The Trust-Building Playbook: 5 Tips Every Digital Health Marketer Needs to Know

The odds are stacked against digital health companies. 

Regulatory hurdles are high. Fundraising is hard. New products fall short of their promise and require more R&D. First customers are elusive. 

And even if a startup clears hurdles, secures funding, makes a working product, and lands some early customers, it finds itself selling to a conservative and risk-averse customer base.

So how do B2B digital health companies succeed?

To answer that question I interviewed 14 digital health marketing leaders and founders at this year’s HLTH conference.

I went into this with a thesis built on the old saying “trust beats technology.” In short, you can have a great product, but if people don’t trust you, you won’t get far.

I wanted to test this thesis that trust was paramount over all else for digital health startups and – if confirmed – I wanted to learn how these companies were tackling this important goal.

TL;DR: It was unanimous. Trust is vital.

As Ted Schwab, chief developmentoOfficer at HOPPR, a seed stage startup using AI to improve medical imaging, said, “Trust is the only thing that matters. Organizations are just not going to partner with you without it.”

OK, so everyone agrees. Trust is the thing. But how do you earn trust before you can prove you deserve it?

Here’s what I learned:

Trust-building step 1: Display your expertise

For any new entrant in digital health, credibility starts with expertise, and expertise is most easily shown through thought leadership. Grounded in data and industry insights, thought leadership demonstrates a company’s knowledge and reliability, offering potential customers reassurance that they’re partnering with a well-informed, capable team.

And research shows that thought leadership drives sales. Edelman, the global communications agency, found that three out of four B2B buyers find thought leadership to be more trustworthy than traditional marketing materials and sales sheets. So it should come as no surprise that several of the respondents leaned hard into this tactic.

One such group was Solera Health, an on-benefit digital health delivery company. They use their platform to not only share their perspectives, but also to conduct meaningful research and generate reports for industry insights, according to the company’s vice president of marketing, Katryn Chansley.

“We do a tremendous amount of thought leadership, and in such an analytical industry that means we have to back it up with data. For example, we just completed a report that looked at claims data from 50 million individuals across the US to prove the savings that can be created by shifting to a virtual site of care,” she said.

Trust-building step 2: Prove your claims with data

The experts I spoke to cited publishing data – particularly clinically validated data – time and time again, with a focus on having third parties do the validation.

Karen Crow, founder of brain health startup NeuroGeneces, said, “You can think of trust in a number of different ways. One is around efficacy – can our device do what we say it can do? Is it accurate? Is it precise? We’ve seen the positive results of our work, but it was important to also run several IRB-approved studies to get third-party validation to back up our claims.”

Expert clinical validation is also a way of life for the team at Delfina, a AI-powered maternal health platform, according to Stephanie Hubbard, vice president of marketing.

“All of our member-facing educational content is evidence-based. We have a highly experienced medical advisory board that helps guide our product development, and licensed OBGYN clinicians review and approve our member-facing content. Our approach to clinical validation uniquely fosters trust with our Delfina Care members.”

Nikki Ahlgren, chief commercial officer at HealthRate, a startup focused on healthcare price transparency, says that trust in healthcare should be built on a foundation of reliable, real-world data combined with actionable insights.

“The healthcare industry has seen its share of flawed analytics and unmet promises, but accurate data coupled with meaningful interpretation enables us to provide insights that genuinely support better decision-making. Communicating that transparently and using data to guide informed action is key to building confidence and trust,” she said.

Third-party clinical validation will always be important, but that doesn’t mean other kinds of milestone data can’t impress, as well.

At Doxy.me (“doc see me”), a telemedicine platform for providers, director of marketing Will Patrick, said, “Doxy.me has enabled over 10 billion minutes of telehealth for our providers so far, and we share this number — live — on our homepage.” 

(If you’re curious, the exact count as of November 4, 2024 was 10,170,809,956 minutes.) 

Trust-building step 3: Establish social proof

Imagine you’re the customer getting to know a new digital health company.

You’ve read their thought leadership and feel good about their team’s expertise – check.

You’ve read their clinical reports and reviewed the data and feel confident that what they’re selling works – check.

But you know your organization is no early adopter, so here comes the next big trust-building criteria: Is anyone using it?

The power of social proof was another common theme shared by the digital health marketing leaders and founders I talked to. Face it: healthcare is a conservative market when it comes to adopting innovations, so most customers want to see others finding success before taking the leap.

Alan Brande, CEO and co-founder of Light-it, a digital health-focused software development firm, said customer stories are key, especially since his firm’s pricing is surprisingly competitive given the sophistication of what they build.

“We focus a lot on success stories that show how we collaborated with clients to create amazing projects. If a prospective client can see the notable healthcare organizations we work with or how we helped a startup build a groundbreaking product, it immediately builds trust,” he said.

Sharing case studies and posting logos are tried and true. But here was something I’d not heard of before: Inviting your customers to join you on sales calls to other customers. It’s an approach that suggests incredible confidence, and one that Lorraine Kraus says works great at Zus Health, an integrated patient record startup, where she heads marketing.

“I’ve brought customers along with me to meet prospects, and when I’m at conferences like HLTH, rather than having my CEO or myself speak, I’ll invite a customer go on stage to talk about their work with us, because I think that it makes it so much more believable about the value that we provide. For customers to have skin in the game, to want to promote you to other prospects, is the most powerful marketing we do.”

Trust-building step 4: Spread the word with PR

Public relations in respected trade media, such as healthcare publications or conference presentations, can amplify a company’s credibility. By strategically using these channels, companies can expand their reach and reinforce trust with a larger audience beyond direct customers.

That’s why Debra Harris, head of marketing at ixlayer, a direct-to-patient care platform for biopharma, said working with trade media to get their message out has been powerful.

“Of course, we want to be trusted when we share insights, spotlight our work, or have company news. By leveraging trusted trade media outlets with an independent POV, versus exclusively our owned channels, we can significantly engage a larger, but still targeted audience, and it is powerful for trust-building,” she said.

Raven Cobb, vice president of growth and marketing at Clearstep, a developer of AI healthcare assistants, emphasizes a multifaceted approach to effectively share their message, using both owned and earned channels, basking in the shared credibility they offer.

“We employ an omnichannel strategy to reach target audiences, identifying and leveraging venues where prospects seek education, information, and ideas. That includes conferences, content syndication, podcast and media interviews, and consultancy resources,” she said.

When engaging through these channels, it’s important to strike a balance between sharing expertise and avoiding overt promotion, she said. “Being too promotional can undermine our trust-building objectives. Instead, we focus on sharing thought leadership and our tried and proven insights on pertinent topics like access, experience, and capacity optimization, suggesting that Clearstep can support our prospects’ objectives in these areas.”

Trust-building step 5: Create an exceptional human experience

It’s easy for marketers to focus on budgets, tactics, KPIs, and so on, and to lose sight of the human beings involved and the emotions that guide their behaviors. Whether that’s the healthcare professional nervous to bet on a new startup’s product or the individual consumer hesitant to try out a new health app, it can be hard to break through skepticism.

Lynette Grinter, vice president of marketing at health benefits navigation app HealthJoy, said one way to do this is to remove uncertainty by making the customer experience explicitly clear.

“Prospects need to know exactly what the experience is working with us, and we need to clearly articulate that so they feel confident enough to sign on. We show them both the human side of our business – including 24/7 concierge support – and the tech side. We show them how we tie together information from employer benefits packages and each employee’s unique health goals. When a prospect is confident about what comes next, they’re much more willing to buy.”

Showing prospects that they’ll be part of a large and thriving club is another way to establish personal connection, but with other customers, not just you.

Specifically, Gabe Paine, vice president of brand marketing at health technology platform PointClickCare, said creating active user groups has proven to be a great strategy for influencing other users to realize the value and full potential of the platform.

“Having a very active community user base is really important, so we invest a lot in our customer network. We have an online community called Pulse, which over 35,000 of our customers have joined, and we also have our annual SUMMIT, a client-focused conference, where 2,000 experts, innovators, and thought leaders come together to tackle key issues in healthcare, including acute and post-acute care. Building an engaged community and facilitating face-to-face interactions allow our clients to share their experiences with both our platform and marketplace.”

Colleen Wisniewski, marketing director for MATTER, a health startup incubator and innovation hub, added that collaboration is key in making a human connection, saying, “We build collaboration into our ecosystem to be able to help startups grow. Effective collaboration, and building that rapport that follows, strengthens trust. The collaboration is by people, not companies, so there’s a strong social contract of ‘if we commit to do this for you, then you’re committing to do that for yourself.’”

Trust is essential in digital health

Whether you seek to tackle one of the steps above or all of them, building trust while simultaneously building products, selling, recruiting, and fundraising can feel impossible.

But trust-building is required whether you have the time or not, and it doesn’t stop no matter how big you grow. Even large national healthcare organizations like Premise Health are continually focused on it. Lacey Hunter, assistant vice president of brand strategy and public relations at Premise, said her team abides by a three-fold promise:

“Be human, be hopeful, and be helpful. That’s how we boil it down. People aren’t going to trust you if they don’t know you. And if you as a company, as a brand, say ‘our market-leading solution uses cutting-edge technology to optimize healthcare benefits’ that just doesn’t resonate with humans. They want to know – in really simple terms and really human language – what you do and why it should matter to them.”

And here’s a final trust-building kicker for you to chew on, this advice from our first interviewee, HOPPR’s Ted Schwab:

“Never, ever lie. Your partners know when you’re not telling the truth. Your partners know when you’re overselling. It’s okay to say I don’t know, it’s okay to say, well, it might or might not work. Don’t lie to people and be truthful, especially about what works.”

Editor’s Note: The author and his company have no financial relationship with any of the companies / healthcare leaders mentioned.

Photo: zhaojiankang, Getty Images

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