Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to be joined by Lindsey Brown, Hedy & Hopp’s very own director of Activation. Hi, Lindsey. 

Lindsey: Hi, Jenny!

Jenny: We’re going to be digging in today about paid media restrictions in healthcare.

So we had a lot of conversations at Schmitt and Dallas. It was just a couple of weeks ago with folks who were either brand new to healthcare marketing. Many of them had many years experience in other industries, but were new to healthcare or folks who are not new to healthcare but have allowed their marketing agencies to really take the reins over the last five years and didn’t really stay up to date on the regulatory environment shifts, and they’re wanting to get caught up on what’s happening.

So, if this is you, this is a great episode to listen in. We’re going to be talking about why there are restrictions in paid media for healthcare marketers, the big restrictions marketers need to be aware of, and then what marketers can do really to, be aware of the future, but also make their campaigns successful today. So, Lindsey, let’s kick off, give us an overview: Why are there restrictions in healthcare? Why can’t we do the fun things that e-commerce companies can do? 

Lindsey: That’s always the question we get. And you know, as marketers, you have to take your take a step back and really put yourself into the shoes of a patient. As a patient, would you want marketers knowing more about you, about searches that you make on the internet, about health, about pages or videos that you’re watching in regards to very specific health conditions?

There’s a lot of, you know, concern over having that kind of data in the hands of big tech or in the hands of really anyone that you haven’t given consent to. And that’s really the purpose of all of these laws, is to ensure that, you know, patients and how people are trying to understand their health, improve their health, access health care, that that is really remained private and remains, a conversation between their physician and themselves as opposed to, you know, their physician, themselves and all of Google, for example. We really want to make sure that that information is protected and kept safe and secure. So, yeah, that’s really kind of why the restrictions are needed. And again, as marketers, we really have to respect that boundary, especially as for many and have all of our clients are in health care. So we know that they understand this really well.

And so be able to partner with them to ensure that information is being secure while also ensuring their marketing is working, is kind of our sweet spot. 

Jenny: Perfect. Well, let’s dive in to what I’m calling the three big hurdles that health care marketers have to jump over. The first one that we’re going to talk about is privacy and HIPAA.

So Lindsey, give us a rundown. How do privacy considerations and laws and HIPAA impact decisions made within paid media? 

Lindsey: So the biggest thing is, you know, we think about consent and offering consent and someone giving consent to share information. And really at the bulk of that is ensuring that their information isn’t shared with third parties, those that they have not agreed to share that information.

And what that has really turned into over the past couple of years is ensuring that that information is not shared with technology companies, especially like Google, where your analytics likely is, and Meta or other advertising platforms where there’s a lot of, engagement, a lot of information being shared. So really, the reason this is the biggest hurdle is it’s really kind of limited marketers ability to employ tracking technologies the way that they used to, where it’s just gather all the information you possibly can, and then we’ll slice down and figure out what exactly we want to work with.

So that’s really the biggest hurdle is, again, ensuring that from tracking technology perspective or big tech or any tech companies, that that information is kept private down to things like the content that you are reading, the information you’re putting into forms, where you are located down to your latitude, longitude, things to that effect are really areas where we’ve had to be really restrictive and ensure that we’re adhering to those particular laws.

Jenny: Yep. And as we’re thinking specifically about paid media activation, regardless of channel, there are some restrictions that that enforce that allow, forces us to enforce. Correct?

Lindsey: Yes, correct.

Jenny: So talk to us a little bit about like conversion pixels. Right. Used to be the gold standard for paid media is still in some other industries. So across all channels, you know, how should we think about conversion pixels now.

Lindsey: Yeah. So really conversion pixels are off limits unless you have some way of employing some type of private analytics tool using server side Google Tag manager or another private server. Really those pixels are essentially sharing information about that user and what they’ve done on your site back with, those platforms where that pixel is coming from.

So if you have a Facebook conversion pixel on your site, anything that a user does where that pixel is found, that’s going right back to Meta and they’re learning all sorts of things about you. So that’s number one, one thing that’s really important that those really should not be used any more whatsoever. 

The other one is list sharing. So a big popular thing that a lot of other companies do is they take lists that either they’ve purchased or that they’ve gathered on their own website, or that they have partnerships with, like second party data. And they use that, upload that into Google, into Meta, with programmatic partners, all sorts of other media partners, and use that for targeting either directly targeting those folks or using, other technologies, kind of figure out what types of people these are and what other types of people they can find that are like those customers. That’s what we call profiling. And that is something that also, not allowed, especially when it comes to patient information. If you’re using your patient lists in Meta or Google or any other platform that is absolutely not allowed anymore because that is constituting sharing patient information with those platforms, even though you’re using it for targeting or, you know, we know that they’re customers of ours, so it’s ok. It’s not okay from a privacy perspective. That’s another big one you have to watch out for. 

Jenny: So let’s talk specifically about Google ads. There are, first of all, some restricted areas or categories where it’s either not allowed or more difficult to advertise in Google Ads. Can you talk about that?

Lindsey: Yeah for sure. So definitely areas of concern will be health care, health and wellness, specifically around reproductive health. I think, political climate and things to that effect really have restricted the use of reaching out to specific types of people or trying to find certain kinds of people for reproductive health information. Weight loss is another one, especially with the expansion of all the new pharmaceuticals out there and different treatments that are available, GLP-1s, what have you. And honestly, some of the, you know, there are some legitimate advertising for that out there. There’s some not so legitimate advertising around there. So again, it’s kind of Google’s way of protecting the consumer from things that aren’t real or, or things that, really you should work with your health care provider on. 

Prescription drugs is another one. That’s a big one. And Google recently announced that they are actually lowering the restrictions on prescription drugs, which there’s a whole whole community of people that are kind of like on one side or the other of this, where on the one hand, as a marketer, if you’re if you’re wanting to share information with with potential patients or potential users of your prescription drugs, you know you want them to be able to find educational materials. You’re not trying to sell them on a drug. You’re not trying to do certain things. You just want them to know that it exists, or you want them to know, like what it’s used for or something like that. 

And so Google has actually limited, or expanded, the use of that within Google. So, where advertisers previously couldn’t do any kind of prescription drug marketing within Google Ads, now they can, so long as it’s informational or for educational purposes only.

The problem is: Who is making that decision? So from from a marketer’s perspective, we could say everything is about education. I’m not pushing it. I’m just I’m just telling you what it is. Google may have a different story. So that’s kind of where the controversy comes in, where, you know, someone may think that it’s an educational campaign, but Google’s like, nope, no, that feels promotional to me. And they kind of get to make the call. So we’ll kind of see how it all plays out. But, it’s interesting in a time where a lot of restrictions are being made in terms of how we can talk about prescription drugs or other therapies, Google’s actually lessening those restrictions, which again, we’ll kind of see how it plays out.

Jenny: What about the Legit Script certification? 

Lindsey: Yeah. So, a lot of times for, for specific areas, especially in things like prescription drugs, I want to say that reproductive health, weight loss, addictive, addiction, things to that effect that are already restricted, in order to run ads for those specific types of, therapies or for specific types of things, you would have to have a Legit Script certification. And that is something that you get through Google. Now, Google doesn’t allow everyone to be certified in that. So again, it has another layer of complexity where Google might think that it’s okay for you to be certified for one thing, but then another company won’t get certified. So again, the playing field isn’t quite even. But Google does make you jump through quite a few hoops to make sure that, you’re not doing anything that might harm the end consumer, which in theory is a really good thing. It’s just, again, how that plays out and ensure it’s consistent and, balanced for everybody. 

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s pivot and talk a little bit about Meta. Meta has made some pretty significant changes over the last three years to what marketers and healthcare can and cannot do. Give us a rundown. 

Lindsey: Yeah. So really, we’ve lost, very specific health related interest targeting. So previously where you could probably look down to a specific kind of condition or a type of symptom or things that effect. Now Meta isn’t really allowing you to do that. There’s a broad health and wellness category, which if you’re a health care marketer, a lot of things go into that, like yoga is in the same category as, you know, heart attack or a heart condition, which are very, very different things. So that was kind of the first thing. All those restrictions being lifted. 

So what that really forced, marketers to do is to think about their services or think about, you know, what they are marketing or what they’re providing information of, really making sure that that creative is hitting on that message because we could at target as finite or because we can’t target is finite as we want to, or that we are accustomed to in things like programmatic or, other areas like direct mail, you know, we have to be more general and Meta. So it really forced marketers to get more creative, and kind of see what messages were drawing folks in, what messages were not, which actually was kind of fun. I think sometimes as marketers, we get so excited about the possibilities of finding very specific individuals, based on their behavior, that we kind of forget that there’s a lot of people out there that probably fit our audience profile that wouldn’t fit into those interests.

So it’s actually been great for us. We’ve had one campaign in particular where Meta was the top performing conversion. Even though it’s a broad health and wellness category, it was for a very specific service, but it really performed amazingly well for our clients, which was like all due to the creative and ensuring that message was really resonating. So again, some restrictions there, but again, you can be creative as marketers. It’s literally what we do all day. So it’s kind of it’s kind of nice to be able to kind of work around those. 

Jenny: Well, with that, let’s talk then about how marketers can pivot. So you talked about really balancing compliance, creativity and results. Talk a little bit more about what marketers should be keeping top of mind if they’re thinking about developing a paid media campaign.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I think the really important part is to think about, again, this is hard for marketers because we want to be very specific, because it’s important. Specificity is important to see the results you want, but kind of taking a broader step back. And like, what overall do we want folks to do. So those CTAs, using more general CTAs that still are applicable to your target audience. For example, “find a doctor” is very different than “schedule an appointment with this doctor now.” Even though we might want them to schedule an appointment with this doctor right now, saying that might get you into a little bit of trouble from a legal perspective, and also might be difficult for you to, to show results on based on the tracking technology—not issues, but, things that we’ve got to get around, Right? So something as simple as “find a doctor,” “schedule a screening,” “learn more.” These are typically things that as we become more sophisticated marketers, we’re like, don’t use learn more. It’s the worst CTA ever. But that is kind of where we’re at. You can use that still to your advantage because it shows that you’re really providing education.

Same thing, with that message, as I mentioned, education really is important. And at the crux of what health care providers and companies want to do is really educate potential patients on what they should do to kind of take their health care into their own hands, and to be really proactive. So I wouldn’t see this as a negative. It’s like, but we want appointments. Yes, you want appointments, but you’ve got to educate your clients first or potential patients first. So let’s really take that, lean into that, and use that in our created to help get around some of the compliance issues. 

So long story boring, the whole point is make sure that you’re really balancing the compliance and the creativity, and don’t be afraid to make something feel a little bit more, general, again, you’re going to find the right people that are interested in moving forward, and then you’ll be able to see those results on the end, on the back end.

Jenny: So one last question, Lindsey. This has been a fabulous overview. Thank you. One last question: I’d love for you to kind of look into your, magic eight ball and give us an idea of what do you think health care marketers need to be thinking about 12, 24, 36 months down the line? Right, budgets continue to get more and more restricted, compliance continues to get stricter and stricter. If I were the director of marketing at a regional hospital system, for example, health system, what should I be thinking about when I’m specifically thinking about paid media? 

Lindsey: So with so much that we’ve heard in other industries, you are going to see some potential with AI-driven targeting. And so what I mean by that is, in a platform such as Meta, there’s actually, a way to teach the algorithm on who you’re looking for, even though you can’t specifically target them based on interest or something else, like an ICD-10 code.

And leveraging something like that will allow that budget to go a lot further. It also will help you from an operations and efficiency standpoint, because you’re not necessarily spending a lot of time doing A/B testing. You’re teaching the algorithm who to find, and learning about what messages are best resonating with them, without having to do a lot of, you know, analysis and things like that. Because on the back end, if we’re going to struggle a little bit on getting down to the exact measurement that we’ve been used to, right, with conversion pixels and optimizing, automatically, you know, we’re going to have to use some tools to help us manage that most effectively. And so AI-driven in targeting or some areas where, we really think we’ll be leaning into to help us both from an efficiency standpoint and from showing improved performance overall. So very excited about the developments there. 

Jenny: Very exciting. Well, if you tuned in today, hopefully this gave you confidence in the future. All of these restrictions truly aren’t things that you need to be afraid of. You need to be aware of them. But as marketers, one of our core competencies is the ability to be creative and to adapt.

So if you look at this through the lens of pivoting with positivity, which is one of Hedy & Hopp’s core values, so say it often. But if you pivot with positivity and really look at this as an opportunity to work those creativity muscles, you really can still drive really strong campaign performance across all of these different media channels.

You just have to get a little creative—and technical—in the way that you implement them. So but don’t give up media still absolutely a strong channel in the healthcare space. You just have to know how to use it correctly. 

So and with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Please share this episode with a team member that you think may find it useful. And subscribe! We drop new episodes almost every Friday, so we’d love to have you as a subscriber. Until next time, have a great weekend and thanks for joining us on today’s episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Cheers!

 

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be coming to you fresh out of SHSMD 2025. Our team had so much fun at this conference, and so we’re going to use today’s episode as a recap.

Even if you weren’t able to go, or if you did attend and want to see if our highlights are the same as what you felt was your personal highlights, this is a great episode to give you a little bit of a recap of some of the main things that we found as big takeaways for our session this year.

I am super excited to be joined by Marissa Gurrister, Hedy & Hopp’s very own Director of Growth, and Brenda Cross, our Marketing Manager. Welcome, ladies. 

Brenda: Hi! 

Marissa: Thank you! 

Jenny: Brenda, let’s start with you. Let’s talk a little bit about the Hedy & Hopp booth. So for conference attendees that have seen a Hedy & Hopp booth, you know, we always go big.

We do custom booths every single year that always try to incorporate artists. We like to give our money to real humans, as we like to say, instead of trade show companies. So, Brenda, tell our listeners a little bit about how Hedy & Hopp chose to show up this year. 

Brenda: Yeah, our booth was a home run with everybody. We went all out, like Jenny said. If you’re watching this podcast, I am wearing a custom sweatshirt that we had designed by our 2023 Artist in Residence, Lauren Younge. She painted these all by hand. If you want to check out our Instagram @hedyandhopp or our LinkedIn, you’ll see some pictures there as well.

Of all of the artists’ work that we incorporated, the big hit was our floral arch arrangements and floral earrings that we wore to the conference. These were all designed by floral artist Annie Kuhn with Verde Designs, and she is from Saint Louis. She flew with us to the conference, set everything up. Real flowers were part of our booth.

She refreshed them every day. We had new fresh floral earrings every day, and they were a huge hit. They were so colorful. And we stood out so much. And it was just, it was very sad to take it down yesterday, quite honestly. But we will be doing it again for HCC, in just a few weeks. So you will get to see more flowers very soon.

We also, as with every conference, we have art prints available for free for people to take from our Artists in Residence. This year, our artist in residence is Heather Ward Miles. She’s a painter from Carmel, Indiana. And soon we’ll be choosing our 2026 artist in residence. So each year, the art rotates. The art was a huge hit as well.

And we raffled off an original painting from Heather, too, for one lucky attendee, to have shipped to them. 

Jenny: Yeah. Great recap. And for fans, if you’re listening in, if you are a fan of the sweatshirts, Lauren actually sells them on her Instagram. So we had lots of people say, oh, I want one. Well, the good news is you can have one. Reach out to Lauren. She actually dropped them on her Instagram about three weeks ago, and I immediately messaged her and said, we will take six. So they are available. If you would like to show support to a fabulous artist, we’ll link to all three of the artists that we mentioned in the show notes. 

Marissa, this was your very first session and I would love to hear your big picture takeaways.

Talk about your perspective of your overall experience. And then I’d love if you could tell me a little bit about one of your favorites. Favorite speakers or sessions? 

Marissa: Sure. Yeah. So it was my first SHSMD. It was very fun. It was just fun to connect with folks in person. I had colleagues from past lives that were there that I got to reconnect with.

And, friends on LinkedIn that I have followed professionally for quite some time, that we got to meet up in person, which was really, really cool. You know, it was interesting to me. I kind of felt like there was a common thread among everyone about these, like, issues that we’re all struggling with. Like, there’s kind of this theme amongst healthcare marketers where I feel like we’re all having troubles measuring performance with all of the like changing compliance laws and regulations and keeping up with it all.

And, you know, just like finding time in our schedules to be innovative and come up with fresh ideas. I feel like one of those three issues came up in almost every single conversation I was having, which was, I don’t know, kind of reassuring to know that, like, we’re all struggling with the same things here. But it was just fun to be able to be there in person and hear what other folks are doing to overcome some of those challenges, bounce ideas back and forth, and just have real conversations.

But honestly, like kind of to that point, the keynote by the poet, Tucker Bryant, he really went into more depth about how sometimes, like our breakthrough comes when we can really, like, take things out of our everyday and remove things, in our daily work that we’re constantly doing to make room for new, innovative ideas. So I thought that really, it was, it really hit home for a lot of the folks there just having those conversations.

Jenny: Yeah. I think he, really, tied it together. He was talking about erasure poetry, where sometimes real art can be created by removing things instead of always adding things. And that really is such a big reminder for marketers because we’re constantly trying to do more, more, more, more and more. And as our budget shrinks, sometimes the actual art of being, you know, decision maker and trying to make a difference and perhaps removing things from our plates instead of continuously adding.

So I agree that one was really meaningful. My favorite session was actually Wash U’s session they did on integrated data. The presenters were Verna Ehlen and Molly Bailey. And I really liked it because I felt like out of all the sessions talking about data and analytics, theirs was one of the only ones that actually got real. They actually had some good meat to the presentation.

They showed some light examples of their dashboards, and there was actually enough expertise in the two women that were presenting where they could actually dig into the details. So it wasn’t just theory and philosophy around analytics and measurement. They were talking real numbers, real integrations, real best practices. And it really went to show how much time and energy had to go into making something like that that actually functioned.

So many times we go to presentations in sessions where it is all theory around what we all should be doing, and then you walk away and you’re like, you didn’t write that much down. So I just want to give a shout out to those two ladies from Wash U because they did a phenomenal job, creating a presentation, that had some good value for attendees.

Jenny: Brenda, how about you? What was your favorite session?

Brenda: My favorite was on the final day, one of the very early morning sessions at 8 a.m.. It was called Beyond the Campaign Launch: Why Your Experience IS Your Marketing, and this was led by Kristin Baird. She’s the president and CEO at Baird Group and Steve Koch, and he’s the managing partner at Cast & Hue.

And the big thing was highlighting that tricky but very crucial relationship between marketing, clinical leadership and operations. And having come previously from a provider, a lot of this I could relate to, that it’s like it was a lot of great information that seems very simple, but is actually very difficult to put into practice. And takes a lot of ongoing work.

Really the key takeaways were, if you say it as part of your brand, as part of your marketing, you have to be ready to live it. That patient experience ultimately dictates your brand, not what you say it does not what you say. Your mission is not what you say. Your promises. You need to make sure you can actually fulfill that promise that you’re making.

They actually put a really great slide up that, had, a tagline or a promise to patients. And then it had an asterisk and it said, like, unless, unless Carl is working or something like that because he’s mean, you know, so like it, it’s there’s no asterisk that we put on taglines or anything like that. But patients are experiencing these hiccups when they actually get to a provider.

That and I really can happen, throughout the entire experience, from booking to billing. If you don’t engage your operations and your clinical leadership and patients and have a poor experience, your marketing and strategy just goes out the window. It doesn’t matter. It will fail. Even if you did your job and you did it with the best marketing campaign ever, with the best creative, it’s, it’s not going to work because that patient experience, cannot—that poor experience—cannot make up for that.

They won’t want to come back. They’ll share it online and, and review, and other people will see that. And it really matters. So they had two steps that, Kristin and Steve highlighted, as part of this process to make sure you’re incorporating clinical leadership and operations. One was journey mapping. To really go through the steps that patients walk through themselves when they’re going in for a particular service.

So you start with a trigger event. What makes people call your organization an example could be, the patient develops a fever at work. They realize they they need to figure out what’s going on with them and really take each individual step, even the very small steps in between matter to see how they’re getting to you, what’s happening when they get there, and what’s happening after, another crucial part, of really engaging with the patient experience is mystery shopping, which I thought was very interesting.

And not something it seems like a lot of providers do from the hands that were raised in the room. There’s only a few people that had done mystery shopping at their organizations, but, it really allows you to look at both facts and feelings as part of that process. So not just all the data that you get from surveys.

You really get really meaningful information as part of that mystery shopping and places that maybe aren’t living up to your promise as a, as a brand, as a health care provider. One key highlight was to not try to do mystery shopping yourself. You may feel like, oh, I can go in and do that. As, the marketing director, or marketing manager, and do that on my own.

But you have your own biases, and you have a lot more knowledge of your organization than a typical patient does. And it’s really best to even have someone who’s not involved in health care as part of their day to day work at all, so they can have a more typical patient experience. And you can see it through, typical patients eyes and not through kind of, your lens that has so many biases incorporated in it.

So ultimately, the patient experience should be part of marketing, which I thought was interesting. I don’t know if that’s feasible for some small marketing teams to take on the whole patient experience with marketing. I think, what they really highlight is it’s important to have that really close relationship with clinical operations, to make sure there’s that feedback loop there and that you’re not launching any campaigns until you nail down your patient experience and any hiccups that are within that.

And lastly, empower staff to become really true ambassadors of the brand and to help them see how their work fits into the overall patient experience. So one example that I thought was really good was, maybe the person, who’s the janitorial staff, who helps clean the bathrooms. That is actually a crucial part of the experience.

I think there was one review they highlighted that was, “Oh my gosh, I went into the bathroom in the waiting room and it was filthy, and I could only think about how my dad is going into surgery there, and I don’t want them to get an infection,” and that’s what they’re connecting. So even things like that can make or break an experience of the patient and also the people supporting their patients.

So, even every single job as part of that system, is, is part of making that patient experience, whether it ends up good or bad.

Jenny: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Great sessions. Well, I can speak for not only the two of you. So the three of us, but also the other team members to say that we loved it this year.

We really had a lot of fun, made a ton of phenomenal connections. So thank you for the team at SHSMD for putting on a phenomenal conference yet again this year. We’re very appreciative of your time and energy. Hedy & Hopp actually led a pre-conference workshop that was 2.5 hours long on Sunday. Packed room talking advanced patient privacy, both on the marketing tactics and on the actual analytics side for integration.

So really digging into things like what the technical differences are between a CDP and sGTM. So, we really enjoyed speaking and got really great feedback afterwards as well, from attendees, so … 

Marissa: Lots of great questions too, from the folks in the room, which was nice to have that like back and forth in that dialog. It was it was nice.

Jenny: Yeah. Totally agree. It was super fun. 

So I will say overall that I think our biggest takeaway from SHSMD this year was that there’s power in prioritization. It’s so easy to keep adding more and more things to your plate. But sometimes having blinders on and focusing on those things that are truly going to move the needle for your organization as much.

But what is most important, and really, that’s exactly what we help health care providers, practices and payers with every day at Hedy & Hopp. So thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We hope this recap episode was valuable. And we’ll see you next week for another episode. Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Jenny Bristow, and I’m your host. And I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m here today excited to chat with you about AI and personas. 

I have two of my fabulous team members with me. I have Sarah Zajicek. She’s a Copywriter and Content Editor, and Yenny Rojas, who is an SEO Marketing Specialist. Welcome, ladies. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

Yenny: Thank you.

Jenny: So we created a podcast episode a few weeks ago, I guess a couple of months ago at this point, talking about SEO and how AI is really changing the game. And then I posted a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago talking about the huge strides our team is making and having our content rank well in AI.

So whether that’s an AI overview or showing up as an answer for LLMs, and I’ve received a lot of questions about the behind the scenes of, “How does that work? How are you using AI to create content on the front end, while you’re still able to somehow make high-quality content that people enjoy reading? What are you doing structurally to have it show up all on a website?”

So we wanted to do a follow-up episode. So on today’s episode, we’re going to be digging in more into the power of AI and really supporting the creation of content and how things like personas and structure come into play. 

So I’m going to start with Sarah. Sarah, really excited to chat with you a little bit about the big shift in AI and what is happening and how people are using AI to find content. So talk to us a little bit about that. How are people using AI to find information, and how should that shift to the way that marketers show up on behalf of brands? 

Sarah: Yeah. So there’s actually a study published pretty recently by the creators of ChatGPT that found that up to 49% of searches, or messages, that are being sent into ChatGPT are actually asking questions. So a lot of people are using it more as a research-based tool than a, an action tool, and they’re looking for answers to their questions.

So the way that we have found we can better structure our content is by answering the questions that people are asking ChatGPT, so we can better show up for those users and gain more brand awareness among them.

Jenny: So Sarah, talk to us a little bit about what that actually means in practice, right? So you have both large systems. You have service lines within those systems. And then you also have individual practice offices. So let’s say, a five location orthopedic practice. If I were a marketing strategist and I were trying to think about how people were going to be finding me, what does the study say? How are people using AI to do that research?

Sarah: So on a smaller practice perspective, patients are generally turning to AI to search for questions more about the conditions or procedures that they’re interested in. And having those service-based pages inside of a small practice’s website can really help the user find the information that they’re looking for, while also getting the education that they’re looking for. And from a hospital system perspective, patients are using AI search to find those specialties within their local area.

So having those specialty pages and having them structured well will help them find that information. 

Jenny: Absolutely. And we talked in a prior episode, not only about the importance of AI through the lens of how people are searching, but also the importance of reputation and the influence of AI. So if you—if that idea is new to you, go back and listen to that episode. We talked a lot about how ratings and rankings can really influence the way that you show up in AI. So really important to kind of think about not just content on the site, but also how people are talking about you off the site. 

So let’s talk a little bit about big picture best practices for content and SEO strategy in the AI area. One of the things that we do a lot for our SEO and GEO clients is focus on their blogs, but also their main service line pages, and that feels kind of obvious, right? Like, of course you’re going to put content there. But talk to us a little bit about the specifics. How are we optimizing those pages?

Sarah: So we optimize service pages and blogs fairly similarly. Our service pages, or the main pages on our website, that act sort of as pillars for the rest of our blog content to connect to. And the way we structured these is with bulleted summaries at the beginning of the page. This creates a quick and snappy way for users to find what information they’re going to be seeing on this page, but also a great way for AI to sort of quick sight what is found on your, on your website. 

Also answering commonly asked questions in the form of FAQs or Q&A style copy helps users find the answers that they’re looking for. Again, using bulleted lists to break up copy and large blocks of text. Anything that gets the user to easily scan what they’re going to be read is more likely to be cited in AI search. And implementing those FAQs. So snappy content, answering questions quickly, and an implementation of an FAQ schema, which is just a, a structured snippet of code, helps not only the users, but the AI search itself, crawl the website and gather that information. 

Jenny: So basically what you’re saying is: AI does not have a big attention span either. 

Sarah: No!

Jenny: So we have the write bulleted lists for users to scan. And we gotta write bulleted lists for AI to scan because everybody’s just looking for the headlines. 

Sarah: Exactly. The easier it is to read for the user, the easier it is to read for AI. And everybody is happy in the end. 

Jenny: Absolutely. I think what’s kind of interesting with a lot of things in marketing is a lot of this stuff feels common sense, right? But actually taking that and implementing it whenever you have a massive digital ecosystem is where processes and structure and well-defined schema really comes into play, right? Like nothing that we’re saying I think people will listen to and say, “Oh, that’s a lightbulb idea.” But the thing that’s light bulb is actually taking that and developing a process to scale it across a massive digital ecosystem, so that way then you’re really making, solid steps forward for the users and for, you know, AI platforms to be able to digest the information. 

Sarah: Absolutely.

Jenny: So if somebody were trying to implement this internally and they were trying to create, let’s say, going into next year, a program to implement this within their own organization, what are some practical applications they should be thinking about?

Sarah: The best thing that they can do, really, is just think about how to quickly and concisely answer the questions that people are using. Think in terms of how you would be searching for things online. A great resource is the FAQs section or more questions section in Google. It provides a list of questions that people are commonly asking and searching for, within a specific query, taking those and running with them.

And again, as many bulleted bulleted lists, Q&A-style copy format that you can, that you can fit into a page. 

Jenny: Absolutely, absolutely. How about the integration of AI writing tools into a process? So how should marketers think about that? When is it in your patient’s best interest to use those tools, versus when is it kind of becoming lazy and creating content that they don’t want to read?

Sarah: That’s a great question. I know AI writing tools can be a little controversial in the marketing space, just because if you don’t use them correctly, your copy can sound very robotic, and obviously if it doesn’t sound right, users aren’t going to find interest in it. And AI is not going to rank it very well either, the AI search engines.

So you want to be able to use your AI writing tool to your advantage, but you want to use your best judgment as a human to sort of, intervene when necessary, break up those blocks of text and, really play around with the instructions that you’re giving your AI writing tool to be able to get the best output for yourself.

So, emphasizing, you know, the bulleted lists.

Jenny: Well, in addition to bulleted lists, you can also do, summaries or headlines. Another thing that is really valuable that our team has done is, for example, if you do have an article that’s been written, you can use AI to be able to summarize it.

Okay, Sarah. So let’s talk a little bit about when I can play a role in the creation of content for SEO and GEO versus when it should be a human actually involved in the process. What’s your perspective? 

Sarah: AI writing tools are great for additional support. Although they’re not perfect, they’re not always medically accurate if you’re writing medical content, and they tend to sound a little robotic if used repeatedly. So, having that human intervention there to help in creating more of a natural voice throughout the copy, breaking up large blocks of text, again, with those, bulleted lists or even summaries, really comes into play with, using AI tools to the best of your ability.

Jenny: Absolutely. Think of it as a support member on your team, not the star person. 

Sarah: Exactly.

Jenny: Perfect. Well, let’s shift over talking a little bit about personas and AI search. Yenny, give us your thought about, kind of where we are, how it plays in, and what the future is going to hold. 

Yenny: Sure. Thank you. Jenny. So first, AI is changing the game, right?

So AI doesn’t care just about the keywords. It tries to understand who is behind the question—your role, context and even all the constraints can influence that answer.

So for example, I have two prompts: typing in “best skincare routine.” Or someone might say to ChatGPT, “I am a 35 year old male with sensitive skin and recurring acne. What is the best skincare routine recommended by dermatologists?” You see the difference in the two prompts? One has context and information. So AI tailors the answer to those specific prompts and personas. That’s why it’s so important for businesses to start thinking persona-first when creating content. AI and large language models change how search works.

Prompts don’t just carry what someone wants, but who they are also. Content must respond not only to queries, but to the identity and constraints behind them. In AI search, a persona is defined, is a defined identity or a set of characteristics that guides how the AI responds to process information. So it goes beyond what is being asked and consider who is asking and under what circumstances.

In old search, success mostly came from doing keyword research, finding the right keywords, making sure your content align and match the search intent behind them. And as long as you pick the right keywords and align your content with that intent, you could rank well, right? So now in the AI search prompts, expose not just what but the who is asking—again role content, context and constraints.

So with AI search, a user’s query isn’t just about what they want, it also reveals who they are and the situation they’re in. Also environmental factors like where they live, living in different states have an effect in their responses. 

For example, if a user prompts ChatGPT is something like, “I am a 50 year, 50 year old living in Miami, Florida. I need a yearly physical, but I don’t have health insurance. Can you show me a list of nearby, primary care doctors who offer free physicals and also provide me with a checklist of what to bring to my appointment?”

That was a lot of context, a lot of information. And so with this prompt, ChatGPT has enough background information: They know about the user’s needs, they know their personal situation, their financial constraints, where they live and how they like that information to be presented to them.

So AI systems personalize the summaries and citations around that context. Different personas, don’t just want different information, they also want it delivered in different formats. So AI tools recommend your content into different formats that are most useful for the searcher. 

For example, a person, an executive persona. Right. This person prefers a summary with a bullet list because they wanted to scan the content quickly. As on the other hand, a researcher persona might want a deep-dive narrative with sources and charts and explanations. 

So by anticipating the format preferences of different personas, we make it easier for AI to recommend the content in a way that is very useful and valuable for the user. 

And so what this means for content strategy, we want to start this in ways to incorporate personas into the content. We want to revisit our core pages, our core content, and integrate targeted examples, localized details. We want persona-specific insights to make the content more relevant and engaging, right? If not every content or not, every topic needs a personalized version. Instead, we want to find places where we can speak to the audience naturally and more directly—whether through localized callouts, customer-focused CTAs, or targeted subsections within that existing content.

Also, now that we have talked about tailoring the content to different personas and formats, the next step is making sure we have a strong base persona to work from. And this starts with core demographics. These are things that we already have when we create the content. Things like the age, the gender, the race, locations, education, income. So all of these basics, core demographics are the foundation for layering our context and preferences and constraints when writing the content. 

And it is tools like Google Search Console that come in very handy because it gives you a real world insight into what, who is finding your content, what they’re typing in, what are they searching for? So by analyzing these types of questions and queries, from your visitors, you can infer what problems or goals they have. And this helps you in building the persona for writing your content. 

Jenny: That’s super helpful. I think a lot of folks are thinking about personas when they’re doing social media content, but that hasn’t necessarily translated over to SEO and on-site content as much.

So hopefully for our listeners, this is really good food for thought and really helps you think about how persona-based marketing really extends into all of these other tactics and ways that you’re creating content for your patients online. So Jenny and Sarah, thank you so much for all of the information you’re sharing today. 

This whole world is shifting so quickly. So we’re going to continue creating episodes on SEO and the impact AI is having it, on it, every couple of months to be able to continue to give people some food for thought in context as they are refining their strategy. 

So thank you, both of you. 

Yenny: Thank you. 

Sarah: Thank you.

Jenny: And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in today. Hopefully, both Sarah and Yenny gave you some additional ways that you can think about content strategy, content creation and the way that AI and AI overviews are digesting and using your information on behalf of your patients. So the way that you will continue to create content will shift over time, and you’ll continue to do better and better to show up in those places that your patients are looking for you.

If you have any questions on this topic, feel free to reach out. We would love to chat more. Otherwise, please share this episode with a colleague who may find the information helpful. Subscribe to this podcast. We drop new episodes almost every Friday, and like us on social media. You need to get updates on the new information that we’re sharing.

And that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great day! Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to this very special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy –  A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Jenny Bristow, and I am your host and the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am joined today by three Hedy & Hopp team members. We have Mark Brandes, our Director of Data and Technology, Lindsey Brown, our director of activation, and Cassie Haxton, a Marketing Analyst on our team. 

And we are here to talk about the fact that Hedy & Hopp is the first ever marketing agency to begin the Epic certification process. Yay! Such a huge deal. We are so, so excited. 

So we are recording this podcast fresh from getting back from the Epic headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin. We had an amazing three days of in-person training and we wanted to kind of pause, freeze this moment in time and really create a podcast that talks about how we got here, our experiences, and create an opportunity for other marketers in the space to understand the why behind us getting Epic certified, and understand if it’s something that might be valuable for your organization to pursue, as well.

So let’s get right into it. I want to jump first into: How did we get here? I’ve received this message no fewer than about two dozen times through LinkedIn inbox messages, of how and why, Jenny? I need to know more. Well, there’s quite a history around that. So the cliff notes—if you’re old enough to know a cliff notes are—is that three years ago, we met Epic and some representatives from Epic at, about four years ago, actually, at a health care marketing conference.

I believe it was, SHSMD. And we saw them again at HCIC, and we began fostering a relationship. We understood Epic is the largest EHR in the world. And with our passion of improving patients’ access to care, EHRs fit in there somehow. But we didn’t really know what the future would look like. Well, that really has evolved over the last four years as our relationship has deepened with them.

And they began expressing to us their interest in welcoming marketers to the table. So for anybody who is listening to this and you’re an Epic-run system, you may be saying, wait, but I’m a marketer and I’ve never talked to Epic before. That doesn’t feel right. They’re not there yet with you, but they’re working on it. So in general, Epic has figured out that having just IT teams implement Epic is not ideal for the patient experience.

So there’s been a concerted effort within the organization to get marketers to the table. Any new Epic implementations, they’re requiring somebody with a marketing POV to be part of that workgroup. And they are trying to get systems that have been on Epic to add people to those work groups, because they know that, you know, the way that you word a message makes a big difference. And they really see the value in that. 

One quick sidebar they shared an anecdote that a system was implementing Epic, and there was an IT person that was in charge of turning on all of the pre-appointment reminders, and they found out after the fact that each patient was receiving over 40 text message and message notifications because they just turned on all of them.

So that’s a great example, tangibly, of why marketing needs to be at the table. So they began this big transformation a couple of years ago. In April, they welcomed Hedy & Hopp, as well as three other agencies, to the Epic campus to really educate us around all the different tools and functionalities within Epic that they believe could be valuable for marketers.

We’ve had a lot of sidebar conversations with Epic, sharing our POV around the value of adding things like UTM parameters to capture data whenever people actually schedule an appointment or find a doctor using their tools and they’ve been receptive and implemented those solutions. So it’s been a really beautiful back-and-forth relationship where they’re hearing what marketers need, and they’re taking action on it.

So with that, we began talking to our system clients about being their partner in making their, or using epic as a patient acquisition platform. And we kept running into the same roadblock that their teams wanted us to be Epic certified in order to get into their systems, both to implement Cheers campaigns, or to pull data, to be able to do full ROI reporting.

And so it was a natural next step. It was not natural to go through that process to sign up on Epic. They did not have a system in place yet. They made one for us. And now, they are excited to welcome additional marketers, even talking about potentially creating some additional training material specifically for marketers, which we’re sharing our POVs on, to make sure that it is very beneficial for folks to be able to go through the training and then jump in and make it impactful.

So I’d love to chat with the team a little bit. Let’s start with you, Lindsey. Marketing tools. So for anybody who, perhaps, isn’t super familiar with Epic’s technical infrastructure or is just high-level aware, what is your perspective of why and how Epic can be a useful tool in a marketer’s toolbox? 

Lindsey: So I think there’s a few different things. One is, you know, how we are communicating with patients really is part of marketing. It’s absolutely part of how a physician communicates. And anyone on the physician’s team is communicating with patients for medical information, things like that. Super important. But how that is communicated, when that’s communicated, in other ways, to ensure that that patient is getting all of the information that they need and they have it at their fingertips is really important.

I think something that’s really special about the whole MyChart ecosystem is that it really allows the patients to be in full control of the information about their health and allows them to communicate with a variety of people, however they want to communicate with it. So it’s a really important tool from a patient experience, which we can learn a lot from that as marketers, and just how those are being used to better communicate with potential patients and ensure when they do become a patient, that they have an optimal experience and they continue being a patient with us and having a positive experience not only with our communication, but also with the people that they meet in person at their facilities. 

So a couple things that I think marketers could really think about, are things like your KPIs. So something that we learned is there’s a lot there’s a lot of little things that you have to turn on within Epic to make sure things are running smoothly. So as a marketing team, if you’ve set a KPI that you know you want to make sure people are booking appointments, you have to make sure that functionality is available in Epic, it’s been turned on, and that it is, in the correct sequence so that folks are actually, able to do the thing that you need them to do from a marketing perspective, so that you can again show that ROI. But if they can’t even do the thing, you can’t get the, you can’t get any of those kinds of results you have to rely on, on probably less technical ways of measuring those results.

The other thing, I was thinking about just in terms of marketing, is there’s a feature within my chart where there are things like announcements that you can use, which is really cool. And I was thinking about, one of our system clients that was running a cancer screening campaign or colon cancer screening campaign, and it was literally for anyone above a certain age.

And something you can do within Epic is make sure there is some kind of an announcement banner. So as soon as they’re logging into MyChart to get that communication that, you know, they’re getting from their physician or looking at their lab results, what have you, they have that reminder and they can go and get a screening right away.

Again, you want to make sure that that kind of functionality is built in before you have those announcements. But those are the kinds of things that you can use from at least a marketing perspective. And then just other ways to engage with your patients outside of the digital space because so much of what happens in a patient experience happens in person.

Make sure that we’re getting people signed up for a MyChart account. Something I didn’t realize is if you’re a patient, you don’t automatically get a MyChart account. You have the ability to access information, but you don’t automatically get a login and a password like you have to actually do that as a patient and get involved. So something we could do as marketers is just help encourage that so that we can, again improve that communication, improve that patient experience, and allow them to have access to all those great tools, as well.

Jenny: Absolutely. And that the exciting part is really just MyChart scratches, just the tip of the iceberg, right? We have Cheers, Hello World, like, there’s, MyChart Builder, which has landing pages which are available for non-patients. So a lot of—a misnomer I’ve heard quite often is that it’s only available to communicate with patients. That’s not true. You actually can run campaigns and capture prospective patient information and nurture them using Epic tools as well. So, a lot more to come on that information at a later date. 

Mark, share with us a little bit through the lens of marketing analytics. What’s the value for marketers or analysts to get access to that data?

Mark: Yeah, I mean, there is so much data inside of Epic, as I’m sure most of our listeners understand. And I think part of going through this training is we were able to really see where those data connections are, and, oh, we should be able to report on this. To Lindsey’s point, you can make those announcements. 

There’s also ways to say, are people engaging with those announcements? Can we see that information, right? And so there’s ways to make sure you can report on all of it. There’s so much reporting already available, just by default inside of Epic. But I think without, kind of a marketer’s viewpoint on that, some of those reports just kind of go by the wayside. I know we’ve talked to some of our clients and yeah, some of that reporting is available, but sometimes our marketing teams don’t even see it. So they can see right now how many people, how many of their customers are signed up for MyChart, right? How many have accounts? How many have signed up for this? Some of that’s available in just standard reporting and it just doesn’t make its way to marketing. 

So that’s another reason why it’s such a push to get marketers involved. Because while you know IT teams are great. Sometimes those reports come a little utilitarian to them. Right? It’s just kind of the standard stuff that just kind of push out. Whereas I think when a marketer gets that information, there’s a sense of we need to disseminate this, we need to really make this actionable. And there’s just that next step that comes with, with the kind of marketing mindset involved there, which I think is great.

The other big thing is that with what Epic is trying to do now, you can really look at your marketing tactics and look and see, did they turn into customers? Did those customers sign up for appointments? Did they go through with that appointment? You can see all the way down that line to really understand—yeah, my marketing really actually did make a huge impact because look at all these actual patients.

You can even get to an ROI at a certain point because you can say, this appointment brought in this much funds, we can compare that to the amount we kind of used in marketing. So there’s a lot of connectivity there. Some of that’s still being worked on. Epic still have some things in place to make sure that when somebody gets to the site, we can actually track them, but there are ways to do that now.

And I think with our training and our conversations with Epic, we’ve learned some of those ways, which is great. So we can kind of help some customers hopefully get that to happen. And then, yeah, I mean, I think that just unlocks a whole new level of reporting. I think so many marketers are stuck in just being able to look at platform metrics, maybe they look at traffic on their website, but sometimes it stops there, and it’s so tough to kind of say, yeah, our marketing was very impactful because we got this much traffic on the site. You got to go to that next level to really start feeling that impact. And I think this relationship with Epic and what they’re trying to do is going to make that very, available to us and possible.

Jenny: Yeah, such great points, Mark. And I think about all of those systems that got in trouble for putting Google Analytics for tracking in MyChart. Don’t—why? The data is already there, right? You just have to be able to have access to the correct people on your team, have the correct backend reporting set up within Epic to then be able to export it.

So when we think about the lens of like privacy and compliance, all of this data is accessible in an appropriate way. 

Mark: That’s right. Exactly. 

Jenny: Perfect. So let’s talk a little bit about the actual training. So we were there three full days. The first area that we got certified in the beginning of our train track was MyChart. So we went through patient experience training, two days of MyChart, and then we have a few virtual days afterwards that include things like Cheers training, we’re doing, the find a doctor, physician finder training.

There’s a couple of additional badges and training that we’re going to be going through, as well as, Cogito training, as well, for our analytics team, for Mark and Cassie. 

Cassie, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the training. So you come to us, you come into the conversation with kind of a business intelligence, heavy data analyst perspective. Was the training, what you expected? What was your big takeaways? If you were more of a comms- or PR-oriented marketer, how would you have felt about it? I’d love to kind of hear your big takeaway through those lens.

Cassie: Well, when I, when I walked into the text software platform, I was like, oh, God, I’ve stepped back into the 90s.

It’s definitely, you know, the interface is, you know, you think of the doctor’s office and you think of it being a little bit outdated. So it’s a little outdated. The structure behind it is not. And, the depth and you know, that you can get to in granularity with setting up how you set up a patient that’s not either that’s it’s very, structured. And they clearly put it together over many, many decades of figuring out patient experience and doctor experience and how to, you know, stitch it together so that they have a good experience on the front end. I think, it was interesting. 

I think the most valuable part of the training for us was just getting in there and getting our hands wet and our hands dirty, and understanding, okay, this is the interface of Hyperspace, which is what the doctors and the nurses use. And then this is the, text, which is what, you know, the builder or the IT person might use and understanding that there’s a difference and that there’s tons of toggles on the front end and there’s tons of pages to shift through on the back end. And it’s not as easy, it’s not just something you can turn on. I mean, you can, but you have to turn on many layers and many details. And so I think it was really valuable for us just to even understand what we’re dealing with. And I think there’s, there’s more to go and there’s more ways to go for a marketing perspective. And for it to be truly valuable for marketers,

I think there were moments where we were kind of looking at each other like, I don’t know if we need to know this part or, you know, we might not go into this place again. But I think and it sounds like Epic’s kind of working with how can we make this more, you know, package it a little bit differently and, and different, maybe combine certain tracks or, you know, shift them a little bit.

But, I think just getting trained and, and certified in it is valuable to be able to understand what all is in there. And then you likely will have someone on your team that, you know, whether it’s if it’s not you, there will be someone on your team that probably will go in and set up everything. But if you have a better understanding of what they should set up and why, and how and how that might affect, you know, kind of that unrolling of a patient experience, unrolling of a marketing journey. Then I think that, you know, that’s going to help everybody in the end. 

Jenny: That’s such great points, Cassie. I feel like whenever we went into this and when we started, like for ad agency day for Epic, for example, it very much seemed like a bunch of wizzy wigs. They were beautiful drag and drop and it’s so easy and beautiful. That isn’t actually how a lot of it is. And that’s okay, right? But I think it’s really important for marketers, if we’re going to go down this journey, if we’re going to take this hike, right? Using an analogy, I want to know it’s a ten mile hike. So I prepare myself versus thinking it’s a one mile out and back, and I don’t necessarily need to bring a bottle of water with me. Right? It’s a different mindset. So it’s not that it’s not achievable. It’s absolutely achievable. And it’s very, very beneficial. But it is definitely a bigger lift, and understanding that and respecting that within your organization, I think, will result in much more meaningful conversations. 

Sort of like the privacy space, right? It’s so much more layered and intense than you would think just, oh, it’s easy. Just to stop collecting the data. Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Same thing over here on the epic side. So definitely takes a lot of thought and consideration. And I definitely agree going through training, even if it was components that we may never use again, was really helpful.

And kudos to Cassie! She’s the first one out of our group to actually successfully pass the post-class project build. So, yay, Cassie!

Cassie: A little more time, then you guys.

Jenny: No, you did it though. I’m very proud of you. Very exciting. 

So, we have some big takeaways, lots of exciting things in the future. If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, wow, I want to keep learning more, we have two opportunities for you.

First, we are doing an in-person Learning Lab on Epic and the marketing and marketing analytics opportunities at HCIC. So if you’re going to HCIC, grab a spot. We absolutely anticipate that it’s going to be a full room. I believe you could register your spot in advance. So if you’re going and want to tune in, grab it. 

If you’re not going, we are going to be repeating that session at a virtual environment, shortly after HCIC. So you can go to HedyandHopp.com/EpicWebinar. And go ahead and grab your spot. Now, there’s no cost to this. It will be virtual with some really great Q&A at the end. So we’re going to put both of those links in the show notes so you can follow along. But if you’re interested in this topic, definitely grab your seat on the webinar.

It’s going to be a much more robust where we dig into each of the individual topics, and should be a really great learning opportunity. 

So again, group, thank you so much for joining me and being the first ever marketers to go through Epic certification. It was a really fun hill to climb, and I cannot wait to see all of the fun work we do for systems.

So with that, thank you for tuning in today, on our episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to share this episode with somebody on your team that you think would value the information and give us a like and a follow to be notified of future episodes. And with that, we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host, and I’m the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to introduce you today to Marissa Gurrister. Marissa is our brand new Director of Growth here at Hedy and Hopp, and she joins us with over a decade experience in-house on the system side, coming to us from systems such as Ascension and Duly.

Welcome, Marissa. 

Marissa: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. 

Jenny: Well, you are going to become a familiar face on the podcast. So I’m so excited to kick off the first episode with you. And as we were brainstorming topics to cover, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of folks want to chat with us about, both to understand the technical details of how to do it, but then also talk about the fun strategy side is … influencer marketing. And you have quite a history with influencer marketing. So why don’t we kick off by having you talk a little bit about what influencer marketing is and what it looks like in health care? 

Marissa: Sure, yeah. So I know usually when people hear influencer marketing, they’re thinking of all those social influencers, all the fun folks that we follow online, on Instagram, selling us all of the things, you know, but really in healthcare, I feel like a few ways. We can have patient advocates can be used as influencers. So, like parents or family members of patients. We can use physicians as influencers. So that can be really fun if we’re looking for physicians to share more, in depth, you know, research based, details about particular services that they offer. And then, of course, we have micro influencers, and we can still use our traditional influencers.

So it’s really fun. A few different ways you can do them. But it’s a little bit different obviously, than social influencing. So in healthcare we typically see organizations using influencers to promote health and wellness services or encouraging preventative services. More educational type content and less selling of a product like you would on social influencing.

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about case studies. Let’s make it real for folks. So what examples do you have? What kind of campaigns have you participated in or you’ve seen in the past? 

Marissa: Yeah, so a few really exciting ones come to mind. We’ve used influencers for a fun children’s hospital out in Texas. This is kind of a tactic that we laid on to a full multichannel campaign that we were rolling out. So it was a smaller tactic in a full campaign. But we used parents and patient advocates of the children at the hospital to share testimonial videos. So we went into the families’ for the kiddos, into the house, and we just had them share what it was like to receive care at the hospital that we were promoting and how it really impacted their life.

And so that was a fun one, because they were well-known influencers and well-known families in the community, and it just brought some, you know, some a humanizing element to the care into the services that the healthcare was providing. It’s always nice to hear about these stories from someone that you might see, like at the grocery store or in the car line pickup at your kid’s school, right? Someone that you know and you can trust. So really having that trusted, authentic voice really helped in that particular campaign.

And then we’ve done other big ones. So we’ve used traditional influencers like you would see selling you something cool from Amazon. We can use them in healthcare as well. So in Tennessee, we did a fun event called Mammos at the Mall. That was like one of my favorite influencer campaigns we’ve done, and we used traditional social influencers, women of the age to be getting mammograms. We contracted them and they took us through their full experience so they would document getting their mammogram, walking us through the steps of scheduling and then going and then the follow up, all of the things.

And it led to a big event at the end of October where we had a mobile mammography bus at the mall, and these influencers invited their followers to come meet them at the mall and get their mammogram same-day. So it was really fun. We had a full event and the influencers were there. They shared like tidbits all leading up through the month of October. And then women could mingle and literally like go get their mammogram same-day, no appointment necessary, which made it extremely convenient as well. 

Jenny: That’s amazing and really takes some of the fear or the hesitancy of self-care away, which is phenomenal. One of my favorite campaigns that we ran here at Hedy & Hopp was actually in collaboration with St. Louis Children’s Hospital. And, what they were trying to do was actually fight back. They did a big consumer study to be able to understand how people perceived the hospital. And overall, people perceived it as, you know, if my child has cancer or they need a transplant, I’m going to Children’s Hospital. Otherwise I’m going to go somewhere else because the parking garage is scary, it’s downtown, all these things. Right? 

So we actually did an influencer campaign with some lead physicians. And so we actually had the physicians, going through and talking about their areas of care. We had one of, actually the marketing person, at the hospital was pregnant. So we followed her through her pregnancy journey, meeting with different physicians.

And it became really interesting because any time there was a new physician or a physician who had openings, we would put them in this series, and within a week their books were full because that’s how much people were really tuning in and engaging with it. So there’s lots of different angles and strategies, whether you’re trying to build consumer trust, trying to really get specific positions or specialty areas name out there, really can be layered with all of these other tactics to have it be a really comprehensive campaign.

But let’s talk about the challenges and the risks of doing influencer marketing, because it’s not exactly the same as on the consumer side, but we have our own set of concerns in health care. 

Marissa: Of course. Yeah. So obviously HIPAA still applies to all of the things that we’re doing, regardless of our campaigns. So generally, if it’s a patient sharing their own testimonial or the parent of a minor sharing their child’s testimonial, as long as you have your consent form and all of your legal paperwork signed, HIPAA is not generally a concern for those particular cases. If we’re having our physicians, like you mentioned, be our influencer, they still have to abide by all of the HIPAA regulations, sharing any sort of patient information or any sort of details like that—no, no. 

And then if they’re being paid. Right. So a lot of the times if we’re using, for instance, Mammos at the Mall, we used traditional influencers who do that for their living. So we did pay them as part of our campaign, as part of our tactic. And that just has to be all documented and disclosed upfront. I would say generally best practices, if it is a patient testimonial or like a, patient advocate testimonial, paid is probably not the best practice there. Like, you want those to be genuine and authentic and you would like them to come provide those without compensation.

So I would just kind of keep that in mind for payment. But yeah, all of those compliance regulations still remain. 

Jenny: Great point. Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about best practices when you’re developing the strategy or implementing an influencer campaign, what are some of your thoughts? 

Marissa: Well, you know I think like number one best practice to me would be vetting and making sure that we’re selecting influencers that are aligned with our brand’s vision and mission and values. Right. Like you don’t want someone who has posted or is posting on their social feed about things or services that you don’t agree with or align with. And I think that also just kind of kills the reputability of the campaign, right? You want someone who is in line with your brand and your brand voice. So I think that’s important.

I think it’s also important to make sure that they stay authentic, that they’re sharing their own version of the story, or they’re sharing their own version of the services. So for, going back to like the Mammos at the Mall, we of course give them some talking points because at the end of the day, it is still our marketing campaign, right?

Like we still have to have consistent messaging and we have a story that we want to share through them. So we did provide talking points, which I think is fine, but as long as they’re sharing these things through their own voice and through their own filter, I think that that keeps it authentic while still sharing your message that you want to convey.

Jenny: Absolutely. And one other thing that I would share, based off a different influencer campaign that we ran, is we are working with a system, and they had a specific doctor, a physician, an employee physician that they wanted to promote. And a couple of months into the campaign, that physician, two things happened: First, they said some really negative things online on their personal account, but then they ended up leaving the system.

And the system did not diversify and have multiple faces out front. So when you’re thinking about building the strategy and number one, research, and understand, you know, this person’s behind the scenes and then also diversification, it should never be about one face. It should never be about one person. Because then that makes sure that regardless of what happens and what pivots you have to do in the future, you’ll have that ability to do so.

Marissa: Yeah. Totally agree. Great points, great points. 

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for tuning in today, folks. We hope that if you are considering an influencer campaign, this gave you a couple of different campaign ideas or ways that you could perhaps structure it for your organization. If you want to talk, shop and brainstorm, give us a call. We’d love to chat. We have lots of other examples of successful things that have been done, both on the patient and on the employer brand side. Influencer marketing is a fabulous thing to layer into a campaign to make sure it’s successful. 

Marissa: Yep, it was great having me. Thank you. 

Jenny: Yeah, thanks so much for tuning in today, everybody. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to chat about another topic that is kind of similar to last week’s episode. So last week we talked a little bit about the benefits of focusing on your own professional approach and content strategy on LinkedIn. Why is that worth your energy as a health care marketer? I received so many DMs and messages from folks that really it inspired them to start creating additional content that I wanted to do another content piece that would focus a little bit on how you can continue to build out your own presence as a health care marketer through the lens of building, you know, your own professional credibility.

So first big caveat: If you’re listening to this on Spotify or on another podcast platform and you don’t have video, you’re not going to get the full effect of this episode. I strongly recommend that you watch the YouTube version or the video version that’s available on Spotify. If you have to do audio only, totally fine, but there are going to be quite a few things I’m going to be visually referencing.

So let’s get with it. So today we’re going to be focusing on and talking about how you can show up your best through video conferences. So Zoom, we all spend so many hours on Zoom. A big percentage of our clients on the provider side, whether they are at a large multistate hospital system or, you know, a ten location, ten location orthopedic practice—a lot of folks are still working from home at least multiple days a week, and even when they do go into the office, they’re still having to do quite a few video calls. So I’m going to talk a little bit about the power of your background on Zoom. It’s the number one thing I get comments on, and I want first for you to see the backdrop.

It feels not as exciting as it normally does. Right? For those of you that are used to seeing me, come on here with joy in my background, you can see it feels a little flat right now, right? So I’m really excited to share with you a little before and after. So, here’s before. And here’s after. It feels a lot more alive, right? 

Three small changes: Lights in the background, candle, and of course, the famous neon sign. So I have a brand to represent, right? I own the company. I have the podcast, so I’m recording often. But there’s a brand that you’re developing visually every single time that you hop on a video call. Whether you realize it or not, it’s absolutely happening.

So I have a LinkedIn post that is one of my most popular LinkedIn posts I’ve ever done that provides some tips and tricks to make your backdrop a lot more appealing—regardless of where you are or how much money you have to spend on it. 

So let’s go through a couple of different ideas. First, lighting. Lighting is so important. I’m recording this episode right now and it’s about 4:30 in the afternoon, so light is coming in from different places. But I have my nice fancy little remote. I’m going to play a little bit with the blinds and show you how completely different lighting can look, whenever you’re opening or closing natural light around you. Then I also have a lamp that I can turn on that again, like so orange. So we’re going to kill that right away. That one’s not doing me any favors. And then whenever this blind is up, it just is too much light, right? It’s too much. So wherever you are, spend some time playing with the window coverings, the back lighting. I have a second screen that always has something white on it, so it’s almost like that ring light effect.

So if you are in an office building and you don’t have access to natural light by setting up your second camera or, sorry, second monitor to have something that has white on it, like your email inbox, even—anything that you need, if it’s not distractive, fine. But it’s white so it really can help kind of have that nice lighting effect.

Another thing you’ll notice that I do in my background that I always recommend for people is I have a lot of depth visually. It’s a lot of visual interest. So I have the ability to do this because I’m actually in a sunroom. I have an entire room that I was able to decorate. So I added lights with depth.

I have a candle with depth light, the neon sign. I have plants at different heights and in different sizes, all around me. And that provides quite a bit of depth. You can do the same thing, even if you have a flat wall behind you, by putting frames at different sizes, different height, maybe putting a short table, over to the side and a plant, to be able to provide, additional depth, of visual interest. You know, as you’re on a Zoom. So definitely thinking about how you can play with depth. 

Another thing you really want to focus on is camera location. So I see folks all of the time looking like this when they’re on Zooms. And I’m looking at my second monitor right now. So they must have their video over here, but their actual video that they’re recording that’s actually picking them up for folks that are on the other side of the Zoom or on the other monitor. That’s a pretty bad experience if you’re chatting with somebody like this, because it’s more difficult to read their facial expressions, and it feels less engaging than if I’m actually looking at the camera and chatting with you face to face, right? So you want to make sure that wherever your camera is, that is the screen that you are looking at.

Let’s talk a little bit about camera height. Everybody’s been on a Zoom call where somebody—let me get my monitor, my thing—where somebody was on a video that was like this right way to high, kind of looking down at them. Definitely, difficult or sometimes even, like where it’s down like this and too low. And it’s very difficult.

I have a little stand mine is on, so I have the ability to move it around a little bit if I want. But definitely play around with height because you want it to definitely feel almost like somebody sitting across the table from you and not looking up at you or looking down at you. You want it to be very inviting to be on a call with you and participating in that way.

If you can’t move your laptop, you can actually set up your phone as an alternate camera. Or you can buy one of those little camera plugins that they offer now to be able to, like, drop the line of sight down. If, for example, you need to look over to your second screen for any reason, you can do that and still be engaging with the content.

Another tip is clean your camera! Here, I’m going to go ahead and do it with mine while we’re talking. Clean your camera! So many people—this is the number one tip I give people for photography, as well: Clean your lens. It is crazy how much natural oil gets on your lens. And whenever that happens, it starts being hazy.

The picture isn’t quite as crisp, and when you’re hopping on Zooms and trying to have a professional polished conversation, as a marketer, you want to make sure that your image is crisp and you’re showing up the best. The internet connection is already going to do you dirty by messing up the clearness of your imagery. So at least make sure that your camera is clean.

I usually keep, either I use my hand like I just did, or keep a nice terrycloth or something that won’t scratch your lens in your desk drawer to clean it, at the beginning every day or whenever you touch it accidentally as you’re opening up your laptop. Always important to keep it clean.

A couple of additional things to think about as you’re designing your space is really thinking about color contrast. You can see I have some really bright things and then some dark things, and I really mix it up. I have art over to the side. It’s actually our Artist in Residence. So I get to highlight their work a little bit. So, you don’t want everything to be one color. And I typically see this whenever people are sitting in, like, a spare bedroom and they’re up against a white wall. And everything is one monotone color. So, thinking about ways that you can transform that, whether it is something, you know, inexpensive and easy, like peel and stick wallpaper to add some visual interest, or perhaps some framed art or photos, even some sophisticated looking posters. There’s really a lot of things you can do with creativity. And as marketers, we should excel at this, right?

So thinking how you can turn something—a corner of your house, or an office area that you have to use for Zoom calls—into something that shows a little bit more personality that’s going to be your spot where you’re going to record regularly, it’s worth putting in, you know, a little bit of time to brainstorm that. 

A couple of other things that I wanted to point out is I always have at least a jacket or a blazer or something readily accessible. I am very casual most of the time. People know that. I am a big proponent of always wanting to be yourself, really show up in a way that is genuine to you. But, you know, sometimes you gotta dress up a little bit. So having layers or things that you can throw on, especially whenever you have back to back meetings, can really be helpful.

So, hopefully this was helpful. I definitely know that as marketers we juggle so much, and for many of you, this is probably the last thing that you want to think about. But a lot of you are probably on many meetings and Zooms with people in your organization, with leaders within your organizations, you definitely want to take time to show up as your best self.

So have fun: Make sure that the way you’re showing up represents the brand and the personality that you want them to remember. And I’m always happy to answer any questions. Share your background with me! I’d love on socials, to take a snapshot of your socials and share it with me or—of your background—and share it with me on socials. I’d love to see what you design. 

So until next week, thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. Hopefully you will have fun designing your space. Cheers!https://youtu.be/KfFPqGtLy8I

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a health care marketing podcast. I’m your host Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m so excited to have with me today Nicole Knight. She is the marketing and communications manager at Virginia Heart, and I 1,000% bullied her to be on today’s episode. So thank you, Nicole, for joining me today.

Nicole: Thank you for having me.

Jenny: So Nicole and I connected through SHSMD. We were both posting on the forums and then we connected on LinkedIn, and we’re going to hop on this call just to do a little bit of networking, getting to know other people in the industry. And we started talking a little bit about the value of LinkedIn.

And I told Nicole that to build her professional network, she should start posting regularly on LinkedIn. And she said, “Why? That sounds ridiculous.” And I said, “This is a podcast. We’re going to start recording.” So thank you, Nicole, because people have this question, they want to know, like, why should I post on LinkedIn? Shouldn’t I just post for my employer?

So if you are an employee in house and even wondering if LinkedIn is worth your time as an individual, this episode’s for you. So Nicole, talk to me about your LinkedIn journey so far.

Nicole: I don’t post, but I do connect with people. I read other people’s posts. Sometimes I’ll comment. I do a lot of liking. But no, I am recluse on LinkedIn. So I’m one of those silent watchers.

Jenny: And what I think is amazing about this is you actually are quite successful at building out your, employer’s and clients’ social media accounts. You were telling me that one doctor has over a million views for some of the work that you’ve done.

Nicole: Yeah. And I really, I think that some, you know, social media is huge in building your own business and building your brand and your reputation.

And I think it’s a really powerful way to connect with people on a more casual, you know, face to face level. They feel like they’re actually talking to you, especially if you make those videos and the reels, of a doctor explaining something. So I think it’s really powerful. I just don’t want to do it for myself.

But, I think, you know, makes sense if that’s what you think.

Jenny: You’re open to the idea.

Nicole: Yes.

Jenny: But you hate it.

Nicole: Yes. Hate it, absolutely.

Jenny: I think you’re very representative of most marketers that I chat with that are in house. Most of them think exactly the way that you do. So this is going to be a fun episode.

So let’s step back a little bit. One of the things that I like to tell people, because if you go on my LinkedIn profile, you can see I post all of the time. I comment on other people’s stuff all of the time. I engage with other people all of the time, and I am more of an extrovert, so I get joy and like at the human level by doing it.

But I also do it because that’s the way to stay top of mind and build out my network. So, if you’re an in-house professional, you should be doing this because one of the things like if you look at the studies about how long people stay in their roles in marketing, it’s on average, what, like three years, maybe four years.

So people are changing positions really often and, the job market at this moment is extremely inundated, of people trying to submit for open positions. A lot of positions are filled simply by, networking. And LinkedIn is really the new version of networking. Even if you’re not looking for a new opportunity, right? Just building your network of like-minded individuals can be your own little community to be able to talk shop, so you can talk about and build networks for people that do similar work around the country. You know, idea-share. When you go to a conference, there’s lots of familiar faces. So, definitely a positive across the board.

So, Nicole, let’s chat a little bit about your posting because I challenged you that I think in order to build your personal, professional reputation as a human—not the great work that you’ve done, but just for Nicole—I think you should start posting once a week with a goal of engaging in other people’s posts daily—whether that’s a comment, or whatever on somebody else’s posts.

So tell me, first of all, tell our listeners how you feel about that.

Nicole: I don’t know what I’m going to say. I feel like it’s super uncomfortable. I do think that I am more of an extrovert when I’m talking to people one on one, or if I’m at an event or if I’m somewhere like that. But online where everyone is watching you feels super daunting. And it lives on the internet forever, so …

Jenny: True. Yes, it does.

Nicole: Yeah. So it just feels like a bigger audience. I don’t necessarily want to be on stage, so …

Jenny: All of that is fair. What I recommend marketers do when they’re in your situation, Nicole, is to take a step back and kind of think about the work that you do and what you’re passionate to talk about, like, what are the things that you bug your family about?

You tell them you’re so excited about the work that you’ve done or the results that you’ve done, or something new that you’ve learned. If you’re so excited that you’re talking about it to people outside of your immediate work group, that’s the kind of stuff that you want to talk about.

So, for me, for example, at Hedy & Hopp, I’ve really stepped back, and created kind of my own content strategy and approach about the things that I like talking about and the things that I will not talk about.

So I talk just a little bit about my personal life—only when it’s relevant to work. So if I do a personal trip that bleeds into work, or if I do, like I log off, or something like, something that really impacts like the day-to-day of my work. On my personal life, I’ll chat about it, but I don’t talk too heavily about my personal life on LinkedIn.

Other people talk really heavily about their personal life, and they’re totally comfortable with this. That’s a barometer that you can kind of set yourself. But for content, trends and themes, I have a couple of topics that I think, I’m pretty great at talking about, like compliance, analytics, media strategies, kind of the more technical aspects of marketing are things that I really enjoy talking about.

So you can just kind of look at your own experience and work that you do, and kind of think about all of the things that get you excited to talk about, and that can be where you start building out some of your content, thought-starters.

Nicole: Yeah, no, I know I feel like my brain is moving a million miles a minute. I don’t know where I would start. It’s so daunting.

Jenny: Well, one idea is, as you’re thinking about how you’re creating content, you know, at Virginia Heart and as you’re creating content around for all of these physicians, what are the questions you ask them? You know, what if you created content that would guide marketers that are doing roles similar to yours across the country about how you do what you do, because you’re clearly excellent at it.

Nicole: Oh, thank you. No, I think that’s a great idea. I think the relationships you build with the physicians that you’re representing is so huge. And if you, you know, create those good relationships, I think it helps you do your job better because I’m not the one actually providing the care. To be honest, I don’t know anything about the care that’s being provided if I don’t learn from the doctors, you know? So even if I’m trying to make a media appearance, you know, the doctors need to tell me what’s coming up. Because if I Google something, it’s already in the news, so it has to be something that they know.

Jenny: That is such a great point. And that is your first post right there. That’s an excellent example: the value of building relationships with physicians.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: Right. What that looks like, how you structure it, how you approach it, like that’s really meaningful, helpful content for somebody—like if you think about yourself 5 or 10 years ago in the industry, what are things that you wish somebody would have helped you with or guided you on? And those are great, usually content thought-starters.

Nicole: Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are afraid of doctors, you know, and they’re afraid of working with them. And it’s always, I just don’t feel that way. I don’t know, I just think that they’re humans and really smart people, and I’ve always liked to be around people that are smarter than me.

Jenny: Absolutely. Same. Same.

Nicole: Being in a room with a bunch of people that know way more than you know. I think that’s awesome.

Jenny: I completely agree. I love being the dumbest person in the room because I know I’m going to walk out learning a handful of things every time.

Nicole: Yeah. Me too. I feel that way all the time.

Jenny: Yep, absolutely. One of the things that I have found really valuable in building out my professional network over the last 20 years is whenever I do connect with somebody online and it is, it seems meaningful or it seems like there’s a shared connection, I’ll reach out to them to do a virtual coffee, even just like 15 minutes, or see if they’re going to a conference that I’m going to in the fall and and try to sync up with ZERO expectations.

Right. It’s always about like, how can I help them, not, or provide value to them—not like, how will it ever benefit me? It’s always the long game of just like being a good human and eventually something positive will come back, whether it’s from them or not, just like the universe will pay you back in that. And I can tell you already have that philosophy because you reached out, you know, to chat. So kind of continuing that to build out your professional network is a great direction to go.

Nicole: Yeah. No, I, I love talking to other people who are doing similar things or maybe something different than what I’m doing, because I feel like sometimes I get I get stuck in my own little silo of what I’m doing every single day.

And, it’s nice to hear what other people are doing and what they’re thinking about, because then that kind of helps me take a step back and be like, oh, what if we do something different? You know?

Jenny: Absolutely. It’s phenomenal you view it that way. So many people can get, like, defensive or stuck in their ways. That’s absolutely, you know, a great way to view it.

Nicole: Yeah I feel like I just take the mentality that I’d rather be a lifelong learner, you know, and you could always do something different or better. And I don’t think that there’s any right way to do certain things, you know.

Jenny: That actually is a really good point about one of the reasons I like LinkedIn. So I know quite a few people that hate LinkedIn or like it’s so spammy and it’s like, that’s why you have to curate your feed.

You have to literally go seek out people that you respect in the real world and go follow them on LinkedIn and then unfollow those people that are creating spammy posts.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: Just spend like a week or two every day consistently, like unfollowing people or adding new people to your feed. And then every time you log on to your feed, it’s actually something super inspirational and curated for you.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: So it’s a way more positive experience. Like mine at this point is successful, powerhouse healthcare marketers across the country—in house and agency, and it’s so inspiring to follow them. And a lot of compliance attorneys who write very long, dry posts. But it’s very helpful information.

Nicole: That is definitely my weakness, is compliance. It’s so, you know, technical.

Jenny: It is you definitely have to be, dedicated to learning the craft, so …

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: We’ve put a lot of time and energy and learning and then creating content that I share a lot on LinkedIn. You know, and other people kind of deepen their skill sets and understanding in the area.

Nicole: So do you think it’s not, you can’t just comment on people’s posts—you have to make your own posts too?

Jenny: Yes, you can start by commenting on other people’s posts, like build up a little bit of muscle around there, but you absolutely have to be a content creator.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: I know, I know.

Nicole: And I love to do it under someone else’s name. A ghost Instagram, right?

Jenny: But you’re the one that deserves the credit. In our conversation, all of the really cool things that you’ve done with your career and with your healthcare marketing skills are so impressive. You know, putting those out there for the world to see and building up your own reputation is something that nobody can ever take away from you. Like, I tell this to people younger in their career all of the time, like it does not matter how happy you are at your current position and if you think you want to stay there forever, you have to always be investing in your own reputation in the industry because life changes, everything changes.

And so, at Hedy & Hopp, for example, we invite all of our team members to participate in the podcast. I want their individual reputations to be phenomenal, so they have all the career advancement opportunities, you know, that they may ever want in the future. So you really have to take control over that yourself because regardless of what you want to do, you know, it will help make sure that every door is open for you.

Nicole: Yeah. It’s so daunting. I feel like I, I see people post all the time and even people don’t get that many likes or comments. And I’m just like, that is so scary and I think you’re amazing for doing it. But oh my gosh, I can’t, I don’t know. It’s like, you know, when Instagram first started and you didn’t really care if you got that many likes? Do you remember that?

Jenny: Yes, I do. Girl, I remember MySpace! I’m old, Nicole!

Nicole: I had MySpace, too. But I, you know, you didn’t really care. You would post these things with, like, the weird sepia filter, and it was just like your burger or your fries, and it was like the most ugly picture. And you didn’t care what people wrote or liked. And there were probably five, ten likes.

Now it’s like if you don’t get 100 likes, you’re like, oh, is that bad? Should I have posted that? And I’ve just recently started to not care anymore. I’m like, you know what? Whatever. It’s my life. And I’m also on private, so it’s all just my friends, but I feel like, you know, LinkedIn is so public and it’s to all these professional people and maybe they know more than I do, or they think that what I’m posting is wrong …
Jenny: That’s what’s called imposter syndrome.

Nicole: I know.

Jenny: No, you got to shake that imposter syndrome off. You are in the trenches doing the work. You have valuable things to say. So there will always be people that know more than you, always. But that should not stop you from posting, because they are always going to be way more people that are interested in what you have to say.

And right now is such an interesting time on LinkedIn. Like, you can post content and truly become a thought leader in like less than six months or a year with regular content updates. But to start, it’s progress over perfection. You do not have to worry about the number of likes or comments that you have, but by engaging with other people’s content, that is absolutely how you’ll get more engagement on yours.

Nicole: Right.

Jenny: So it’s like a nice cycle.

Nicole: Yeah. Because the algorithm kind of drives those comments and posts and things to other people’s pages, and then they come back to yours.

Jenny: Absolutely. Yep, yep. And then it keeps you top of mind, as well, because they’ll all see that you commented on their notifications. And so it just is a really nice, like, ecosystem cycle.

Nicole: Yeah. Ugh, I know I read other people’s stuff. It’s just so hard.

Jenny: Well, Nicole, I have faith. I think this podcast is going to be an awesome first post for you when it goes live. And then I really look forward to staying in touch with you and seeing what you do, as far as building your engagement, proactively looking people up on LinkedIn and connecting with them. Like if people are saying smart things in the industry and you see that on like a publication or a forum or whatever, like look them up and follow them and see what they’re saying in other places, and just use it as a platform to continue your own learning within this industry in a way that you can control it.

Nicole: Yeah. No, I think that’s really, really good advice and valuable skill to take forward and kind of force myself out of my shell. And I guess we’ll see what happens. So how long do I do this for? Forever?

Jenny: Forever! So Nicole, what I recommend—do this for six months or even shorter between now and the end of the calendar year.

Make a challenge for yourself between now and the end of 2025 that you’re going to do one post a day, or, sorry, one post a week, and then one engagement a day, or whatever cadence you want to commit to. You set that for yourself. Do it through the end of the calendar year. And then as you go into 2026, take a step back and say, like, what did I get from this?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: How much time did I put into it? Did I get that amount of value back? And then you can decide for yourself if it’s something you want to continue or not.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: Every year I do that and I always am like, yes, I’m going to do even more because it has been extremely fruitful for me. So I’m excited for you to do it and see what it does.

Nicole: How often do you post?

Jenny: At least weekly, Sometimes multiple times a week.

Nicole: Wow. And do you—do ideas just pop into your head, or do you have to brainstorm and really think about what you’re going to say?

Jenny: So ideas. I am always looking at content, like trying to find content—that’s just the way that my brain works. I am, like an idea generator, so, just ask my team. So always throwing new ideas on top of it. But that’s the way my brain works. So I always, have my phone with my notes app or my notepad with me, and I write ideas down. Then I always have it to go back to, but often the ideas that I spent the least amount of time planning, usually that I literally took the picture, wrote the post and did it on my phone get the highest engagement because people aren’t looking for super polished stuff on LinkedIn.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: They want real stuff. They want something they can relate to.

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: So those are the posts that I always find do the best. So I don’t spend a ton of time doing content strategy—Hedy & Hopp does as a brand …

Nicole: Right.

Jenny: And people at Hedy & Hopp do that. But like for my own personal one, it very much is just like, what are people talking about?

What is trending? What is bothering me in the industry?

Nicole: Yeah.

Jenny: Or how can I add an interesting POV based off of my own lens of how I see the world.

Nicole: And you don’t always add a photo, right? You just—sometimes it’s just your thoughts.

Jenny: Sometimes it’s just my thoughts. Usually you get way better engagement if you have a photo or a link, something that gives, a visual like enhancement to the post. So I almost always put a photo in.

Nicole: Oh you do? Okay.

Jenny: Almost always. Mmhmm.

Nicole: Wow. Okay.

Jenny: Yep.

Nicole: All right. Well, this will be interesting. I will report back.

Jenny: I love it. Well thank you, Nicole. And thank you for listeners. Hopefully if you are an in-house health care marketer and you’ve been kind of thinking about the pros and cons of spending more of your day on LinkedIn or just generally building your online reputation for your individual professional brand, even if it’s platform agnostic, hopefully this was helpful to you.

We’ve done episodes in the past talking about the value of submitting for and winning awards for your work, as well as the value of speaking at conferences and building out your professional reputation that way. So you can go back and give those episodes a listen. We are going to link to Nicole’s LinkedIn in our show notes, so if you’d like to connect with her and watch her posting journey, she would absolutely love that.

And just thank you so much for tuning in today. We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!