Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here with the team from Hedy & Hopp that attended SHSMD last week. We are so excited to come back with some learnings from some of the great sessions that we attended, and share a little bit of our POV of the conference overall.

So we’ll start by just a quick round of introductions. Marissa, I’ll let you kick us off.

Marissa: Hello, I’m Marissa Gurrister, Director of Growth for Hedy & Hopp. 

Sarah: I’m Sarah Cutcliffe, I’m the Director of Epic Services for Hedy & Hopp.

Lindsey: And hi, everyone. I’m Lindsey Brown, the VP of Integrated Marketing. I oversee our Paid Media, our Content Creative and Epic Services divisions.

Jenny: Yeah, so our team had so much fun. Per usual, SHSMD is one of our favorite events every single year. This is, I think, like our seventh or eighth year going. So we always look forward to it. Always have a great time. We did for our session this year. We actually did a lunch workshop. So Sarah and I presented From Access to Action.

It was a 90-minute workshop on how to pull patient appointment and revenue data out of Epic, put campaign UTM parameters into Epic to be able to form a complete picture of your campaign’s performance. So, Sarah, this was your first time presenting at SHSMD, clearly not your first time ever presenting, but I’d love to kick off by getting your thoughts on the session that we presented and some of the Q&A, because we got into some pretty in-depth Q&A with the attendees.

Sarah: Yeah, I was really excited. I knew that we were going to have a full house. We had wonderful attendance. And having that many people that are coming because they’re hungry for Epic information, you know, you’re going to run the gamut. And I’m sure you felt this way, too. It was very clear, watching the reaction of the audience that different groups were at different points in their Epic journey on how they’re using it, the tool.

So I found that to be really helpful to know, like what type of information we can share in these presentations or in these podcasts. Because some of our friends are much more mature in their Cheers journey or their other Epic tools, and they need a little bit more advanced meat and potatoes. So it was exciting to get that read.

And also, yeah, the questions were wonderful. It’s also very clear to me that there are themes that are not specific to any customer that like, everybody is feeling, marketing is getting to know it. I.T. is getting to know marketing. And how do we make that the most lovely transition possible? Because it can be really hard and confusing sometimes if you don’t know who to work with.

So I found it to be informational for me, even though I was sharing some information. Yeah.

Jenny: Yeah, I agree, it was kind of fun because we structured the presentation where we could have it be more high level introductory, but also kind of get into the nerdy weeds a little bit, depending on how we were getting feedback. And we got kind of nerdy and people were following along from a Q&A perspective. So it was very cool to see the difference in experience and even awareness.

Some folks in the audience were writing notes down when we were introducing the names of different tools. Right? So they were very early, which is totally understandable. Whereas other folks were making detailed notes whenever we were talking about some really specific technical implementation tips.

Sarah: So absolutely, I totally agree.

Jenny: Yeah. Very helpful. Marissa, I would love for you to share more information about the booth. This is your second year going to SHSMD, and we had a pretty fun booth presence this year. What did you think?

Marissa: We had a super fun booth. Well I think our booths are always super fun, but it was beautiful. We had a beautiful rug backdrop that was handmade by a family in India. So we’ll add a photo down below and you can check that out. And it’ll be in the newsletter. But it was so pretty. It was so fun.

Loved chatting to folks as they came up to see it and feel it and touch it. I was a little nervous. I was like, don’t touch it. It’s so heavy. I don’t want this thing to fall over. But we did it. And it did not fall over. It was beautiful. And then, of course, we had our Artist in Residence artwork.

Haley Gearo is our Artist in Residencies here. We distributed her prints. It’s so fun. We had several ladies come up and say, “Oh, I’ve been collecting these for years. Like, I can’t wait to add it to my gallery wall”. I know Sarah, like, one woman mentioned to you, this was her powder room artwork. She’s gotta hang it up on the wall, which I love it.

It’s so fun to hear that. And we gave out bracelets. Year after year folks are still coming with their friendship bracelets, so that’s super cool. But honestly, I just loved connecting with folks. Like you said, this is my second year, so there was definitely familiar faces. It’s our first full fall conference, so it was great to get back and see folks who we had seen last year and who I know will be at HCIC. 

So it was just really cool to get to be there and reconnect with folks and have some good conversation.

Jenny: I love it. Well, let’s jump in and highlight some of our favorite sessions and I will actually kick us off. One of my favorite sessions was actually by Ohio Health. They did a session that was called From Acquisition to Acceptance: Building Awareness and Preferences in New Communities, and it was all around the work to integrate newly acquired and rural hospitals into a broader system ecosystem.

So they touched on things like communication strategies, but also talking about some prior lessons that they had seen or experienced through previous acquisitions and how that positively influenced the work that they did. It was really helpful. M&A is something that is quickly changing the landscape of the healthcare ecosystem and continuing to talk about what our role is as marketers to be able to support M&A, is something that I think should just be a steady theme at every conference that we go to.

So great job to both Cody Albert and Christina Thompson who spoke on behalf of Ohio Health. That was a great session. I’ll kick it over to Linds. What was your favorite session?

Lindsey: So one of the ones that I attended was on the last day. It was put on by Dayton Children’s Hospital. It was called Nine Lessons from a Values Driven Culture. And part of what I really loved about this particular session is being able to translate like what a system is doing from an internal perspective, and how that can translate to like what we do here at Hedy & Hopp.

We’re very much a values driven culture, and it’s really important that we have that pull through from even the people that we employ and that we hire to how we manage those folks, how we keep that culture going in a virtual environment. So it was very, eye-opening, I think, in understanding really how your brand can’t, you can’t just go through a rebrand.

We can’t just have these values that we stick up on a wall or stick in a virtual background or on our website, or, you know, that we talk about in a monthly all hands. It really needs to like, pull through in terms of calling out people that are doing an amazing job for specific values, making sure that they’re opportunities for people to have a little bit of joy throughout the workday.

That is really reflective of the values and the culture that, you know, our organization has. So I took a lot away as a leader here at Hedy & Hopp in ways that we can ensure that we are really following and and pulling through those values that we do every single day. And there’s always room to improve there.

But what I also loved about it is, as someone that oversees our creative division that helps organizations go through rebrands so often, the rebrand that also comes with a new brand promise or modified values or something like that. We think about what that’s going to look like externally. What is that going to look like for patients? What’s it going to look like for our internal leadership?

But we don’t always get to how am I going to pull all the way through to the employees that work here, not only in the marketing department that are heavily involved, but all the way through to the clinicians, to the nurses, to the support staff, to the people behind the front desk. And just making sure that we are being good partners with those clients that we work with on rebrands that we’re not forgetting about the implementation.

And one of the things they mentioned in that session is that, you know, those kinds of brands are not like a one-stop shop, like there’s an end date. There’s no end date to that. It continues on and on and on. So the metrics that you use have to evolve on how you’re driving that success, how you’re reinforcing those values.

And again, just a lot of really great information. And I believe it was a two-woman show. So power to the two women that meet that happen. It was Kristen Bowser and Ashley Junkunc. They they were amazing presenters. They had amazing ideas and just major kudos to how, dedicated they were to seeing this vision come to life and ensuring that the employees at Dayton Children’s really were feeling and living that culture.

So Bravo ladies.

Jenny: I love it. That’s great. Sarah, what was your favorite?

Sarah: I, women’s health is near and dear to my heart as a woman, obviously, but as a woman owned company, too. I attended one called The Playbook: Where Rivals Unite to Champion Women’s Health as a Strategic Priority. It was extra interesting because Ohio State and Michigan partnered for this, which I can’t say was ever on my bingo card.

Whether that would be in athletics or, in a health care conference. But they both institutions talked about how they reimagined providing care for women at their institutions. I found it to be really powerful because obviously it was data driven. They could see that they were having poor outcomes with the existing structures that were in place. Especially surrounding like maternal health was a big ticket item for both of them.

And they were able to say, okay, we know this is wrong, both by data and feel and feedback. How can we reimagine this for better outcomes, not just for our institutions, but for our patients and the success that both of them could demonstrate in better outcomes for babies, for moms, for women in general. And just like expanding the idea of what women’s health is, it was just a very powerful presentation.

And I learned a lot. So it it inspired me to in the way that we can support our clients, like when something feels right, when we know that this should be a priority. How do you find the data to support what is working, what isn’t working, and how do you take that leap to reimagine how you can, you know, change for the better?

And then, I mean, they felt so strongly that they, these rivals came together to talk through this, this wonderful development for both of them. So that was Luanne Thomas Ewald, Jennifer Dauer, and it was moderated by Priya Bathija. And she is like, she works with both institutions as an outside consultant. It was a wonderful experience.

Jenny: Very nice I love it. Marissa brings home.

Marissa: Yes, of course. So I attended a fabulous session called Beyond Automation: How Human Centered Community Engagement Builds Trust in an AI Era. And that was with Rachel Conley from Rochester Regional. This one specifically spoke to my little heart. I started my healthcare career on the events team doing healthcare events for a large system, so it was really cool to get to sit in and hear how Rochester Regional was utilizing their local sponsorships to really build trust in the community and hear from them some of the innovative ways that they were really smart with their sponsorships and extending their reach.

Sometimes it is truly quality over quantity. So they were really focused in on doing some super fun things and activations, some key events they held like a jazz festival, which is really cool, which I want to go to. It sounds so fun. And then also a big 5K race. So super fun to hear from them.

All of the innovative ways. AI is obviously a really hot and sexy topic. I think we heard a lot about it at conference, but it was just really refreshing to actually just like go back to our roots for a second and think, like, if we’re going to be at these events, like, what can we do to connect with our community on a really personal level?

And not always have to have, like AI involved in every single thing we do. So it was a really refreshing topic. Great to hear from them. It was her first conference presentation and she absolutely crushed it. I was so proud of her, so it was really fun. I loved that one.

Jenny: I love it. I will say that actually brings up a really interesting point, Marissa. I feel as though AI was woven into some sessions, but it was not the star of the conference like it was last year or the year before. The novelty has really worn off, where you can’t just say AI in your presentation topic and you’re automatically going to get a spot to speak, or, you know, the room is going to be packed.

At this point, people care more about what was the actual meaningful outcome. And how did you really keep the patient and your team front and center as you were doing this implementation? So very good point about that. And I’m interested to see, we leave in what, two weeks, we’re going to be in Orlando for HCIC. So we’ll do a similar recap then.

And we’ll share and kind of have that be a string that connects the two of what is the trend of AI content there? Is it a similar approach where maybe it’s part of the broader conversation, or are there going to be sessions and more tighter conversations where AI is more of a star? So stay tuned, listener, we will give you an update on that in a couple of weeks.

And besides that, thank you again for the entire team. They did a phenomenal job organizing this conference. Once again. Great to see so many familiar faces and we are already looking forward to 2027. And with that, listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We appreciate your time. If there’s any topics that you want us to cover, give us a holler.

We would love to do an episode featuring a topic that is of interest to you, whether it’s going deeper into one of our Epic topics or one of the other areas that we love getting nerdy on. But that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to tune in next week for a fresh episode.

Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have with me Sarah Cutcliffe. Sarah is Hedy and Hopp’s new Director of Epic Services. We are so excited to have her join us, and she’s going to be joining us at SHSMD this coming weekend.

So we wanted to do a quick little podcast episode for those of you that are attending SHSMD, it’ll give you a little bit of context about who we are, who Sarah is, what we’re going to be talking about so you can come prepared and excited. And if you’re going to, unfortunately, miss SHSMD, you’ll get a little bit of an understanding about what is happening and be able to connect with us.

If there’s anything that we’re going to be talking about that you won’t be able to hear in person. So first of all, Sarah welcome so much. We are so excited to have you join Hedy and Hopp. You’ve been here for a few months now. Really enjoyed having you integrate with the team. Let’s kick off by having you talk a little bit about your background and how you fell into this world of Epic expertise.

Sarah: Yeah, well, the excitement is the same on my side. I’m super jazzed to have joined Hedy and Hopp. I’m excited to be meeting everybody, both from our team here at Hedy and Hopp, as well as all of our friends at SHSMD and beyond. My Epic background, when you say I fell into this, it literally was that.  I’m going to date myself.

I put my resume on Monster.com after grad school. And Epic reached out to me the next day and said, hey, would you like to apply? And I had no idea what Epic was at that time. I did know that I had friends who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, so I took the interview. And now I’m looking back almost 20 years later and can’t believe that this has turned into my career.

But I started at Epic as a revenue cycle trainer, so I got to teach people how to use the software. It was an incredible experience. Once I left Epic, I ended up in healthcare consulting, and it really gave me a great new perspective of understanding how Epic customers actually use Epic. There’s a big difference, and Jenny.

I think you know what this difference feels like, between this is a software and how can we use it? And then looking at how customers actually use it, what is functional, how do we achieve our goals using this incredibly powerful tool? So I was able to work for several healthcare systems across the country, both as a trainer.

And then I moved into the analyst space. So I was doing the build and working with my internal operational teams to make sure that Epic did the things that they needed. And my most recent role was at Hospital for Special Surgery. I was the Director of Performance and Optimization, and I was able to take really complex projects and bring them to life in Epic.

So across many different teams, I was able to bring people together and execute on like pretty hard and, not always the most fun, stuff but we were able to put together some really, wonderful and impactful projects, like enabled paperless billing for the hospital. We were able to retool, our we had no, “no show late cancellation” policy, for example, and we were able to execute on that.

So my background is really understanding Epic, being able to talk to operational teams, marketing teams, understand what they need and then be able to translate that in how it can be executed using Epic. And anybody who’s dipped their toe in the Epic world, you know that it has its own language, its own teams, its own processes.

I’m very familiar with what those are, and I think that I’ll be able to bring that knowledge to Hedy and Hopp and be able to help us, be able to support clients as they navigate using this new tool in the marketing space.

Jenny: You already have, Sarah. Teams and clients have already spoken so highly about working with you. At this point we’re working with systems across the country, helping them leverage and understand marketing analytics and marketing automation tools that are available. And so being able to have somebody that actually understands the vocabulary, terminology, how to ask for something, using the right language, it’s really a gamechanger in helping our clients move a lot faster and more confidently navigating those conversations.

So, so excited to have you on board. We are very excited about SHSMD. We are doing an hour and a half long lunch session on Sunday. The title of the session is from Access to Action Turning Epic into a Growth Engine for Health Care Marketing. And if you are not yet registered, I am sorry to say it is sold out.

This was a registration required event and it sold out very, very early. So that’s really exciting. We are in the works of planning a webinar repeat. So if you are attending SHSMD and aren’t able to go, or if you are not going to SHSMD and you’re having FOMO, keep an eye on our socials will be announcing a link to be able to register for a free webinar for a repeat, but we’re really going to be about all of the different analytics and data tools that exist within the Epic tool suite, and how to use that to be able to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way.

So very excited to dig into it. One of the things that I’m most excited about is we’re leaving about 30 minutes for Q&A, because whenever we did our Summer School Webinar Series, there were so many questions submitted, we had to do follow up emails to respond to all of the questions because we just ran out of time. So with this session, we’re really allowing a lot of time for folks to be able to dig in, ask questions, really understand the material in a meaningful way before they head home.

So, should be pretty fun.

Sarah: So I’m excited that it is on Sunday, because that gives us an opportunity to be able to talk through those questions over the next few days of SHSMD as well.

Jenny: I completely agree. I, one of my favorite things about presenting at conferences in the first day or two, is being able to have folks be able to come to our booth, schedule lunches, coffee. So we’ll just have one-on-one and talk about their implementation questions or their tactical questions related to the content that we presented.

So I completely agree. It should be fun. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, kind of what you are excited about with SHSMD, what you’re looking forward to. This is the first time you have gone to SHSMD, right? So yes, I’ve not gone to an industry event that is focused on marketing before, so this will be new to you.

So what are you interested in?

Sarah: I’m really excited to learn more about how Epic can fit into this space overall, and meet needs of our, like, future clients or any health care systems. I’m also excited to meet people. I’m a people-person I like really feed off of getting to know people. And because this is my first like marketing for a, I get to meet a lot of new people, which I, I know I’m really gonna enjoy, but I also am excited to see, what health care systems are there because I have a pretty wide experience.

I have a suspicion that I’m going to actually meet people that we’re connected based on where I’ve already been before, or people that I know who work at different systems. So really jazzed for people. Also, I went to grad school in Maryland, so crab cakes, baby. I’m jazzed to grab some good seafood when we’re in the Baltimore area.

Jenny: Same. I am so excited. That will definitely be a highlight. Yeah, so. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. We are very much looking forward to SHSMD. Sarah, we are so excited to have you join us in person. So clients will be able to meet you in person. And then folks in the industry can start chatting with you about your POV and how we are bringing all of these tools to life for systems.

Sarah: Yeah. Can’t wait.

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy! Share this episode with anyone you know that will be attending SHSMD. Be sure and stop by our booth. We have a very uniquely handmade backdrop this year as Hedy and Hopp often does, we’re bringing the vibes. So swing by to be able to check it out, as well as some super fun swag that we are known for that you will love wearing around the conference.

So thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers. Bye.

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to join you. I just finished doing our very last session, so session four, of our four-week Summer School, Epic for Marketers webinar series.

We had phenomenal attendance from leaders and marketers within health systems across the country, and really just phenomenal feedback from all of the attendees about what they learned. So I wanted to do today, just a brief little summary of a couple of the analytics tools and reporting options that are available to you within Epic today. So if you’re a marketer that uses an Epic system, first of all, you should absolutely go back and sign up for our Summer School series.

We will send you a link to watch the four episodes, the recording of each of the weekly episodes, and then, you will have all the information that you need to get a deep dive. But today, what we’re going to do is I just want to talk a little bit about the different names of the tools and the databases and the reports that are available within Epic.

So if you are a marketer on a health system that uses Epic, all of these tools already exist. One of the cool things about Epic’s marketing tool suite today is that you have the ability to put data into Epic and pull data out of Epic to be able to do your marketing campaign reporting. So what does that mean?

That means, let’s say that you’re doing a campaign for mammographies on paid media, and you can put a UTM parameter, which your marketing teams use for all campaigns already, on the ad when they click on it, and then go to your website and then schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter will actually be added to their patient record. And then you can actually do an export from that patient or from that database to be able to do a dashboard to show your marketing campaign ROI.

So you can show we spent X dollars on, say, this Google campaign. Here’s the number of clicks it received. So that’s campaign data. It lives within Google, right? And then here’s the number of landing page visitors that we received. Here’s the number that booked an appointment. Here’s the number of folks that actually completed that appointment. And then here’s the downstream revenue associated with it.

So that information all lives in different places, right. So what you have to do is put data into Epic and then pull data out of Epic to use your own data visualization tool. So a couple of different names of tools and terminology that you should know, is first Chronicles. That is a real time live transactional database. So it runs Reporting Workbench which is where a lot of pre-built tools, or sorry, reports live that you could access.

And it’s a great tool to answer questions such as “did our campaign today spike my chart activations today”? Otherwise, what you’re going to be looking at is Clarity, which is a relational database that does nightly data extracts, and Caboodle, which is the data warehouse that lives within Epic. So this is really great. If you want deep campaign analysis, this is where you actually want to see how many appointments were scheduled yesterday, what the downstream revenue is for the last 90 days after your campaign was launched, etc..

So LinkSource is the tool that Epic uses and it’s a native Epic tool. Again, you don’t pay for this. It just comes with Epic and whatever you send out. So you get that mammography campaign either it’s a Cheers campaign or maybe it’s a media campaign when somebody goes to the landing page for mammography service line and they schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter is appended to their patient record, along with the appointment ID, and then you can pull it out to be able to visualize it within your own data visualization tool, to be able to see all that information.

So you have the ability to put some information into Epic, but you don’t have the ability to visualize the data within Epic like most groups will want to see it. So we want to figure out exactly what data fields can we put in, and then how do we pull them out? One of the really interesting things, and some benefits that we’re seeing right now is whenever you manage your marketing teams and partners, really cohesively, you have the ability to be much smarter about media spend and patient acquisition approaches.

So for some of our clients, for example, if you’re able to manage paid media and Epic Cheers campaigns, let’s say again that mammography campaign will have an understanding of the amount of access that is available, and then we can actually send out a Cheers campaign to try to try to drive demand with our current patients, get them those appointments that we know they are up for, that they need to be scheduling to be able to stay on schedule with the proactive care.

And then also, we could do a paid media campaign to try to bring net new patients in. And if you have a centralized ability to be able to view access and availability, then you have the ability to understand, hey, we have more current patients responding to our Cheers campaigns. We’re actually going to pull back on our media budget a little bit until more appointments open up, and then we’re going to ramp it up again.

So there are some great dashboards that are already available within Epic. You can go to it’s called the Analytics Catalog. And that’s like a search engine for existing reports. Otherwise you can use SlicerDicer or the Reporting Workbench as other tools to be able to pull up data to be able to understand what’s happening as far as appointment scheduling and campaign response within your organization.

So this is just the tip of the iceberg. If what you’re hearing on this podcast all sounds like a foreign language to you, but you are with a system that uses Epic, please, please, please sign up for our Summer School series. It’s free. We’ll immediately send you the links to all four episodes. The first covered MyChart and Hello World.

The second episode dug into Cheers. The third episode talked about how you and your IT teams need to collaborate to be able to get all of this technology rocking and rolling and some different considerations of things that IT wished you understood about how their processes worked. And then the fourth was all around analytics data and dashboards. So again, it’s free.

The link will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining. Hopefully this gave you a little bit to think about. If you’re already on Epic as your system, there’s lots of data that it really is at your fingertips and just waiting for you to begin leveraging to be smarter about the way you’re conducting outreach and the way that you’re measuring performance of campaigns.

Thank you for joining us today on this episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. I will see you next week. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m really excited to come with you today and chat a little bit about speaking to the boardroom, how to pitch marketing metrics to the C-Suite.

So we have had lots of conversations with our clients about this over the last couple of months as folks kind of prepared for budgeting conversations or progress update conversations with their board. And one of the things we really enjoy doing at Hedy & Hopp, as being a true partner to our clients and helping prepare even the content, the slides, making sure they have access to the metrics that they need to be able to justify the progress that they are making with the marketing investment, even outside of what Hedy & Hopp,

Maybe we are their media partner, but perhaps in how they manage organic or social. We are happy to help them, you know, put together that story about the progress that we’re making. And we have seen, you know, time and time again, it’s really difficult to make the transition from the marketing metrics that you’re used to talking about with your team and with your agency partners to metrics and data points that the C-Suite care about.

So today we’re going to talk about exactly that. We’re going to talk about the disconnect. We’re going to talk about and identify three financial metrics that your CFO is actually going to care about. We’re going to talk about building the executive-ready dashboard. And then we’re going to talk about how you can use these same metrics on the defense.

If you’ve been told that your budget is going to be cut. How can you actually frame the cost of inaction? So let’s jump in. Typically, as marketers, we’re always talking about things like, you know, more upstream metrics to be able to understand the reach that a campaign may have. And then, of course, getting down to that cost per lead metric.

One of the things that has been very difficult to actually accomplish in healthcare marketing is actually fully understand the revenue that marketing’s leads are driving, the growth that can be directly attributed to marketing’s work. And that has been because historically, there’s been a bit of a firewall kind of around the EHR and all of the, you know, clinical metrics.

That is shifting rapidly. We have successfully been able to put tracking metrics like UTM parameters into patient records within Epic, and then pull campaign reporting out. That allows us to understand the number of patients and the downstream revenue that specific campaigns drove. So the days of having, you know, that that walled garden and not being able to fully report on the entire journey and revenue that your campaigns are driving, luckily, is over for most organizations.

You just have to act to be able to stand up all of these different reporting technical capabilities. But once you’re there, what we need to focus on are a couple of different things. First, really understanding. And instead of talking about cost per lead, reframing it as a patient acquisition cost. So this is still on the cost side of the equation versus the revenue.

But it’s really important to be able to understand how to calculate the patient acquisition cost by service line. So as you’re talking about, to the board, objectives for the organization to be able to drive volume, you can actually put some dollars behind it through the lens of what is it going to take from a marketing dollars investment at a certain patient acquisition cost to be able to accomplish your goals?

So that’s the first metric. Second is really fine tuning it from downstream revenue, which again, we’re excited to even have in healthcare nowadays. So downstream revenue for many organizations is going to be a win. But if you really want to win the hearts and minds of the board, switch that over to contribution margin. So the board knows that revenue itself can be misleading.

So if you phrase it through the lens of contribution margin, that is the revenue generated by marketing driven patients minus the variable costs of their clinical care. So that helps them understand the true financial impact of the patients that marketing was able to drive. And then finally service line ROAS which is return on ad spend. So don’t look at a blended ROAS for your campaigns.

You really want to break it down and identify specifically those high margin clinical procedures like cardiology or orthopedics and neurology, where the financial return is going to be the highest, because that will absolutely enable you to be able to help justify additional dollars for some of these, service lines, especially if there’s additional, access to bring in additional patients.

Next. Second, let’s talk about an executive-ready dashboard. So the golden rule of a board presentation is less is more. You do not want to have to spend five minutes explaining a slide. That means it’s too complex. You’re trying to communicate too much. So an easy way to think about this is really like a three-column framework. Tell a story in five seconds.

First the input. What capital was deployed? What was the marketing spend by service line? In the middle is what is the output, the clinical volume that was generated. Again you can pull EHR, verify new patient encounters. And then third is the impact. So what does it mean for the bottom line? Hopefully you’re able to pull again contribution margin.

And then also estimated lifetime value. This is a really easy way in a screenshot. You know on a one slider to be able to quickly explain what progress marketing is making to achieving those operational and organizational objectives. A couple of things I want to call out. I failed to mention this in the first segment. In order to truly get to contribution margin, you’re going to have to become BFFs with your CFO.

So to actually be able to understand what that calculation needs to look like, what are those variable clinical costs? To be able to do that calculation, you need to become BFFs with them, help them understand what you’re trying to report on, because for them, they want that data just as badly as you do. So really working together to be able to report at that level of granularity is a big success for both of you, so it should be a pretty easy conversation.

And then finally, let’s talk about the defensive play. Let’s talk about the cost of inaction. So right now we are seeing budgets being slashed across the board in healthcare. Regardless of if you’re a privately held organization, you know, PE-backed whatever. Budgets are being slashed right now. So how are you going to help the board understand the impact of these budget cuts?

So marketing often is first on the chopping block. So it is your job to defend it. So first talking about and framing it as a market share leakage. So what happens if marketing stops actually calculate the patient volume that will be turned off if you turn off or reduce marketing budgets and really phrasing it not as a, you know, this is we’re saving money, but this is what’s happening.

But hey, we’re ceding market share to our primary competitor down the street. You know, here the number of patients that our marketing is absolutely going to no longer be bringing in the door. So big impact there. And then finally showing the board the direct correlation. If your hand is forced and you do have to reduce budget, actually look at and track the financial implications of what happened, what was the trajectory of, say, high margin elective procedures for a three month time period if marketing was turned off compared to what your expectations were, based off of that strategy that you had presented probably a year ago.

You know, based off those patient volumes, you expected that it would drive so really phrasing it as a choice. Like we can reduce our spend by 20% in order to hit this quarter’s cost cutting goal. But our historic models show we’ll reduce the 150 K drop in surgical contribution margin next quarter. Right. It’s data. And then if they still need to or want to reduce it, that’s fine.

But you’re actually making sure that they understand and meaningful numbers what that impact is going to be. So again this is a difficult mindset shift for marketers that have reported with different metrics and terminology their entire career to all of a sudden be talking to a completely different audience that oftentimes doesn’t care what the campaign is. They don’t care what the creative is.

They just want to actually know if it, you know, drove and contributed to growth of the organization. So definitely encourage you to step back, kind of think about the data points that you’re using, think about your analytics tech stack. Do you have the data pipelines in place to even accomplish reporting at this level? If not, give us a call.

We’d be happy to help you, but once you have it in place, then actually start reporting on it, and I guarantee your seat at the table will be much more valued by others than when you’re simply talking about marketing metrics, which they may consider vanity. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this was a helpful episode.

Share this episode. If there is a colleague that you think would find it helpful, please share with them. Please like and subscribe and we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to be here today to chat with you about human-led AI and paid media. So lots of folks are still talking about AI conceptually.

They’re talking about how organizations need to be smart, about how we’re integrating AI into your marketing processes, that compliance needs to be top of mind, and everybody’s doing it. But not many folks are actually pulling back the covers and sharing with you how they’re doing it, what steps they’re actually using to implement AI into their processes, and the results that they’re seeing.

So we thought today that we would focus specifically on our paid media division at Hetty and Hop and share our five pillars of AI integration. So at Hedy & Hopp, our stance on AI is it’s truly a core part of the agency’s DNA. So a couple of ways this shows up is we have a full-time employee who owns AI implementation throughout our agency.

It is her full time job that is all that she is focused on, is making sure that our processes are optimized, we’re being smart about the way that it’s being integrated. We’re following compliance regulations and that we’re being innovative. Our golden rule at Hedy & Hopp, however, is that AI accelerates and informs, but humans own the strategy and validate the outputs.

So the entire way that we think about AI has to be through that lens. We also look at it through two different bookends, if you could say. First is, is it improving our internal processes or is it improving our customer’s experience? Or patient experience? If we’re talking specifically about media being delivered? And so as we consider our prioritization of AI processes and tool usage within our organization, that are that is the two different ways that we think about how and what we prioritize as an organization.

So paid media has been a big area that we’ve been focused on finding efficiencies and improving the output of our clients media spend. So paid media is huge at Hedy & Hopp. And we manage millions and millions every month on behalf of our clients. We manage digital, but also traditional across the country. Buying billboards, radio, TV, all of the things to be able to make sure that our clients are really showing up where their patients need to find them.

So that really presents an opportunity, right? How can we use AI to be able to improve the budget allocation and the results? While also making sure that we are compliant? So the five pillars of AI within paid media that we’re going to talk about today are first, smart planning and budgeting, precision persona building through the lens of compliance, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimizations.

So let’s dig in. First, let’s talk about smart planning and budgeting. So typically whenever you’re looking at setting up a paid media strategy, there’s a couple of different ways, or steps that we do upstream as we’re doing research to provide recommendations for a client. One of the ways that we were able to improve this process and use AI to increase the efficiency and the strategic output, is use a variety of tools to be able to analyze over 400, 1st party data points, and then use real inventory data and performance signals to dictate exactly how budget should be distributed across those channels.

We wanted to make sure every dollar had a specific role, and in that full funnel that we were designing for our clients, and AI helped inform that with a lot of data points that would have taken hours and hours to be able to review and aggregate together in a traditional fashion. So one of the tools that we used is called AI Digital.

It is a favorite of ours. We use it in a variety of different parts of the process, but we have other tools that inform this step as well. But what it allows us to do is really move past those platform- suggested default. So for example, if you’re going in for a service line campaign and you’re trying to understand, you know, for orthopedics, perhaps we have 25 different DMAs that we need to show up for.

Google or Meta will tell you what’s available from an inventory perspective based off of your targeting. We like to go at this point deeper than that, and use additional first-party data points to really understand what the best optimized approach is to be able to drive those conversions and appointments. Next, let’s talk about targeting. So developing personas for each of your campaigns is foundational, right?

We’re going to be looking at a paid media brief really making sure that we understand the audience and the purpose for doing this campaign strategy and placement. But as budgets get larger and there are more moving pieces, often we found that there may be a primary persona, but we’re missing out on the opportunity to have more personas that allow us to do deeper level targeting.

So with some of our tools, we now have the ability to actually create precision personas, focusing on some granular audience data around demographics, median age, household income, and personal values across Google, LinkedIn and other platforms. And then once those personas are developed, our team then pressure tests them. Makes sure that they are accurate based off of the information that we understand within the health care landscape and the specific audiences that we’re looking at.

And then we have the ability to do a lot more strategic targeting across a variety of platforms using these personas than we would had we not had the ability to create additional personas at scale. So this really allows us to leverage many more personas and have precision targeting against those than if we were using old, more standardized persona developing processes that are a lot more time consuming to review data aggregation at scale.

Next, let’s talk about emerging channels so everyone understands that at this point, consumers are going to ChatGPT or other LLMs, and they’re asking healthcare-specific questions. They’re trying to find answers before they book that appointment. Well, at this point, we’re recommending and we are placing our clients in those LLMs as results. So in ChatGPT, for example, we can actually do placements within ChatGPT results.

Of course, we have the entire organic AIO/GEO optimization. We do that for a lot of our clients. I did a previous podcast episode about how successful we have been about having our clients show up organically in LLM recommendations, so that is a separate work stream. That is very important. But we also can prioritize placement through paid media placements, and that is always something that we’re thinking about now whenever we’re doing paid media recommendations, really guaranteeing those placements.

Sort of like if you think about Google Search, you have organic and you have paid. Kind of think the same thing about LLMs, now you’re going to have organic, then you also want to try to have paid whatever it’s available on that specific platform. Real time Insights is the fourth pillar. So we’ve never been an agency that would wait until the end of a flight to be able to talk about what worked right?

We are always an agency that’s going to be bringing up recommendations at a, at a minimum monthly, depending on the size of the budget, because sometimes if it’s a smaller budget, you can’t do insights faster than that. You need time for things to run to be able to have statistically significant results. But the cool thing about integrating AI into our custom Data Studio dashboards, which, by the way, for a lot of our clients, now includes Epic patient appointment and revenue data.

Using our UTM connect tool, we’re able to put those paid campaign UTM parameters directly into the patient records and then export them. So our campaign dashboards now often include full ROI, right? We’re not only looking at the number of people that attempted to book appointment, we’re looking at the number of people that showed up to the appointment and the amount of revenue that was driven. Right? Full cycle. Within these dashboards. 

We now have AI layering on top of these dashboards. And the raw paid media data to be able to understand trends before the human eye could actually identify them. So that’s one of the cool things about the capabilities of AI, is the massive amount of data that it can ingest and be able to identify trends faster often times than humans can.

Even if you have a dedicated analyst, having AI look, when you’re having, you know, dozens of campaigns and ad groups or placements across a variety of channels, AI accelerates those insights. So we’re able to have faster feedback loops and faster optimizations, because AI is identifying and flagging those insight opportunities for us at a much faster rate than was available traditionally.

And then finally, pillar number five is creative optimization, something that we have begun integrating recently that I am really, really excited about is actually including the creative production within our paid media fee. So it used to be that, all creative was outside of paid media management fees. But what we have found is whenever we actually include it, we can now use a variety of different AI tools to do quick, say, regional variations for a service line campaign.

And it drives much stronger results. And whenever we just include that in the fee, our team can act much faster because it’s all inclusive. So we have a variety of tools that we use for creative asset production that allow us to do those iterations that really speed up the optimization and results of campaigns. A huge, huge, huge caveat: we will never use AI for creative concepting.

We very much believe concepting still needs to be done by humans. So for us, when we talk about creative optimizations using AI, we’re really talking about creating versioning. Again, a perfect example is regional variations for a service line. If you want to have that specific neighborhood or specific DMA name in, and you have say, you know, 40 different areas that you’re optimizing for, you can, you know, crank that out in less than five minutes with some of these great AI tools, and then a human will QA it before it goes live, can save you a lot of time and money.

Then if you were trying to actually have a human go in, you know, and type in all of those individual DMA or city names. We are very excited about the direction that AI is going. I think this is probably our fourth or fifth podcast on AI, and it really is reshaping the way that marketers think about processes and optimization opportunities.

We still firmly believe humans are not going to be replaced in marketing. Sort of like when the onset of digital and the internet happened. Humans still are very, very important. But if you are not actively looking at ways that I can improve your speed to market and the results that you’re getting for your paid media management, then you’re really missing a key opportunity.

So again, the five pillars: smart planning, precision personas, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimization. This isn’t just about automation, it’s truly about smarter, human-led paths to performance for paid media. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. If this episode was helpful to you, we would love if you would give us some stars.

Some comments. Share it with a coworker that you think may find this episode helpful. Subscribe so you receive a notification when future episodes drop. And if you want to chat with us more about either how you are currently working to integrate AI into your own marketing processes, or about how Hedy & Hopp can help you with your paid media management.

We would love to hear from you. Shoot out, shoot us a message and give us a call. We would love to dig in and chat further. That’s it for us today on this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to chat with you soon. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today we are going to talk about scaling shared services. So we have been inundated over the last couple of months with inquiries about rolling out a shared service model to local offices.

So this really can come into play really usually about three distinct areas. So first you have the private equity play. And that’s in situations where groups have been acquired, but decision making and budgets are still partially left then individually acquired offices. So they’re still able to hire their own marketing vendors, make their own marketing creative, etc.. Next would be an M&A hospital system scenario, and this is when health systems that have experienced rapid growth through M&A still may have some marketing control at the local hospital level, so they still hold some regional power.

There are still some local nuances. And we also have found often that within hospital systems, you may even have certain departments that are trying to go rogue with a pink t-shirt, for example, that is completely off brand. Everybody has heard that horror story, right? And then another final example is nationwide organizations or health plans that are nationwide, but they have a lot of state or regional departments, decision making powers around marketing, positioning, lots of autonomy to really be able to drive their own marketing strategies and tactics.

And there’s also different regional regulations that they’re working with. So let’s talk about best practices here. This is something that Hedy & Hopp has been leaning in on and helping organizations figure out for over a decade, and we’ve gotten pretty good at helping folks really walk the line, because one of the mistakes that we see often is folks trying to force the hands of those, let’s call them local offices, right?

Just picking a word division, whatever. But these local offices, if they have autonomy or believe they have autonomy, the worst thing you can do is try to force their hand and force them to do what you want them to do with marketing. Unless you have a decision coming from the very top down that is literally stripping them of decision making and marketing ability, then you need to think of them more as your clients and get them excited about collaborating on marketing and advertising initiatives.

So let’s talk about four different pillars or strategies of ways that you can kind of pull them in and get them excited about collaboration. The first is making sure that you have an easily accessible, self-serve brand toolkit. So you really need to have some easily accessible brand guidelines and templates for really inexpensive, print-ready local customization. This is how the hot pink t-shirt that Sally had her neighbor print 30 versions of end up happening is because there isn’t a way for folks to be able to easily create things within brand standards.

If it’s too difficult, if it takes too long, or if it’s too expensive, they’re going to go rogue. So you got to figure out how to make it easy for them, make it easier for them to actually use the tool that you want them to use than to go rogue, right? So one of the first things you want to think about is a DAM or a digital asset management tool.

There are tools like Canva Enterprise or Mark where corporations can really lock down the logos and fonts and the template if you will. But local teams can swap out things like headshots, local phone numbers, etc. to really customize it for what they need. That is way easier for folks in trying to design something from scratch. If it takes a local office three weeks in an email chain of 20 people to get a flier approved, they’re going to go rogue.

So a DAM is absolutely the way to go here. And there’s lots of different options. Now, it’s your decision, at that point, if you just want to allow them to access the templates, the brand templates, do some customization and then take the print ready files and go to their own printer that they may have a relationship with. Or, if you even want to lock down the production where they actually have to use your t-shirt vendor, your print company, etc. That is a separate decision that you’ll need to decide. But as you’re setting up your DAM with all of the different templates, you could really make that decision about how much autonomy you give them on that last step of the production process. 

The second pillar is the network effect or knowledge sharing. So one of the things that we find the most valuable is making sure that if folks are pooling their resources or participating in some sort of a joint marketing campaign, that they know they’re benefiting from the learnings of others.

So give it a catchy name or productize it in some way. Call it like the “marketing laboratory effect,” where you’re going to be testing out strategies like perhaps a TikTok strategy or a YouTube pre-roll strategy within one market. And then once you have a win, you productize it and roll it out to locations B through Z, right? That way, the offices aren’t just buying menu items, they’re buying collective intelligence and processes that you know are going to be successful.

They will be much more excited if you productize and systematize the rolling out of that. If you do it quietly behind the scenes, they won’t know that it’s happening and you won’t get the credit for it. So you really have to figure out a way to productize it and then evangelize it, as you’re working with all of these different offices.

The third is centralized strategy with local execution. So figure out a way for the headquarters to absorb the heavy lifting. Think strategy development, creative concepts, even asset development. So it’s financially worthwhile for those local markets to opt in. This is really the carrot versus the stick dynamic. You’re saying, hey, you’re going to save a lot of money.

If you work with us on this, we’re going to do all this upfront heavy lifting. We’re going to work with an agency or we have in-house talent to be able to do all the big picture strategic thinking, and then we’ll be able to hand over the things for you to actually do the local media buy. So if they have the local radio relationships, or they’re really passionate about placing in local newspapers, they can still do those things.

But you will know that the creative assets have been taken care of, and they will feel confident and excited about it, because that’s honestly where a lot of the upfront money and time goes in getting campaigns to market. So it really will become a financial no-brainer for them to participate. 

And then finally thinking about a shared dashboard of some kind, a lot of groups that we work with to put together a shared services model, really find a lot of value in building with us a reporting platform that allows leadership to see the macro view, so the total ecosystem spend and results while letting local teams drill down into their specific microperformance so you can see what the spend is per tactic or across your entire campaign, what the results are, what the patient volume and revenue is that’s been driven. 

And then you can drill down either per tactic across the entire network or per local office. That makes it really helpful because then you can understand, and they get value, because reporting and analytics is a really difficult thing to be able to set up from an infrastructure perspective, if you’re just at a local office, you they may not have the relationships or the technical access to be able to set up something like that.

So if part of participating in the shared services models, also getting access to a reporting dashboard that they simply have to log into to be able to see the results, it’ll be very exciting for them and wonderful for your leadership team to be able to then actually understand financially what is happening. So everybody’s had situations where local offices go rogue.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas about how to better structure a shared service model. So it is a win for Corporate and a win for all of the local offices. If this episode was helpful, please give us a like. Give us a follow. Share this episode with a colleague who you think may find it valuable, and give us a follow because we drop new episodes every Friday.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you soon! Cheers.