Nowadays people are talking about this new growth hacking trend that is making the covers of magazines and thousands of blog articles and videos on specialised channels.

• However, what is it really?
• Does growth hacking apply to health care?
• Can health care industry actually implement a growth methodology and active experimentation framework?
• And most importantly of all, how can it help me or my healthcare company?

To get started on the subject: Growth hacking is a relatively new focus in the marketing field, which would focus solely on health care company growth. The goal of its extremely effective methodology is to quickly test ideas that can improve the customer experience before investing a lot of resources, copy and expand ideas that can work, and modify or abandon those that don’t work.

First, we start with metrics to measure growth of our health care corporation. The key metrics should always be the ones that best deliver growth to your Health care, like new strategic partnerships, sales revenue or new enterprise clients. Once we know which metrics are the most important ones, it is time to set goals. Goals should be SMART, and these are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Increase our Lead to Client Conversion Rate, rising Net Profit Margin by 5% or Increase in a 10% qualified website traffic (which would be traffic coming from IPs of potential clients) could be an example of SMART goal. Think of goals as a desired increment, of decrement, of your key metrics.

When we already know what brings us growth (North Star Metric) which KPIs to focus on and also, what are the SMART goals associated with them, it is time to design or ideate growth drivers.

Growth drivers are hypothetical ways to achieve our goals, and we will be validating or rejecting them through small campaigns, called experiments.

An example of our first experiment might be to test how we can accelerate our business growth with social ads focused on raising awareness towards specific problem. We know clinical case discussions are an important part of lifelong learning in the healthcare industry and also help to solve complex problems. We can start by making this process online by looking at a platform for verified medical professionals, where they can discuss medical cases, share knowledge and contribute to the improvement of healthcare and position your business as a reference. Being the reference for our customers in their recommendations to family and friends could help us to develop the potential of our business, it is proven that when a family member, friend or trusted person recommends a place it is up to five times more likely that you go there and discard other similar options. To do this our customers must be fully satisfied with the service we have offered them and as we know there are different methodologies for us to get their support, from discounts, to other types of attention or simply by asking them for a referral.

Strengthening the website and SEO could be another way to improve our key metrics. Nonetheless, the key to differentiate products is a strong and active community, so we must find a way to expand its user base, but only for specific demographics like doctors, healthcare professionals or medical students? Should we also try normal people that are concerned about their health? Experiments will answer all these (and other) questions! We may choose Facebook mobile app advertising, which allows targeting audiences with surgical precision, and therefore only display our ads to medical professionals in specific professions or regions, if we are in a B2B healthcare business and we cater our solutions towards medical professional buyer persona. In this way, the user base of the platform may grow rapidly.

• Can you reach large audiences with viral videos?
• How do we get more visitors to our website?
• How do we increase the number of customers?
• What is the most effective and fastest way to achieve my company´s short-term goals?
• And what is the audience we should focus our advertising efforts on?

All these and more questions are what we have to answer to find the right marketing strategy, answering them from small tests that allow us to have a global vision of the most important thing: What can make us GROW.

Before investing a lot in a strategy that we don’t know whether will work, we test these approaches first though experiments and then, only if we validate our hypothesis, implement them as part of strategy.

Finally, the learnings. Learnings are essential to document in order to know what worked in the past and what to avoid repeating.

You should have a regular feedback cycle and track your learnings consistently.

Want to know more about how to apply growth hacking to your Health care business? Sign up for Hypertry and ask for a one to one session!