When it comes to payor marketing, or marketing for insurance companies, planning for the year falls into two primary periods of the year: your open enrollment/AEP period and the off-season.
In this week’s podcast, our CEO Jenny Bristow breaks down how to plan your marketing efforts for these two stages of the year to maximize marketing success:
Always On
During your slow time of year
Open Enrollment & AEP
During your busiest season
Implement the right marketing tactics at the appropriate time of year to leverage both stages of the payor marketing year.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
https://calendly.com/jennybristow
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp, a full service and fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited to chat with y’all today about payor marketing. So often, we talk about marketing for patient acquisition for providers, but a lot of the work we do here at Hedy and Hopp is actually on the payor sides of health insurance companies.
It’s something we’re equally as passionate about, and we’re doing a lot of strategic planning and some great conversations right now with clients. And there are some baseline fundamental best practices that we do here at Hedy and Hopp in the way that we think about payor marketing that I thought I’d share today.
So today let’s dive in and talk about the two stages of payor marketing. So as anybody who is on the health insurance side of the health care marketing [00:01:00] world knows there is an open enrollment period in the fall, whether you are doing Individual and Family or Medicare plans, there is a flurry of activity in the fall when folks have an opportunity to change the plans they are enrolled in.
And then there’s typically a more dormant time, which we are in right now. So, open enrollment for both Individual and Family or Medicare is in the fall, bleeds a little bit into January. But then it really closes up. And some folks still, of course, still apply if they have a change of circumstance, or if they turn 65 and newly qualify for Medicare, but in general, it’s a much slower period of time in the spring, leading into the fall.
And so we at Hedy and Hopp really start thinking about two different stages of the yearly cycle. And I wanted to talk about those two stages and the activities that we like to think about and approach in each of those stages. Because too often we see folks kind of tackling projects at a weird point [00:02:00] of time throughout the year, where we would actually recommend doing it at a different time of year for a variety of reasons.
So let’s dig into it. The two stages are open enrollment, which is in the fall, like I just talked about, and the rest of the year we like to call “always on.” So let’s talk first about always on. So the dormant or slower time of year where you are having some people sign up, but in general, it’s relatively quiet because you don’t have most people in your area looking to switch plans.
A couple of things, there are six core things we recommend doing during this time of year. The first is continuing a media program for brand awareness and for that chunk of the population that still is able to enroll in your programs. The biggest problem we see folks doing is actually going dark with their media planning.
It’s much more difficult to turn a campaign on for open enrollment when you don’t have some you know, wind in your [00:03:00] sales as far as Google’s algorithm and all of your other media placements, it’s much more difficult to turn something on and then turn it back off again than it is to have something on at a lower level and then ramp it up, you know, in time for open enrollment.
So, again, always have a media program going that’s focused on brand awareness, keeping your brand top of mind and building that consumer affinity leading into open enrollment. Number two, now is the time to do website updates or redo your website. The traffic to your website is going to be massively lower this time of year.
So if you’re wanting to build a completely new website, build a new user journey, new landing pages for your plans, whatever it may be, now is the time to do it. Number three, investing time and resources in the measurement planning and dashboards. This is a great time to do it. So looking back at what worked and didn’t work for your last enrollment period, and really understanding, you know, through the lens of reporting on my campaigns, what were the gaps?
What were some things that my leadership team asked for that maybe I wasn’t able to get to the level of granularity that they wanted? [00:04:00] Or perhaps there’s things that I would like to just proactively report on about campaign efficacy that I wasn’t able to do last year. So stepping back and really making sure you’re measuring your campaign success.
Your dashboard or whatever reporting functionality you’re using is technically set up accurately. Something I would do here is a little sub bullet is any patient privacy work you need to do. So any cleanup to make sure that your analytics tools are not collecting IP addresses, device IDs, et cetera, that’s part of that measurement planning and dashboarding.
Number four, any new tool integration. So if your company is wanting to roll out a CRM, for example, or a new email marketing tool, now is the time to do it. You do not want to roll out Salesforce during open enrollment, your busiest time of year, you’re going to have way too many priorities. Do it during your slower period where you really can have time to invest in the infrastructure and the rollout in an appropriate way.
Number five, persona development and user journey optimization. Coming [00:05:00] out of your busiest time of year, you’re going to have a lot of data, fresh data at your fingertips. Now is the time to really dig in, look at it and try to fine tune your personas. Better understand who your customer is, who are people, who’s the average buyer?
Who is the person that, you know, is going through and perhaps getting close to enrollment, but not actually completing that action. And what can you do as far as your user journeys on your website to improve it next year? It’s a great time to invest in those sort of research programs. And then number six, roll out and test content marketing strategies.
So if your persona, uh, marketing work that you did, and you develop some new personas and some content strategies rolling up to it, begin rolling it out. Now, roll it out during the slower period, begin putting a little bit of media budget behind it to increase invisibility and see what kind of engagement numbers you can get.
Again, you want to do it earlier in the year. So you have time to fine tune it leading in. To when it’s time for open enrollment, but testing new content marketing strategies [00:06:00] during this time of year is really great. So you have these six priorities, things that you want to tackle kind of during your slower time of year, and then it’s going to get chaotic for open enrollment.
So everybody now is thinking about actually going and switching their health insurance plan. You have, you know, ACA actually like running, uh, nationwide broadcast campaigns around it, raising visibility and awareness that now is the time to do it. What should you be doing as an organization to really look at the volume of new users and customers that you can get into your plans.
We limit this to three. Core areas. The first is conversion oriented media programs. Now is the time to kind of dump those awareness campaigns and get into conversion oriented campaigns. I have an entire episode on media strategies and talking about awareness campaigns versus conversion campaigns and what that means.
Now is the time that if your budget is limited, you’re going to dump that [00:07:00] awareness and you’re going to dive directly into conversion. If you have the budget to support both, that’s fabulous. They really can feed off of each other to really keep people in that conversion consideration. If they perhaps come to your website and then don’t make a decision immediately, you can perhaps pull them back in again.
Uh, not with retargeting though. Remember friends, retargeting is dead to us. So if your agency is doing retargeting or in house, stop it right away. Message me to learn more about why, but don’t do that anymore. Number two, we’re going to limit website changes testing. and tracking right now. Like we’re not going to make any changes to any of that, right?
We had like a whole part of the year at the beginning of the year to do that, and now is the time to just kind of sit. We can collect data, right? We can have a conversion rate optimization tool on the site, begin collecting a lot of user data. Perhaps we’re going to begin doing a little bit of A/B testing on landing pages as far as headlines and call to actions.
That’s all great, but we’re not doing any widespread website changes right now. We’re not launching a new website in November, for example, [00:08:00] I’m not going to do that. And then the third is to really begin testing that persona based work that you did. So any you know, reasons to believe or core messages that you landed on now is the time to test that and market.
So think about your media, creative, uh, landing page, creative, and ways that you can test that to be able to understand with real world data, what can improve conversion rates on your website. So again, we find it really helps if you think about your year as two separate phases. If you’re a healthcare marketer in the payor space, you’re going to have a more dormant time of year, which we think about as always on.
And then you’re going to have a busy time of year, which we like to think of an open enrollment. You’re going to do all of your research, big changes, structural changes, et cetera, during your dormant always on period. Then we’re going to buckle down and focus on conversions. For that always on or for sorry for that open enrollment.
So if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to reach out. We’re really passionate about pair [00:09:00] marketing here at heading and hop. We think that our work with providers is only good if people have health insurance to actually be able to afford that care. So we really see it going hands and hands.
And please do not forget to rate. And, uh, review. We are marketing happy. We have received lots of feedback recently from folks that have tuned in and found the content helpful. So if there’s a specific topic you want us to cover, shoot me a note, uh, Jenny at heady and hop. com. We’d love to hear from you.
So until next time stay, we are marketing happy, stay joyful in the work that you do, and we’ll see you for a future episode.
In this week’s episode, Jenny compares the two primary types of marketing agencies: brand agencies and performance agencies. Brand agencies are focused on big-picture, brand awareness efforts to make sure your brand is well known. Performance agencies, like Hedy & Hopp, focus on the finer details to make sure campaigns are driving strong results.
There are three aspects to consider when considering working with a brand or performance agency:
A brand agency will focus on awareness tactics, like TV and programmatic, to make sure your brand is well known. On the other hand, campaigns from a brand agency will be specific and conversion-focused. Performance agencies may work to develop specific personas to make sure your brand’s message is effectively reaching the right audience.
With a brand agency, don’t expect a lot of detail when it comes to reporting. Brand agencies aren’t necessarily results-focused, whereas performance agencies are. Performance agencies produce robust reporting, measured all the way to conversion, with a heavy focus on ROI. Performance agency reporting can get very granular to let you know what’s working and how campaign performance can be optimized for even better results.
Simply put, brand agencies may have gaps when it comes to technical knowledge. Since brand agency campaigns emphasize brand awareness, they aren’t built to know everything about website conversion tracking or how a website tool works, whereas a performance agency is.
Both brand and performance agencies have specific strengths to consider before working with them. While H&H primarily operates as a performance agency, we do have team members from brand agency backgrounds to fulfill your organization’s brand awareness needs, too.
Connect with Jenny:
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare marketing agency. We work with providers, payers, and those driving innovation in healthcare all across the country.
I am joining you today; I just felt inspired. I had a really interesting conversation with a prospect that’s really unhappy with their current agency. So we hopped on a call. This is, I think our third conversation, had a really great chat and they kept just comparing us to their current agency. And there were such broad gaps.
I began poking a little bit and it became very clear their current agency is a different kind of agency. There’s really two different kinds of marketing agencies. And so I thought it would be helpful for those of you that aren’t super familiar with the two different kinds of agencies to get a 101 [00:01:00], you know, what are the different kinds of agencies there’s more than two, but we’ll focus on the two primary today.
And how do you tell the difference between number one, what you have right now? And if you’re going shopping to find the new agency partner, how do you confirm the new agency partner is the kind that you’re looking for? So let’s jump in. And first for anybody who was watching the video, I have to just say yay for female empowerment.
I just got back from getting a facial. I am fresh faced. I don’t even have mascara on. So yay for female empowerment. If you ever wanted to know what Jenny looks like without makeup, Today’s the day, but I was too inspired to wait. So I had to record today. So let’s jump in. So, the two different kinds of marketing agencies, or two primary kinds,
There’s some secondary and tertiary, but if you’re really shopping as a healthcare, in house healthcare marketer, and you’re trying to find an agency partner, you’re going to come across two different kinds. You’re going to come across a brand agency and a performance agency. So Hedy and Hopp, we are [00:02:00] performance agency.
And lots of folks that come to us frustrated with their marketing agency are actually working with a brand agency. So their goals really aren’t aligned. So let’s kind of break down the differences between how they work. So first, if you’re working on a campaign strategy. Let’s say you’re developing an annual strategy.
You’re breaking out your different business units, service lines, et cetera, really figuring out prioritization campaigns, tactics, et cetera. A brand agency is really going to be focusing on awareness. So top of funnel strategies, think like traditional TV, out of home, think programmatic or broad digital buys.
They aren’t really going to be focusing on super specific search engine marketing, conversion-related terms. They’re not going to be spending as much time developing personas and understanding the consumer or [00:03:00] patient journey to actually book that appointment. It’s more about making sure your brand is well known in your area. So again, it’s not that either approach is bad.
It’s just that some companies. Like I’m a Jeep lover, for example, Jeep is not doing ads specifically to try to get somebody who’s interested in a Wrangler 4XC to the landing page, to be able to buy one online, right? They always do broad awareness campaigns. Cause they want you to be aware of their brand and be top of mind, but then they also want to make sure that you’re high level aware of either, either any financial specials they have going on, like financing deals or any new vehicles that they’re launching for that year.
But that’s very high level. You know what I’m saying? So if you’re really thinking, you know, what kind of agency do I want to work with? Think about your goals. Are you trying to become really well known in your area? Or are you trying to drive specific campaign [00:04:00] outcomes, specific signups, conversions, etc.
The next difference is going to be the level of reporting specificity you receive. So one of the huge complaints this prospect today said, but also we hear this all the time is their reporting sucks. They just said like, this much spent on a programmatic. We have no details. We have nothing. We don’t know even what service lines or whatever we’re promoted.
It’s just like a bucket. This is programmatic. If they even get that, sometimes it just says “digital.” There’s no reporting down to the number of phone calls or form fills or scheduled appointments. None of that fun stuff. Because again, that’s not what the agency is structured to produce. Whereas a performance agency, you’ll typically see much more robust reporting.
You usually will see the ability to measure all the way to the conversion and really much have a better understand and focus on overall ROI with your campaigns, and they’ll talk more on the language of, you know, what’s the average cost per conversion [00:05:00] per service line per campaign. So you’ll get much more into that level of granularity with a performance marketing agency.
The third one is technical ability. This is something that I can speak to personally. We have been brought in to actually partner with some brand agencies. Sometimes folks are wanting to actually bring in a new, say, paid media agency or digital agency and they’ll call Hedy and Hopp and bring us on but perhaps they have an existing relationship with a brand agency that’s going to do their big picture campaign creative for the year.
We love partnering with other agencies, always happy to do that. In those situations there’s always a tremendous gap in technical knowledge because again, that’s not what that brand agency is built to do. They’re not built to understand, you know, when a pixel fires on a page or you know, exactly how your Find a Doctor tool works and, you know, how to maximize or reduce the number of steps on the UX.
So they’re going to come up with perhaps some really beautiful campaign creative, but perhaps not be able to [00:06:00] execute it in a way that’s friendly, maybe on a mobile device or something, you know, super technical specifications. So those are the three differences again, campaign strategy, you know, broad or specific reporting specificity, and technical ability.
I will say, there are outliers in every situation. You’re going to find brand agencies that have a couple of really technical folks they’ve brought on and they’ve really made that part of their organization really robust. And you’ll find performance agencies like Hedy and Hub that actually have a variety of senior leadership that came from a brand agency.
So we’re able to do that big picture creative in addition to the performance execution. So there’s always going to be outliers, but in general, vast majority of agencies are going to fall into one of those two buckets. So if you are currently on the hunt for a new agency, I really suggest you pause for a second, think about your own organizational goals, what you want to be able to do and accomplish, figure out what direction you want to do, and then create some questions around those three [00:07:00] sections for those prospective agency partners to make sure you’re truly getting what you think you’re getting.
A good way to do that is ask for examples of reporting. You know, ask for project timelines and how quickly you’re going to be able to get into market. Ask for examples of campaign strategies. They result for people like you in the past. Just ask for some examples to be able to see if it’s at that level of granularity you’re looking for.
Because again you know, agency relationships. It takes a while to stand one up sometimes. And it, you know, usually the goal is for it to be a longer term commitment. So you certainly want to make sure you’re making that right decision. So hopefully for those of you that are actively thinking about new partnerships, this information was helpful.
As always, please give us a rate, some good ratings. Follow our podcast and subscribe. And if you have any future topic ideas, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up at jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Have a fabulous day. Thanks for tuning in.
Do you want your marketing talents to make a difference in the world? Join Hedy & Hopp, where we are focused on improving patients’ experiences finding and accessing healthcare.
We’re excited to be hiring for THREE positions!
Who is Hedy & Hopp?
Rated one of the fastest-growing companies in St. Louis for two years in a row, Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency.
At Hedy & Hopp, we believe that a healthcare brand’s first opportunity to have a positive impact on a patient’s experience starts just as soon as the patient begins a search for a provider or healthcare information. This is the key moment a brand can begin to make a connection with a patient. And we do this with clients and employees who share our passion to improve access to healthcare in an environment of joy and positivity.
Hedy & Hopp offers a competitive base salary plus profit-sharing plan, as well as an employer-paid benefits package and a 401(k). We also offer a generous PTO allowance plus half-day Fridays year-round (we close at 1pm CT).
Our Core Values:
Our organization provides a unique environment where work life balance is not one size fits all and where people can show up as their true self, each and every day.
In today’s episode, Jenny shares her top four tips for marketing on a budget. The vast majority of folks in the healthcare space operate on a smaller budget, and Jenny shares the following tips for maximizing marketing performance when budgets are tight:
This episode is worth the listen, as Jenny shares all the details marketers need to know when marketing on a budget.
Book Time With Jenny:
https://calendly.com/jennybristow
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Learn More about Google Ads Grants:
https://www.google.com/grants/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are Marketing Happy.” I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and owner at Hedy and Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here today to talk to you about marketing on a budget. So, often, we talk about regional systems, national payers, all of these organizations that really have a higher level of marketing budget.And along with that comes marketing sophistication.
But, the vast majority of providers and payers and folks in the healthcare space have a way smaller budget. So today’s episode is going to be dedicated to y’all. So if you have a marketing budget of $30,000 a month or less, this is for you. Some folks we talk to have marketing budgets of $15,000 or less.
Again, this episode is for you. So let’s dive in immediately. I’m going to give you four tips to be able to make sure that you’re really being as strategic and smart as [00:01:00] possible with your marketing budget. So the first thing we want to talk about is again something that people often overlook when they have smaller budgets. Whenever people have smaller budgets when they approach us and talk about how we might be able to lean in, a common trend we see is that they have overlooked what we believe to be the most important step and that is knowing your audience.
Persona development and developing your messaging against those personas is really important. It can be very easy to step over this step and immediately start developing a go-to-market strategy or marketing campaigns. But if you have a smaller budget than every single dollar you spend really has to resonate.
So we strongly suggest if you are a smaller budget marketer, definitely pause, and spend some time really refining who you are marketing to. Who is the patient or the decision maker that needs either your care or your health insurance plan? And definitely make sure [00:02:00] you understand what are the emotions that are the key drivers?
What are barriers for them to make a decision? What’s their age? What is their typical web browsing behavior and decision making process for care that you provide? Once you document that you will then be able to really refine your entire marketing program. And, every single ad you deliver will be massively more effective. So number one, know your audience.
Number two, pause and create an annual plan. So often folks with smaller budgets, we see that they’re always playing catch up. They feel as though this is what they’ve shared with us. They are more of an order taker. Where they have the CEO or somebody who runs a service line really more dictating what they need to do from a month to month basis, and there’s no big picture strategic plan.
Again, pause. A great time to do this is ahead of a fiscal or a calendar year, but really pausing and saying what are we doing for the [00:03:00] year, two key questions you need to answer in that annual plan are, what are the service lines? or the business lines we’re going to be focusing on? and what are the goals? How are we going to measure and understand success?
You then can, of course, build out campaigns and tactical execution underneath that. But mapping it out on the annual plan really helps you look at it big picture. Avoid pivoting quickly without strategy. So kind of being told top down what you need to be doing, you will have already created a plan, shopped it, had it approved by senior leadership.
And you have then aligned on the service line or business line prioritization throughout the year, taking into account seasonality, et cetera. But then you’ll have a much stronger foundation to operate against versus going on a month by month or quarter by quarter basis.
Number three, friends, if you have a limited budget, you’re a bottom funnel marketer. And I mean that with so much [00:04:00] love. Quickly let me verbally for those of you watching the video visually define what I mean by bottom funnel. If you imagine a funnel on the bottom funnel are people who are actively trying to find you. So people who are going to Google or Bing and typing in “healthcare provider near me” or “health insurance plan,” “Medicare plan available to me.”
They’re actively trying to find you and solve a problem that they have. Those are your customers. Those are your immediate buyers. That is bottom funnel. One step up is people that are like your typical buyer. So they match that persona, but they aren’t necessarily trying to solve a problem immediately.
So they aren’t in that decision making pivot at that time. They’re not actively researching solutions. They just happen to be in your right Demographic and psychographic for your typical buyer. And then upper funnel is much more brand awareness. So think even things like out of home, broad [00:05:00] programmatic, if you’re thinking about digital, et cetera.
Not a whole bunch of targeting goes into it. Some does, of course, geographical, but you aren’t really usually going down to a demographic or psychographic level as much. So if you have a limited budget. Friends, bottom funnel, you want to maximize people that are actively trying to find your services. And that means Google ads, Bing ads, and really making sure from a Google local listings perspective that you’re optimized and really maximizing reviews.
Here’s a good call out. If your organization is a nonprofit, make sure you’re leveraging Google Grants. So Google Grants is additional media spend, $10,000 a month, available for nonprofits. A lot of healthcare organizations are nonprofit entities. And if you are, if you’re a 501(c)(3), go to Google Grants, we’ll link to it in the comments, and apply.
And that can secure an additional $10,000 a month to your media budget. Now you have to have somebody manage it for you [00:06:00] that knows how to manage Google Grants because you have to have certain performance metrics to really maximize that budget or else they take it away from you, but it’s free money. So definitely go and apply.
And the last thing I want to say is, my friends, have a measurement plan and a dashboard in place you can understand performance. You need to make sure all of your key actions on your website, whether it’s a form fill, a phone number, whatever, are actively tracked. You need to understand how many new or how many prospective customers.
And then hopefully if your data is clean enough, how many actual customers you drove in the door with your marketing campaigns. That is the way to be able to effectively optimize. And make sure you’re marketing in the right places and then be able to ask for more budget if they want to market more, because again, you’ll have a case that you’re doing a really clean and efficient job and they will be able to delegate more dollars, perhaps to additional business units or service lines to expand [00:07:00] marketing’s overall scope for the organization.
Do realize that there’s lots of technology you can integrate to improve tracking. For example, there’s a lot of call tracking software, CallRail, Invoca. All of these organizations have HIPAA compliant call tracking, basically changes the number on your website. When the person calls, uh, it’s marked according to how they found your website.
So you could accurately track that, say, a Google ad drove a phone call. So it’s very easy to implement. You can do form tracking for conversions through a web analytics event. All of these things are easy to do, but it takes a strategy to sit down and pause and figure out what are those key actions on our site that show marketing is working and then an action plan to actually implement it.
So again, friends, if you are a small budget marketer, these are the four things you should be actively doing. Number one, know your audience. Slow down, figure out if you need to prioritize specific service [00:08:00] lines, what the goals are for each of the different audiences. Slow down and get aligned. Then develop an annual plan and take into consideration any service line focus, any seasonality, actually document any tactical or campaign pivots you need to do according to seasonality, get that approved, and get aligned throughout your organization.
Number three, be a bottom funnel marketer, you got to focus on those tactics where folks are actively trying to solve a problem. It’ll be the least expensive conversion that you’ll pay for with your marketing budget. And number four, develop a measurement plan and a dashboard. So each month you can report on the number of new conversations and new customers you actively drove through the door.[00:09:00]
So again, Hedy and Hopp, we are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with organizations of all sizes. We love working with large regional and national players, but we also are really passionate about helping smaller organizations. So if you are, you know, a marketer with a smaller budget, reach out, grab some time to do a one on one with me.
We’ll put a link in the show notes for you to schedule an appointment. I’d love to chat about your strategies and any questions you have about being more effective with your marketing spend. As always, be sure to give us some love on whatever streaming platform you’re listening to. We’d love some stars and some comments.
And let us know if there’s a topic you’d like for us to cover in the future. Have a great day. And thanks for tuning into today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
On this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” our CEO & Founder, Jenny Bristow, speaks on a topic that’s been brought to light on a lot of our calls with clients and prospects recently – competitive insights. With the new fiscal year creeping around the corner for many, it’s crunch time to deep dive into competitive intelligence. We’re talking about more than just keeping pace; understanding your competitors’ approach to marketing helps you fine-tune yours. Tune in for actionable insights on how to tackle this item on your to-do list!
Highlights from Today’s Episode:
[00:45] – The Critical Need for Competitive Insights – We discuss why understanding the market through competitive insights is not just beneficial but essential for healthcare organizations looking to fine-tune their strategies effectively.
[02:00] – Choosing Your Competitors Wisely – Jenny guides us through the strategic process of selecting competitors for analysis, emphasizing the importance of including local and leading digital-first players to ensure a well-rounded perspective.
[03:15] – Decoding Competitors’ Marketing Tactics – Explore the various tools and methodologies to analyze the marketing efforts of your competitors, from ad placements to content strategies, using platforms like Wappalyzer and SEMrush.
[05:00] – Understanding Digital Priorities – Learn how to dissect and understand the digital focus areas of your competitors, which can reveal a lot about their strategic priorities and budget allocations.
[06:30] – Navigating Access to Care and User Experience – Jenny sheds light on evaluating competitors’ tools and user experiences, emphasizing how these components can significantly impact patient access and care journey.
[07:45] – Unpacking the Marketing Tech Stack – Discover the importance of understanding the technological tools and platforms your competitors are using, which can offer insights into their marketing prowess and capabilities.
[09:00] – Assessing Reputation Management and Industry Promotion – We conclude with a look at the value of understanding how competitors manage their reputations and promote themselves within the industry, which can provide clues to their focus areas and strategic initiatives.
Links & Resources
Tools for competitive analysis mentioned: Wappalyzer, SEMrush, BuiltWith
Learn More about Hedy & Hopp’s Competitive Intel Program
Book Time With Jenny
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with providers and payers all across the country to help improve patient’s access to care.
Today, we are going to talk about a topic that we have received multiple calls about over the last few weeks. Some people are just starting to begin thinking about this. Others are wondering what’s even possible. We’re going to be talking about competitive insights. So, this is one of those marketing projects and processes, depending on where you are in your organizational sophistication, that sometimes is put on the back burner for a year or more.
The best organizations are doing competitive insight regularly, whether that’s a monthly cadence, quarterly cadence, whatever. It’s important to understand what’s happening in the market so you can [00:01:00] pivot your marketing correctly, whether it’s tactics, messaging, budget, et cetera. But a lot of organizations that are reaching out to us right now have not really prioritized on this since COVID.
And I get it. Like a lot of stuff has happened since then, friends. And a lot of these marketing teams are just now kind of realigning and getting back to, a comfortable place so they can start thinking about growth. But, a lot of people are asking about this because they’re going into the new fiscal planning.
A lot of folks have a new fiscal starting July 1st. Many people are having to start turning in budgets. And a lot of people are really saying, you know, “Maybe we want to do some competitive insights before the new fiscal to help guide that, or maybe just incorporate it into our new fiscal as a thing that we begin doing on a regular cadence.”
And so, today I wanted to talk about if you’re thinking about competitive Intel, or if you’re not, maybe you should be so, you’re, you’re welcome. I appreciate you. We’re going to talk about five key areas that you want to begin [00:02:00] thinking about.
So, first of all, before we get into the five areas, let’s talk a little bit about selecting which competitors you’re paying attention to because one of the top things that I see people doing wrong is only looking at people in their own back door and looking at people who geographically, a patient or a customer could choose from, but at this point, and with this market, and the way health care is today, you have to also start thinking about who else is truly in your market mix as far as somebody that a customer could choose to go with.
So, for example, if you are a provider group maybe One Medical, Amazon’s offering, is a competitor to you now, maybe you need to start looking at them and understanding how they compete with you and specifically in what areas they compete with you. So, the one thing I’d recommend is picking out at minimum three competitors.
More is better, but each one takes a lot of time. So, starting with a minimum of three, one to two in your own backyard. And then at least one [00:03:00] nationwide digital first. Competitor, if that is something that your particular sub-segment of the industry has to think about or compete with. So let’s get into the five.
There are five key questions that are really helpful to be able to answer about your competitors. The first one is: “What tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team?” So, the really neat thing about marketing online the way that we are in 2024, is there are a lot of tools that allow you to scrape the web and understand where your competitors are placing ads. What kind of content they’re creating? Where they’re placing it paid media insights. How much are they spending? What platforms are they spending money on? Are they using video? If so, how are they utilizing video, and what’s their video strategy?
So understanding what tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team is really helpful because it can point out areas where they may be reaching those patients or customers where you aren’t. So for example, often we see people really excited to think about patient [00:04:00] acquisition campaigns using Google, maybe they’re not thinking so much about Bing, right?
Like this is a really basic example. But, a lot of older people use Bing. So depending on your demographic of your typical customer or decision maker for the care or healthcare purchasing decision being may end up being just as valuable to you as a Google ad placement and maybe that’s something that you see a competitor is doing that you’re not. So, the bottom line is really spending time using online tools that are available to you. Some of them have really small monthly subscriptions. Some of them are free. There are tools like Wappalyzer or Builtwith that allow you to see what tags are placed on people’s websites and that often give you clues about the kinds of campaigns that they’re running.
Highly recommend you do that as a first step for any competitors you’re looking into. And then you can use tools like SEMRush. There’s tons of them out there to help you understand from a paid media and organic perspective where they’re focusing their energy. So again, understanding [00:05:00] what tactics their marketing team is leveraging is the first question you want to ask and understand.
Number two is what are the digital priorities they’re focusing on? So, the two ways we like to break this up are service lines or business units. Like where are they spending their money? If they are, let’s say a children’s hospital and they’re only promoting three service lines that really tells you a lot about their budget, perhaps, but also the prioritization is an organization.
So it’s really helpful as you’re doing that first analysis of tactics to weave in the purview of understanding messaging targeting around service lines. Things that you want to understand are their focus areas for service lines through, uh, activity, budget, and content frequency. Again, maybe they’re geographically in your back door, but if they’re not even promoting the things that are your priority service lines, then it’s important to know that they’re there, but maybe you keep an eye on them, but kind of look at another competitor that maybe is pushing harder to gain market share.
The second one under [00:06:00] is organic content trends. So what kind of content are they creating for their service lines? Sometimes perhaps they don’t have the budget or they’re choosing this as a tactic. Maybe they aren’t doing a lot of paid media to push a service line forward, but maybe they have a content strategy like a podcast or a video series around a service line and that may be driving lots of engagements and organic growth within that service line and the traffic that they’re bringing in. So, again, understanding the big picture number two is what digital priorities are they focusing on with service lines and organic content trends underneath.
Number three. access to care or user journey experience. What’s in their tool set? Let’s say I again, one that I’m going to keep using that same example. Let’s say I need to go to a children’s hospital and I need to find out a doctor and or schedule an appointment. What tools are they using? How easy is it? How integrated is it into the service line pages of the website? Do a little work researching a specific condition treatment or provider and see how [00:07:00] easy it is to get where you need to go.
They may have a user flow or some UX that they’ve integrated that’s really making it amazing for the person finding and scheduling care to be able to find what they need quickly. So, it’s really important that could absolutely shift market share if you’re not aware that they’re implementing and testing something like that.
Number four is their marketing tech stack. So. Again, I mentioned Wappalyzer, but there’s also lots of tools that allow you for free to be able to look at the code of your competitors’ websites. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because you can see what marketing tools they’re using. Are they a Salesforce Marketing Cloud organization?
What website analytics tools are they using? Do they have their own app that they’ve built that allows scheduling functionality that perhaps can make it easier for somebody to find or schedule care? Do they have some other CRM or marketing automation that they’ve implemented to be able to guide people through the process?
[00:08:00] Marketing budgets, strategies, and executions are not just in driving traffic, but it’s also optimizing the journey once they get there. So, understanding that access to care patient journey experience, as well as what tools they’re using. Super important, and really helpful to give you that North Star of where you may be falling behind.
And then the fifth one, this one’s my favorite because what people say about themselves publicly is where they’re focused. They’re not going to be promoting or going and talking about a service line or a campaign or something that isn’t an organizational priority. So, the fifth and last one is reputation management and industry promotion.
So, the first one is external looking in. What are patients or customers saying about this organization? What does it look like they’re doing from a review solicitation perspective? Does it seem like they’re using like a Press Ganey or reputation.com to be able to solicit reviews? And if so, like, what volume and velocity are they doing for those reviews?
But the second component of that is, are they [00:09:00] going and speaking at industry conferences? If so, what topics are they speaking about? Are they doing it with a co-presenter? If so, who is that co-presenter? Maybe a technology they’re partnering with or an agency that’s driving a lot of success for them.
So that’s, again, just helpful to understand where they’re thinking and prioritizing things as a marketing organization. To help you make better guesses and understand what may be coming next for them.
So again, the five things you should be thinking about if you’re running a competitive Intel program is what tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team, number one.
Number two, what digital priorities are they focusing on? Number three, their access to care, their user journey experience, what’s it look like? Number four, their marketing tech stack, and number five reputation management industry promotion. These are all things that can help you really understand where your competitors are.
And again, it’s not that you want to copy them. We’re not out here copying people, but you want to understand and not be surprised if somebody suddenly gains market [00:10:00] share or jumps ahead of you or, you know, Whatever, you know, they continue succeeding. If you’re falling behind, you need to be able to better plan and prepare in order to go into the upcoming fiscal.
I am very excited to say that Hedy & Hopp’s actually launching some one-time programs around competitive Intel. So, if you are interested in learning more about what it looks like, we’re actually going to be linking to it in the show notes. So, if you want to learn more about what it would cost to have an agency like mine lean in and do this competitive intel for you with all of our technical expertise and subscriptions to back-end programs and tools, uh, give us a shout. We will put a link in the show notes that will allow you to schedule a Zoom with me and we can chat more about what you are interested in learning your budget and your timeline. We’d love to work with you.
So again, thank you for tuning in today to this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Please, please, please [00:11:00] subscribe. Please give us a rating on whatever platform you are listening in on. And if you have any content suggestions, shoot them to us. We’d love to create content based off of your feedback.
That’s it for today. See you on a future episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
In this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” the podcast that brings joy to healthcare marketing, our host, CEO, and founder Jenny Bristow, dissects a topic that’s stirring up the digital marketing world alongside Mark Brandes, Hedy & Hopp’s head of all things analytics and decision science.
This episode sheds light on the mixed feelings surrounding GA4, digging into its challenges and revealing how to harness its full potential. Jenny and Mark go beyond critique, offering practical advice for organizations deeply invested in GA4. Whether you’re grappling with catch-all tracking, seeking clarity on website performance, or looking to beautify your data analysis with Looker Studio dashboards, this episode is packed with actionable solutions. Join us as we transform technical hurdles into opportunities for joy and insight, ensuring your marketing efforts are both happy and effective.
Episode Highlights:
[0:45] – Introduction to GA4’s Mixed Reception: Insights into the digital marketing community’s varied reactions to Google Analytics 4.
[1:20] – The Challenge with GA4: Mark and Jenny discuss the steep learning curve and common frustrations with the new platform.
[2:55] – Embracing Measurement Planning: Highlighting the importance of a well-crafted measurement plan for accurate data analysis in healthcare marketing.
[4:10] – Implementing Dashboards for Better Analytics: How custom dashboards can make data from GA4 more accessible and actionable.
[6:00] – The Future of Healthcare Marketing with GA4: Optimizing Google Analytics 4 for enhanced decision-making in healthcare marketing.
[7:30] – Practical Tips for GA4 Transition: Jenny and Mark offer advice for organizations adapting to Google Analytics 4, focusing on setup and tracking strategies.
Links & Resources
Connect with Jenny
Connect with Mark
Check out more about how Hedy & Hopp can help you do more with your data!
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host, but I am also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full-service fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with healthcare providers, payers, and innovation groups all across the country.
And I am so excited today to have our very own Mark Brandes join us. Mark is the head of all things analytics and decision science here at Hedy & Hopp. So, welcome.
Mark: Yeah, thanks for having me on Jenny.
Jenny: So we’re going to talk about a really fun topic today. And that is that a lot of people basically are feeling like Google Analytics 4 sucks.
So what are your thoughts about that?
Mark: They are, and I can’t say I fully disagree. But I do think there are some things that are great about Google Analytics 4, but I also understand where people’s frustrations come from, because I have the same frustration, especially working at an agency [00:01:00] where we have to move around from different clients, and I need quick information out of those tools. And GA4 is not something you can get quick information out of. You have to really put some effort into it, build some things to have the reporting be the same to access some of the data. And so I, I agree.
And I think what we’ve seen is that you can actually, um, create measurement plans that help you really understand what you can measure. And I think that helps really identify what you’re pulling out of the platform that can help. You can also then extend with things like dashboards. So we can talk a little bit about how that would work.
Jenny: Oh, I love it. I love it. And I know we give a little levity to the topic, right? But like, I think the reason why it’s important to address it is there’s a lot of organizations that for one reason or another are tied to using Google Analytics, even with all of the HIPAA and. The patient privacy stuff with a lot of the workarounds, for example, the one that we implement with server-side Google tag manager.
We developed that [00:02:00] program because a lot of people wanted to stick with Google Analytics simply because of the sunk cost of time and energy they’ve already put into setting up the tool and or integrations or dashboards they’ve already set up. So I think on today’s topic. I think we’re going to set aside the fact that yes, there are other tools you can use, right?
The Piwik Pros, the Mixed Panel, like there’s lots of other analytics tools that you could use, but today let’s focus on if you are using Google Analytics for whatever reason, organizationally, if your team has decided you’re sticking with it, then how can you make the most of it? So I’d love for you to start, if an organization is sticking with Google Analytics 4, and they’re just generally frustrated, what’s the first thing that they should do?
Mark: Yeah. And there’s a comfortable nest there, right? Like they’re kind of comfortable. You’ve been using GA and I think that’s one of the things that makes GA more tough is because the interface makes people uncomfortable and you kind of lose that comfort that you had. Right. And so that’s, I think pretty jarring for people.
But yeah, what [00:03:00] we can start to do is for one, when we work with clients, we see a lot of implementations where either their team or an agency or somebody else has come in and they’ve set up what I call just kind of, catch-all tracking. Right? So they’ve gone in and said, we want to track all these links.
Okay, well, let’s track that the link happened and we’ll grab what page it happened on and what page is going to and that’s great until it comes to analytics time, until it comes to the time to the analysis and then things become more difficult. You have to start piecing through all that. You have to pull stuff out.
You have to see was that this link? Was that link? You also have times where it’s not as easy as that. Sometimes it has a JavaScript that comes through. Right? Because you opened up a window instead of opening up a new page. So there’s different things that can break when you do that kind of tracking and that doesn’t really get caught when you kind of just do a throw it all catch it all type of tracking.
So, from our position, it really helps to understand, okay. what are the things that are really important to us on our [00:04:00] website? What’s our website there for? And I think that is a place that we help with having those conversations with really getting down to the heart of, What is this website doing for our business?
And then how can we tie things on the website back to the success of our business? And we do that through a process called measurement planning. So it’s really detailed out and we define, okay, we want to track when this thing happens on the site. Well, we can help define what does that mean in terms of Google Analytics is this event with this parameter on it.
So we can help define all that. And not only that, but it also helps. Catalog everything and really put it into place. I’ve had so many clients tell us, this is amazing. We’ve never seen this information. We’ve, we know all this, but we’ve never seen it in this format and it helps them understand like, okay, I get what we’re doing now.
I get what we’re tracking. I get where this is coming from.
Jenny: Yep, absolutely. And I think whenever people think about measurement planning. That sounds like a step that’s a “nice to have”. So I think reframing that conversation internally [00:05:00] where it’s not a nice to have it’s a “must have” if you’re spending money online and need to understand what the ROI is, etc.
So, when you start with the foundation of a strong measurement plan, let’s talk a little bit about how that enables you to make really accurate and detailed, reporting or dashboards.
Mark: For sure. So a good example is when we moved to GA4 well, in UA, you used to have events that had event category, event action, and event label.
Everybody was so comfortable with that. It made sense, right? You could categorize all this. You could drill down inside your reports. All that’s gone now because everything is an event inside of GA4 and you only have one field for the name. And so you have to either shove all those category, action, and label into that name, which we’ve seen some people do.
We’ve also seen them do, the label as the event and then put category and action as their other parameters to get added onto it. But those are difficult to pull out of the actual interface itself. Trying to drill down into those isn’t the same. When you click on an event, it doesn’t take you to those [00:06:00] next levels.
It takes you to another screen where, yeah, you can look at those levels, but it’s difficult. And you can go into, say, the Explorer reports inside of GA. For you can set up a table there. You can set up a pivot table to help you look at all those different things. But that takes time and effort understanding how the tool works a sense of what pivot tables are, which isn’t the easiest topic for everyone.
And so getting to some of that information, and that’s what I mean by a GA4 feels like it’s terrible, right? Because I can’t get anything out of this. I can’t find the information I’m looking for anymore. And from my perspective. Usually, the information is there. We just haven’t identified what it is, and we haven’t made it easy to bring it out.
And so, yeah, once we have that measurement plan in place, what we can do is really set up a dashboard. And I know sometimes in some circles, dashboards get a bad rap, but I think the way that we approach them is to really have them be an extension of GA4, to bring back some of that reporting field that you had inside of UA, right?
You can drill down into here. You can look at this specific [00:07:00] topic. You can look at your, your month or your date range breakdown. You can see a time chart over that for those specific things. And so that’s something that’s missing at a GA4 currently is your ability to do that. And we can bring that back.
And then you can add it back with adding on something like a Looker Studio dashboard. The great benefit is that Looker Studio is free. So, it’s something you can add on. It’s really the time and effort that takes to set it up and that’s again where we can help with our expertise. We can help you once you have that measurement plan in place, we can help you set up the dashboards. We’ve got somebody on our team who makes beautiful dashboards. Their works of art, in my opinion, but even better. The reason I love that is because it helps you want to come back to the dashboard. It’s not just a spreadsheet looking thing that you come and you just kind of get through.
It looks nice. It’s appealing. And so you want to come back to that dashboard. It’s like, yeah, I do want to go check my dashboard. It’s nice to look at. It’s got my. Yeah. Brand colors. It’s got a good feel to it. And so that’s something that I [00:08:00] find is great because it doesn’t make going through the data at shore.
It makes it kind of a little more happy, a little more fun.
Jenny: I love it. Our whole focus of our brand is infusing joy. And I think our dashboards definitely do that one thing. Whenever I’m talking to prospective clients and I’m sharing some examples of our dashboards, we see their jaws drop because some examples you can literally drill down by business type.
Or by location. So let’s say you’re a 60-location specialty provider. You can see how one particular location is performing as far as traffic spend campaigns, et cetera. And that’s all because the measurement plan that was done up front made sure all of the tracking and implementation was set up correctly.
So definitely a step not to be missed.
Mark: Exactly.
Jenny: Yep. Well, thank you, Mark, for being on always appreciate your perspective and ability to turn something super technical into something that’s easy to digest. So thank you again for being on this week. I love it. And for listeners, thank you so much for tuning in this week.
Be sure to tune in for a future episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Have a great day.
In this week’s episode of “We Are Marketing Happy,” we explore the dynamic world of healthcare marketing and the impact of COVID-19 on physician referrals. Our host Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, discusses the shifts and trends in healthcare systems’ marketing strategies with Lindsey Brown, our esteemed Director of Digital Activation. Together, they delve into the nuances of referral marketing in a post-pandemic landscape, offering invaluable insights for healthcare marketers looking to enhance their referral processes and improve patient care through strategic marketing.
Links & Resources:
Enhancing physician search functionality on healthcare websites:
Doximity: https://www.doximity.com/
Sermo: https://www.sermo.com/
Connect with Jenny
Connect with Lindsey
Thank you for tuning into today’s insightful episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Your engagement and curiosity fuel our discussions. If you found this episode insightful, please subscribe for more thought-provoking content. We’re eager to hear from you – share your thoughts, questions, or topics you’d like us to explore in future episodes. Your input is invaluable as we strive to create content that resonates with you. Don’t forget to rate, follow, share, and review if you enjoyed today’s discussion. Join us next week for another dive into the evolving landscape of healthcare marketing. Stay marketing happy!
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp, a fully healthcare, full-service marketing agency. I am so excited to have with me today, our Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown.
Welcome, Lindsey.
Lindsey: Hi, happy to be here, Jenny.
Jenny: Lindsey manages all of our actual implementation work for clients. So once the strategy is developed, she manages the team that actually brings the campaign to life. So as a result, you really have your ear to the ground of what’s happening in health care systems, right?
Whether it is a, you know, standalone single practice, or if it is a regional system, you really got the insight. So one thing that I’m excited to talk about, a trend that you’re seeing, is shifts in how physician referrals are being handled within marketing teams. So give us the lowdown. What are you seeing?
Lindsey: So, this trend has been happening for quite a few years ever since COVID. A lot of [00:01:00] trends have changed in healthcare since COVID variety of ways, way patients are accessing care, the way that Physicians are interacting with their patients how much information patients are willing to give to digital platforms to, like, improve their health and understanding of their overall health.
So, lots of things are different. 1 thing from a business perspective that really has been trending since COVID and shifts in resourcing shifts and staffing AKA downshifts and staffing, unfortunately, is some of those new business development positions have been eliminated or have been changed a bit.
So, where pre-COVID, you may have some new business development with every single service line that you have or within individual clinics that you have that are really responsible for getting physicians to refer their patients to that clinic for specialty services or for other services. Now, they’re either being reduced up staff so that they have to think about the system overall.
So that’s a lot more for them to manage or those positions are going away completely. And they’re relying mostly on the marketing team to help bring in those patients [00:02:00] from physicians in a more targeted way in a more business to business or B2B fashion. So that’s really kind of what we’re here to talk about today.
Jenny: Yeah, I love it. And whenever we talk about physician referrals, there really are categorically two different types, right? There’s not only getting referrals from outside of your organization, so complementary services coming in. So let’s say a primary care group into a specialty services, but there’s also within your own system referrals as well, right?
So there’s B2B focuses externally, but when we’re thinking about marketing holistically, it’s important to understand. The two differences. Yeah, exactly. So what are some things that a marketing team that’s been handed this new responsibility that’s never had to think about it? What are some things that they should be thinking about to be more effective?
Lindsey: Yeah. So first and foremost, as marketers, I think that the general process isn’t going to change for how to figure out how do you reach physicians that can refer new patients to your practice. You’re going to start with the audience. You’re going to start with the opportunity. So [00:03:00] looking at the data that you have available to you, like, what are your top referring positions?
What is common about those referring positions? What are things that kind of make them linked? And then there are other physicians that kind of mirror those kinds of characteristics that you can then target and go after essentially. The other thing you want to look at is the opportunity. So are there service lines that used to receive a certain amount of referrals, but now their service lines have seen a pretty significant downshift.
What is the reason for that downshift? What is the reason for that reduction? Is it maybe your practices have changed? Maybe a new competitor entered the market and is stealing your share. What are those opportunities that are available? And kind of using those two things again, like we would marketing to patients, what’s the opportunity?
Who are we talking to? You implement the same kind of campaign. Your tactics might be a little different. I think with B2B, it’s really important to note that relationships are really important. You may not be able to build those 1 to 1 relationships with your patients right away, but physicians can and do network with one another, they have conversations with one another.
And so something that your physicians can [00:04:00] do and something as part of your marketing plan can make sure you’ve got cohesive messaging that your physicians, when they’re talking with other potential refers or existing refers, that they’re keeping that relationship moving forward and they’re keeping that positive relationship.
The other thing to think about is like we do with B2C marketing is how do you stay top of mind? So making sure that you’ve got the right content that you’re distributing to your referring physicians or the target physicians that you’re looking for, what kind of information is going to be most helpful for them to see your practices when they want to refer their patients to.
And last but not least, is making sure your information is all accessible. You know, physicians are people, too. They peruse the Internet just like normal humans do, and they read publications and they engage in social media. They do all sorts of things that normal humans do.
Right? So how do you make sure that simple things like your website is up to date? Your Google, my business listings are up to date and have the right information in the right hours. How do you make sure [00:05:00] that the way someone can refer is really clearly visible and it’s a really easy to use referral system.
So things like that are really important to keep in mind as you’re thinking about reaching that audience and seeing some traction.
Jenny: Yeah. And I love that Lindsey. One thing that I’ve heard multiple times from groups that have spent the resources and really just energy improving their physician search functionality on their website is the biggest lift they saw was internal referrals improving because the doctors and office managers within their own systems were using that to find out who to refer within their own organizations.
So especially if you have a larger regional system. We talked to some folks that physicians within their groups don’t even know they have this specialty because it’s something recent. So I think not forgetting the basics and the foundations, the things that help consumers also help physicians or their office managers or whoever is in charge of facilitating that is a really great point.
Lindsey: It is a really great point, [00:06:00] Jenny, because I think oftentimes the opportunity is within your own system. Now, if you are in a large system, it’s. You’re not going to know every single physician that’s there. You’re not going to know when someone new comes on board. Someone doesn’t. So there’s some internal marketing things that you can do, like making sure that you’re announcing when a new physician joins the staff or making sure that you’re announcing big wins in your specialty.
If you’ve won awards or if you’ve ranked really high or improved your ranking in certain services, making sure that communication is throughout the hospital. And I think something that you know, we can consider is that patients that are within a system already. You know, that if there’s continuing to be in that system, that likely insurance is going to be available.
So if you go outside your system, you never know if you’re referring a patient to a practice that may not be covered by insurance. And that’s something that patients really care about and really want to make sure that referring physician is thinking about. So staying within your system is also kind of the kind of first easiest way to go.
And so make that easier for them as part of your internal marketing efforts.
Jenny: Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. So I think let’s end on, if [00:07:00] you’re going to be launching a patient referral marketing program, what are some things that marketers should be thinking about as they’re developing the strategy?
Lindsey: Yeah, so first and foremost think about your audience and your opportunity. So we talked about a little bit earlier, making sure that’s your foundation. You should already have an idea of what that is. But if this is a new thing that your marketing team is bringing on, that’s your first step.
Do some discovery, do some analysis and where your area of opportunity is. Second, make sure that those foundational elements are in place and intact, that your listings are up to date, that your profiles on your physicians are up to date, that you have those internal comms kind of ready to go and what that’s going to look like.
And then third is you’re in your planning mode. So what are some paid tactics that you can employ? Things like search or other areas to help you with that. Especially if you’re a clinic that needs support. external help from referring physicians. So you’re not part of a large system. You’re in a smaller system, not discounting the need for branding efforts.
So you are a smaller clinic and you don’t have a [00:08:00] huge voice in the area that you’re in. Make sure those branding efforts are out so that your lower funnel tactics will be more successful because people know who you are and they know what you do. And make sure as part of that messaging, you’re really touting.
What your specialty is, but also how great you are at that specialty. Why working with you and referring the physician or the patients, excuse me, to you is going to benefit the patient and make sure that you’ve got those comms intact so that there’s always going to be a feedback loop. The referring physician is not going to lose track of the patient, not going to lose track of what’s happening.
There’s a potential for that feedback loop and making sure that again, as part of the process and part of the messaging as well.
Jenny: I love that. And one other thing that I’ve heard you talk about before that I’ll add is for marketers that are new to thinking about B2B marketing and physician marketing, really exploring and understanding all the different targeting that is available when you are kind of going into that whole paid.
Campaign execution, like targeting by NPI. For example, you can really get granular as far as what physicians you’re targeting, and [00:09:00] there’s a lot of physician specific publications you can do marketing on. So it’s a whole nother world that if you have not done that yet, definitely lean on your agency partner or other people within the industry that can educate you about all the different tactics you can employ.
Lindsey: Yes, 100%. There are physician-specific platforms out there. I think about things like Doximity or Sermo. They have physician referral programs that are available. Those are just to name a couple. There’s a variety of others out there. There’s also a variety of tools to help make sure that you’re implementing this and keeping track of your progress so that you can show success.
Because again, as marketers, we always have to show like, how are we providing value? How are we improving? And then we’re also going to be improving our bottom line. So using tools like your CRM platform or something else to that effect will help you track your progress and see additional areas of opportunity and ways to optimize.
Jenny: Oh, I love it. Well, Lindsey, as always you came bringing the intel. So I appreciate it so much as I’m sure our listeners do also. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in today in this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Be [00:10:00] sure to subscribe and don’t forget to reach out with any content ideas, things you’d like to hear us talk about or cover in future weeks.
We create this content for you. So if there’s something you’re struggling with, there’s something you’d love to get a different industry point of view on, give us a shout. We’d love to cover it. So on that note, have a great rest of your day. And we’ll talk to you on next week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
Take care.
In healthcare marketing, leaders often face the challenge of helping their teams become more efficient in a field full of regulations and diverse patient needs. Balancing new regulatory demands and accommodating diverse patient needs requires finding smart ways to streamline processes and maximize productivity. In this week’s episode, discover how to amp up your healthcare marketing team with Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp.
Jenny explores innovative approaches to streamline workflows, maximize collaboration, and amplify success. She hits on project briefs, scorecards, case studies, and in-house knowledge-sharing to revolutionize your approach. Tune in to learn how to utilize these actionable steps and empower your team toward greater efficiency.
Jenny’s book Recommendation: Traction by Gino Wickman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
00:02
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. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with payers, providers, and folks driving innovation in healthcare all across the country.
I’m really excited to be here with you today and share some insights. We just wrapped up our monthly all hands. So once a month, our entire agency gets together to be able to talk about status updates for ongoing initiatives within the organization. We do shout outs related to our core values. One of the things that takes up a big part of the agenda though, is talking about ongoing operational improvements. And an interesting conversation I have often with the marketing leaders that are our clients or folks wanting to be our clients is ways that they can improve their own marketing team’s performance.
01:06
So we’re a marketing agency, right? We work with marketing teams within healthcare companies. Sometimes those teams are two or three people teams. Sometimes they are 40 to 50 people teams. It really varies based off of the size of the organization and the budget prioritization of marketing within that organization. For example, we have a variety of children’s hospitals that are clients and at one maybe they have a five person team and at another they may have a 40 person team. So you can see big variations even with the same category within the healthcare space. But often folks come and ask me, you know, Jenny, “How can I manage my team more efficiently? What are some ideas to be able to kind of tighten up our deliverables, work more effectively with your agency or agency as a partner?” And as we are going through our all hands today, I jotted down a couple of things that I thought could be really helpful to share.
02:05
So if you manage an internal marketing team at a healthcare organization, here are four things you can consider to incorporate into your processes or the way that you view your work that can make your team more effective. The first one.The very first thing my team does whenever we land a new client, whether it is a project, a one-time piece of work that has a set timeline, as well as a set deliverable, is we create a project brief. And that’s again, if they’re a project or if it’s an ongoing retainer client. A project brief is a simple document that outlines why the project or work needs to exist, what the objective is, how we will know if it’s successful. And then often it will include details such as geography, service line, or any business unit information that you need.
It’s designed to be one piece of paper that you can hand say to senior leadership if they’re asking why you’re spending money or time on work, a contractor or an agency, if you need somebody to lean in or even another member of your team, if they’re net new coming into a project or a piece of work, they can read the brief and easily understand what is going on. We create the brief right after the scope of work is signed, in conjunction with the client kickoff meeting. And then that brief for us is the north star for that work. We’ll update it throughout the life of the work if we get additional facts from the client or any additional information just needs to be added to provide clarity for the team that’s either working on it or that will be reported to.
03:48
So if you are not yet creating a project brief for your internal work with your internal team members, pause and ask yourself if creating a brief for all of the asks, all of the work that you do before you begin working on it, could help reduce the chaoticness or the confusion within your organization. And I’m gonna bet the answer is yes, ’cause there’s certainly a reason why we do it here at Hedy & Hopp and most agencies do it. It’s a pretty standard practice.
So again, number one, number one tip for making your internal marketing team more effective is standardizing the creation of briefs for every single project or piece of work that goes out your door. And maybe you have, you know, a campaign brief and then some tactical pieces are underneath it. You don’t necessarily need to do a brief for a newspaper, a local newspaper ad that you’re doing, that should roll up to a bigger brief that more summarizes the work.
04:44
That’s number one. Number two, scorecards. So at Hedy & Hopp, we are an EOS organization. So EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. There is a fabulous book called “Traction” and it walks through the importance of measuring what’s important. Not only measuring it, but also providing visibility throughout the organization. It helps ensure that everybody is truly rowing the boat in the same direction.
We’ve been an EOS organization for about two and a half years, and the standardization of processes, the ease of communication within teams and our ability to set and achieve goals as an organization has increased massively over those two and a half years. So, I’ll link to the book itself in the show notes, but think about if you were to create a scorecard to be able to measure the effectiveness of your team at doing their jobs, what are some things that individuals and the departments within your team could actually report on or on a weekly or a monthly basis?
05:46
So for example, here at Hedy & Hopp, some of the things that we report on are; are projects being completed on time? What is the quality? And we have a variety of ways to measure quality within our agency. So, you could come up with your own quality factors, but is the quality of work at a standard that we are setting for ourselves? Is the work being done on budget and on budget? It doesn’t necessarily mean need to mean out of pocket dollars. It could also mean hours. So did you estimate correctly as far as how many hours it would take your team to complete something. And then results. One of the key ways, whenever marketing leaders come to me and say, “You know, Jenny, we historically have not been a data driven organization. I’m a huge believer of being data-driven. What are some ways I can improve the way that we are talking about and sharing metrics within our organization and measuring results within a weekly and monthly dashboard within our team?”
06:48
By far, one of the number one ways to make that happen is you’re setting a standard about what your expectations are for how campaigns should be managed and reported upon within the organization. And it’s a really great way to do it. So, that also ensures you go back to the brief. Number one, you have to report on what the expectations are for performance and the brief in order to report on and to see if you hit that goal in the weekly or monthly dashboard that you’re creating. Again, this doesn’t necessarily have to be something that you share with senior leadership. It can just be something within your own team structure that you report on to understand like what makes your own week, month, and quarter a success for the marketing team. It can be something you can hold yourselves accountable to or as a leader you can hold your team accountable to. But I would totally recommend looking into setting up some dashboards.
07:37
Number three case studies. So this is something as an agency, of course we create case studies, right? We wanna highlight the work that we’re doing so we can help more patients access care. We wanna work with even more providers, payers, and innovation groups across the country. We’re very passionate about it, right? So for us to showcase our work means we can get more work. But as an internal marketing team, showcasing the success of your work and do a couple of things. And there’s a couple of different reasons that you wanna start thinking about standardizing the development of a case study after specific and certain kinds of projects wrap within your team. The first is, again, if you’re trying to become a data-driven organization, it certainly will help if you have people within your organization report on the results.
08:27
If in the brief you said you needed to have X number of leads come in for a specific service line, if in your weekly monthly dashboards you’ve been reporting upon that, and let’s say you hit the ball outta the park, gosh, that’s a great case study to be able to put it together and then showcase not only to your entire marketing team, ’cause perhaps only a certain percentage of them worked on that piece of work, but you can highlight it and say, this is the way we view success within our marketing team, right? We view it by having an understanding of the number of patients we wanted to reach and then achieving that, and we’re gonna share that. But number two, it also allows you to have some really great ammunition to be able to share with leadership to be able to say, here is why you approve that marketing budget that we requested. Here is the impact we are having on revenue today based off the new patients we’re bringing in the door.
09:16
And then a third exciting one is, as a marketing leader, it’s also an opportunity for you to be able to submit your work for awards. And again, if you go back, there was an episode I did about why and how you submit to awards. This is a great example though. If you wanna showcase your team’s work as far as being data driven, really excelling by maximizing your budget, driving certain service line success, having a case study will allow you to submit for those awards and then really make your team feel super proud of the work that they did. And then fourth and final, one of the things that we actually measure within Hedy & Hopp is our subject matter experts within our organization sharing their subject matter expertise, right?
09:58
We are an organization that is very focused on continually growing, learning, and expanding our skill sets. We have the ability to do a lot of education and training even just within our own ecosystem, and you do too. So creating some sort of system where you’re doing lunch and learns, maybe it’s a morning zoom session every other Tuesday where certain team members have half an hour to be able to showcase a new technology they’re using, a smart way to integrate AI into your processes (There’s episode coming on that soon), or perhaps it is somebody giving an update on Google’s algorithm changes and how that potentially could impact your budget planning for the balance of the year. A lot of expertise lives within your own team. And finding a way to standardize the sharing of that in a way that, again, twofold not only helps your entire team, but also helps your individual team members get experience sharing and talking about their expertise.
11:07
One thing that great leaders know is that by helping other people become more comfortable at public speaking and sharing their knowledge, that’s gonna help them tremendously with their own professional career. Short and long term, even after they leave your organization, they are gonna be a better communicator of ideas and thoughts because of their time working with you if you implement something like that. So it’s really a win-win.
So if you are an internal marketing leader within an organization, again, four things I’d recommend integrating, thinking about how you can make this standardized during 2024. A brief, every single thing that you do needs to roll up to a brief within your organization. Weekly and monthly Scorecards, how are you reporting on the work that you’re doing and how do you know that it’s up to the standard that you want your team and your organization to perform for? Number three case studies, you’re doing great work. Get into the process of standardizing and talking about it internally and externally. And then number four, knowledge sharing. You have lots of smart people on your team. Really find a way to be able to help them and you shine.
So that’s it for today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, I’m gonna share a link to the book, “Traction” in the notes, show notes if you are really wondering and curious about how you can make your department more data driven. It talks about becoming an entire organization that follows EOS, but if you’re just really thinking even about your own department, there’s a lot of great practices that you can integrate that could make you more effective and efficient at communicating. So thank you again for tuning in. We will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great day.
When you find out you have a budget that must be spent by end of your fiscal year, how should you spend it? We outline Foundation vs. Acquisition activities and the framework we use to help our clients spend the funds in a way that can help the entire fiscal budget of next year perform better.
In this week’s podcast, Jenny talks about utilizing end-of-year budget surpluses. One way is through Foundation activities, or one time projects that have a defined start and end time that set your organization up for success next year. The other are Acquisition initiatives, which help your organization finish out the current year in a strong way. Jenny offers advice on how to choose where to put that extra budget and how to choose the projects that will have the biggest payoff in the long term.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
[00:00:00] 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. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m really excited to be here with you today to talk a little bit about end of fiscal year budgets.
I’ve received three phone calls this week. Today’s Tuesday. I’m recording on a Tuesday will be released on Friday, but I’m recording on a Tuesday. I’ve received three phone calls already from folks that have end of year budget surpluses, and they’ve called me and they’ve said, Jenny, we really want to brainstorm and talk about ways that we can invest this for our patient acquisition work.
And so there’s a structure and framework that I use to help people decide the prioritization of where to spend their budgets. And I wanted to share that with you today. So first, let’s set the stage. Let’s imagine, you have a new [00:01:00] fiscal year starting July 1st, and you just realized you have a budget surplus that you need to spend between now and June 30th.
So that way your budget for next year stays the same. We’re not going to talk about if you should just give it back or not. We’re going to assume you want to spend it, and you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize your marketing for the year. So you’re going to spend it.
There’s two different approaches. You have either foundation or acquisition work that you can do. So I want to walk through that thought process. Vast majority of the time, I advise folks to spend that excess budget on foundation activities. What can we do between now and the end of the fiscal that will help make all of next year’s fiscal more successful?
So those activities may be something along the lines of patient journey mapping. What is their experience coming to your website, learning about a specific offering or service [00:02:00] line, and then actually finding a doctor, scheduling an appointment, mapping that out and identifying where you can improve the digital user experience.
Perhaps, it’s a Google local listings audit and optimization that could be a really impactful one-time activity to again, improve your entire program for next year and marketing budget success. Perhaps it is a content marketing strategy, doing an audit of the assets you have now and prioritizing maybe what you want to develop next year.
Maybe you need to clean up your messaging and you need to really become clear on the way that you talk about your organization, persona development, really figuring out who you’re talking to for your service lines or your offerings and really cleaning that up going into next year. Those are all foundation activities.
You can think of them as like one time projects that have a defined start and end time. And again, they’re going to benefit your entire 2025 fiscal [00:03:00] marketing output. On the other side, if you feel really great about your foundation. Maybe your conversion rates are super strong. You’ve already invested in all of those.
Then you can start proactively thinking about acquisition. Maybe you want to drive a really strong end of fiscal campaign performance. Maybe you want to test out some additional marketing tactics. I want to walk through again, the framework of how I help our clients think about where to put excess budget if it’s again, acquisition focused.
So you feel like your foundation is good. Now you want to focus on the actual acquisition of patients. Paid media is one place that a lot of folks want to put those dollars, some framework to think about paid media bottom of the funnel is really where people already know that they need what you’re offering and they’re just trying to find a doctor, they’re trying to schedule an appointment. They’re trying to get in. That’s Google and Bing and other search media, right? That’s pay per click. That’s really putting the money in [00:04:00] Google and making sure whenever people Google orthopedic doctor near me, they are able to find your services and schedule an appointment.
Interesting things you can test that maybe go above and beyond that, really thinking about social media. How do you, what, maybe you want to test some certain campaigns, maybe you haven’t done social media in the past, but that’s an opportunity for you to really be thinking more about who your average customer is or your patient is thinking going back to that persona that hopefully you have developed already.
How can we reach those folks? On a variety of channels online, and maybe you want to test out some fun channels like Spotify and Pandora, uh, streaming ads. Maybe you want to test there’s a variety of tactics that maybe are on your wishlist podcast advertising. Maybe there’s a variety of things that are on your wishlist that maybe you want to do just a little sprint for to be able to test the performance leading into the next year’s fiscal.
The one thing that I would always advise against and this is 1 thing that we’ve had a lot of folks ask us about is simply trying [00:05:00] to do awareness campaigns between now and the end of the fiscal and that may be something like a Facebook campaign that doesn’t have smart persona targeting or doesn’t have a good content strategy or patient journey behind it. It’s really just trying to get your brand out there.
Unless you’re maximizing and ensuring that every single patient who’s proactively trying to find you online can find you and schedule an appointment easily. I would never advise you to spend money on awareness. Ever. A lot of agencies would be happy to do the money, put it on programmatic.
Stop it. Stop it. Don’t do that. I actually don’t even allow our clients to spend money on programmatic unless it’s a very specific use case. And we feel really confident that they’re maximizing media otherwise. I’m not even to get into all of the privacy potential concerns with programmatic platforms.It really is just very low effectiveness um, and difficult to prove from a brand awareness perspective.
So, if you are finding yourself in this really fun [00:06:00] position, like a lot of folks are, end of fiscal have some budget leftover want to maximize it.
I strongly encourage you to think about foundation projects that you can do between now and the end of the fiscal year that can help make all of 2025’s fiscal output more successful. What have been your hiccups? What have been areas that are impacting your overall success. Is your cost per patient acquired too high with your media campaigns? Dig in and find out why if you can do foundational activities and improve the cost per new patient by 10%, that essentially gives you 10 percent additional budget for next year. With all other things equal. So if you are finding yourself in this fun position of having budget left, call me. I’d love to brainstorm and give you some ideas of what we see other folks doing. But again, I strongly recommend that you spend some time focusing on that patient journey and maximizing it.
One time [00:07:00] projects, maybe content audit strategies to improve searchability. There are so many ways to tackle it. It just depends on what your individual organization is struggling with. But again definitely recommend foundation versus acquisition activities. Thank you for tuning in today.
Hopefully this gave you some good food for thought. If you’re one of the many folks in this fun position right now, and as always we’d love to be your partner. So if you’re currently working on a patient acquisition campaign and perhaps looking for a new marketing agency partner, give us a call. We are a full service agency.
And we would love to work with additional providers and payers across the country to help you maximize your marketing budget. Thanks for tuning in today. Have a great rest of your week. We will talk to you soon.
In this week’s episode, Jenny discusses candidate recruiting and how marketing teams can lean in to help build a full and successful candidate pipeline.
Healthcare marketing is a pendulum. On one end, marketing efforts are focused on new patient acquisition. On the other end, HR and recruiting teams need to invest time and resources into finding quality providers to deliver the care you are promising new patients.
Jenny outlines three key steps for recruiting marketing:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host. I am the CEO and Founder here at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare-exclusive marketing agency based in the Midwest. And we are the Founders and the hosts of the podcast.
So thank you for joining today. I’m going to jump right in. We’ve been having a lot of really interesting conversations over the last three weeks around candidate recruiting. So as far back as we’ve been doing healthcare marketing. So eight years ago, whenever we, whenever I started the agency we realized this, it’s a pendulum, right?
You’re either doing marketing for patient acquisitions. You’re trying to help patients find the care that they need within your organization, or you’re actively trying to find and hire providers to be able to make sure you can deliver the care that you’re promising to patients. So, we’re kind of that pendulum is [00:01:00] swinging back.
We’re having lots of conversations right now about how marketing can lean in and assist HR and the recruiting teams to be able to get a more full and successful candidate pipeline. So I want to talk a little bit about that process. And there are three key steps in the process that I want to outline.
We have strategy, user journey, and optimization. So I’m going to go through each of them briefly. So the first one, strategy, it’s so important whenever you’re leaning in as a healthcare marketer to assist the HR or recruiting teams, if you’re leaning in to be able to help them be able to more fill the patient funnel, let’s say you are a
system or a provider group in Colorado, and you desperately need more RNs. The first thing you should do is spend some time on job boards finding out what the other offers are. So if I’m an RN in [00:02:00] Boulder and I go on Indeed, what are the competing offers? What is the pay? What are the main value propositions?
What are the differentiators? Just like in marketing, how you have to figure out how you’re going to have differentiators for your patients. To have them choose you for care, you have to do the same thing for recruiting. It is way too tight of a job market to assume that you can simply put a job posting together, throw it up on Indeed, and you’ll have a whole funnel full of candidates.
You have to be very strategic. What we recommend is spending a few hours going through and really documenting what are the different opportunities that those roles or those individuals for those roles have? What are the decisions that they can make if they’re looking for an open position? So really documenting what are the pay ranges that you see?
What are the key differentiators? Is it schedule flexibility? Is it hiring bonus? Is it retention bonus? [00:03:00] Whatever. There’s financial and non-financial reasons why somebody may choose to work with you. So document the decision matrix and what other options are out there outside of your organization.
Then create another document or part of the document that lists out all of the different things you can offer and figure out what is going to make your job posting actually stand out. What we love doing is once we’ve created this matrix is really identify three to four key messaging and positions that you can test.
So, perhaps leading with different differentiators or testing different financial structures. Of course, you always have the hourly or the salary, but then maybe you’re leading more heavily with the hiring bonus because that’s what everybody’s doing in that market, so you have to do that as a bare minimum or whatever it may be, but identifying what those three to four testing components are and then making a variety of job postings that reallyhighlight those different [00:04:00] positionings, the different ways that you can stand out.
That is a very important step one. Step two is documenting the user journey. So anybody who has been in the job search process recently knows it is so frustrating! I have a lot of friends and prior colleagues that are actively job hunting.
Or even if you just go on LinkedIn, you see so many people complaining about how difficult it is to even just apply for a job because of the clunkiness of the technology. So put yourself in that candidate’s shoes. Actually go through your application process and understand how many clicks does it take before you can actually submit your application?
How much information do you have to have handy? Do you have to upload your resume and manually enter your information? Is it possible to do the application on a mobile device? Is there a separate landing page for this specific role that you’re trying to fill that really outlines those key differentiators and puts them right into a quick [00:05:00] apply situation online, documenting the journey and then identifying opportunities to be able to improve it through smarter marketing, whether it’s landing pages, quick links, et cetera, or technology improvements.
A lot of the candidate tracking software is actually have a new functionality where you can maybe have somebody when they begin the application, enter their cell phone number or their email. And that will initially start their file. So your recruiter can follow up with them in case they don’t actually finish the application.
So there’s all these like technical tricks that you can do to really increase the volume. And then you’re going to be relying of course, on HR and recruiting to have a strong follow up process, which of course, you can lean into as far as communication, timeline, cadence, automation, all that fun stuff.
But the third one is once you have, you know what you’re saying and how you’re standing out, you know that the technology is there, then actually starting promoting. So just like when you’re doing patient recruiting, you have two separate ways people will find you. The first. Is that they’re actively looking for a new position.
So this is on job boards.[00:06:00] Even honestly, in Google, there’s a variety of paid media opportunities. You can make sure that your job posting is front and center, but there’s also the right person, right credentials that isn’t actively searching. And that’s where additional media opportunities, such as Facebook or Meta ads.
Even on TikTok, if you have a strong TikTok presence for your organization, there’s lots of different ways that you can target folks based off of their experience, credentials, et cetera. And then it’s all about optimization. So something we strongly recommend is really viewing it just like the patient acquisition funnel.
How can you measure the dollars you’re spending on marketing for recruiting through the number of applicants that you receive, interviews, and then new hires with one of our prior clients, we actually even had it go through 30 day retention. So we really knew candidates were strong if they not only are interviewed, offered, hired, but then 30 days later, if they were still there, that’s the kind of candidate that our marketing optimized towards.
So making sure you’re measuring [00:07:00] things and optimizing appropriately, treat it just like patient acquisition. You got to make every dollar count.
Last thing, I had two separate people ask me this question yesterday with all of the patient privacy and analytics rules of the changing and the analytics set up the tactics that we can do.
What in the world does that do to candidate marketing? Is candidate marketing beholden to these same rules? Kind of. Is the short answer. So, in an ideal world, you will have a separate recruiting or careers website or micro site that is completely separate from your organization’s website that patients access.
In that situation, you often can get away with using Google Analytics 4 right out of the box. You might even be able to do directly Facebook and Reddit conversion tags on it. If there is no patient-related information. It’s strictly a recruiting and careers website. For most people though, it’s actually a page tab, a section of their current site, [00:08:00] in which case you have two choices, you can bifurcate your website and have some of it have certain kinds of tags and some of it have the other we recommend just going full tilt safe.
Yeah, let’s treat everything the same, figure out what your new solution is, whether you go with our privacy solution, the server side tag manager, hit me up if you want to talk about that. Or if you go with a CDP or a new analytics tool, whatever it is, it’s really easiest if you just do it across the board.
One thing I’ll say is that server-side tag manager is Hedy and Hopp’s privacy oriented solution. We actually have the ability to integrate meta and LinkedIn’s conversion APIs. So you can still get full conversion data on everything, but you’re not unnecessarily collecting IP addresses, device IDs, all of that fun stuff.
So, really can go on the other side. So, thank you so much for tuning in again. If you have any questions about candidate recruiting your HR marketing campaigns, give me a call. We love brainstorming this stuff. We [00:09:00] love sharing ideas. And definitely happy to share some case studies for some cool work that we’ve done recently.
But thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy.