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Case Study
Strategic PR and media presence for a health-tech company scaling across West Africa
A health-tech platform with a genuinely important product and no voice in the media conversations shaping their sector. We built their communications strategy and delivered 28 tier-one placements in six months.
Tier-one media placements
Campaign duration
New partnership leads from coverage
Scale
Stage engagement
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The Challenge
Doing important work quietly in a loud sector.
The company had built health infrastructure that was genuinely improving patient outcomes across three West African countries. But in media terms they were invisible. Their competitors were getting coverage in TechCrunch Africa, Quartz Africa, and CNN Business. They were not. Investors and potential government partners were forming views based on what they read, and what they read did not include this company.
When they came to Upside Route, the brief was urgent: they had a term sheet meeting in twelve weeks and needed to present as a company that had earned the right to be taken seriously. The work had to move fast without cutting corners.
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The Approach
Earn attention through substance, not noise.
We started by building a strategic messaging framework that gave every spokesperson a consistent, compelling voice on the three topics most relevant to health-tech investment in West Africa. We then built a tiered media list, identified the journalists whose audiences overlapped with the company’s target stakeholders, and ran a systematic outreach programme grounded in original data and founder insight, not press releases.
From that foundation, we built the full brand system. Naming rationale and brand narrative. Visual identity covering logo, colour system, typography, and motion principles. Messaging architecture that gave the team a consistent voice whether speaking to an SME founder on Instagram or a fund manager in a boardroom.
We also built the internal brand guide and trained the team on how to use it. Delivery at that pace only works when the recipient knows what to do with what they receive.
“We had tried PR before and felt like we were paying for emails that went nowhere. Upside Route changed what we thought PR could do for us.”
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The Outcome
Twenty-eight placements. Three partnership conversations.
Twenty-eight tier-one media placements over six months including features in Quartz Africa, CNN Business Africa, and TechCabal. Three inbound partnership conversations attributable directly to specific articles. The company’s founders are now cited regularly as authoritative voices on health-tech in West Africa, which was the foundational objective.
Three.eight times the investor interest metric reflects the volume of inbound warm introductions and meeting requests in the six weeks after the brand went live across their digital channels. The company has since used the brand system to on-board a communications agency and a new head of growth, both of whom cited the clarity of the brand book as a material factor in their decision to join.
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