💡Educational marketing: a marketing tactic relies on distributing educational content. It teaches prospects about the value of your products or services, rather than making a hard sale.

Health & wellness entrepreneurs, especially those who sell products for women, face a myriad of business challenges unique to our industry. From excessive regulations to high fulfillment requirements, health & wellness products tend to be more complicated than your typical eCommerce ones.

Intrinsic spoke to FemTech Co-Founders Christine Jurzenski and Erica Schultz about the way this problem shows up in their business. Their question will resonate with most female health companies: How can I convince my market to invest in something if they don’t understand how it works?

CRANEL: The FemTech Company Disrupting Women’s Health for the Better

💡FemTech:  The term “FemTech” was coined recently by entrepreneur Ida Tin. Over the last 5 years, the FemTech industry has expanded to include thousands of tech-friendly companies addressing women-centric products.

More than half of women will develop a urinary tract infection (UTI), with a large portion of these infections becoming recurrent. Unfortunately, a course of antibiotics remains the only medically approved treatment. The overprescription of these drugs often leads to antibiotic resistance, especially among women with frequent infections.

To combat these painful infections, Jurzenski and Schultz founded CRANEL Corporation. This women’s health tech start-up offers indicative tests and subscriptions to cranberry shots. These pure, highly concentrated vials contain 500mg of Proanthocyanidins (PACs), which are known to flush bacteria out of the urinary tract.

Clinically proven to show anti-adhesion properties for UTIs, CRANEL works 30% faster than tablets. And although there’s much folk wisdom surrounding the power of cranberry, the science still isn’t well-distributed. Regardless, when Jurzenski approaches new prospects, she says she still has to explain how and why the product works.

“Many people think it’s an old wives tale,” Jurenski says.

CRANEL hopes to enable all women to take charge of their bladder and gynecological health. However, Jurzenski and Schultz understood quickly that many of their potential customers didn’t understand the science behind their mission.

In response, the FemTech startup tailored its marketing efforts to address a lack of general UTI knowledge. With the help of traditional digital marketing techniques and some creative business solutions, CRANEL sales tripled in 2020.

Lucky for us, the co-founders were gracious enough to share their educational marketing secrets.

Explaining the Science Behind Healthcare Products with Educational Marketing

CRANEL uses 4 key tactics to help customers understand the science behind their women’s wellness brand. Here’s what you can take away from their educational marketing strategy.

1. Leverage video content 
2. Connect with customers at every opportunity 
3. Create a strong DTC platform 
4. Favor a subscription model over one-time purchases

Leverage video content

Educational marketing, first and foremost, is content marketing. Creating high-quality informational content is a must, but video content, above all, is king.

As Schultz reminds us, “Getting people to read things is harder and harder.“

In the femtech market and other digital industries, education-based marketing should go beyond blog posts. Use educational marketing campaigns that show your clients instead of just telling them!  

Connect with customers at every opportunity

A crucial part of selling a technical product is creating trust with your consumers. CRANEL uses its website in addition to email marketing and social media to foster relationships with its customers. However, creating content for web, email, and social channels is expensive.

By prioritizing brand reputation in a customer-centered way, CRANEL managed to gather User-Generated Content (UGC), the holy grail of any content marketing campaign. CRANEL makes it easy for their customers to submit their own stories, reviews, and experiences with the product. The result? Lots of fantastic content, right from their users, for free.

“Our content, both organic and paid, has higher engagement if it is user-generated, and even higher engagement if we allow users to write their own scripts,” says Jurzenski.

Overall, UGC has improved brand loyalty, grown the community, and increased authenticity for CRANEL. It’s also allowed CRANEL to establish multiple platforms for connecting with customers, without paying a fortune for content creation.    

Focus on Direct-To-Consumer (DTC)

To build a truly successful educational marketing strategy, CRANEL employed a multifunctional approach. In addition to traditional content marketing, Schultz and Jurzenski focused on DTC sales, in order to encourage longer and more meaningful relationships with their customers.

Lots of business gurus urge entrepreneurs to get on Amazon, Alibaba, and other large eCommerce platforms. Sure, the artificial intelligence of these mega-sites could sell products in your sleep, but CRANEL opted for a human approach.

“We prefer DTC because we can actually talk to our customers. We can educate them in the way that we want,” Schultz said.

Their DTC business model facilitates educational marketing because CRANEL owns the entire customer experience. The messaging embedded in actual the buying experience educates prospects on the value of the product, in a way that would not be possible with Amazon or another eCommerce platform.

Favor a subscription model

Even CRANEL’s pricing scheme enables customer education. UTIs are triggered by anything from sexual activity to menstrual cycles, making it difficult to identify the exact cause of improved women’s health outcomes.

“A subscription model encourages women to try the product long enough to see results, preventing churn,”  Jurzenski points out.

Educating your audience doesn’t happen in one purchase. A pricing model that favors long-term subscriptions will help your customer education efforts. Keep customers connected with your product long enough, and they’re more likely to engage with your content enough to learn how valuable your product is!

What FemTech Teaches Us About Educational Marketing

As part of a bourgeoning industry, digital health founders, particularly in women’s health, need to educate their market. Unfortunately, female health research continues to lag behind men’s, leaving life-changing treatments and technologies out of the public healthcare sphere. As a result, entrepreneurs in the FemTech industry must consider customer education a critical part of their sales and retention strategies.

Interested in trying CRANEL out as a customer? Use code “tartface” to receive 10% off your first cranberry elixir order.

P.S.: Look at CRANEL’s educational marketing in action! Their coupon code name is tart face to promote the fact that the shots are tart because there is zero added sugar or flavors.

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