This August I got an opportunity to join the VOS team as a Marketing specialist and witness the process of product development from its beginning to launch. Since today the app hit more than 10 000 users and 1000 followers on Instagram, I would like to celebrate it by sharing how we began our marketing journey with VOS.

2020 has been quite an eventful year for all of us and VOS is no exception. This time it was no longer important how successful or attractive you are. What was important is to check how you feel and how stable your mental health is. That’s why our team felt an urge to deliver the best results as soon as possible. Where are we now and how we got there? Let’s see.

The product

Even before COVID-19, the prevalence of mental disorders among adults was increasing. In 2017-2018, 19% of adults experienced a mental disorder. Imagine how high the numbers are right now. The culture of embracing mental health just starts to mean something besides shallow self-help content. Now it delivers a more significant message than a simple motivational quote.

I personally was always interested in psychology and mental health. In my teenage years, I was hustling and tried many different hobbies at once while mixing them with being good at school and having a social life. Too much pressure on myself but good lessons learned early enough - stop running around and focus on yourself.

In reality, even grown-ups barely admit or share their emotions and feelings, not to their family or loved ones, not to themselves. They might not think about it, ignore or either don’t know how to express them. That's why it was my pleasure to join the team of young talented professionals who wanted to develop VOS - a self-reflection & journaling app. The key features include guided journaling, mood tracking, and analytical insights. Read more info here.

The product is perfect for a wide range of target audiences since mental health is as important as physical health. But my personal mission as a part of the team was to reach out to people who would find it helpful and interesting. Then to communicate what’s new and exciting the app has to offer. 

Plus, I was lucky enough to participate in product development by coordinating with therapists about the final set of questions, finalizing the brand's tone of voice with copywriters, and creating the entire marketing strategy from scratch with co-creators of VOS.

Community

The VOS.health was never meant to be just an app. VOS.health is an entire ecosystem of products and services that aims to serve the mental healthcare industry and help people to take care of their minds. An app is just a tool, but there is always much more to it.

By exploring survey results from our Early Adopters, I’ve noticed that for some users our tool serves to track their mental health and to observe a bigger picture of life. Some users see it as an adventure and a possible way to discover more about their personalities. For both of these groups, I wanted to provide a safe space to explore and share. When it comes to talking about mental health online, goal number one is to create a trustworthy environment for people to open up and share, which isn’t exactly easy. 

In the beginning, I’ve analyzed what the market has to offer and decided to focus on four main communication channels, which are Blog, Instagram, Facebook community, and Events. Each channel brings something unique to the table for the community members so everyone can find something suitable for their needs.

The first step was to create a blog or channel for people to educate themselves on topics of mental health, sleeping disorders, interpersonal difficulties, and recommendations on how to improve quality of life on a daily basis. Now it’s available directly in the app, which lets users enjoy it after completing their daily self-reflection routine.

Then, @VOS.health Instagram page is an area, where we openly suggest various day-to-day topics and common problems, share mental health tips, and provide books/TV-shows recommendations for all sorts of occasions. In a nutshell, I create a discussion by posting a relevant topic highlight and lead it with the general audience in Story format. Whereas, the Wellbeing community on Facebook is a private and safe space for our members to start a conversation and discuss their problems, feelings, dilemmas, and share basically anything in the world. My task is to encourage participants to share and make sure that the community rules aren’t violated.

If you are going to suggest that the event management industry has experienced a dramatic change in 2020 you will be completely right. Some may argue that audiences won’t be as engaged in a virtual event. However, according to the Digital World, 86% of the people who have attended digital events report higher or equal levels of engagement compared to in-person events. Plus, it’s more cost-efficient. That is exactly why I decided to boost event activities for VOS right up from the beginning. 

For the past two months, I’ve experimented with two event formats: Zoom webinars (How to Manage Mental Health in Times of Covid-19) and Instagram Live Stream (The Culture of Dating in 2020). And it was a pretty fun experience. We invited 3 professionals from the mental healthcare sector to share their views and tips on how to manage mental health. Both events required minimum funds and exceeded the attendance and attendee retention KPIs.

Plus, the recordings are available online, which makes the content more accessible to a wider audience.

Performance marketing is the key

Performance marketing is the most effective way for us to measure the ad performances and allocate marketing budget across channels. This way we create transparency between the channel budget and actual sales.

“Try different things and do what works.”

In collaboration with our team of designers and copywriters, we are constantly trying to improve the sets of creatives that we are running across channels, considering factors as the performance of the previous ads, market specification, and target audience.

Email communication and feedback

Capturing new leads is important but keeping them intrigued and excited is an entirely different story. Would you agree that in this case email marketing comes in quite handy? Carefully planned and well-implemented email automation will help you deal with routine work, save you time and money and most importantly keep your users up-to-date and engaged. 

The word "automation" sounds a little distant and doesn’t suggest a personal approach especially the one we would need for our personalized product. At the same time, email marketing automation allows us to stay in touch with the audience 24/7 by sending relevant messages at the right time.

In the case of the VOS app we share the best self-reflection tips, inform users on the upcoming events and promotions, help them stay on track with their progress, and more.

The common goal

Last but not least is one of the most important elements of any project - to have a common goal and an aligned dedicated team. Since I am a part of a young and innovative product, there is no time to plan for a couple of months ahead. The team reacts quickly to a user's needs and delivers on-point features. My role is to announce them accordingly and even make sure it will happen in 8+ languages. No doubt, communication is key in such a rapidly growing environment.

From my side, I’ve managed to communicate with different types of professionals and since this was my first marketing app project, there was a lot to learn, process, and coordinate with different parties. As I’ve said, it’s been a pleasure working with talented developers, designers, and project managers to get it up and running. Special thanks to therapists and psychologists that help us with product development and events. We also have a dedicated community of translators that helped us to make VOS available in 8 languages: English, Czech, Spanish, Turkish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

The bits explained in this article don’t include everything that I and our team have tried or are trying to implement in terms of communication and marketing strategy. But yet already a significant piece that helped us to get where we are now and there is always more to come.

Let’s grow bigger and stronger in 2021.

Try out VOS available on App Store and Google Play.