From Lit to Leads: Navigating the B2B Healthcare Marketing Ecosystem with D'Anna Siegle

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

No, great question. Good way to start. For me, the journey really did start back in college. I majored in English literature. For me, that art of storytelling was very powerful. I love the way words can minds, create emotions, all those things, driving action. So naturally, that led me to a career in marketing with heavy content as a focus. Over the years, as many of us do in this field, I’ve worn a ton of hats, had a lot of experience, diverse experience throughout the discipline. But when I made a shift to health care tech about six or seven years ago, that’s when things started clicking for me. And I started in product marketing, which at the time was a fairly new role underneath the marketing umbrella. I saw how crucial rather marketing is to the story of the company and driving growth, especially when you’re having a product-led motion. From there, I started just adding to my role and my responsibilities from within the marketing function. That eventually got me to VIM. It eventually got me to my current It’s a little bit of being at the right place at the right time, and then also a lot of hustle and raising my hand, flexing into responsibilities.

One thing is in healthcare tech and B2B tech, you’re often like that startup environment. And so being able to flex into new responsibilities is really important because you’re aligning with the growth of the company. What do they need right now to move forward? So that’s where I am. Our team growing today, and our department really is at the center of growth for our company.

Yeah. So we have quite a few segments that we touch because we’re a middleware platform, so we have a lot of flexibility in what we can offer the marketplace. But we work with small, medium, and large enterprises. So if you think about in health care, specifically, we work with the large payers, the large insurance companies. We’re also working with ACOs and MSOs, and a field that we call value-based care enablers. So anyone who is covering Medicare, Medicaid lives, and pushing value-based care into the provider workflow. And then our actual end users are those clinicians, those providers, and those care teams who are interfacing our UI and extracting the value out of the relationship.

Yeah. I mean, you have to really focus in on what each persona needs and what value they are looking for, what the challenges that they have. And we always try and tie that to our broader brand and mission, and so that they can see themselves within your story and what you’re offering. And so it really does take a lot of doing that persona work, understanding who those people are as humans and what you’re competing against. So sometimes it’s the status quo. It’s a spreadsheet, or it’s a back-end system that they’ve built within their actual organization. So you have to take all of that nuance into consideration when you’re trying to message to them and building those messaging frameworks.

I wouldn’t say there’s anything typical when we think about a go-to-market motion. I would say that we have more of a tried and true approach when it is a go-to-market motion. So whether that’s a product launch or bringing a new customer to our end users, we always start, no matter what, with heavy market research. So we’re looking at the nuance of the industry, the current state of the market, how our product fits in that market. Product market fit is critical. And then how we solve those specific challenges and what gaps we fill. From there, we’re building our messaging framework. So it’s our positioning, our messaging, our sales enablement tools. We’re building all of that out. And then we first do what we consider an internal soft launch. So we’ll actually bring together all of the teams, anyone who’s outward-facing, anyone who touches a customer, and we’re going to educate them internally. In some cases, depending on the caliber of the product launch, we might actually do a certification process. So we’re not only educating them, but we’re making sure they really understand the value, those value props, and can walk the walk and talk the talk, essentially.

And one thing we’ve really found valuable is that during those internal launches and that internal training process, we’re getting a lot back as a marketing team. So we’re hearing questions. They can anticipate what their customers, what their prospects might be wondering about this new go-to-market motion. They’ll ask us those questions. And if we don’t have the answers, we know we can prepare ourselves before we officially go to market or have general availability. Then one other thing, just a side note, because I can’t help myself, but we document everything. We want it accessible across the organization. For us, too, to be able to go back to it and say, Okay, we need additional output or enablement, and here’s our framework. And if we misread a market signal or we missed a key insight, we can always go back to that master document and refine it and improve it for the next time.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is just more internal. The Google Docs and spreadsheets, we do use Monday from a project management standpoint. We’ve used tools like Jira in the past. It’s a mix. But we try and just whatever we do, we just make sure that it’s something that everybody has access to. It’s simple to find and utilize.

Yeah. For us, and I would say in my most recent role, this is the time where I’ve spent the most with our demand gen and that function of marketing. We don’t really think of it as much of a tactic as we do a stance. Our stance is to educate, to inspire, to delight. We try really hard not to sell, even though we are selling, and we try to do it more enough in an authentic way. We want to be recognized as a thought leader, and before we started this call, as that authority in this space, both for the algorithms who are reading what we’re writing and crawling across the web, but also for the people who land on our pages, who land on our content. It’s not just about the clicks or conversions. We want to make sure that we’re adding value. One thing my demand gen leader on my team is always saying is brand drives demand. I definitely truly believe in that. I stand by it. I really think it helps build trust. And demand gen, and like you said, that journey, it’s just one part of it. It’s one touch point. So when you think about a sales funnel or however you define it, you want every one of those touch points to add some value to the process.

In health care, I know you have experience there yourself. It can be a really long sales cycle. It can be a year or two if it’s a big enterprise corporation. So when it comes time, when that buyer is ready to make that decision, you want them to think about you. Think about something that you posted, a piece of content that they downloaded. You want them to see you as the authority, the expert, and then, of course, make that shortlist for when evaluating a solution. So that’s how we look at demand gen as part of the bigger picture.

Yeah. I mean, part of our inbound strategy in the effort to create value, be authentic, be more human is doing a lot of LinkedIn outreach and campaigns and elevating the subject matter experts in our company. Not everyone can be a marketer, but everyone definitely has something to teach our marketing team and to teach our audience. And so we really try and tap into that. We’ve seen a lot of effectiveness from founder-led marketing, where we highlight the vision of our company, but through someone, through a human, through the CEO, through the CTO. That’s created a lot of inbound interest. Of course, we do all the regular tactics that you would imagine in a marketing function. But when we find something like that that is producing a lot of interest and engagement, we lean into that even more.

Yeah. No. I mean, what we try and do really is when we do have a touch point, we have some inbound engagement, looking at those signals and then entering that person into some nurture funnel. We try and segment as much as we possibly can with the data available to us. But some of those include just simple things that you’ve done that’s been in your marketing playbook for years. It’s the newsletters, it’s the email marketing. We trigger outreach campaigns based on activity or a specific action. If somebody is landing on a key page that we’ve optimized on our website, and that we know that when they land on that page, it’s going to lead to another step. It’s going to lead to them converting and asking for a demo, then we can nurture from that point of view. So we really try and augment some of our general marketing with those market signals, those buyer intent signals, and try and use data to the best of our advantage to define what the journey we want them to take, what we want to take them on. One trap I feel like some companies make is assuming buyers are all going to have this linear journey.

I just don’t believe in that. I think that it’s never a straight line, especially in the B2B space. You have to plan for those offshoots and try and really extract those aha moments where they resonate with something you’ve created, content-heavy as an approach we take. And so once they’ve resonated with that, we want them to take the next step. And so we’re designing our journeys around that.

For sure. I mean, it’s definitely something like as a company where I work now, they definitely encourage the use of AI. From the marketing team perspective, we really do use it to augment our creative process. We try not to let it take over and just write things for us and produce the content. We just use it more for that fleshing out an idea. And I often myself use it as a brain dump. This is what I’m trying to do, help me create an outline, and then I can dive deeper in an area. We use it for research. We’re using it for anything that can help us save time so that we can focus on more quality content and things like that on those deliverables. Actually, it was a fun It’s a side and unique story is we recently used AI because we had an ad video that we had to create. It was basically a brand video. It was going to be used during an event, and we had a really tight timeline. We thought, Let’s try one of these new AI video creators. We wrote out our script and we defined the transitions and what we wanted the visuals to look like.

It was super cool and it worked really fast and we were able to tweak it with prompts and there was editing tools within this video creator. Ultimately, we didn’t use that video. It wasn’t quite up to the quality we wanted. But what it did do and how it served us is we were able to take it and we outsourced to an agency and we said, This is basically what we’re trying to create. Here’s the script, here’s the video with all the visuals that we tweaked. Here’s how we refined the script that we originally created. Can you help us 10X this, make it that much better? And it saved a ton of time because that creative process and that back and forth, telling them what our brand story is, showing them how we message and how we talk the talk often takes a couple of weeks. But this cut that timeline down almost in half. And so it was really an effective and unusual way for us to test AI. I would say my advice is to let people… People should test it. They should try things out. And then if it doesn’t work, you can try and use it in other leverage it like we did.

Yeah, absolutely. We definitely use HubSpot as a marketing tool in our stack, and we have automated sequences and workflows that we’re setting up based on some type of input from our prospects. We also use outreach reach, and we do a ton of commercial and sales team enablement. And so we have outreach in some automated sequences. And we are actually exploring some new solutions that, based on specific actions or buyer intent signals, channels, we can drop some ICPs into these workflows and help nurture them. Because, again, the buying cycle really differs across our ICPs. And so we want to make sure that how we’re nurturing them, how we’re delivering content, how they learn. Maybe they like videos over written content, depending on, do they want a big white paper or do they want just a short form, quick video. So we’re using automation to then send them on a content journey. Again, that’s focused on adding value.

Yeah. They always say content is king, right? So we typically try and align it always with what our company current North Star is and keeping core to our mission and to what those mission statements say and what that value is, and then segmenting. Again, we serve a lot of different prospects in a lot of different industries. Well, not industries, but a lot of segments within our healthcare industry. We are tailoring the content to all of them. But there is that common thread of who VIM is and what we’re trying to achieve and selling them into that bigger vision that through the content, reiterating what we can do and selling that vision allows them to see themselves within the story of health care and with the story of them. And so that’s how we approach it. And we have a whole team dedicated to that content development. We want to make that buy buying decision as simple as possible. So giving them the tools to understand who VIM is and then understand how we solve their problem. So that could be in lots of formats. But one of the keys to that for us is really letting our customers tell our story.

We have this rich mix of perspectives. We have providers, payers, everyone in between. And so we lean into their experiences. So of course, we have the tech guides, the white papers for anyone who needs it. But to me, nothing beats a customer, a real person telling their story of how they use your product, why they love it, and what resonates with them. I think that’s where you get more attention and somebody is able to get through the noise and get to the heart of what we’re trying to sell.

Yeah, definitely. I would say it’s a never-ending push and pull, right? So we do have a team that focuses entirely on SEO and website optimization and that user experience. So we are looking together at the data. We’re looking at time spent on the page, the bounce rate, like those leading indicators, and we’re finding any red flags that might tell us this is a poor user experience, and then we have to course-correct pretty quickly. So that’s We’re looking at week over week. Obviously, our SEO team is looking at that every day. Honestly, there’s real-world examples I could tell you about where maybe we have this beautifully designed landing page where we’ve done all the market research, all the messaging and positioning. And it’s a great page. Our ICPs are landing there from our SEO efforts, from our demand gen. They’re spending a ton of time there, but then we were finding that they weren’t converting. So our biggest CTA is just to book a demo. So what we decided is we needed to investigate why that was happening. We did a couple of things. We created some on-demand demo videos with a really simple gait. Most of our content is ungated.

That’s another philosophy we have, but we did gate this one piece where all they have to do is enter their email. And we saw that they were able to have this personalized experience because we had a human create the demo, someone on our team who often gives them, and they were able to access it, see the UI, see the product for themselves. And then with that, we also looked and experimented with just our CTA button. It sounds super simple, but looking at the design, looking at the language we’re using, taking bringing away that technical jargon. And once we made those two changes, we really saw a big lift, and we had a huge increase in lead conversions. And that is a testament to trying to look at all those data points and then making changes. And a lot of marketing is, of course, experimenting, and sometimes it doesn’t always work. But with this particular scenario, we saw where it went straight through that path where we saw a poor user experience, something wasn’t driving them to engage in our CTA, and we made changes and saw results as an outcome.

Yeah. I mean, that’s super critical, right? So one thing we do is we really lean into our customer success team. So that could be the account managers, the customer service teams. They are on the front lines. They’re seeing firsthand how our product is impacting our customers and our end users. In some cases, they’re even helping our customers define what success means to them. So we can take all those learnings and then roll it into our marketing strategy. Obviously, from a marketing point of view, we want to capture those success stories. We want to turn them into powerful marketing and social proof assets. But it’s not just about the acquisition side of it. It’s also about keeping them, as you said, happy customers, making them advocates for you, helping you with referrals. So with that, we try and show our customers the art of the possible. When you work with them, what can you gain by becoming a part of this curated network? And then again, leaning into them to help us tell that story outwardly as well.

No, it’s a great question. I mean, listen, every B2B tech company I’ve come across is confusing in different ways. Even for the team developing it and the content team on the marketing side writing about it. And that’s a little plug for product marketing, too, is staying close to the product and really understanding how it works and how people use it as important. But at the end of the day, nobody wants to hear jargon or nobody wants to read through some tech manual that’s disguised as marketing. So again, I think I keep repeating this, but the best way for us to overcome this is by showing and not telling. So showing demos, making things accessible, putting UI in every email, newsletter, website, wherever you’re delivering content, making sure you’re actually showing the product and how it works. And then if you do have to tell because you do have to write things, I call it human-speak, trying as much as possible not to be technical, telling the prospects what we actually do and why it matters to you, our amazing buyer. And again, bonus points, if you have the customers who can tell the story for you.

We use a lot of fireside chats, and we don’t do a ton of webinars. We feel like those don’t have as much effectiveness in our industry, but things like that, just giving them a platform to tell the story allows the ICPs and the people reading our complex solution to nod their head and say, I get it. Now I want to find out more. This makes more sense to me. We don’t ever want to speak over people’s heads. Sometimes we do, sometimes it’s a miss, but we’re always trying to simplify the message, like you said. And it is, I think you were touching on the fact that it’s a really human in nature, innate in being in health care. And so tapping into that more authentic side of things is where we’re seeing more success.

Marketing touches so many different strategic objectives. So one thing that we do on our team is we have what we call a monthly marketing scorecard. So we have reports and dashboards and all those things, but we try and distill it down because I found that explaining the impact marketing have internally is like another job in and of itself. So not just because you’re trying to prove your value as a marketing function, but we’re really trying to do that cross-pollination and make sure that our internal customers, our Our CEO, our sales team members, we’re all aligned and we’re working together towards the same goal. So we’ll take that scorecard, we’ll split it up across those objectives, whether that’s growing revenue, increasing leads, and enhancing conversions, building brand awareness, supporting special projects, field marketing. And then we’ll actually just list out the tactics for the month, what campaigns we’re running, what did we actually do? And then we’re measuring the effectiveness of it. So depending on which bucket you’re in, you’re going to see a different mix of metrics. So it could be awareness, engagement, conversion on our CTAs, customer retention and stickiness. Some of them are shared goals, so revenue goals and things like that.

And then from here, we’re looking month and month, or over month, month, and quality quarterly comps, rather. So we’re seeing what needs to be optimized each month. We literally put the numbers in green and red, and if we see numbers are in the red, we know something’s not working, and so we’re going to tweak it. So that’s our big picture month over month scorecard. But I think you also have to look at ongoing measurement in areas where you need to react much faster. So with ads and ABM efforts and targeting those top-tier ICPs, you have to be ready to pivot fast when the numbers and the data are telling us we’re off track. So of course, we’re human. We miss things, but we always try and be ready to course-correct and adjust and learn from our mistakes.

Not yet, but we are in talks with a couple of some of those more specific ABM platforms. Of course, we have all of our messaging and marketing tech stack, but we’re trying to go deeper in understanding more on the signals that we’re seeing and how all of those first-party, second-party, third-party data are coming together to tell more of the story of who is interested right now. Timing is everything, of course. You want to target them when they’re ready to buy, when they’re looking at a particular page. So we are looking at adding that to our marketing tech stack. I think it’s really important. And so it’s working into the budget right now.

Yeah, I guess so.

Last one, I think. Let me think about it. We were doing an award application, and so I asked it to help me shorten a response, to be honest with you, because sometimes when we are telling our story and storytelling is hard, we can go a little bit too long. So I said, help me shorten this response.

Marketing cliché I wish would disappear. I don’t know. Where they say something Everything’s dead. Whatever it is, email is dead, whatever it is. Email is dead. Newsletters are dead. It drives me crazy because every single company and every single industry is a little bit different. I think you can still get value out of that old marketing playbook, but you just have to put a new lens on it.

Yes.

I know. Yeah, I’ll delete you if you tell me that. All right.

That I can’t live without. That’s a tough one. I mean, probably a Hub HubSpot, that type of tool, whatever that is at your organization. You have this huge database of leads you’ve curated, and you have to be able to communicate with them. That’s probably one I couldn’t live without.

Yeah.

Brand mascot? Oh, my gosh. I feel like that’s more in the B2C space. In my head, it’s always in B2B. But I don’t know. I like in some of the auto insurance mascots. I love the Geiko Lizard, and I think there’s I forget which company does it, but where it’s like you can’t become your parents. I think that’s hysterical. There’s that one person who’s like, Don’t become like me. I think that’s really funny. I think they did a good job there.

Where have I ever seen an ad that’s super unusual? I always think it’s strange when they’re in bathrooms at airports or train stations. I guess it’s a lot of time on it, But yeah, I think that’s always a strange place to put an ad.

That’s a tough one. I follow so many. I really like Neil Patel. I think Anne Hanley is really fun. She gives really tactical solutions. Then there’s someone new I’ve been following. I think her name is Alice DeCourcy. She’s one of those when you open up your LinkedIn feed, you have some new idea to try that day, and she gives you all the playbook and what worked and what didn’t. She’s also a good one.

Thank you so much. Super fun. I appreciate your time as well. I suppose.