Testing, testing: The science behind ICO marketing
The Etheal method for testing every last bit of our marketing and sales strategy
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Before we started Etheal, our team worked in a field that seems far from a healthcare ICO, but actually has a lot in common with it. Our 10 years of combined experience in digital marketing connects us in surprising ways to indexing and organizing massive amounts of data, communicating complex topics clearly to our community, and scaling our reach.
At the end of the day, be it a hotel booking service or a medical tourism disruptor, our marketing philosophy boils down to one core principle:
Marketing is both an art and a science.
We realized a long time ago, that people can’t accurately verbalize and predict their behavior — much less on the internet. In fact, we just wrote an article about Harvard Business Review’s research on correcting bias in internet reviews.
Our conclusion? In order to work effectively and grow our community as quickly as possible, we committed to using mathematics and behavioral tests to objectively reveal what really works in our communications.
The Etheal method
In our last 6 years running a digital marketing agency, we’ve finessed the following method, and have now applied it to communicating Etheal’s ICO.
The method consists of three steps, that filter through all of our potential messages and communications to come up with a clear message that engages.
Step 1
The first step is to gather subjective data from stakeholders and community members. This data can be reaped from focus groups, customer interviews, opinion of executives, salespeople pain points, and more. At this stage, our main goal is to collect messaging ideas. We distill these messages into broad groups, but we don’t judge or filter.
Step 2
Next up is putting these messages to the text. We do behavioral tests, put all the ideas out there and measure how people react. Does the message pique their curiosity? Is it misleading? What target groups does it actually impact? And a thousand more questions — the end goal is to determine which message got a reaction from our desired audience.
Step 3
Finally, we roll out the clearest (winning) message across different outbound channels. This includes TV ads, outdoor ads, PPC, email marketing, anything and in between.
The tactic is simple enough to understand, but everything is best explained with a real-life example. So here is some insight into how we put this into action in Etheal campaigns.
The Etheal method in practice
As usual, we used this objective method to determine which messages were most effective in our Facebook ads. We used this test throughout all of our communications.
On Facebook, we went three radically different directions in our primary messaging. We created the following ads: one with emojis (since we heard they perform well), we used Rick and Morty and even tried the tagline “Make Healthcare Great Again”.
Which ad do you think won?
If you guessed A, B, C, D you’re wrong — They all FAILED.
But, what we learned in all of these tests is that one topic was succeeding above the others (regardless of its format). The ad’s message was: Why does a Harvard Medical School Alumnus professor support Etheal?
So based on this data, we built a campaign around this engaging message, shot a video with Professor Dr. Tibor Bartha discussing Etheal, and distributed.
What else do we test at Etheal?
The answer may not surprise you — literally everything.
We tested expansion to Brazil before to make sure that what we are doing is viable. In under 1.5 months, we translated our platform, and listed 380K medical professionals. We were able to conclude that our engine is easily scalable around the world.
We also tested selling our new system to clinics within medical tourism, and out of 50 cold emails, 12 of them replied with all the necessary data we needed. Which means that the pain in medical tourism is real and clinics are more than open towards new solutions.
