Healthcare Marketing Agencies: A Shopper’s Guide

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to come to you today on a solo cast to chat a little bit about the state of health care marketing agencies.

As most people know, if you’ve been kind of following along over the last couple of years, there’s been a whole bunch of M&A activity. There’s been a lot of acquisitions, a lot of mergers. And the landscape has shifted drastically from what it looked like a couple of years ago. So I’ve spent a little bit of time over the last six months really trying to evaluate, like, what’s happening now.

Who are the players? Who’s thriving in this new landscape? You know, and as a provider or a health system, if you’re looking for a new agency, kind of what are your options today? We’ve had, you know, a lot of folks in the industry, right now are shopping for new agencies. And so, if you are thinking about looking for a new agency or, you know, if you are just curious about kind of what the categorizations of agencies look like in healthcare marketing right now, this is a great episode for you.

So, first of all, I’m going to start with a general disclaimer that from an agency decision perspective, the first thing you need to decide is if you want a health care only agency. There are lots of massive agencies, big conglomerates in the WPP and Omnicom firms of the world. They may have a healthcare specific agency, but they’re part of a really large conglomerate.

Also, you could always go to a really large, you know, non-healthcare specific firm out of New York City, and be, you know, one of their only healthcare clients. But maybe you love the creative work that they do. That could be the right decision for you. On today’s episode, really going to talk only about those organizations that are focusing exclusively in the healthcare industry.

So from our point of view, with all of the different regulations and compliance things shifting in the landscape, most buyers today are really wanting to focus on organizations that understand all of the nuances and the different challenges that healthcare marketers specifically are facing. So that’s kind of the framework of what we’re going to be talking about. So if you are looking for an agency today, there we have seen oftentimes this pendulum where folks are wanting to go first to like a full service agency, and then the pendulum swings over and they maybe want to go to a performance agency or a specialty agency.

And it really makes me think of this Peter Drucker quote, that says in times of stability, you need management and times of uncertainty, you need leadership. And so as we’re thinking about the organizational decisions that may drive the decision of if you’re going to look to partner with a full service agency or perhaps a performance or specialty organization, it really comes down to what are you needing within your organization?

Do you need that strategic guidance to help lead you through uncertain times, or do you really feel like you have your strategy on lock, and you need  really great execution partners. There is no right decision for everyone. It’s really going to come down to looking at yourself, your team, your marketing leadership within your organization and deciding, you know, where are you, you know?

And what do you want to do? Are you looking for a transformative change? Are you looking more to improve, you know, return on ad spend, and you’re wanting to get really tactical with what you’re wanting to execute. So that is kind of the big framework of how decisions, I believe are being made today. As far as what sort of organization folks are looking to partner with.

So we in our mind, really think about it as three different categories of agencies. I did an episode about 18 months ago that talked about the two different kinds of media agencies and its brand or performance. We had spoken with a lot of organizations that were looking for specifically a new media agency, and they were frustrated because their partner was really focusing more on awareness tactics and weren’t giving them any reporting that was helping them understand cost per lead, return on ad spend, or any of those more ROI-oriented data points.

The episode I’ve heard from folks really helped provide clarity around why that is. It’s not that that agency couldn’t do it. It’s just that’s not what they were built to do. They were really built to, you know, advertise for, you know, a BMW placement where it’s more about brand awareness, which is a great objective for some kinds of organizations.

So that specifically within paid media. But you can see that also across the broader spectrum for all of the different things folks are trying to accomplish. So the three different kinds of agencies that we see existing today that are healthcare specific are full service, performance, marketing and specialty. So when you think about full service, for us, the differentiator of organizations that we view as full service are those that focus on upstream strategy and branding.

Right. They’re still going to do often all of the same performance marketing tactics, but they have that upstream capability to help with things like, market research, persona development, kind of the, you know, who, what and why you’re going to market. It can help with messaging, positioning. So full service is a really great kind of agency to look for if you’re really needing to make some of those strategic decisions in addition to doing the activation work. Performance marketing, really focuses exclusively on patient acquisition and retention, usually only through digital marketing tactics.

So again, full service, more of that upstream strategy. But they also are going to have usually traditional media buying capabilities. Whereas a lot of the performance marketing agencies that are in market today and health care focused exclusively on digital, because they’re really focused exclusively on driving those appointments. And as we all know, billboards may be needed for brand awareness, but they certainly are not going to, you know, do a specific lift as far as the, you know, patients coming through the door or scheduling appointments.

And then the third category we call specialty, these are folks that specialize in content, specifically focusing on upstream research, direct mail website services. These groups are phenomenal at their craft, right? They exist and have existed for many years, often doing one specific kind of work. And so they are pros at it. These groups are great if you feel like you have all of your other marketing areas on lock, and you really need somebody to come in and dominate just on content, or you just are looking for a website rebuild, but you don’t need those broader agency strategic services.

There are lots of folks winning in this space. Just a call out a few of our friends–AHA Media,  WG Content, Coffee Communications. Right. There’s a lot of folks that are really great specialists and phenomenal at their craft. And then of course, a fourth category, which is not an agency category, but it’s something that usually organizations are kind of shopping for.

Parallel path is tech solutions. So these are SaaS platforms. These organizations do not offer services. For implementation you will usually be required to do a lot of maintenance and ongoing work yourself. But think about, analytics compliant CDPs. So our friends over at Fresh Paint and Ours Privacy, those are great examples of tech solutions. Often you think about full service performance marketing or specialty organizations can partner with these tech solutions and have deep relationships like we’re great friends with Ours Privacy. 

We share a lot of clients help do implementations for them. Lots of our clients use fresh paint. So often you’ll see those groups working in collaboration. And same thing with the specialty agencies. Like we have lots of clients that we share, you know, with some of those specialty agencies that I named earlier. So agencies working together is definitely something that you want to filter for as you’re doing your search back to the full service agency.

Lots of folks, when they’re going down the full service side, are kind of uncertain how to differentiate between all the different full service agencies. One thing that you always can ask is what are their roots in? Right. That’s kind of how you can understand how they were built, why they were built. Often their roots are in creative.

So they are a creative shop, have a creative founder, and then they, you know, added on digital capabilities maybe 5 or 10 years ago. And so they’re usually stronger on the creative side and maybe not as strong on the digital. Again, that is a mass assumption. They could bring in strong leadership to be able to make that side stronger.

But that’s kind of a general trend that you’ll see. Otherwise, groups like Hedy & Hopp, we actually are built with a foundation of really strong analytics, compliance, and performance. So I worked at Amazon previously, so I bring all of that data driven decision making into the founding of Hedy & Hopp, along with that strategy component. And now we’ve added creative over the last five years and really have made ourselves a great full service option for folks.

So again, there really is no right or wrong decision as your shopping agencies. But we’ve seen over the last couple of years that we’ve been in RFP presentations alongside competitors that maybe are like a tech solution alongside us presenting or a specialty group along with a full service. And they’re just such differences in who we are as organizations.

That it’s kind of confusing to us sometimes about why we are in consideration alongside one of these other groups, because our offerings are so vastly different and sometimes it’s because the buyer really wants to see and understand what each group can bring to the table, which totally makes sense, we love having those conversations, but sometimes it’s because they don’t understand the differences between the different groups and how to think about them categorically.

So if you are thinking about going into the agency, shopping, experience or the next couple of months or year, hopefully this episode was helpful to give you a little bit of a framework around what you should be thinking about, the kind of organization that you need based off of where your marketing group is within your, you know, life cycle and kind of what partnership you’re looking for.

So thank you for joining us for today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy. If this episode was helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend. And please like and subscribe to be notified of future episodes. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy cheers!