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.
# # #
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.
———————————————-
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.
Marketing and sales teams are the left and right hands of bringing new customers to your organization. We know they work hand-in-hand, but do you treat your organization’s data that way? Combining data is a challenge – we see it all the time.
The truth is, many of our partners have faced this problem (maybe you’re in a similar boat). You know that multiple channels, such as Facebook and Google Ads, influence your marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL). You also know that sales activities like phone calls, emails and demos influence your SQL success rate and your close rate.
But can anyone at your organization say confidently, with data, how all these factors work together? Does Facebook have a better SQL rate but lower MQL rate than Google? What about Facebook versus email? Helping you answer questions such as these is why we built our Multi-Touch Attribution Model for marketing and sales touches.
The Multi-Touch Attribution Model takes into account both touches from Google Analytics (GA) and your customer relationship management system (CRM)*. Our model combines data from GA and your CRM to break out conversions equally between multiple touchpoints.
Now, not only can you see individual customer paths, but you can also see how each of your channels influence and interact with one another.
The best part is that we leverage technology that is easy to use. Hedy & Hopp takes care of the heavy lifting in terms of data extraction, storage and analysis. You will always have access to your data through Google BigQuery, and your data will automatically populate in a Google Data Studio report that you can customize and share.
*Note: So far, we have integrated with Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, and SugarCRM. More CRMs to come!
If you use Google Analytics for reporting, you likely use the default attribution model called “last click.” More importantly, GA can’t account for any offline data in your CRM. Using the basic attribution models in most CRMs, you end up with an incomplete view of your customer’s journey.
We work around this by building our model from scratch using the Google Analytics API data. We look at all of the digital marketing touches for a user, even ones before they convert. So, if a user comes to your site from Facebook, and then converts a week later on Google Ads, we will include both sources in our model.
But the biggest advantage of our Multi-Touch model is that we integrate your Google Analytics property and your CRM to track the same user from Google into your CRM. We then look at all of the different touches in your CRM system and add that to the attribution model.
The process can be set up in two weeks, and as your prospects convert to customers, the data begins to populate! Depending on your prospect-to-customer lifecycle, you can start getting actionable data in just a few weeks.
Imagine knowing that Facebook converts better with an introduction email, while Google Ads converts better with an early demo!