tech-qualified-header-small-no-tagline

Episode 318: Changing Your Messaging Based on Customer Feedback With AnnaMaria Turano of Synzi

Episode Summary

AnnaMaria Turano is Vice President of Marketing at Synzi, a company that was facilitating telehealth services before it was cool — or, rather, before it became an overwhelming necessity because of COVID-19.

“In late 2017, entering 2018, we figured out Synzi was the right name, the right brand. And then we determined the look and feel of what that brand identity should be, including the colors, including the font, etc., to be markedly different from everyone else in the telehealth space,” AnnaMaria says. “We saw ourselves as having been a pioneer of bringing forth a different type of solution and a different way of thinking about how that solution would actually work in a provider organization.”

Because Synzi started using the term “virtual care” before other telehealth providers, AnnaMaria and her marketing team knew it was important to establish the company’s unique identity.

On this episode of Tech Qualified, AnnaMaria discusses marketing’s role in making a company stand out, the importance of maintaining customer relationships (and adapting based on their changing needs), and how helpful it is to think of varying marketing objectives as working hand-in-hand rather than achieving separate things.

“We’ve got all these things we’re doing at once. They’re all important. They all feed into each other, and there is no reason to just put one aside versus the other,” she says. “You can’t drive lead gen without strengthening brand awareness, and at the same time … you’re going to have to enable sales and make sure that your sales force has the right tools they need to close the deals, but also the right tools they need to get the customer started.”

Guest Profile

annamaria-turano

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

“We are designed to work for post-acute care organizations, as well as the overall healthcare ecosystem. What our technology enables healthcare and medical professionals to do is to conduct virtual visits with their patients, which is very important during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also going forward, it will continue to be important as people understand how relevant and how accessible telehealth is in their practices. The technology also enables agency and organization administrators to push out relevant emails and texts about a patient’s condition to drive adherence as well as enable secure messaging. So when there is PHI, which is proprietary health information, being shared, it’s obviously encrypted in a way that is not accessible by others who can hack into someone’s personal phone.”
“What has remained constant is that we’re leveraging our customers’ experiences and their ‘success stories’ and using Synzi to address COVID-19. Whereas before, it was just addressing other pain points that they have, obviously what I did right away was recalibrate the outreach messaging and creative to sync with COVID-19 pain points at the same time, making sure that that’s not the only message that we’re essentially continuing to communicate. And if you beat into the audience’s brain, because it’s overwhelming, they’ve got it everywhere — meaning that they’re hearing about COVID-19 not just in their professional livelihoods and dealing with the challenges it presents there, but obviously when they go home at night, it’s on every news channel — so it’s making sure that we’re not just one message at this time.”
“Constraints are obviously omnipresent in any industry, but especially in pharmaceuticals and financial services and with healthcare, as a marketer, what that forces you to do is to become that much more creative with how you’re going to reach your audience, how you’re going to stay in front of your audience and how you can best resonate with your audience. So in some ways, unlike consumer packaged goods where there’s a little bit more leeway of what you can say and how to say it, in healthcare, you do have these constraints around you, but that actually forces you … to do what’s right at the right time. … So when I looked at the marketing and the sales cycle for the organizations that we work with, I would say right now that the sales cycle is increasingly abbreviated, it’s accelerated, because people know that they need to have this solution.”
“About five, eight years ago, telehealth was also a buzzword, but when we launched Synzi, we markedly said that we go beyond traditional telehealth and we renamed the category and called it virtual care. And over the past couple of years, that’s actually where our competitors have moved to as well. … We really were innovative in starting with that as our value prop because that allows us, now that telehealth is buzzworthy, to say, ‘Yes, we have telehealth apps and they’re part of our larger, broader virtual care platform.’ And in order to kind of solidify how we equal virtual care and that we’re here for you from a telehealth standpoint, what I’ve done is really set up a whole host of thought leadership over time. It’s anything from press releases — which are not just highlighting our new wins or our recent platform releases, but even more importantly, highlighting the successes our customers have had … and I write bylines for healthcare mediums that are focused on the channel that we serve as well as other healthcare organizations.”
“It’s understanding what else they are working through. They’re making decisions about other things all the time, not just about a telehealth or virtual care platform. So for example, right now amid COVID-19, unfortunately every healthcare organization is also thinking how do they source enough PPE? How do they make sure that they keep their patients and their staff safe? How do they address staffing shortages that they might’ve had going into this as well as what they’re experiencing now. So it’s recognizing that we are not necessarily a silver bullet to solve everything, but positioning ourselves as we’re here to help in these ways. This we can help you take off the plate and help you sleep a little bit better at night knowing that you’ve got at least the continuation of care from a safer manner.”
microphone-podcast

Want to be a guest on the show?

Do you have a unique perspective on marketing for B2B technology? Perhaps you have something in mind that will add value to the tech marketers listening to our podcast? We’re always looking for guests who can provide valuable insights. Check out our guidelines and apply to be a guest.