Doulado is a technology startup on a mission to revolutionize the way doulas (birth doulas, postpartum doulas, grief doulas, and beyond) do their work, simplifying administrative tasks through an intuitive, accessible CRM platform exclusively designed with doulas’ unique needs in mind.

They’ve excelled in this mission, presenting a well-polished, continuously improving product, superb customer service, and flexible pricing that reinforces Doulado’s mission of making maternal health accessible to everyone who needs it.

Through all of this progress, however, there was one critical task that hadn’t been tackled:

The company’s customer understanding came from conversations with users and prospects, and product changes were implemented as feedback and requests were manually submitted by users. Although conversations with clients are paramount to product development, this system is inefficient in the long term.

Doulado was in the dark about their users’ buying journey, and there wasn’t much visibility on what they were doing within the application, either. Were they coming through an advertisement or an email campaign? Was the invoicing feature the most used one, or was it private messaging with clients? 

An analytics setup is essential to understanding the complete customer experience. With a major partnership coming up with the worldwide recognized DONA International (the biggest organization certifying doulas worldwide), the already overtasked founding team decided it was time to seek help and sort out the analytics situation.

My goal was a simple one: Create a sturdy, reliable analytics backbone that would not only withstand the influx of visitors and users coming from DONA but also serve Doulado in the years to come, giving a solid foundation to track user behavior over time and through all of its major channels.

I would start with the basics of setting up a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with customizable dashboards that reflected relevant data to Doulado; I would also set up a Google Tag Manager (GTM) structure with tags and triggers through different steps of the buyer journey (the ones we had been able to identify thus far).

Optimizing website copy to improve SEO and adding UTM parameters (and a structure for analyzing these) were also part of my goals, as we were trying not only to better understand how customers were using the website and the Doulado app, but also to find out where they were coming from, and what messaging made them click with the Doulado brand.

With a deeper understanding of user behavior, Doulado would be able to make product decisions in a fraction of the time. Landing pages would be easier and faster to test, and the overall customer experience would improve for thousands of users at a time.

The DONA partnership was set to launch in the first week of October, which gave me exactly one week to have a functional analytics structure up and running before the emails were sent and the announcements made on socials. I was racing against time, and every minute was precious.

Since no previous analytics structure was set up, I enjoyed a pristine blank canvas to work with. But, since no previous analytics structure was set up, I also had a pristine, ominous blank page.

Before I could begin tinkering my way through GA4, I had to revise what little data was available, and deep-dive with the founders to understand what type of data was specifically valuable to Doulado. I didn’t have any previous experience with a maternal health startup, and what little I knew about doulas and doula work wasn’t enough to understand the intricacies of their decision-making process.

So I did the best thing you can do in these cases: I listened. Doulado’s founder, Mary Beth Johnson, is a woman who’d spent the past year of her life building up Doulado for the sole purpose of serving doulas and making their lives easier. If there was someone who could guide me in understanding what this market looked like, what challenges doulas faced, and how Doulado aimed to solve that, it was her.

Through our conversations, I learned that doulas are highly specific with their services (even within the same field like <<birth doula>> services available may vary by practitioner), and they often operate in groups or through organizations. They are constantly re-certifying themselves and broadening their skill sets. Since doulas deal with medical information, data privacy is paramount, and HIPAA regulations are strict about who and where information can be accessed.

All of these details began drafting the lines of a strategy to follow. Knowing what was important to doulas would help craft a message that was attractive to them. Knowing what type of features they sought (HIPAA compliance, teamwork, tailored service offerings) gave me the threads I needed to determine which data would be most important to track.

Some data was available, and through it, I was able to identify the biggest gaps in the existing analytics strategy, it also gave me insights into what could be done with the existing resources (Doulado was a startup with heavy budget constraints, so I had to be not only time-efficient but also cost-effective).

A few things popped out after my initial analysis of the existent data:

Email marketing received low engagement and had a low open rate, but outbound emails weren’t consistent enough to determine a pattern.

Social media content performed well on Instagram and TikTok but didn’t receive much engagement on LinkedIn, which would become a priority social media platform as Doulado sought to secure funding.

The web analytics provided by Squarespace (the web design tool used by Doulado) showed data on visits and popular pages but didn’t paint a complete enough picture to understand how users were interacting with the site.

Almost no pages on the site were SEO-ready, but the higher-performing ones were blogs, which told me the content was resonating–it was just a matter of polishing it.

There was no traffic source-tracking in place and no way to determine if new leads came from socials, an email, or a search result, though a well-placed survey on the sign-up page did ask users to select where they’d come from—that was as good a place to start as any.

It was important to address these gaps in the new strategy and tie them in with the new structure in a way that gave us even greater insights into this information. Tracking traffic sources would greatly impact advertising investments in the future, and it would steer social media efforts and content creation. Website behavior and SEO would tell us what content resonated with visitors, and how the user journey looked like before deciding to sign up (or drop out).

Since time was of the essence, I decided to focus on website analytics first by setting up GA4 with enough customized events to track key behaviors such as most visited pages and most clicked CTAs, paying particular attention to the landing page created for the partnership announcement.

A social media campaign was soon to launch alongside the partnership, so I also focused on preparing attractive assets to share on Doulado and DONA International’s social accounts, adding tailored UTMs to source-track all the incoming traffic. Additional UTMs and documentation would follow for future campaigns and marketing efforts, but at the moment, preparing for the partnership launch took priority.

I worked closely with Doulado’s CTO in crafting a strategy for in-app behavior analysis as well, guaranteeing that when a new user signed up through Doulado’s website, their journey would seamlessly continue on the app. This duality was important to continue improving the user experience for all existing and new doulas using the platform.

Considering the budgetary constraints, I only used free tools to set up and run the analytics strategy. I also made use of the tools that Doulado already worked on within their operation.

Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

Google Search Console

Google Campaign Builder

SurferSEO (free capabilities)

SEMrush (free capabilities)

Meta Business Suite

Flodesk (email)

Squarespace (website)

Monday.com (Project management)

Canva (visual assets & presentations)

Thanks to all the previous research and the conversations with the founding team, and once all the access to the necessary tools was granted, the execution of the strategy was swift for the most part. Preparing the GA4 structure from scratch and setting up the relevant events both from GA4 and GTM took less than two days and gave us ample time for testing and correcting, placing each trigger in place, and drafting the dashboards that would soon fill with the data incoming from the partnership landing page and Doulado’s marketing site.

The social media campaigns were also prepared with a few days to spare, which was enough to communicate the strategy with DONA executives and ensure everyone in the deployment team was aware of the changes. Since email communications would be sent from both ends (and to different audiences), we also collaborated on preparing differentiated messages for each group. Links embedded with UTMs were shared with DONA to include in their communications, and they were instructed to redirect all traffic to the Doulado + DONA exclusive landing page.

It was important to make sure the new analytics structure would carry on beyond the partnership launch week, so after these prioritized tasks were completed, I dedicated the rest of my consultancy time to preparing a master document that gave a step-by-step breakdown of the marketing analytics setup, with instructions on how to navigate and customize GA4 dashboards; how to add and setup events through GTM, and which events were or would be most relevant to Doulado based on my research.

This document guaranteed that the analytics backbone that’d been set up would be given proper maintenance and that future marketing analytics resources would have a blueprint to work with, and sufficient data collected to make business decisions.

For the second portion of my objectives on SEO improvements and website content, I performed extensive research on keywords and high-performing content within the maternal health and particularly the doula industry and provided additional documentation with content recommendations and an editorial and social media calendars to follow during Q4’23 & Q1’24, outlining as well a community strategy that would further support Doulado’s mission of expanding the reach of maternal health. This community was launched during my time with Doulado, and it showed great promise even in its early stages.

Website content was improved and metadata and tags were added to all Doulado pages to support SERP ranking. Using Google Search Console I identified unindexed pages and other link and content-related issues and fixed as many of them as possible within my last week at the company, submitting several pages for Google to review, and sharing the remaining outstanding ones with Doulado in a document, outlining as well the steps to follow to fix them. This way Doulado would be able to improve their search results ranking not only through SEO but also by complying with a high-performing website.

After a month of the analytics setup and partnership launch, I met with the Doulado team to analyze the data collected and re-calibrate the marketing analytics strategy as needed.

The results were encouraging; as expected, greater data collection capacity led to fuller dashboards telling a story that could be acted upon. The customer journey map was now a fuller picture, with many of the former gaps filled, and a myriad of new information to complement that gave us a greater understanding of doulas’ journey through Doulado’s main website and the steps they’d taken to get there.

Demographic data told us which cities showed higher engagement and time on page, and through it, we developed an additional strategy that targets organizations within these regions, offering an opportunity for Doulado to break into those markets. Pre-existent data from reputable sources confirmed some of these are areas with a high demand for doulas and doula services.

Regarding the Doulado + DONA partnership and subsequent campaign, we were able to identify the top traffic sources (email clicks) and reinforce the messaging through other channels to improve responsiveness in these. 

In a combination of quantitative (marketing analytics back-engine) and qualitative data (survey completed by users as they sign up and through the Doulado community), Doulado was now able to identify the top concerns doulas face in their business and the rationale behind their decision to sign up for an account. 

This data was used to improve the marketing and content strategies, concentrating efforts on speaking on highly relevant topics for doulas, and writing blog articles that offered specific advice and guidance to doulas on topics of business management, online presence, and CSM for their business.

Where there was previously no way of knowing where or how doulas were finding Doulado’s marketing site, we now knew that a great portion of web traffic came organically through search results, with another considerable chunk coming from backlinks and references on other websites. Knowing this, maintaining a healthy SEO and well-indexed website would remain a priority for the team.

Coming from a non-technical background, having prepared dashboards that were easy to navigate was imperative for the founder and main marketing resource. After a live walk-through and alongside the documentation formerly shared, it was now easier for the team to make data-informed decisions on future strategies, determine ad-targeting and spending, and steer content creation and social media efforts towards high-performing opportunities, rather than waste precious–and limited–time and other resources on strategies that wouldn’t resonate with the target audience.

As the analytics dashboards continue to fill month over month, a clearer picture will draw upon Doulado’s visitors and their behavior, allowing them to make data-driven decisions with higher accuracy, and letting them test different formats, landing pages, and campaigns with greater confidence in knowing that all the information will be available to review and deliberate upon.

The doula industry remains a highly specific space, where each doula has their particularities in service offering and needs, what is true is that there is common ground in the ways doulas find and interact with Doulado. Doulas resonate with Doulado’s mission to democratize maternal health and find the ease of use and capabilities of the product to be just what they need to propel their business forward.

Such a humane mission should be protected and have the opportunity to continue growing. Although adding a marketing analytics structure seems like a small, humble task amid the greater machine that is a startup, it’s not one to overlook.

Doulado will be able to continue its mission and grow exponentially in the years to come. It will continue to make educated decisions on what’s best for its business, confident that they have its clients’ feedback, and a greater backbone of data and relevant information to pull from as new strategies are devised.

Data analytics, and more specifically, marketing analytics should be a crucial part of everyone’s business strategy. It is a gateway to better understanding your users, online presence, and overall business position in the market. Those insights can help you scale your business faster, and on the other hand, the lack of them may just be the reason why you never find your position in your niche.

A marketing analytics setup is one of many steps Doulado is taking to improve its marketing strategy and overall business strategy, and although this was a relatively quick project spanning over eight weeks, the long-term impacts of this successful implementation will be felt by the company in the long-term.

I had a wonderful time working and learning with the Doulado team, and every challenge posed was a great opportunity to get creative and hone my skills.

If you're looking to take your marketing operation to brand new heights, please reach out! I'd love to work together.