health.

This data can be analyzed and shared between doctors and patients. Using the Alivecor Kardiamobile device and app, a patient in as little as 30 seconds can take an EKG and send the results to their physician in real-time.

Data helps physicians identify patients who may be at risk for costly ER visits or frequent hospital readmission. Data allows for coordination of care and treatment — when patients have multiple specialists treating chronic conditions — data allows for proactive alerts to physicians to schedule wellness appointments and advanced preventive screenings.

Physicians’ real-time access to medical health insights helps save money and reduce patients’ pain, suffering and anxiety.

Presently, most of our health care system relies on a fee-for-service model — doctors are paid based on the volume of services they provide — not how much your health improves.

Alivecor offers a value-based solution that aids in delivering real-time health outcomes and the ability to prevent the devastating progression of cardiac events leading to strokes and death.

Imagine going to your doctor’s office and knowing every aspect of your health and well-being is taken into account, with a personalized plan of action.

Imagine that your doctor helps you make personalized decisions about not just your care but issues not usually discussed in a doctor’s office — like how to access healthy food to improve your health and manage a disease state.

Alivecor truly is a model for value-based healthcare.

By delivering more preventive screenings and helping patients adhere to their medication better, the Alivecor product offering improves Afib patient’s health and lowers medical costs.

Alivecor uses data to get ahead of chronic conditions (afib, bradycardia, tachycardia) and prevent these cardiac conditions from worsening.

Considering that roughly two-thirds of Americans are prescribed at least one prescription medicine, 50 percent do not take their medication, resulting in 125,000 premature deaths every year. Neglecting to take prescription medicines presents a considerable problem to public health and the associated costs of end-of-life worsening care.

An engaged and educated consumer has an incentive to adhere to their prescription drug regime.

They understand the consequences and are seeing the effect of compliance or non-compliance in real-time.

Taking a value-based care approach and extending the doctor-patient relationship using a collaborative process where physicians and patients work together instead of in silos ensures that patients manage their condition and comply with their medication.

Hospital and ER visits are expensive — the average cost of a three-day hospital stay is approximately $30,000.

In less than eight years, AliveCor has acquired over 50,000 users and has a post-money valuation in the range of $100M to $500M (USD) as of 23 October 2019, according to PrivCo after recently closing $5.8 million toward its $9.2 million goal.

In total, Alivecor has successfully raised over $65 million, including a sizable investment from Mayo Ventures.

According to SensorTower, Alivecor had 20,000 downloads of Kardia, the cloud-based premium offer last month, and under 5,000 downloads of KardiaStation. KardiaPro presents data in a simple, intuitive format designed to conform to medical providers’ CPT reimbursement code requirements.

Veterinary AliveECG is specifically designed for veterinary professionals and their pet owner customers, allowing vets to take accurate recordings and improve the quality of care offered.

As Alivecor products are considered wearable, this raises the inherent issue of privacy and HIPAA.

Wearables fall into a healthcare “gray area” when it comes to HIPAA compliance.

HIPAA would likely apply when a healthcare provider asks consumers to supply it with the health data collected by their wearables.

As Pamela Greenstone, program director for the online health information management program at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Allied Health, points out, “All wearables, once they are interfacing with your healthcare organization’s information, your physician practice EHR, that’s where HIPAA applies.” Reading through the Alivecor Privacy Policy, it is not possible to tell if they are HIPAA compliant. At no point do they mention HIPAA compliance.

So, what sent Alivecor into rapid growth?

Undoubtedly, their product played a considerable role. There was nothing like it at the time.

But like any product, Alivecor needed to make sure people knew about them and knew what the product did.

That’s where marketing comes in.

In 2011, one of the co-founders — David Albert, MD — Albert worked because on handheld EKGs (ECGs) since 1990 when the first Palm handheld was released. In 1998, he received a patent with Bruce Satchwell and Kim Barnett for wireless transmission of EKGs in handheld devices.

At the time, EKGs were too overpowered, expensive, and complicated for most consumers to use.

Dr. Albert was in search of a better way for cardiac patients to monitor their heart health.

In December 2010, Albert uploaded a video to Youtube that got over 100,000 views in 48 hours. By attending the 2011 CES show, a venture capital raise of $3 million in seed funding resulted.

Knowing that this was a potential starving market, Albert set out to create Alivecor, which now has multiple products in its pipeline, including a KardiaBand with clinical studies at Columbia University and the Mayo Clinic. These studies demonstrated that KardiaBand could detect elevated potassium levels (hyperkalemia) in the blood without a blood test.

One of the many things that make Alivecor unique from its competition is it uses a neural network to train its products to detect heart problems. According to the patent filings, the network uses four convolutional layers, with two tied to 300,000 parameters and takes about seven minutes to train on a new user.

After about 30 days of product use, the software builds a user’s heart profile — a data-driven model, including how the heart’s electrical system is firing.

In this growth study, we’ll dive into how Alivecor acquires users by analyzing:

• What they do to acquire traffic and how to improve both organic and paid traffic
• How they turn that traffic into customers
• How they can improve their interactions with consumers
• How they can drive retention

Behind the strategy

Alivecor’s customer acquisition strategy relies on two distinct pillars:

1. A starving crowd: people desiring a better way to manage their disease state and relief from the fear that afib symptoms can be evaluated and delivered in real-time.
2. Their company vision: to save lives and transform cardiology by delivering intelligent, highly-personalized information about the heart to clinicians and patients anytime, anywhere.

The Alivecor vision aligns perfectly with the needs of that starving crowd. Based on the concept that your customers are trying to accomplish something, solve a problem with your product — that’s the “Job” that needs to be done.

These jobs could be something like:

I can feel my heart racing. Am I having an afib episode? If so, am I at serious risk for an MI or stroke?

Or we can dive deeper:

The Alivecor reading says I’m in afib, and my heart rate is now at 140 bpm, I checked my heart rate 30 minutes ago, and my heart rate is more elevated; I should head to the ER.

As I analyze and dissect Alivecor’s marketing and growth strategy, you’ll notice that almost everything Alivecor does or is recommended lines up with the needs of the starving crowd by showing them how Alivecor can achieve the goals that they’re trying to accomplish — being able to complete an EKG in 30 seconds in the comfort of your own home or on the go.

Behind the strategy

Website

Home page

Product Page

Clinician Page

Target Audience

Paid Search

Social Media Ads

Organic Search and SEO

Content Marketing

Content Distribution

Email marketing

Website

After analyzing the site, I concluded that the following pages are the highest priority for user and customer acquisition.

1. The Home Page — page goal: converting highly-motivated traffic into purchasers and retain premium protection plan users.
2. Product page — page goal: convert cold and warm traffic into purchasers and premium protection plan users.
3. Clinicians Page — page goal: entice medical providers to recommend KardiaMobile to patients using the potential for telemedicine reimbursement

Home page

Simplicity is the first thing you notice about the home page. It’s not a very common strategy for most businesses. With Alivecor being so intuitive, powerful, and quick to use, they lead with the product rather than spend a lot of time explaining with volumes of text.

Alivecor keeps it simple by letting the desktop and mobile app video provide context about the product and its ease of use.

A homepage with a lot of information steals attention away from what’s most important to Alivecor’s business goals: product sales and product usage.

In my opinion, the homepage header text lacks an emotional connection; it fails to address or relieve most cardiac patient’s number one emotion — anxiety. People diagnosed with a cardiac condition are scared and afraid; they want knowledge and solutions. The header text sells features, not the benefit of the product offering.

People don’t buy things just to buy them; people buy things to solve a specific problem. Just as nobody uses a product or service for its own sake, but because a product or service helps them solve a particular problem.

For this reason, Alivecor should always be positioned as a helping hand that helps the real hero of the story — their customer — overcome their fears and offers a real-time solution to be proactive with their disease state and improve their overall health and ideally health outcome.

Valuable content centers on the story your audience already inhabits, entering it not as the hero but as a helping hand.

There are two principal reasons this approach is so practical.

First, you want your audience to visualize themselves as the champion of the product. If you can’t or won’t stop talking about how great your product or company is, this is very difficult to accomplish. Secondly, adopting a more humble tone can help increase your credibility in the mind of the reader.

I would suggest that Alivecor do two things: first, make it easy and straightforward to purchase, and secondly, use a better call to action (CTA) in place of “View Details.”

An actionable CTA requires a verb. Verbs are action words. In a CTA, a verb lets the audience know exactly what you want them to do.

Without a verb, the CTA lacks direction.

For example, using a CTA consists of “Learn More Now” or “Be The Captain of Your Heart Health — Buy Now.”

Focus on FOMO (fear of missing out); the text should lead the potential customer to conclude that by doing [X], I’ll improve my health, quality of life, happiness, etc.

Alivecor needs to take away the product’s risks on the home page; this allows the ability to minimize the risk of trying the product and add reassurance to increase conversions.

You want to reassure new customers that they have nothing to lose. Alivecor could focus its call to action because potential and new customers can try the product for 30 days and contact support for a return authorization with no strings attached.

For example, the CTA and homepage text could reflect:

Subheadline 1: Try Alivecor for 30 days and if you’re not convinced, return it with no strings attached

Subheadline 2: We’ll email you five days before your 30-day trial expires

Graphic: Highlight the 5-day reminder, so you don’t forget to cancel if you are not seeing the benefits of using the Alivecor product.

And to encourage product purchase and usage, they show two rows of bullet points and text to confirm the efficacy of the product offering:

I’ve always remembered author Laura Busche’s words: A brand is a unique story that consumers recall when they think of you.

Following Busche’s thinking, a positioning model will help you locate the place your brand should occupy in a consumer’s mind:

First, answer these three questions about your company:

• What is it? Be descriptive.
• What are the customer benefits? How does it improve customers’ lives?
• What is its personality? If your product, company, or service was human and you met at a cocktail party, how would you describe him/her?

“For the consumer, the answer who you are, how you’ll improve my life, and what it’s like to work with you, respectively.” But it takes a few more steps to deeply anchor your brand in a consumer’s mind. That brings you to the branding pyramid:

As Busche so sufficiently stated: “Emotional benefits relate to how I, as your customer, can gain confident control of my life by using you. The ‘something bigger’ speaks to what you aim to deliver to your customers, but also to the world in ten years. Like a company’s mission or vision, this brand promise or ‘something bigger’ should be inspirational and help define ‘true north’ for the brand and the product you’re building.”

“The pyramid model is a way to ‘level up’ from the attributes that define your product to the benefits it delivers. Then you can step into the emotional realm that makes a brand memorable.’

Emotions are how you will be remembered.

Emotion is the link between how the product will benefit the consumer and how it will benefit the world. The right emotion is powerful and memorable enough to tie them together.

Sell the benefits, not features:

People buy benefits, not features.

• Features are factual statements about the product or service, like what it can do, its specs and dimensions, etc.
• Benefits tell the result of what a product can do for the customer.

Compelling emotional imagery and common-sense messages are critical for successful branding. Recall when Steve Jobs launched the iPod, Apple sold the benefit of having “1,000 songs in your pocket,” not the feature of ‘1 GB of storage”.

By focusing on the benefit combined with an emotional connection, you increase clicks and conversions.

Consumers, and more so health consumers, don’t care about product features; they care far more about benefits.

Alivecor needs to focus on the “why” the customer should want to purchase, rather than “what” the product is.

The CTA and aligning text need to focus on the problem it solves (benefits) for customers.

Alivecor’s main product page has similar text and a twist on the homepage message.

The look is different, but the overall strategy and messaging are the same.

The product pages provide very little information about the product. In essence, the only information you can find on the company is from vague, jargon-filled statements like “Take a medical-grade EKG anytime, anywhere. In just 30 seconds, detect Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm” and “KardiaMobile is the most clinically-validated personal EKG in the world, Now a medical-grade EKG can become part of your daily routine. Enjoy the peace of mind.“

All are grand statements — when there’s enough context — but they are almost meaningless by themselves.

Why?

Because there’s no more relevant information on the page, suggesting that the user needs to have context about and understand the medical terms of the product BEFORE they get to this page (otherwise, no one will purchase or enroll in the premium service).

This is likely considering the means potential customers take to get to the page:

• Direct and branded traffic — these people know what Alivecor is and what you can do with the product(s). They either want to learn more about the product or disease state (in which case they’ll navigate the correct page) or purchase.

Due to these factors, there’s no immediate need to go in-depth with a sales pitch.

Yet, what about the millions of potential cardiac patient consumers who find themselves on the Alivecor website without prior knowledge of the product offering?

Here’s where Alivecor needs to focus on the instant reward. For potential customers and new customers, you want to deliver value as soon as possible to provide a rewarding customer experience.

Offering an ebook, infographic, or similar information on the disease state, reading an EKG, or equivalent, builds customer trust and adds to the customer experience.

Instant gratification goes a long way in creating goodwill, and humans love it. When we, the consumer, decide we want something, we want it now — this is why over 100 million Americans pay for Amazon Prime to have their orders delivered in 24 hours or less.

This is why copy matters, and the copy chosen for the CTA sets expectations on when the consumer will see a reward for taking action on your website.

Product Page

The few ads and retargeting ads that Alivecor runs go to a product page that targets cold traffic:

Value proposition (headline)

The value proposition is arguably the most critical part of any page. It’s the first thing potential customers see immediately upon landing on a page, and it provides the context you need to instantly understand if the product does what you need it to do.

This Alivecor product page has no value proposition:

Source

It isn’t until you scroll past the hero image that you see the Alivor value proposition, and it is represented as bullet points of text and pull-down menus:

The page fails to answer the 3 critical questions that someone first asks themselves when they visit a page:

1. What is this? FDA-cleared, clinical grade personal EKG monitor. Okay, so what?
2. How does it help me? Detect Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia, or Normal heart rhythm.
3. What makes it better than the alternatives? KardiaMobile has been used by the world’s leading cardiac care medical professionals and patients, with more than 60 Million EKGs recorded.

It’s short, value-focused, and demonstrates a tangible outcome, which the customer is looking for. This also uses a few direct response marketing principles to create a compelling hook:

• A primary promise:
• A perceived differentiator: Used by the world’s leading cardiac care medical professionals and patients
• An interesting element: Add Premium Protection Plan that includes Device Replacement, Cloud Storage & Security, Personalized Heart Health Report, and Medication Tracking.
• Crush objections: No commitment required. I would add — Cancel anytime.

There can be improvements to this value proposition (like adding in an emotional component). Still, combining the four elements above makes it captivating and engaging enough for you to want to continue reading.

A significant problem with the Alivecor product pages is the consumer is now distracted and starts looking at things other than purchase intent.

It’s easy to get distracted, reading through reviews, technical specs, and more.

This opens up the genuine possibility that the consumer leaves the page without ever purchasing.

Alivecor would be far better using a dedicated landing page for each ad group.

This can easily be accomplished with the aid of a graphics designer and copywriter.

Unbounce today offers the ability to template landing pages quickly and easily. These can be set up in advance with relevant copy to reflect the ad, which engages the consumer and eliminates the current on-page distractions.

Messaging framework:

A web page is part of the customer journey and should present a story about why the visitor should take the action you want them to take, allowing people to rationalize their behavior.

The outline of this story is your messaging framework, which consists of 3 key elements: what you say (message), when to say it (hierarchy or order), and where you say it on the page (layout). Solely after you know your hierarchy should you focus on how you say it (images and text).

The Alivecor pages lack this straightforward messaging hierarchy. Using the Geico tagline as an example, the consumer quickly understands the value proposition:

Section 1: Value proposition: — 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.

Alivecor would be better off with the value proposition on the homepage from the main product page with an enhancement: 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, anytime, anywhere.

Section 2: Alivecor’s advantages, benefits, and how it works — Take a medical-grade EKG in 30 seconds. Simply open the Kardia app on your smartphone, put your fingers on the electrodes, and see results instantly.

Section 3: Pricing — Choose the Kardiamobile product that best suits your needs and try for 30 days; if you’re not satisfied, call for a return authorization and full credit.

Section 4: Critical features you may enjoy — Add even greater peace of mind with a Premium Protection Plan for a low monthly price and try for free for 30 days. Here, I would sell the benefits of longitude data, alerts, and cloud storage. The ability to enhance medication compliance, determine potential triggers of afib saves lives, and it could be your own.

Section 5: Social proof (testimonials and social proof)

Section 6: FAQs

Section 7: Social proof (who else is using Alivecor)

I would suggest that Alivecor show the logos of the various hospitals that are using the products, from the Mayo Clinic to Cedars-Sinai

Here are 4 other ideas Alivecor could try:

• A more precise and visual story arc for the page (Value prop > social proof > significant competitive advantage > how you see effectiveness and success in the product > features & benefits > social proof > CTA > FAQ)
• Precisely laddering out how you’d see success in the product, with visuals for each step (example: 1. Choose a product. 2. Take your EKG in the comfort of your home, office, or even the car. 3. Send your EKG to you physician from anywhere)

As a general rule, be careful about having several columns or elements visible on the page at once.

For example, a 3-column section could be similar to having 3-people trying to speak to you at once — it’s distracting and hard to choose who to focus on.

Combine that distraction with the four exceptionally visually captivating images in this section, and you could end up with a reader who has no idea what to look at or read first.

With no clear message per section, you risk there being too much friction — it’s distracting, not scannable, steals focus away from the words, and somewhat fails at getting you to want to read the copy.

That being said, I believe the images reflect the copy very strongly and, with Kardiamobile being a tool that allows you to take an EKG literally with your fingertips, I think it works for the brand.

Alivecor has taken a chance on not following best practices, and, in my opinion, it’s turned out well.

• Showcasing the relevant features underneath each of the steps outlined above
• Adding a link to a series of pages that provide a simple explanation of each cardiac disease state Kardiamobile works on as a row on the page to push people into the product. This reinforces the diversity of the product offering.
• Offer both gated and ungated content. Alivecor needs to build an email list and then use this list to engage its target audience.
• I signed up for the Alivecor email list and received nothing in return, not even a simple welcome email.

These changes would likely not make the homepage longer, but they will create a much clearer showcase for its value and engage the Alivecor target audience.

Clinician Page

I have a serious problem with the copy on this page:

In particular this copy:

This verbiage raises serious concerns from consumer perception and potential legal ramifications.

As two physicians — one at a leading New England teaching hospital and a Dean at the University of Michigan Medical School — stated to me when I ran this by them, “Healthcare has a lot of issues, this page is suggesting that medical providers are only doing this for monetary reasons and creates a situation for unscrupulous providers looking for a quick buck to game the system, hurting the entire profession.”

Legally, telemedicine is under the Federal Government’s microscope for fraud and abuse. As noted in the Pocket ECG settlement when Acting U.S. Attorney William E. Fitzpatrick for the District of New Jersey stated, “Sophisticated medical technology can be used to help doctors dramatically improve the lives of their patients, but it can also be misused to increase medical bills fraudulently,”

A simple Google search illustrates the ongoing issues with telemedicine fraud under the Federal Government’s microscope.

Paid Search

As Nik Shamra texted me: “it’s crazy how many brands believe paid is the main way to launch a brand. You have to create the narrative, and the story (the WHY) first and paid is just a TOOL to amplify it.”

“Paid media shouldn’t be looked at as a main form of acquisition, but rather an extension of the narrative created organically through content marketing, word of mouth, reviews, press, and the mission of the company itself. You can’t just spend money to create a narrative. Well, you can, but you’ll just waste a ton of it upfront.”

That stated, let’s dig into the Alivecor paid media.

Alivecor takes a substandard approach to Google Ads. Which I question the effectiveness of.

Below are the Google ads that Alivecor is presently running with the number of keywords each ad targets. This includes an ad for Amazon, which I find slightly amazing as it sends traffic away from their website.

Each of the text ads uses one branded keyword for a total of 18 keywords. Examples of the keywords are: “alive core,” “mobile EKG monitor”, “kardiomobil”, “kardia heart monitor,”“alivecor kardiamobile”, “kardia”, “alivecor kardia mobile”, “kardia ecg”, “alivecor heart monitor”, “kardia mobile ekg monitor”.

Target Audience

I have a serious concern as to who the target audience is that Alivecor has identified.

Based on the Google ad targeting, see the[chart below], it appears that a clearly defined target audience has not been established, and it skews toward younger males.

Numerous studies have and continue to document that women are the buyers of household healthcare. As Oliver Wyman’s new Women in Healthcare Leadership Initiative and Women in Healthcare Leadership 2019 report recently documented: “Healthcare is an industry where women make 80 percent of buying and usage decisions and 65 percent of the workforce.”

A few other relevant stats:

• Women make 90% of household healthcare decisions. (Source: Yankelovich Monitor, M2W Conference)
• Women account for 93% of OTC pharmaceutical purchases. (Source: Tom Peters, in the forward to “Marketing to Women,” by Marti Barletta)
• More than the family doctor, the internet is the primary source for healthcare information, and women more than men seek such information online. (Source: Natural Marketing Institute, 2009)
• More than three-quarters of those 65 years and older say they go online for health information (Source: Burst Media Survey, 2007)
• 9 of 10 women online seek health information via the web. The Internet — more than the family doctor — is the primary source for healthcare information, and women seek such information online more than men. (Source: National Marketing Institute)

Source: The Purchasing Power of Women: Statistics

Additionally, women are also the ones who push their reluctant spouses into the doctor’s office, adding years and quality to their lives.

My strong suggestion is for Alivecor to test targeting ads and promoted content to women; after all, they are the ones making the healthcare purchasing decision and are deeply engaged with researching health issues.

Through SEMRush, I identified that Alivecor uses1 of 3 main keyword targeting strategies:

1. Branded keywords (details above)
2. Not Utilized; Goal keywords
3. Not Utilized: Solution keywords

Goal campaigns

A big part of the Alivecor targeting strategy should include goal-related keywords — this type of ad [and content] addresses a more narrow and specific search term and audience. In reviewing goal-related keywords on SEMrush, there are easily at least 200 goal-related keywords Aliveor should be targeting with content marketing and ads. Here is an example using the keyword “ECG”:

Each of these keywords blueprints a job that you can accomplish using the Alivecor products.

Like what does ECG measure:

The ad that Alivecor I would recommend they use should be straightforward.

Headline 1 — What Does an ECG Measure

A close variation of the search query to ensure that I know this result is relevant to my search intention, which helps it stand out and provide the CTR is high, and the CPC is low.

Headline 2 — DIY your ECG in 4 easy steps

Outlines how easy I can take my own ECG in 4 steps. Cool. The headline also mentions Do it yourself [DIY], which speaks to an accurate, quick, and cheap solution. Just the kind of value-based healthcare Alivecor was made for.

Description — Try an EKG or 6 Lead EKG, take an instant ECG, get instant results. Try it for 30 days and if not satisfied, a full refund!

This expands on the four steps mentioned in headline 2 (buy, download the app, take an instant EKG, Instant Results). It also reframes Alivecor as a product you have to pay for. In essence, this should weed out tire kickers and people only interested in a free product and pre-qualify those ready to pay for an excellent product and service.

Where they can improve:

Sitelinks

This feels like a lost opportunity for Alivecor; they link out to pages that aren’t relevant to user search intentions. Alivecor should create an ad group or campaign site links customized towards the ability to quickly and easily take an EKG. This can be easily accomplished by either linking to a dedicated landing page or one of their other relevant pages, like a dedicated product page or an advertorial that aligns with the ad( or ad group).

I would strongly recommend the use of a landing page.

As Professor Galloway has stated, “rookie marketers mistake thinking choice is a good thing. Choice is a tax on your time and attention. Consumers don’t want more choices, but more confidence in choices presented.”

Cut all unnecessary elements from your sales pages; this is precisely what a good landing page does. The consumer’s ability to not get caught up reading numerous reviews or clicking on a pull-down menu of items or the main menu and reading other pages increases the likelihood of a conversion.

Message matching

The ad’s messaging needs to be tightly aligned and relevant to the messaging on the landing page. It needs to show that I can take an EKG in 4 easy steps, with the critical message from the ad: “30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, anytime, anywhere in 4 easy steps”.

By clicking on the ad, you expect a page that has you imagining yourself taking an EKG in 4 steps and why one would use an EKG, not a page that only talks about a product and its features.

A mismatched ad/landing page messaging can decrease your ads quality scores — driving up the cost per click — and will likely increase visitor bounce rates.

Why create a goal campaign?

This strategy is perfect for Alivecor. It positions the product as an effective and efficient way to reduce customers’ fears and anxiety, fundamental to every product or service’s purchase decision.

Targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords and keyword phrases is a great way to lower cost per click [CPC] costs.

Goal-related campaigns require a more comprehensive funnel. This requires more resources to build the funnel. These campaigns are too high up in the funnel for a lot of businesses to target using Google Ads. These campaigns are very effective.

For example, when a search is done for a term like “What Does an ECG Measure,” this says that they haven’t found a lot of quality content that answers their search query. The target audience is actively looking for information about how to relieve their anxiety. Alivecor should capitalize on this opportunity taking consumers through the buyer’s journey; this is an active research process by the consumer. Educational content builds trust and establishes the company as a credible source of information — as an expert. A multitude of assets that can be created for this journey range from ad -> lead-magnet -> email sequence; advertorial (a blend between an ad and an editorial) -> landing page, or ad -> long-form sales page, that tells why an EKG is essential and what it tells the consumer; shows how to take an ECG/EKG using KardiaMobile, the benefits of longitudinal data and similar.

Yet, Alivecor doesn’t take this approach.

Solution campaigns

Alivecor should target high-intent users with their solution campaigns. This type of campaign focuses on people who know what they want to accomplish and have a firm idea of how they will achieve it: with medical-grade technology.

High-value campaigns focus on keywords related to a specific solution — often by adding nouns such as afib, EKG, watch, false-positive readings.

For instance: ECG, apple watch, false-positive readings, Alivecor

Since Alivecor is not running any solution campaigns presently, I’m going to use what is available via a simple Google search using the same search intent for this example.

If Alivecor were running a solution campaign, I would suggest Alivecor lead with content in the ad. It would be straightforward to create a compelling piece of content that uses the Beckers Hospital Review article as a cite and include recent data that the Apple watch is not practical with a heart rate above 120 beats per minute (BPM).

Headline 1 — Which has clinically correct EKGs for afib — Apple Watch or Kardiomobile

This ad explicitly mentions my core search terms to ensure it’s relevant to me. They note that “Likely to be tons of false positives, which will drive anxiety and some overtreatment.” Apple said its app accurately detects atrial fibrillation 99 percent of the time when it gets a good reading. However, Dr. Yazdi is concerned that accuracy may be compromised in younger patients, for whom atrial fibrillation is rare.”

“Dr. Yazdi’s analysis found that in people under the age of 55, the Apple Watch correctly diagnoses atrial fibrillation 19.6 percent of the time. This compares to 76 percent accuracy among users between the ages of 60 and 64, 91 percent among those aged 70 to 74, and 96 percent for those older than 85.”

This tells me that the Apple Watch may not be the best portable EKG monitor for me — through clinical and scientific-based data — and calms any concerns I may have regarding the Alivecor product offering vs. the Apple Watch.

Headline 2 — Apple Watch and False Positive Afib Readings

This is great because it focuses on the fact that I can expect false-positive readings using the Apple Watch vs. Alivecor products. The key benefit here is alieving consumer anxiety while aligning itself to the company vision.

Description — Pick An ECG Monitor, Download the App & Instant Results. Try It Risk-Free For 30 Days!

The description walks me through the three easy steps to take an EKG in the comfort of my own home, office, or on the go (purchase, download, instant results). This messaging appears throughout the Alivecor website and should be utilized on their ads for other campaigns.

Once you click on the ad, you should be taken to a straightforward landing page that showcases the products and ease of use with a buy now button.

A landing page is a dedicated resource that is good for the purpose it should serve — giving potential customers helpful information directly related to the ad they clicked on, in this example, demonstrating the ease of use and accuracy of the Alivecor product offering.

It’s critical that the message from the ad is matched on the landing page.

Key takeaway: Alivecor will benefit by using paid search at two different stages of the funnel very well. The ad copy needs to do a great job of speaking to the search term and the unique benefits that the product and service brings. The landing pages need to have the page copy match and align with the ad copy.

Social media ads

Facebook and YouTube should be two of Alivecor’s biggest channels, according to Pew Research, 69% of adults use Facebook (74% visit the site daily), and 73% use YouTube. Three-quarters of women in the US use Facebook versus 63% of men.

The share of older Americans on Facebook has more than doubled since 2012. Of the aged 65 and older demographic, 46% use Facebook, and 38% use YouTube.

I want to take some time and dissect the creative, copy, and overall messaging behind Alivecor’s social ads.

Ad teardown

The team at Alivecor is not testing many different angles — and it’s not limited to the copy, brand message, or images. But also how Alivecor communicates the overarching story, they’re trying to convey.

The Alivecor ads lack great, eye-catching visuals and copy for their ads.

Facebook ad 1:

Portable FDA-Cleared EKG Device. Record & SaveEKGs on Your Phone. Try it Risk-Free for 30 Days. Free Shipping.

Offering a 30-day risk-free offer demonstrates the value of taking the risk out of purchasing for their potential customers; the brand message lacks an emotional connection and does little to relieve the anxiety that cardiac patients have with their disease state. Let’s dive deeper into that.

Facebook ads: On-brand designs

Facebook ad 2:

Image:

Ad imagery is possibly the most critical aspect of social media ads. An ad has to stimulate the visual senses with elements to get people’s attention mindlessly scrolling through their news feed.

When looking through Alivecor ads, I noticed that many of their images in their ads follow a noticeable pattern. The ads lack any customer testimonials, or customer using the product, or user-generated content — every ad has a product image, and that’s it.

And they lack a clear description of the product or benefit. They lack a snappy value proposition that narrows in on the singular job that a user is trying to accomplish — — relieve their anxiety.

I would suggest something like, although before I commit to this copy, I would want to complete additional research:

— 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere

By adding engaging copy to the image, you make the ad more eye-catching, allowing the reader to understand your core message by explicitly stating it immediately.

This ad contains a screenshot of the product to showcase an EKG, and it lacks the definition of WHY, or any emotional connection or benefit such as easy to use( the product and service) [The people I showed the ad to thought it was for a video game or day trading]

There’s more to the marketing imagery than having a nice image while explicitly showing your product and how it helps you. You need to consider the messages you are communicating.

Copy

You need an emotional connection in your ads; an excellent copy will do this for you; Alivecor needs to up its game in this area. The copy should be concise. Most importantly, communicate that you can take an EKG in 30 seconds in 4 easy steps and potentially save your life, or at minimum prevent an adverse event, relieving any anxiety you may have.

If we break it down further, Alivecor’s current ad copy needs to focus on variations of the following core messages:

• The job you’re trying to do: Take an EKG in 30 seconds
• The benefit/advantage it gives you: Reduces anxiety of the unknown and the potential of an adverse event (e.g., stroke, afib episode, etc.)
• How you do it: Put your fingertips on the electrodes for 30 seconds, and you’re done. Send the EKG to your medical professional

Image:

The use of warm colors and the product in use is designed to draw your attention while implicitly communicating ease of use — a message designed to appeal to the target audience or the healthcare purchaser in the household and those who are frustrated or anxious about their cardiac health. This helps reduce the frustration level WITHOUT stating it:

An ad that contains an example — or screenshot of the product and app in use — to showcase how you can rapidly take an EKG to see your heart function and pulse in real-time, and how simplistic it is to use, although this ad image can be improved by showing the actual person taking the EKG and facing the camera:

Copy:

I’m a big fan of direct yet straightforward copy in ads. Ad copy should be concise, spaced out, easily readable. Below is an example [that is not based on research that would be needed to verify the copy] 3 different goals that you can accomplish with Alivecor:

• 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life
• Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere
• Save and Share Your EKG with Your Medical Doctor

If you’re an afib [or cardiac patient], this information is highly desirable to you — no one wants to wait days for results from their doctor or end up in the ER needlessly. An ad like this is targeted at existing consumers with knowledge of the product offering to close them, and the key selling points would be different compared to the ads targeting cold traffic.

Facebook and YouTube Video ads:

Video should be a big part of the Alivecor ad strategy, and it makes sense why; Alivecor is a medical device where it’s the most significant advantage comes from the ease of use and speed.

An image makes it difficult to convey how fast and how easily you can take a medical-grade EKG and send it to your healthcare provider — but a video will do this easily.

Video: I would suggest that Alivecor use a few video formats; walkthroughs, case studies, and product overviews. I would also use video to tell real success and patient stories with their ads.

Using video with a real person, just like you and me, shows how easily they solved their anxiety, improved their care and coordinated with their medical professional to make someone else’s problem feel like your problem.

Emphasize the power Alivecor brings to managing the disease state.

This is a classic and very effective marketing tactic that’s great for targeting audiences who have yet to realize they have a problem [or that a solution is available for their problem] that needs to be solved.

Copy:

KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health. 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life: Take an EKG, Anytime, Anywhere

The ad is well written and focuses on two psychological triggers: empowerment and ease of use by personalizing the copy and connecting with the readers on a deeper, more emotional level.

For example, tapping into ease of use with the message: Take an EKG, Anywhere, Anytime you let the reader know they’ll reduce their anxiety while receiving results equivalent to a medical doctor’s office.

By stating that KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health. 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life shows that Alivecor empowers you by elevating your ability to manage your healthcare without hesitation or obstacles and on-demand.

Regarding the copy structure, it becomes evident that I’m also using a similar structure to the ad we tore down above. Here’s how it goes:

• The job you’re trying to do: Take an EKG, Anywhere, Anytime
• The benefit/advantage it gives you: 30 Seconds Could Save Your Life
• How you do it: KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health

Retargeting Ads:

97% of people who visit your site for the first time leave without buying anything, and then they’re lost forever. Unless you can bring them back, that is where retargeting ads come in.

Retargeting builds visibility for your brand, allowing you to reach an audience that has already expressed interest in your products. It allows you the opportunity to show ads to a perfectly primed audience — people who have previously been on your site — and nurture them to convert or come back to make a purchase.

On average, retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than display ads.

Your retargeting audience is aware of who you are; it makes no sense to show them generic, introductory ads. This audience was on your website, and they didn’t make a purchase. Retargeting is an opportunity to address their concerns and convince them to come back and convert.

This is not how Alivecor is using its retargeting opportunity.

Below are several of the retargeting ads I was hit with over the last week. As you’ll see, most are image-only ads that lack an emotional connection, a reason to purchase (much less click on the ad), lack context, a sense of urgency, offer no social proof or testimonials of satisfied customers:

This ad, in particular, I question, using a logo in place of a brand name makes sense once one has established themselves as a market leader with instant logo recognition. Alivecor is not at this stage yet, and spending money on ads like this is throwing money away.

A question and concern that immediately comes to mind when seeing this ad is how many consumers know what a “KardiaMobile 6L Portable 6-lead…” is, or the purpose of the product, much less than an EKG is or for?

Key takeaway: Alivecor’s social media ads, accounts, and posts need work and need to be visually brilliant to build an engaged audience and community. Every piece of content created should be repurposed and matched with a visual element for social media [see content distribution for details]. The ad structure outlined above works well to convey the Alivecor value proposition when combined with experimenting with multiple messages and ad types to ensure Alivecor is always optimizing for the best results.

Organic Search and SEO

SEO should be a massive channel for Alivecor from smart onsite strategies and building an entirely new database of disease state and lifestyle information and a lot of link building (there are other options than just straight link building, I would initially invest in content marketing and promotion). Alivecor needs to invest heavily in Organic Search and SEO.

It’s a big operation — and it will pay off. Today, all healthcare starts online. SEMrush estimates that Alivecor presently gets a little over 76,000 people visiting their website a month from organic search, or 36% of all of their website traffic:

The direct traffic exceeds both paid and search to the Alivecor website, and social media is nonexistent.

An effective SEO strategy is based on two high-level functions: Off-site SEO and technical SEO. (Content also plays a huge part, especially in healthcare, but I’ve given that its own section).

Offsite SEO

Alivecor gets more than 50% of its traffic from branded terms.

(USA traffic only. Branded search terms account for over 50% of their traffic)

This may indicate that many people who land on their website have heard about Alivecor from external sources like their doctor, clinical studies, public relations, or other medical blogs.

That becomes apparent when diving into Alivecor.com’s backlinks — Alivecor spent a lot of resources acquiring external links to their website, over 50% of them to their home page.

These 12 websites represent 24,723, or 47.3% of Alivecor backlinks, and all reference a clinical study or a physician’s viewpoint of the product offering.

This aligns with the use of PR, clinical studies, and industry news sites.

Alivecor launched its blog with the website and has zero guest post articles up on the web.

What stands out from most businesses that want rapid growth — guest posts act as a significant catalyst for growth — Alivecor is missing a big opportunity — Alivecor should have saturated the internet with guest posts from the day they launch the website.

Guest posts give a sudden influx of authority websites speaking about Alivecor and would have exploded their website traffic, brand awareness, and domain authority.

Technical SEO

Most technical SEO analysis looks at elements like meta tags, heading tags, URL structure, and other factors for search visibility — these are all standard details.

In the Alivecor blog, several URLs break Google’s best practices and use dashes and not hyphens in the URL. This impacts search rankings adversely.

Source

What makes a good technical SEO strategy shine are the organic funnels created through keyword targeting and a Google-approved website structure.

Regarding keyword targeting, I would suggest that Alivecor takes a similar approach to their Paid Search Strategy :

• Branded terms: Ranking for phrases that contain Kariamobile and Alivecor
• Solution Terms: Ranking for phrases that describe the product and functions of their product like Home EKG Monitor or Afib Monitor and similar.
• Goal-related terms: Ranking for terms that describe what you can do with their product like “In 30 seconds, you could save your life.”

An integral part of the Alivecor overarching growth strategy should be helping the average person see success in all related cardiac and lifestyle modifications that the products apply to. I’ll go into more detail in the content marketing section.

By diving into their search rankings and website structure, it’s crystal clear that Alivecor has not invested in the structure. I would suggest that Alivecor consider splitting up their blog into four core categories that center around helping people successfully manage their disease state — these target goal-related keywords:

• Disease States [Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm]
• Management of Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia or Normal heart rhythm
• Lifestyle
• Management of Afib, etc. with Data

Rather than use individual blog posts that will get lost as Alivecor builds a content library, I would suggest Alivecor use a main page and subpages for evergreen content of the categories listed above. This allows Alivecor to feature evergreen articles and significant user acquisition drivers.

Think of these as categories, and the structure ensures that a customer or potential customer can easily find high-quality content they are searching for.

A question asked a lot is, what makes these pages rank in search?

A high ranking on Google search results from extraordinary relevant, clear, and extremely valuable experiences for the user. Many factors contribute to your rankings, but they all distill down to one thing: do users react well to the page?

Alivecor pages need to contain well-thought-out content and a structure designed to walk the user by accomplishing their goal.

And the page follows SEO best practices.

The H1 headline needs to communicate the benefit of using Alivecor products to manage Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia, or Normal heart rhythm, not just state the medical jargon.

From there, the content needs to walk you through a well-thought-out structure that answers basic questions, is easy to read, inserts relevant keywords contextually, and is broken up into basic thematic subsections.

How do these pages convert users?

Traffic that doesn’t convert is not contributing to your bottom line.

So how does Alivecor convert this traffic? To answer that, let’s walk in the shoes of potential customers looking for a way to manage afib.

I’ll begin my search with a query:

How to manage afib

And I’d end up at this search engine page result or what is commonly known as a SERP:

Creating high-quality content with a good meta tag tied to an effective landing page with additional information and a video; for example, this content in an ebook format is a very effective lead generation product.

Promoting this content and building high domain authority [DA] backlinks should lead to the ability to have this content come up as the 1st three search results after Youtube videos and featured snippets — so naturally, the consumers are going to read the description to see if it’s for me:

How to manage afib? Yes, that’s what I’m looking for.

A low-fat diet combined with walking? Excellent — now I know where to start and look. There’s a short video of a cardiologist and nutritionist offering additional information and tips.

And it’s rated 4.7 stars by 491 people? It must be excellent.

There’s no singular best practice for writing meta tags, but this search query result is appealing and matches my need, so it stands to reason that I’m going to click on it.

I end up on a landing page that takes me through how I can use diet, exercise, and KardiaMobile to monitor and track my heart health and afib episodes. I also see a short video on using the KardiaMobile Premium features to track data from my weight, medicine compliance, stress, personal notes to see what may be potentially triggering an episode of afib.

Now I click on the Call To Action [CTA]: KardiaMobile enables YOU to monitor your heart health; I’ll be taken to the signup page.

And after a short registration process, Alivecor redirects me to the screen where I can create a premium account, walks me through how to download the app and has a short introduction video on how to use KardiaMobile and maximize the value of the data, and asks me to follow them on social media or sign up for their e-newsletter.

In 2 minutes (at most), Alivecor has helped me sign up and achieve success (self-activate) using the product.

These pages should follow SEO best practices — Keyword in the H1, keyword in the introduction, and provide a transparent user experience that makes it easy for someone to purchase KardiaMobile, and understand the power and value of the total offering.

Key takeaway: Alivecor has not implemented a very successful SEO strategy, both technically and through links. Alivecor should have started pushing for backlinks from the first day that their blog went live and should have created pages and articles that not only rank well for terms high up the funnel but push visitors through the funnel and turns them into users.

Content marketing

There’s no doubt in my mind that high-quality content will drive a lot of user growth and retention for Alivecor. It’s the 3rd pillar of every good SEO strategy but deserves its own section.

A reasonable content marketing effort emphasizes depth and quality over-breadth and volume. It is well planned out and executed — even after 100’s of blog posts, infographics, tutorials, and videos.

Alivecor needs to focus on developing high-quality content that goes deep on the subject matter vs. breath and helps people succeed with their disease state. This aids the majority of site visitors who are seeking out specific content to solve their specific problems.

A hub and spoke methodology with content allow Alivecor to create content on specific topics. The main piece of content is the hub and targets top-level keywords and links to relevant long-tail-related topics. This will allow Alivecor to cover topics for readers at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. This will enable Alivecor to build depth in its content marketing strategy.

Basic content marketing rules apply and need to be addressed as Alivecor builds its content marketing strategy:

Do not create content for content’s sake.

Make organic content for the audience, not the product

Good content is focused on topics relating to customers’ needs and issues.

Good customer issues overlap with your brand’s positioning.

Good brand positioning starts with researching your clients.

I continuously remind folks that once a visitor is on your site, your marketing has won — now you need to make it easy for them to research or purchase.

Recall: All healthcare starts online today.

Every minute users are completing over 70,000 search queries related to health on Google. As David Feinberg, head of Google Health, has stated, health-related search queries account for about 7 percent of all daily searches.

Consumers proactively turn to Google to learn about their medical conditions, symptoms, and medications. It shows that users are interested in learning more about their health. While it is a step in the right direction, it can be a double-edged sword.

The internet is full of dubious websites that may not always have accurate or clinically safe information. When people are trying to self-diagnose, it’s not likely that they will be able to tell quality, genuine resources from “garbage” and dangerous sites.

If reputable medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and hospitals develop quality content that is informative and educational, this problem can be solved. That’s one of the reasons why healthcare content marketing is desperately needed. There is a high demand for articles on medicine, disease states, health technology, and healthcare overall, but very few quality resources.

In addition to building brand and product awareness, healthcare content marketing is a great way to generate quality leads. It can help medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and healthcare organizations build their reputations as experts in the long run. It provides an excellent opportunity to grow your business.

David Feinberg, MD head of Google Health, said at a speech he gave at a technology conference in Austin:

“People are asking us about conditions, medications, symptoms, and insurance questions. In this case, we are organizing the world’s health information and making it accessible to everyone.”

Before you begin to define your healthcare content marketing strategy, you need to identify your area of focus and the main problems consumers face in your niche.

Once you have identified your niche and anxiety points, talk with an expert. You need to understand the problems, solutions, and everything related to the particular topic.

You need to be mindful of your target audience while writing content. It’s most likely that it will be laymen who are not familiar with the medical or technical jargon. The average American reads at a 4th-grade level, and you need to use language appropriate for your target audience to understand easily.

A blog is a great way to build an audience for your product or service offering and build an email list of dedicated consumers who want to hear from you.

I was aghast to see a blog post on the Alivecor website where they send the reader to external sites for disease state and lifestyle information.

Opening the post with the sentence: “The Internet is massive, and a quick search will turn up hundreds of pages of results on atrial fibrillation. But if you’re serious about finding high-quality information on AFib management or a positive, active support group, you might have to put in some research time.”

This sentence says to the reader, we, Alivecor are not interested in helping you manage your disease state.

This is a tremendous missed opportunity, along with sending a wrong signal to potential and current customers.

I’m going to keep saying this until I’m dead. Today, all healthcare starts online, and consumers actively seek quality, accurate information on their disease-state, the management of, and lifestyle advice to minimize the disease’s impact state.

Consumers are actively seeking out content that quickly and thoroughly answers their questions or concerns.

Healthcare is no different than other types of marketing. It is essential to connect with people through stories in healthcare content marketing as well.

High-Growth firms are finding new content channels and formats to make their expertise more appealing, too. Research shows they invested 28% more marketing effort towards publishing primary research and 21% more toward case stories.

Take the time to check out the New York-Presbyterian Hospital patient stories campaign.

Their Patient Stories campaign shines a spotlight on the success stories of patients. Not only does it give a chance for patients to share their uplifting stories, but some of the comments also double as testimonials.

While their website shows patients’ comments, their YouTube channel has video stories. It’s a great way to showcase the work that you’re doing and garner additional social proof.

It is essential to point out that Alivecor doesn’t have any consideration-stage or gated content on their website. If consumers are engaging with your freely available content, they will want your gated content.

When looking at companies with effective and results-driven content efforts, we can break their success down to 3 areas; I would recommend Alivecor consider four areas:

1. Blog structure
2. Article structure
3. Cardiac school
4. Content Distribution

Cardiac school would be a new addition to the Alivecor website, utilizing YouTube. It would be an educational offering of MDs videos talking about different aspects of the disease state and management of, or nutritionist educating on diet, weight loss, and similar.

Blog structure

The Alivecor blog structure must be obvious and immediately state the purpose, for Alivecor, my suggestion would be to establish pillar categories.

Dedicate specific pillar categories on the blog homepage to showcase four high-level use cases of the main product: KardiaMobile.

• Disease State
• Management of Afib
• Lifestyle
• Data, Collaboration, and Management of Afib

The majority of Alivecor’s articles are awareness stage content, like How AFib can Affect Your Risk For Dementia. There is a significant opportunity to take it a step further and showcase how easily you can use the product to manage the disease state, track your EKGs to see what triggers an Afib episode, how losing weight substantially reduced afib by taking the article Weight loss and exercise may ease atrial fibrillation. Tailoring an article similar to this and working the benefits of KardiaMobile into the article instantly becomes a decision stage content piece.

When taking this approach with content marketing, you need to select relevant content topics aligned with each pillar and the user’s interests — this is a fundamental strategy — for example, Coping with heart disease or Coping with Afib.

Other potential article series can be written around: What caused this?” (cause) “How will this affect my life?” (consequences), and “What can be done about it?”(control).

Identifying a cause of the illness provides patients with a direction for action plans to control the disease. Patients who have afib want to know the factors that caused their afib and what will promote its progression, and recommendations for modifying factors that might trigger afib and foster persistence of their afib.

Patients need to understand the limitations of drug or ablation therapy not to be distressed if they have afib episodes even though they are being treated with medications or have undergone cardiac ablation.

With afib, pulse taking is an essential strategy in monitoring response to treatment, whether the goal is rate control or maintenance of sinus rhythm, and KardiaMobile does this without the need for a patient to learn how to palpate their pulse, count its rate, and monitor the pattern for irregularity.

Sleep apnea is a common contributor to fatigue in patients with afib; this is another series of potential articles that bring high value to patients.

An afib patient’s inability to identify a modifiable cause for their afib can be emotionally distressing. Most will make efforts to exert control of the disease by seeking to find a cause or trigger for recurrent afib episodes, and this is where the value of the KardiaMobile data comes in. It also is a topic for articles on managing depression and negative emotions from afib.

Stress-induced afib and the inability to identify a modifiable cause for the afib can be emotionally distressing to patients, and some will make efforts to exert control by seeking to find a cause or trigger for recurrent afib episodes. This ties right into the KardiaMobile Premium offer and the ability to make personal notes, monitor pharmaceutical compliance, weight, and other potential triggers.

Patients’ need and want to know about their illness varies individually by their health care encounter and their belief that they can manage the disease. Afib patients wish to understand treatment options, with a rationale for each.

Patients’ beliefs about their illness influence their coping responses to their condition, which, in turn, influence the outcomes of care, such as adherence to the treatment regimen, ability to function, and psychological adjustment to the illness. This is an opportunity for Alivecor to create relevant, high-interest content for its customers and potential customers.

Notwithstanding the topic, or if the article is for the awareness stage or conversion stage, one thing is certain — the content should always be more relevant to using the product rather than the general topic being discussed.

Article structure

From the content topics, Alivecor writes, the content team’s goal needs to be focused on results. That means paid purchases and upgrades to the premium offer.

This results-first attitude can be accomplished in every article — every page should have two constant elements:

• A Call To Action on the sidebar
• Add a call to action in the article footer

These are elements commonly found on a blog that’s optimized for conversions.

A way for Alivecor to stand out is the constant use of advertorials.

An advertorial is a sales-oriented informational piece. It’s often an article that heavily promotes a product to turn readers into customers.

Most of the Alivecor articles should be advertorials.

Each article, when purposely structured, and written, so that’s not only has a high educational value and is informative (high quality) but must be structured in a way that gives specific reasons to add call-to-actions within the posts.

Every piece of content and the related topics should help you do something, for example, dealing with depression after diagnosis, how weight loss and exercise aid with the management and control of afib, how to find your afib triggers — essentially, they all help readers accomplish specific goals.

Take it one step further, and suggest:

Our product/service also helps you accomplish [goal], check out this [product/service], and see for yourself.

Many businesses would find this “salesy,” but Alivecor deals with a target audience that is actively looking for quality information and solutions. It’s a great way to push the readers to take that next step while still being contextually relevant to their interests.

Key takeaway: Alivecor needs to create content that is not only search friendly but provides a ton of invaluable information to potential and existing customers. Alivecor should not shy away from using its blog/content to drive new users at every possible opportunity.

Content Distribution

You can create great content that would resonate with your target audience; however, just posting it on your website is a guarantee for failure.

Repurposing Content:

You can increase your site sessions and contacts without spending money on ads, all by repurposing your long-form content.

Video repurposing:

Video performs best on social media, so turning your long-form content into video memes is excellent. Facebook videos alone get 135% more organic reach than photos.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. It processes over 3 billion, yes billion searches each month, and 100 million videos are uploaded every minute, so you want to post your videos here. Another hack is to upload a .vtt file of your transcriptions with the video, making every single word-searchable, which helps significantly with SEO.

Square videos are better to post on social feeds than landscape videos as they take up 78% more real estate on someone’s phone. In a study by Buffer, it was also found that square videos have led up to an 80–100% increase in engagement over landscape ones.

Vertical videos are optimized and sized specifically for Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories. Over 500 million users per day use Instagram Stories alone. It’s a great place to be and get seen, so posting content optimized for that platform is great.

Image Quotes:

Image quotes are still necessary as Facebook posts with photos still get 3x more engagement than those without them. These are also great to add variety to your feeds amongst the video.

When it comes to your image quotes: Images with people in them can have up to a 95% increase in conversions alone.

Thumbnails:

Thumbnails are crucial for both YouTube and Facebook but in different ways.

Facebook thumbnails are crucial for advertising your video memes. These thumbnails are always run through the Facebook Text Overlay Tool to ensure they have 20% or less text so that your ad runs like a dream and isn’t stopped for having too much text.

YouTube thumbnails that are consistent and have big, bold titles tell your audience what they’re about to watch before they even press play.

When posting these assets created from your long-form content, a few things to remember:

• Square assets are meant for social feeds, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Vertical assets are intended for stories (Instagram and Facebook stories)
• Landscape assets are meant for YouTube.

Where To Post These Assets:

• Shuffle your repurposed assets across all platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Place different assets on each platform on the same day. For instance, post a quote on Instagram but a video meme on Facebook. Don’t post the exact same content on all platforms at once.
• They use Hubspot or a similar tool to share and track your social efforts. The important thing is to track it.
• Post to Facebook & LinkedIn groups with the right audience. Groups are an excellent opportunity to connect with potential leads and partners.
• Create and post on your own Facebook & LinkedIn groups.
• Tag and mention as many guests and/or customers as possible. This puts you in front of their audience and encourages them to share the content as well.
• Always include variation in terms of copy/text when posting on social media. Some statuses need to be longer and more engaging than others.
• Post image quotes both in terms of albums and separately. This makes sure they get seen everywhere.
• Post to IGTV. This is significant additional exposure for your video content.
• Add YouTube embedded videos to your blog for SEO with a summary of the video.

Forums:

Every product and disease state has a forum on the internet; it’s just a matter of searching for them. There will be people looking for helpful educational content to answer their questions and concerns from Quora to Reddit.

Engaging with your target audience in forums and Facebook groups helps spread your content in a non-intrusive manner while bringing value to these consumers. This also drives traffic to your website and increases the interaction on your content.

When you engage in these forums, your role is not to sell your product, and your purpose is to engage with your target audience. You want to ask and answer relevant questions and answer their questions.

Now you’re thinking, okay, so how do you do this?

For example, these two questions from the Facebook Group “Atrial Fibrillation Support Forum” could be quickly answered by showing empathy and adding a relevant introduction paragraph and link to a blog article.

By doing this, you are engaging directly with your target audience and adding value.

You are not selling.

Suppose you do this successfully and earn the community trust. In that case, they will respond with product sales, word of mouth marketing [WOM], and user-generated content [UGC] and are a built-in pool of customers you can refer directly to for surveys and feedback.

You can then build your own community of super fans who are your best advocates.

Paid Promoted Content:

If you’ve been hesitant to start promoting content with paid ads, it’s far more straightforward than you may believe. Many advertising platforms allow you to promote your content to a highly specific audience, drive qualified traffic and leads, and grow your customer base.

These include:

• Facebook Ads
• BuySellAds
• Outbrain and Taboola
• Reddit Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Google Ads
• Quora Ads
• Facebook Groups
• Medium
• Email
• Forums
• Pinterest Ads

Regardless of who your target customers are, you have an excellent chance of attracting them to your content.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a highly-personal method to speak directly to your audience. It allows you to leverage your brand voice consistently. Email marketing is easily the least expensive form of marketing. Not only is it economical, but it is also highly effective, for every $1 spent on email marketing will have an ROI of $40.

Email allows you to reach people who may not even know you are in the market. Not all your target audience are avid blog readers or use social media, but everyone reads their email.

Email marketing provides the ability to deliver a customized message to your subscribers, and it is relationship-focused.

An effective e-newsletter strategy is very content-driven and may include humorous content, an advice column from the point-of-view of a fictional character representing the brand, and boosting brand awareness. This increases the likelihood that subscribers will open the company’s emails.

An engaged, growing email list is one of the greatest marketing assets for any company; email keeps the brand front of mind with your target audience and customers. People who have opted to receive email updates and relevant content from a business directly to their email account create a high bar and competitive moat.

To grow the Alivecor email list without spending budget monies on ads, this can be accomplished through numerous means ranging from lead generation — consumers subscribe via the company’s website — by leaning on the company’s content strategy or by developing a quiz or contest and promoting these to their target audience.

Event Marketing

Attending consumer-based trade shows where the Alivecor target audience is predominant is a great way to directly put the product in your audience’s hands and increase brand visibility.

For instance, the AARP Life@50+, Tampa Bay Senior Expo, or the Tulsa World Senior Living Expo offer free health screenings and seminars on health and wellness that Alivecor can easily tap into these captive audiences.

Another suggestion is to hire several retired nurses in Florida and put on a cardiac wellness seminar at local HOA communities. These communities are very active and have well-run community centers. For a nominal cost, including a per diem for the nurses, Alivecor can easily reach thousands of target audiences and create word-of-mouth marketing.

These events give Alivecor social media marketing materials that drive engagement when used appropriately, and when tagging the attendees in the posts, it drives viral shares.

Event marketing allows Alivecor to interact with potential customers and market to them directly. This gives potential customers the chance to see KardiaMobile and the premium service first hand and meet the people behind the business, creating a memorable impression and establishing a relationship you can’t buy or garner through any other marketing form.

Summary

An exceptional product, an under-served market, combined with a vision that anyone with afib can actively manage the disease state.

By doing a deeper dive and understanding their target audience’s needs, and then using each digital channel to attract and convert those users, Alivecor can expect rapid growth.

This forms the foundation of a world-class marketing and growth strategy.

Alivecor has grown significantly during the last seven years, and they aren’t showing signs of slowing down.

DISCLAIMER: I have no association with Alivecor or its management or founders. This case study was done using publicly available information on the Internet. If you would like to discuss how I can help you with your marketing and marketing strategy, contact me on Linkedin