Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host today. And I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am super excited to have with me today, Sarah Zajicek. She is our copywriter and content editor, and she specializes in working with our practice marketing clients.

And we were talking about the topics that are trending with our clients, with the prospects that are coming in the door. And a lot of folks really are getting back to the basics, right. There’s all of these shiny objects that have kind of stolen people’s attention over the last couple of years, and in 2025, we really feel like it is an area of focus for marketers to get back to the basics.

So we wanted to do a multi-part part series on high-performing content. So today Sarah and I are going to talk about creating high-performing website content, and then I’m going to be joined with Haily Bartlett, our senior art director next week. And we’re going to talk about creating high-performing creative. So welcome, Sarah. We’re excited to have you on.

Sarah: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Jenny: So talk to me a little bit about your role at Hedy & Hopp. 

Sarah: Sure. So, primarily, right now I am writing website copy. I’m also editing that website copy. Primarily for our practice marketing clients. And these are clients that have private practices, or multi-location practices, usually under ten locations across the country.

And in that website copy, I am laying the foundation for strong SEO. So I work hand in hand with our SEO strategists, make sure that the copy is compliant with SEO standards and that we are also implementing those SEO keywords throughout the copy to help our practice marketing clients rank well on Google and Bing.

Jenny: Very nice. And also, I know that you and your team have implemented a lot of GEO content strategies as well. We’ve covered that on a lot of prior episodes, so we may sprinkle a little bit of that in on today’s episode. But definitely a fast-moving target. So talk to me a little bit about why content matters on the website, because I feel like lots of folks at conferences talk about how 50% of Google searches end up being zero click, meaning the answer to their question is found within the visible search results, whether it’s the practices phone number or a summary of services provided or the location.

So 50% of people don’t even need to click through to the website. So why does it still matter to focus on having high-performing website content? 

Sarah: Absolutely. So like I said before, high-performing content sort of lays the foundation for your SEO and also your AIO and your GEP. So, so having that content there helps drive organic traffic to your website, although you may not be seeing the clicks.

If you are structuring your content correctly and really trying to hit for those, AI overviews or general search options, you’re going to provide the users with the resources that they need to be able to contact you in the future and eventually convert into those new patients. So the relationship between your content and users, finding your contact information, and eventually finding their way to you, really go hand in hand.

Jenny: Absolutely. So, thinking specifically about our practice marketing client. So again, think about like an orthopedic group with eight locations across the state. If I was thinking about rebuilding a website for them, where would you start? When you’re thinking about content, you know, throw out their current website. Imagine you have to completely start from scratch. How would you start imagining the site architecture?

Sarah: Absolutely. So when it comes to the site architecture, you really want to lay things out in a way that your search engines are going to be crawling your site. A lot of this has to do with headings on your website, making sure that you’re heading tags are implemented correctly. Also, the way that your paragraphs are structured, you want to use short sentences.

Paragraphs that are pretty to the point, easy for not only the user to scan and read, but also for the search engines to scan and read. But you also want to be having those calls to action on your site, and you want them prominent not only for the user, but for those search engines, AIOs and whatever generated search engines that your users may be using or potential patients may be using to be able to find that call out information so you can convert more often.

Jenny: Yeah, that’s a really great point. Talk to me about length of content because in this industry it’s a pendulum, right? I feel like at one point everybody says, oh, it has to be long form content, like a thousand words per pages, and the pendulum swings to the other side and they say, oh, no. For a smaller practice, let’s do like one long landing page where everything’s on one page.

You know, people don’t have to navigate and click around. What is your team seeing as the best practice right now as far as serving the most ideal experience to the patient and those platforms like the search engines and GEO tools. 

Sarah: That is such a great question. So I think there really needs to be a balance. Typically with SEO standards, you do want to see some pages of longer form content.

Blogs, typically 750 to 1200 words. Those are really what the search engines rank as what we call authoritative content. So authoritative content is content that pretty much self-explanatory, drives authority. It helps the users know that you know what you’re talking about, and it helps the search engines know that you are credible as a resource. So when it comes to blogs on your website, I feel like that’s where the longer form content should come in, provide useful information to the user while creating that credibility and authority for the search engines to help rank your website as a higher ranking than other websites that may not be as resourceful for the users that are online.

When it comes to your main content. It should be shorter form. They say a typical page, about 500 words, is all you need in order to capture your user’s attention, and also the search engines attention for users to find you. Something that’s really quick and scannable. Lots of subheadings so users can find what they need on the page quickly.

And under those subheadings, I feel again short paragraphs, snappy sentences. A lot of bulleted lists have been favored by AIOs and generative search options just because they’re quick to scan, easy to read, easy to process. When it comes to those main pages, easy to process is the way to go. 

Jenny: Absolutely. That is such a good point.

And, I know something that we often have to educate our clients about. Also, is reading level, the way that you write that content. Right? Because physicians, especially if we’re working directly with the physicians or clinicians within the organization, they have much larger vocabularies than your average patient, right. So thinking about like, what grade level are we going to be writing our content at and really thinking about maybe like a fifth grade or so grade level, is really great, both for making sure that your content is easy to understand, but also making sure the vocabulary you use is actually what people are searching.

I remember whenever we were doing a big content program for a client a few years ago, we were working on the cardiology services section of the hospital’s website, and the cardiologist, the head of cardiology, hated the fact that we use the phrase heart doctor over and over, but that’s literally how people were searching for cardiologists on Google is heart doctor.

They didn’t know the word or didn’t know how to spell the word cardiologist, which may seem so weird to doctors when that is the name of their profession. But really understanding, you know what? How are people actually searching for these providers and making sure that we use the language that is approachable and understandable to them? 

Sarah: Absolutely. And that’s where the SEO and keyword research portion fits into our content is you do want to make sure that you’re hitting the right audiences at the right time by speaking their language, and a lot of times that does mean using some terms that our physicians or our practices may not typically favor but we do explain to them that, you know, some of these terms, like heart doctor for a cardiologist or, shoulder surgery instead of shoulder replacement. Some of these things, although they seem a little more elementary, it is just colloquial for the average person, and it’s what the average person would say and typically search for. So we do try to write, typically a sixth-grade reading level, for all of our clients.

And we try to also make sure that all of the content aligns with their values and their brand as a whole. Although content primarily serves a function for making sure that your users are informed and making sure that you rank well on search engines, a lot of it also has to do with your brand voice, and making sure that you’re clients and your patients know who you are, and that you understand that they need help and that you’re here for them.

Jenny: That is such a great point, and something that I feel like our practice clients often overlook. When you’re at a health system and you have a marketing team of 30, you have your brand tone defined. You know, the vocabulary that you use. You know the tone, you know, key messaging for your organization, whether you have it or you’re, you know, in the process of refining it, something exists.

A lot of our practices that we work with haven’t even thought about that. So, how do you help a practice really figure out brand tone? And then what’s an example? Perhaps if you can think of one of, you know, a way that a brand can really show up in a, you know, a certain way and really showcase their brand through the language they use?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that I do when trying to help a practice figure out who they are and what they want to exude in their website is really just go through some adjectives with them. Do you want to be warm and compassionate? Do you want to be family-friendly or would you rather be more professional? More technical?

Definitely more medical. And that is the preference of the client. And we can go either way, and we’re happy to accommodate in either direction. I will say a majority of our practice clients tend to lean towards a warm, compassionate, family-friendly tone. Just because, again, with medical practices specifically, I think the goal is to make sure that the patients know that we are there for them and we want to help them in any way we can, and in guiding practices to helping develop that voice for themselves.

I think the best way to do that is just talk to the doctor, talk to you, the owner of the practice, talk to some of the employees and see where their core values lie. And once you find that and sort of have a conversation about where they want to go and what direction they want to go in, sometimes those things just sort of flow naturally.

Jenny: I love that. Well, Sarah, to wrap us up, I’d love to hear from your perspective some common pitfalls that we see practices fall into whenever they’re beginning to think about their website content. What are some things that we’ve seen frequently that perhaps are myths or things that people think is important to do within content, but definitely are pitfalls, and we should stay away from them?

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Like we said before, I think avoiding a lot of jargon, avoiding a lot of technical language, and really avoiding a lot of fluff, people that are coming to your website, yes, they do want to know you as a practice, but they they also want to get their answers, if they have any questions about a condition that they have or treatment that you offer, be as informative as possible and make sure that every piece of content that you have on your website truly has a purpose.

Whether that’s informing the reader about a service that you offer or a new surgery that one of your surgeons is starting to, implement at your practice, or even if it’s just an event that you’re holding a community event that you want others to participate in, make sure that everything that you’re publishing really has a purpose for the reader.

And in terms of SEO, just don’t stuff with keywords. I know can be hard to implement your keywords to rank well on SEO, but using them too often or adding them too many times can make things sound unnatural. And when things don’t sound natural, people aren’t going to respond to it well, and search engines aren’t going to respond to it well either.

Jenny: That’s such a great point, Sarah. So, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this is really helpful as just, overview and refresher for folks that are perhaps heading into a website rebuild process and are starting to think about the way that they want their organization to show up. At Hedy & Hopp, note that all of our clients are onboard with something that we call the foundation package.

And so all of our practice clients get two things in the foundation package. They get first compliant web analytics. So we set you up with a analytics platform that is fully compliant so you don’t have to worry about all of those compliance topics we talk about on here so often. And then also we go through a messaging framework and help you understand those key things Sara was talking about.

About how do you want to show up? How do you want to be perceived? And then, who are you targeting and what are the key areas of focus you want to talk about with your organization? So those things then serve as the North Star for all of the complete campaigns we run for you, whether it is designing and building a new website or activating something on a marketing services side to be able to actually drive new patients through your door.

So, thank you again for joining us. Listeners. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of our series, where we’re going to talk about high-performing creative. Be sure to like and share this episode with any of your coworkers who you think would benefit from the information, and we will see you next week. 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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have with me our very own Kristen Weidman. She’s our project management lead, and she’s joining us today to talk about a topic that seems to be coming up in every single prospect and client conversation we have, and that is, GEO or AI and the huge impact and change of behavior we’re seeing on search.

But today, Kristin and I are specifically going to talk about reputation management effect on SEO and GEO. So, Kristen, welcome. 

Kristin: Thank you so much for having me, Jenny. 

Jenny: Yeah. Let’s start off by having you share a little bit about why reputation management matters. And I feel like that’s one of those things that conceptually, we all know it matters, but we talk to organizations time and time again that perhaps they’re spending lots of money on paid media or some other patient acquisition activity, and they’re not paying as much attention to reputation management.

So share it, if you will. A little bit about why it matters for organizations to be shining a spotlight on it.

Kristin: It is a great question. And obviously all of these other things are wonderful to invest your time and money into, but something that is can be invaluable and is something that you can’t necessarily buy, but is something that can be put into words as your reputation.

How do you treat your patients? Is your doctor really fast and really knowledgeable? Are the consumers looking for someone who is more family-oriented, who has bright colors on their walls? So when it comes to healthcare, it’s a lot about how consumers are what kind. So not just the keywords that consumers are searching for, but what types of healthcare professionals and facilities that they’re searching for.

And how does that align with your brand? 

Jenny: So absolutely, in fact, there was a study that came out earlier this year that actually showed that over half of all adults do research through the lens of reputation management. So whether it is listings like Google listings, looking at reviews or checking out social media profiles before actually reaching out to a practice to even schedule an appointment.

So this is pre-work that people are doing before you even talk to them. 

Kristin: Yes. 

Jenny: Let’s talk a little bit about the EEAT concept. Tell me how it fits into reputation management and how it’s applied.

EEAT is what Google is now using to, to determine their rankings. So how your website and how your listing rank on a Google search.

So E stands for experience. The second E stands for expertise. The third stands for authoritativeness, and the fourth stands for trustworthiness. Now, reputation management. So the information about your business, how consumers are feeling about your business applies to both the authoritativeness that you have in the space and obviously your trustworthiness. And who you are as, as a facility or as a provider.

And as that stands, again, that affects how you show up in search results.

Jenny: So, absolutely. As we’re thinking about, our clients and as they began leaning into SEO and GEO, which just to clarify, the abbreviation, GEO stands for generative engine optimization. We also have seen the term AIO (artificial intelligence optimization). And we are leaning more as an industry more towards GEO. So you’ll see us using that term more than AIO.

But let’s talk a little bit about when organizations engage with us for SEO and GEO. What are their goals? 

Kristin: So the three that I think make the most sense when you talk about reputation management are appearing in the map pack or the local pack. And what that is, is, the map, the three different, the three top locations or providers that show up, that are actual locations and listings on Google and then or they’re looking to be recommended by or be the recommended businesses by Siri or by Alexa or anything else that is powered by some of those AI.

AI programs. And then you want to earn more traffic via AI overviews or being on the first page of Google and those, I overviews is going to be your GEO. And more traditionally the first page of search results as SEO. 

Jenny: Absolutely. And I think just to share an interesting trend, we’ve talked about this on prior episodes, but we’ve seen a lot of our clients really starting to lose some of those long tail keywords.

So if you think about the evolution of SEO, it used to be, for example, for an orthopedic group, we would be targeting, kind of higher up in the intent search funnel phrases. So for example, like sharp knee pain on outside of knee. So maybe if they’re like trying to diagnose themselves or learn more about something research research-oriented.

It used to be that for SEO, all of these local groups would be trying to rank for that. Now because of GEO. Usually it’s going to be like a Cleveland Clinic or an organization with really, really high authority. So a lot of our efforts have really shifted for our clients to be more around those action-oriented phrases of like, orthopedic doctor near me or open a patient, open appointments soon, those kind of action-oriented phrases to kind of round it out a little bit.

But let’s talk a little bit about how reviews and review generation strategies can impact all of this. Why does timing matter and what are some key considerations that people need to be thinking about as they’re creating a review generation, a solicitation program? 

Kristin: When you think about review generation, you want authentic reviews, you want detailed reviews, if possible.

The timeliness really matters more across your reputation strategy. And then that signaling to Google on the back end. So what I’m talking about is timing matters. So sending out a review request within a couple of days is going to increase both the rate at which your patients are actually responding. And putting up those reviews and then as well as increases, the signals to Google that you are a consistent, authoritative business and a trustworthy business, and you’re really doing business on a day-to-day basis.

As simple as that. 

Jenny: Yeah. And you nailed a good point there it is about consistency. So it’s not about generating 500 reviews in a month and then sitting dormant for a year. It’s about ongoing continuous improvement and additions of reviews. Let’s talk a little bit about tools and workflows. I know here at Hedy & Hopp we implement a lot of reviews, elicitation tools that our clients already have implemented, whether it be reputation, social climb, the list goes on and on.

For a lot of our clients, though, if they do not yet have one, rater8 is the tool that we have chosen to partner with that we roll out because there’s a lot of really nice integrations and whatnot. Can you talk a little bit in general about tools and workflows? 

Kristin: Yeah. So, there are two different kinds. We call them.

Either they are integrated with your EHR or they are not. So if a system is not integrated with your EHR, that is anything from we will make QR codes that connect to the Google listings and to write a review. And we’ll put that up as a standard. You can put that up in your office at your front desk.

And then, anything that’s not EHR integrated is also any sort of system where you are downloading a report of your patient appointments that showed up and you are sending out, say, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly text or email blast. So those are still effective. You will still get reviews, you will still be authentic and trustworthy. What happens with the EHR integrated is they are typically on a rolling basis.

So let’s say somebody had an appointment yesterday. You can set up a system like rater8 that is connected into your EMR, your system that says great, they have an appointment yesterday, I want this morning at 9 a.m. everyone who had an appointment that was completed yesterday pull them out, shoot them a text this morning at 9 a.m. So that since it’s already top of mind since they just came into your office or facility, then they are more likely to respond.

They’re more likely to have details. I’m definitely not remembering the doctor’s appointment that I went to a month ago, let alone a week ago even. 

Jenny: Totally agree. So on that note, right, we’re setting up a process to continuously ping, can get new reviews and get those added to our profiles online. What happens when you get a bad one or just responding in general?

Like, what are some general philosophies and principles that people should be thinking about as part of the overall process? 

Kristin: So, a common misconception with responding to reviews is that we only respond to four and five-star reviews. That is a big no-no. Just like how you’re yeah, you’re not only, well, just like, oh, in person, you wouldn’t just respond to only positive things I said to you.

This is real life. These are real people’s experiences, typically with your office or your providers. So you are wanting to respond in an approved way. So you want it to be HIPAA compliant. You are not mentioning any other further details about their conditions or treatments that they got during the appointment. So fairly generic. What you can do is you can use some of those SEO keywords that you are looking to come up for.

Oh, so glad you got a fast appointment with our orthopedic doctor. That’s a little more fancy, but in general, you should be responding. Within 48 hours is typically the best marker. And what again, that signifies to Google is this business is active in receiving reviews and seeing patients. This business is also active and holding authority in responding to reviews and patients.

So they are active with an input of a review. And they are, active with an output of responding to that review, as well as just being a trustworthy business of being human and responding. 

Jenny: Absolutely. And Google, and the generative engine platforms clearly see that engagement and responsiveness is a positive indicator for your organization, which helps with ranking.

Kristin: Yes. One fun fact is, I have seen more and more recently that AI overviews are starting to pull from listings and from reviews. So they so if you’re saying what a to an AI, system, like what do you know about my business? And you ask them for the sources they are starting to source review and listing sites.

Jenny: They are. It’s really fascinating. So how about taking it to the next step and actually bringing the reviews into your website? What thoughts do you have about that? I think that is also extremely important and it is another indicator to Google. So in days of old you wanted new content on your website. So whether that be a new blog with your main keywords put in, but also alongside that now are these fresh new reviews from real people so that really underlines the authoritative ness of your site, because you are getting essentially content from a bunch of different individuals from across the internet who are also using the internet, which indicates to Google that you are more and more relevant. 

So it’s all about your relevancy and then you want it can be fresh. It’s user-generated. So that is also something that is a different signal to SEO versus being something that’s authorized by somebody from your actual website. So typically we are putting that into a widget on the website, and then that’s pulled through our system so that you’re getting those reviews in real time.

Jenny: Absolutely. And I think it’s really important to understand how this plays a bigger part in your overall digital ecosystem, because as we’re thinking about generative engine optimization, a lot of folks, you know, have come to us with the assumption that, hey, it’s just, you know, some back end coding tweaks or just some content changes on your website itself.

So, this really is a broader ecosystem strategy to make sure that you’re really, showing up the way that you want to, you know, with the right language, messaging and positioning to be able to continue to push your marketing efforts forward. So, Kristen, if you had to summarize a good takeaway for people as they’re thinking about SEO, GEO, and how reputation all really pulls into it, what would you share with our listeners?

Kristin: I think of reputation management for SEO, GEO or AIO however you want to call that as, free PR so these are real people that are waving their hand and saying, I went to this facility, I loved it, I read it 4 or 5 stars, and it’s basically our version of today’s day and age of word, of mouth advertising.

And not only is that going to help you, your listing alongside your website, your click through rate, your conversions. Really, at the end of the day, Google and really any of these search engines or even any of the AI overviews, all they are wanting to show is the most relevant, reputable search results and information and websites and listings, and they deliver the best experience to their users.

Jenny: Absolutely. Well, listeners, if you have specific questions for us, if you or if you want to chat about your own brand and how you can bring your organization in front of patients more easily, give us a call. We’d love to chat with you. We can chat about reputation management services, SEO, and GEO in addition to all of the other components of your marketing ecosystem.

And thanks listeners for tuning in. We have received a lot of really great content requests from our listeners. So if you have a topic you would like for us to cover in an upcoming episode, shoot us a note. You can reach me directly at jenny@hedyandhopp.com We would love to cover a topic that answers a burning question perhaps you and your team are trying to determine, and with that, please share and like this episode.

Subscribe to be notified of future episode drops and we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Have a great day, friends.

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host and the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m joined today by our very own Mark Brandes Mark is the Director of Data and Technology here at Hedy & Hopp.

And we are so excited because we just got back from Epic’s first-ever event focused on marketers that work with health systems. So only four agencies were invited to this event, and we were very excited to be one of the four. And my plane just landed about an hour ago to get me back home to St. Louis. But we wanted to hop on and record this episode right away so we can provide our listeners with a really good download of all of the exciting things coming out of Epic, focused on marketing teams.

Mark: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jenny. It was a great trip. We learned a lot and, I’m excited to talk about it. 

Jenny: Awesome. So I think the first thing that I want to cover, because for those of you that you know, maybe are hearing about this for the first time, the question is going to be why? You know, why did Epic have this?

And it was really interesting. In our conversations with Epic, they stated, at the kickoff of the event, that they’re very much seeing marketers as being a new end user of Epic. So, traditionally, it’s the CIO, CTO, you know, they’re the ones doing the Epic implementation, making sure the technology is stood up and used appropriately by the clinical teams and for the operations.

But there is coming a point now where the marketing teams are needing to get in, or should be getting in to be able to make sure that the brand is represented appropriately, aesthetically, from a communication perspective. There’s lots of patient communications happening within Epic. And so they’re really recognizing that need. And so they chose to hold this one-day event with a few select agencies that they saw as really well connected and well understanding of health systems to help number one, educate us on all of the resources available for marketers.

But number two, to get our thoughts and points of view on what it would take for all of these different tools to truly be useful for marketers, what functionality exist today versus what should be on the roadmap as they’re building it out, you know, to be able to fit our needs? 

Mark: Yeah, I really appreciate it. They’re kind of bringing that to the table because you’re right, historically, Epic has kind of been in the purview of the IT department.

Right. And lots of data. There are lots of things they need to make sure secure. And so it’s definitely advisable that they’re kind of in charge of that. But I think what we’ve seen in recent years is that all that data can also turn into marketing opportunities. And so when there’s questions around that usually it’s well how do we port this data into something else securely?

How do we put data into Epic that maybe is more marketing-focused. And so I think Epic understanding hearing those conversations realized there was an opportunity to say, hey, we can do this internally. We can actually have this built into the software. So then you’re still having the same kind of security and trustworthiness you’ve had Epic all these years.

And we can turn that into marketing solutions. And I think that’s a fantastic way to go. I think it’s opening up some conversations between those kind of marketing teams and the IT teams to help understand here’s how we can work together, and Epic is making that available to people. Right before it was this conversation of, well, do we let marketing in there?

And, you know, sometimes that conversation ended with absolutely not. And so I think they’re finding ways of letting marketing in in a safe way. And so that marketing can still do the job, can still bring the brand to the forefront of those conversations, still work on kind of user behavior and work on that. And it can still focus on the back end of Epic and making it as strong as possible.

Jenny: Yeah. Two key things that I took away from the conversations at the table at the very beginning of, you know, why marketing should have a seat at the table is, number one, all of the agencies that were there admitted that they have seen shadow IT groups beginning to form at all of these different marketing departments within health systems.

Right. Because if it won’t work with you, because they have different objectives or goals of their, you know, own teams, you got to get your job done. You have to accomplish your own objectives. So often CFOs will actually start building their own little mini shadow IT departments or analytics departments to be able to still accomplish their goals.

So they are seeing that happen. We are seeing that happen. And kind of the goal here is like, that’s not what’s best for the organizations. That’s certainly not what’s best for the patient. You know, really should be a seamless experience. So that definitely is one thing of note. And then another thing that somebody mentioned in the meeting is that, you know, marketers, our job is to influence behavior change, right?

If you think about the core of what marketing is, it’s behavior change. And so Epic at its core, when you think about the different platforms where patients can interact with it, it allows them to seek out care that they need, schedule those appointments, change appointments, pay bills online. Right. We’re trying to enable them to have a little bit of control over that.

And so that’s what marketers are best at, is making sure patients understand what is available and then helping them find and leverage those tools. So again, I definitely see this as a really strategic move from Epic’s part and very excited about it. Let’s dig into the actual tools that we talked about. So high level. We talked about MyChart Builder, Cheers Campaigns and Contact Management, Provider Finder, Online Scheduling, and Hello World Omnichannel Engagement.

So we’re going to start with MyChart Builder. And we’re going to go through each of these. And what I’m excited to do with Mark is just to share some of the big picture takeaways. What are these tools? You know, if you’re a marketer within an organization, maybe you’ve never even touched Epic. I know some of our clients, you know, we’ve gone in and there perhaps have been some Cheers campaigns running, and some of them have been running for like six years.

The person that set it up originally was no longer with the organization. Marketing didn’t know what was happening. So what we’re going to do on this episode is talk about each of these platforms briefly, and then we’re going to be actually publishing additional content about each of them with more of an in-depth example of how it rolls into marketing’s workflows, and that way that you can get a better understanding of how you can begin leveraging it.

So first, MyChart builder, MyChart Builder is basically a microsite builder to deliver personalized experiences. So all the way back in 2016, whenever 15 and 16, whenever Hedy & Hopp was first getting involved in healthcare marketing, we were beginning to useing Epic’s iframing capabilities to be able to iframe in the location finder, provider finder, or schedule appointment tools.

Not great, right? Like iframes aren’t great, but our goal was to try to, like, reduce the number of steps patients had to take to be able to find that care. Well, this is a huge leap forward where Epic is saying, you know, we want you to be able to create an entire landing page experience where it is native.

So to find a doctor, schedule an appointment, all of those steps you want a patient to take will be updated real time based off of real-time filtering and availability, based off of all of the, physicians and locations that are actually within your organization’s Epic instance, which is phenomenal. So no more data porting over to a third-party tool, not knowing if it is an up-to-date database through the lens of physician information, or location information or insurance information.

Everything again, has that same one source of truth. So that is something that I know I’m super excited about. It has a really interesting wizzy wig. Interface for those of us that, you know, perhaps they don’t want to code. They want to make it as easy as possible for marketers to be able to stand it up.

But you have the ability to set a lot of creative guardrails as far as fonts, formatting, colors, rounded corners, square corners, you know, really making sure that your brand visuals are coming to life on these microsites, or landing pages. 

Mark: Yeah. And I feel like this is one of those areas. Jenny, you mentioned shadow IT teams. I think this is a great place.

Well, I said great, but this is one of the most, prolific places where this would come up. Right? Where I need this landing page for this specific thing. It, you know, for whatever reason, it can’t get that it’s not part of their kind of sprints moving forward. It’s going to take a while and we need this stood up, you know, within a couple of weeks.

And so you’d see kind of third-party tools come in to make these landing pages. And then you’d use iframes like you mentioned. And so that always caused kind of some friction there. Right. There are handoffs. There was concern around that, making sure that data stayed private. And what’s going on between all those, those changes.

And so I think this tool having it already built in the Epic platform is huge because a lot of those security things go away. And I think even from a conversation from a, you know, internal standpoint with health systems now, it’s not that, you know, the marketer has to go talk to the CIO and explain we’re using this tool, it’s going to do this.

And there’s got to be all that conversation. Now that conversation is, hey, we want to use Epic. And the IT person says, oh, we know Epic. Yeah, obviously we use Epic. That sounds great. And it’s just so much easier to get these things done. And to your point, I think the tool that they’re building is definitely getting more robust.

And the type of features it has, they took us through a demo and the idea that, you know, you can kind of have this widget and you just pulled straight from these variables, like, I can pull appointment times and visit types and boom, my widgets are ready to go. And we’re lining it up. And so I loved that ability to give kind of marketers the ability to do that because again, IT teams can help there.

But sometimes that’s not their bread and butter. Especially depending on the kind of organization you’re in. So giving marketing the access and the tools to do those things and work directly with the same tool that it’s comfortable with, I think is huge. So I really appreciated that. The other part, they showed us a lot of analytics that Jenny and I feel like with builder specifically, it’s getting to the heart of, you know, I made a comment, to the team at the time that so often with all of our clients, we kind of lose them from a marketing perspective once they go over to MyChart.

So once they click on that provider, once they click on that login to my chat button, we kind of lose them. And so this gives us one more ability to like look at that and see, oh, now I can actually see the people are using that. And Epic allows me because it’s all on their back end. It’s all secure.

I can see that. Hey, not only did this person click on that appointment time, but I actually can find out that they actually did their appointment later. And it’s done all in a secure, anonymous way because you’re basing it off Epic’s data, but you never have to see any of that data. It’s just providing kind of the data that you need to run your campaigns to understand ROI at a better level.

Your ROI isn’t stopped at, you know. Well, they left the website. And so I think those things are huge. You know, they had included UTM parameters. They thought through those kinds of things. And I think that’s great. Gives us a level of attribution there, which I think we all are looking for. So, really exciting product. Yeah.

Mark: I agree, and I actually have to do a little shout out for us because they actually chatted with you and I Mark like eight months ago, and we’re chatting a little bit about the roadmap of MyChart Builder.

And one of the first things you said is please start with the black box, use a UTM parameter, and then we can pass variables through and they listen. That’s the best thing I think about Epic is that they actually listen and say, oh, I understand now why that’s valuable to you as an end user. I will incorporate that into our roadmap.

So really positive.

Mark: Shout out to Nick at Epic. He’s fantastic. We had some conversations around that. It was it was really fun.

Jenny: I love it I love it. And one other very important thing that I want to call out is, this isn’t just for talking to existing audiences or existing patients. So this isn’t just emailing cardiology patients and saying, you know, hey, you have your annual screening coming up.

No, you can actually use this for prospective campaigns, because whenever somebody submits a form, if the form is your call to action or begins actually booking an appointment, they can actually be created as a prospective patient in your database. So they are not labeled as a patient, but they’re labeled as a prospect within your database. And I know a lot of our clients leveraging Epic do not leverage this functionality.

You are only in Epic if you are a known patient. So just knowing that they’ve actually expanded their database from a, you know, human perspective, that it can be prospective and existing patients. 

Mark: Yeah, I love that too. Jenny. And I loved they they had kind of really thought through the kind of use cases there. And, and they made it clear that, hey, we’re not using this for, say, donor prospecting or something like that.

You know, this is a very specific use case, but I think we run into a lot of health systems where, okay, not only do we have to have Epic for our patient records, but how are we going to actually do outreach? So we need like a CRM in place to do that. And the epic was very clear. Hey, this isn’t a full scale CRM that’s going to do all your CRM stuff, but if you’re the type of system that only has, you know, a few resources running around and you have to kind of make decisions, Epic is a great solution there because it does give you the ability to gain those prospects.

Still, to message out to them. So to have those kind of, building exercises with those prospects, and I think that’s fantastic because, you know, so often health services don’t have the resources or the team or the skills to build out a whole CRM and another tool. You also run into privacy issues there, right? There aren’t a whole lot of CRM is running around that are HIPAA compliant.

And, you know, at a really satisfactory level, you know, you get a tool like a Salesforce, but do organizations have the resources to not only pay for Salesforce but set it up? And so the fact that Epic has these tools built on and you can kind of jump in and start using them, that made them easy to use.

I think is really great. So yeah, I was really excited about the forms for sure. 

Jenny: Yeah. And I think that goes directly into the next category. You’re talking about Cheers with the contact management and campaigns. Right. Because that is what we’re doing is outreach. And one of the really fun conversations we had with the four agencies, along with the Epic team, is Salesforce versus Cheers.

Right. And so, they again, like you said, made it very clear. Look, we’re not looking to replace Salesforce. We’re not going to be tackling donor communications, any of that stuff. Like we’re here to better serve the patient. And so I love that they have a singular focus on that. I think that results in a much better output, for serving the patient instead of trying to serve all of these disparate audiences.

And so there were a couple of really exciting things that they are rolling out. I’m going to tie in the one of the other ones we talked about, Hello World, because it’s kind of interesting and difficult to understand when we first hear about it. Cheers campaigns are sent out through Hello World. Hello World is a functionality that really allows each patient to be communicated with on the platform of their choice.

So if they often want to have email or SMS, or a phone call, it really allows you to be able to manage that real time per patient but you set the campaigns up actually within Cheers and then send it out that way. So as I’m thinking about all of our patients, some of the things we’re really excited that we’re working on with them is figuring out what’s the low hanging fruit here.

Right? Like if somebody goes for a specialty appointment and they don’t have a primary care doc on file for your organization, you should be sending a follow-up email. You know, a couple of days after the appointment, saying, hey, you had just had this appointment. We noticed you don’t have a primary. Here’s a way to be able to book with three doctors, you know, within ten miles of your location, that have appointments in the next two weeks open.

Right? That is an amazing patient experience. And so really thinking through those patient journeys and how you can help them do what’s called the next best action for them, and really setting it up through those automations within Cheers. 

Mark: Yeah, that type of automation we’ve seen in CRM types of tools, Hubspot’s the Salesforces of the world, and the fact that, yeah, this functionality is brought in to Cheers, I think is great.

I think everybody in the room is like, wow. I mean, like, we should probably be using this, right? And it’s like, yeah, we should be, because to your point, I think those types of workflows and that kind of automation just it’s always kind of aspirational for people to want to do that because but there’s always such a learning curve.

We got to learn a whole new software. We’ve got to make it compliant. We’ve got to bring it in. We’ve got to find somebody to actually run it with the skills and the knowledge and the interest there. And so this is just taking some of those barriers away, which I think is great. And to your point, and they showed us lots of stats that, man, this can make huge impacts even with a simple after, you know, appointment follow up.

Right. Something like that is huge for, for a client or the ability to kind of change their appointments. Right. And allow them to do it. They showed us with Hello World, specifically being able to, in your kind of text message, say, no, that time doesn’t work for me anymore. Do you have other times available?

It will send you back some time options. You get to pick one of those and hey, we’ve already checked it out. You know, we’ve already set you up with that new appointment time. I thought stuff like that was just really innovative on their side, thinking through those kinds of things and, and the fact that all that, again, is tied in with your Epic data and you don’t have to worry about putting something in and moving something over the fact that it’s all right there available to you.

I think it was a really big and smart move for them.

Jenny: That feature you just mentioned, it’s called, they’re calling it Conversational SMS for that actually will respond to you real time, and feel human like sometimes it actually does go over to your real support desk. At other times, they actually have the ability for some AI chatbots to be able to begin leaning into the technology.

They’re leveraging AI and a bunch of really smart ways, which is exciting. And you know, something I want to step back for, for just a moment is a lot of the things we’re talking about kind of delve into the a little bit into the side of, patient experience and some of it’s marketing. Right. So I think within each organization, sometimes patient experience lives under marketing.

Sometimes it live side by side. An ideal scenario is you’re working together regardless of if you’re actually underneath one umbrella or not. So leveraging the same communication platform to ensure that patients aren’t being inundated with communications, and that communications are consistent across your organization is really beneficial. So leveraging these same tools, you know, definitely will help accomplish that.

Mark: Yeah I agree. And I thought that was really great from Epic. And I was going to say our listeners, be prepared. If you have a conversation with Epic, they’re going to come in and they’re going to say, okay, who’s going to own this? Do we have a person from marketing here? Do we have a person from patient experience, a person from IT?

And they’re going to want to make sure everybody’s kind of involved in those conversations, because I think they’re seeing that you have to have that kind of collaboration in a health system to have these things be successful. And I don’t think Epic is interested in kind of helping you set this up, just to kind of get another sale out there.

They want you to be successful. They want your patients to have a great experience. And I think they know those teams working together. So I think that’s a great point. And I think that’s why them opening things up to marketing in the patient experience, people to get in there and see what’s going on and be able to change things to see kind of, hey, they’re going through these workflows and we always see people drop off at this point.

Well, that’s because we’re asking them way too many questions. So now we have patient experience in there that can help that. Or maybe it’s the way we’re messaging to them. So marketing’s in the same conversation. Understanding maybe we change the messaging here, what we’re saying. So I think those are always collaborative decisions. And the fact that Epic is kind of enabling that space to have all those conversations is really good.

Jenny: And before we wrap up, Mark, I want to talk about a topic that is your favorite is analytics and measurement. So, we are doing a follow-up session with them, digging more into analytics and KPIs. But they gave a little bit of insight around additional capabilities for marketing teams to be able to pull out full ROI.

So really understanding revenue per conversion based off of billing codes, based off of campaigns, a lot of information that again, whenever we were talking to the other agencies in the room, everybody admitted that honestly, nobody in healthcares actually got this automated. Even if somebody says, oh, you know, we do all of these fancy things within our marketing technology tech stack.

We have Salesforce, we have all of these things. If you peel it back and start asking the difficult questions, it’s actually a lot of manual stuff happening behind the scenes, but they are actually allowing marketers to be able to get to the heart of the data that they need in an easier way, and it’s going to just keep getting better and better over the next, you know, six months to a year as they roll out some of these new features.

Mark: Yeah, I agree, and I think it comes down to the touchpoints right? For me so often those touchpoints always exist on the website. So we got to find a provider, find a location, set up an appointment. And those things were always usually part of your website, but then would always drive to my chart like kind of I mentioned before.

And it was always that step you couldn’t take. And I think Epic has done a real good job. Shout out to Morgan, who is sitting by me too. She was great, explaining kind of how they have things like On My Way available now that you can actually have right there on your builder site on your other website.

And since that’s already connected to all your Epic data, you can start to actually then once those, those kind of important moments happen, somebody finding a provider, somebody, doing an on my way, right click that since that’s already contact with Epic, you can then follow that patient all the way through. And again, what’s available to the marketer, to the analyst isn’t all to the person’s name.

Any of that information. It’s, hey, did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish? We put this in front of the client. We use this message. Did they end up actually going through with the appointment? If so, we’re seeing a success. So much of that before was that I hope they did it. We think they probably will. But as they kind of pointed out to us after that point, there’s still all kinds of stuff.

There’s hey, my appointment time was wrong. I need to change it. There’s so many points of failure that patient can have and the ability for epic that they’re already kind of tracking all that, that stuff. Then the fact that some of that data is available to marketing now is huge. And being able to strategize, how do we change that behavior of this patient?

How would you meet the patient where they are? I think that was just really cool to see. 

Jenny: I agree, and we’re going to wrap this episode today. I feel like we could talk about this literally for hours. We are so excited about everything that we’re going to begin rolling out with our clients to better help their patient access the care that they need with tools.

In many situations, they’re already licensed and paying for. So if you are an Epic-based organization, which most systems and groups are at this point, and you’re looking for a partner to be able to help you really leverage the marketing functionality that exists and is going to be coming soon within Epic, give us a shout! We are very excited and passionate about this, and would love to be your partner to make sure that you’re leveraging all of those features and functionalities. 

So thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to seeing 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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am very excited today to have our very own Heidi Hammond. She’s the senior paid media specialist here at Hedy & Hopp, and she is joining us to talk about HIPAA-compliant retargeting.

So I have told you all on prior podcasts over and over and over. Retargeting is absolutely out of our life at this point. Right. In health care, it’s no longer allowed. Well, there’s actually a big asterisk to that statement. And Heidi’s here to walk us through what that asterisk entails. And what you actually can still do within healthcare marketing when it comes to retargeting.

So, Heidi, I’d love if you could start us off by explaining retargeting in a broad sense for anyone who perhaps isn’t super involved in paid media, and then dig in and explain how healthcare is different. 

Heidi: Yes. So retargeting is basically where you’re able to take signals, from people, typically on your website would be your non-healthcare industry favorite.

And you target them based on having visited your site or even a certain section of your site. And it’s really powerful, and it often performs super well when you’re outside of healthcare. And that’s where I’ve come from for most of my life. Is not being in healthcare. This is I’ve just joined the healthcare industry in the past year.

And so, I’ve typically had my full funnel strategy of okay, I target, I have my top of funnel, mid funnel and I work them down through retargeting. And I came into healthcare. And that is, you know, I’ve had to sit and cross off a bunch of those items. So, but the thing is not everything is crossed off.

There are still options for helping people to move down that funnel. 

Jenny: I love it. So one thing that I will say first before I get on to my next question is I used to work at Amazon. And what’s really interesting is when I was at Amazon, they actually started getting tons of consumer pushback because Amazon was ruining people’s Christmas.

So moms would hop on the family laptop and buy a present or go shopping for a present, and then the kids or the spouse would hop on later and they’d get retargeting ads for those items she was looking at. So even though it still is legally allowed in other industries, there’s still a little bit of consumer ick around it.

Right. Around, like, maybe we don’t feel so great about it. So even outside of healthcare marketers are trying to be smarter about how tightly they remarket or retarget and what the message is and how closely aligned it is. But it’s I’m so glad that, you know, we’re talking specifically about this in healthcare because there’s so many additional legal ramifications.

So let’s talk about, in platform retargeting. Right? Because that’s kind of what we’re left with. If we can’t target folks based off of going to our website and leaving and not doing the action, what we do have left is actually retargeting them within a specific platform. So, Heidi, how can you maximize in platform retargeting? And can you explain the tactic called platform owned signals?

Heidi: Yes. So platform-owned signals are anything that’s owned say by Meta. So if somebody is coming and interacting with your page or with your ad, or watching your video, you can create audiences within Meta targeting those people. And this is HIPAA-compliant because this isn’t based on any it’s not anyone’s been on your site. This is kept within Meta aggregated, anonymized, and usable.

So, as long as you also keep your messaging compliant as well. So there’s that. We’ll get to that in a little bit. But, you’re basically this is super powerful. So, a few examples are video watchers. And that’s probably my favorite because you can say, hey, if someone has watched 25%, 50, 75 or 95% of my video, you choose which one over however many days, the last 60 days.

Now, say this video was, okay, here’s who we are. This is what you know, these are our values. This is you know, I’m thinking of this in a hospital. You know, I have a lot of healthcare clients in hospitals. So, you know, these are our values and how we care for you. Well, if they’ve watched 95, 75, or even 50% of that video, there’s a good chance that they’re ready for the next message, a little bit more about you.

Maybe if you’re doing something with labor and delivery, it’s like, hey, here’s an actual tour, here’s a testimonial, here’s some of these value propositions that are just going to be a little bit lower funnel, answering those frequently asked questions. And, you know, they’re ready for it. So you’re remarketing. It’s just using it, doing it in a safe way.

Jenny: Yeah. I always talk about the walled garden philosophy, where basically your website and all of your first-party data really is in a walled garden with really high walls. Right? Everything like Meta lives outside of that walled garden, so you cannot take data from them and use it for marketing campaigns. Like for targeting. And they can’t do the same back.

Right? We don’t want Meta to have any information about what happens on our site, but if it sticks within Meta’s ecosystem, then it’s allowed again, as long as you are compliant from the lens of messaging. 

Heidi: Yes. And that’s a really good way to describe it. And there’s actually there’s honestly so many more audiences within Meta’s walled garden. Like, I think we forget about it sometimes, even as a marketer.

I go back in there and I’m like, there are actually like video watchers, is just one of them. You can target page viewers, like your business Facebook page or engagers or followers, just to your page. But the same goes for Instagram and for all of your ads. So now you have a ton of different, platform owned signals and audiences that you can target and test against each other.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we’re going to, you know, continue talking about content throughout this. But again, having a good content strategy sure makes paid media team much easier, right? If you have something engaging to share. Because if you don’t have a video that they’re engaging with, then you certainly aren’t going to have those watch signals to market back towards.

Heidi: Absolutely. Yep. 

Jenny: Perfect. So what about ad sequencing? Talk about that a little. Yeah. So this one is another method that is worth testing. It’s again not direct or probably like real remarketing, but it’s a way to maybe kind of hack the system a little bit and try to get people through the stages of the funnel, without obviously fully retargeting them.

So this is available. You can do this in Meta just with the way that you target. But there’s actually like an official ad sequencing, ad type within YouTube ads. So this applies to both. But basically what you’re doing is you’re storytelling and you’re saying, okay, I’m going to take this audience and I’m going to saturate them with this message, which is your awareness message.

And once you’ve and that actually is, I find in healthcare, a lot of times we have, we kind of like tight goes around different hospitals. So you can really like saturate that audience and then say after a few weeks or concurrently, then say, okay, you’ve heard this message, you’ve heard who we are. Now we’re going to show you the next one.

So you’re not narrowing that in normal remarketing. It’s kind of narrowing the people as you go. This one, you’re going to keep saturating that full audience, but you’re just going to kind of say, okay, you’ve heard the first message, now you’re going to hear the next message. Now you’ve heard this message, let’s get you to book that appointment.

So, that’s how it would work in Meta. In YouTube, they actually you can create a sequence where you say, okay, this is the order. I want someone to see these videos, and it’ll just feed. And that’s nice because it’s at the individual level. So it’ll just feed them the videos one at a time. So that’s another way to kind of work around.

And I never used it before because I was like, oh, I can just retarget them. Like, why do people use this ad sequencing? And you know what? Turns out it’s really helpful for us in healthcare who have our hands tied a little bit. 

Jenny: I love that, and one call out I want to have. And Heidi, I know you and the team do this.

I just want to make sure our listeners understand this each some states have, targeting requirements or exclusion. So for example, some states don’t allow you to do radius targeting like so trying to target folks a certain number of miles around a hospital system, thinking about like drive time, and the choices they would make based off of that.

So sometimes you can do that, other times you have to do a zip code or county-oriented targeting. So, do make sure our team, when we do our media plan, we always dig in. One of the first questions is what are the state laws we have to comply with related to messaging, privacy and platform, geography, etc.?

Do make sure that you’re doing that as well. Whenever you’re looking to implement any of these tactics. 

Heidi: Good caveat. 

Jenny: Okay. Perfect. So, one of the things that I feel like I have this and blinking red letters and all the presentations that I do is lookalike audiences are dead. Stop doing lookalike audiences. That is the biggest problem ever.

But, what’s an alternative to lookalike audiences? 

Heidie: Okay, the key to lookalike audiences is who the seed audience is based off of. So it’s because we always base those off of site visitors that it’s like, yeah, don’t do that, don’t do that. But you can create lookalike audiences in Meta based off of video watchers. You can create lookalikes based off of page engages all of those audiences I talked about before.

And I’ll be honest, I think that especially and maybe we can touch on this in a second. AI with all of that, it’s worth just testing and seeing what’s better. And lookalikes haven’t been doing as well in my test lately, but it’s worth testing because it’s an option that we have and we’re limited in our options, so it’s always worth testing and seeing what’s going to perform best for you.

Jenny: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And, just for the audience’s sake, we have found that in healthcare, whenever we’re doing our privacy audit, there have been a lot of our clients that have actually directly uploaded client list to Facebook patient list to make lookalike audiences. That is such a big, big, big red flag. So just to hammer in Heidi’s point a little bit more again walled garden, you can’t take your information and give it to Meta to create a or YouTube to create a look like audience, it has to use their signal and engagement points only.

So no data is being shared between platforms. 

Heidi: And when you go into the audience section in Facebook, I mean they have it split out like that, platform-based and user-based. So just ignore that section. Anything. Don’t click there, don’t upload anything or add anything and stick to the platform based. 

Jenny: Excellent, excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about AI.

I know Meta has a new Advantage Plus feature. Let’s talk about it. Can you explain it to our listeners? 

Heidi: Yeah. So basically, it’s their AI targeting method. And it’s a big, broad box where you don’t really put anything in. You can suggest signals like an age, and I think gender. But it’s a suggestion. And basically they’re going to use their AI to react to how people basically looking at how people are reacting to your ads, and they’re going to optimize based off of that and find people for you.

This is a huge, powerful tool for us who in Meta, all of our audiences have been taken away, and know that you can’t target based off behaviors. I mean, I think of ten years ago and like how lovely it was to say, you have this thing, we know you’re exactly who we want to target.

But this is honestly, it’s been outperforming a lot of my other audiences, where you kind of give them the power and say, find me the best people for this message. And basically, in terms of remarketing, like, how could that work as a remarketing strategy. Feed it, different messages. You can have one that’s focused for your top of funnel ads, but then have one that’s, you know, for your consideration and remarketing and, and it will optimize and get used to.

Oh, okay. We’re used to these types of ads and it’ll find kind of people, for that. So it’s worth testing for remarketing, to see if it could do better than like video watchers or, page engagemers. 

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely worth adding to, you know, your testing schedule over the next couple of months for all of the paid marketers listening.

So we’ve talked a little bit about content and creative. Let’s talk a little bit about creative best practices. What should marketers keep in mind as they’re building out their strategy.

Heidi: Yes. So applicable to all your campaigns and healthcare. Just avoid being specific. And that’s any of these tactics can kind of be ruled out if you’re starting to be like, do you have alcohol addiction? Like, no. You know, that’s kind of that’s invasive and getting too personal. Right. And so no one wants to see an ad like that.

So keep it broad. Addiction recovery services. Are you oh are you having you know, general pain. You know, just kind of like broad sweeping. You’re not going into very specific.

Jenny: Symptoms or diagnoses. 

Heidi: Yes. You know. 

Jenny: Yeah. Those are the two areas symptoms and diagnoses are the two areas you want to steer clear of. But you’re exactly right.

So broad versus specific. 

Heidi: Yes. Keep it broad. And that keeps everything that we just talked about compliant. 

Jenny: Yeah. One great example. Like if we’re thinking about OB for example, you could perhaps promote like your new facility and come and tour it. Right. Versus saying, I know you’re an expectant mom, you need to come, you know, here before you give birth in nine weeks because you have no way too much information about them, so hire broader, etc.

Heidi: Exactly. That’s a good example. 

Jenny: Yeah. Perfect. Okay, so let’s wrap up with just some quick do’s and don’ts. So as folks are thinking maybe okay, Jenny saying remarketing and retargeting isn’t totally off the table, we can ease our way back into it. What are some big picture do’s and don’ts of what they should avoid and what they should do as they’re moving into this?

Heidi: Yes. So, avoid any site-based, retargeting, CRM uploads, any pixel-based conversion actions, stay away from gathering any PHI in that regard. And retargeting based off of that. Do you use platform-approved audiences? Do rely on engagement signals, use ad sequencing, and test your advantage plus products? I would say that’s the best summary I can get from this.

Jenny: I love it, Heidi. That is perfect. Well, listeners, I hope this gave you some new ideas about different things you can add to your paid media arsenal as you’re working on enhancing and building out your program. Know that we’re always here to chat. Our team of paid media, including Heidi, we have a wealth of knowledge around healthcare s pecific campaign strategy, development, messaging and creative build out. 

And then of course tactical and measurement plan implementation. So if you have questions, give us a shout. We’d be happy to chat with you. And thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Please be sure to like this episode and subscribe so you’ll be notified of future episodes as we drop them, and have a great day!

Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service marketing agency that specializes in healthcare. And I’m also your host. I am very excited today to be joined by three guests. This is the first time we’ve had three guests on this podcast, so it’s going to be a very exciting episode, but our very own Mark Brandes, Hedy & Hopp’s, Director of Data and Technology is joining us. 

And then, two of the co-founders at Ours Privacy. So Adam Putterman and Tyler Zey are joining us. So welcome, gentlemen. 

Adam: Thank you for having us. We’re excited for this too. 

Jenny: Yeah. So today’s topic is one that, I think we hear the question posed by clients and prospects almost every single day.

Right. They’re trying to figure out how to make their websites and their digital marketing ecosystem compliant from HIPAA, FTC and state laws and all of the incoming, you know, the the constantly shifting regulatory environment. And the question is sGTM or CDP, which is going to meet my needs. So today we’re going to do a fun Face off sGTM versus CDP.

We’re going to understand how both of the platforms work or how the technologies work. We’re going to talk about the pros and cons, and hopefully this content will be really helpful for you and your organization. If you’re trying to figure out what path will make sense for you based off of your budget and the level of technology and marketing sophistication within your organization.

So to get started, I would love Mark. I would love if you could give us about a two minute summary. How does sGTM, which stands for server-side Google Tag Manager. How does that help marketing organizations in the healthcare space or marketing teams in the healthcare space, stay compliant? 

Mark: Yeah. Thanks, Jenny. So a lot of us are familiar with Google Tag Manager in general.

We’ve heard the term, we know that it’s out there. That’s a software you can kind of, stick on your website and you can add different tags and triggers to. And what that means is, if I want to send data to Google Analytics from my website, then I can put a Google Analytics tag in my GTM container that’s on the website, and that’ll send data to Google Analytics.

Or if I want to send data to Facebook or Snapchat or something else, I just have to add that tag onto my GTM whenever I want to send it. I can set up a trigger and it sends that data away. The thing that we’ve run into with that is that it’s kind of more of a black box, right?

You don’t necessarily know exactly what’s being sent. You know, some of it I know that I want to send my link, click on this button event to Google Analytics 4, so you’ll be sending that data to Google Analytics 4, but you don’t know the rest of the data that goes along with that, right?

It’s not just that event name. There’s a lot of other information that gets sent. There’s the page URL. There’s actually some user information. So there’s data that gets sent. And there was always kind of a black box with Google Tag Manager. And so with sGTM, what happens is you actually add another server into that mix. And so instead of you sending data directly to say, a Google Analytics for Facebook, you’re actually going to put a server in the middle of that communication.

And then that server is going to pick up that information. And then inside there you’re going to be able to say, okay, I don’t want to send this piece of data. I don’t want to send that piece of data, I want to change this piece of data so nothing gets stored on this server. Nothing is out of compliance.

You’re going to want to use a server that has a BAA that you have all your legal requirements in place with that. There’s a few good ones out there, right? So there’s AWS, there’s Google Cloud. So there’s a few different servers you can use. But the idea is now you have control over that data flow.

You can edit things, like I said before, they go to those platforms.

Jenny: I love it. That is a very succinct, wonderful explanation. Thank you. Tyler, how does a CDP work? 

Tyler: Yeah, it’s largely similar. Right. You send it all the data just as you would with GTM. It’s just then you have more of a UI layer over the top of that that’s more unified for each destination.

So you’re not, you know, sending to Google Analytics 4 and Snapshotting and figuring out the differences between each one. It’s more unified. But there’s also this sense of, identity that is stitched across time, where you have a user that maybe you’ve, you know, hydrated various properties on or the CDP automatically provides it with synthetic data, and then you can, send that back to the destinations largely in the same way, you know, auditing or removing or redacting or modifying, with built in functions and things that you wouldn’t want to send back for PHI and PII.

But from a conceptual point of view, you know, you put a little snippet on the website or, you know, hook up to things like third-party form tools, getting webhooks, API calls sent in, which might be another point that it’s a little different than sGTM because you, can have all those other endpoints feed into it, maybe more easily, maybe not.

Depending on how your GTM setup is. And then, yeah, you just send it out to the various destinations. 

Jenny: Very nice. So we have folks come to us often, and they really are not sure what the right solution is for them. And Adam, something I’ve heard you talk about before that I’d love if you could break down for us is the maturity framework, because there’s budget considerations which we’ll talk about.

I want to get into the pros and cons of both of these platforms next. But there’s also a general sense of maturity where, based off of, you know, where that organization is, level of marketing sophistication, maybe one tool makes more sense than the other. So break it down for us. How do you view this? 

Adam: Yeah, I think we talk about this a lot as well.

And, depends on scale compliance needs, how big your team is, a lot of things. So how we’ve thought about it is stage zero is you’re just pixeling. You really shouldn’t do this. You know, Jenny, you talked about you probably provide data for all of these stages, which would be really interesting or which has been really interesting.

But stage zero is you’re just pixeling. You have a Facebook pixel on your site, you’re not moderating it at all, and you’re taking on a ton of compliance risk. There’s there’s some ethical concerns there. You’re not really thinking about it. I think most organizations have moved away from that, thankfully. Stage one is you remove the pixels and now you’re flying blind so you’re no longer at risk.

There’s no compliance risk. But now you have significant challenges or obstacles being placed on your marketing team. Your ads are potentially unoptimized and not working. You might not even know they’re not working because you don’t have any analytics set up. So, you know, there’s a baseline visibility problem. So that’s when we see organizations start to move to stage two, which is you’re building something internally.

sGTM is a great solution. Some teams will see, invest in conversion APIs for every destination and and and really sink their teeth into that. This way, you get performance, you get privacy. It’s a great approach. And then the kind of obstacles here are what happens as you scale. How do you maintain it? How do you continue to invest in it and invest in it or grow it?

And that’s when organizations kind of move into stage three, which is using a healthcare-specific CDP, obviously something like Ours Privacy would fall into that. Similar to stage two, you have compliance, you have performance, but now you also have sort of the peace of mind of this is all that we do. The seamlessness of, the UI layer that Tyler mentioned and then the performance and compliance benefits or primarily performance benefits of identity stitching already being connected to every destination.

So being able to roll out experiments in a very quick way, you have to start to have some negatives potentially around cost and then learning the tool. And then lastly, and this is where it starts to get really fun, is when you move into stage four and you go beyond just advertising and using the CDP to get back to a, kind of pre privacy world and start integrating third party data, clean rooms and building a sort of unified, holistic approach to your marketing that includes connecting anything and everything to everything internally, but in a compliant way.

Jenny: Yeah, I love that, Adam, because that is the exact framework that we help folks decide. I mean, in healthcare, I think, it’s aspirational to want to have a lot of automation in our marketing work, to have a CRM integration, to provide personalized experiences. A lot of organizations aren’t yet there. So one of the things that we ask those specific questions, and that is kind of our deciding factor, of are you sophisticated enough yet?

Or the money to spend on a CDP makes sense? If not, maybe spending less money on sGTM in the short term, while you get to that level of sophistication, invest that money in getting a CRM or in, you know, those other areas of your marketing function, then you can move over to a CDP, because we’ve seen a couple of groups invest in a CDP too early, and then they found it as a waste of money, when in reality it isn’t anything but a waste of money.

If you are built appropriately to leverage all of the enhanced functionality. 

Adam: That’s a great point, and I’m curious when you when you, were going through the survey results, how often were you seeing a mismatch in stages? Or also did you see a lot of work because you’ve done it multiple years in a row? You just run out?

Are you seeing a lot of people progress through the cycle, or kind of where do they get stuck? Just curious for your take on that really great question. 

Jenny: So for our listeners, Adam is referring to our 2025 state of patient privacy. So this is the second year where we have done an audit on hundreds of healthcare websites, and we look at the code, our analytics operations team goes through and determines what tags and tools and technologies folks are actually using.

So it’s not a survey where folks are telling us, because some of the people would not want to tell us what we found, they would not even respond to the survey. So this is a much more accurate representation. We included everything from super large, you know, state-wide or multi-state hospital systems, health systems, all the way down to critical access hospitals and everything in between.

So we’ve seen tremendous shifts. For example, in 2024, we had 70% of websites still using Google Analytics 4. That dropped down to right under 50%. So a 20% drop in Google Analytics for usage, which is pretty significant. And we saw a drop from, right under 45% of old messy tags, meaning, you know, Universal Analytics, which stopped working in 2023.

So the fact folks still had it on their site in 2024 showed how messy it was. That dropped from 44% down to 17%. So that just shows a huge awareness of not having those tags that are really non-functioning and not providing value on your site. We also, though, saw a huge jump from 12% of folks not having any analytics on their site at all to 28%.

So a huge jump that likely had a lot to do with getting nasty grams from OCR and the FTC, class action lawsuits have continued to increase. So those are legal teams that really are on the super, super conservative spectrum, of where they want to be for marketing analytics technology. 

Adam: It’s interesting too. Just a quick plug for, I don’t know if it’ll be obsolete by the time this, or, irrelevant by the time this airs.

But, having a messy tag set up is important, especially with things like we just saw. I saw you post about it with the GTM change that’s coming out in a few days at this point. And it matters. It’s not just a, quality of life workflow improvement. Like these things get change unless you need to know why they’re there and what they’re doing.

Jenny: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Mark, I’d love to go back to you and have you give us just from your perspective. I know we’ve worked, but at this point, dozens, if not over 100 different organizations of various sizes in the healthcare space over the last year. What do you see as some of the biggest pros and cons of when an organization chooses to move forward with sGTM?

When is it a winner for their organization? 

Mark: Yeah, I typically think that there are, you know, they like their GA4. They like that Google Analytics, they’ve used it for years. They have structures put in place. They have reporting dashboards. And so they really don’t want to move away from that. But they also, are comfortable. They’ve already removed a lot of pixels from their site.

They’ve already gotten used to living in that world. And so when you have a situation like that, I think sGTM makes a lot of sense because it’s not going to impact you. There’s nothing else you kind of need to learn. You can approach an agency like Hedy & Hopp. We can set things up for you, and then they’re just kind of going, right?

So it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind, knowing they’ve got to kind of do to control, and, you know, to the point that Adam was making, once you get a little more sophistication, those types of teams maybe look to add somebody on their team for doing analytics or doing more technology, then they can start asking the questions about, okay, well, what are we doing with this type of data?

What are we doing over here? And then we can be there for those conversations. And then I think you see that growth right? That maturity to understand. Okay, well, maybe you guys are thinking about moving into this type of technology now. And so is that, an adjustment inside of sGTM we make, or do we look at another solution for you down the road?

And so I think having folks come in like that really, you know, they’ve they’re nervous. They’re nervous about, hey, we got this letter from HHS. You know, we’re nervous about that. We don’t know what’s on our site. Those types of folks, I think, right away we can really make a huge benefit to them, right. Because of the kind of the low cost that is associated with this GTM.

There’s not as much of an approval process. Sometimes it’s just, hey, get in there, do it, and we’re going and we’re compliant, you know, pretty soon. So it really gets them up to speed with compliance very fast. And I think people appreciate that. But I think, yeah, there’s a point there where there’s a lot of technology that’s used in the sGTM setup.

You have to have a lot of different skill sets across a lot of different softwares to kind of stitch all that stuff together. And so, you know, you met hear Tyler and and Adam mentioned that there’s just an ease of use with the UI on a CDP. You’re not going to have that with this GTM necessarily, right?

But you’re going to have to rely on an agency like us, maybe to go in and help you set that up. So those are kind of the things that I used to think about when, when clients are asking. 

Jenny: And I would say to Mark, often, our clients, it’s kind of a set it up and then they don’t have a lot of changes they anticipate having to make to their tracking.

They don’t have a lot of new technologies they plan to integrate in the next, you know, 6 to 18 months. So that’s another thing that I think I’m interested in hearing Tyler’s perspective. Tyler, give us your perspective from the CDP side. When is it truly a benefit for clients to choose a CDP route? 

Tyler: Well, I think there’s compliance from a high point of view, and then there’s compliance from like your technology team’s point of view of like soc2 and, you know, like if your company workforce is high trusting and a lot of those frameworks require any server your company maintains to have, like monitoring for error rate and like, you know, usually some guidelines along logs being retained for 13 months and usually a firewall in front of it. And ability to like audit what’s going in and out of the system, and in real time. And, I think a lot of those, unless you set it up right. And if you do set up all those, it does increase the cost for sGTM.

Drive up the complexity and, you know, like the compliance nature of it from a different side, maybe more of the engineering or IT side of the house to a point where it maybe isn’t necessarily as, palatable, or easy to use, you know, and even from our experience with it, experimenting with it, we do a lot of experimenting, like until we deploy it, like in a multi-region way, one, you know, like once on the West Coast, one’s on the East Coast.

We wouldn’t see single-digit percentage differences in traffic, to GA4 through it. So I think the running and operating of that does take a little bit of cloud engineering, in addition to just marketing. And I think with the CDP, you get that, out of the out of the box, in that compliance to without the the overhead of maybe more engineering compliance.

Jenny: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I would, love to talk about kind of what we see the future, where we see the future going for marketing, analytics and tracking. I think we all could just take a collective sigh about with everything going on in the government, who knows if any sort of actual, you know, adherence, of compliance is actually going to happen in the future.

But I think we all can just generally agree that privacy concerns aren’t going to go away and they’re going to continue getting tougher and rougher. Adam, I’d love to hear your perspective of your thoughts of the industry, of what you think’s going to happen over the next, you know, 1 to 2 years. 

Adam: Yeah. I think that one, we’re going to see an expansion of state expansion of state privacy law presence like like states launching that don’t currently have one and two is complexity there.

You know, there’s a bill on the governor’s desk, I think in New York that would have a drastic impact on the entire industry. And I think that’s only going to fragment and increase. Two I think the class actions are going to significantly increase because people are having early success. That’s partially a good thing. Partially a bad thing.

And then three, I think we’ll see more action, like Meta’s data restrictions where the advertisers themselves, whether it be a Reddit or a LinkedIn, are going to push people towards the conversion APIs and server-to-server connections for their own selfish reasons. But also it’s, you know, it’s good from a privacy perspective. And then organizationally, I think what we’re most interested in or what what we’re keeping a close pulse on is really that’s that final stage of the maturity cycle, which is, as your survey is showing, more and more people, you know, move away from fixed line, moving away from big blind, they’re also opening up capacity to start experimenting with new destinations.

So like let’s finally launch a podcast, advertisements or whatever it may be. And then third-party data, and clean rooms. We’ve seen some really, really interesting use cases.

Tyler And that to piggyback on that, like with the conversion API, I, I think it all is going to converge eventually. Maybe not next year, but over the next like three years towards that clean room mentality where you have your internal data and instead of like a real, instead of like a conversion API or the first version of pixeling, I think that’s where it all kind of had it.

And it, it will, it’ll be slow. But right now it feels really complicated. But I think there are you’re starting to see breakthroughs in ways that make it less complicated and companies that make it less complicated. And I think it will be, it sounds really abstract too, but essentially, I think it’s a really, easy way to share back that the types of people that, or the type of audience that you’re trying to attract without sharing back that individual.

PHI or PII, you know. 

Mark: Yeah. And I, you know, one of my big concerns, Jenny, is kind of leaving some of the small businesses, the small regional hospitals kind of in the dust there. Right. Like, I don’t think those small regional hospitals are going to be considering clean rooms anytime soon. You know, they have a one-person marketing department that is just trying to keep the lights on for the hospital.

So how do we help that person actually stay compliant? Because some of this stuff came as a huge surprise to them. Like, they’re not they’re not trying to they don’t really realize what they’re doing with Facebook because all they know is it’s helping them do their marketing, and that’s where they get their reporting. And now what do I do?

And so how do we help them? I think that’s one of the things Adam mentioned, all the different state laws that are going to affect if you’re in a a small hospital that’s like multi-state, right, because you’re near a border, like you can have multiple things you need to keep track of. And how do you do that? Right?

You don’t have a compliance team. You may have a legal person on a call, but so those are things we run into all the time with some of these hospitals, that are on the smaller scale and, and helping them out, is so difficult because there’s not really a great repository out there.

A lot of the things we run into is, you know, they just want a list of what, what can I do and what can’t I do. And I am the bearer of bad news to say it depends. Right. There’s just so much gray area and and I think, you know, listening to Adam speak about all those changes that are happening until I feel like there’s some sort of national law, it’s going to be so difficult for people to handle all this.

And I just don’t know when that’s going to, to happen. Even with the guidance that came out from HHS, there’s just a lot of gray area and there haven’t been a whole lot of judge’s ruling saying, okay, this is okay, and that’s not okay. We had the one from Texas about IP addresses and page views, but other than that, it was kind of left still up in a gray area a little bit.

Right. And so I’ve talked to a lot of lawyers over the past two years. And you’ll have on the same call they will vehemently disagree about we can do this and we can’t do that, or this is never a good sign. Yes it is. And so it’s it’s so difficult. And and how do we get there. And I’m not sure our legal system is going to keep up.

And so it’s on hospitals to really be proactive as possible I think. And that’s something that we’re going to see is that I’m trying to just hey, I know we can maybe legally do this, but is it actually worth it? And so making those kind of decisions, I think you’re going to need some consulting help there. 

Jenny: And that’s a great point.

I think that’s one of the things that we are trying to do as an organization. And part of what I view this podcast role is, is continuing to educate because the larger folks that have the budgets, they can, you know, do things like buy these technologies and implement them. But some of the smaller folks want to do justice, right for their patients.

And so they need a mix of a technology solution and then education to be able to get there. So I know, you know, Adam and Tyler, that’s near and dear to your heart as well. You know, from an education perspective, to help the industry 

Tyler: And making it easy, you know, like, we really try, I would say very hard not to compare us to other, but to make the UI and the experience easy so that it is, something that’s approachable to more people.

I wouldn’t say we’re there yet, but we try it.

Adam: It shouldn’t be harder to do the right thing in the space. Yeah. And right now it’s much, much, much harder. Very easy to just put a pixel on the site. 

Jenny: Absolutely. And to turn on a retargeting campaign, Yeah. That much whole other conversation. Well, gentlemen, the three of you, thank you so much for joining me today.

You know, Adam, I know both you and I are both going to be at Swaay and HMPS in the next couple of months. So for anyone who was there, if you want to continue this conversation in person, I know we would love to continue it. Please approach us. If you see us out there. We’d love to get nerdy with you.

Otherwise, if you have any questions, please reach out to us. I will put all of our contact information in the show notes. So we would love to hear from you. Please like and subscribe to our channel. We’re very proud of the subscriber base that we have built up. And look forward to dropping new episodes every Friday.

So that’s it for today’s episode. Have a fabulous rest of your day, and we’ll talk to you soon. 

Adam: Thanks again for having us.

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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here with you today with two of my fabulous team members here at Hedy & Hopp to talk about our experience going to HMPS.

So HMPS stands for Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit. It’s put on by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists. It’s an annual conference. They actually celebrated their 30th year this year. So huge shout out to the woman behind the conference, Judy Neiman. Congratulations. She’s absolutely a fabulous human in everything that she’s done to contribute to healthcare marketing and communications professionals.

We really, really appreciate you and want to give a just a shout out to Judy, but, we attended him for the first time this year. I know we’ve done lots of show coverage for other conferences, and we’ve been told time and time again, why aren’t y’all at HMPS? So we showed up this year and boy, are we happy that we did.

So joining me today is Taylor Fedderke. She’s a marketing manager here at Hedy & Hopp. And Kristin Weidman. She is a project management lead. So welcome ladies. Let’s chat a little bit about our experience. 

Taylor: Yeah. Thanks for having me Jenny. Definitely jumping into some things here. Of course, we showed up nice and bright at HMPS with all things colorful art.

So of course, we had our backdrop from our Artist in Residence as well as our friendship bracelets. And some art to exchange with any of the individuals that showed up at our booth. So it was great to kind of show up with our usual setup, and share some fun goodies with those new attendees. 

Kristin: And thanks for having me, Jenny.

And I agree with Taylor. We showed up bright and beautiful. The conference took place at Omni Orlando at Championsgate, and there were plenty of food options at the resort and then areas to soak up the sunny Florida sunshine, as well as outside of the conference. 

Jenny: And I feel like it is my duty to report on the quality of food at conferences.

As a food driven human. That’s one of the things I always pay attention to. It was great. And I will say that they had so many coffee break sponsored by different organizations. There was never a moment where I thought, oh gosh, I could really use a coffee or a pick me up, diet Coke, and I wasn’t able to find one.

So kudos to that. 

Kristin: Completely agree, Jenny, a very caffeinated experience. And then also the other attendees that were there were higher level marketing professionals from a large variety of organizations, plenty from Orlando area and Florida. But all across the US, you’ll hear about everyone that attended the, conference and also spoke as panelists, from across the US.

Taylor: Yeah. And with that, Kristin, a lot of them had mentioned they’ve been coming to HMPS for years, which is great. They’re all super excited to be there again this year, and a lot of them shared that this is one of their favorite conferences as well. They’ve been coming for years and will continue to come. So that was great to hear.

Jenny: Yeah, I was super excited to be asked to, lead a panel. So this was our first year attending HMPS, and I was so honored and appreciative of Judy for asking me to get involved in our first year there by leading a panel on privacy versus personalization. So, as you all know, we talk about privacy all the time over here at Hedy & Hopp.

So Judy asked me to lead this panel. There were three different folks on the panel that had very different perspectives. So Christine Skiffington was the provider point of view. She was from Inspira Health. Sujal Raju was the website vendor POV from Enqbator, and then Celia Van Lenten with Miles & Stockbridge was the lawyer’s point of view.

So we had a lot of fun digging in and asking their different perspectives of where we are as an industry right now, and the way that we are tackling privacy through the lens of personalization. How much of personalization are we actually accomplishing right now or is it mostly aspirational? And we had a really great conversation. I heard from quite a few folks afterwards.

They really liked the different points of view because, for example, let’s say, you know, Christine would mention something from a provider’s POV and then Celia would happen and say, yeah, from a legal perspective, here’s what I tell clients, you know? So it was really helpful to understand how all of these different forces work together. But let’s back up a little bit and talk a little bit about overall themes that we noticed.

So as you all know, we are, very accomplished conference goers. We go to a lot of them, and there were a couple of key themes that we noticed compared to other conferences that we go to. Taylor. Which one you noticed? 

Taylor: Yeah, kind of piggybacking off of your session that you were just speaking about having a panel there.

There were so many sessions that involved a panel. And I will say that was something that I really enjoyed. I think you other two did as well, just because you get to hear the different perspectives. And some of the panels were like, you sat in on them, and they’re like, you know, make sure you don’t share this information with other individuals.

It’s kind of like a little trust circle and was really fun just to have it be, kind of all in the open. So yeah, I really enjoyed that structure for the session format. 

Jenny: That’s great. How about you, Kristin? 

Kristin: I really liked that. There were plenty of sessions to choose from, so they were back to back and they were even some were overlapping and they were very interesting. There were over 70 for this conference, so it was honestly hard to choose which to attend. It seems like we chose to divide and conquer, which was really helpful. 

Jenny: I love that. And on that note, we’d love to highlight some of the key sessions and key to learnings from the sessions, because it we all know organizations can’t afford to send people to every conference.

So at the wrap of each event, what we love to do is highlight just a couple of conferences or, sessions at the conferences. But really, the key takeaway. So things for you to think about, and maybe glean from some of the knowledge that we were able to pull back from the conference. So I’ll start us off.

One of the sessions I attended was one of those trust circle sessions that Taylor mentioned where at the very beginning they said, do not record, do not repeat verbatim anything that is said here because folks are going to be really sharing, you know, some behind the scenes decisions and situations that they go through. And I will just say, as a senior marketer, I love that, I love when people are willing to be able to share, you know, what the conversations really look like at the executive level.

And so the session was called If We Only Had a Billboard and there were four fabulous women, Gayle Sweitzer from the University of Kansas Health System, Alexa Warner from Bon Secours Mercy Health, Christine Woolsey from Hospital Sisters Health System, and Susan Alcorn, she was actually the facilitator from Alcorn + Dean Strategic Communications. And we’re not going to say which of these fabulous women said each of these things, but I wanted to call out a couple of really good takeaways.

The first is when you’re having a conversation with leadership, oftentimes, and this was kind of the why the session was put together. Folks will say, we need a billboard at this location or at this event, and here’s what the creative should look like, right? Everybody can be a marketer in their own minds, right? But oftentimes it results in a lot of disparate tactics that don’t roll up to your overall strategic plan of your department or your organization.

So a couple of great pieces of advice that these women gave is number one, instead of saying no, say yes, however. So, for example, if they say we need a billboard here, say, you know, that’s a great idea. However, if you remember, according to our strategic plan, we aren’t pushing orthopedics right now. You know, we’re really focused on, you know, cardio and oncology.

So not shooting down their idea, but instead pulling it back to the overall strategy. One other thing was being the leader who takes a pause and is the voice of reason when you’re given a new tactical idea. So this takes trust building. You can’t do this on day one, but once you build the trust where those individual people get to the point where they trust you to say, you know, I’m going to go back to my team and talk about that idea.

I love where your head’s at. Let me go back and actually review our strategic plan and see where this fits into that versus giving them an immediate yes and what they need or want you to say on the call. The biggest takeaway was, you know, be comfortable sitting through the uncomfortable and slow your team down. You know, most marketers at their heart are people pleasers, right?

Like we feel good about helping other people. So you need to remember as a leader, part of your job is making sure that you stick to the strategy that you’ve outlined. So feel confident enough to take a pause, give affirmations that they’re thinking about marketing. But then always redirect to that overall strategic plan and use that as your true north.

Taylor: And with that to Jenny, just want to tie in that budget piece as well. Not only do we have that strategic plan, but what does that budget look like if it’s mapped out for your year already? Where are you going to pull from? So there’s definitely plenty to, you know, pause on and then circle back to after you’re able to kind of revisit that, reevaluate where those pieces have gone, to make sure you’re staying aligned.

Jenny: And all of these ladies shared some really wonderful, real examples of conversations that they had had internally where they’ve had to be kind of the bad guy, to be able to uphold marketing’s strategy and budget integrity. So kudos to the four of them for facilitating such a fun conversation. 

Kristin: Jenny and Taylor I really loved learning about this session.

Coming from both of your perspectives, while you were both at that session, I was attending an open forum with panelists and a facilitator, and I attended It’s Not About the Web; It’s All About the Transaction. So at its core, this was about how you use your healthcare website and how that may be evolving. So it was facilitated by a gentleman named Ben Textor.

He is the Co-CEO of Digital Health Strategies Inc. and then there were three awesome panelists I really enjoyed all of the different perspectives. Kind of like you had mentioned, Taylor. The first was Gerard Gober, Head of Digital + Mobile Health Technology at Universal Health Services. The second panelist was Pam Landis, SVP at Hackensack Meridian Health.

And then the third panelist wasLucky Rai. He’s the VP of Digital Channel Experience, Memorial Hermann Health System. Plenty of different perspectives there. Essentially what the session touched on was that we’re moving away from using health care websites for their patient education libraries, all of this long form content about every single potential medical procedure that you could have, you know, just some light reading for your night time before you go to bed.

We’re moving away from that. And it does make sense with kind of the talk of moving from SEO to AIO and today is kind of a new age. What we are moving towards is using any of these healthcare websites to accomplish tasks. So what the three of them really summarized was the most common user tasks.

So somebody is going on to your website and they are either wanting to pay their bill. They’re wanting to log in as a current patient through your patient portal. They are wanting to find care, which is those that patient acquisition that we are so involved with. And then also the fourth is to find a job. And then the other thing that they talked about is if you if someone is not coming to your website to do one of those four things, what is the next best or closest closely related task that may not be on your site?

So they connected that to reading reviews and review sites, or searching social media for your brand name or your Google Business profiles, calling directly from one of those or finding your facility and getting directions to their next appointment via Apple Maps. So either they’re doing one of the four main user tasks, or they’re doing, finding user tasks, kind of some of those secondary locations.

So just emphasizing the importance of both your website and all of those kind of micro sites that you may not have built, but they are associated with your business and how they represent you. And then you need to reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to this task. So can you make it easier, make sure that your Google business profile or you Apple Maps are up to date with the correct directions, the correct phone number, the correct specialties.

But then on your website, is it about a button that is really easy to see in your UI and UX? Is there about the phone number being nice and bright? Is the phone number correct, or do you need to, lead them to a locations page where they need to look up which facility they’re calling to talk to?

So many examples. But instead of that long form content, Pam Landis, I thought really said it best is your website is now your patient experience hub and how your patients come to experience your system. Yeah, that’s so true. I will say, first of all, shout out to Pam. Pam’s fabulous. I’ve seen her speak at a few other conferences and she’s a wonderful presenter.

But this really ties in with what we’re hearing at other conferences, right? Like you don’t need thousands of pages about all of these obscure symptoms and diagnoses. People are no longer, you know, with generative AI, you know, looking for hospitals to answer that on their websites anymore. So really helpful. 

Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And to tie in, Kristin, I know you mentioned AI just a bit ago for that session.

Another session when you sat in on was Gen-AI Unplugged: 10 Real-World Healthcare Marketing Trials. And this one was with Jen Jenkins from University of Utah Health and Lacey Reichwald with Aha Media Group. So of course, I feel like I was kind of, throughout all the sessions, tied in somehow, just because it’s top of mind for so many of us.

And I know we had a few little nuggets we pulled out of this session, Kristin. And so one that really stood out to me that I found was unique was specifically using a ChatGPT, and creating GPT for personas. So when strategizing or writing copy, you know, a lot of times, you know, as we’re working through this process as healthcare marketers, we have those personas built out in a variety of places that we’re referencing going back to.

But you can actually build out GPT and ChatGPT for persona, which was new information to me. And so she was kind of explaining how she, for example, named one of her personas Chelsea. And when I say she, this was Lacey kind of going through all the details and how she’s done this on her own. But Chelsea is one of her personas, and so a lot of times she’ll just type in @ and it will pull up Chelsea, and then she can kind of use all that information to help her either maybe write copy or pull together the strategy and what that may look like. And so I know privacy’s still kind of all top of mind for us though. So maybe your organization doesn’t use ChatGPT there. I’m sure there will be some other options out there in the future, but this is just kind of a new way that we’re moving and utilizing AI to make sure that, you know, our content is accurate in terms of meeting that target audience.

And so that was just a really cool bit of information that I pulled. What about you, Kristin? What else did you find interesting? 

Kristin: I also noted that, I really liked that, both of their kind of combined advice was that you create a base style guide and a base persona for any repeatable task that you do, or any repeatable client, repeatable voice, repeatable strategy that you’re doing on a day to day basis.

And then also, they were very complimentary of AI in creating those personas and helping create those style guides. So, that’s just what they emphasized. The AI was good at best at analyzing and comparing sites and comparing content. So go to creating those personas, even identifying content gaps. So they were just showing us some great examples of how I can be used using those different GPT and then really analyzing, what you should be targeting in your marketing.

Both women really provided a lot of SEO and content writing tips and tools that I will actually be bringing back and circulating with our entire SEO team, our insight, entire website team. So what’s really nice was this was not just, informational session. This was really actionable session for me and being able to bring it back to the team.

Jenny: And I do have to give a shout out to Suzie on the Hedy & Hopp team, because we actually have a couple of custom GPTs set up, with happy language. So she’s actually done a really good job, creating some and testing it for HIPAA-related information and language. And testing all of that out internally. So shout out to Suzie for that.

Kristin: Got to give her credit. And yeah, you should not be surprised. 

Jenny: I know you’re right. Exactly, exactly. Awesome. Cool. Let’s shout out one more session. Kristin, what’s one more session you attended that we should talk on? 

Kristin:I did attend on the I think technically it’s the third day of the Thursday, session with some, pretty big names in healthcare marketing.

And the session was called Defending Marketing ROI: What Works. So this was the facilitator was Chris Bevolo, from BPD, which is formerly Revive, I believe, another marketing agency, he’s the Chief Transformation Officer there. And then the panels were all CMO in their own right. So that was just a really cool, piece to be a part of.

And so it was, Tanya and I don’t remember how to pronounce her last name, but Andreadis, so she’s the, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, and VP for patient engagement at Penn Medicine. And then, David Feinberg is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mount Sinai Health System. And then, third but not least, was Paul Matsen,.

He’s the Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Cleveland Clinic. So, again, some really large notable health systems there, which was already impressive to start the session off with. The really focus of that was how to prove that marketing is helping, and maybe not just that marketing is helping with patient acquisition, but how marketing can help with some of those bigger business strategies.

So the C-suite doesn’t always care about just what was X number of patients that new patients that came in the door that day? They can care about anything from the brand and the name. They can care about the reputation of a certain portion of their institute or certain portion of their service line. They might care more about patient retention.

That might be more of their strategy that year. It’s really anything, so they might even be focusing on different service lines. So it might just not be about the generalized, oh, we just want new patients for the entirety of Cleveland Clinic. It’s no, they’re really focused on their heart and cardiology services since those are obviously top of mind top line where people come in with really acute symptoms and conditions.

And so that is basically what what Paul was saying was, is always part of their strategy every single year, which did not surprise me. And so how they talked about it was instead of just grabbing at different metrics and grabbing at fun things and trying to really present, I think they really all three took a nice step back and said, getting your strategy and your plan from your leadership.

So letting the business strategy inform the marketing strategy. And then another thing that they made a big point of was have them sign off on it. So not just say, oh, in floating, passing, we think that this is important. We think we should put up a billboard. Yes. However, what is the signed-off business strategy for Penn Medicine this year?

And then you let that inform your marketing strategy and then kind of to close the loop, you prove your usefulness based on agreed upon metrics. So again, instead of pulling things from we have a ton of data and analytics at our fingertips across any of these systems and across even between, there may be a marketing team. There may be a data and analytics team, there may be an actual strategy team, and then there may be data from the clinics as well.

So really focusing in on what leadership say are the metrics that they are looking at for success. And just one really specific thing that I thought was amazing. Paul from Cleveland Clinic, he called out that his C-suite also asked a really interesting question that he said, we probably all kind of get a lot is great. Love that you’re doing marketing, love that you say that you’re pulling in all of these new patients from these great areas on our agreed upon service plans and strategies.

But how do we know that we wouldn’t be getting these patients anyway, especially something as big of a name as a Cleveland Clinic? How do we know that we wouldn’t just get these patients anyway? So Paul kind of went on, a bit of a crusade there, and I was extremely impressed with, how he followed through on this hypothesis of that marketing still can bring in, these new patients.

And it is because we are marketing and not just because, the magic of the Cleveland Clinic mean. So they actually did a study where they went entirely dark in two different markets. So they were markets that were outside of their they do a, I think about a 300 mile radius from Cleveland in Ohio. They were separate, more, national and of specific markets.

They went entirely dark in those two markets for 15 months. And he wanted to say, fear not, because they did invest that exact same money into other emerging markets that he also knew would be successful. So he did a great job of balancing this out, where the Cleveland Clinic would not be losing patients by any means, and he would not be messing with his budget.

But that they were reinvesting that money somewhere else to then show the numbers in these two dark areas. They did this for 15 months. He didn’t say this explicitly, but they talked to other big, another large organization that may have done this from Minnesota, that, that is how he said it. I really loved that.

And, they said that it takes about three months for all of your marketing efforts to drop off. So they wanted to make a clean break and then get some entirety of almost a year of clean data of what does it mean when we’re not marketing in these areas? And they found a 20% drop in new patients. It’s pretty significant.

Nothing they did in that again, studied the areas enough where it wasn’t a drop in Cleveland Clinic’s overall, patients, but from those specific areas, they could pinpoint that they got 20% less. And what was even more fun is the clinicians were also really excited about all the new clients and the new patients that they were driving from these other areas.

So he kind of proved his point, but also helped the business. So really appreciate that. He definitely did not recommend that you try this at home. So we’re not just going to go running off to do that, but what it seemed like is they hope they already internally approved and published this study internally. And it sounds like they their hope is that they’re going to try and publish this study, in the next couple of years or so.

So this was a study that they just did. They just turned on back all of this advertising on January 1st of this year. So this is really recent data. I found it fascinating. And as, in healthcare marketing with love, our data obviously heady and hot. So to be able to do that and show the real impact, while also creating some joy with some new patient volume in other areas.

I really love that perspective. So I thought that was fascinating. It is. And kudos to him for having the guts to do that. We hear all the time that our clients are dealing with senior leadership asking that exact question, and I think it would be beneficial for all of us if Cleveland Clinic moved forward publishing that study. So Paul, make it happen. Friend, we are here for you. 

Jenny: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And then one last thing before we wrap, I want to shout out we are very excited to have launched We Are, HIPAA Smart while we were at HMPS this year. So at a conference last year, we had a few different people ask us where additional training and certification could be found for the rest of their marketing team.

So perhaps one person attended one of my talks and they said, you know, I got 20 people back at the office that need to know this information. What can we do? Well, light bulb, anybody who was there may have literally seen a light bulb go off over my head, but I rushed back to the office, the virtual office afterwards, and we put together a little task force within our organization to repurpose all of the training materials we already had that we trained our current clients on.

Beefed them up a little bit and then stood up. We Are, HIPAA Smart came. It’s a great platform for those of you that require training for your internal marketing team members on HIPAA. This training is made for marketers by marketers. So it talks about the tools and technologies that we deal with. And it is not HIPAA from a clinician’s perspective, which is what a lot of folks experience within their organizations is going through HIPAA training, where none of it actually applies to their day-to-day.

So we’re very excited to have launched with a compliance fundamentals class, as well as a HIPAA-specific training. And then we have some advanced technology training, as well as, marketing training for lawyers. Do it to help them understand things like how and when pixels fire, how forms work, etc.. As well as one additional course for vendors that are being asked to sign Business Associates Agreement, so they can really understand what the legalities and consequences behind that mean.

So very excited. We had a lot of positive feedback. And lots of really fun engagement on it post conference. So if you’ve not yet checked it out, please do so again. It is we are HIPAA smart.com. And give us a shout. If you need a group rate give us a shout. We are happy to talk about training packages for your entire marketing team.

And on that note, thank you so much, Taylor and Kristin, for joining me today to share all of our wonderful insights about Hemp’s. We are absolutely going back next year. This is a show that’s now added to our regular conference rotation. And thank you for everybody that really made our first year so joyful. We made a lot of really fun new connections and really already cannot wait until next year.

So thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you next week! 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 the host and I am the CEO at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here with you today to officially announce the launch of our compliance training platform for healthcare marketers called We Are, HIPAA Smart.

Anyone who knows the background of Hedy & Hopp knows that we have done lots of training on healthcare marketing through the lens of compliance. So ever since the bulletin was released in 2022, we’ve put up podcast episodes featuring lawyers in the space that specialize in healthcare, helping us understand the bulletin language, or understand how state laws or FTC regulations may be impacting our work.

We have done lots of podcast episodes with our own internal team members who are industry leaders on this topic, Mark Brandes and Lindsey Brown. And we’ve spoken at conferences across the country about this topic. While last year at one of the conferences, during the Q&A at the end, an audience member raised their hand and stood up and said, you know, Jenny, this is great, but now I have to go back and talk with the rest of my marketing team and help them understand what all we need to be paying attention to.

Are there any online resources that I could point us to for us to all get training on what’s going on, and how we can build a compliant team and process? And I swear, if you were in that crowd, you probably saw a light bulb go off over my head because I immediately thought, no, but there should be. We are so passionate about helping marketers learn all of these complex details.

Work with your legal and compliance teams to get aligned on what your approach for your organization will be. Implement the changes you need to implement and then get back to doing the marketing that you love. That really makes a difference on patients’ lives by helping them access care. And so for us, this felt like a really utilitarian solution to help make sure that everyone in the entire marketing team within your organization has standardized training to help them understand what’s the regulatory landscape within healthcare marketing, what do we need to do to comply and do it through the lens with examples that are relevant to them? 

We are a business associate to a lot of healthcare providers and payors. We recommend that they have all vendors sign BAAs because of accidental exposure to PHI or, in sometimes a purposeful handling of a PHI trying to do the marketing tactics and campaigns.

And so as a result, every single member employee at Hedy & Hopp goes through healthcare BAA training within the first two weeks of starting employment with our organization. The frustrating thing is, all of the training modules available online are more focused for clinical users. People that are actually in the doctor’s offices or in the hospital seeing patients or prospective patients face to face.

None of them. We have not found a single platform that actually talks about examples and applications through the lens of digital marketing tactics, tools, and processes. So we made one. This platform is available to all healthcare marketers, whether you work at a provider, payor, if you work at an agency, anybody who is working with healthcare marketing, it is available to you.

It does not matter if you have 20 years of experience in healthcare or if you are brand new. Maybe you’re coming from another industry. These modules, the curriculum within them will help you understand what rules, laws, and regulations you need to be aware of based off of the geography that you serve. And then, how to modify your tools and processes in order to be compliant.

There are a variety of training modules that we are launching with. We’re launching with two. The first one is compliance training for healthcare marketers. This is a 101  class that walks through big picture all of the variables that marketers need to be aware of if you’re going to do work in healt care. So we cover at the 10,000ft level the basics of HIPAA, FTC, state laws, and we introduce class action lawsuits and how that can impact your work.

That’s really an intro 101 class. We then have a module that 100% focused on HIPAA compliance training for marketers. This course goes over the foundations of HIPAA and takes an in-depth view about how the shifting privacy guidelines impact the work that we do. So we go into modules such as paid media, website analytics, CRM, email marketing, websites, and much more.

In a couple of weeks, we’re going to be launching our first advanced module. This is Advanced Technical Healthcare Marketing. So this goes into the how-to detail. So if you’re a member on a team or if there is a member on your team and they’re responsible for actually implementing marketing tactics, this is the module for you. So this course will actually go and talk about advanced analytics techniques and tactics.

It will talk about settings in Google Analytics 4, a lot of technical details about sGTM, and CDPs. We’re not hiding anything here. There is no oh Hedy & Hopp does implementation, so we’re not going to talk about things in depth. None of that. We’re not keeping anything a secret. All of the technical details that we have chosen to include in the curriculum are there.

We truly want to empower marketers to be able to do the technical components of their work. Two other fun modules that we’re going to be launching later in the year is a compliance training for lawyers, the technology 101. So all of you have worked with a lawyer who really knows their stuff when it comes to FTC and state laws and HIPAA.

But sometimes there’s a gap between what they know and then how technology actually works. So this course is going to be a course that actually helps them understand what is a pixel, what’s a floodlight, how does it work? How and when does a form actually pass data through and where does it go? So it really is going to help them understand what marketers are actually dealing with through the lens of technical details so they can be better stewards of their organization and really get into the weeds with you.

And then the last one is a BAA 101. So for all of you vendors out there that are being asked to sign a BAA, my goodness, you better know what you are signing before you sign it. There are serious, legal and financial ramifications for signing a business associates agreement. So you really need to understand all of the details, what it means, and how to get comfortable and understand, your responsibilities by signing one.

We have a lot of other resources and courses coming later in the year. So these are just the ones that are, on the tail end of development that will be ready to launch very soon. A couple of big-picture Q&A. Are discounts for multiple users, and can one person create multiple seats? We’ve been getting this question a lot from our beta users.

And the answer is yes. So if there’s one person within your organization that you want to have, manage and create seats for team members so your entire team can go through training, super easy peasy. To do that on the site and you get a phase discount based off the number of seats and training modules that you purchase.

And then if you have any questions, give us a holler. We’re here. We’re very proud to launch and put this platform out into the market. All of this education was forged through blood, sweat, and tears for actual client work that we have been doing over the last few years. We have done dozens and dozens well, actually, let me take that back. 

Hundreds and hundreds of privacy audits and implementations for providers of all sizes, everything from a single location provider or a critical access hospital, all the way up to a statewide or multi-state provider system or payor group. We’ve done it. And so we have taken all of that knowledge and education and really put it into this platform for others to benefit from.

Our point of view is that we want to get all of this behind us. We want to help shape the industry and create processes that allow us to get back to doing marketing and allow healthcare marketers to start thinking again about some of those more advanced techniques like personalization and or integrating AI into our workflows. But we got to get this privacy stuff behind us.

So hopefully you will find these training courses helpful. One final thing is, except for the 101 course, the overview course, all of these courses come with certificates of completion. So again, if you want to ensure that every single one of your team members has a foundational, amount of training before beginning to work for your organization, or if you are an employee and you want to really showcase to either your current employer or to future employers in healthcare that you know your stuff when it comes to compliance within healthcare marketing, it’s a great thing to be able to put on LinkedIn, to be able to showcase, your knowledge in this space.

So that is it for today’s episode. Again, I am super, super jazzed. You can go and check it out at We Are, HIPAA smart. And again, HIPAA is two As not to Ps friends two As. We Are, HIPAA Smart, and ping me with questions or comments. I’d love to hear what everybody thinks once you get in there, but it’s something, again, that we’re just super proud of and excited to put it out there to help marketers, you know, get to where we need to be to move forward as an industry.

So thank you so much for tuning in today. Please, like this podcast, podcast. Share the episode with somebody on your team or within your network that you think would benefit, and subscribe to our channel to receive updates on future episodes. 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. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am the host and the CEO at Hedy & Hopp. Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we’re very proud to be the producers of this weekly podcast. Today, I’m very excited to have with us our very own Shelby.

Our Shelby is a senior account manager here at Hedy & Hopp, and we’re going to dive in and talk a little bit about Swaay 2025. Shelby and I were super jazzed to go to Swaay the Swaay conference this year. It’s our first time. It’s been on our list for a few years, so we’re very excited to be able to attend this year.

And we wanted to record a recap of the conference. So any of you that maybe have had it on your radar will get a better idea of the pros and cons and what to expect if you’re hoping to add it to your calendar of events for 2026. So welcome, Shelby.

Shelby: Thank you, thank you. Always happy to be here.

Jenny: So I’m excited to start off with the reason that we finally pulled the trigger to go to the conference. Again, Swaay has been on our list of conferences we’ve wanted to go to, but traditionally we’ve prioritized just like two conferences a year. As everybody who’s ever attended a conference, as an agency or a vendor, you know what a big lift it is, to be able to attend the prep that it takes.

So we’ve been very kind of conservative about adding conferences to our calendar, but I got a really fun call from our good friend Colin, over at Swaay and Colin told me that somebody was going to be winning an award this year. So I had the pleasure of asking Shelby to go to Swaay with me under the guise that we were just going to check it out.

And, Shelby, you are so awesome. You said. Okay, let’s go. You had no idea why we were going. And I asked you to go two weeks ahead of time, and you were like, sure, why not?

Shelby: Exactly. Yeah. I had questions. I’m like, okay, this is last minute. This okay. Yeah. I’m down. I’m down to go check it out.

Like Jenny said, I knew that this had been kind of on our list for a while to see, so I was very excited to go check it out, see what content we could take back to the team and, and the community. Was not expecting, an award to be a part of the mix. And anyway.

So Shelby and I flew from the Midwest to San Diego. It was held on Coronado Island, an absolute gorgeous venue. And the very first session of the event was the opening keynote and the awards. So I first want to give a little shout-out to Swaay. They do a couple of really cool things the beginning of every conference, they first do a land acknowledgment of acknowledging the indigenous people that lived on the land where the conference is being held.

It’s just a really beautiful moment to recognize the history, of whatever geography the event is held at. And they also did a patient keynote. So every year they have a person who actually experienced healthcare through the lens of a patient, opened the event as a reminder of why we all show up to do the work we do every day.

And this year it was Shereese Maynard from NostraData Medical. Shereese, she did an amazing job. It was absolutely beautiful. Sharing her own personal experience, being in the health care world unexpectedly, and kind of sharing her reprioritization of a work, life. And again, just the affirmation of the important work that we all do 100%.

Shelby: And it was really interesting to hear about her experience in her patient journey, kind of starting when Covid, the height of Covid, and how that completely shifted her experience in healthcare. And so all of the tools that we’re looking into that we are implementing on our websites, on our apps, the long-term impact of that on a patient, that dealt with it in Covid and then even now. So it was really, really impactful.

Jenny: And I think one of the great takeaways that really sunk in with me as she talked about how it was a reminder that, you know, as marketers and people involved in healthcare, we understand how to navigate the system better than anyone, right? We are the ones who help hold the keys to those patient access points.

So it really is truly a gift that we’re able to leverage that insight and knowledge to help, you know, the everyday patient better access care. So then it got to the awards, and it was adorable. I actually secretly recorded them announcing you, and I think the cutest moment was whenever they had a slide up doing a quote, my quote of you, when it specifically said almost 40 employees in 12 states, she brings joy to everything she does.

Your face. I could see the wheels turning. You were like,um I know that’s stat.

Shelby: It was like I’ve said that stat, I know that stat. What’s going on? I’m like putting two and two together. Wait. So it was so sweet. It was completely unexpected.

Jenny: It was really wonderful to see you honored alongside all of your peers. It was a very, very well deserved award.So Shelby was named, the Rising Star Healthcare Marketer for Agency for 2025. So you had to be in the industry for three years or less, which you’ve been in the professional world for more than that, but specifically focusing on healthcare. You’re about two and a half years, and so you barely made the cut off. But, perfect timing to acknowledge and honor your contributions to the clients that you work with every day.

Shelby: Yeah, it was, as you said, very unexpected. Very, very special, to be honored in that way by the community. And, yeah, just reinforce all of the hard work and care that goes into every day. But Swaay is so lovely and in the way that they foster community, I would say very similarly to how we kind of that Hedy & Hopp talk about our community, both internally and with our clients.
And so it was just super special to be acknowledged by them. And yeah, be able to just continue growing alongside this awesome team and the great clients I get to work with. So felt very, very honored. In that moment and even since then, it was super special.

Jenny: Love it. Well, let’s talk about a couple of our favorite sessions.

So one of our favorite things to do when we go to conferences, of course, is to meet healthcare marketers. But our second favorite thng to do is attend sessions, because we are very dedicated to continuing learning and growing as individuals. And I love seeing the different ways that people aggregate and present information at these conferences.

Some of the things I noticed at Swaay, big picture takeaway is that there were a lot of panels, some lectures, and then some unconference. They really tried to make it more of a community feel and vibe with the sessions versus being lectured at the entire time, which I will say is not always bad. Sometimes being lectured at if you’re learning good content is absolutely fabulous.
I you know, I’ve learned a lot in lectures, or sessions that are primarily presentation style, but that’s one big takeaway. But there are two sessions in particular that I know we wanted to chat about today. The first was a session called Designing a Formal Listening Process to Support Decision Making and Marketing. And there were two individuals.

There was Dan Dunlop, he’s the principal at Jennings Health, and he spoke alongside David. Sorry, I’m going to butcher your last name. David Laszakovits, he is the director of communications and external affairs of the American Board of Radiology, and it was really fascinating because they the entire presentation was around how the American Board of Radiology realized that they were slowly coming out of touch with the radiologists that were in the field, and their certification requirements were no longer producing the kind of radiologists that they thought was necessary to meet today’s demand.

So they instead of just rolling out a new testing and certification process, they went on a listening tour to really get input from a large number of people on the board and radiologists practicing in the field, and it drastically changed their testing methodology way more than they expected that it would. But I felt it was a really good reminder that, regardless of how much you think you know about a situation, listening and being prepared to pivot with positivity, whenever you get some real feedback is always really positive.

Shelby: Definitely. And they kind of walked us through the whole process that they took, which was a lot of different steps from one-on-one interviews. The surveys and written submissions from folks. They really took their time digging in, and I love they talked about how a lot of their one-on-one interview sessions they did. They did not just one with the individual, but they did multiple because they realized you’re not really getting the full picture just from one meeting.
And so it definitely showed how much they were pivoting with positivity and being flexible throughout the process to get what they needed to make that informed decision. So hats off to them. I know they’re still in kind of the process of a phase two of some additional stuff that they’re working on, so that one was really, really interesting.
Jenny: Yeah, I totally agree. They did a very, very good job with it. The second session that we wanted to highlight, was my personal favorite. It was called Cultivating Growth: How Nebraska Medicine Created a Brand to Attract and Retain Top Healthcare Talent. And this was, the moderator was Laura Roberts, who’s the chief client officer at Unlock Health and featuring Nebraska medicine.

They had both Frank. Lococo, who’s the VP of marketing and communications, and Katie Breach, who’s the VP of people operations. And they talked about how they were putting together basically a marketing campaign to be able to drive inbound candidate applications. So viewing recruiting through the lens of marketing, and this is something that Hedy & Hopp we do extensively with our clients.

Because usually one of the biggest hurdles to providing care, is making sure you have the staff to, you know, work those shifts. So, working on creating recruiting hubs, candidate application and, you know, nurturing campaigns, paid media programs, etc. we do every day. So to hear it through the lens of Unlock in Nebraska Med for me was really wonderful.

I thought they did a great job, and I love that they had both right from the marketing side and Katie from the HR side, kind of presenting the differing but complementary opinions of why it worked to collaborate.

Shelby: Definitely. And they talked, you know, kind of extensive, extensively about how important that partnership was, that it was essential that there was buy-in from both sides, that they were all in together.

This was going to take resources from both of their teams, both of their sides of the house. And so they really kind of went all in together, which was really, really special to see the great results that they’ve been seeing so far. But I think that just rings true across so many of the projects that we do with our clients is being able to really partner with those other internal groups and departments that are going to be experiencing the impact of those campaigns.
Right. Like, hopefully we see a lot of volume, and hey, the team is ready and aware of that volume that’s going to be coming through. So super exciting to see the neat stuff that’s going on over there at Nebraska.

Jenny: Yeah, that’s a great point. Shelby. One of the competitor case studies they presented actually was how the team was not ready for the volume.

So the application-to-interview rate was very, very low because they did not appropriately respond to those applications. So it’s a great, great call out there.

One thing I’d love to do is just a call for conversation, something that I feel like I’ve talked about over and over again, that Nebraska medicine did not share in the session. And I have yet to hear a system or hospital talk about this is how everybody’s determining marketing budgets for recruiting in HR. On our side, what we have seen is huge variations in how folks are determining this.

There is not a standard formula. There is not any best practices across the industry that we have been able to decipher for. Some of our largest clients still come to us and say, what have you seen? So that’s one thing I’d love to do. Just a call of content if anybody’s listening, and you’d love to share some industry insights, please give us a shout because we would absolutely love to chat, and talk more about how this could be something that we are more visible with externally within the industry, because I think it really help folks understand what others are spending and how you’re determining appropriate budget levels.

So let’s move on to the final part of the podcast. Let’s talk about pros and cons about Swaay. So like I said, this was our first year going. We go to a couple, a handfu,l maybe of conferences per year. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of Swaay.Health. The first pro that I would love to share is that it is more intimate than other conferences, so that means it has a smaller exhibit hall.
It means there are less people in each session. It means that, during meal times there are less tables and, people to navigate. So that is a pro in my eyes. If you, number one, aren’t a people person, and you don’t get excited about the idea of going to a conference of a thousand people, or perhaps you haven’t gone to one in a long time and you kind of want to ease your way back in.

It’s also a pro if you’re looking to form immediately a sense of community, because the thing you notice immediately is every single table of folks is excited for you to sit down and join them, even if you’ve never met before. They are excited to meet you. They’re excited to chat. One of the things that Colin talked about specifically in the intro is there’s no such thing as competitors at Swaay.

You throw your title out the door, you throw your city already out the door. Everybody’s there for open, honest, and mutually beneficial relationships, and that is a vibe. You feel it throughout the entire event. So that is a huge pro. I’ll also flip it though. If you are trying to go to a, get a lot of value meaning content you want like a four day session with thousands of people, you want to try to meet as many people as possible, and maybe you’re more worried about volume instead of depth Swaay may not be for you.

We’ve been to a lot of conferences that are much, much larger than sway. And so again, I think that is a personal opinion about what you think you will get value out of.

Shelby: 100%. And I think, kind of leaning in a little bit on the pro that you mentioned, Jenny, I think they talked a lot at the beginning of the conference about, you know, giving before you get in kind of the mindset that they try to set in place at Swaay and being vulnerable and being honest, asking the questions that it’s a safe space.

And that definitely came through in our time there. I think, for folks who, yeah, are looking for that kind of community or are maybe newer to the space and are kind of looking to dip their toe into making those connections, asking those questions definitely felt the good vibes and just the openness of everyone that was there.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Another pro I would name, and this was our first year going, but I talked to multiple attendees that echoed this from prior years. It was held on Coronado Island and it was almost a vacation-like setting. It had a beautiful view of the bay where we were eating meals every time. It was very thoughtfully put together to provide just a fabulous, high-end experience.

So that’s something that I say is definitely a pro

Shelby: 100%. And I will say the food was also fabulous.

Jenny: The food was amazing. Shelby. It was amazing.

Shelby: It was so good. Hats off to the team. I know that they put a lot of effort into picking the food choices, and that was lovely. And that can make such a big difference because you want to spend time there eating and chatting with the folks around you.
So it definitely just added to the experience.

Jenny: It did. I’ll say there was very high-quality protein items at each meal. And then also the moment Shelby and our eyes locked after we each took a bite of that chocolate croissant. I’ll never forget that moment. I do too. If I see a person out and about, I’m like, oh man, that one.

It was so good at a conference, I would have thought a conference chocolate croissant would be stuck in our memories. That just goes to show, again, the attention to detail, that they put into every piece of this conference. Very, very, thoughtful, very much making sure that regardless of your dietary restrictions, you were there and there were snacks available at all time and sodas.

I mean, I’ve been to some really expensive conferences, and they only had bagels for breakfast, and then there was no water through the entire facility. Right. So, like, we’ve all been to those events that just, like, aren’t set up to allow you the space to be able to actually focus on the content because you’re too busy, you know, walking across the street to buy a bottle of water or something silly.

So Swaay really put the thought into making sure that you were going to be taken care of, and attendees said other prior conferences were like this as well. That wasn’t just 2025.

So perfect. Well, this was a fabulous recap. Again, Shelby, congratulations on being named the Rising Marketer for 2025. I’m so proud of you and so just thrilled to work alongside you every day.

Shelby: Oh, thank you so much. So excited to keep on growing with the amazing community that we have, inside our organization, and our lovely clients and folks that we partner with. So looking forward to all that is to come.

Jenny: Awesome, and thank you for tuning in. Hopefully, if Swaay has been on your maybe list, this will push you to give it a shot in 2026.

Strongly recommend attending if this content spoke to you. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out directly. We would love to chat. Thanks for tuning in today. Have a fabulous rest of your day, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.