A Whole New World
Yield’s client is an enterprise technology and services provider to the Healthcare industry. It is a public company with over $300MM in annual revenue and a 25-year history. They recently created an entirely new division to focus more directly on the end-users of their services as a means to enhance the “stickiness” of their enterprise products. This, however, was a whole new world to our client and required a different set of expertise and skills.
Yield was engaged by our client to help them develop a go-to-market strategy for this new division, which now consisted of a newly acquired mobile app company and another in development. We then translated this strategy into action by developing and implementing a tech marketing and analytics tech stack that was leveraged by both products.
Defining Success
Yield’s first engagement with our client was to deliver an initial, data-driven, go-to-market plan for the launch of the new mobile app, integrated with the existing efforts of the recently acquired mobile app company. In addition, we provided a recommendation for a marketing and analytics tech stack that, where possible, was the same for both apps.
To assess the various go-to-market opportunities, we did a deep dive on existing research on the targeted user base and augmented that research with third party data sets to develop segmentation criteria and then compared that against the enterprise priorities of the “mother ship.”
Launching a product inside of a public company is very different from launching a startup. In our experience, larger companies have a relatively low tolerance for ambiguity and therefore lose patience with the non-linear, messy path of finding product-market fit. In this environment, having a highly targeted go-to-market strategy with exceptionally clear definitions of success is critical.
At the end of the engagement, we had established a clear go-to-market launch plan for the new mobile app that was coordinated with the existing go-to-market rhythm of the existing company. We also recommended a light weight, but scalable marketing and analytics tech stack, as well as detailed configuration specs, to support the launch and post-launch efforts.
Ready, Set … Learn
A key skill for success in launching new products and services is the ability to test, learn and adapt at velocity. Until you have users in your product, you only have hypotheses, so building the muscle to traverse the “OODA Loop” (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is priority #1.
Yield worked closely with senior members of the product, engineering, marketing and analytics teams to develop a core set of KPIs, the related configuration plan for the stack and prototype reports that provided the “observe and orient” capabilities we needed, both in terms of user acquisition and in-app behavior.
We also worked with the marketing team to develop a comprehensive, multi-channel strategy across organic and paid social, email and app downloads. The team utilized our sprint planning process to ensure alignment of targeting, content, landing experience and measurement.
Time For Jet Fuel
We are now in the third phase of our engagement with this client, which is focused on scaling up the reporting infrastructure and reporting processes to evaluate users by cohort, from acquisition to in-app behavior, to provide early visibility on how our various acquisition and retention initiatives are performing.
In parallel, we will be extending the processes and tech stack configuration to the existing business to bring the performance measurement systems of these two discrete mobile apps into a common structure.
To see some of the frameworks and tools we used in our work, check out our Go-to-Market Resources section.
