CODE Technology is a digital health SaaS startup operating in the Patient-Reported Outcomes space. CODE's unique combination of human touch and automation enables their product to collect PROs at unprecedented rates.
I was brought on as the company's first brand director to later serve as their first Marketing Director. I led the design team and the brand / lead gen marketing strategy. I managed and executed on all artifacts needed to make the strategy come to life. I also designed the patient-facing survey product.
CODE Technology is a digital health SaaS startup operating in the Patient-Reported Outcomes space. CODE's unique combination of human touch and automation enables their product to collect PROs at a rate not previously thought possible.
I was brought on as the company's first brand director and then the first marketing director. I led the design team and the brand / lead gen marketing strategy. I managed and executed on all artifacts needed to make the strategy come to life. I also designed the patient-facing survey product.
CODE Technology is a digital health SaaS startup operating in the Patient-Reported Outcomes space. CODE's unique combination of human touch and automation enables their product to collect PROs at a rate not previously thought possible.
I was brought on as the company's first brand director and then the first marketing director. I led the design team and the brand / lead gen marketing strategy. I managed and executed on all artifacts needed to make the strategy come to life. I also designed the patient-facing survey product.
Roles blur in most startups, and CODE Technology was no different. I had the incredible opportunity to work in all facets of of the business. However, I spent most of my time focusing on three specific parts:
Brand and gesign
Lead generation marketing via inbound content, conferences, and social
Product Design
Brand and Design
From a brand perspective, we knew we wanted to differentiate CODE from competitors by following a B2C approach on the look, feel, and voice. Working together with the founders, we developed our foundational brand principle; lovingly referred to as, "The Mullet."
I led the strategy, creative direction, messaging, and design of everything you see.
This includes the website, product, content and everything inbetween.
We wove The Mullet principle throughout our entire customer journey --- from marketing and sales collateral to client-ops service design and the actual product.
To us, the Mullet was all about balancing the business in the front party in the back mentality. It meant that if we were going to take an approachable, playful point of view with our brand, our customers and partners needed to trust that we were serious about delievering on our promise and that we were undeniable subject matter experts in the PROs space.
One specific way we applied The Mullet principle was through our inbound marketing strategy.
Through a series of mostly gated guides on meaty orthopedic topics we flexed our experise and differentiated our brand.
Modern graphics and common languge (no crazy unexplained acronyms), simplified complicated topics and showed how our product addressed the issues our customers faced every day.
Another example from our product pulls from CODE's core value of, "Celebrating big and small wins."
We thought about the journey our users experienced with our product and intentionally wove this value into everyday moments like: celebrating the growth of their registry via email reports, highlighting positive patient feedback, and interesting research data our team uncovered.
CODE's core business model is different from competitors too. To emphasize the human component of our product, I decided to put real CODE team members front and center.
CONTEXT: All direct competitors only provide software to collect PRO surveys. This means providers still need to use their staff to manage their PRO program on top of all their other tasks. CODE complements survey software with a dedicated team of account executives to manage the PRO programs - resulting in higher collection rates. In the PRO space, this business model is totally unique.
Lead Gen Marketing
Another part of my job was to drive leads to for our sales team both through our website and industry conferences.
For the website, we used a combination of paid, earned, and owned media to drive people to landing pages and articles. Below are wireframes for the content hub and a version of the Our Platform landing page.
Content was specifically crafted to address questions our sales team fielded often from specific buying personas, the intent of the visitor, and keywords we wanted to own.
I led design thinking exercises to identify visitor intent and organize our content program based on that intent.
- Learn about PROs
- Gather information about PRO vendors
- How to use PRO data
Featured collaborators represented our target buying personas: executives, providers, and nurse navigators.
Below are select final artifacts from our inbound content marketing program:
Blog
Gated content landing page
Display Ads
Distributing content on twitter
Website home page
Our platform landing page
For conferences, we took a non-traditional approach --- opting to partner with the conferences to create content rather than simply exhibit in a booth.
We knew there was a huge opportunity to engage with the right people at these prestigious annual conferences - but we also knew that slurging on a beautiful, fancy booth was not the right move.
After a few brainstorming sessions, I noticed there was a gap in the digital / social space at these conferences. Thought leaders were posting on Twitter and LinkedIn, but companies were not meaningfully engaging or creating content for or at the conferences. BINGO.
This was a game changer because we could create a ton of relevant and unique content for our website, and also give us the opportunity to meet and form relationships with influencers we wouldn't have access to otherwise.
To start I pitched AAHKS (the largest hip and knee conference in the United States) on a content partnership. The conference team would set us up with thought leaders in orthopedics and in turn we would take a small team to the conference and live blog, tweet, and create video content. For the video content we set up interviews between our CEO and the AAHKS thought leaders and livestreamed them using Facebook LIVE. We shared the content with our conference partner, interviewees, on our blog and owned social channels (Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube).
With the influencers covered, we wanted to make sure the content was seen by conference registrants too. To do this we geofenced the conference and served up digital display ads driving attendees to the content we were sharing on our website.
The goal was to own the digital space of the AAHKS conference and thereby increase awarness of our brand and product. We did just that.
Not only did we create an inbound content machine - but we succeeded in taking over the digital space of the conference. By spending just over $1,000 in paid social and display ads, we grew our social audience (61% on Facebook and 16% on Twitter) and pushed 1,043 unique clicks to our website content.
We also made connections with well respected leaders in orthopedics that we would have never been able to do just sitting at a booth waiting for people to come to us.
Our work at AAHKS even lead to other conferences reaching out to us and asking us to do the exact same thing (which we did) - opening up the floodgates of opportunities for our executives to talk shop, share their expertise, and build relationships with these influential surgeons and leaders.
Product Design
CODE's product has both a B2C & B2B component. PRO surveys are taken by patients on any device and then are scored and used by the care team via our web based app.
The care team can actively access all their outcome data in their portal, integrate with their EHR, or passively recieve updates about their registry via email reports.
I was able to think about the user experience as a whole, instead of one silod part of the product. I spent most of my time on the UX/UI of our patient-facing survey product, our provider-facing email and downloadable reports, and patient outcome reports.
Patient-facing survey app
Some factors we took into consideration when designing the app was the age of our most prominent user group, scalability for white labeling, the contextural enviorment the survey taker might be in, UI/UX familiarity, and zero friction once committing to take a survey.
Below is the simple survey taking flow for the interface you see above.
Our B2B users are mostly working out of their EHR, so we designed actionable analytics reports to be pushed to the care team weekly and monthly via email. Reports can be customized based on the following user persona: surgeons, nurse navigators, and adminstrators/executives.
After interviewing users and experts about what kind of benchmarked data was most important to them, CODE launched a bechmarking feature.
Users with the right permissions can filter their data and download custom reports all from their CODE portal. Data is filterable by: procedure type, survey type, survey interval, amout of proceedures. Users also have the ability to compare surgeon to surgeon, surgeon to org, and org to the CODE registry. I'm sure you can imagine the power of this benchmark data for admins and researchers alike.
Patient reports were designed with a similar look and feel. Requirements were they needed to be no more than one-page front and back, look patient friendly, and the design needed to be codeable so that the org could push the report to their EHR if they decided to integrate.
HOOS and PROMIS | 3 intervals
Patient Experience Report
Lysholm and PROMIS | 4 intervals