In today’s episode, Jenny welcomes iHealthSpot Director of Practice Marketing, Bill Riley, to share some very exciting news that will advance the offerings of our agency—Hedy & Hopp has acquired iHealthSpot. iHealthSpot is a healthcare marketing agency that specializes in helping local providers establish and grow their marketing footprint to increase brand awareness and drive patient engagement. At Hedy & Hopp, we work with more regional providers and payors, so this acquisition gives us the capabilities, processes, and technologies to serve smaller groups, expanding our impact to improve how patients find and access care through smarter marketing campaigns.
During the episode, Jenny and Bill discuss:
- 3 Ways an Agency Grows – This includes new business sales, organic growth and client retention, and what we are covering today—agency acquisition.
- Working with Large Clients vs. Small – We often see the size of a client’s organization play a role in the audience type, their competitors, and the education opportunities pertaining to different marketing levers.
- Our Transition Strategy – Over the next couple of months we will be determining how to combine the H&H and iHealthSpot teams and make the transition seamless and simple for our clients.
- The Acquisition – When choosing the right company for an acquisition, a few key factors are looked at such as industry vertical, segment of clients, and synergy between services and the team members.
Connect with Bill:
Connect with Jenny:
- Email: jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Heddy & Hop. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And today we’re coming with a really big, exciting announcement.
This has been posted all over our socials. We want to do a podcast episode specifically on it because we’re just super jazzed about it. And with that my guest today is Bill Riley. Welcome Bill.
Bill: Thank you, Jenny. Great to be here.
Jenny: So the exciting announcement that we’re making today is that Hedy and Hopp has acquired another healthcare marketing agency. So that agency is iHealthspot and we are super excited about it. I’m having Bill on today to chat a little bit about his perspective of the acquisition. Bill ran iHealthSpot, and he’s joining Hedy [00:01:00] & Hoop to continue running the practice marketing business under the Hedy & Hopp umbrella.
So I wanted to start by kind of backing up a little bit. I’m talking a little bit about the three different ways an agency can grow. Cause I think it’s really important if you’re not in the agency space, you may not have the perspective of like, how does an agency grow besides you just landing new clients?
What does that look like? And really there are three different ways agencies can grow. The first one is new business sales, right? Like brand new organizations you’ve never worked with before coming in the door, wanting to work with you. And we have Hedy & Hopp has killed it with that this year. We have over 15 significant new clients coming on board this year.
Actually that’s a couple of months old. I think it’s higher than that now. But we’ve done a really good job with onboarding net new clients. The other way is organic growth and client retention. Hedy & Hopp is also excelling in this space. We have 88 percent client retention over the last four years since pivoting to healthcare [00:02:00] exclusively.
That is a very high percentage. Especially when you take into consideration that some folks just come to you for a one time project and they’re included in that calculation. So we are really proud of that 88 percent retention. The other way, the third way, and what we’re talking about today is growth through an agency acquisition.
This is something that has been really on our radar is something we wanted to tackle, maybe next year or a year down the road, but it was not something we were actively thinking about right now. However, an agency would do an acquisition of another agency if they’re trying to add a service line. Or a capability or add customers or revenue.
And for Hedy and Hopp, this acquisition really made sense on both sides. Bill and I actually met at the HCIC conference. He attended my session about HIPAA and immediately came up afterwards and said he loved hearing about the topic and we’ve, you know, stayed in contact ever since and that kind of is how that acquisition [00:03:00] came to us.
We were not out actively hunting to buy an agency. It really just organically came our way. At Hedy & Hopp our five areas of passion as far as the kinds of clients we love working with are regional providers, regional payers or health insurance companies, pediatrics, oncology, and reproductive health.
And Bill, I’d love for you to chat a little bit about iHealthSpots area of focus, because it really, if you take our regional providers bucket, it really is exciting how deep it’s going to allow us to go from a client base and area focus perspective.
Bill: Yeah, thanks, Jenny. I think it’s a beautiful fit between the two agencies.
Generally speaking, broadly speaking, Hedy & Hopp has, let’s say, fewer clients in the grand scheme of things, but these tend to be much, much larger organizations. Where as iHealthSpot is very much the [00:04:00] opposite. There will be several hundred clients that we will bring transition over to Hedy & Hopp.
Majority of these are very small, like, like single location practitioners or specialists or what have you. There are some, you know, multi location clients. We have some regional hospitals, but the vast majority are smaller ambulatory practices. We have a number of primary care, probably 15 percent of the base are primary care related clinicians.
The majority are specialties. Those that, if you think about. Don’t have direct line of sight to the patient or they don’t own the patient is not necessarily attributed to them. So these are organizations that really need to lean into marketing to accelerate their patient acquisition efforts. In many ways, you know, we’re healthcare [00:05:00] only just like Hedy & Hopp but in so many ways many of our tiny clients will behave from a marketing standpoint are behaving just like a local retailer in a town or in a neighborhood or whatever.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a really great point. And I think it’s the timing is just so interesting because over the last 18 months, we’ve had a large number of groups just like that come to us and want to work with us. But our people, processes and technology are really built to service larger organizations. So for example, our clients that come to us have media budgets of hundreds of thousands on the low end, up to like five to 10 million plus annual, right, because they’re statewide or multi state.
And so it’s really difficult to just take that and shrink it down for one location. So we were actively building a small practice marketing service, like a division when you approached us. So I’m really excited that we’re going to have the opportunity to both continue to service [00:06:00] those larger groups, and then also appropriately service the smaller ones, helping them really focus exclusively on patient acquisition and getting those new patients through the door.
Bill: Yeah, it’s a great point. And, you know, in many ways, The nuts and bolts, the blocking and tackling of digital marketing is often the easy part. What, where we do a lot of work, especially with a new client is around just education, you know, at a larger organization, a larger enterprise they will have some sense of a marketing organization or marketing team that is responsible for the branding and the presence and awareness of that institution.
When you’ve got a tiny orthopedic practice or dermatology practice, they don’t have the wherewithal to do that. So we’re you know, we’re often working with the physician owner themselves or the office manager and you know, just like any discipline, there’s a vocabulary and there are [00:07:00] acronyms and, you know, this is something that we learned from early on it’s very easy to talk past each other.
You know, if you start throwing around all these words about PPC and SEO and keywords or keywords with a long tail, you know, people get kind of frustrated and they don’t know, right. So part of the process, a huge distinction between a large enterprise and a tiny practice is just, first of all, helping folks to understand what all the digital channels are, assessing who they are and how they fit in their local neighborhood with patients, with other competition.
And then, you know, not just evolving a strategy, but just helping them to understand teaching along the way is a big thing that we try to do for the smaller clients.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s kind of interesting because I’ve had a few episodes about this, but the heart of [00:08:00] Hedy & Hopp truly is education also. Right, cause even at the larger size, they also need education, but it’s usually a different kind of education. Right. But like at the heart of it, if you’re truly a smart and joyful, I will say marketing agency, educating your client and bringing them along for the ride. As far as actually understanding what your strategy means and what you’re executing is such a big part of it for relationship building and helping them just be successful.
So awesome. Well, what I’d love to talk about then is our transition strategies. So, like you said, there are hundreds of my health spot clients. There are, I believe around 450 coming over, so quite a significant client base. And so what we’re planning to do is we’re actually going to continue. Bill is going to continue running our practice marketing business formerly known as iHealthSpot, keeping the health spot branding for now, but he’s going to continue running that business.
Most of the teams are coming over. So same faces, same processes, same technology, nothing is changing. Same thing with Hedy & Hopp. All of our clients [00:09:00] can continue having the same team members, same processes, same everything. And then over the coming months, we’re going to be looking at understanding how can we combine teams?
How can we begin offering some of those technologies that we offer larger groups to those smaller groups and vice versa? I personally was really passionate about building a business unit to be able to service smaller groups because I’m very passionate about improving patients’ access to care and the ability to find the care that they need.
And often that isn’t necessarily through large groups. Sometimes it is, like you said, like the orthopedic group on the corner. And so having the ability to service both appropriately has been really near and dear to my heart. So very excited about this.
Bill: Yeah, agreed. And just to Emphasize your point, I’d say our number one focus is making this transition for our clients as seamless and as simple and easy as possible. Jenny, like you mentioned, that the same staff that is delivering the [00:10:00] services. The same faces, the point of contact for our clients, the same help desk staff, all coming over along with all of the underlying infrastructure.
So, for clients that have websites with us or other marketing services, social media, paid ads, you know, listings, reputation management, what have you, all of that infrastructure is coming over as well. So we plan for as simple and seamless a transition as we can.
Jenny: I love it. I love it. And Bill I would love to hear just your perspective of company fit because I mean, I have my perspective, but I’d love to hear more about your thoughts as you’ve met the Hedy & Hopp team members and just learn more about, you know, our organization and the cultural fit between the two groups.
Bill: Yeah, no, this one to me is a pleasure to answer. You know, you can look at, you can look at things, opportunities like this from a few different dimensions, right? You can look at, of course, we’re in the same vertical industry, and then we look at [00:11:00] segments of clients, and there’s some overlap there, there’s some adjacency there, so that’s a great opportunity.
We can look at synergy between services, right? I’m excited because there are a number of services offered by Hedy & Hopp that we’ve not figured out or we don’t offer. And we’ve been asked for and I think the same is true with respect to eye health spots. So, okay, that’s interesting.
But to me at the end of the day, it’s about the people, right? The product here from our combined teams. You know, the product is the people and the people delivering the services, the people being the point of contact for the customer, being the advocate for the customer.
That’s really in my view, what makes or breaks a successful client and client relationship. So, easily what I’m most excited about is what I see is wonderful alignment and just cultural fit between our team [00:12:00] at iHealthSpot coming over and joining Jenny, you know, yourself and the rest of the team at Hedy & Hopp.
It’s wonderful. Everything I’ve seen is focus on teamwork. It’s a focus on being positive. Of course, there might be challenges or issues that come up. Of course there are. But you know what? We’re going to roll up our sleeves. We’re going to work together. We’re going to help each other out.
We’re going to celebrate the success and then we’re going to go on to the next one. That’s something we’re very passionate about and I see if not the same, perhaps even more from Hedy & Hopp. You know, we had other, I will say, there were other avenues that iHealthSpot was considering, and Hedy & Hopp was by far the best fit, and I would say the cultural alignment is the highest priority in my mind.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Bill, welcome to Hedy & Hopp. We are so excited to have you in the entire iHealthSpot team members as [00:13:00] well as clients on board and really look forward to just a super exciting future together.
Bill: Thank you, Jenny. Let the adventure begin. Thank you.
Jenny: And for all of our listeners, if you have questions about our expanded capabilities, or if you’re a smaller group, who’s been wanting to work with Hedy & Hopp, but perhaps didn’t know if your budget would be a match now’s the time to reach out. Give me a call or an email at jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com and we would love to chat with you, but thank you again for tuning in, please give this podcast rating, give us a review of subscribe and let us know if there’s any topics you’d like for us to cover in the future until next time.
Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll talk to you soon.
