Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host. And I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am very excited today to have three of our very own teammates joining us to celebrate the one year anniversary of the acquisition of another agency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin: Yeah.

Jenny: For sure. Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin: Thanks, Jenny.

Phil: Thank you, Jenny. 

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

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

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

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host and I’m the founder and owner at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to have with us our very own Madison Molho. Madison is the Director of Strategy here at Hedy & Hopp, and she joined us last week to talk a little bit about the development of a brand, whether it is a net new brand, if you’re doing a rebrand, if you’re trying to do a brand refinement and the ways that you could make sure that the work you’re doing not only matters to the end patients, but also that you have the necessary components in place so that anybody working on activating your brand understand how to bring it to life correctly. 

 

With messaging and visuals. But that’s not all, Madison. Our team then usually takes that work and turns it into something called an engagement framework. And I think when I talk to people at different organizations, this seems to be one of those missing pieces where organizations really have a gap in between the brand and the activation.

 

So talk a little bit about what an engagement framework is and why it matters. 

 

Madison: Yeah. So essentially, the engagement framework is that bridge from the foundational brand into activation. And it starts to pull in elements from the brand framework, the messaging framework, which we talked about last week into how we would execute in whichever channel or space we’re in.

 

So engagement framework looks at a high-level audience journey with the caveat. Obviously, we all know people do not move through journeys linearly, but for the sake of this, we look at it linearly, and then we look at how somebody will move that journey from their perspective. What do they want to achieve at each stage, what are their challenges, and what are their needs?

 

And then we layer on how that brand interacts with them from a messaging standpoint, from core channels, and then KPIs. So we can start to move our audience in the direction we want them to be and not just meet them where they are, but move them to where we want them to be in a way that, again, is relevant to them and is more organic and not somebody you know coming and pulling them, but really along with them in the journey.

 

Jenny: That’s so helpful. So, for example, for our clients that we do performance marketing for or the agency of record for, we’re often doing large activation campaigns. So give me some examples. How do we make this tangible for our listeners? If we’re creating an engagement framework and then we’re actually doing the activation, what are maybe a couple of different steps in the engagement framework or different ways that you can kind of bring it to life for folks?

 

Madison: Sure. So a lot of times the engagement frameworks are broken up by audiences slash personas depending on where we are, knowing their nuances across audiences, we say patience. That’s a very broad group of people, regardless of who your patients are or where you are. So it’s important to understand the nuances within each of your audience segments. And so really that allows us to have specific messages within each stage that then we can transition into, let’s say, media.

 

If we know that we’re activating media in, let’s say YouTube, for somebody who’s 65, we have a specific message in that part of the journey, knowing where YouTube plays a role in that funnel, plus the message, and then allows us to build that connection from what we know the audience wants, you know, overcome their pain points, hit their objectives, while also delivering that relevant message to them in the proper channel.

 

Jenny: Sure. Because, for example, like let’s say we’re doing a campaign for a payor, if it’s a programmatic campaign, you can’t have a hard sell, right? They aren’t actively searching for a solution. They’re not emotionally maybe ready to make that commitment. So it’s a different step. 

 

Madison: Right. So at that point, you’re probably just making sure your name is out there.

 

They’re aware of you. They start to see, you know, your brand colors. You see an image, you’re like, hey, that’s pretty relevant. But, you know, they may keep scrolling, which is totally fine. That’s the point of where that message is, because that’s where we would layer on another channel, and another tactic with another message to pick up where our programmatic ad left off.

 

Jenny: Yeah, that’s really helpful. And then of course, we have the measurement plan, which we could have someone on our analytics team on to talk about the specificities of it, but that thing could be layered on top of the engagement framework to really say, you know, at each of these steps, how are we defining success? How are we going to build the metrics within our dashboard to be able to make it real for folks, etc.?

 

Madison: Absolutely. So we always try to put a KPI per stage in the journey into the engagement framework. Knowing an entire measurement plan will also come later, but again trying to focus by the objectives stage. What are we trying to measure? What does success look like by stage as we move that person down the journey, making sure we have the right channels and messages, also working together to drive that.

 

Jenny: So let’s talk a little bit about like let’s say it’s a larger system and we’re doing perhaps a brand level campaign, but then also service level campaigns. Do you typically recommend an engagement framework for the service lines as well as the brand, or is it one broader engagement framework that then all of the service line campaigns roll up to?

 

Madison: It depends on what the objectives are. I would say normally, yes, I would split between brand and service line, just because service line tends to have a very specific objective and an even more niche audience that allows you to get more granular and more targeted with how we look at the audience, the messages, and the channels we put them in.

 

So they do work together because of course, they’re one organization and you want to be consistent and cohesive. Obviously, the campaigns that are in-market will be different, and what you’re trying to accomplish with those campaigns are different. So it’s important to understand the audiences from the objective as well. However, they should work together. 

 

Jenny: What advice would you have for marketers, on the provider side, that are thinking about tackling a rebrand or a brand refresh, or maybe they have an existing brand, but they feel like they’re not showing up in the way that the brand should be showing up.

 

When it comes to actual activation, what advice would you give somebody about where to start? 

 

Madison: That’s a great question. Well, as a true happy, and if you will, I would say it starts with the data. And as I like to say, not all data is quantitative. It’s also qualitative. And so perhaps, you know, conducting some preliminary, either internal surveys, some with the audience, understand what’s working and what’s not working and where you need to push the brand.

 

For some instances, I would say sometimes there’s a new, charge within an organization to reposition or, you know, move that company in a new direction. And at that point, it’s okay, let’s take a step back and understand where do you want to be? And now let’s figure out how we get you there. Of course, I will always come also with that sort of data, but in a different, order of operations.

 

Jenny: That’s helpful. Do you think, fun. Would you rather would you rather, try to refine an existing brand where you didn’t have the ability to change the name of the organization and bring it to life more effectively in a way that resonated with the patients? Or would you rather kind of start from scratch and design something where there’s no existing brand equity?

 

Madison: It’s hard. Again, I think it depends on why the name is staying and what challenges that would have to overcome. I do think it’s a little more fun to start from scratch, because I also think it’s fun to work with the clients on that, because everybody starts at the ground floor together, and you really spend a lot of time together working in partnership to build it.

 

And I, I find a lot of joy in doing that. And I have, I think, built really strong client relationships in the past, doing that because you’re in it together. Not that the other way isn’t fun also, it’s just a different way to interact, to engage in different challenges, to overcome. But I do I think if I had to pick in this way to have, I think I would do it from scratch.

 

Jenny: I think it’s so fun. I love that, I think it’s so fun because we work not only with large systems, but sometimes with private equity backed groups where they’re actually or position on groups where they’re buying additional locations. And so I think we’ve seen time and time again as they come in with this big fancy name and they want to swallow up all of these names of the folks that they’re acquiring, but actually had some brand equity within their local communities.

 

And then that goes away whenever they rebrand because it is being rolled out correctly. So I think the nuances of branding are so interesting and really shows why it’s so important to think through the ramifications of each of those journeys versus, you know, just thinking it’ll be super easy to be able to relaunch something. So.

 

Madison: Yeah, I would say off of that to something we haven’t talked about yet, which is important in this example, is also understanding brand architecture and what matters.

 

Where does where do you want your equity to be? Where is it currently? And then how do you have that something that’s scalable, especially if you work, if you are physician-owned, private equity back where you are, if you’ll say a healthcare system with plans to acquire different hospitals, where does that live? That’s a whole other fun thing to tackle as well.

 

Jenny: But part of the overarching branding as well. Absolutely. Well, Madison, this was so helpful and interesting. I love talking about brand strategy with you. You have such interesting insight. So thank you for joining us today. For our listeners, please like and subscribe. If you have a topic you’d like for us to cover in the future, give us a shout.

 

Or if you’d like to chat with us about brand and strategy work, we’d be happy to brainstorm with you and share some insights about situations that we’ve seen that may be similar or complementary to yours. To maybe give you some examples. And that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to tune in next week for a new episode.

 

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 your host. And I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have our very own Madison Molho join us. She is the Director of Strategy here at Hedy & Hopp, and we’re going to talk about the importance of a brand today. So welcome, Madison.

Madison: Hi. I’m excited to be here.

Jenny: We’re excited to have you many folks that reach out to Hedy & Hopp really views as a performance marketing agency, which is a lot of the work that we do, but we’re full service. We do a lot of brand and strategy work. So I wanted to have you on today to kind of highlight our perspectives and our views when we’re working with an organization to either create a new brand or refine and clarify their brand.

And foundationally, there’s really a couple of key things an organization needs to know about itself for its brand to matter, right? You say all the time, and have some beautiful graphics. A brand needs to be authentic, relevant, and different. So, talk to us a little bit about that. What’s that process of defining those three things for an organization.

Madison: Yeah. So fundamentally brands are multifaceted. There’s a lot going on. I think we all know brands are more than just colors and logos. It’s what’s behind it and what drives not only the brand every day but the people behind it. And so what we like to do is look at three different areas. We talked about authenticity. Something has to be true to the brand.

We as consumers can sniff out inauthentic things pretty easily and like to connect with things that are authentic. So it’s important to establish that within a brand, as well as making sure that it’s different from its competitors. I think that’s probably the most well-known component of branding or brand positioning, because obviously you want to be separate from your competitors, so people reach out to you.

So that’s a second component. And then third is also relevant to the audience. You can be authentic and you can be different. But if you’re not connecting with the right people, who do you want to connect with? Who cares? And while all three of those aspects matter, what we really do is look for that intersection of the three.

So you think about a venn diagram, that perfect overlap of those three elements. And we call that substantively distinctive. And really what we aim for within a brand. So we make sure we were fine all of those areas of being authentic relevant and different and that substantively distinctive brand and that work carries through all the way from our brand positioning, work, messaging work through the creative that the audience would see.

Jenny: Absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about some examples of each of these, because I think for a lot of folks, these branding terms are thrown around a lot. But if you don’t have a background or experience in branding, you might not know what being authentic means. So I’d love some examples because we’ve done a couple of brand, either refinements or rebrands for organizations in the last six months.

And some of the findings, I think were really interesting. So without naming names, let’s talk about some examples. What are some examples, of where organizations are being authentic to the brand or maybe where they’re not?

Madison: Honestly, I think Hedy & Hopp is a great example. We rebranded, and I helped with that effort. And so what we look at is identifying a core value.

And that’s separate than the values that you would put on your website. You know that we talk about every day. I think some everybody probably listeners podcast knows joy, is one of our core values bringing the joy. But it’s really that core value of why do we get up every day? Why do you and I get up every day and work for this organization?

Why does this organization exist? And that’s something that’s intrinsic to the brand and something that has to be, I mean, identified. You can’t really manufacture that. And so that’s what we look to, carve out for brands again, making sure that it’s not, I guess manufactured that it is organic, it is true to who they are and just kind of helps coalesce the organization around that idea.

Jenny: That’s a great call out. And I agree, my favorite part is joy with Hedy & Hopp. I think one example of, when this doesn’t work is when organizations try to be aspirational with it. So for example, when they say, you know, putting the patient first is authentic to us, but then you look at their online views and the terrible patient experience, or their ratings are terrible, right?

So like you said, you can’t manufacture it. It can’t be aspirational. It’s gotta find, you know, what’s truly authentic. How about different? I think, you did as, your team did some work over the last couple of weeks and shared a couple of decks with me, kind of highlighting the difference of different organizations within a specific geography, which I thought was really interesting.

How you did an overlay of the words organizations used. Talk about that a little bit.
Madison: Yeah. So what we did was look at essentially a competitive audit across five different factors that brands and companies bring forth that start to round out how brands show up in the world, how people start to connect with the brand, interact with the brand and internalize that brand to show where our client is compared to their competitors and where their space and where they can actually own space and be different again, in a way that’s authentic to them.

That’s not something again, manufactured. So we looked at everything from who the organizations were at their core, their size, you know, if they had any sort of affiliations. We needed to be aware of, their positioning, their messaging, the services they offered, or SEO volume compared to our, client, their brand tones, photographic style, how all of those elements that come together to really start to coalesce around a brand.

We wanted to find where that space is. But I also think it’s important to understand, especially in healthcare, some things you just kind of have to say, even if your competitors say if they’re quote unquote, any stakes that we as patients need to make sure that companies have like validate, like, yes, I would like to work with you. So I will say there is some gray area when it comes to difference, but we do want to make sure that there’s enough space for the brand that we’re working with to own.

Jenny: Absolutely. And when you take that authentic a different piece together, then when you overlay the relevant component, that’s the why should we care? Right? So give us a little example of that.

Madison: Yeah. So it’s really important to understand the audience at their core, beyond just the superficial parts of the demographics where they live. Even I would say their objectives when it comes to their life or even whichever health care sector we’re working in, it’s really important to understand what their emotional motivators and what’s truly driving them at their core, that they might not even identify with you if you were to ask them.

But if you were to put it in front of those, say, yeah, that does really resonate with me. And it’s important for a brand to understand that, because you are trying to connect with them and provide them something that they can’t get somewhere else, and you want to meet them where they are. I realize that is a cliche at this point, it’s important to understand them so you can meet them there and bring them where you want to go.

But if you cannot connect with your audience, you know what’s the point?

Jenny: Absolutely. I think it’s interesting whenever we are brought into an organization and they’ve done some branding work, but they don’t yet have assets created that allow them to create campaigns that adhere to the work that they’ve created. Right? So it’s all conceptual, and it is not yet at the point where teams can execute against it.

Walk us through kind of at that 10,000ft. Like, what are the steps from taking it to that concept down to the tangible? Okay, here’s what you can give your designers and your copywriters to make sure that the actual creative execution rolls up correctly. Yeah. So of course, it’s always important that we’re always grounded in the fundamentals of the brand.

So something we do is called a brand framework that holds all of those essential elements of the brand. And that also lends itself to the development of what we call the messaging framework, which allows, the brand and everybody who works with the brand to speak cohesively and dial up and dial back different messages depending on who they’re talking to and where they’re talking to.

So you don’t sound robotic, but you sound like you’re coming from the same organization. And then, of course, depending on where we are in the process with whoever we’re working with, we would develop also brand guidelines that help to kind of blow out the visuals, what not to do, what to do. But also there’s a brand tone established in there, as well as a brand narrative that helps to bring this more from the conceptual foundational into the executional and those combined along with more deeper audience work like personas like looking at a journey and engagement framework to help to pull again the foundational conceptual pieces into executional.

Again, like I said earlier, meeting people where they are. But it’s important that each person gets, again, a relevant message that it’s authentic to the brand and depending on where that shows up. So it’s not just hanging out in the theoretical, it really does move from foundational core almost ran all the way through how that company and brand really engages in interacts with their patients or audiences.Jenny: Yeah, that is great. I saw, it was a great little LinkedIn post. Somebody in my network did this morning about how, you know, accountants and CPAs, people don’t think that they can do that job, but everybody thinks they can do marketing’s job because all they’re doing is thinking about that very last fun creative output and not all of these steps leading up to make sure there’s consistency and effectiveness in the content that is being created.

So, thank you for taking the time and walking us through all of that. And hopefully anybody who’s trying to better define their brand or even looking to rebrand this has provided you with a little bit of a roadmap of what that can look like and the different components that you should be thinking about developing to ensure that your new launch is successful.So thanks for joining us, Madison.

Madison: Oh, of course. Thanks.

Jenny: So thank you for tuning in today. Really appreciate the support. If you could give us a like and subscribe, it’d be really appreciated. We are so proud to produce and drop these episodes every Friday and really love hearing from our listeners. So if you have a topic idea you’d love for us to cover in the future, shoot us a note. Or if you have a branding or strategy project you’d like for us to lean in on, shoot us a note at jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Until next time, have a fabulous rest of your day and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited! Today is our 100th episode of our podcast. It is a, it has been a super fun, rewarding journey.

And to celebrate, I invited Maggie Piasecki. She is the other owner at Hedy & Hopp and she’s also our agency’s president, our fearless leader. So Maggie, so excited to have you on today. Welcome.

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

Jenny: So before we dive into today’s topic, I wanted to do a little bit of a throwback. So our first ever episode was in August of 2022.

And I had my dear friend Annie Harmon on. We met when she was at Ascension, and, at the time during the interview, she was at Reputation. She’s now at Press Gainey, in their healthcare division. But we were kind of snapshotting a moment in time talking about the impact of reputation for health systems and the different technologies that systems were using to try to improve their reputation online.

So if you want to throw back about what technologies were trending in 2022, you go give that one a listen. But today we’re going to talk about the four top themes that we are seeing with healthcare marketing executives. So Maggie and I consistently talk. We have a handful of conversations every week with folks across the country. And with that, we really have our finger on the pulse about what’s keeping them up at night, what is their leadership asking them to talk about, and board meetings and leadership meetings.

What are the trends their team members are bringing to them wanting to invest time and budget on? So let’s dig into the first one. The first theme is staying ahead of patient expectations and AI being the go to. So Maggie, I know we’re hearing about patient expectations. And I often what are you hearing?

Maggie: Yeah. So it’s a complicated one because I think any healthcare executive you talk to will always ask about patient acquisition.

Like, how are we being different, how are we staying ahead of the competition. And some of the key themes that keep popping up is, you know, multi-channel omnichannel approaches aren’t enough anymore, right? Patients, we know that they’re online. We know that they’re always going online when they’re searching for information, whether it be research or searching for a new provider.

But they’re doing that across such a variety of different platforms, channels, mediums, and they’re expecting for these organizations to show up in all of those different channels, platforms and mediums. Right. And now you have AI search coming into the to the realm as well, which, you know, creates a whole new set of difficulties. So I think, you know, some of the biggest challenges are ensuring that, our healthcare clients are prepared to show up across all of those different mediums, platforms, channels, etc. when the patients need it, they expect it quickly, but they also then expect it to be connected to a human if they need to speak with them.

So making sure that all of that is integrated. But the other pieces I really think around content strategies. We’re hearing content strategy a lot, especially with the AI tools. So, this no click type of search mentality really needs to come to the forefront. And ensuring that, you know, our clients content is ready to be very easily digested and picked up, whether it is through an AI search result or an AI tool itself.

It’s almost like a bit of a conversation right between patients and these AI tools. So I think, you know, content strategy that works across variety, different platforms, but also is digestible from an AI standpoint, have been really some big challenges that have been coming through in a lot of our conversations.

Jenny: Yeah. And kind of piggybacking on that zero-click search result, thought process, and mentality.

We’ve been advising and have been seeing a lot of our clients really shifting from that top-of-the-funnel content strategy to more bottom-funnel, where it’s solution-oriented. So no longer, you know, if you’re orthopedic, an orthopedic group no longer searching for, things like ways to prevent, you know, an ankle injury instead, it’s more I have an ankle injury.

Who do I go see now?

Maggie: Who do I go to?

Jenny: So somebody more raising their hand looking for a solution. And what kind of content can you provide to make their journey easier? Because oftentimes those broader searches, that’s a national audience. You know, if you are a regional system, there’s no value in trying to rank for those large terms unless you have, you know, a business case for that, which some groups do.

But the vast majority of times your resources are way better spent at that more, you know, action-oriented keyword structure.

Maggie: Yep, I would agree. And then again, making sure that it’s, you know, accessible across any different type of platform channel medium, AI tool, etc. not just thinking again, multi-channel, ensuring that’s all integrated across the variety of different ways that they can engage.

Jenny: One of the things we’ve been seeing people kind of unsure about is the uncertainty and inability of being able to track and understand website volume and traffic that is coming from AI search engines. One thing that we’ve been seeing, the movement on in the last couple of weeks is different tools actually trying to show, and help you understand how you, hate to use the word rank, but rank.

So how you’re showing up in these platforms, especially like the Googles, you know, Gemini, you know, I summary at the top. So there are ways to actually measure the efficacy of that at this point. So your team should be really, you know, digging in to be able to add down your reporting and insights. You’re looking at.

Maggie: That’s a really good callout.

And I think also, then the other flip side of that is there are trends, you know, showing that click-through rates are starting to go down, right, because of that shift. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not performing well or you’re not outperforming what you were doing prior. So more about the engagement and conversion across a variety of different platforms.

And the AI component kind of bringing all that together. So it’s a really good point.

Jenny: Yeah, I think that flows really well into the second key theme that we’re seeing, which is brand loyalty. And local trust still matters. So what’s your POV on this? Maggie.

Maggie: Yeah, this is always kind of a push and pull, especially with healthcare executives.

So going back to your point about sort of top funnel and, and not really putting money and energy into your in terms of like those larger, more, I would say symptom-based type of searches, but really putting the money and energy into building brand awareness and equity locally. There’s a lot of value that’s coming out of that.

And I think there’s been a big shift over the last maybe 18 months or so of how much that brand establishment locally really means. The end user. I also think when you look at a lot of the shifts from acquisition standpoint, so some of the larger organizations coming in and starting to put their brand on more of the local or regional hospital systems, that individual still wants to feel that brand connection.

And so when we’re in a room with healthcare executives and we’re talking about, you know, where do you want to spend your money, where are you going to get the best bang for your buck? We do try and move them up a little bit to brand awareness, because while it won’t show an immediate impact, it is building that long-term value in relationships.

And I also think, you know, going back to some old school tactics around the local publishers and the local newspaper or news outlets can play a big role in helping build that brand equity and starting to build some better relationships and sort of news coverage there. I think we’re seeing a shift with a lot of, especially our regional healthcare systems and tapping into those, those outlets.

Jenny: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think it would be a dream to only do digital, right, because, I mean, the easiest a dream, but that just isn’t reasonable. That isn’t where audiences are always going to be reachable, especially when you’re going into either a rural area or you have an older demographic you’re targeting. So it is really important, you know, to be across the board.

Another thing I’d love to kind of like piggybacking on that. So we’re talking about brand loyalty. One of the things we see folks struggle with, is really balancing brand marketing versus service line marketing, you know, and how you kind of not differentiate the kind of figure out what size of a bucket, budget bucket each of those get.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Maggie: Yeah. And I would I would push that. It’s not just budget bucket, but it’s ensuring that the messaging all ties back together. So I think when we’re in the planning stages with our client, they’re they’re not only trying to figure out where do I put my budget and why, but how do I ensure that there’s consistent messages, right.

Because that person that’s receiving the brand campaign or the brand can message campaign message may also be receiving, let’s say, a cardiology-based message for that service line. So ensuring that those two come together, what we typically try and do is we get down to what that client needs to see from an ROI perspective with getting those patients in a door.

So I think if you talk with any hospital system, for example, they’re going to have a set goal on on the number of new patient acquisitions or the type of market share they want to take over from the service line. So getting creative about how do we adjust marketing spend to meet that demand. And maybe it’s a five-month sprint, depending on what the turnaround time or sort of leeway time is to get them in the door.

But that’s one way that we would often push, our teams to look at that. And then, you know, I go back to the messaging that messaging matrices, which I feel like fell off for a little while, are really coming back. When we think about tying that brand back into the service lines. And so in we’re about to go into planning stages for a lot of our clients and thinking about that, brand and messaging matrix across the brand, but also then the service lines really helps get that marketing team and anybody else it’s activating for them consistent ways that we’re communicating with the audience because they’re going to see it, you know, a

bunch of different times across a variety of different mediums.

Jenny: Yep. That’s a great point. Third trend establishing a preventative care relationship with baby boomers. Preventative care is not necessarily sexy, but it is a strong entry point to that relationship development. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Maggie: Yeah, I mean, we we hear the word baby boomer quite a bit, not only from our payor clients, but also from our healthcare system clients.

You know, I think the number is around 70 million. They’re going to reach by 2030 if I have my numbers accurate. So it’s a huge chunk of the population. This baby boomer group, you know, they’re sophisticated. They’re, you know, much more comfortable with digital than the generation prior to them. And they’re expecting to have that brand relationship with their healthcare providers and systems.

Right. And they want it to go beyond the transaction of just coming in, getting an appointment done and then leaving. So a lot of what we’re hearing from executives is challenging us to think about how do we get in at that preventative care point, how do we continue to extend that relationship with the baby boomer audience to where we’re not just a transactional name?

To them? We are a trusted relationship, healthcare partner to them. To really get them in that long because, you know, there’s going to be a variety of different needs that they’re going to, require over the next. You know, 15 to 30 years.

Jenny: Absolutely. And making it easy for them, just making it appointment and, you know, minimal clicks.

Maggie: Integrating the comms and all of those different pieces.

Jenny: Yeah. All of those things. And then last but not least, is they are talking about focusing not just on patient acquisition, right? Onesie twosies bringing in new folks, but really thinking about capturing more of the healthcare dollar overall for their patients. So share your thoughts here. So patient acquisition obviously is number one across the board, right? That’s what we hear in and out of every conversation. But where we are seeing that extend is one thing. Once they get that patient in the door, the marketers, not the healthcare organization, but the marketers themselves, are being challenged with, how do they expand that footprint with that individual patient. Right. So if they come in, let’s say for an emergency room visit, how do we extend, to get them to take another service with that healthcare organization?

Right. Once we have them in the door, how are we extending to think about preventative care or this type of subspecialty, whether it may be cardiology or orthopedics, whatever, have you. So there’s a big challenge in pushing down to marketers to not stop at patient acquisition and to think about how do they nurture that patient once they’re in the door of the system.

It’s obviously a hard balance, I’m sure, as everybody knows from a privacy standpoint. But I think one trend that I believe you talked about in your original episode is the tech stack behind it. Right? So I think healthcare organizations across the board are continuing to see, you know, some gaps in how do they integrate those variety of different texts and platforms from the point of patient acquisition to ensuring that we can compliantly communicate with them about what else is available?

And that’s another big area we’re really I think health executives are asking us that question. You know, we have Epic, for example, there’s a lot of opportunities and platforms within the epic system that they’re not yet tapping into, and they’re asking for us to really come in and help them think about how do they do that from a compliance standpoint that’s usable and actionable?

Jenny: Absolutely. And we have some clients that are on Salesforce and they absolutely love Salesforce. But we have a lot of clients who would love to be on Salesforce. But today they have Epic. So they’re challenges. You know, budgets are being crunched all over the place. How can we really focus on increasing the share of the healthcare dollars with the tools and resources that we already have access to?

So that’s a really great point and something that I think a future episode is going to be dedicated about.

Maggie: I would agree, and I think more and more marketing dollars will go to really ensuring that that patient is expanding, the lines of service within the organization post patient acquisition as we look in the next couple of years.

Jenny: Yep. I completely agree. Well, Maggie, today has been an absolute joy. Thank you for joining me.

Maggie: You are welcome. Thanks for having me.

Jenny: Yeah, I was so fun to celebrate the 100th episode. You’re the only guest I’d want to have on for today. And, I also want to give just a nod that it is officially going to be four years since the gang got back together in August.

That we’ve been working together again and has been just an absolute joy. Being side by line.

Maggie: Yeah, a ton of fun. And cheers to four years for that. And cheers to 100 episodes.

Jenny: Yes. Well, listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. Please like and share this episode. If you have any colleagues that would be interested in the content and please, follow along.

New episodes drop almost every Friday. And we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I 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.