Let’s Talk Practice Marketing (Welcome Back Abby!)

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow, and I am your host and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today is episode 101, and I am very excited to have our very own Abby Davis join us today.

Abby is a very excited young boomerang employee. So Abby was with our organization for five years, 2017 through 2022, and Abby had a really interesting role with the organization previously, which we’ll get into. She then left the organization, did a little mini-retirement, entered a couple of other industries she was interested in exploring, and then we reconnected earlier this year, and I am so excited to have her rejoin our organization.

So before we get into your current role, Abby, I’d love to first of all, again, just welcome you back to Hedy & Hopp, we love having you on the team. And that I’d love to hear a little bit about, your role previously to kind of share with our listeners and level set your expectation coming or your experience coming back into the organization.

Abby: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jenny. I’m really excited. Yeah. I’ll tell you a little bit about my role with Hedy & Hopp in the first go round. So in 2017, I joined with you and the team, and I came from the publishing background. So I worked for Elsevier, better known as Moseby. So it was in the health science education textbook for higher education, publishing.

And we really focused on moving all of our print content over to the digital space. So it was when, you know, e-readers were coming out and online platforms for nurses and doctors and things like that, using all of our materials. So, I actually spent about 12 years at Elsevier, and it was very corporate. So, a large corporation, we had offices in in many countries.

And I was looking for a career change. And a friend of mine that I had worked with before had joined Hedy & Hopp, kind of a smaller young startup back then, and encouraged me to leave my kind of comfy corporate job and come over to digital marketing and website design, and development with Hedy & Hopp. And so when I came over, I was kind of dropped in a foreign land, you know, I knew, healthcare, I knew publishing, I knew, electronic content, but I wasn’t as familiar with digital marketing, in that space at first.

So when I came, I started as a project manager. And then soon after I joined as a project manager, as you remember, we, we started working with a large healthcare account, and that’s when my, my role really kind of skyrocketed from account manager to senior account manager, director of client accounts, and then ultimately, when we were much smaller, I was assisting as the VP of operations and finance.

So, around 20 late 2021, I decided to take a little break, a sabbatical from work to try to kind of reset and reorganize our refresh. So I took about two years off and, had a great time. I traveled lots of places, within the States and outside the country. And then, like you said, tried a couple different other organizations and then ultimately, was really happy that, you know, we stayed connected and was able to come back to Hedy & Hopp and join with you guys.

Jenny: Yeah. So when you were with us the first go around, you briefly touched on this, but you are the account manager for we were the digital agency of record for, the largest faith-based health system in the country. And it was a really large account and was really the conduit for me falling in love with healthcare marketing.

It really allowed us to see and understand how healthcare marketing could have a real impact on patient lives. We could make their day easier, make a crisis moment easier by allowing our talents to make it easier for them to find care. Schedule an appointment online, you know, find that specialist they need to work with, etc. so very passionate about that.

So, whatever you came back, you’re now on the practice side. So just a little bit of a reminder for our listeners here at Hedy & Hopp. We have two sides of our organization. We have the system side, which is larger healthcare organizations, payors, providers think like really large hospital systems, health systems, statewide, multi-state. But we were having a lot of inquiries come in from groups with smaller budgets.

And that’s, that’s something we’ll touch on really in-depth here is the budget differentiation. But a critical access hospital or a five-location ortho group, for example, would come to us and we just didn’t have the ability to service them as easily because our processes were built for systems. So we started building out those processes internally, and then the opportunity to actually acquire another agency that specialized in that space presented itself.

We finalized that deal in August of last year, acquired iHealthSpot. Now we really have two divisions of our organization. We have the system side, which really, again, works statewide, multi-state, and then the practice side, which really focuses on groups with a smaller footprint. But still looking to do that patient acquisition work and drive their reputation forward to be leaders in their area of expertise.

So, Abby, your role here is really focusing on both client growth and operations on the practice marketing side. So, from your perspective coming in, what is the difference in doing marketing at that practice size compared to what you had done previously when you’re here, and what we still do on the system side.

Abby: Yeah. So I have, you know, coming back and working with, with the practice clients, it’s fun and exciting because when I was on the system side, and worked with much larger clients, especially like the client that we talked about earlier, that I kind of started my, my marketing career with, you know, it was it was

fun and exciting, and we had to lean in and really learn and really strengthen our muscles around, compliance and privacy, HIPAA, state law, you know, state restrictions and things like that. And however, we didn’t really necessarily have the systems in place to be able to take those to take what we were doing for these large organizations and, be scalable to, to take on smaller practices like you mentioned.

So maybe they only have 1 or 2 locations. They’re smaller, they’re independent. But since we’ve acquired, you know, the acquisition in August with the practice Marketing group, we’ve been able to really take those processes and those systems that we built over the last several years and build out really cool best practice packages for our clients.

So this helps them a lot of our clients come with, you know, on the practice side, a variety of, you know, kind of experience and knowledge in the digital and marketing landscape so that our packages are able to, you know, really provide best practices and build a strong foundation kind of no matter where you’re at in the digital space.

Maybe you’ve tried it before. Maybe you’re you’ve tried to do it internally or with a vendor before. But, you know, you really didn’t have the muscle or the internal resources to be able to understand what you’re actually doing in that space. So now that we can take all of these great systems and processes that we’ve built for our larger clients and implement them for smaller practices, it’s super exciting.

Jenny: Absolutely. So some of the areas that we focus on, we have packages specifically around reputation management. So, building the online reputation and driving reviews, we have patient growth. So, really thinking about paid media to be able to drive service line or brand-level awareness online. We have packages around SEO and AI. We have AIO, we have, really affordable website packages, analytics packages, etc., so these are much, or very affordable.

Because they’re really leveraging best practices. There’s not a lot of, customization or, I don’t want to say strategy work because a lot of strategies gone into developing these packages, but it’s best practice. It’s what you need to be doing and showing up where you are. And we’re not reinventing the wheel. So let’s talk a little bit about the elephant in the room.

Talk about budgets. Like how is somebody a system client versus a practice client? What kind of budgets are we looking at on the practice side?

Abby: Yeah, that’s that’s a great, item to talk about because that’s one of the scariest things to the to the small practice owners, the physicians, the office managers, the folks that are coming to us and reaching out to us and saying, hey, we need help here.

But they’re scared of the budget because they know that they’ve they’ve looked before, and I mean, Google and Meta and all the other platforms. It’s extremely competitive. So they feel as if, you know, they come into the situation. They want to make sure they have the right amount of money, the right amount of budget to, to see the ROI they’re hoping for, especially if this is their first time and they have to then report back to their stakeholders in their leadership teams of you know, how our efforts are working.

So one thing, that I noticed a lot was with the, you know, foundation packages that you can come in on the practice side, we help you be able to add a small, you know, one time fee, be able to come in, understand the state of the state where you’re at, what have you done, what you know, where how far have you gone to identify your audience?

Your, you know, define your key messaging. Make sure that you have a strong foundation built, we’re able to come in and help some of these practice clients at a much smaller budget then I’ve heard that they’ve gone out to reach, you know, gone out to pitch for other agencies and seen much higher prices.

So, so we’re able we, our team and Hedy & Hopp, we were able to put these packages together, taking into account the, you know, the number of hours that it takes. You know, what kind of conversations do we have? What level of strategy do we need to do in order to, get you, you know, get your foundation started or build strength in a foundation that you’ve already built, and then hit the ground running.

So, like I said, now with our packages, with these best practices that we’ve put in place, we’re able to really identify the right amount of money that it takes, but not an excessive amount of money or all the fluff like kind of what you were saying on the other side. Like it’s more just, you know, hey, you want to get started, we want to help you.

We’re the experts here. Whether you stay with us forever or you’re just signing on with an agency partner to help you, you know, kind of, get your footing in the digital space. We have the packages that we’ve spent a lot of time, you know, building that can help you no matter where your budget is.

Jenny: Yeah. And to be just kind of transparent about budget ranges, we often talk to folks with budgets, you know, and, you know, the 100,000 to 250,000 annual all-in range, right? So, folks aren’t having huge seven-figure budgets. It’s critical access hospitals. It’s, you know, privately owned specialist groups. So they have a much more conservative budget. But we’re able to help them.

I think when you look at the goals for organizations, regardless of size, it’s usually the same, right? We’re trying to build a reputation. We’re trying to drive, patient volumes. We’re trying to drive awareness of ourselves in the market in really heavy competitive landscapes. So being able to do this with packages, on the smaller side, really makes sense.

And it it really is. It’s two. We were all Hedy & Hopp right. But we have team members really dedicated to the practice side that really know that side and what levers you need to pull that are just completely different from the system side.

Abby: Exactly. And you mentioned, you know, the large budgets that we can see. I talk to practices, every day.

And, you know, it is always kind of an elephant in the room because it’s like, I don’t want to put them on the spot and say, what is your budget? So we can see if we can work from it. But, because more than likely we can. But yeah, we’re seeing budgets that are coming in more, as you know, some practices only have $2,000 a month to invest in this.

You know, and sometimes that’s all in. That’s $2,000 a month to be able to start our campaigns, you know, do the, the the research. So, you know, obviously that’s going to be on the lower end of our budgets. But you can see that the difference between the kind of budgets, you know, all the way up to multimillion-dollar budgets, that’s working on the system side, to now, you know, this is a new physician or new practitioner launching their practice.

And how can we help them, gain traction and get their, awareness out there, and then also, you know, stay on top of all of the trends in marketing. So whether it’s social, PPC, you know, all of the, compliance, the trends, the, the updates that, we’re seeing across the platforms and new regulations and things like that, you’re able to have an agency partner, that maybe is just, you know, a small extension of your team, but we’re able to help you, stay on top of all those things because you’re small practice, you’re busy.

You want to see if you’re patients, you want to grow your practice. You want to increase your visibility in the community. So let us focus on, you know, navigating all of those ins and outs through the digital marketing landscape.

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us today, Abby. I hope this episode was informative for our listeners.

We talked so much about the work on the system side that we do that I really wanted to highlight this part of our business, because we do know a lot of our listeners don’t have a huge seven-figure budgets. So really helping you understand, you know, that heady enough was to love to be here and be your partner, and help you, you know, really help patients access the care that they need.

So with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Please subscribe and like the podcast. We drop new episodes every Friday, so we’d love to have you as a regular subscriber. Send in any topic, ideas or topics you’d like for us to cover in the future, and we’ll be sure to add that to our roster.

Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Abby: Thanks so much for having me today, Jenny.