Context
Rocket Locums is a technology company in healthcare staffing. Its platform matches locum tenens providers, physicians and advanced practice clinicians such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, directly with the hospitals and clinics that need temporary coverage. Matching runs through software that reads specialty, geography, and skill sets, and both sides of a placement rate each other afterward, so a provider can review a facility and a facility can review a provider. The company set out to serve Texas first, with growth beyond the state as a later phase.
Locum tenens coverage is usually arranged through staffing agencies, where neither side sees much of how a placement is priced or chosen. Rocket Locums built its platform around the opposite idea: a two-sided marketplace where the terms and the ratings are visible to everyone in the transaction. Demand for temporary clinical coverage had been rising for years, pushed by rural staffing shortages, clinician burnout, an aging physician workforce, and the pressure of the pandemic. By the fall of 2021 the software was finished and the company was turning from building the product to putting it in front of the people who would use it.
Challenge
Rocket Locums had built a software platform that matched locum tenens providers directly with healthcare facilities, replacing the traditional agency model with transparent, two-sided matching and ratings. As the business prepared for its first phase of growth in Texas, it needed a way to judge whether its practices were working and a plan for reaching both providers and facilities online. With no direct comparator in its market, the open questions were which measures to track and where to spend outreach effort. The founders wanted a short, defensible set of indicators they could follow from launch, covering money, satisfaction, marketing, and operations, rather than everything the software could count. On the marketing side the question was more specific: where to place digital advertising so it reached working locum providers, and how to tell which placements worked.
How the team worked
The team opened with a discovery meeting to understand how the platform worked, how matching and reviews ran on both the provider and facility sides, and what the founders wanted to change. Marketing came out as the first priority, with performance measurement close behind, and the team scoped the project around those two areas rather than spreading across the whole business.
From there TASK met with the client weekly, bringing market research and an outside view of the locum tenens industry to each session. Work ran in two tracks. An in-house metrics track produced the four part KPI framework and the survey design behind it, defining each measure, the formula that produced it, and the place the underlying data would come from. A software track covered analytics supplementation, social media channel research, and recruiting and email outreach options.
Both tracks were grounded in published research on the locum tenens workforce: who takes locum assignments, at what point in a career, and how providers find and choose the firms they work with. That reading set the direction of the marketing work, pointing it at provider candidates rather than at the facilities posting assignments, and it shaped which channels the team thought worth testing first.
Channel and vendor work was comparative rather than anecdotal. The team built a side-by-side comparison of social management platforms on features, analytics, ease of use, and independent reviews before naming one, and it worked through medical marketing databases, email service providers, and search optimization services the same way, noting what each could and could not do for a company recruiting clinicians.
A mini deliverable presentation midway through the semester walked the client through the KPI definitions and the marketing strategies still in progress, and gave the founders a point to react before the work was fixed. The final written deliverable consolidated the KPI framework, the analytics recommendation, the social media strategy, and the recruiting resource comparison into one document.
Workstreams
- Defined a set of key performance indicators across four areas, financial performance, customer satisfaction, marketing performance, and operations performance, tailored to a two-sided matching platform.
- Designed a two-stage customer survey, one at account creation and one at contract completion, to feed customer rating, returning user, and referral measures without self-selection bias.
- Reviewed how the platform's existing product analytics tool could be supplemented with workflow automation so survey and off-site data would flow into the same reporting view.
- Researched social media channels, including physician-specific networks and locum tenens communities, and compared scheduling platforms before recommending one for consistent posting.
- Evaluated medical marketing databases, email service providers, and search engine optimization services as routes to provider candidates.
- Presented the KPI framework and marketing plan in an interim deck, then compiled the full recommendations in a final written deliverable.
What the team found
- Published research on the locum tenens workforce showed demand for temporary coverage running ahead of the supply of available providers, which pointed outreach at provider candidates rather than at facilities.
- Providers tended to move into locum work mid-career rather than straight out of training, and the smaller group who started early read as the audience most open to an online-first service.
- Compensation terms and the personal relationship with a staffing firm both weighed on how providers chose whom to work with, so transparency and service quality mattered as much as reach did.
- Providers still learned about staffing firms largely through established, offline channels, which meant digital advertising on its own was unlikely to carry early awareness.
- Physician focused professional networks and locum-specific online communities concentrated the target audience far more tightly than the general social platforms did.
- The platform's analytics tool read on site behavior well but could not see anything collected outside the website, leaving the satisfaction measures without a data source until that gap was bridged.
What the client received
- KPI framework covering financial, customer satisfaction, marketing, and operations performance, with a definition and data source for each measure.
- Two stage customer survey design for account creation and contract completion.
- Recommendation for supplementing the existing product analytics tool with automated survey data.
- Social media channel research covering physician networks, locum communities, and general platforms.
- General posting strategy for content, cadence, and handles across channels.
- Social management platform comparison table with a single recommendation.
- Comparison of medical marketing databases, email service providers, and SEO services for provider recruiting.
- Interim presentation deck and final written deliverable.
Outcome
Rocket Locums left the engagement with a defined set of measures for finance, satisfaction, marketing, and operations, a survey design to populate them, and a ranked view of the social, recruiting, and email channels most likely to reach locum tenens providers. It also had a clearer picture of who takes locum assignments and how those providers choose a firm, which gave the founders a basis for deciding where early outreach effort should go and what the message should emphasize. The team recommended a single scheduling platform for social posting and a monthly cadence for revisiting marketing measures as results come in, so the company could judge each channel rather than guess at it.
Recommendations
- Track a short set of financial ratios covering return on investment, how readily operations cover short-term obligations, and overall liquidity, all readable from statements the business already produces.
- Collect satisfaction data through a mandatory two-stage survey rather than an optional one, so rating, repeat use, and referral measures come from every user instead of only the most motivated.
- Judge each marketing channel on both what it costs to acquire a customer and how often signed contracts name it, and revisit the marketing measures monthly as results come in.
- Supplement the existing product analytics tool with a workflow automation service so survey responses collected off-site arrive as events in the same reporting view.
- Concentrate social posting on physician-focused networks and locum tenens communities, tell founder and provider stories rather than product features, keep one handle across platforms, and post weekly.
- Reach provider candidates through a verified medical marketing database and targeted email, and treat search engine optimization as a later investment once the outreach basics are running.
Next steps
- The client was handed a KPI framework with a definition, a formula, and a data source for each measure, in a form ready to be built into dashboards inside its own analytics tool.
- The client was handed the two-stage survey design, at account creation and at contract completion, showing which measure each stage feeds and how to avoid self-selection.
- The client was handed a comparison of social management platforms with one recommendation and a general posting strategy to run through it.
- The client was handed a comparison of provider recruiting resources, covering medical marketing databases, email service providers, and search optimization services, with the trade-offs of each.