Our Year of Evolution for Practice Marketing

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. I am very excited today to have three of our very own teammates joining us to celebrate the one year anniversary of the acquisition of another agency.

So back on August 1st of 2024, we acquired an agency called iHealthSpot, and we acquired this agency because Hedy & Hopp was really built to service what we call system client. So, statewide or multi-state providers and payors were really the way that we structured and built our organization. But time and time again, we would have smaller organizations that had a smaller geographic footprint, which usually comes with a smaller budget coming in, asking us to do work with them.

And it broke our heart every time we had to choose to not partner, because we just couldn’t come up with a process that would be efficient for them. We began building a second business unit internally, and then, less than a month later, the opportunity to acquire iHealthSpot presented itself and we were thrilled. So I iHealthSpot, the acquisition brought with it, about 450 practice clients.

So clients think like a critical access hospital or a 5 or 6 location orthopedic group that’s physician-owned or private equity backed, perhaps. So they have a lot more autonomy can move. They can move faster than large systems, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. So today I’m excited to invite three team members that came and joined Hedy & Hopp as part of the acquisition to talk about their individual departments and some of the changes they’ve seen since the acquisition.

So we’re going to get started with, Kristen Wiedman. So, Kristen, one of the exciting things, you are the Project Management Lead. First of all, just to set the stage, you’re the one who makes sure that all of the work is delivered on time and on quality, and everybody knows what their jobs are. So one of the first things that you and I began working on is really evaluating the different packages and ways that we worked with these organizations.

I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the revision of the practice marketing packages over the last year, and what’s what that has meant for the practice marketing clients. 

Kristin: Thanks, Jenny. Yes. So I think one of the first things we really looked at was how we named our packages. So we originally had things named by services, which can get a little confusing, right?

If you are just a physician that is trying to get new patients, looking at this list of SEO and listings management and paid ads, you don’t really know where to start. So I think you and the sales and marketing team at Hedy & Hopp has worked really well on naming things in a way that they make sense. So, things like a patient volume package or, you know, working on your brand reputation.

And, so I’ve loved those changes. And then from, more an operational and a project management standpoint, I think we’ve done a good job with adding a package that was really needed and really fit, and set the stage for our clients. So it’s called the foundation package. So we saw a lot of, and I think this was kind of a learning from the system side of things of that we may not be able to service, practice with, the full service of a strategy team or the data and analytics team.

But to bring a feel of that over, we have that foundation package. So it’s either you’re working with, the orthopedic group or the critical access care hospital or any of those smaller clients, but you can still work on a messaging and branding strategy for them, and then you can also work with HIPAA-compliant tracking that we do, and analytics.

So just a way for those systems, kind of best practices to still lend themselves to maybe what might be a smaller client. 

Jenny: Yeah, that’s a really great point. I feel like, some of the branding and messaging best practices bringing over has been really fun to see that come to life. On the practice side. 

Kristin: Yeah.

Jenny: For sure. Awesome.

Well, Phil Terry, you are an account manager on the practice side. And I think for me, it’s been really joyful to see the account management teams begin merging best practices. Right. Because when you typically work with either very, very large organizations with lot of stakeholders or smaller organizations with less stakeholders, it’s different. Right? Practices are different. The way you approach it is different.

So I would love to hear your thoughts on, the evolution you’ve seen over the last year. 

Phil: Yeah. So I think it’s nice that, you know, even though we’ve worked with, you know, larger clients or smaller clients, the goal of the account management team is to really dial down what the client wants and the client expectations. So being able to learn how you guys have done it on the and hop side, and how that mixes with the eye health spy side and still being able to be client-focused and intentional on bringing out what the clients essentially want out of out of what we can do of our services.

And then still, being that sort of Swiss Army knife for the client, you know, whether or not they want to, you know, do a quick website update or learn more about SEO or, you know, see what I can do for their business and still being able to bring all of those elements in and, sure, we can do for them.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the interesting things is the way that the system side structures, what we call the core team. So we have project managers, account managers, and strategists, and sometimes on the practice side, you’re wearing multiple hats. Right. So we do have project managers, but sometimes you’re also the strategist, and sometimes you’re bringing in a strategist, kind of just depending on the scope and the size.

So I will just say huge kudos to seek out managers on the practice side, you know, Phil and the rest of your team, because it’s really great watching, you know, the skill sets that you all bring to the table for practice clients. 

Phil: Definitely. And doing that sort of proactive learning with the other account managers about what you guys are doing.

As far as, taking in some of the ideas about owning the solve and owning the outcome and really applying that to the clients and giving that full service and having a flexible team behind you has just been, you know, amazing to be able to work with it. 

Jenny: Oh that’s awesome. That’s awesome, Phil. And last but certainly not least, Yenny Rojas, I have to say, the work you have done to incorporate GEO and AI overviews into the SEO, like standing round of applause, kudos, kudos, kudos.

The results you have created for this team are absolutely phenomenal. I would love if you could share just a little bit about the way that you’ve approached it and some of the results that we’ve seen with some of your hard work over the last couple of months. Jenny. 

Yenny: Thank you. Jenny, I want to start by saying SEO is not that I know.

I’ve heard people say, you know, SEO is. Then that’s not true. The classic SEO as we knew it is that, the all rules of search, right? So keyword stuffing, basic meta tags, chasing the rankings just with your generic blog post that has evolved, SEO has evolved right into some different bands and more strategic, especially with AI or videos and AI and large language models, reshaping how information is delivered to clients and patients and, and users.

Right. Air systems and large language models, or LMS like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, etc.. Those aren’t like your traditional search engines. They don’t give you a list of tabular links. They give you answers. Right? And that changes the game as we knew it. The goal is no longer just to be ranking on Google, is to be the source that LLMs pull information from.

They generate answers. The goal is to be recommended by those agents and being cited in AI reviews. So what we have done, what we have implemented here is, structuring the content in a way that can be read by albums. We are writing with both humans and machines in mind. So we start with the answers at the top right.

We use a bulleted lists structure, structure, content number list. We prioritize clarity and scanability. And always have in mind when writing content is the answer at the top. So answer the question first, and then the explanation comes later. And the content. So another thing is the evolution of SEO is a AEO and search engine optimization.

And generative engine optimization. I know that’s a lot of acronyms. You know, but we’re not just writing blogs anymore to rank. So we’re writing content that directly answers the user intent and can be put into AI summaries. Right. And voice assistance. That’s how people are searching now. I just want to say, if you structure content in a way that films can understand, if you don’t do that, you’re is becoming invisible in the future for organic search, your website has to be LLM friendly.

So, just my closing thoughts and a final tip for everyone listening. Focus on clear answers, implement a structure for content, and make sure your site is then. 

Jenny: It’s such, such great advice and a very concise answer. I love that. I did a post last week celebrating some of the successes that you and the team have seen, because you have been continuously testing and rolling out new methodologies.

And the June test in particular that you rolled out resulted in some immediate, AI overview visibility for our clients, which I was really excited to share some screenshots of. So great job. And it’s pretty exciting because what we thought would happen of the system and forming the practice team for some best practices around things like, account management structure and owning the solve, and perhaps the way that packages are structured, it comes the other way too, right?

Y’all are able to move a little bit faster because practice teams typically are like excited to be guinea pigs and test new strategies and test new tactics. They’re like, yeah, let’s go. So then whenever we see it work, we can then roll it over to the system side for the larger, larger folks. With that, you know, real proof point that it works, and then they can get approval to roll it out on their side.

So, I think the, just the evolution of the two sides growing together has been really fruitful. So to three of you, thank you so much, for the joy over the last year. It’s been so fun working with you have the rest of the practice marketing team that has joined. We are very excited that we’ve had nearly 100% retention rate of employees and clients.

So it’s been really phenomenal. I think this is, like best case acquisition that I have ever seen. And it’s definitely due to team members like the three of you. So thank you very much. 

Kristin: Thanks, Jenny.

Phil: Thank you, Jenny. 

Jenny: And with that, we’re going to go ahead and wrap today. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode.

If you have any questions about our practice marketing services, give us a shout. We would love to chat with you and tell you more about how it works and how we can help even smaller healthcare organizations that maybe don’t have as large of a budget still be very competitive in their individual geography against your individual competitive setting. So give us a chat.

We would love to chat with you about your options. And thank you again for tuning in. Join us next week for another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!