I'm the Strategy Director at the Creative Business Company. Subscribe for marketing guides, insights and deep dives.
How to grow beyond your niche
Hi, it's Ian.
Here's a marketing question that keeps me up at night - how do you grow a niche brand beyond it's user base?
A lot of companies become known for a certain product or service, but struggle to expand to new audiences and categories.
For example, EngagedMD is a SaaS company that automates patient admin and education for fertility clinics. Having made their name in fertility with products spanning patient education, informed consent, form-filling and eSignatures, they were ready to expand into new medical specialties.
But having built the brand for a specific niche audience, getting famous beyond fertility was proving to be a challenge.
Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 23 seconds
Challenge
Getting famous beyond fertility
Life as a healthcare professional or carer can often mean long hours, no time for breaks, and constantly needing to be in two places at once.
As the healthcare sector comes under increasing scrutiny over pay and workloads, EngagedMD wanted to evolve beyond fertility clinics to support carers from all corners of the medical industry. But with nearly a decade of brand equity, content, and thousands of hours of video made specifically for fertility clinics and patients, pivoting the brand to include new specialities was daunting. They needed a concept that would elevate them beyond a niche software company and position them as an ally to medical practices and caregivers all over the world - without losing what made them special.
Strategy
Help carers carry on caring
Meeting with the product team quickly revealed a complex buyer ecosystem for EngagedMD’s software. Nurses and patients used and benefited from the platform the most, but it was the medical doctors who ran the practices (and were notoriously skeptical of adopting new technology) who were the final decision makers.
We created a benefit ladder to map out each stakeholder’s challenges and needs and discovered how they laddered up to common benefits across the ecosystem.
Mapping out the stakeholder challenges and solutions showed that the real value of EngagedMD's platform went beyond fertility clinic operations - they could help all medical practices spend less time on low-value interactions and more time with patients.
This became the foundation of a full-funnel positioning framework that could be used for high-level emotional messaging, as well as performance marketing and sales.
The new slogan re-positioned the brand around the benefit of having more quality time with patients, while the messaging pillars provided clear and succinct proof-points that could direct demand generation campaigns and inform sales conversations.
Visual identity
A helping hand
Working with Thisaway and Fakery, we brought the brand to life by personifying EngagedMD as a team of little helpers of doctors, nurses and administrators.
This friendly team not only offers carers a helping hand, they also act as a reassuring guide to patients by helping them navigate medical processes and procedures.
A new logo takes the form of a helping hand. Drawn in a loose style inspired by doctors’ signatures and scribbles, the flowing and free hand alludes to the ease of using EngagedMD. A subtle ‘e’ is incorporated into the thumb to ensure the icon is distinctive and ownable.
Combining the new visual identity with the broader positioning allowed us to create a brand that could apply to any medical speciality, while retaining what made EngagedMD special and unique.
You can read more about the EngagedMD transformation here.
If you feel stuck in a niche but want to go mainstream, why not book a quick call with our team?
We'd love to chat about your challenges and see if we can help.
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Thanks for reading, Faisal Siddiqui __ |
Ian Barnard
I'm the Strategy Director at the Creative Business Company. Subscribe for marketing guides, insights and deep dives.
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