In this episode, Jenny sits down with Chris Boyer, senior digital health strategist and principal of @chrisboyer LLC, to discuss the shifting (and somewhat messy) state of social media in 2025. With the undecided future of TikTok and Meta reshaping its content and advertising rules and regulations, it’s time for organizations to rethink their social media strategies.
They explore the impacts of Meta’s content moderation changes, how the tightening of ad restrictions affects campaigns, and why social media should be seen as “leased land.” Plus, they discuss the challenges of fighting misinformation and creating valuable content in today’s polarized digital environment.
Connect with Chris:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.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. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp a full service healthcare marketing agency. And I am so excited to have my dear friend, Chris Boyer on. Chris is the principal @chrisboyer LLC, but he’s a senior digital health and experience strategist, and he’s a fellow podcaster.
So yeah, I’m so excited to have you on today.
Chris Boyer: I’m excited to be on your show. I’ve been a fan of your show since I found out about it. And I’ve been listening diligently ever since. And I mean, us podcasters, we have to stick together, you know.
Jenny: We do, we do. And Chris and I also are very lucky to share an absolutely amazing client.
And so we’ve been able to collaborate really closely on work for that client. And as a result, I’ve just really grown to respect the work that you do and the POV that you bring to your clients. So I’m excited to chat with you today. Today we’re going to be [00:01:00] talking about the state of social media, mostly around the trends of organic, but we’re going to do a little sprinkle on paid as well.
And for all of those healthcare marketers that are trying to decide what you should be doing as far as what platforms you should be investing time and energy on, where you should be pulling back and maybe removing your brand. Hopefully this conversation will give you a really great state of the state of what’s going on and our different perspectives of it.
We’re also doing this as a dual podcast. It will be on Chris’s platform as well as on mine. And so that’s a really fun experiment. I’ve never done it before. So I’m excited for both of our audiences to share this content.
Chris Boyer: First time for me as well. This’ll be a lot of fun to do.
So you actually set that up, Jenny, as having me do an intro on the state of social.
Jenny: I know I’m excited about it. Tell us, Chris.
Chris Boyer: Well, you know, I mean, I could really be snarky and shorthand and say it, that it’s right now a hot mess. I mean, there are a lot of [00:02:00] things happening. We’re recording this in early January of 2025.
There are a lot of things happening on social media that are reflective, I think, of a lot of the high tech space that’s going on, as well as sort of a shift to where things are going. But most significantly right now, I think that hospitals and health systems that are involved in social media have to really take a serious stop and reflection on what they’re doing and how they’re doing it now.
I’m not young to social media. I’ve been actually around the space. About 15 years ago I was part of the Mayo Clinic social center for social media. What we were was a think tank of hospitals and health systems using social media and advocating a way back when, health systems were blocking social media at that point in time.
And it almost feels like we’re in another state of genuflection about what we’re going to be doing. And it feels like we almost need to bring the band back together to talk about this, because certainly [00:03:00] things have changed. But it’s, it’s ever more important for us to take a step back and and assess where we’re at.
So let’s talk a little bit about where we’re at Jenny right with social media. This is coming on what I think it’s about a week ago that Mark Zuckerberg came out and said that content moderation on all meta channels is going to go in a different direction and the direction he’s taking it is the way that Elon Musk took X or Twitter to which is basically having the community moderate misinformation on these channels.
This also comes three weeks after Meta made some significant announcements about how they’re going to be advertising restrictions for health systems. In using social media, I think this is sort of a fallout from, you know, a year or 2 ago when they had the pixel issue. You recall the pixel issue, [00:04:00] all the compliance things that we’ve been dealing with where they’re now setting up some guidelines and restrictions as well around how to use paid advertising on the social channels.
So everything is evolving and changing. Oh, and yeah, by the way, as of today, the Supreme Court is listening to arguments about whether TikTok could operate in the United States. Now, we don’t know yet what their outcome is going to be, but the leaning is towards they’re going to completely disband TikTok, at least the way we know it, in the United States.
It’s crazy, right?
Jenny: It is crazy. Most creators on TikTok have been posting about diversification, how to go find them on Instagram, how to find them on YouTube. I mean, everybody is planning for the shutdown to happen less than one week from today. So from a marketer’s perspective we’re moving forward as though it’s shutting down.
I feel like we have two separate [00:05:00] you know, trains moving forward out of the station, right? We have the political perspective of the lack of moderation content moderation and trying to keep it a like say, not safe space, but an accurate space, right. Through some people’s definition of accuracy, which as of right now, I feel like if you ask two different people, what definition of accurate information is, they’re going to say different things.
So it’s a really weird state of the country. That’s one thing we have going on, but then the other one is all the stuff with the HHS and the privacy. And we saw Google try to respond to it last year and basically say, hey, not our fault, not our problem. If you get in trouble, it’s not us. That is really Meta’s way by trying to have the conversion data restrictions. It’s just their way to basically say, hey, it’s not our fault. Y’all have to figure it out on your own. The both of those are coming together at the same time and it’s chaos. I feel like just a couple of years ago, it was expected for us from a marketer’s [00:06:00] perspective for all of these healthcare organizations to be on all of these channels.
And it’s time to rethink it. It’s time to think about each channel individually, kind of think about the potential harm being on that platform could cause to your brand from an organic and a paid perspective, and then decide if it’s worth your if it’s a worthwhile investment. Endeavor or not. It’s not just about, can you put the effort forth to maintain that channel?
That’s what the conversation was a couple of years ago. Now it’s, will it cause your brand harm by being on that channel from a perspective you know, angle.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s really an interesting thing too. Right. If I participate in this channel, is that going to cause damage to my brand, you know, and what does that, what does that reflect?
I think social media always has been intended to be the voice of the community, right? Social media. That’s the kind of the whole impetus behind this let’s, let’s eliminate the original reasons why Facebook was created and all of that. We won’t get into that, [00:07:00] but I think the spirit of all of this was that we, that participants in these social channels could create community guidelines, could create the way we actually communicate and interact with one another. And to a certain extent, we are now getting coming full circle by saying, and you could also indicate what works and what doesn’t work on these channels in terms of moderation of content. But we’re doing this in a, in a society, not only the U.S. society, but a worldwide society that is rapidly becoming diverse. I would even call them siloed. Polarize. Yeah.
Jenny: Yes.
Chris Boyer: And so what does that mean for us, right? If we can’t, if we can’t understand, if we can’t even understand where you know, what is good and what is bad in terms of content, how can we be expected to moderate that ourselves as users?
And that’s a question that I have that I think that many of us that own brands and participate in social channels worry about at this point in time. Yeah. What can we do? How can we, how [00:08:00] can we participate in a meaningful way?
Jenny: I completely agree.
Chris Boyer: Yes, you know, way back when we used to say that you remember there was like paid owned and earned media.
And then when social media came around, they said it was least. Yes. Do you ever recall that? Right?
Jenny: Yeah. Whenever so I’ve been doing, you know, content strategies and audience driving strategies, you know, for the entire 10 years of heading up for healthcare, but then before that as well.
But the entire concept was, okay, we can, you know, build a platform on YouTube, but it’s not your channel. It’s not yours. It has your brand name on it, but at any time YouTube can delete the entire thing, Facebook, same thing. It used to be that you would put the content on there. And if you hit post, all of your followers would see it.
Then it was not that way anymore. The algorithm shifted drastically. It was who Facebook wanted to see your content. And then you had to begin paying [00:09:00] for people to be able to see your content. As you know, at the same level of visibility that just a couple of months previously, you were able to get for free.
So that really shifted marketer’s perspective of what these channels were and kind of created this idea of creating a content hub or a platform that you own your own website where the content of in one format lived. And then you view the social media channels more as a distribution channel, a way to reach these different audiences, maybe have paid campaigns.
Maybe have some sort of like a community discussion forum on some, however you want it to structure it. Right. But you cannot depend on any of these channels to actually be an asset for your brand long term or something that you had complete control over, like an email distribution list, for example. And not only are we back there, but now some of this leased land is on fire.
And so we have to decide if we want to continue the lease.
Chris Boyer: Right. Exactly. Meanwhile too, there’s always these new and upcoming social channels that You know, being tested, etc. I hear, you know, with the [00:10:00] X debacle, where there was a lot of people that just left X after, you know, the last six months, and they’ve been moving over to either BlueSky or Threads or what Threads, a Meta channel, by the way, right?
It’s Meta, but they’ve been moving over to these other channels. It’s like, where, where is the next channel? I think I’ve had a lot of health systems ask me, where do I go next? Like, what should I be keeping an eye on? Way back when we would say, you know, when, in the early days, when it was all the Twitter, Facebook and, you know, YouTube, really, we would say, claim your name.
At least someone, no one could take your name away, right? You don’t want anyone posting on your name’s behalf. So go ahead and just claim your, your username and then maybe monitor those channels you know, and at a certain point, if you had the analytics to start to understand, hey, maybe this is something we want to go and participate in now, there’s so many other parameters that we have to take into account, like, you know. You mentioned like the algorithm will the algorithm deliver my content to the right [00:11:00] people or do I have to pay to distribute my content to those people?
And when I do distribute that content to those people, is the information that they’re going to give back to me about performance? Is that accurate? Is that inflated? Right? There was a lot of lawsuits and fallouts around Facebook, Meta Overinflating their video views, for example, or whatever. So those are things you want to think about.
And then, you know, is it a black box? If we post there, are we going to actually be able to ever come out of that channel again? If we start doing community management on Twitter or X. Right. Are we going to ever be able to take that information and bring it back into our own patient experience management or whatever it might be.
These are now factors that we have to take into account with every new social channel that’s out there. It’s a, it’s a headache. I would say it’s a real headache for health systems right now.
Jenny: So I’d love to hear Chris, how you are guiding your clients. Then let’s say you have a client and they’re on [00:12:00] Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube right now with a content strategy where they have different variations of the content to fit the platforms appropriately.
They have a whole team creating content and they come to you and say, Chris. Do I need to jump ship for some of these? Do I need to make modifications? Do I need to add other ones? What are some key things you’d want them to think about?
Chris Boyer: Well, I think you brought this up earlier too, right? Jenny is that you, you mentioned, right?
You want to create your own website or your own content on something that you own. Yeah. We still have to do that. We still have to maintain that. So many people have kind of outsourced their video delivery network. To YouTube, I would, I would say to them, first of all, invest in something that can host your own videos on your own website and act as YouTube does with your content library.
And you could, you could distribute it and, you know, segment your content everywhere you want to on your own web properties. First, using taxonomy, using, you know, SEO, using whatever those properties that you need [00:13:00] to in order to, to ensure that it’s being seen by the right people. That same content you can then duplicate on YouTube, because I would say don’t go away from YouTube because YouTube is still the second most highest trafficked web presence next to Google online right now. That’s, that may not be true in a few years, but right now it still is.
Jenny: Yeah.
Chris Boyer: So you have to keep that. The other thing though, is when you get into like Facebook and X and, you know, these other channels that are out there, this is where you have to really take a look at, is this the right form for me to reach my audience, the audience that I want to reach?
I would say that a lot of health systems right now are still using Facebook as a way to communicate with their own, their own audience. People their own employees, right? They follow them on these social channels, so they’re now starting to shift more of using those channels as an informal way to communicate feel good stories about [00:14:00] themselves to their audiences.
I think that’s still a safe and benign way to do that. They don’t pay a lot for that, right?
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: So that’s it’s a kind of a low investment and it’s an augmentation of your communication channel. But when it comes to X, that’s the one where I see a lot of health systems already abandoning SHIP on.
They’re leaving it. Same. They’re moving on.
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: And, and to me, I wonder, because I have an account on X still. I don’t post, but I haven’t felt the need to pull the plug yet and leave. And I’m still wondering because is this going to change again? I mean, think how quickly it happened, right? It was what, two years ago, right?
That it, it’s over the last two years, it evolved and changed. Is that going to happen again in two years? Are we abandoning ship too early? Can we just sit it and stay and maybe temper down the active you know, involvement that we have on these social channels, and the only way we’re going to really be able to do that is by measuring the interactions that you have [00:15:00] and really quantifying those and quantifying them now less on the top of the vanity metrics about how many people you reach, et cetera.
But more on, is that content resonating? Is it producing the actions you want? Is it getting clicks through for an action or is it doing the community management that you want it to do? Are a lot of people using Facebook as a way to come to make comments about their care? Right. Or, or what have you, if that’s the case, you can’t really abandon that platform, but maybe you can reshift your focus.
What about you? What are you hearing?
Jenny: So a couple of things. First of all, I got off Twitter last year, maybe 2023. I was like, I gotta get out. This is. Nah, I don’t feel good when I’m on here. So I jumped ship. And I am so happy that I did. A point I want to make about having a different video distribution platform instead of YouTube is that’s great for patient privacy reasons as well, because YouTube is one of those embedded tools that’s grabbing IP address behind the scenes.
So there are multiple benefits to doing that beyond just thinking about like [00:16:00] content distribution. Best practices. So I want to note that’s a good reason to think about that. Additionally I, at this point, none of our clients are actively pursuing anything on X. The political nature of the platform has just made all of them want to shy away.
Most of them still have their handles, but they’re not actively doing anything, including paid on it. I think my advice, usually whenever we’re talking with clients about this is to really step back and think about your personas and who you’re trying to actively target based off of your key service lines and key geographies.
And can you serve them appropriately on those platforms and with the content that they need to move forward? Right? So I think it’s easy to say everybody’s on Facebook. Okay. A lot of people are on Facebook, younger demographics. Maybe they have an account on Facebook. They’re not spending time on Facebook meaningfully, right?
They’re on Instagram. So if you’re trying to target a younger demographic and yeah, you have an account on Instagram, do you actually have the [00:17:00] expertise or a partner with the expertise and then the money to meaningfully engage with them on Instagram? Cause there’s a difference, right? So organic content creation can you meaningfully create and maintain that content distribution strategy? Or do you just need to do paid? A lot of folks that we are working with are choosing, like you said, to really pull back on the organic content creation. They’re still doing it. They’re not shutting accounts down right now. But they’re really leaning in on the paid side because they can make sure they’re targeting exactly who they need. They’re actually seeing it, which a lot of our brands still aren’t seeing on the organic side, and they’re able to much more effectively measure conversions and whatever. We had a really cool campaign launch for one of our clients.
It was actually around a specific location and it highlighted a couple of key individuals and it turned into this beautiful love fest. All they, it was shared dozens of times, all like hundreds of comments talking about how amazing this location is and that these employees are. And it’s not of course, [00:18:00] necessarily going to be driving immediate patient appointments and volumes as a result of that campaign, but it’s building brand affinity.
So really thinking about the channels and how you want to leverage it based off your resources is important because. If we’re going to be going out and testing blue sky and all of these other ones, then we can’t show up equally at all of them. Or should we?
Chris Boyer: That’s true. We really can’t. Yeah, exactly. I like that.
I, and I think, you know, when you, when you mentioned that client with that story, it also brings up something that I hear a lot from people that are participating in these social channels as a users is that they’re, they’re really looking for content that’s not political in nature. That’s not negative in nature.
So this could be, these, you could really have a homestead of content that has feel good stories about the care you’re doing in your community and have that really perform very well. Again, this is early stages, right? But as, as more people are starting to say, wait, should I be still on Facebook, even [00:19:00] from an advertising perspective?
Well, yeah, Facebook is going to go through its little. You know, just it’s gonna move over to a certain extent. It’s not going to be really good right now, but there may be an appetite for really great positive content, which hospitals and health systems can promote. Right, so maybe that’s an opportunity here, you know, too early to tell, but, but the whole concept, I think I, when you and I last spoke, I, or at a recent presentation I gave, I talked about social media advertising as being paid for education.
So there’s another opportunity there, too. If you think about it, well, whether we like it or not, these channels do reach a lot of people. If you can leverage advertising on social channels as a way to reach these audiences that are hard to get otherwise, can you do it in a way to educate people about your brand?
About the work that you do about the wellness that you [00:20:00] provide to your community. Is that worth it? I think it is absolutely top of the funnel metrics, but it certainly helps you in the long term.
Jenny: I definitely agree. Let’s talk a little bit about the the conversion tracking restrictions on Meta. Cause I think that goes hand in hand.
And if you’re going to be launching a campaign, can you measure the success of it and I think it’s really interesting because Meta made all of these announcements at the beginning of December, and I’ve been slowly rolling out additional information. Different organizations have seen restrictions hit their account.
There’s 2 different levels of restrictions you know, high and medium, depending on how concerned they are with the level of potential PHI that they are coming into into contact with, and I think a couple of things that I just want to educate folks on what they’re really trying to do is they’re going to, they’re trying to stop receiving patient level information as a result of your advertising campaign.
So if on your website, let’s say you have a [00:21:00] hospital website and your campaigns are driving to a specific service line where it’s a schedule appointment. When you have all, you have a conversion pixel on that landing page and you have a form where they’re requesting an appointment or it’s tied into Epic and they’re scheduling an appointment that way.
Facebook doesn’t want any of that. They don’t want to see any of that. Right? So if you’re using a CDP, if you’re using fresh paid, if you’ve set up sGTM, like I preach about all of the time as one of the cheapest ways to move forward with fixing your analytics, you’re, you can still run all of your meta campaigns because you already have all of these best practices set up.
We have not seen any restrictions with any of our client campaigns because we already took out all potential PHI. We changed our naming structures where we’re not giving hints to them about if it’s about scheduling an appointment or, you know, we don’t have campaigns named like mammography or anything that would help them even understand what’s going on.
It’s all, you know, veiled you know, naming structures. So learn about it. Learn about how they are restricting [00:22:00] it, but then go back to that patient privacy, one on one, you know, framework of what do we need to do to make sure we’re not accidentally sharing this information with any third party platform, and then you’ll be fine on Meta and you can still run your campaigns as.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Jenny. When you think about that, right HHS guidelines really set the bar for where we want to go, and I know they revised them like in the middle of last year, but they reinforced the fact that you want to avoid sharing any kind of privacy information with any third party company, you know, and it was so much so that Google said, yeah, not us.
Don’t even use us, right? They basically said we don’t want to be used. Well, now that is going a little bit towards that route as well by saying, right? Look, we’re going to restrict the use of what you can track through our platforms, which really reinforces the first party data strategy that we all need to take and the privacy centric frameworks that we need to adopt.[00:23:00]
So when you look at like, you know, the tools that, you know, various different tools about how you can keep patient privacy withheld, I think that’s great. I think the also is where do you want to apply that pixel? How do you want to track? Where, where in the funnel do you want to bring them in to measure them through and when do your own internal measurement systems take over and measure it through to, you know, conversion, ultimately conversion, we all have to do that.
And we got along, we got by for so long by not paying for any of this stuff.
Jenny: I know it was, Oh my gosh. And retargeting that was so much fun.
Chris Boyer: Oh my gosh.
Jenny: Lookalike audiences. That’s the other thing that Meta’s big announcement restricted is you can’t do lookalike friends. We shouldn’t have been doing that for anyway.
We shouldn’t be uploading a list of our cardiology patients and saying, find me more of these. And a lot of people were doing that. So if we’re not going to be learning and kind of holding our own selves accountable as healthcare marketers, these platforms are [00:24:00] going to do it for us because they don’t want the liability and I don’t blame them.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be in that business either. And, you know, I think that it is time for us to really kind of level set our marketing technology to address the current state of privacy of patients of not only what the government restricts. Think about all the state level. Restrictions that are coming out and they’re changing state by state.
There’s something like 20 different state legislations right now, and they’re all slightly different.
Jenny: And there’s a national privacy law that’s working its way through. We’ll see with the incoming administration. They typically historically have tried to push things to the state level. Maybe the national one will be put on hold for the next four years.
Who knows? But no, I agree for anyone who’s listening. I have a really great HIPAA 101 episode on the We Are, Marketing Happy that walks through the state of the state where we are in some tech frameworks that you can think about to get your organization aligned. Go check out that episode. If all of this is a new topic to you, because that will get you caught up to speed really fast.[00:25:00]
Chris Boyer: Yeah, it’s a really good episode. It really kind of breaks it down in a very easy to understand way that I think that’s really fascinating. And also the other thing is. Think about internationally, they’re already ahead of the game, right? So a lot of organizations I work with are building their privacy frameworks to meet what the EU has already established.
Right.
And so I think that they are far advanced than the United States is in terms of the privacy. It is more complicated and rightfully so, right?
Jenny: It is. But I mean, Chris, they even have laws coming out around AI governance in the EU right now. And we are years behind that in the United States.
So following all of the privacy laws in the EU, and I will say California mirrors a lot of those. So in the States, if you want to look at the most restrictive state, definitely start looking at California and consider that a best practice. And that’s typically the way everything rolls out. You can spam if you want to.
Go way back, [00:26:00] right? Like that’s how it rolled out. EU first, California, and then national. And so my guess is we’re going to see that not only with patient privacy, but then in privacy in general, but then also of course, with AI eventually.
Chris Boyer: Right now. Now let’s, I want to circle back to a word you used earlier on when we were talking the political aspects of things here.
Because that really is weighing its hand here. I was just listening to the New York Times daily about how the technology companies are embracing the new administration because they believe they’re going to ease restrictions on these social channels because they believe it hinders innovation. And so there is sort of like a cultural shift of technology companies to embrace sort of that more of this open, unregulated, unfettered, innovative social world, right?
Technology slash social world that we’re in, hence why we’re moving away towards from content moderation, those sorts of things. [00:27:00] But it’s gotten to the point where, where does it start? When does it stop? And unfortunately, that’s the hard part. I was over the weekend, the Washington Post released an article, an interview with Xavier Becerra, who’s led the Department of Health and Human Services.
And he said, I just can’t go toe to toe with social media anymore because the level of instantaneous information and quote unquote disinformation that’s being propagated on these channels is so hard for the government to participate in. So, wdoes that mean for us as health systems? Do we have to start regulating our content as well because there’s no higher body that’s going to be addressing this?
What are your thoughts, Jenny?
Jenny: So I always recommend that an organization kind of create some rules and guidelines that make sure they’re being true to themselves and their brand, right? What are the brand’s core values? What’s important to the brand as far as the way that they show up in the way that they develop [00:28:00] relationships and share information with their community.
Develop those first. And in the vast majority of situations, that’s going to be much more conservative than any social media platform will try to guide you. And so I always recommend creating that and then have your content strategy, speak to that. You have to have a review process before you put anything out into the world where you look at it through a variety of political lens.
How could this be interpreted? How could we accidentally be stepping into something that maybe we don’t fully understand that review process now, unfortunately needs to be mandatory. Whereas, you know, a year or two years ago, it didn’t. But that’s something you need to do to make sure that you’re not accidentally using language or imagery or something that, you know, could accidentally get you in trouble.
Now your brand to be positioning yourself as one thing or the other, you know, one side or the other, and that’s fine, but accidentally doing it as a landmine that most brands, you know, want to build some general, you know, safety nets around. So that’s, [00:29:00] you know, my general recommendation, even basic things like pronoun, there’s so many ways you can accidentally step into it right now on social media.
But generally if a healthcare provider system, et cetera, wants to develop an education a platform to be able to communicate directly with their patients, potential patients, education, and sharing your point of view. Folks are hungry for real information. And a lot of folks do have the ability to understand misinformation and spot it.
And they’re looking for content from trustworthy sources. So I actually view this as an opportunity for brands that have the ability to create content that’s meaningful and educational to lean in and help create some content that’s trustworthy on these platforms and fight against the misinformation.
Because otherwise if we all lean back, then the platforms, you know, we’ll have zero value for consumers. And who [00:30:00] knows, you know, where things will be guided in the future.
Chris Boyer: I really like that. I really like the fact that you’re suggesting that we are sort of the stewards of combating medical misinformation as best as we can, whether we like it or not, we as health systems still have a lot of trust in this space.
The elements trust barometer is still pretty high for hospitals and health systems. It’s gone down for federal agencies like the CDC. It’s like a 40 percent now down from 64 percent for just two years ago. Right. I mean, we’re starting to see the trusted. Established organizations don’t even ask about mainstream media, right?
It’s just like, trust is going all over the place. But one thing I found consistent is that hospitals and health systems that have a local presence in their community still have a trust index that’s lingering between 60 and 70%. That’s pretty significant in this day and age.
Jenny: It is significant. And I have [00:31:00] found with our clients that whenever you go even deeper than that, and you actually have humans that work at your organization that are well known, that are well loved that have a large client or patient base that loves them.
If you have them be the face of your content, we have found that drives engagement and trust even further.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. But, you know, this, conversation reminds me of what it was like 15 years ago when we were talking about adopting social media in this space, right? Is that we’re still dealing with a lot of things of like, is it trustworthy?
Is it going to damage our brand? Are we going to participate? I would argue that. We always should be questioning what we’re doing to that same level of you know, critiques. We need to make sure that everything we’re doing is meaningful, is addressing our end ultimate end goals as our strategies of our organization.
It reflects us in a genuine, authentic way. That’s our branding, right? In order to do that. Does that mean we’re going to be on Facebook in 3 years? Who knows? Right? [00:32:00] Because that may change too. There may be a backlash. I’m kind of on the mindset of like, if it’s not working, just go quiet and let it go.
Right. And then see if you come back to it eventually.
Jenny: Mm hmm. Here we are standing away.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. So. I mean, maybe it’s gonna happen again, right? And maybe Twitter will eventually or whatever X will then shift hands again. And suddenly, you know, maybe it’ll, it’ll shift or maybe there will be a replacement coming into play, who knows, right?
But at this point in time, I think we still need to be very cognizant and be truly authentic to who we are as a brand. That’s my theory.
Jenny: I agree. And create a hub where all of your content lives in one place and then view all of these channels as simply distribution methodologies. And it’s going to shift over time and then that gives you control of your future and not have you, you know, be beholden to some, you know, [00:33:00] billionaire’s whim decision.
Chris Boyer: And if you’re in, if you’re getting into paying social strategies and how much your media distribution cost should be, that’s where you need trusted partners that really understand the space to help you with those decisions. If you’re doing it all yourself, make sure that your team internally is very aware and understands where their dollars are being spent.
But I will tell you, it’s great to have people like you at Hedy & Hopp to kind of help organizations make it, you know, make the right decisions in the space because we’re in a hot mess situation right now.
Jenny: I know it’s really interesting. I will say just anecdotally that we have no clients right now doing anything on X, but almost all of our clients that are running paid campaigns are still really heavy on meta platforms and it’s driving really strong performance.
So just anecdotally for anyone listening. And saying like, has everybody pulled from Meta? Are we behind? No, most people are still doing from my experience and purview are still actively promoting on Meta. That doesn’t mean they’re creating content [00:34:00] organically on meta and investing time there, but from a paid perspective, it is still driving meaningful results that you know, warrant putting the dollars there today, as of January early January, 2025.
Chris Boyer: Get back to us in two months or two years.
Jenny: Exactly. Well, Chris, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy for anyone who’s interested in following you or connecting with you, where can folks find you online?
Chris Boyer: Well, I’m easy to find because that early on I learned how to SEO myself and I also am doing AI SEO right now.
So you can just Google Chris Boyer, probably find me. But the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn, Chris Boyer. You’ll see my headshot there geeky guy with glasses, or you can find at christopherboyer.com. That’s my website. And then of course, listen to my podcast at Touchpoint Health, the Touchpoint Podcast.
Jenny: Well, thanks so much for being on today, Chris. And for listeners, we’re going to share all of those links in our [00:35:00] show notes. So if you want to reach out to Chris, it’ll be super easy to reference later. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining us. I hope today was helpful and gave you a little bit of an understanding about all the different shifting sands in the social media world today.
So thanks for tuning in and join us on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In the final episode of our “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we’re getting hands-on with AI platforms. While understanding how AI platforms function is important, it’s when you start using them in your workflows that the real value shines through. This interactive episode walks you through five practical exercises designed to make your daily tasks smoother and more efficient.
The exercises covered:
•Using ChatGPT for quick note transcriptions
•Brainstorming content ideas with Claude
•Conducting market research with Copilot
•Navigating privacy concerns with Perplexity
•How AI can improve communication
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we specialize in working with providers and payors across the U.S.
Today is episode three of our three-part series titled AI 101 for Healthcare Marketers. We designed this series to really allow you and then anyone on your team you forward the series to really understand how AI works, understand the different tools and models that are available to you, understand some core tenants of using AI within your marketing function.
And then really getting your hands dirty and doing some prompt engineering and getting some results. You got to move beyond theory in order to really understand something. So that’s today’s goal. If you are listening to me today, I strongly [00:01:00] recommend that you have me in one ear with an earbud and you have your laptop or computer in front of you, because I’m going to walk you through some prompts that are going to allow you to really get your hands dirty.
So this is really meant to be an episode that you listen to for a second. Pause, listen to again, pause. And it may take you an hour to get through it simply because you are being interactive and working through these different examples. And I think we have six different examples we’re going to be walking through.
But again, I strongly recommend do not skip this and please do not just listen to it and not do the prompts real time, because I know you say you’ll go back and do it later, but I assure you that you won’t because you are busy. An you have a million and one priorities so let’s please make this interactive. So we’re going to use a handful of different platforms.
The reason why we’re going to do that is because I want you to see what the output looks like. I want you to create a free account on a variety of platforms so you’ll go back to it and use it again. And I want you to see what they look like and the outputs that they [00:02:00] generate. So, the first one we’re going to do is Chat GPT, and this is actually something that you’ll need to use with your phone.
So take a moment, go and download ChatGPT, the app to your phone to your iPhone or Android, and it is as of the recording of this podcast so mid December 2024, it’s a little green icon that you’ll want to download. Once you download it, you’ll have to create a free account if you haven’t already. But this is one of my favorite uses, use cases to teach people that are kind of afraid of prompt engineering.
But it is a huge time saver. So I myself, I will show you for anybody watching the video, I am a handwritten note person. A study came out 15 years ago. I think that said, if you write during a meeting, it actually makes the information be cemented multiple parts of your brain. And, you know, I’ve never followed up on if that study is accurate or not, but I am [00:03:00] a believer.
So I’m constantly doing pages of handwritten notes. And then at the end of every day, I’m having to actually transcribe them and text them in in order to share them with my team. So this is a great hack. Using the ChatGPT app, open it up in the lower left-hand corner, hit plus button and go to camera.
So you can take a picture. Take a picture of your page of notes. You also can take a picture of a PDF. Let’s say a handout, like a marketing sales collateral piece. Take a picture. And then once you do that, hit submit, and then it will ask you, what do you want to do with this? And one of the options will be to transcribe.
So respond back. Yes, please transcribe. And then what it will do is actually then will transition that image, whether it’s handwritten notes, collateral, whatever, in to text. So it does such a good job reading handwriting. I have very bad handwriting and it does an excellent job reading my handwriting and trying to decipher the organization of content off my notes.
So if I had [00:04:00] something on the far right, it does a good job putting it where it needs to be in bulleted format. Once it does this, you can actually select the content. You can text it to yourself, jump into Slack, email it to yourself, whatever you need to do. But if you are a handwritten notes person like I am, this could be a great way to use AI technology to quickly eliminate that time consuming task of texting or typing in your notes.
Workshop number two, using AI for content brainstorming. I really like this from a content marketing perspective. So again, whenever we talked about the AI tenents, one of the core ones is not using output as a marketing collateral. Like we’re not going to take something that Claude writes and just use it as a blog post, right?
We’re not doing that for a variety of reasons, legal concerns, quality concerns, et cetera. But it’s great for brainstorming ideas. I really like it because it helps get out of my box in my own [00:05:00] head of the biases I have of what I think matters, what I think people are talking about. So we’re going to use Claude for this one.
So open your browser to Claude.ai, create a free account if you don’t have one yet. And then here is your prompt. So first we’re going to tell the platform we’re going to tell Claude their role, we’re going to give them a little bit of context and then we’re going to do the ask and we’re going to do a general ask and then we’re going to get more specific with the ask.
So here’s the prompt. And again, I’m going to read this. You can pause this podcast and then you can think about how you’d modify it for your own needs. You can type it in as is if you want, or you can modify it based off a project you want to do content brainstorming for your own organization and modify it.
So prompt, you are the chief producer for my podcast We Are, Marketing Happy. We create concise educational videos for healthcare marketers. Please create a visual mind map for all the video topics I [00:06:00] could write on about healthcare marketing for providers and payors. Please include the article title in a short summary for each topic.
Make the title and summary punchy and use lessons from David Ogilvie to craft them. So if you think about that prompt, we did a couple of things, right? Okay. Told Claude who they are, gave them context, and then said what we want the output to look like as far as the format and the copywriting approach.
This is really important because you could also have the copywriting approach be very professional and buttoned up or very casual using slang, modern slang language. There’s lots of ways that you can modify that to have it be appropriate for your brand. And for the output, I actually asked it to do a visual mind map.
Again, you don’t have to do that. It can, when it does the visual mind map, it also creates just like a piece of like written text to accompany it. That could be really helpful. Workshop number three, we’re going to use Copilot for this one. Again, just to get [00:07:00] examples using all the different platforms. So go ahead and open up Copilot, make an account.
If you don’t have one yet and here’s the prompt. This is around market research. I want to open an urgent care facility in St. Louis, Missouri, where my customers can get quick and easy access to care at a standard rate. Act as a market researcher and give me information on the demographics of people most likely to use urgent care in St. Louis, including age gaps or age groups, income, education, gender, and specific location. For queries like this, you’re likely to get back a lot of information that you already know. After all, you have a job as a marketer in healthcare. You’ve been doing this for a while. Some of you for a long time.
I’m 20 years into my career. I’ve been doing this a long time. Of course, I could do that on my own without using AI, but I like it for four key reasons. Number one, it usually adds perspective or other angles to things that I may have missed. Right? Assumptions that I may have [00:08:00] made. It uses language the community uses.
So specifically in that prompt, it ended up naming places like Central West End and other things that are just included in the day-to-day conversations that folks in St. Louis use. It challenges biases the team may have developed internally. So maybe with a specific service line, you think, oh, people come to us for pricing or people come to us because of this, and they always go to our competitor because of that.
Do they, or is that just what you’ve been telling yourselves for the last decade? So prompts like this are helpful for that reason. And then also when you tell it at the very end, if you add, please cite your sources and give citations it can find sources for you that are more likely relevant to your goal.
So there are general market research resources that you may use to pull data, but it also may share information for some lesser-known regional publications or additional contacts that maybe you wouldn’t have found otherwise. So it can be really helpful. The fourth [00:09:00] is around privacy. So for this one, we’re actually going to use Perplexity AI.
And actually, if you want to be if you want to be a little saucy, you can do it on Perplexity and you also can do it on Gemini and you can compare the results. But the prompt in this situation is around privacy. And once you opened Perplexity.ai, the prompt is going to be, please tell me the privacy and user concerns a healthcare business would have using Facebook pixel on their website, considering the most recent HIPAA guidance.
Now, this is interesting to look at the output for a few reasons. First of all, you can see if it’s biased or not, but also, so, again, I’m filming this mid-December. About three weeks ago, HIPAA, sorry, Meta dropped a bunch of additional guidelines around conversion tag usage for healthcare companies. Does Perplexity, Gemini, or any of the other tools share that with you?
How up-to-date and recent [00:10:00] is the information that they’re sharing? A lot of these models can access the Internet, but unless you tell it to, sometimes it just relies on the indexed data that has available. So, should you take any of these outputs as gospel? Absolutely not. But what it can do is actually summarize a lot of the issues around the topic in a tidy bundle.
Once you get that, then you can check into the sources that it cited, make sure that they’re accurate. You can learn some of the legal terms or issues you need to research. So, for example, maybe it will bring up some special considerations within your own state related to private state-level privacy laws, et cetera, so just flag some things you need to dig into and then also can give you a starting point to have a knowledgeable conversation with your other team members, like legal compliance analytics and development.
So whenever we are wanting to step outside of our own area of expertise there’s a whole nother culture and set of acronyms in all these other departments. So the more that you can [00:11:00] understand how to bridge that gap, the easier it will be and these tools can help you do that with queries like the privacy one we just shared.
And if we really want to dig into communication our final examples, we’re doing five, not six, I apologize, is around communication. So, for this one, you could really use any of the platforms that you like. I would probably prefer if I were doing this on my own, I would probably select Claude just because of the how human the responses are that Claude provides. But again, dealer’s choice.
You could even do it on multiple platforms to compare examples, but there are three separate prompts I’m going to give you. So you’d want to do each of them separately, but what we’re going to do is I’m going to tell you the prompt and then I’m going to tell you why you might want to do that prompt or other use cases within your organization or processes.
The first one is how do we speak about service line or disease, let’s say cardiology with the public? What is common nontechnical terminology that is [00:12:00] used? And what are the biggest concerns we should address? So, again, this challenges your organization’s messaging around service lines or diseases. It challenges biases or assumptions.
And it really can help you kind of get out of your own head whenever you’re thinking about how you’re talking about a service line. If you have service line campaigns launching in 2025, this is a great thing to run for all of them to make sure that your messaging is still relevant. Your landing page copy is still as comprehensive as possible.
And you’re being thorough for your patients. The second prompt. I think my business needs server-side Google Tag Manager. Can you explain that to me and help explain it to other people on my team? This is a great one if you’re trying to understand something that another team owns, and you need to be able to walk into a meeting and look like you kind of know what’s going on.
A great example of this is we were at, when our team was actually setting up server-side Google Tag Manager, we are setting it up on a Google Cloud platform. One of our clients. [00:13:00] Their internal team had only used traditional servers. They were asking us a lot of questions about using like traditional server language that just weren’t really relevant for Cloud servers.
And so our team was having some problem bridging the gap. There’d been like seven emails back and forth saying like, no, that’s not how these Cloud servers work. Instead it’s like this. And we just weren’t able to connect based off of that gap in vocabulary. Our team actually used a prompt that actually said, how can I explain this Cloud server set up specifically around X, Y, and Z to a person who’s more familiar with a traditional server structure?
And it gave all the answers, of course, our team read it, fact-checked the technical setup, et cetera, but once they did, they sent it over and the person on the other side of that, oh, awesome. Cool. Proceed. Right. So there was just a communication hump they couldn’t get over. And then the third one, this is great if you are walking into a meeting and you’re going to be expected to be knowledgeable about something [00:14:00] and you have no idea what’s going on, really great foundational knowledge.
So let’s say for example, here’s a prompt. We are interested in media mix modeling. What are some of the pros and cons of this that I should be discussing within my organization? So let’s say, for example, your manager put a meeting on your calendar for next week around a topic. And you’re like, Oh man, I’ve been so busy with these other topics I haven’t even really researched or learned about that yet.
You can type in a prompt like this to one of these platforms and say, give me the 101. What do I need to know to be able to speak on it at a foundational or intermediate level? And these platforms can give you the information and then you can even have a Q and A session to be able to make sure you’re rounding out your knowledge.
So a great way to use it. So why do you, why should we care about this? Right. When the first episode we talked about and we covered about how where we are with AI right now is sort of like where the internet was in the late nineties. People could still do business without it, but my gosh, once you started [00:15:00] doing it, it was easier.
And then once you got to, like, the mid 2000s, you really couldn’t do business anymore without understanding the Internet and being able to send an email. We’re kind of at that point with where, you know, you don’t have to learn it, but my gosh, and I don’t think it’s going to be 10 years from now. I’m thinking 5 years from now based on how quickly everything is growing and ramping up.
We need to learn and understand how to integrate AI into your workflows. And I strongly suggest you start now and going through this three-part series was already a great start, but what’s coming next. In 2025 is my guess we’re going to be seeing three key things.
We’re going to be seeing marketing campaign optimization. We’re going to be seeing a lot of ways that you can be able to optimize your campaign. Assets do a lot of additional testing within your campaigns to be able to optimize performance results. There’s going to be a big jump in the ability to leverage AI-based analytics analysis and reporting.
[00:16:00] So is an analyst job still going to exist? Of course it is. But they’re going to have all of these new AI tools that are going to take them from looking at data for seven hours to looking at it for 20 minutes and having a much better understanding about what is going on. And the third is creative asset development.
So right now, a lot of the creative tools are kind of crappy within AI, right? Like they’re nothing I would put out on behalf of our brand. Besides basically, like, the creation or extension of using a basic template, but in 2025, I really think that’s going to change. I think there’s going to be a lot of tools that are able to take a basic brand design and then framework and then really be able to roll it out to a lot of different assets.
So it’ll be interesting. And what you have to do now is get started now. Make sure you understand all of the guardrails. Make sure you’re really well versed on it. And then, of course, make sure that your organization is bought in and you have all of the different legal things in line. [00:17:00]
So thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series. I really hope this was helpful. We have found again the more you actually dig in and use these platforms, the less scary they are. Just remember to keep privacy top of mind, and I’d also recommend hopping on a couple of LinkedIn groups around using in your daily workflows.
There’s lots of great prompting examples that are shared. It’s just a way to be able, if you’re a LinkedIn user, like, I am, it’s a great way to really incorporate it into a daily bite size learning by using or joining a tool or sorry, a platform like that.
There’s also tons of newsletters you can sign up for, but I think at this point, most of them are created by so they’re not awesome, but it will give you information at least about the platform advancements if you’re interested in that. But thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series and for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.
My name is Jenny Bristow, and I so appreciate you tuning in, reach out for any questions. [00:18:00] jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Have a fabulous day. Take care.
In the second episode of our three-part AI series, Jenny builds on the understanding of AI by covering the six tenets for using AI at your healthcare organization. While AI offers exciting opportunities, it also comes with challenges that require caution and strategy.
The six tenets covered:
1. Approach AI results with heavy skepticism: Even tools like ChatGPT can provide inaccurate information, with hallucinations still occurring about 30% of the time.
2. Do not use AI outputs as-is: AI-generated content should always be reviewed and refined to avoid sounding impersonal or inaccurate.
3. Do not have AI create marketing deliverables: Relying on AI for final marketing assets can be a liability due to inaccuracies, bias, copyright concerns and can cause potential harm to your brand.
4. Be clear in your ask: Use structured prompting techniques to get the best results.
5. Ask for sources: Always ask AI tools for sources and confidence levels to verify their output.
6. Keep privacy a priority: Treat any shared information as though it could appear on a public billboard to ensure confidentiality and compliance.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of this fabulous podcast. I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m very excited today to bring you episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers.
In our first episode, we talked about how to understand AI if a person presents it to you. Trying to understand and categorize the different kinds of AI at a foundational level to give you a better understanding. And the six core platforms that are used most heavily today
What we’re going to do in episode two, is we’re actually going to talk about the core tenants, the 6 tenants of using AI in healthcare marketing. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how to get buy-in within your internal organization about using these tools. So let’s get started.
[00:01:00] Six tenants for using AI in healthcare marketing. The first tenant is approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Even ChatGPT knows it lies sometimes. So it’s called a hallucination. All of these platforms are built wanting to please the user, which is you. So if you ask these platforms are questioned that they don’t know the answer to very often they will lie to you.
They will come up with an answer. So you have to really approach all of them with really heavy skepticism. A great example is at Hedy & Hopp, again, we’re a full-service agency. So we do everything from marketing strategy, messaging, persona work, to activation. So big strategy and activation for campaigns to drive patient volumes.
A great example of this is on the privacy side we were digging in and helping one of our new clients be compliant. They were in a state that we hadn’t worked with before. So, before we called our attorney that we have on retainer for all of our privacy work, we thought, hey, let’s see [00:02:00] if these platforms can give us a good rundown of the current privacy laws in that state.
No, the platforms lied. Specifically, ChatGPT lied. It actually made up a court case, including the name of a court case. So had we not been super diligent and actually fact-checking the result we would have given wildly inaccurate information and it does this for all sorts of questions. It could do it if you ask it a statistic, if you ask it any information that it cannot easily access, even the versions that have ready access to go onto the Internet to search. If they can’t find the answer quickly, they will lie. Now the percentage of times hallucinations happen are drastically dropping. Every time that these models are updated, hallucination rates decrease. I saw a recent study that for in particular, from the prior model to this model, hallucinations dropped [00:03:00] from it was like a percentage in the fourites down to in the thirties. And you may say, Jenny, but wait in the thirties is still super high. And yes, it is, which is why we’ve got to fact-check this stuff.
So again, number one was approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Number two, don’t use AI output. As is it’s not great. It reads like it’s AI. So there will be a time and place where AI models are sophisticated enough where they can do full content creation and copywriting for you. But it’s just not there yet today.
We tested all of the current platforms, but the same prompts and have been doing that over the last year to kind of understand the way that they’re maturing and the way that the models are shifting Tested different prompts, all of these things. You do not want to make any of your users feel as though AI [00:04:00] is talking to them.
So we’ll talk about some ways that you can use AI to compliment your content marketing program through thought partnership, brainstorming, assumption checking, but we’re not going to use the output as is. And number three is do not have AI create marketing deliverables. So a couple of reasons, but the biggest takeaway is it’s a direct liability to your employer or your brand.
There’s four reasons why. First legality. I mentioned this in the first episode when I went through all of the different tools, but ChatGPT is actively being sued because they trained the model using a lot of content where the creator of the content was not given. They did not give permission and they were not compensated.
So, imagine if ChatGPT, you know, next year ends up settling this lawsuit or going all the way through the courts and then being fined, say 2 billion. How do we know that’s not going to roll downstream? And [00:05:00] anybody who used any some certain outputs of ChatGPT are going to be financially liable.
We don’t know that. And so we have to be really careful and understand that using it exactly as is to create a marketing deliverable can be a legal liability. We also are going to bring up hallucinations again, accuracy. We don’t know that it’s accurate, right? We’re not going to trust it more than we trust our own ability to create content or strategy work.
And so that’s important. Bias. AI tools can learn bias from the data and training that it is interacting with. So, you want to make sure that you’re really careful in the way that you prompt, even the words that you use. Maybe creating bias and the results that you’re receiving. So we have to be really aware of that and not using deliverables as is to publish content out on behalf of our brand can protect you from that.
And then fourth attribution and authoring [00:06:00] along with the aforementioned legal issues. If these tools are used to create things that are put into production, there could be an issue. For example, let’s say you’re doing a brand refresh and you’re wanting to come up with a specific tagline. You ask Gemini, for example, to come up with a variety of taglines for you and one feels so good.
It is so awesome. And you launch it. A week later, you find out that’s one of your top competitor’s taglines. No wonder it sounded so good. So again, you cannot take things at surface value. So we’re not going to have it create marketing deliverables for us. The fourth tenant is to be very clear in your ask.
So there’s actually a prompting structure called Risen R I S E N that my friend, Chris Boyd forwarded along to me. And cause I had just kind of been creating all of these prompting structures myself. And he goes, you know, there’s a thing called Risen, right? Like, Oh, thanks, Chris. Yeah, I didn’t. I appreciate you.
But whenever you’re actually creating [00:07:00] a prompt or typing in something to ask the AI model to do something for you, it’s called a prompt. You want to give it clear directions by asking it to play a role, giving it context using specific language, asking for multiple versions, asking for it to cite sources.
Sometimes a prompt or request can be two pages long. So prompting is truly an art form today. Now, will prompting be important in this time in 2025? Probably not. I think back to when again, the Internet was first coming online in the late mid nineties, late nineties. I taught myself. I was in 7th grade in 1997.
I taught myself how to hand-code websites using HTML and JavaScript, and I started a web development business and I built lots of websites in my local community for businesses, schools, and churches. It was really important to know HTML and other coding languages at that point. Today, you can stand up a website using Squarespace and [00:08:00] not have a, any idea about what the code looks like on the backend.
Now, is there still a profession where understanding coding is super important. Of course there is, but again, we’re talking about like the average marketer. And if you need that skillset, I strongly still recommend that if you’re interested in becoming proficient, you should understand prompting and prompt engineering.
There are a couple of different sources. I would recommend Coursera has some great courses around prompt engineering specialization. Udemy has a session called Master AI with Prompt Engineering. It’s 65 bucks. So super affordable. And then LinkedIn learning has lots of new sources. I do know that they run specials from time to time.
If you’re a new user, maybe your employer already has the ability for you to do LinkedIn learning courses. Check it out. Otherwise, they still are really affordable to go through them. It is really important to understand it again now and I still think it’s going to be [00:09:00] important in the future as these models get better and better at kind of like guiding the user where we need to go.
We may not need to know exactly what a prompt should look like at that level of granularity, but it also still helps your brain understand what’s happening behind the scenes. So it’s still a great tool or a good thing to learn. Number 5. This is why I love Perplexity, but also why I think maybe Perplexity may not be around much longer because you can do this for all the models.
You just have to remember always tell within your prompt for the platform to cite its sources. So, you can ask the platform to give you its confidence level and its answer, and then also ask it to provide sources and citations for any information it included the results. So again, Perplexity does this automatically, but all the other platforms, you can just include that at the end of the prompt, and it’s really fabulous.
And then number six, remember, keep privacy a priority. We absolutely have to keep remembering that. Any [00:10:00] information you put within these platforms, imagine it going on a billboard outside of your organization. And if you’re comfortable with that. By all means, move forward with it. The last thing I want to touch on is building consensus within your organization.
So one of the reasons that we created these six tenents is to give our clients and then also just people in the healthcare marketing community, a starting point to have these internal conversations. Just like in the privacy world, if you go to your legal and compliance teams and say, hey, here’s what we’ve been doing with marketing, here’s the diligence we’ve been doing. Here’s the research and the education we’ve been doing. Let’s have a conversation to get aligned. It’s a much more mutually respectful situation than if you go to them and say, hey, will you do all this privacy stuff for me? You know, so let’s treat AI the same way.
Let’s do the legwork. Let’s understand some initial starting points of how we may want to use it within our organization. Let’s help come up with some rules of what we want to see [00:11:00] happen within our marketing team and the usage within our team and organization. And feel free to use these six tenents as a starting point, add to it, modify it, whatever you need to do.
But these are some great guardrails as you’re thinking about rolling it out and implementing it across your team. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers was helpful. Next week we’re going to cover some actual prompts.
We’re going to dig in and actually look at some specific queries you can type in with some real use cases. So when you’re listening next week, be sure to have me in one ear with your laptop pulled up in front of you cause it’s meant to be an interactive session where you can get hands-on and really build your confidence at starting to use some of these platforms. W
ith that, have a fabulous rest of your day and we can’t wait to see you next week on that episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In the first episode of our three-part “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we break down the basics of AI so healthcare marketers can better understand how to use it effectively. Jenny discusses how AI has rapidly evolved—ChatGPT is just two years old, with 56% of adults ages 18 to 24 using it according to YouGov and Reuters Institute—and explains the types of AI, including Narrow AI (used today), General AI, and Superintelligent AI. She also covers how AI learns through methods like supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and highlights its key capabilities, such as natural language processing and computer vision.
The episode introduces the most used platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude, breaking down what makes each unique. By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of the leading AI tools and how they can be utilized.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 the host of this fabulous podcast and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service 100 percent healthcare marketing agency located in the Midwest and we specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
Today I am very excited to kick off the first episode of a three-part series about AI and healthcare marketing. In this three-part series, we’re going to break down a topic that a lot of marketers really find overwhelming. Whenever you’re learning a new technology, that is such a seismic shift from how you work in your normal day-to-day you typically have a couple of different approaches.
You have early adopters, people who love learning new things, making themselves feel vulnerable, and shaking up their day-to-day. And then you have the people that, you know, adopt things in a [00:01:00] standard time frame. They’re not going to be an early adopter.
They’re going to wait and see which tools really shake out, which processes shake out, and how the industry responds. And then, of course, you have the laggards, the people who really don’t want to adopt new technology. I’m hoping this three-part series will help demystify AI and help give you, and hopefully, your team, if you choose to share this podcast series with them, a much better understanding of AI as it stands today.
So late 2024 going into 2025. And really understanding how can we begin using AI effectively within our internal marketing processes today? What does that look like? What do we need to put into place in order to make sure we’re doing it effectively? And you know, where do we start? So our three-part series, episode one is going to help you understand the primary AI platforms right now.
So I’m recording this in mid-December 2024. We’re going to talk about their differentiators and [00:02:00] examples of different tasks where they shine. Episode two is going to be talking about practical ways to really develop some framework around how you roll AI out to your internal marketing team. So we’re going to call it the six healthcare marketing AI tenents.
And we’ll provide some guidance around how you can work with your own legal and compliance teams, and be able to set up some frameworks so you can use them in an approved way within your organization. And the third and final episode is going to be real-world examples. I’m going to have you listen to this podcast, and have your laptop or computer up.
Pause me. Do the prompt on your other window, and then hopefully you’ll feel much more comfortable understanding what you’re looking at and ways that you can incorporate it in a meaningful way into your day-to-day workflows. So with that, let’s dig in. I think one of the most interesting things when you think about AI, I mean, ChatGPT really became available to the public in 2022.
So I’m filming this in 2024. It’s just two years [00:03:00] old. I mean, it is not that old. That’s basically the same amount of time that we as marketers have been worrying about all of the HIPAA guidelines changing. So a lot has been happening in our world. So first of all, take a deep breath and just say, to yourself, it’s okay if you’re not on the bleeding edge of AI implementation, you’ve had a lot of other stuff to worry about, but I do want you to think about, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands, you know, even if you like me, I wasn’t in the business world yet at that time, but I very clearly remember the shift to people being comfortable with using the internet and using email in the business world.
If you made that shift. You were successful. If you didn’t make that shift, it really impacted your career trajectory opportunities. And that’s what I am going to do. So a great quote is by Karim Lakhani, a Harvard professor. It is “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” and that’s very much my belief as well.
I don’t think marketing departments are [00:04:00] going to go away, but I do think we’re going to be expected to move faster and use technology to really expedite our processes and our output. So let’s learn how to do that. Another thing I will say is that in June of 2024, EMARKETER came out with a study, they did a survey to understand how many people are actually using AI in their day-to-day, not just at work, but in general, even for their personal life and 56 percent said of adults, ages 18 to 24, have used ChatGPT, but that number drastically decreases as folks get older.
In fact, if you look at the age range of folks, 45 to 54, only 28 percent of people have ever used ChatGPT. Now, that was about six months ago, so I’m sure that numbers are a little higher at this point, but if you haven’t really dug in yet. That’s okay. Let’s get started. So when I’m learning something new, I like to put a framework around it.
I’d like to understand what am I learning. How am I learning it. So that’s how I’m going to present AI to you [00:05:00] today through the lens of a framework. There is an AI upskilling framework that LinkedIn Learning put out that I’m a really big fan of. They, it’s basically a pyramid shape and each level of the pyramid is a higher level of specialty within this topic.
So the foundational level is understanding what AI is, having some overall literacy around it and understanding what responsible AI looks like. The next level up is actually applying it. This is where you start prompt engineering, start developing a strategy around AI implementation, and really focus on productivity with it.
Above that is where you’re actually perhaps building your own AI models or putting an overlay, a skin over an existing one to be able to build your own interface. Above that, you’re really becoming a specialist at this point. This is where you’re training and maintaining models. You might be, you know, building a machine [00:06:00] learning models, really getting into deep learning and neural networks. So you’re really a technical specialist. And then above that is really where you’re deeply specialized, where you’re at the level of education, where you can even do security and ops specifically around AI. So as we’re thinking about that level of special specialization that you can do with AI, we’re really going to focus on those bottom two levels.
We’re going to focus on understanding and then applying it. So, that’s our goal today. I do want to pause a little bit and give you a general reminder about compliance. I am the queen of compliance. I don’t want to be, but here we are.
I’m always talking about compliance on our podcasts. We’re going to talk about this a lot. As we talk about the actual ways that you can get your hands dirty and start using AI, but a general reminder, unless your organization has set up its own AI ecosystem that you know is private and secure within your own environment, you have to treat everything that you [00:07:00] put into AI as though you’re putting it on a billboard outside of your office.
So for example. Of course, we’re not going to upload patient names, but we’re also not going to upload information like our revenue goals for a service line or our organization’s name. And, you know, what areas we’re focused on for growth for the next year. Assume anything that you put in will be used to train the model, even if, many tools offer this, even if you opt out of allowing it to do that, you still have to make the assumption that unless you have signed a contract with them and you know that it is within a secure ecosystem, somehow the data could be leaked.
So proceed with caution. The other thing that I will say is that Europe is again leading the charge in the world of privacy, and they actually have developed an EU AI act. The estimated rollout is in 2026, and their focus is ensuring that AI is used in a safe and approved manner. And they’re specifically looking at things like [00:08:00] preventing the manipulation of human behavior to circumvent free will and the exploitation of vulnerabilities of a specific group of people.
So fabulous things to put in place. Some things that I know US-based AI organizations have struggled with a little bit because we haven’t put those sorts of guardrails in place. And it’s why we’re going to have a variety of tools to talk about today, because there’s been inner fighting and they break up and start another organization that they think will be more ethical.
But again, Usually, like we saw with GDPR, whatever starts in Europe will eventually make its way over to the U.S. We likely will see some sort of legal framework coming around AI usage in the future, but right now nothing exists. If you go out on the web and you just type in AI for copywriting, there are going to be dozens of tools that come up.
If you do AI for design. Dozens of tools are going to come up, but at the end of the day, most of them are actually powered by just a handful of [00:09:00] models, less than a handful of models. So what we’re going to do today is we’re not going to talk about the 40 cool design apps or this cool app that can help make sure I’m looking at the camera when I’m doing this podcast, because maybe I’m reading off a script, which I’m not.
I always go off-script. Just ask my podcast manager. It drives them crazy. But we’re not focusing on that. I want you to understand the foundation of how AI works because then what you can do is look at any tool that a team member presents to you and you can say, yeah, but what model runs it and then you can understand structurally how it operates.
So I think we’re going to start with understanding the categories of how AI works, learns, et cetera. So the first question you want to ask whenever you’re presented with AI is what kind of AI is it? And there are really three kinds of AI. You have narrow AI, which is also known as weak AI. General AI, also known as strong AI and super [00:10:00] intelligent AI.
The only kind of AI that’s available to the general public today is narrow AI. So any sort of AI you’re interacting with right now, ChatGPT, Siri, or Alexa, all of those are really narrow AI. Strong or general AI is a platform or an AI tool that can really do anything a human can do, like learn new things, solve problems, and understand emotions.
They say this is not yet developed. I believe it likely is created, but it is not yet available for the average consumer. And then the third, which I really hope does not exist yet is super intelligent AI. And this is an AI tool that is really smarter than the smartest human in every single way. So picture a super brain that can solve problems that we can’t even imagine.
That is really what horror movies is made of. So that is a third kind. So all of the AIs we’re going to be talking about today are considered the first category, which is narrow or weak AI. The next question you want to ask when you start thinking about AIs [00:11:00] and how they categorize themselves is how does it learn.
There are again, three ways. But how it learns, you have supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. So supervised learning, for example, is when you show, you want them to recognize it, to learn how to recognize a cat. So you show lots of pictures of cats, labeled cats, and then it understands what a cat is.
Unsupervised is when you actually give it lots of photos of different animals, and then. Without telling it what it is, it kind of figures out based on similarities and context clues. Oh, these are all cats and these are all dogs. Reinforcement learning is more like training like a dog. So if it does a trick correctly, it gets a treat.
If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get anything. So it wants to learn in order to be given a treat of some kind. The next question that I always ask when you’re confronted with a new AI tool is what can it do? So you have four different categories of generally what AI [00:12:00] technologies can do. First is expert system.
So this is an AI that’s like an expert in their specific field. So think like a medical AI that can help doctors diagnose diseases. So they can perhaps look at test results, they perhaps can look at an MRI scan, and they can identify certain things. The next, which is what most people think of when they think of the word AI, is Natural Language Processing, or NLP AI.
So this AI understands and talks in human language, so this is a chatbot that you can talk to, think, ChatGPT. Again, that is an NLP AI. Computer vision AI. This is where AI can actually see and understand images and videos. So think like when you’re flying internationally and TSA doesn’t need to see your passport because it just took a picture of your face and it knows exactly who you are.
That is computer vision AI. And then the fourth category is called robotics AI. And that is when an AI [00:13:00] controls robots to do physical tasks. So think like an assembly line in a factory where it’s assembling cars or the Amazon warehouses where it’s actually picking items for shipment. That is robotics AI.
And the last section that we want to talk about whenever we’re thinking about AI is what kind of interface is it. So you have two. You have an out-of-the-box solution, which is what we’re going to talk about today. So you have ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, or you can build your own interface using one of those existing models.
So, when we think about all of those cool tools, for example, like that tool that can make my eyes look at the camera, even though I’m looking off to the side. That is an interface somebody built using one of the existing models to power it, and you can do the same thing. So once you get good enough at AI and understand how the different models think you could, for example, create a platform to allow your marketing team to interface with [00:14:00] a model that is segmented off into your own secure ecosystem, and it’s trained on your brand voice, and it is trained on your service line priorities and your marketing goals for 2025 and your team can do Q and A with it and get really specific with it. Really exciting and not really that hard.
So, in order to do that, you have to do a couple of things. You have to create a dev environment, decide which model you’re going to use, set up an API. So you can do that. Create an interface. How do you want to look at it and type with it? And then launch. And of course, you have to think about the security through the lens of of course, HIPAA and whatnot.
So your team would have to help you with that but it is not as technically advanced, you know, or scary as it may seem before you get to know how all these models work. So whenever we are talking about all the AI tools today, we’re really talking about are these couple of core models that have chat [00:15:00] interfaces on the front.
So we’re going to talk about 5 models. We’re going to talk about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. So these are the top 5 based off of our team’s usage and trends that we are seeing in the industry. Let’s dig in. The first, one, ChatGPT. This is the tool that when everybody says, do you use AI, this is what they are talking about.
Right now they have a 65 percent market share. It’s pretty astounding. They were the first one in market, they officially launched in November 30th, 2022. So they just celebrated their two-year anniversary, which is really crazy. It was developed by a company called OpenAI. And there’s a couple of specific things around it.
So, you can use the tool without logging in. Which is really nice if you’re wanting to just kind of understand the tool without creating a free account or signing up for a paid account, which you can do. Paid accounts or anywhere from 20 to 30 a user per month. And you also can get a [00:16:00] company account, where then you can create notebooks or the ability to have shared threads with other team members, which can be really helpful.
The next one we’re going to talk about is Gemini. So Gemini is actually a combination of two tools developed by Google. We have Duet AI and Bard. They lived separately and then they were, it was officially rebranded on February 21st, 2024. So this one has really only been around less than a year and it kind of feels that way.
It feels much younger. When you’re talking to it, it also feels like training guardrails have been put in place that make the answers feel a little bit more generic, but then also biased towards Google. So you may have noticed in recent months that Google is starting to include more Gemini responses in its search results.
So if you do a search, for example, saying like, who’s the best orthopedic surgeon in St. Louis. It will try to answer that with AI above the search results. So when people are thinking about and talking about like AI SEO [00:17:00] or AIO, that’s what they’re talking about is how do we get listed up in that area? It’s been a pretty slow rollout simply because of how long it takes to generate the answers.
And users are very impatient when it comes to searches on Google. So they are only rolling it out for some topics and for some users, but they will eventually have a pretty wide rollout. And then Gemini is also been the source of news headlines because of its apparent bias with its tool, especially when it comes to image generation.
If you think back whenever there was that big controversy around a query, such as give me a picture of a land owner. And it was an older white man, like there’s just some biases and the answers that it provides. And there also are biases in the written answers. So, for example, one of the queries we asked all of the platforms during our comparison and testing was information about if Google Analytics 4 was still safe to use with the new HIPAA guidance. And it wrote back and was like, why yes, you can still [00:18:00] use GA4. Whereas all the other platforms were like, proceed with caution. Here’s some information you need to know about it. So the tool is very clearly designed to keep you within that Google ecosystem.
But there are some built in integrations that make it really easy. For example, it’s already built into some of the tools you use on a daily basis such as Google drive, Gmail, et cetera. I will say my 14-year-old son is a huge Gemini fan and he uses it for a lot of his schoolwork. He creates private notebooks or gems for each of his classes.
And then he has it create study guides for him. So he uploads the documents that teachers give him, asks them to create study guides and to quiz him. So it’s really easy that it’s built-in with the existing infrastructure that many of us are already used to. The next platform is Copilot it’s owned by Microsoft and it runs on OpenAI’s GPT 4 large language model.
So what [00:19:00] again is interesting here is once you start seeing, okay, there’s all these different brands, but wait a minute, Copilot operates on OpenAI’s GPT. So you start to see overlap in the technology. It launched in February of 2023 and it replaced Cortana and Bing chat. It’s limited to only five queries a day without logging in.
So if you do want to kind of understand the tool without creating an account, you can dip your toe in a little bit. And then there’s a paid version that integrates with Microsoft 365. So your company may already have activated this. This could be an easy one to play with depending on your company’s tech stack and ecosystem.
It was definitely lesser known overall in the generative AI market, but they’ve done quite a few recent, well, throughout 2024, huge marketing pushes, including a bunch of Super Bowl ads that really increased its awareness. And we also really like that the formatting and prompt responses are pretty easy to read and consume.
So it’s notably different the way that it. [00:20:00] And the formatting it often did bulleted lists versus paragraphs of text. So that’s just an interesting difference in the way that it’s choosing to communicate. It’s also connected to the internet in the free version, which is a very helpful feature. But you have to be careful as it doesn’t have the maturity of ChatGPT, and it could be misleading with its accuracy or confidence levels.
So it hallucinates and we’ll talk about hallucinating a little bit. In the next episode, all these platforms hallucinate but Copilot definitely does. Another thing that I didn’t mention about ChatGPT is. And that’s going to come up with copilot also is that they right now are being sued by multiple different parties as a result of the way that it trained its model.
So, it basically just let it loose on the web and let it digest hundreds of thousands or millions of documents and pages and websites and books and all of these original content pieces created by other people without permission or [00:21:00] compensation. So, lots of lawsuits are happening with ChatGPT.
CoPilot, so, it’s powered by GPT. What’s interesting is they actually have advertised that they will protect any of its commercial customers from these lawsuits based off of their uses of Copilot. So, if ChatGPT ends up kind of going down or being sued for 2 billion dollars, will that roll downstream to its users?
We don’t know yet, but we do know that CoPilot through CoPilot, Microsoft has made a promise to allow it to roll down to its customers. So we’ll see if they hold true to that. The next two are interesting. So we got Perplexity. Perplexity is privately owned by four co-founders. It was launched in 2022 and it leverages OpenAI’s GPT 3.5model and Microsoft Bing’s search engine.
So it is really kind of positioning itself as a search enhancement tool rather than generative AI tool. And one of the things that we really like about Perplexity is how it really cites its [00:22:00] sources for any searches that you do. For example, if you’re going to be doing market research or anything where you really need to understand where the data is coming from, we really like perplexity for those.
Purposes, but we will see how long Perplexity is around as these other models continue to get more sophisticated and people just get used to asking for these models to cite their sources. It may not become as big of a differentiator. And the last platform I want to chat about today is Claude. So Claude is actually my personal favorite platform.
It’s owned by Anthropic, which was started by former members of OpenAI. So at the very beginning of the episode, I mentioned how there was a little bit of infighting within OpenAI because of the lack of consensus around if guardrail should or should not be put around the training models, the kinds of responses and questions that you can ask AI.
And so four people that helped found OpenAI just said, forget about it. We’re leaving. And they started [00:23:00] Claude. They use a unique approach called constitutional AI. And that means it’s focusing on making the models helpful, honest, and harmless by having them self-critique and revise their responses based on the company’s guiding principles.
So we think that they wanted to develop an AI that had more guardrails from the start, as opposed to the direction OpenAI took. The Claude AI models have been developed with a strong focus on safety and ethical AI practices, and they’re designed to be transparent and how and why they share the information that they do.
An interesting thing is that Claude can actually analyze both text and Images and you can even understand complex diagrams. We know that in June, Claude 3 Sonnet was released, but they’re rolling things out continuously. All these platforms are. So I’m not going to talk about specific models for any of them, but they’re continuously releasing new models and updates.
The other thing that I think is interesting is that [00:24:00] the concept of constitutional AI sounds good on paper, but there are some queries. For example, our team asked it, how can I kill all Python processes in my Ubuntu server? That’s a normal thing a developer would ask, and Claude refused to answer it because of the word kill.
So is that a problem with AI model because it didn’t understand that or is that a problem with our prompting and we need to learn to use different language. So something to think about. But again, Claude to me is the most personable and the way that it communicates. So, thank you for tuning in today.
This is the first of three episodes that we’re going to be talking about AI. Today we really covered AI as far as how to understand what you’re looking at from a model or technology perspective and the six core platforms that are used the most right now. Next week, we’re going to get in and talk about the six core tenets of using AI and ways to convince your organization to [00:25:00] integrate AI and allow you to use it.
And then the final episode, we’re going to be talking about specific prompts and give you some tips about how to actually incorporate it into your day-to-day. I hope today’s episode was helpful, and we will see you on episode two of three of AI 101 for healthcare marketers with We Are, Marketing Happy. See you soon.
As healthcare marketers, we thrive on making an impact on patients’ lives, but the fast-paced, compliance-heavy nature of our work can feel intense at times. That’s why we created the Artist in Residence program. To bring a sense of joy and creativity into our days while supporting incredible artists who inspire us.
For 2025, we are proud to announce Heather Ward Miles as our Artist in Residence. Based in Carmel, Indiana, Heather is a contemporary painter whose abstract expressionist work explores the human experience. Her use of organic shapes, unexpected colors, and translucent layers draws viewers into her world, inviting connection.
Heather’s art will add new expressions to Hedy & Hopp’s digital platforms, materials, and brand aesthetic throughout the year. By partnering with artists like Heather, we not only support their creative passions but also remind ourselves and our clients that creativity and connection are essential to our work.
Discover more about Heather and her incredible art on our Artist in Residence page.
In this special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny dives into a critical update for healthcare marketers. Google is requiring advertisers to opt into call recording for its Click-to-Call feature, creating potential HIPAA compliance risks. Jenny explains the changes, why they’re a concern, and what steps you need to take to protect your organization.
Key Points:
•Google’s new terms for Click-to-Call could result in PHI or PII being recorded, violating HIPAA.
•The rollout is inconsistent, so accounts must be monitored closely.
•You can contact Google support to opt out of call recording.
Action Items:
•Check if the terms were accepted for your account.
•Share this episode with your team or agency to ensure awareness.
More Information
•Search Engine Journal Article
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
I am not so thrilled to be here with you today, because I’m going to complain a little bit about Google. I had to hop on immediately to record this podcast so we could get it live this week. Today I’m recording, it is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024, and I wanted to record and get this live immediately because this is a huge potential compliance and HIPAA concern for all of us healthcare marketers who are running Google ads.
So if you run Google ads for your healthcare organization, you need to be very careful about any new terms that [00:01:00] you accept within your Google ads account. Google has begun randomly creating notifications within accounts, kind of similar to account verifications, where it’s like no rhyme and reason about when you’re prompted for account verification, we had some clients prompted months and months ago, and some prompted yesterday, right?
So it’s not like it’s being done on the 15th of each month or based on budget or size, you’re just prompted and you have 30 days to do it. They’re doing the same thing. This one is specifically around call extensions. So if you’re doing a text ad within Google ads, you likely have called extensions activated, right?
It is a great way to allow patients or potential clients to click to call in to immediately speak with your team to schedule an appointment, book a service, et cetera. Right? Everybody uses it. Well, these new terms that you’re receiving under the notifications. What it’s trying to do is to force you to accept [00:02:00] call recording in order to continue using the call extension feature.
And why is that a bad idea? Well, we’ve been talking about HIPAA for a very long time. The last thing you want to do is share any potential PHI or PII with a third party such as Google. We’ve done all of this work getting our marketing analytics tech stack set up and now Google is trying to record those inbound calls from call extensions.
So let’s back up a little bit and talk about the history of this. We did a little bit of digging because we didn’t know Google had ever really done this. Turns out, a Search Engine Journal posted an article in 2018 that said they were starting random call recording in order to reduce fraud and spam. So it was not a system-wide thing.
It was not something they did regularly. It was just to try to improve the user experience. There was another search engine journal article in mid-2020 where they [00:03:00] said that within Google ads, it became a feature that you could turn on not turn off, but turn on. So it was off by default is our understanding.
Well, now, what they are doing is they are actually saying that they want you to opt into it being turned on all of the time. And whenever it specifically says about call recording Google monitors and records a small percentage of phone calls that are initiated by call-only ads or call assets for some advertisers in the United States, allowing us to improve call quality for both users and advertisers alike.
Evaluating call quality ensures that advertisers are providing a positive call experience and prevents caller spam and business fraud. So according to that, it sounds like it is not 100 percent of the calls, but is it 1%? Is it 80%? Does it vary by the day? We don’t know. Even one call recorded by Google, if you’re a healthcare organization, is too many.
Because from a privacy perspective, [00:04:00] we don’t want to do that. So where are you? What’s going to happen? Well, just like the Google ad verification, the account verification process, you actually can contact Google support and you can actually opt-out of this if you click on the terms themselves, it specifically has a section around HIPAA disclaimer, and it reads like this, unless otherwise specified in writing by Google, Google does not intend use of the communication features to create obligations under the health insurance portability and accountability act as amended and makes no representation of the communication features satisfy HIPAA requirements.
You and any third party that is advertising on your behalf are so for applicable compliance with HIPAA. So what does that mean? That means you have the ability to actually opt-out and tell Google Hey, we do not want you to do any call recording on our account. What is the concern? The concern and the [00:05:00] reason why I had to publish this podcast episode immediately, we modified our publishing schedule in order to get this out.
If you have an agency or a third party that is managing your Google ads on your behalf, they likely will receive this notification of change of terms and just accept it without understanding what they are accepting that will be opting you into this. And then again, we’ll be creating additional compliance issues and concerns for your organization.
So we’re going to have a variety of links that we’re going to share in the call notes or in the show notes for today’s episode. And what you need to do is if you have a third party managing your Google ads, number one. See if they’ve received a notification and opted into anything within your account, but number two, send them this episode, have them listen to it, and make sure that they are not accidentally opting you into this and creating additional compliance consideration.
Again, these are at the account level. So for example, heavy and hot, we have [00:06:00] hundreds of accounts that we manage. Every single one of them has begun to receive this notification. We received two yesterday. And so, again, just like account verification, it’s going to be a slow roll. You may receive 80 tomorrow, who knows but you need to know about this and make sure that you are not accidentally opting into it.
As always, this should be a great reminder that if you are not working with a healthcare-specific marketing agency to manage your media strategy, this is a great reminder that maybe it’s time to start shopping around. This is a kind of situation where somebody could accidentally opt into something without realizing the potential implications to your organization.
So just a little pitch to wrap up this episode. If you’re currently working with an agency that has not yet brought this to your attention, or perhaps even accidentally already accepted the new terms without realizing what they were doing, call me. You can shoot me an email, at jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
I’d be happy to chat with you about our [00:07:00] media and marketing services. But otherwise please share this episode with anybody who’s managing it, whether it’s an internal team or a third-party team, and make sure you don’t accidentally accept these new click-to-call terms. With that, I will wrap up today’s episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, please like, and subscribe. We really appreciate all of our followers across all of the various podcasting platforms. And I will be with you again next Friday for a new episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
Jenny is joined by Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Paid Media, Miranda Ochsner, to break down the top paid media trends for 2025. They discuss insights from the 2024 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report, including why 72% of marketers plan to boost their ad budgets despite economic uncertainty and the importance of balancing performance marketing with long-term brand building. TikTok’s growing role in healthcare marketing and its impact on cross-platform ad strategies also takes center stage.
They also share some reminders when it comes to remarketing and retargeting strategies including the shift away from website pixel-based retargeting, as well as Meta’s restrictions on healthcare advertising and Google’s new AI-driven bidding tools.
Connect with Miranda:
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandamochsner/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 the host and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we’re very proud to be the producers of this podcast.
Today, I am joined by our very own director of paid media, Miranda Ochsner, and we’re going to be talking about some of the paid media trends that are happening in healthcare right now, especially as we’re going into 2025. There’s a lot of moving pieces, new platforms, and lots of changes to existing platforms.
So let’s jump right in. Miranda, to get started, I know that Nielsen released their annual marketing report on the 2024 report. I’d love if you could walk through some of the key insights and trends that Nielsen shared.
Miranda: So, every year, Nielsen releases these reports at the end of the year, just kind of what they’ve [00:01:00] seen over the course of this past year.
But as we’re looking into the future, and it really, helps paid media teams just truly understand what to kind of look out for, especially in our very fragmented media landscape things to your point are constantly changing. So we, you know, we want to make sure we’re staying abreast of all of the topics.
So, there were 4 key insights that we really pulled from that. Really the 1st 1 being an increase in spending. I know there’s been. Some pullback over the last couple of years on paid media budgets and how we’re dispersing those funds and whatnot. But based on this report, about 70, a little over 70 percent of marketers are planning to increase their budgets and a majority of that really being prioritized in digital channels specifically social, but also the retail media network space just from an effectiveness standpoint, really maximizing.
All levels of the funnel with that, whether you’re in the awareness, you’re in that interest phase, or if you’re in the conversion phase speaking of conversion, the 2nd key insight was really focused around performance marketing versus brand building. You [00:02:00] know, we, as marketers always want to aim for that holistic ROI.
But many have been prioritizing those short-term performances which, you know, really leaves this opportunity and potentially miss, you know, this is for brands to do those brand building initiatives. So we really need to make sure we’re focusing on both in that full funnel because we don’t want to risk that.
Really don’t want to risk that long-term brand equity that brands take so long to build up, right? We can’t, we don’t want to, we don’t want to miss those opportunities. And third, the insight we found was just some media strategy challenges. To your point, the channels are constantly changing, targeting, especially in healthcare. You know, the healthcare space, we’re really having to find this balance of traditional and digital media, but we need to truly understand that optimal reach.
What should we, you know, what should we be under investing in and really truly understanding what that balance is. And that all [00:03:00] comes down to audiences and goals and how we’re measuring them across the board. Which leads into the fact that fit, or excuse me, the fourth insight measurement gaps, you know, there are a ton of tools out there.
And marketers really aren’t utilizing tools that are evaluating both traditional and digital channels at the same time. It’s very siloed of looking at the traditional very upper funnel, but knowing that they can trickle down into that lower funnel. And same on the, you know, on the digital side, really focusing on the more bottom-funnel.
And that’s really missing holistic insights. And, you know, when you’re looking at these effective media campaigns and strategies. Especially around messaging and channel placement. You want to make sure you’re looking at everything holistically and how everything is affecting one another.
Jenny: Yeah, I will say those last two points. I feel we saw really strongly with a lot of our new clients coming over from working with other agencies. Over-reliance on digital and not really having a strong traditional. Media strategy in place, which at heady and hop, we do both traditional and [00:04:00] digital. So we’re able to really provide that holistic strategy for them.
And then the lack of measurements and effective reporting is still something we’re seeing every single day. Folks just aren’t really receiving those comprehensive ROI reports to understand what impact their media is having on them.
Miranda: Right. And with those reports, Jenny, you really, you don’t want to just do a data dump. You want to provide some actionable insights and recommendations of what we’re seeing. Because, you know, paid is only one piece of the puzzle, right? There’s it can affect very many different things, right? So we want to make sure that we’re using those advanced analytics, but also Continuing forward with a diverse media mix and not just relying so heavy in one channel or the other.
Jenny: Yep, absolutely. The next topic I would love to talk about is TikTok. So, a lot of our clients and just in general, we, you know, we were at SHSMD and HCIC and we were just lots of chatter around folks beginning to use TikTok through the lens [00:05:00] of course, organic, you know, content creation and posting, but really starting to start looking at the paid opportunities within TikTok.
So I’d love if you could chat a little bit about the platform in general, and then also about their new partnership with Nielsen to enhance the cross-media ad tracking capabilities.
Miranda: Yeah. So, you know, TikTok is still relatively new in this, the social space, if you want to call it that that they, you know, they are listening to they are listening to the folks that are utilizing their platform, whether they’re just scrolling for hours, engaging with content or from the paid advertising side of it, you know, depending on kind of what video you want to put out there.
And you know, you have the option to have a six-second video. You have the option to have a three-minute video. You have the option to have a 10-minute video. So it’s really kind of dependent on from an organic as well as paid, what kind of campaign you’re going after and what kind of audience you’re going after.
Really love the adaptability of the platform as it continues to grow. [00:06:00] Now there are still some limitations specifically around targeting, especially in the healthcare space. But. You know, just there’s the overall privacy concern with TikTok as well as there’s still a new platform and trying to figure out those balances to remain compliant and whatnot.
So, specific and, you know, specific and healthcare you know, TikTok does have a role in health education you know, that the hashtag healthtalk is a big one. I know that there’s hundreds of millions, if not billions of views with that hashtag in place you know, so TikTok, you know, TikTok does trust influencers over medical professionals a little bit more, but, you know, that opens up that misinformation and we really want to be mindful of that if you are a brand that wants to move forward within the TikTok platform you know, healthcare providers, so HCPs in their specialties, as well as pharmaceutical companies, are really leveraging TikTok because TikTok Thinking of it potentially a little bit more, a little bit more upper funnel with that, just from the standpoint of educating and engaging audiences you know, [00:07:00] they’re making leaps, you know, they’re making giant leaps and how they do this targeting and whatnot, but from a healthcare standpoint and from a literacy standpoint in healthcare, we have to be really careful about the management to make sure it is that reliable information.
So there’s still this kind of a balance of, you know, yeah, TikTok’s a great platform, especially for millennial and Gen Z audiences but also understanding to have a trusted professional and make sure that we’re not pushing out misinformation.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And A couple of just general things.
I feel like we have to acknowledge TikTok is still facing a potential ban in the United States in January. Everything that I have read basically indicates that it won’t be an overnight shutdown. But in general, our advice to clients has been. To really leverage more bottom-funnel tactics before you begin spending money on TikTok.
So TikTok definitely can have a place in a strategy, but you need to make sure that you’re really capturing folks who are looking actively, you know, for [00:08:00] the services, the procedures your specialty and the areas that you provide before we start, you know, digging into TikTok. And really also, we generally recommend that you need to have a strong content marketing strategy in place holistically, and then paid on TikTok can support that versus just moving forward with TikTok ads.
Miranda: Right. And with TikTok you know, from what we’re seeing, audiences don’t want to see an overproduced message. They want it to feel very, organic and just very natural, just not so overproduced, which is very different than what we see on CTV and Linear and whatnot. So truly understand that platform and those nuances.
I would recommend before any kind of investment in TikTok, really having a clear content plan in place because it’s not just one video you have to put out there. It’s multiple different videos because with how consumers are consuming media, especially in TikTok and engaging with it, they want fresh messaging all of the time, which then goes into production.
So it has a, you know, it has a trickling effect when it comes to those ad budgets.
Jenny: Absolutely. [00:09:00] I’d love to move now to Google. So Google is constantly evolving, constantly rolling out new products to be able to get all of us to spend more. I saw that for the first time their search share of search ads is going to be dipping.
I think it was below 50%. And let me pull this article up real quick. I want to make sure that I am referencing it correctly. But it’s really going to be dropping. So what they’re actively trying to do is yep. So, let’s see, it was AdWeek launched an article and they said that Google is going to be dipping below 50 percent as far as their share of the search advertising market in the US by 2025 for the first time in a decade.
So they’re kind of in hustle mode, right? Like, what can we do to innovate? What can we do to kind of get some of that market share back? I think it’s interesting. Some of their AI-powered results are beginning to compete with their search results. So the innovation they’re doing for consumers is also [00:10:00] hurting them on the search side, because they’re actually providing zero-click content.
So you can get that information without clicking through to the person’s website who provided that content. So one of the things that they announced was an AI power tool called search bidding exploration as part of its smart bidding suite. And I’d love for you to tell us a little more about what we know about that so far.
Miranda: Sure. So it’s still, you know, it’s still in the testing phase, but you know, it’s interesting. AI is just really you never know what you’re going to get with all of these new AI tools coming in. So, with this specific tool, it’s part of their bidding suite, their smart bidding suite. So it’s, this is really designed to help those larger advertisers optimize campaigns towards TROAS.
So, obviously our return on ad spend, but specifically, there’s this new phrase with the T in front of it. So that’s adding the target return on ad spend as well as those broad match keywords. So, you know, the tool will identify low traffic yet very [00:11:00] valuable search queries and then it adjusts that target row as anywhere 10%.
And then it just kind of expands that reach beyond those traditional search terms. So it’s opening an opportunity of things. You know, we potentially missed in a stride. Your agencies have potentially missed whether it’s content strategy, keywords social listing, are there certain things that folks are talking about that we might not have in messaging, just really, truly understanding how it gives that opportunity to expand what’s currently being searched for.
Jenny: Yeah, and this is a trend that we’ve seen not only with our clients but then also we heard lots of buzz about it at SHSMD and HCIC is agencies seeing traffic volumes changing for their search campaigns. So, for example, those bigger, broader buckets that are more educational and more upper funnel, less traffic coming in there because folks don’t have to click through to understand what a knee replacement surgery is.
Miranda: It’s right there in front of them.
Jenny: And so, I think this is a great [00:12:00] reminder for folks that as they’re thinking about their strategy for 2025, really make sure that you’re beginning to incorporate some AIO so an I optimization and old kind of thing and SEO that an I O and your overall strategy to really compliment that media strategy because, as we all know, everything works in cohesion together.
Miranda: Yeah, it’s just not a set it and forget it anymore. You constantly have to be shifting and pivoting to see kind of what your consumers and whatnot are really going to get, you know, going for when they’re doing their searches what they’re sharing what they’re engaging with.
There are some concerns with this. You know, it’s just it’s restricted to advertisers with very large budgets. So if you have a 5,000 or 10,000 a month budget, this might not be an option for you. But this is definitely some of those bigger ones. Those bigger ad spends as well as the concern just around transparency.
As well as those very granular insights. To your point, folks are seeing performance dip, which goes into that larger concern [00:13:00] of like, how can we optimize? How can we do X, Y and Z? So really what is that balance as we implement this tool?
Jenny: Absolutely. I’m going, I’m saving our favorite. For last, the one that everybody’s freaking out about—Meta.
But I have one other topic that I want to throw into the mix and that’s retargeting. And I’ve talked about retargeting and through the lens of privacy, but for folks that have been ignoring those podcasts because they don’t want to think about privacy, I’m going to mix it into this media conversation.
So you’re going to hear it a general reminder that you can no longer do retargeting or remarketing based off of your website visitors. So we can do in platform retargeting. If somebody has engaged with your ad within Google, you can retarget them in Google or within Facebook. You could retarget them using Facebook’s own targeting platforms or targeting capabilities, but you can no longer put pixels on your website to target them if they visited your site and did not convert.
Miranda: Yes, just remarketing hurts a little bit, but you know, just stay compliant. It’s what you have [00:14:00] to do.
Jenny: Yeah, exactly. So if you’re still doing retargeting or remarketing, you need to cut it out. Stop uploading lists, stop using retargeting pixels. If you’re in healthcare, general reminder. Yeah, now I’d love to end talking about some shifts that we have seen with Meta.
They’re constantly changing. They were one of the main reasons all of this, all of the class action lawsuits happened around pixels and folks being accused of sharing data through the lens of considerations to the sharing user data with Facebook and in return for receiving conversion information, lots of podcasts on that.
But made an announcement that they are going to be really restricting a lot of data specifically for healthcare organizations starting in January. 2025. Now we are really excited about this because our clients aren’t really going to be affected based off the way that we set up campaigns. I’d love if you could give a general overview of what the announcement was and then why our [00:15:00] clients don’t really have anything to worry about.
Miranda: Yeah. So Meta, you know, I believe that came out about two weeks ago, a week and a half ago. It’s still very fresh. And I think to your point, folks are like, What are we doing? What is going on? What do we need to shift and whatnot? You know, so these, I believe these restrictions are going to start January 2025.
So 3 weeks. So it’s coming quick. These you know, these changes are really going to include the data sharing for specific. Healthcare related websites and apps. So, fully restricted properties like condition-specific sites will lose access to conversion campaigns. Mid restricted properties, you know, are really facing limited optimization for those lower funnel activities.
So really anything that is mid low to low. we, you know, recommend rethinking. Like, how are we going to utilize Meta within our strategy? Because it really needs to be a little bit more. It doesn’t need to be. It has to be a more upper funnel. You know, really [00:16:00] recommending as we move into 2025, those healthcare advertisers.
Whether it’s the agency you work with, whether you’re in-house, whatever that looks like, really advise to audit those data sources. You know, we want to make sure that we’re doing our checks and balances to make sure there are no pixels in place, none of, you know, nothing of that lives on the site to remain compliant and really adapting those strategies to focus on those private, you know, those privacy-friendly methods.
Jenny: Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the changes we made. What a year ago, the way that we set up campaigns with Meta and why we’re pretty confident that our clients in a great place going into 2025.
Miranda: Yeah. So we, you know, you never know what you’re going to get thrown with some of these platforms.
So, you know, Hedy & Hopp really took a proactive way of approaching how we’re utilizing Metta, both Facebook and Instagram in our strategies. And it is really focused on those upper funnel engagement metrics versus the lower funnel. We’re really [00:17:00] thinking awareness, really thinking engagement when we are utilizing those placements.
So making sure we’re tracking those metrics properly while completely having nothing to do with pixel placements on the website and whatnot. And if we see those through our audits, we’re raising the flag of like, nope, we don’t recommend using this. We’re going to shift our focus here and really outline those as we go through the media strategy as we’re walking through benchmarks, whether it is more a very upper CTR metric, whether it’s a video view, or if it’s just some kind of engagement within the ad itself.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the things they specifically call out is you can no longer do audience creations for retargeting or lookalike audiences. Thank goodness we’ve been reaching this for so long. Like we shouldn’t be doing this in healthcare friends. Right? So I think the general summary is if you’re using meta and you haven’t really thought about how you’re using it, how you’re tracking conversions, and you’ve kind of been on autopilot now is the time that you need to really take a good look at [00:18:00] your campaigns, the structure, how you’re tracking conversions the kinds of functionality that Facebook offers that you are or are not using to really make sure that you’re going to be in a good place.
Miranda: They’re either going to shut your campaigns down or not let you set them up at all. So it’s better to be proactive. But I know we’re three weeks out till the new year, but really start thinking through that, you know, immediately as these are part of larger, you know, strategy conversations that are starting in January.
Jenny: And even thinking about worst case scenario, if you need to turn meta off or plan on massively restricted spending for the first month or two as you really clean everything up in your account and set to get into a good place. It’s better to be proactive and know that you’re likely going to see massively reduced volume in Meta, you know, then be midway through the month and start looking at reports and, you know, then be just like, what is going on?
Miranda: You know? Let’s be four steps ahead and not six behind.
Jenny: Exactly. Exactly. Well, Miranda, thank you for coming [00:19:00] on today. I think it has been every year in healthcare. 1 of our core values that Hedy & Hopp is pivot with positivity because we’re constantly thrown new things, which all of us find really fun.
It’s fun to find ways to continuously allow our clients to evolve effectively reach folks that need that care. And help them, you know, find the resources that they need to be able to schedule that appointment. So thank you for coming on today to be able to provide a summary of what folks can expect as far as 2025 media strategies for listeners.
If you are kind of unsure. The things you heard today are new to you. Your internal team hasn’t been talking about them. Your agency hasn’t been proactively bringing them to you. Give us a call. Our media capabilities are one of our strongest within our organization, and we work with providers and payors all across the country to help them reach their acquisition goals.We’d love to chat with you. So with [00:20:00] that, thank you so much for tuning in. In please like, and subscribe this episode, send it future episode ideas my way. If you have any, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this episode, Jenny is joined by Hedy & Hopp’s Account Manager, Shelby Auer, and Marketing Manager, Taylor Fedderke, to recap their time at HCIC24 in Austin. With its walkable venue downtown and amazing food, the conference provided a great setting to reconnect with peers and explore the latest industry trends.
They dive into key themes from the event, including the growing role of AI, how SEO continues to be a game-changer, and fresh approaches to reputation management. They also discuss how organizations are using data to improve provider finders, enhance consumer engagement, and streamline digital strategies, as well as the importance of building authentic brands and maximizing social media with AI tools.
Connect with Shelby: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-wanne/
Connect with Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorfedderke/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
HCIC24 Speakers Mentioned:
•Mike Canonig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcanonigo/
•Jamie Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-ryan-mha-79690521/
•Angela Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angie-taylor-34ab3a173/
•Amy Muehlbauer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-muehlbauer/
•Elizabeth McGonigal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-mcgonigal-999bb739/
•Elise Horst: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elise-kogelnik/
•Emily Mangini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-mangini/
•Nolan Perry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolanjperry/
•Amy Stevens: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydickesonstevens/
•Ryan Donahue: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandonohue/
•Max Freund: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-freund-b4231a2a/
•Adriane Bradberry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianebradberry/
•Chloe A. Politis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloepolitis/
•David A. Feinberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-feinberg-57746a5/
•Sebastien Leon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienleon2/
•Carla Rivera: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-rivera/
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 the CEO of Hedy & Hopp, which is a full-service marketing agency that specializes in the healthcare space. We are your hosts for this podcast. I am very excited to have with me today, Taylor Fedderke and Shelby Auer, two teammates of mine at Hedy & Hopp.
We just got back last night from HCIC, which is the Healthcare Internet Conference for 2024. It was in Austin this year, and we wanted to hop on this morning and record a fun little recap for those of you who were perhaps unable to attend, usually attend in the past, or perhaps you’re thinking and wondering what HCIC is all about.
And should I attend in the future? So that’s the purpose of today’s show. Good morning, ladies. Welcome. So we’re going to break today’s podcast down into [00:01:00] 3 distinct areas. The 1st is going to be our experience. So, the H&H team, what did we experience going to a couple of key callouts of things that perhaps are different from other events, et cetera?
We’re going to talk about key themes. That we saw, and then we’re going to do a few session callouts. So if you were unable to attend and you want to kind of understand what were the topical themes, what were the educational themes and what was kind of hip from a session perspective we’re going to cover a handful of those.
So I will actually kick us off. I’d love to chat a little bit about our experience. As all of our regular listeners know, last month, we were at SHSMD. Which was another fabulous conference. If you only had to pick two a year to go to those right now are our two favorites and have been going for quite some time.
But HCIC, there were a couple of interesting things. I have 2 in particular that I want to call out. I think the location and venue for this event were fabulous. It was in downtown [00:02:00] Austin at the JW Marriott. So walkable. It was right on 2nd. At the end of every day, or even if there was like a couple of hour break, we constantly saw people rushing downstairs to try to get outside and go for a walk, and we did the same thing.
It was fabulous. And it was also really awesome because you could in the evening if you wanted to kind of network with other folks, just walk up and down second, and you would run into a handful of people kind of at every other restaurant. So it was very easy to do networking outside of the conference-sponsored events.
So kudos to the event organizers for that. And then I am a food-driven human. I know this about myself. If you ever want a good meeting with Jenny, just bring good snacks. But the conference had fabulous food. One morning there was a Belgian waffle bar friends, a Belgian waffle bar at a conference. I was blown away.
So I know all of us kept just looking at each other and laughing when we saw the food, like what this is phenomenal. So I [00:03:00] just have to give a shout-out to the sponsors. I know I’ve hosted many events. I know how exciting it is to be able to offer food of that caliber. So they really were showing up and trying to use it as a differentiator.
So I know we don’t go for the food, but it absolutely was the icing on the cake.
Taylor: Yeah. Completely agree with you there, Jenny. Some other callouts too. So we had our privacy session with Jenifer Warrell with Quartz Health Benefits. And then of course Jenny as well. And so this was kind of the updated what’s going on in all things, privacy, FTC, state laws, everything like that.
Great session. And it was really fun to talk to people afterward that had been to the 2023 version last year and kind of get their thoughts on, you know, what they’ve been working on and then them coming back this year and wanting to kind of hear about, okay, what’s changed.
They’re really trying to educate themselves. And so it’s a really great conversation after the session. I think all three of us said so that was really another fun little experience we had there too.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a great point. I [00:04:00] think it was kind of interesting to me. Two things. First of all, the number of systems and providers that still haven’t really done much that had a lot of tactical questions, which, hey, we’re here for this.
Like we are here to be your friends and hold your hands through the process. Do we get it? But the other thing that kind of shocked masterclass was that they still didn’t know what the heck was going on. So another shout-out, like another clarifying point. If you’re working with an agency or a website vendor, you need to be asking them some hard questions because the number of folks that came up after our session, and then at our booth that were asking very basic tactical questions, cause they just still didn’t get it was really high.
It really, honestly, was that kind of concerning for me, for providers that maybe don’t know, and they just assume their partner has it covered. So, time to start asking some hard questions, friends.
Taylor: Yeah.
Jenny: So let’s pivot and talk a little bit about the themes. So at each event, I think you can kind of see a little bit of trends and themes like topical [00:05:00] shifts folks are happening.
I have one I’d like to start with the number of people who came up to me and said, this was the first conference they have attended post-COVID was staggering. I mean, we have, we jumped back in, in 2020. Let’s see 432 2022 was when we started doing in-person conferences again. So for me, it’s old hat, right?
Like I’m back at it, whatever. A lot of organizations are just now kind of getting their feet under them and comfortable doing that. So I’m really excited to see what 2025 is. I think it’s just going to continue building on that momentum of comfortability of being back in person.
Shelby: Definitely. And though people are still discussing AI, of course, and privacy, those were two key kinds of themes across the board still, but there were a couple of additional focuses that we saw across the board.
Reputation management, what you’re doing with your Google reviews. How are you handling that information and how could you really [00:06:00] use it to your advantage and SEO kind of going back to those fundamentals that I think we’ve. Maybe shifted the past couple of years, focusing on what’s going on with privacy AI.
We need to be on top of this technology. Understand what’s going on. There was a lot of great conversation about just very specific tactical strategies around SEO content strategy across the board.
Jenny: Completely agree, Shelby. I think we’re going to talk about it. I have a couple of sessions that I want to call out.
They’re exactly in that vein, meaning people are getting back to the fundamentals for content strategy and media optimize it like all of these areas. Kind of the shiny object syndrome, we saw a little bit of it at this conference, but a lot of it was like back to basics friends, like, let’s not think that we’re so advanced because first of all, in healthcare, we know we’re not as an overall industry, right?
Because of a variety of things we won’t get into today. But it very much was proudly saying [00:07:00] like, hey, let’s talk about content strategies again, right? Here’s some tips and tricks. And it was very well done. So on that note, let’s talk about key session callouts. One that I would love to highlight was a session specifically about provider finders.
So we’re talking about getting back to basics, right? Like one on one help. Patients find a provider on your website and help them schedule an appointment and the session that I want to call out. There are quite a few on this topic actually. But the 1 I want to call out was a new front door, exploring the next-generation provider finder.
And there were 3 providers that presented. Mike Canonigo with Advocate Health, Jamie Ryan was Scripps Health, and Angela Taylor with Atrium Health. And while this was like a low-key marketing play by Sparkle, cause all three of the providers were highlighting the Sparkle platform, right? It was actually extremely well done.
It did not feel like a sales pitch for Sparkle for most of the presentation [00:08:00] and what these three. Presenters did is they really talked about what the data is telling them about how to provide or how patients actually want to find a provider. So, for example, I think it was Jamie’s talk specifically about really highlighting what insurance folks, expect and really having that be a top-level search functionality, which I thought was really important.
And then they also talked about the ability on the back end and the importance of really creating your own best match algorithm and really making sure. Hey, what is the data saying people are actually selecting or using? Like, are they really filtering the data? By gender for a provider, or are they really only focused on insurance like insurance is stable table stakes, right?
Nobody’s going to select somebody that doesn’t have their insurance, but like, how are they interacting with that and the ability and the thought process of really only showing people that have available appointments 1st? And really maximizing the patient experience. So this was one [00:09:00] of those, like back to basics, let’s get the fundamentals, right?
And really think about how users want to find a provider and make sure that our experience matches that. So kudos to the three of them for a very well-done presentation.
Taylor: Yeah. And I have another session that again kind of ties into that consumer journey. This one in particular, the title of it was Enhancing the Consumer Journey with a Data-Driven Digital Content Strategy.
This is with Amy Muehlbauer with Advocate Health. Really kind of just talking about where they’ve gone in terms of creating this full content strategy. One 14 Google searches are now health-related. I mean, if you think about it all the Google searches that are taking place on a daily basis, like millions, billions, so many out there thinking how they all are related.
Knowing a lot of them are related to health. I just, it’s a huge piece of that. And so with that, they really talked about how they want to capture this opportunity with consumer data research. And so kind of that’s the foundation piece for their web content, SEO, content, marketing [00:10:00] efforts. And another kind of tidbit they through, and I really enjoy that they mentioned this and talk about this a lot, I guess, within their organization is that, you know, SEO needs to be a main ingredient, not just sprinkles on top of a cupcake.
And it’s so true to kind of think about that as you’re going through these you know, taking the opportunity to revisit content, all these pieces, making sure that’s at the forefront.
And I think Shelby was in this session as well. And I think you found this one pretty interesting too.
Shelby: Yeah. No, they did a wonderful job really walking through the details of what they’ve done to build their content strategy. I mean, getting down to talking about this kind of content hub approach to all of their service-specific pages and using the most asked questions about those specific.
Services or conditions to build out separate sub-pages that answer those questions specifically. They also are utilizing posts on Google business profiles as a [00:11:00] key way to boost impressions and page clicks, and it’s not. something you have to pay for, but it does look like an ad. So they really talked about being able to make sure that you’re utilizing all of those different options within the Google My Business profile and to advocate for making sure that, hey, we want to put efforts into SEO, but oftentimes leadership is like, okay, well, what is that really getting us?
They calculated how much it would have cost them. Through paid search efforts to boost their rankings like they have done with some of this SEO work which I think is a super key detail that any of us can take away when talking about how do we make sure that this is prioritized as an organization.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. ROI can be really difficult to calculate in some situations. So I think that lens of like what would have paid search costs to do the same thing is a great way to kind of show the value. So a cool call out. One that I’d love to highlight [00:12:00] was An AI session. I sat through many AI sessions.
The 1 that I thought was the most interesting was artificial intelligence and action leveraging AI for enhanced patient engagement. And the reason why I think this 1 was the most interesting to me is the number of people I saw scribbling down notes. So for me, if I’m in a session and I’m like, oh yeah, we do all of this stuff at heady and hot, right?
Like maybe I personally am not writing things down because I feel like our organization is pretty great in that area. Instead, what did I do I look around and I say, what’s that? How is everybody else responding to this? There was a lot of note-taking. So, I will say kudos to Liz McGonigal with Penn Medicine and Elise Horst with Fathom.
They did a great job really highlighting actionable ways that you can take specifically large data sets and use AI to be able to identify trends. So again, it’s not using AI to write content for you, which was the big theme of the no throughout the entire [00:13:00] session. But it was really. Using AI to do a lot of data calculation, and identify abnormalities with your campaigns.
And there was a tool that they called out. It’s actually called Akio, which we had never used at Hedy & Hopp. We actually use a variety of other platforms. And I looked it up and it actually looks like it is a tool specifically for agencies. So I’m not totally sure. I haven’t played with it yet to see how much value it would have for a provider in an in-house team.
But I will say that is one that we’re planning on checking out to see if it has any functionality that’s better than all of the other AI tools we’re currently using. So good job.
Taylor: Yeah. And I had another session here to kind of tie it back to what Shelby had mentioned at the start of this podcast episode about Google reviews being a bit of a hot topic and just like kind of that reputation management piece.
And so the title of the session was How to Request Reviews: The Importance of Google Reviews and Why You Should Ask for Them. Presenting this session was Emily Mangini and [00:14:00] Nolan Perry with Sutter Health and they’ve really implemented and have a strategy at their organization of finding ways, you know, to really build a really robust reputation management plan here.
And so with that, they kind of walked through their experience with implementing this and really growing that and kind of seeing the fruits of their labor. And one thing they had mentioned here too, just again, kind of at the beginning of the session was that of the 200 plus factors, Google considers reviews to rank number three which again ties into kind of that SEO piece.
So all these things are kind of tying into each other. And with that too, kind of talking about, for example, you know, a lot of time with these organizations looking at Google Maps, people trying to find that local care maybe for urgent care as one, they kind of threw out as an example and really where they did some testing with gathering reviews and kind of seeing how that would help with you know, getting them higher up on that map in terms of kind of that review placement there.
But for that, if you think about the map breakdown, there are really only 3 things that are showing us. People are kind of poking around and looking at maps and looking for where they’re going to go. And so [00:15:00] that’s the name of the organization and then also how many reviews they have shown up there too, along with that placement on the map.
And so, you know, Just showing the importance of reviews, which we’re all very aware of at this point, but I think just kind of reminding us of that. And then they kind of walked us through again, how they kind of implemented this in their process through that. But as a whole, I think it was a really great session to kind of just again, remind everybody and then also kind of put some next steps out there in terms of.
Working with your teams, making sure, for example, your responses are you’ve spoken with legal to make sure those responses make sense. And so this can be very different depending on the organization and how they want to tackle that piece. But as a whole, just making sure that you’re, you know, it can really help boost your brand and provide that visibility.
And again, just ties into the reputation of your brand there too. So it was a great session overall.
Shelby: Really interesting and piggybacking off of that, a session that I sat in on was called Consumers as Allies: Utilizing Market Feedback as a Strategic Tool [00:16:00], and Amy Stevens over at Tidelands Health presented with Ryan Donahue with NRC Health.
We work with a lot of organizations that partner with NRC and this specific session really dove into Tidelands Health and how they are. In an area that has grown exponentially over the last few years and how hard that can be to scale your internal processes to be able to keep up with all of that change their local population has become incredibly diverse in comparison to where it was a few years ago.
And they had been inundated with phone calls that they were not built to be able to answer. So they started getting reviews all over the place. I can’t even talk to anybody. Nobody will answer my calls. And instead of you know, there probably was a little panic, [00:17:00] but instead of just leaning into the panic, they really took that as an opportunity to kind of rebuild their internal processes.
They audited every phone tree across their health system to be able to streamline that process. And I know I’ve had conversations with clients of mine that want to start that process. But they kind of started there and then ended up really implementing larger changes, like creating a better patient and family advisory council that was virtual and allowed them to capture more of their growing diverse market than what they had previously.
And I just wanted to shout out Amy and her team because convenience ease coordination and availability were all places they were not ranking well. And those ratings moved from worst in their market to first in their market.
Jenny: Wow.
Shelby: Went through all of these changes. They developed [00:18:00] an app. I mean, again, they really took that feedback as The catalyst to let’s look at our strategic plan.
What can we modify and change to really make sure that we are taking this feedback and even going beyond what we need to do to make the experience better?
Jenny: Yeah, that’s phenomenal. What amazing results for something that feels so tactical, right? But truely has a huge impact. This is another example of going back to the basics and not focusing on the shiny objects.
Let’s make sure the basics are right first. So, one that I would love, and we just have a couple more or a few more sessions but one that I would love to call out was again, back to the basics. So it was a session called Integrating Clinical Content Strategy with Website Design Through a Repeatable Process.
And it was Max Freund with the University of Iowa Health Care and Adriane Bradberry with Unlock and Max did a really great job talking about their organization’s focus on clinical content on their website, what they do, and what [00:19:00] they don’t do. So he shared about 8 percent of the pages on their website are clinical content.
And at first, the crowd was oh, that’s a small percentage. And then he sat back and said, is it like, we don’t want to be top line or people are doing symptom checks, right? A lot of organizations focus really heavily, too high in the funnel, or people across the country or even the world may come to your website because they’re doing high-level research on like, what is type two diabetes?
Right. You’re not going to be the definitive source for what is type 2 diabetes, but you may end up being a great source locally for folks to come in to understand what are the treatment options. What are the different options that they have? So it was really a reframing of how to think about clinical content.
And a great point was the emergence of AI in Google search results, a lot of that super top of [00:20:00] the funnel content is going to be served up in search results as that top AI answer, right? So if you’re going to be spending a lot of energy to build out content, to get people to your site, you have to be a lot more thoughtful about the way that you’re tackling content and where you’re spending your energy.
I can speak to this personally with some content strategies we’ve done for clients going in and looking at. Oh, my gosh, this content piece has gone, you know, viral, which in health care, like viral, it’s thousands of visitors, right? Are visiting this, but then you look at the geography when people are coming in from around the world, and you’re like, they’re never going to come in for an appointment.
So what’s the value of that? And so stepping back and really forcing yourself to have discipline. And the kinds of content are helpful. They specifically shared an 8-step process to incorporate clinical content, and they actually went and talked to subject matter experts or identified me as that clinical expert multiple times in the process.
So, getting with them early and often, and then having them [00:21:00] review it. So he had a very detailed explanation around. creating templates and approval processes and making sure it’s signed off on. And that has allowed his team to be able to get really nitty gritty with the level of clinical information they have and ensure the level of accuracy is there without you know, having to have marketers that can create that level of technical content because if SMEs are involved and they are the ones that can do that.
So, kudos to Max. You did an awesome job on that session.
Shelby: Amazing. Now, when it comes to content and what some of these organizations are doing what I thought was really unique in the space, was David and Chloe over at Mount Sinai Health System shared a session that was titled The Social CEO, and I work and talk to a lot of people in the space who, you know, their leadership, their higher executive leadership want to be involved with marketing, especially when they’re new to a system. [00:22:00]
And I mean, that’s huge for the local community. And so David and Chloe and their team ended up partnering with their new CEO to build a social media strategy for him to be able to push out content to the community. Re-share things that the health system is sharing out on their socials to be able to really kind of grow eyes on their content, but such a special session.
And this is kind of new for them. This is their 1st year doing this. So I’m excited to hopefully hear a follow-up session in the future about how that potential potentially extends beyond just their CEOs. Social profiles, but they really walked through that process of creating manageable workflows between their social team and the CEO.
But I think this is such a great way if you have leadership who want to be involved, but you know, putting their face on a print ad or a billboard might not make the most sense to really [00:23:00] connect with the community. I think doing a strategy like this, that’s more personal on social media would be a great way forward for a lot of systems.
Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And to tie in with that to the content side of things, I had one last session that I wanted to make sure to call out. And this was maximizing social media impacts with AI strategies from Broward Health. So with Broward Health, this was a Sebastian Leon and Carla Rivera. And they mentioned several AI platforms that I had not heard of in terms of just what has worked with them or worked for them on the content side of things.
And so a few ones I wanted to just point out call out was what the first one was Jasper. And so they use this one for a variety of things on the content side. But their biggest help for that is the SEO optimization role plays. And so a lot of times they’ll have it they’ll create some type of content.
And then with that, they’ll have it created for multiple channels so they can really push it out and kind of maximize their time there. You know, but they’re still again, creating that content and writing that in the [00:24:00] first place and then allowing it to create all these different forms. So again, just kind of implemented it in terms of workflow to quicken the process there.
Another one, and then this one that was very interesting to me was Devi. They use it to monitor Facebook groups. And for example, one that kind of mentioned was like maternity side of things to see if there’s these buzzwords that people are talking about for these like mother Facebook groups to where people are, you know, sharing experiences and things like that.
So they’re using Devi to kind of monitor that. And then using those buzzwords and their content to kind of pull it in and really relate to them and connect there. And then another fun one too, which is on the video side. So as we know on the content piece, a lot of times it’s hard to, you know, sit down with physicians and get these videos that are really great and engaging with the eye contact piece that a lot of people struggle with.
They, for this, they use a platform called VEED. And so you’ll be looking like, say, if I was recording and I was looking off to the side here they can plug it into VEED and it will have AI go and create it to where eyes are looking directly at the camera, [00:25:00] whether they’re looking at our script or something else.
And so something very new on the video side that I thought was cool. And then lastly, there were a couple of two, just more on the competitor insight side that they dove into Pathmatic and Nielsen. And they just can get really nitty gritty into just all the competitor research. And those were two I hadn’t really heard of.
But with all this, one person had a really great question at the end of the session. It was like, you know, how do you get the chance to try out all these different platforms? Cause I think that is a struggle a lot of times. How do you get the funding for it? And they’re like, think about all these free trials that are out there.
A lot of them. You can get the opportunity to try that out and see if it works for you. See if it’s something that, you know, has been helpful in your content creation process. And so I thought that was really great to think about because I think as a whole, it can be a little overwhelming to be like, how can I get the funding to try out all these new platforms constantly to see what will work for us?
And so I thought that was just really cool on their end to mention what has worked for them there.
Jenny: Yeah, two quick callouts. We clearly have heard of Nielsen, just not specifically the AI capabilities. So, yes. So just for anyone who’s listening, [00:26:00] like, of course, Nielsen. But that’s interesting.
And then the other thing I will just say as a general reminder for AI. Remember privacy, so do not put things in any of these tools that you are not willing to put on a billboard outside. So, within all of these sessions, I sat in on, they all did a really great job reminding folks about that.
So kudos to presenters for keeping privacy top of mind. I think it can be really easy whenever you create an account with a tool to think like, oh, this is a safe space. No, it’s not. So just a general reminder. If you do start doing all these free trials, do keep in mind that you have to be very careful with any information that you upload.
So, thank you for joining us for today’s recap. We had so much fun. We are all, I think, pretty ready to sit and be in silence for a couple of days after all of the conversations and talks that we had. But so much fun. We’re already looking forward to 2025. So for anyone who is interested in learning more about any of these sessions, note that we are [00:27:00] going to put links to all of the people that we mentioned. We will put their LinkedIn links in the show notes. So if you want to reach out and ask them more about their sessions, I’m sure they’d be more than happy to engage with you. Everybody is just so welcome welcoming and willing to be able to share information with others in the industry.
And on that note, thank you for joining us for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We really appreciate and value your time. We would love it if you could like, and subscribe. New episodes drop almost every Friday and we’ll continue to cover topics that we think are helpful for folks in the provider and payor space.
So, with that have a fabulous weekend, thanks for tuning in and we’ll talk to you soon.
In this episode, Jenny Bristow, CEO of Hedy & Hopp, speaks with Drew Hardesty, CEO of Wonder Boy Media, about how AI is transforming video and image editing in healthcare marketing. They explore the innovative ways AI is helping marketers save time, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency in editing tasks.
Episode Highlights:
If you’re a marketer looking to make the most of AI in your editing process, this episode offers information on how to use these tools effectively—without compromising creativity or privacy.
Connect with Drew:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are the proud producers of this weekly podcast. I am so excited today to have Drew Hardesty with me.
He is the CEO and founder at Wonder Boy Media, which is a full service video production company based out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Welcome, Drew.
Drew: Thanks for having me.
Jenny: Yeah, we actually met at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago. We were in what we like to call the quirky corner area, but we had so much fun talking about all things content generation for providers.
And so I invited you on the podcast today to talk about one specific area of topic that we dug into quite a bit, which is the emergence of AI in both photo [00:01:00] and video editing. Mark Brandes, who is the Director of Technology and Analytics at Hedy & Hopp. He and I did a masterclass at SHSMD about AI and the immediate applications that marketers can use in their day to day workflows.
To improve efficiencies consider things from different perspectives, et cetera. And you and I had a really great conversation about how that applies to video and imagery. So to kick the show off today, I think what I’d love to do is have you really explain the difference to listeners about AI art generation versus AI image and video editing and what we’re going to focus on today.
Drew: Okay. Absolutely. So when it comes to art generation these tools like Dolly. Dolly’s the one I use the most, but Canva does it as well. It’s really using a text prompt but being fairly specific and concise with that and having these machines just generate sometimes [00:02:00] perfect art, sometimes a little off, but for the most part, it does a really good job.
So art generation is based on text prompts. Whereas AI and when it comes to editing is based off of, you know, something that’s already been created a video that’s already been shot an image that’s already been shot or captured. And then using that and some of the surrounding aspects of the image to, you know, generative fill or expand or all these things that we’re starting to hear more and more about.
Jenny: Excellent. That is a really great example. And when, and during the class, some of the folks that were participants, we had a fun workshop area and one of the people actually like said, do a dog looking at a laptop, like this really quirky prompt. Right. And like, it’s really cool to see what AI can do as far as creating that imagery through the lines of art, but it is rarely applicable in our day to day lives as marketers in the healthcare space.
So I’m excited to focus more on the AI through the lens of like editing and process improvement. So, let’s start first talking specifically about [00:03:00] photos. I’m going to chat about photos first. Then I’ll chat about the video second. So talk to me a little bit about marketers when they’re thinking about photography or any sort of static image assets, and what sort of applications there are for AI to improve their workflows or editing processes.
Drew: Yeah. So we exclusively use the Adobe suite. So we’ve got, you know, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, all these famous programs people have heard of. Those can have a little bit of a learning curve. And so for those marketers out there who don’t have that experience or don’t have that time to learn these programs, Canva does a great job with it as well.
I’ve taken images into Canva, their background remover is really good. Their duo tone tool, you know, all these different things that you can edit an image that’s already been shot, you know, maybe it’s a headshot of a physician, but it was kind of a weird background.
You want to take that out and put them in front of the hospital. So, you know, Canva does a really good job of removing [00:04:00] backgrounds and things like that where we would get more into kind of the professional realm would be in Adobe and the AI in Adobe is just taking leaps and bounds like every day.
It blows me away how good it is. Their denoiser, we’ve got a camera that, you know, we’ll shoot some pretty good megapixels, but it typically has some noise there. AI denoiser is unreal. Their generative fill. If there’s you know, a space that you want to expand. You know, put something in like a, hey, put a tree here next to this person, you know, they can, it does a really good job of that.
We’ve used it for expansion. So if you needed just a little more headroom on a shot, or if you needed a little more of a wall in the background, their generative fill and generative expand are just light years ahead of things. Most people would have access to you.
Jenny: That is a great summary.
I was reading an article last week, a little bit about Adobe’s AI functionality, and the person said, I tried to create a list of all the things that don’t do, and I literally [00:05:00] couldn’t come up with anything because it’s expanded so much in the last couple of years. That’s really exciting. So one of the examples that I hear over and you spoke on it, is marketers that have to get a physician’s headshot for the directory and they used to drive or send a photographer that they hired a contract or on staff for hours out to a remote, a rural clinic to get a headshot of that physician. And it was a whole day’s contractors expense. And now, like you said, you can literally take just a photo of them that they submit and then generate it into a standardized headshot imagery.
So I think. Just like you said, whenever I’m thinking about ways that marketers can be smart about it, it’s not so much about getting super creative and doing fancy art. It’s more about how can I clean up processes, reduce the noise or the budget, unnecessary budget of travel and whatnot, just to be [00:06:00] smarter with my budget allocation.
Drew: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s where AI is really well used in the workflow process. So if you have an image of a doctor already, and you just want to polish it up, make it look more professional, you know, there are apps out there that will take just the face and then put them on this, you know, Clean looking professional looking headshot, you know, it’s just, it’s more of a workflow thing.
I think then getting to create right now, the creative side of it is a little wonky, but workflow is where it really is powerful.
Jenny: I love that. Let’s transition over to video. Cause I think we’re going to talk about the exact same thing on video, right? It’s not about generative creating it from scratch.
It’s more about being smarter with your workflow. So what are some ways that folks like yourself, your organization, or marketers within organizations that focus on video editing, what are some ways they can look at integrating AI into their video editing processes?
Drew: The biggest thing right now, at least in our world where we are here in Owensboro, we’re starting video podcast [00:07:00] studios.
I’m actually in one now. And so those podcasts, video podcasts could be an hour and a half, it could go Joe Rogan and be three or four hours long. And where AI really helps there is these plugins that have that Adobe has that will take multi camera angles and edit them in minutes. And just the amount of time that would save me as an editor from basically having to rewatch the whole video that I already saw live in person.
Taking that and editing it within minutes is just. A huge time saver. And I think that’s where, as when it comes to video AI is going to, as is really helping us with time saving just helping that workflow speed it up, get projects out the door faster and accurately. And it does a really good job.
Jenny: Yeah. So thinking specifically about this podcast, for example, thinking about like removing pauses, removing ums and other filler words, right. I think it’s really [00:08:00] important to clarify that there’s nothing creative being done with this editing with AI, right? That’s where the human touch is still so important.
So for a podcast, it’s not as big of a deal because we do a straight shoot here, but if you’re doing, for example, a commercial video you know, for your organization, that’s not something that AI can edit. For you, right? Like that still takes, you know, a person like yourself or a member of your team to be creative, right?
Drew: Yeah. That is. And I mentioned that we talked earlier about some posting I had made on LinkedIn, Instagram, and it’s that human touch. That was, you know, what I liked about that post is that it’s so important especially, you know, in healthcare marketing, when we’re trying to focus on storytelling and the human condition.
It takes that human touch to really make something creative and to tug on heartstrings and to connect with people. Whereas AI isn’t quite there yet. It’s still, you know, I’m not out of a job yet, put it that way. I’m not worried about my job. AI has not taken over my job. You know, there’s still a place for that [00:09:00] human touch.
Jenny: I think it’s just probably letting you focus on the more fun parts of your job.
Drew: Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s. Taking over the tedious work and allowing us to be a little more creative.
Jenny: I love it. So if I were an in house marketer and I were thinking about doing either a video or a image job of some kind with an outsourced organization, what are some questions or things I should ask them to understand if they’re using AI effectively?
Cause I would think that probably would mean that from a budget and timing perspective, they’re likely going to be a better partner.
Drew: Absolutely. I mean, Open AI is, you know, free and, you know, you can use Dolly, Chat GPT. I was doing it earlier. I was trying to come up with some tattoo designs of all things.
And it just spits out, you know, 10 designs right then and there. So that’s completely free. Most, I would say marketers probably have a Canva subscription. And if you have the pro version, then, you know, you have their AI tools as well, that are a part of that. Yeah. You know, Adobe, again, we talked about that can get a little more expensive depending on, you know, your, the learning [00:10:00] curve, how much you know about it.
But once, once you have access to those programs, it’s completely free. I think it really just goes back to creativity. When to use something that’s free and when to partner with someone is when you need to be creative and AI is, you know, going to kind of get you halfway there, but that human touch is what’s really going to set it off.
So if you need to be, you know, spitting out graphics on brand for social media posts, I think AI is great for that. They’re going to get the tone, right. As long as you’re prompting, well, they’ll get the tone, the colors, the brand, all the things, right. But when you need to do something really creative and outside of the box, partnering with someone getting that human touch would really help.
Jenny: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. And one last disclaimer as the self proclaimed queen of privacy, I have to remind everyone to not upload anything into any of these AI platforms that is considered private. So if you’re not willing to put it on a billboard, [00:11:00] outside of your office for your competitors to see, or for the general public to see, do not upload it.
That includes anything specific to patients any sort of financials or positioning information about your organization. You just gotta be really smart about that.
Drew: Yeah, that’s a good disclaimer.
Jenny: Absolutely. Well, Drew, thank you so much for being on. For our listeners, Drew’s organization, we’re huge fans of Wonder Boy and all of the work that they’ve done.
I’m going to include a link to his LinkedIn in the show notes. So if you’d like to reach out to him to chat more about his work or his use of AI in this space, I’m sure he’d be happy to chat.
Drew: Absolutely.
Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Please, as my kids would say, like and subscribe, and share us with a colleague who may appreciate this content. We will see you on a future episode.
In this episode, Jenny Bristow, CEO of Hedy & Hopp, is joined by Suzie Schmitt, Senior Digital Producer, to chat about creative solutions for data integration in marketing dashboards. Building on recent discussions about privacy and analytics at industry conferences, they discuss a workaround that enhances the reporting capabilities of data—while staying HIPAA compliant.
Additional Episode Highlights:
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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’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to be the creators and hosts of this podcast. I’m jazzed to be here today with Suzie Schmitt.
She is our Senior Digital Producer here at Hedy & Hopp. And I invited Suzie on because as we’ve covered in recent podcasts, I was at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago talking about privacy and I’m going to be at HCIC in a couple of weeks talking about privacy, and though our agency does so many things beyond privacy we’ve definitely become known as privacy gurus in this space, which is a hat we’re proud to wear.
But the questions keep coming up about workarounds, like even once you get sGTM or some other analytics solution in place, and you’re really comfortable with the way that you’re marketing analytics or your website data is being collected, [00:01:00] used and stored.
What about those third-party tools that you’re using? And so I was having a fun offline conversation with Suzie and I invited her on to talk about a workaround that our team has created that I thought could be interesting to some of our users or some of our listeners today. So, Suzie, I’d love for you to just give us a little bit of the lay of the land.
How did this technology solution, this process even come about?
Suzie: Sure. So we were looking into call tracking options for one of our clients to track campaign performance and we found that CallRail has a great HIPAA-compliant product, but that reporting on it once you leave the CallRail ecosystem can be kind of difficult.
So when we’re trying to tie everything back into all of our marketing efforts to get a holistic picture, we weren’t able to get all of the data we needed just from the out-of-the-box connector. So what we did is we created an API call that [00:02:00] only calls non-sensitive information. So it all gets written to a Google Sheet that has no PII at any time.
So it’s completely clean and kosher from a privacy standpoint. And it runs on a time base every 12 hours and updates our dashboard automatically. And that was a way for the client to get those specific numbers tied to campaigns and tactics into their dashboard where they could see it combined with all of their other tracking metrics.
And we did that through Google Apps Script, which let us connect that API using JavaScript just to a Google Sheet.
Jenny: Excellent. And I love that. And we’ve been long-time recommenders and users of CallRail. Their HIPAA-compliant version is great. And VOCA is another tool that a lot of our clients use.
Again, they have a HIPAA-compliant version, but what we’re talking about here is that with the HIPAA-compliant version, while the tool itself then becomes HIPAA compliant, it can then kind of be [00:03:00] difficult to get all the data you need into your reporting interface to actually report on campaign efficacy.
So for example, with our clients, most of them use Looker dashboards, and we are the ones that set them up from a campaign reporting perspective. And so if we’re trying to do, you know, soup to nuts from spend to final conversion you know, we got to get that data in. And so what you were able to do then with the call reel data is export it.
Only the data that is non-PHI, and then pull it back into Looker and then associate it with the correct campaign information. So we could accurately report on the number of phone calls and conversions that came in, right?
Suzie: Correct. Yeah. It’s kind of like a little custom Looker connector.
Jenny: Absolutely.
And this can be done really with any platform that has API availability, right? Walk us through, like if a marketer on this call is thinking like, Oh, I want to make my dashboard more robust in the third-party tools that I pull in. How can they [00:04:00] think through what tools this could be applicable for?
Suzie: Really, anything that has an API is an option. But as you go through it, think about the fields you do and you don’t need. So for example, for the calls, we needed the number of calls. We needed the average duration. We needed the time of day that the calls were coming through so we could make sure all of our campaigns were running smoothly, but we did not need any of that sensitive data that CallRail needed. And so once we had identified what we did need, we went to the documentation for the API and matched it up. And if you can see that the documentation has it, the ability to get granular enough so that you can get what you need and not what you don’t, it’s probably going to be a pretty good option for a pretty simple JavaScript API call.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve done it may feel a little manual, but in the end, it’s not manual. We’ve done Google Sheets to feed data into reporting dashboards for lots of different use cases. So this is just another example of creatively pulling data in to customize it for our needs. [00:05:00]
Suzie: That’s correct.
And since most APIs are pretty static and don’t change very often, we have a really low level of maintenance to do with these. And Google also has a built-in way to handle secrets so we’re able to handle API keys securely as well. So it’s been a really great, low-maintenance way to keep our dashboards up to date and make sure that all that data is tying in together and we can tag everything appropriately.
Jenny: Absolutely. So for those on the call, if you’re trying to build out your reporting dashboard for additional data sets or information from other platforms that you use, and there isn’t an immediate way to do it, this is a great way to kind of think outside of the box and kind of problem solve a way to be able to get the data.
Another thing that came to mind for me, whenever you were talking about a solution like this is if you’re an in-house marketer and you create these reporting dashboards and you share them with people outside of your organization, especially people you don’t have a BAA with, this is just another level of [00:06:00] safety to make sure there isn’t any data accidentally being put into those dashboards that you shouldn’t be sharing with third parties.
Suzie: It’s a great clean data source to keep things entirely separate so that you have, if you need to, you can go into CallRail and you could even match that call ID and see those granular details on each one if you need it. But if you want to report and not worry about any of that, it is ready to go. And if it doesn’t have anything sensitive.
So it’s great for reporting, whether it be for a presentation, like it’s something like SHSMD or whether it be to a larger internal team anything where you just wouldn’t want that sensitive data around.
Jenny: Oh, that’s awesome. So what are some watchouts? I know, for example, we were talking through, like, you shouldn’t just go and set this up on your, like, personal Google workspace. So if somebody’s going to pursue the creativity of a solution like this, what should they look out for?
Suzie: Well, the first thing is that we have two BAAs with Google here at Hedy & Hopp. We have one for Google Cloud platform and we have one for our workspace instance, which means that all of [00:07:00] our Google apps for workspace for business are all covered by their BAA.
So this was done on my, on the Hedy & Hopp accounts and not on a personal Google. You can never get a BAA with a personal Gmail account. So you want to make sure that you’re doing this in a secure environment. Anytime you’re dealing with an API, you’re also probably going to have an account number and API key.
And you’re going to want to make sure that you take care of those by using Google’s secrets manager to properly hide those variables. They’re not just exposed and flying out there because that’s kind of just leaving the key to your house in the lock. And then finally, you just want to be really careful about the fields that you pull because you just want to make sure that you’re referring to that documentation and lining it up and making sure that you really are creating what you think you’re creating and that everything that you want to make sure that you’re not just relying on what you think a field name might be.
So those are really my big watch ads for keeping these compliance safe and useful.
Jenny: I love it, Susie. Thank you [00:08:00] so much. And for our listeners, I hope this had you look at the opportunities for data integration to dashboards in a slightly different, perhaps more creative light. I know this is a pretty technical topic to talk about on our podcast, but I like throwing those in every once in a while to kind of encourage some technical thinking and brainstorming, especially because I know based off my conversations over the last few weeks, so many organizations are still focusing on building appropriate reporting dashboards and incorporating as many data sources as possible to have them be holistic.
So hopefully this episode was useful. Please know that if you have specific questions about platform compliance, or even opportunities for what a dashboard could look like please reach out to us. We love talking about this stuff and we’d be happy to hop on a call and talk with you and even brainstorm about specific platforms or tools you’re trying to integrate and see if we can help you problem-solve. So, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode, Suzie.
And thank you listeners for tuning in. [00:09:00] We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.