Welcome to the first episode of the We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast, hosted by Jenny Bristow. Jenny is the Founder and CEO of Hedy and Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency based in the Midwest. Today, Jenny welcomes Annie Haarmann, Head of Consumer Experience, North America at Reputation.
On this episode, Annie breaks down how different health systems are responding to technology advancements in order to improve patient’s access to care. She outlines technology that is changing patient’s journey such as Google’s knowledge panel and local three-pack to natural language processing and artificial intelligence to determine emotions such as fear, optimism and anger.
We also talk about how health systems have been regrouping after many marketing budgets were slashed during Covid and the long-term impact to the growth of virtual care.
Annie discusses the importance of real relationship building with vendors, being brutally honest about your own weaknesses, talking about things that are broken, and using metrics that matter.
Watch their discussion below or listen to the podcast, We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast.
Connect with Annie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniehaarmann/
Connect with Jenny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Full Transcript:
Hi friends. Welcome to We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast, where we talk about the technology and innovation that are improving patient’s access to care. I am super excited to have with us today, one of my long time friends, Annie Haarmann, Annie is the head of Consumer Experience North America at Reputation.
Welcome Annie. Thanks Jenny. I’m so glad to be here and glad to be one of your long time friends. [00:01:00] Same. So we have so many different directions and things that we can talk about. You have been such an innovator in healthcare the entire time that I’ve known you. I’d love to start off talking a little bit about technology.
So, I know that in the past you were actually working at a healthcare system, and now you are at a technology vendor. So you’ve seen a lot from both sides of the spectrum. What technology have you seen that you think has most improved patients access to care?
Yeah, I think that there’s no way to have a conversation about care access without talking about the big elephant in the room, Google. As you know, it’s the single biggest technology that has impacted the customer journey, What we now call doctor Google or the idea that, you know, we’re all as consumers seeking answers to questions about our medical conditions.
And, uh, I remember hearing from, from [00:02:00] Google recently that the percentage of healthcare related search related to symptoms is 81%. So, 81% of healthcare searches is just a consumer, trying to figure out their symptoms, whether it’s, you know, what is a wrist sprain versus a broken bone or COVID symptoms, are taking them through what we used to call a marketing funnel.
And now we just kind of call that a consumer journey. And I can search my symptoms. I can understand my treatment options. I could even look at reviews from other people who have my same symptoms or conditions and have seen that provider. I can select a provider based on their feedback and it’s all right there within the Google ecosystem right there in the knowledge panel or that local three pack.
And, you know, we used to have these debates. I’m sure you [00:03:00] remember was what are we gonna put on our homepage? What’s the right thing to feature on that homepage of the website. and that page doesn’t ever matter if you can’t get the consumer to come to it. And increasingly Google is going to intercept those patients.
They want them scheduling right there within the Google results. And why would a consumer ever go to your website if they can get everything for right there? And this idea of zero click conversion is not just a nice to have anymore. It’s the standard. And if you are not optimizing for that, then you’re missing out on the single best access point for your patients.
I remember it was in 2019. You were speaking at HCIC and I remember sitting in the audience and you actually walked through a patient experience. The experience was your own cause you weren’t feeling well, you had to go urgent care or something. And so I remember you actually screenshotted and documented how, what the query you [00:04:00] did, the search results that you received, the way that you were able to book an appointment.
And it was such a great, true representation. How easy it is to find care whenever providers and systems do it correctly. Yeah. I vaguely recall that. I think that was my data science experiment with an N of one but it’s, it’s true that as consumers of healthcare, we care what that experience is going to be like for other consumers of healthcare.
It’s the only product or service that. Truly, every person is going to have some kind of experience with it. And if we don’t make that better, then we’re not doing a service to society as a whole. Something that makes me really excited about – the idea of making access easier is that it’s not just a marketing thing.
It’s really about treating humans the way that they wanna be treated and make it [00:05:00] easy for them to get the care that they need in the time that they need it.
I totally share that same passion, as you know. So what do you think is next? What next technology innovation or platform or tool is going to be next?
Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s funny, there’s a lot of advancement that has happened in the last couple of years in digital. And we’ve seen certain platforms like virtual care that used to be this loss leader that healthcare systems didn’t really know what to do with, or put it over in the innovation corner.
And all of a sudden we had a need to scale all of that and make it actionable immediately. People who couldn’t leave the house. And so I do think that it’s a really exciting time to see the shift from this idea of healthcare access as a marketing thing, to healthcare access as a consumer experience [00:06:00] thing and, and driving those access points.
You know the best thing that I have seen come out of healthcare innovation is really what we’re bringing in from other industries. So if you take a concept like healthcare consumerism, other industries have already nailed consumerism, they didn’t have the same kind of challenges that we did in healthcare.
And they were able to really hone in on some of those things that we’re now just catching up to. The thing that comes to mind for me as the future is natural language processing or NLP. When we talk about AI and healthcare, we’re always focused on clinical uses. But there are also a lot of non-clinical uses for AI in marketing and you know, years ago, you probably remember it was so exciting just to see on our social media reports, that we could get a percentage of how many positive [00:07:00] comments, how many negative comments.
And then there was the neutral comments, which was, you know, sort of silly because it was the biggest of, of all the groupings. But now, NLP has gotten so advanced. It learns over time that we can start to pull out emotional components, like fear and anger and trust or optimism.
And those are really important emotions to understand when you are trying to change behavior. How are you going to motivate someone to take action, to schedule that mammogram when, most of the conversation around that topic is fearful? How can you allay those fears with the marketing that you’re doing?
How can you eliminate some of the barriers that cause anger and and make it easier for them to access the care and to do the follow up care that they need. So it’s not just about what is [00:08:00] the story we tell it’s what is the story we tell that will drive someone to action and we can do that by paying more attention to the natural language processing technology that is available to us.
How far out do you think we are from mass adoption?
Ooh, that’s hard to say. I see that a lot of my clients are very excited about it and they say, oh, that’s so great. I want that. I wanna see it, but we haven’t reached the point of fully actioning that information. So a lot of them are just starting to wake up to the fact that we can even provide this kind of information and you know, realizing they can drill down to that level and see, even based on a service line or an individual provider or a region of our service area. And so I think right now we’re at the awareness stage [00:09:00] of things.
It’s funny you bring this up because this is something we talk to a lot of our clients about. There are laggards who are sort of just coming onto some of the digital marketing things that we would probably consider standard in other industries. There’s the middle of the pack, which is the ones who are understanding the information, but maybe actioning on part of it. And the leaders, which I would say is a smaller elite group of health systems have really figured out how to action this information.
They are drilling into the data, not just a, oh, it’s nice to know this thing. It’s oh, here’s the action we’re going to take. Because of this thing that we learned, and here’s what we expect the result to be. And they’re testing that and they are building marketing campaigns with that in mind. And it’s really exciting to see some of the, the, [00:10:00] the changes that it is resulting in for my clients.
So you and I we’ve been in this industry for a long time. Right. Things change every month. How do you stay abreast of new technology? Are there any trainings or any resources that you’ve found or used over the last year that have been really helpful?
Yeah. I read everything. I listen to all of the podcasts. I am a digital hoard. I’ve got probably. 40 episodes of various podcasts that are downloaded into my phone. And when I get on a plane and I won’t have wifi access, I just plug in and just learn as much as I can. And the way that I learn about what’s going on, isn’t so much from a technology stand.
I wanna hear what healthcare system executives are [00:11:00] saying. I wanna hear from that medical group leader, I wanna hear from that chief nursing officer if iit matters not what the latest tech is, or if it doesn’t. Actually get to the heart of what is causing pain for healthcare system leaders. And I tried to always put that at the center of my conversations with them and ultimately the healthcare consumer at the center of what they need from me.
And so what I would recommend is – don’t worry about the latest technology podcast or signing up for a technology, event or subscription. What you should really listen to is what are those executives talking about? And you can find that through, you know, all of the, the trade publications, you can subscribe to the podcast versions of [00:12:00] those and just listen. When you hear the same challenges repeated over and over, because that’s what has to come first.
It’s not the technology. It’s the problem. Absolutely. Oh, I love that answer. I love it. So something that I really wanted to dig in with you is talking about budgeting in marketing. I feel like it has been well, I know it has been a, quite a rocky couple of years for healthcare providers. A lot of their budgets were slashed to nothing during COVID and now everybody’s rebounding.
Some people are doing more than they were before as an attempt to be able to make up some lost ground. How have you, and how have your clients tackled budget planning post pandemic?
Yeah, I, I work with clients of all sizes. Um, some that have very small budgets and some that have enormous budgets and it doesn’t matter what [00:13:00] the budget is.
You need to focus early on the value. You know, for a lot of health systems, they have finance processes or certain protocols where you go through an approval of whatever investment you wanna make. And you have to show the value of that, and you need to challenge your partners, or your vendors, if they aren’t a true partner, they’ll do this with you.
If they’re a vendor, they might but, challenge them to give you metrics that matter and your vendors don’t tell you what metrics matter. You tell them. I remember years ago when I was a customer, I was a purchaser of lots of technology. I was having a conversation with, with my boss about a [00:14:00] proposal that had just come through.
And our sentiment was they came in and tried to tell us what our problems were, but they didn’t ask us what our problems were. They just told us what they were. We know what our problems are and so we know the priorities. And so when you can tell your outside partners what those things are, and sometimes it can be difficult to do – a lot of marketing leaders don’t wanna share that level of detail with their outside partners, and it can only help you because then they know what matters.
They know what they need to track, and they know whether they are delivering value. And so create those deep relationships early – figure out what your processes are know what you need in order to show value to that budget. And then, challenge your partners, cuz at the end of the day, you know, if your agency isn’t reporting on real metrics, like incremental new [00:15:00] patient revenue on appointments scheduled, if there’s still leaning on views or impressions and, and that’s it, you know, that’s not gonna help you because all the impressions are not going to mean anything.
If you don’t get one appointment out of it and that one appointment means nothing. If you can’t then attribute that appointment to something that your marketing team did.
I love that answer. And I think that is early the foundation for the most successful relationships is candor. That’s candor honesty, some brutal real conversations. And, you know, we had a lot of candor when, when I was your client, I don’t know if you’re revealing that on this podcast, but, but yeah, that’s very, very important. And it is for you, I’m sure that you’ve had clients who didn’t tell you exactly what was going on or tell you all of the details you needed to know in order to add value.
And it’s almost like, you know, you would come in with [00:16:00] your eyes closed to try to paint the picture for them, but you don’t know what’s important. And when you can be honest about that so you know if you’re off the target or you’re close to the target.
That’s the bullseye. You need that in any kind of relationship. And that’s what I consider to be the difference between a, a vendor, which is just, I pay you money and you give me the thing, versus a partnership, which is, I’m investing in you and we are mutually invested in the success of this outcome.
Completely agree. I think a lot of marketers early in their career feel like keeping some of that information close to the vest is a power play. And I think the opposite is the real power play. The more you can share to allow people to be your true partner and stand up and kind of push the limits of what’s possible because they know they’re actually going in the right direction for you is really when the magic happens.
[00:17:00] Totally agree. Well, Annie, thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation. I always love hearing your insights. Any final words for our listeners today?
Yeah, I think it gets back to the candor thing. I mean, you know, me I love telling everybody what the problem is because the more people I tell about the challenge that I’m facing, the more likely it is that I’m gonna get a nice set of answers from a variety of people and what I would encourage any healthcare marketers to do is to talk about the things that are broken. Don’t be afraid to talk about those things, because guess what they’re probably broken for some other team too. And maybe it used to be broken and they fixed it, or maybe you have an idea that would help them. The point being, talk about these things, talk to, and talk to people who don’t have the same perspective as you.
I mean, [00:18:00] I learned so much from talking to other departments that were not marketing. And it put things in a better context for me to. To win for the whole organization.
I love it. Well, Annie, thank you so much for joining. I’ll be linking to your LinkedIn in the show notes, if anybody would like to connect.
And for all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you soon.
Digital Marketing and Analytics Agency Pivots To Serve Healthcare Industry Exclusively; Projecting 50% Growth Over Next 18 Months
Aug. 8, 2022 (St. Louis, MO) – An increasing number of healthcare organizations are recognizing the importance of shifting from a product-oriented focus to customer-centric focus in the face of consumer demand for better healthcare experiences. But to do that effectively, the healthcare industry must harness the power of customer data and insights to build a brand connection before a customer becomes a customer.
Anticipating this evolving shift in healthcare, St. Louis-based digital marketing and analytics provider, Anvil Analytics + Insights, has renamed itself and pivoted its business to exclusively serve the healthcare industry with a focus on connecting and optimizing the patient experience in finding and receiving care. Anvil Analytics + Insights is now Hedy & Hopp – a healthcare marketing agency that activates effective and emotional connections between brands and customers, using a foundation of data-driven insights.
“The healthcare landscape continues to shift, creating more obstacles patients must navigate in order to find and receive care,” says CEO/Founder Jenny Bristow. “It is critical for healthcare organizations to make it easier for patients to find information, schedule appointments and feel an emotional connection to their brand. This requires healthcare organizations to break apart siloed marketing efforts and integrate marketing experiences and brand connections into the patient’s life.”
Hedy & Hopp draws on an integrated mix of expertise across healthcare brand strategy, consumer engagement, marketing technology and analytics to integrate the healthcare brand into the customer’s life – a process we call Hedyology®.
“This shift requires healthcare organizations to think differently and find a way to connect disparate data sources to streamline patient experiences in order to apply effective marketing in the digital space,” Bristow says. “Hedy & Hopp is built on a foundation of helping healthcare clients navigate this change and find innovation in their marketing approaches.”
The company has been positioning itself for growth, making many notable hires in the last year. These include:
The firm employs 20 associates. Bristow expects to hire five additional associates in the next year. Anticipating the needs of the market, Bristow is projecting 50% growth over the next 18 months. While based in St. Louis, Hedy & Hopp hires experts globally and works remotely, as clients are located throughout the U.S.
“Hedy & Hopp has given our team the expertise to make efficient, informed, and patient-centered decisions in one of the most challenging landscapes when it comes to sexual and reproductive healthcare. Their careful guidance and thoughtful partnership is a critical capacity builder for the Planned Parenthood marketing team. We are grateful for their collaboration and highly recommend them to any affiliate that needs an extra hand in digital analytics and advertising work.”
Bonyen Lee-Gilmore | Vice President of Strategy and Communications, Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri
Anvil Analytics & Insights was founded in 2015. Bristow, who previously built and sold an agency in Seattle, as well as worked at Amazon, took sole ownership in 2021. Bristow and the company have enjoyed many honors including being named by the St. Louis Business Journal as the #1 fastest growing company in 2019. Bristow was also named to the 2022 Titan 100 list of top C-level executives, and was a 2018 winner of the Stevie® Awards for Women in Business in the Female Entrepreneur of the Year category.
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Isn’t it beautiful when life comes full circle?
About 20 years ago (eek 😖), I hired my first ever direct report – Maggie Piasecki.
We worked together for about four years and had a blast. The photo below is from a conference we attended in San Jose for digital marketing, back in 2004, when we visited the Google campus!
When our careers took us in different directions, we stayed in touch with lunches and happy hours, always trying to find a way for our paths to cross again.
Last year, when I bought out my business partner and had an opportunity to rebuild my leadership team – I called Maggie.
A few months later, she joined as the company’s second in command (though let’s be real, she is usually first in command 🤣).
As we approach our one-year anniversary working together (8/8), I wanted to take a moment to pause and appreciate my dear friend.
Maggie makes every day a joy and is a true testament to our company’s core values.
She is the reason why recruiting hasn’t been an issue over the last year – everyone wants to work with Maggie! Once you work with her – you respect and love her. She is a true gem.
Maggie – thank you for being you! I’m so appreciative to have you back in my life again and can’t wait to see where we go together!
🥂
[Last updated: April 22, 2020]
Like many of you, we’ve been getting used to the new (temporary) normal of working as a distributed team — using Zoom and Slack even more than we used to, and social distancing to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Like all of you, the health and safety of our community is our top priority during this time.
As an agency that does a lot of work in healthcare, we have seen a variety of requests come through to help prepare and send communication out to patients related to COVID-19. As a way to give back, we’ve created some “starter pack” resources related to COVID-19 and collected them on this page, which we’ll update periodically. Hopefully, these resources will be helpful as you navigate this situation. Please reach out to us if we can help your organization in any way.
If you have a Google Optimize account, there are new features to quickly add temporary messages that will keep your users updated on any recent changes. Learn more on Google’s Marketing Platform blog.
If your organization is looking to send out a COVID-19 response email, you can use this template to get started. We created the template with healthcare providers in mind, specifically those who might not have an internal marketing team or an agency partner. It’s got some ready-to-go content from the CDC and other trusted sources, and you can customize it with your organization’s branding and content. Download the HTML to use with your preferred email platform. (Also, if you’re interested in having us build out an email for you in a custom system, contact us.)
With digital communication and telehealth being more necessary than ever, now might be the time to consider how your marketing and analytics tools stack up when it comes to HIPAA compliance. We’ve compiled this useful list of tools and platforms that are either HIPAA compliant out of the box or can be customized for HIPAA compliance. If your organization deals with PHI and is doing any kind of website analytics, business intelligence, or data management, this blog post will be helpful.
Healthcare companies are dealing with a lot right now, including the need for new COVID-19 communications. You’ve most likely seen that OCR announced HIPAA flexibilities during the COVID-19 emergency.
We put together this list of some noteworthy data visualizations related to COVID-19, with links and commentary from our data experts. As we navigate these “uncharted waters,” we think it’s inspiring to see all the different ways people are using data to create real-time maps, dashboards, and other visualizations to help communicate crucial information.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/helpful-data-visualizations-covid-19-links-jenny-bristow/
If you’re working from home like we are, you might be interested in these free virtual training and professional development opportunities:
Want to improve your data analytics chops? You’re in luck! Every weekday in April, the Decision Science team at Hedy & Hopp
will be releasing a short, practical tutorial to help you strengthen your tracking, data analysis, and dashboards. Check out the tutorials on YouTube and be sure to subscribe to our channel to see new videos as they are launched:
A huge announcement was made last week by Google, letting the world know that Universal Analytics (the version the vast majority of folks still use) will be shut down next year. Unlike prior analytics version changes, they will NOT be migrating the code over if you do nothing. If you do nothing, your website data will no longer be tracked. It’s a huge deal for marketers!
Our resident analytics guru, Sam Cox, wrote a summary that outlines the must-know information about the update. Again, we have been warning about this change for a while (you can see an old blog post from December 1, 2020!) and if you still haven’t acted, now is the time.
Next July, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will replace Universal Analytics as the default tracking platform for Google Analytics. GA4 represents a fundamental change in the way data is tracked within Google Analytics and offers many benefits over traditional Universal Analytics (UA).
What’s the difference? The biggest difference between GA4 and UA is in how data is tracked. Whereas Universal Analytics relied on sessions and pageviews to track data, in GA4 data is tracked in events and parameters. In simpler terms this means that you can more flexibly track what’s important across any devices and platforms a user might interact with, allowing for a fuller picture of how users interact with your web properties.
For example, with UA if a user visited your app on their mobile device and then completed a purchase on your website on their laptop, that would previously be tracked as 2 unique sessions. With GA4, it’s possible to track that same user’s interaction with both your app and mobile device as several different events with the same user.
GA4 allows for full cross-device and cross-platform reporting within a flexible event-based data model, giving Analytics users greater insight than ever before as to how users interact with your web properties.
At Hedy & Hopp, we are excited by the new tracking opportunities GA4 presents, and we’re committed to making sure the transition away from Universal Analytics doesn’t impact the access you have to the insights that matter most.
Will I be able to access my old analytics data after moving to GA4?
No. As of July 1, 2023, UA properties will stop recording new data. You will be able to access that data for at least 6 months after that, but it will eventually become inaccessible.
Can I access historical data through the new GA4 platform?
No. Since the foundations of UA and GA4 track data in fundamentally different ways, you can only access GA4 data once the tracking code is installed on your website. It is important to set up a GA4 property as soon as possible in order to have access to the largest range of data possible.
Will I be able to set up a new dashboard that looks the same as my old dashboard?
Yes, pretty much. However, we would recommend using this opportunity to evaluate your current dashboard and weigh whether any new GA4 capabilities might change the way you view and interpret your data. Also, some metrics you may use to evaluate the performance of your website, like bounce rate, have changed in GA4. We are committed to ensuring you have access to the same insights as before, even if a few of the metrics we track may look a little different.
Install the GA4 tracking code on your website as soon as possible if you have not already.
Since the switch to GA4 will mean that Universal Analytics will stop collecting data July 1, 2023, you’ll want to build up as much data in GA4 as possible before then, especially if you look at YoY data. The good news is that you can install GA4 on your website in tandem with Universal Analytics to maximize the benefits of both analytics platforms.
Evaluate all current Google Analytics integrations and update them to GA4.
Everything from your website to paid advertising platforms, CallRail tracking, CRM to data studio dashboards may be utilizing old UA data that will need to be updated to GA4.
Update Data Studio Dashboards.
Switching to GA4 will cause any current Universal Analytics data in dashboards to break, so all dashboard pages that incorporate UA metrics will need to be updated. Take the time to consider some of the new capabilities of GA4 and if that changes anything when it comes to KPIs and how you’d like to visualize your data.
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If you’re a client, don’t worry. The team will be reaching our shortly with our plan of attack for your setup and dashboards. If you’re not a client and need help, give us call and we can create a plan of attack to make sure you don’t lose any data.
Photo Credit: Kristin Wilson on Unsplash
Maybe you’ve heard this before – establishing a business intelligence (BI) strategy is hard work. It’s true. BI, big data analytics, data governance, and other buzzwords are really just pseudonyms for “hard work.” Specifically, for the hard work that it takes to collect data, manipulate it, interpret it, and leverage it to answer questions. Because, at the end of the day, when it comes to BI that’s what we’re after – answers to questions.
In this article, we’ll take you through the process of implementing BI and arriving at the answers to your questions. We’ve broken the process down into five steps: develop a plan, secure buy-in, choose a platform, ramp up gradually, and then dig into your data. But it’s not easy. Keep reading to learn about pitfalls to avoid and tips to achieve success when implementing BI.
To get to answers, we need to start with questions. What questions are you trying to answer? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve? That’s going to depend on your business. The important thing is to know what your questions are. These questions are going to guide your data strategy and help you develop a measurement plan. Before you begin with any BI implementation, you should know what you want to get out of your efforts.
It’s crucial to keep your questions specific and measurable. A question like, “How can I drive visitors to my website?” isn’t measurable. A better question would be “Which of my marketing campaigns is most effectively driving visitors to my site?” because it’s specific and it’s measurable.
When you’ve identified your key questions, it’s time to figure out what you need to measure. For example, if you’re trying to figure out which of your campaigns is driving the most traffic to your site, then you would need to measure where traffic to your site is coming from.
When deciding what to measure, i.e. what data to collect, there are some basic factors to consider:
Please contact us if you want more information about setting up a measurement plan!
At this point, if you don’t already have buy-in from leadership, it’s time to take your well-thought-out measurement plan and go get some buy-in. If you don’t have the necessary support, it’s going to be difficult to move forward. Luckily, if you’ve got a good plan, then you’ve probably got what you need to secure buy-in.
Even if you already have leadership’s backing, this is the point where many BI implementations end up stalling out. Here’s a common scenario: You’ve collected some data, maybe you’ve already got a dashboard to two and some slick-looking visualizations… So, why aren’t the answers to your questions hitting you over the head?
In addition to securing buy-in from leadership, it’s also important to consider if your company-wide culture is ready for BI implementation. Is your company undergoing a “digital transformation” and if so where is it in that process? Depending on where your company is, culture-wise, you might have more or fewer hurdles to implementing BI. For BI to work, everyone needs to be on board. It’s also essential to remember that BI is a means to an end, it’s not a silver bullet. BI can help you answer specific questions, but it can’t singlehandedly solve a business’s underlying problems.
Okay, if you’ve got support from leadership, and your company culture is amenable to implementing BI, then it’s time to start thinking about BI platforms.
Two big questions to consider before you compare specific platforms are: What functionality do you need? and Who will be using the platform? Speaking very generally, platforms with greater functionality will often be more complex and harder to use, at least out-of-the-box. Ideally, you want to find the platform that provides all the functionality you need, along with the clearest, cleanest, most attractive user interface – so that everyone who needs to use the platform will actually use it.
Free demos can be a helpful way to “test drive” different platforms. But you should keep in mind that limited-time demos will only give you limited insight. You likely won’t get the whole picture until you adopt a platform full time. You might also consider leaning on an agency partner in comparing platforms. At Hedy & Hopp, for example, we have first-hand experience with many different BI tools, from Looker to Sisense to Tableau.
One “rookie mistake” we’ve seen companies make when they’re starting out with BI or analytics is trying to jam-pack way too many metrics onto a single dashboard. We get it. It’s tempting to pad your dashboards with vanity metrics. They make your dashboards look sophisticated and complex. But more often than not, simpler is better. Those vanity metrics take up space and distract from the core metrics that are going to help you. For data to be worth reporting, it’s got to be relevant.
Something else we’ve seen more than one client get hung up on is fixating too much on “big data.” It’s a buzzword for a reason. All else being equal, more data is usually better. But, with that said, don’t forget about the little data. The little data matters too. (Big or little, what’s most important is the quality of your data. Is it accurate?) Usually, you should collect as much data as you can. But for certain metrics, you just won’t be able to collect very much. Using this “little data” might involve more creativity on the part of you or your analysts, but it can be useful. Don’t ignore the little data.
Like with other aspects of a digital transformation, when it comes to implementing BI or starting out with analytics, it’s best to take a “crawl-walk-run” approach. Don’t try to do everything all at once. When it comes to BI, this could mean limiting yourself to a few critically important questions regarding your business and answering those first before moving on to other questions. For example, it might be more important to ask yourself what’s the best way to get visitors to your website, before you drill down into analyzing how best to get visitors to complete a particular action on your website.
You’ve developed a data strategy. You’ve secured buy-in from leadership and team members. You’ve decided on a BI platform, or several, to make use of. You’re not trying to do too much, too quickly. You’ve identified some critical metrics and you’re watching them like a hawk.
Congratulations! At this point, you’ve probably already answered some of your key questions. The good news is that you’re on the right track, and you’ve got more wins in your future. The “bad news” is that the hard work isn’t over yet. The truth is that when it comes to BI, or business in general, the hard work is never really over.
But let’s end with some more good news. If you’ve collected enough relevant accurate data, some of your questions are going to be easy to answer, but others won’t. The good news? Those tough questions are also usually the most fun.
Here’s a quick example from our Decision Science team. Recently, one of our clients became concerned that their Amazon marketing efforts were cannibalizing sales from their own e-commerce website. Our Decision Science team took that hypothesis and tested it using sales data from the two systems (the client’s site and Amazon). We weren’t able to find any significant correlation, but we did notice some odd trends in the sales of individual products. This is where we had to really dig in. We broke the data down and did three separate tests on the top-selling products. By doing so, we identified one specific product that was selling more on Amazon at the expense of sales on the client’s website. We shared this data with our client and our marketing strategy team so that they could tweak their campaigns to address the concern.
Tough questions can’t always be answered after the first attempt. They require you to do more than look at the data, but to really analyze, understand, and interpret. They require you to dig in – make your data talk. That’s the hard part, but it’s usually the fun part, too.
Post-pandemic, a lot of marketing teams are experiencing the Great Resignation. We have seen some of our clients’ teams experience a 50%+ turn-over during the last 18 months and now many struggle to rehire and fill open roles.
Over the course of the last 15 years in the agency world, I’ve seen the pendulum swing from most companies choosing to leverage agency partners as a key component of their team, to the other side of the pendulum, and instead try to build internal teams as the primary engine for execution while only using agencies for technical or time-consuming tasks. Right now, we see it swinging back the other way. Agencies are again a key component to marketing strategy development and execution. As companies struggle to fill their open roles with quality candidates, they are outsourcing to agencies they trust.
If you’re in a similar position, Hedy & Hopp has helped countless clients in the healthcare space accomplish their objectives and launch or fine-tune their digital marketing efforts. You’re not alone – recruiting quality candidates is very difficult right now. If your campaigns can’t wait, I’m sure the next question you’re asking yourself is, “But how difficult is it to onboard a new agency partner?”
How do you know it’s the right time to investigate a more meaningful relationship with a digital marketing agency?
Here are a few signs to look for:
If you’re struggling to solve staffing problems and your campaigns and objectives can’t wait, you need to level up your resources and make sure you’re using insights, not gut feelings. You need Hedy & Hopp.
Connect with us today to chat more about how we help clients in the healthcare space.
2020 was quite a rollercoaster for businesses, but for medical device sales (which rely historically on conferences, trade shows, and in-office visits), it ripped the rug out from under them.
Since COVID started, Hedy & Hopp has helped a variety of medical sales businesses become more digital-savvy and update their marketing and sales processes to adjust to the new normal. Tactics have included everything from enhanced technology to better manage sales pipelines, automating lead nurturing, creating processes to educate prospects digitally, and much more.
We have heard from countless medical sales companies that they are all facing the same issues so we decided to conduct a webinar to provide some guidance as these companies finalize their 2021 strategies. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, there are definitely best practices that every medical sales company should be incorporating into their processes in 2021 that can help provide a more solid sales foundation moving forward.
You’ll learn the following:
Join Hedy & Hopp, a marketing agency that specializes in healthcare organizations and medical sales, in this informative and action-oriented one-hour webinar.
Yes, you read that correctly. Referencing performance on your website based on the number of visitors and pageviews has officially been killed by Google as they launched Google Analytics 4 (GA4) this quarter.
It’s a huge shift for marketers. GA4 is a new version of Google Analytics. It completely reimagines how users and actions are tracked on websites. GA4 was previously referred to as website + app beta, but since coming out of beta it will now be the new, officially supported version of Google Analytics. This means that all new developments and support will focus on this version, and older versions will eventually become obsolete. If you need to create a new property today, it will default to GA4.
The biggest difference in how GA4 tracks a property’s performance is that it uses event-based tracking, versus user-based tracking (such as views). The system is reimagined to care more about what happens on your site, which is truly the most important data for marketers anyway, so we are excited for this development. It also will tackle tracking issues that the current Universal (now considered “old”) version of GA would have more and more often around cookies, which is currently the primary source of tracking in Universal Analytics.
While many functionalities within GA4 are not fully built out, we are advising all of our clients to install GA4 on their websites now to begin tracking data. You will not be able to move data over from Universal Analytics to GA4, so in the future, if you want to run year-over-year reports, for example, you’ll want to install GA4 immediately.
It is important to note though, that functionality (such as eCommerce tracking and predictive modeling) will be added over the coming months, so our recommendation is to do a basic install but leverage the out-of-the-box reports for now. Over Q1 and Q2, we expect more functionality releases that will ensure we can set up the properties to best leverage all of the tools, and reporting can get more and more sophisticated. You can read more about this fundamental shift in website tracking on Google’s own blog post about the launch of GA4.
We are offering a special flat-rate fee to get GA4 installed before January 1. We never, ever do specials, but it feels like this is a situation that requires it. It’s a low-cost, easy task to cross off your to-do list that will ensure your data is solid. It will also give you access to GA4’s basic reports so you can begin to get used to how the data is going to be reported. It’s a pretty big shift for our industry, and we will continue to write updates as new features are released.
Reach out to us for details.
We were excited to find out recently that Hedy & Hopp earned a spot (#1,726) on the Inc. 5000 list of the Fastest Growing Companies in the country! Being named to this list is a huge accomplishment for the entire team. 2020 has been a weird year, so we’re thrilled to take moments like these to celebrate.
In 1982, Inc. introduced the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. Since then, this prestigious list of the nation’s most successful private companies has become the hallmark of entrepreneurial success and the place where future household names first make their mark. Pandora, 7 Eleven, Toys ‘R’ Us, Zipcar, Zappos.com and numerous other well-known brands have been honored by the Inc. 5000. In 2007, the Inc. 500 list expanded to the Inc. 5000, giving readers a deeper, richer understanding of the entrepreneurial landscape and capturing a broader spectrum of success.
Today, the list is a distinguished editorial award, a celebration of innovation, a network of entrepreneurial leaders, and an effective public relations showcase. The Inc. 5000 ranks companies by overall revenue growth over a three-year period. All 5,000 honoree companies are individually profiled on Inc.com. The top 500 are featured in the September issue of Inc. Magazine, the leading entrepreneurial advocate for 38 years running. Inc. also ranks the fastest-growing companies by industry, metro area, revenue, and number of employees, and we also highlight women and minority run companies.
Learn more here.