In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Jeremy Rogers, Executive Director of Digital Marketing and Experience at Indiana University Health, who brings nearly nine years of experience at the organization and a deep understanding of the evolving healthcare marketing landscape. We dive into a critical challenge many marketers face today: demand for healthcare services sometimes exceeds supply, requiring a strategic shift.
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And today I am super excited to have a special guest on today. We have Jeremy Rogers.
He is the Executive Director of Digital Marketing and Experience at Indiana University Health. Welcome Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hi, Jenny. Happy to be here.
Jenny: Yeah. So I’m really jazzed to have you on today. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn for some time and really respect the work that you’ve done. You have been at Indiana University Health for almost nine years.
So you’ve been through and seen a lot of the shifts in healthcare marketing and the different ways marketers have had to pivot as far as digital becoming more important and the privacy becoming more important. And what I’m excited to chat about with you today is a lot of my podcast episodes have been around the [00:01:00] conversation of driving patient demand, but sometimes demand far exceeds supply.
And so marketing’s role in that case really shifts. We’re still very important in the conversation, but it isn’t about driving patients. So I’d love to start off this podcast, just getting a little bit of insight from you about what are you seeing with that shift? How is that impacting you and your role within your organization?
Jeremy: Yeah, it’s a super important topic. You know, I think you’re spot on. I mean, I can think back, you know, my career here at IU health is basically split in half by the pandemic thinking back in the good old days, pre COVID. The top of the funnel was wide open. Everyone was focused on acquiring net new patients.
You know, it’s low acuity, primary care, urgent care, fill the funnel, you get downstream revenue. That’s the classical model. Well, the reality is in this post pandemic world, it’s super duper uneven. I mean there are many parts of the country where access and you can [00:02:00] define access many different ways.
I don’t want to quibble over that. But it takes a lot longer for a patient to receive care today than it did, say, four or five plus years ago. And so, the impact of that, the trickle down of that, I think is being felt in different waves across the country. You know, a lot of our work back in the day was heavily focused on primary care.
That was the quote unquote loss leader. You attract a patient, you get your hooks into them, you build loyalty, you get a referral, they have a procedure, a screening, what have you, and then magic happens from there. Well, the reality is today, for a typical primary care provider, you may not be able to get in for two weeks if you are lucky.
And so in terms of what that does with the customer journey, the way people come in and out, the way people are leveraging urgent care or quick care or virtual care. As proxies or alternatives [00:03:00] to receiving care and the impact that has on their lifetime value their brand affinity for a health system is just totally different now than it was.
So again, super duper important topic.
Jenny: Absolutely. So what is marketing’s role in this new ecosystem? Right? Like the brand hat, we have the brand hat, we have the communications hat, the digital hat, technology, we have all these hats we’re supposed to wear. What is our day to day look like when this is the scenario?
Jeremy: Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer for that. I do not. I’m sure people much smarter than me have figured it out. I think the short answer is it depends on who you are, where you’re at. And I think it, it varies day by day. I believe, you know, a progressive marketer nowadays is really reevaluating the value they add in terms of the pay, you know, how are they representing the patient, representing their organization.
At the core, a marketer should be the voice of the customer. Like, what are you representing there [00:04:00] internally? So in terms of the collaborations we are having across your systems, whether it’s operationally medical groups you’ve got to be at the table speaking up about what customers expectations are, because that’s what pains me the most is even in my own family.
There are people who just don’t understand. You know, if you have to go to an emergency department today, it’s not a great experience. You’re oftentimes waiting for hours and hours. And I don’t think a lot of consumers around our country have embraced that similar with like primary care. I mean, I told my own mom a few days ago, you may want to book your wellness visit a little bit earlier this year, because it’s going to take you longer.
Like I can tell you personally, I’ve got one booked out over a year from now because I know you just can’t get in like you used to. So just the small things and big things like that’s where I think marketers have to play.
Jenny: Oh, Jeremy. First of all, I do too. I book my annual when I’m at my annual. So I aligned with you because I understand how the world works now.
Jeremy: Very smart. Yes. [00:05:00]
Jenny: But so if we’re thinking about that, then it’s more about you know, loyalty, current customer engagement, proactive communication about service line availability, et cetera. So then building relationships with other teams within your organization is super important. What are some of the departments within your organizations that you’ve become good friends with?
Jeremy: Yeah, so I would say almost all of them is the reality and maybe not good friends, but like bigger edging, like we’re frenemies maybe potentially but heavy on the operations access side and it depends on how the different orgs are structured, but folks who run your scheduling teams, whether it’s the call center or the front desk, you’ve got to be plugged in with them.
In our case, we have a very strong medical group presence. The medical group is heavily involved in that. They’re the ones who are handling patient throughput, even new provider recruitment, because you think about the supply demand piece, you got to be involved there too. All the way down to registration, like what is the, you know, look across the [00:06:00] customer journey.
It’s not just the care continuum, it’s the pre and post piece. You’ve got to be plugged in across that entire continuum.
Jenny: Yep. Absolutely. I’m going to ask a question that may be controversial for some folks. What’s your thought about working from home when you’re needing to actually develop friendships?
Because I’ll tell you a lot of our clients, we work with systems across the country. A lot of them are still working from home. We have some folks that maybe they go in a day or two a week. I mean, how realistic is it to be able to really work from home primarily or exclusively and then also still be developing these relationships?
Jeremy: No, I’m with you. I’m not a purist. I think it’s a bit of both. I think in my experience, the average academic health system in our country is still fairly conservative. You’ve got a lot of people, whether it’s leadership or operational people, they’ve been in person. Forever. They never stopped being in person.
So I think we, you have to show up where they’re at. So, you know, for example, my team, most of my [00:07:00] team is largely hybrid. They’re not in person very often. Me personally, I’m on average in the office maybe four days per week because I want to be able to bump into those leaders in the hallway, the break room in the elevator.
But that’s just my style. I think you have to kind of, you know, have a pace and show up where people are at basically.
Jenny: I completely agree with you. I definitely think that’s really important to building that community where people are wanting to collaborate and work together. So if I were a listener were a marketer in a hospital system, and they’ve been really primarily focused on driving patient volumes, and they’re starting to see maybe they need to stop driving volumes because appointments are too far booked out, and they haven’t yet developed these relationships, and they don’t really understand what scheduling looks like.
Do you have a couple of tips or starting points for them with some activities that they could do to kind of start wrapping their arms around what their own situation [00:08:00] is within their system?
Jeremy: Sure. So I think if they don’t already get to know the people who produce the reports, like get into the data because they’re there.
I guarantee you, if you don’t have it already, there’s some people in your organization who have the data that would show you. They may look at things like next available or median lag, whatever the measure your system uses to quantify access. You need to understand that. That’s the first step. Once you get there, it’s really drilling into it because, you know, I mentioned earlier, it’s hot and cold, right?
I guarantee you, you still have some access. There are probably some service lines or individual services where you have decent access. It may not be the ones where you want them to be. They may not be super strategic, but you’ve got to know, like, what is the current state? Once you get that, then what is your planning cycle?
Whether it’s brand planning or service line planning. You probably want to focus your time, energy and resources on those areas where you have [00:09:00] a good shot at getting a patient in within a reasonable expectation. You probably want to double down in those areas. And I think conferences I’ve been to in recent months, I still hear people talking too much about casting a broad net.
I worry people are wasting their time. They’re wasting their money and their finite resources on promotion or campaigns or just efforts that don’t have a chance in heck of actually resulting in a booked appointment because there just isn’t access. I see too much of that.
Jenny: Yeah, I, that’s an excellent point.
I mean, one of our best practices as an agency is whenever we are running patient acquisition campaigns, there’s a multi multiple times a week, we’re talking about available appointments and what locations do we need to pause? What locations can we double down on budget? So if you as an organization either manage your own media or have a third party, definitely incorporating something basic like that as a starting point can make sure that your spend is allocated appropriately.
Jeremy: Because most people probably [00:10:00] don’t have bigger budgets now. So you want to make sure you’re being smarter with the money you have. And this is a really good way to do it.
Jenny: Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Jeremy, this has been so helpful. And I think really gives folks an alternative way to think about their role as marketers in the shifting landscape.
So thank you for your time today. I’ll be putting Jeremy’s LinkedIn link in the show notes. So if you want to connect with him and ask any follow up questions that will be available. Otherwise, thank you so much for tuning in today. Be sure to like, and subscribe, and we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.
Thanks, friends.
In this episode, Miranda Ochsner, Director of Paid Media at Hedy & Hopp, joins Jenny to discuss how to determine the optimal media mix for your organization. At H&H, we frequently work with clients across a wide range of budgets—from under $10,000 to over $1,000,000. Our recommendations for media channels vary depending on several factors, and Miranda breaks down the key considerations and decision-making processes involved.
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m super jazzed today to have our very own Miranda Oschner with us. She is the Director of Paid Media here at Hedy & Hopp. Welcome Miranda.
Miranda: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Jenny: Yeah, so I’m excited to have you on today because we have a really robust media capability here at Hedy & Hopp, and so that means we’re having conversations with organizations every day, every other day about what they’re perfect media mix looks like right.
And sometimes we talk with folks who have smaller budgets, say under ten thousand a month to spend and some of our clients have over a million dollars a month to spend. And so our recommendations vary wildly based off of the budget size, as well as [00:01:00] some other considerations. So. I first want to set a disclaimer that for anyone listening, this is not a roadmap of what your individual media plan should look like.
Right? Like, do not copy paste the things we’re talking about today. I just really wanted to talk about some different considerations and the decision matrix we use whenever we’re putting together different channels. So, Miranda, I would love it if you could start by just giving us an understanding of first, budget size, right?
If somebody has a smaller budget versus a super large budget, how does that change your approach to determining the media mix?
Miranda: Yeah. Great question. So I mean, budget’s really going to drive from a, you know, from a channel recommendation, you know what we’re pushing forward with, right? If it’s a 10K a month budget versus a million dollar, that’s gonna vary what that recommendation looks like.
You know, we’re not gonna wanna stretch $10,000 a month over five different channels and three different tactics in each one. ’cause you, you know, you really wanna invest in those channels that are gonna work best. But if you’re looking [00:02:00] at a million dollar a month spend. You’re going to be looking at a lot of different channels, but it’s also going to come down to what the, you know, what the core goals are, you know, is a goal awareness, or is it going to be a deep funnel conversion that we’re, you know, that we’re looking at?
And that’s really how, where we start to make those recommendations.
Jenny: That’s a great point. Let’s talk about let’s start with deep funnel. You know, really that patient or consumer acquisition tactics. I mean, one of the things that whenever I’m starting a conversation with folks and then I loop y’all in the next round to have those deeper, more robust conversations is talking about.
I call it like the media funnel, right? At the very bottom of the funnel is tactics where people are actively and proactively trying to find what you’re offering, whether it is a service line offering an insurance plan that they are in need of purchasing today, they are proactively finding it. So.
What are some of the things that you start with? Whenever we’re more that lower in the funnel where people are proactively researching solutions.
Miranda: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, before we make any kind of channel [00:03:00] recommendation, we’re always wanting to look at what that research is, whether it’s the patient side or the HCI side.
We really want to look at it from a media consumption standpoint, but then we’re also looking at it from a social listening standpoint, as well as, you know, doing our keyword research. Like, what are folks searching? Are there discrepancies between this county versus that county? And really, truly understanding the, you know, the differences between all of the different channels of where they’re really spending their time.
So we can pinpoint what keywords do we want to bid on, you know, put a little bit more behind when we bid or what’s an area we really probably should avoid from paid search that we’re not seeing. So, you know, seeing any attraction from so really understanding the nuances from the research standpoint are going to fuel that recommendation.
You know, if we’re deep funnel and they are actively looking. I mean, we’re always going to be looking at it from a paid search component. And again, budgets going to come down to how we split that up, whether it’s more branded focused words or more service line focused words and what kind of reach we’re looking at specific on the location.
Are we looking [00:04:00] at a 10 mile radius around a facility? Are we looking around a hundred miles? So it all really plays into that on what that, that core goal is, but also how, you know, how the patient and target audience is engaging with media and they’re trying to understand their steps, right.
But also maintaining their privacy at the same time.
Jenny: Yeah, great point. So I have conversations often with folks who have really relied primarily on digital and they’re wanting to kind of dip their toe into the more traditional like radio billboards, et cetera. Is there a general budget range or a tier where you start having the team start exploring more traditional tactics and channels to be able to add to the strategy or how do you make that consideration of when it’s time or appropriate to do that?
Miranda: Yeah, that’s a tricky question, Jenny. Traditional is very expensive as we know especially right now it’s, you know, it’s political season and we are seeing traditional costs I think they’re about 45 to 50 [00:05:00] percent higher than they normally are, which is just crazy. It’s crazy. You know, so when we’re looking at it from, does this make sense for the best use of our funds in this given moment, we have to take all of that into consideration.
You know, the Olympics push prices up a little bit and you know what, not in political, you know, got to keep all of those things, but also the seasonality, like holiday time, not a great time to be on TV because like there’s so much going on with the holiday. So really, truly understanding what the best weeks are, what the best quarters are to understand how to make that recommendation.
But also, you know, depending on the market you’re in, right? For example, Springfield, Missouri might be very different than Austin, Texas, or Atlanta. It’s really dependent on the geography size as well as what you can do from a budget standpoint. You know, since we’re in St. Louis, to use that as an example, out of home boards for one four week cycle can go anywhere from 4, 000 for a month to, you know, [00:06:00] 10 a month.
So it’s like, is that the best use of our funds? If we are trying to do a lower funnel conversion metric from a KPI standpoint, we probably shouldn’t invest 80,000 in billboards straight out the gate. Let’s really focus on what that core goal is and then build upon that.
Jenny: Absolutely. And an interesting thing that we’ve seen over like the five last five ish years or so is that kind of in between, right, with like connected TV and then digital radio, where you’re kind of tiptoeing into that traditional space, but it’s still managed digitally and some ways you have more flexibility with budget.
So how do you take that into consideration? Is that market based? Is that demographic based? How is that incorporated?
MIranda: You know, it’s all of the above. We really, you know, when you’re looking at it from a digital standpoint we still have the luxury of looking at it from a traditional viewpoint of, okay, we can understand what these kind of come back is from like a ratings.
And then we can compare it to, you know, what we’re looking at it from a traditional, but then we look at it from a CPM [00:07:00] standpoint versus how we’re looking at TV, which is a cost per point standpoint. So really trying to understand those nuances. You know, at the end of the day, if the goal is just mass awareness, we’re going to focus on in a very efficient CPM.
So that’s really how we want to buy any kind of digital component. So really understanding, you know, how we can buy those different platforms. Sometimes we can go direct to platforms, whether you know, it’s a Spotify or a Pandora or a Hulu. We can go to them direct, but we also have these capabilities to kind of buy inventory across all of them based on who the audience is.
And it’s not so much if you’re a female living in St. Louis or a female living in New York, it’s more of like, they’re a mom and we can tell by their use they’ve got two children who are actively in St. Louis with kids in sports or extracurriculars and really hone in on who they are without digging too much into that PHI really keeping that we have to stay HIPAA compliant, right?
So, there are ways that we’re working with these partners to [00:08:00] make sure we’re utilizing those tactics at an efficient cost while remaining compliant. And then we’re on the channels that they’re on and not where we think they’re at. Right? Like 10, 15, 20 years ago, it was like, we have to be on this station or on, you know, in this print publication or this billboard, because that’s where everyone drives by that.
And it’s like, that’s great. Now we can track all this stuff. And it’s more about where the person actually is, not where we think they are.
Jenny: Yeah, I love that. I think all of us healthcare marketers kind of collectively mourned the fact that retargeting is really taken away from us as a target and we’re still mourning it.
Right. But I think you bring up a great point that you still can do a lot of smart demographic and sociographic targeting within these platforms based off the data that they have. They have, so it’s not your data. It’s the data that they have, and even in platform retargeting is still allowed. So for example, if somebody interacts with your ad on Facebook, you can still retarget them on Facebook within face the Facebook ecosystem.
You’re not incorporating your own site or your own [00:09:00] data. So again, like a smart media team can create a platform, a strategy that doesn’t incorporate that. Right. In a compliant fashion.
Miranda: Yes, 100%. You have to be strategic. You know, there the digital space is changing every day. I think I just saw like two new updates on Google and I’m like, oh gosh, I mean, it’s just constantly changing.
So keeping, you know, keeping aligned with all of those changes in addition to making sure we’re staying compliant is a constant thing that this team is educating themselves on. Like, you know, there, there are really Minor things that, you know, larger agencies that aren’t healthcare focused are like, oh, that’s no big deal where we’re over here.
Like that’s a big deal.
Jenny: Exactly. Sometimes it’s like, oh my gosh, a big enough deal that we can’t use this partner anymore. Right. Totally shift because what they’re doing, you know, it could get our client into legal trouble. And so definitely having healthcare expertise and understanding all the privacy stuff is really important.
MIranda: Yeah. Yeah. It’s. It’s a constant shift in how you have to think and whatnot. And it’s at the same time, it also makes your [00:10:00] internal teams be a little bit more strategic and ask a little bit deeper questions and, you know, really focus on that persona building of what that patient looks like. So it makes, you know, it makes those internal conversations more strategic, but also having those conversations with your potential clients or your client of, hey, this is how we have to look at it.
Let’s think about how we approach this or this goal for this audience instead of just like, Everyone. So really, it really gives you an opportunity to be super strategic and putting that puzzle together.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Last question I have for you is when we’re thinking about again, like the decision maker matrix, and you were talking about this a little bit, but I’d love just a little bit more detail.
Like we have clients come to us and they say like, oh, all of our patients are rural. So we only want to do traditional, we don’t want to do digital at all, or all of our clients, all of our you know, patients for this service line are all over the age of 65. So we only want to do X tactic. So how do you push back with data and research to really make sure that we are reaching them where they are not where people assume [00:11:00] that they are?
MIranda: Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s a great question. Cause every audience is different. Different, right? Like at the end of the day, we have a lot in common, you know, but we also have a lot of differences and it’s, we’re not going to have the same journey. And it’s the same with, you know, the audience spaces of an 18 to 34 or 35 to 54 or 65 plus, there are so many different experiences between those different age groups and individual ages that it can’t just be a one size fits all model, you know, through research, it’s like, we’re looking okay.
You know, the 40 plus really vibes with Facebook really well. And then it’s like, oh, they kind of dabble in Instagram and they kind of dabble in TikTok. But really like, we know when we’re laying out our budgeting, we have to give a little bit extra certain audiences in that channel versus another. So as we’re laying out those strategies, we’re constantly looking at how our audiences are indexing with the different channels, and we’re looking at it from a heavy consumption tact, you know, a heavy consumption approach to very light, minimal to none. So really understanding [00:12:00] how and when they’re consuming media. Also, how many times are they reading the newspaper? We can get that, you know, we can get that granular through our research tools and through different platforms that really kind of fuel those conversations.
Like. We hear you, but let’s chat about what we found and see where we go from there. Just, you always have to have that research to back those conversations because if not, you’re just making assumptions and nobody wants assumptions.
Jenny: Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Miranda. This was really helpful and insightful.
And I hope for all of our listeners, if you’re in the middle of media planning, or if you’re really making considerations about perhaps shaking your world upside down and revisiting the way that you’re structured, give us a shout. We’d love to have a conversation with you. Happy to hop on a complimentary hour long call and just share some thoughts and insights around what we’re seeing working right now both in the provider and payer space, regardless of your budget size. You can shoot me an email jenny@hedyandhopp. And again, thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode, please like, and subscribe, and we will see you on a [00:13:00] future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Have a great day, friends.
In this podcast episode, we cover the essentials for dashboards. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the terminology, technologies, and the need to demonstrate ROI when developing your first dashboard for your healthcare organization, you’re not alone. Our goal is to set a baseline of understanding so that when you tackle yours, you’ll know what to look out for and the right questions to ask.
What We Cover:
Questions to Consider:
This episode is designed for those just starting to dip their toes into dashboards. Whether you’re working with an in-house team or an agency, these insights will help with the development of your dashboard.
Related Patient Privacy Podcast Episodes:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of we are marketing happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency and our goal is to bring the joy to your healthcare marketing work. I’m here today to chat a little bit about dashboards.
I’m going to call this episode Dashboards 101. Dashboarding and reporting can be extremely overwhelming to folks in the healthcare marketing space, especially for folks that come from more traditional think like communications or PR background. Whenever they’re beginning to try to show the ROI of the marketing campaigns for the first time, it can be very overwhelming.
There’s lots of different terminology that floats around. There’s lots of different platforms and technology that you can take into consideration when you’re moving into the dashboard or reporting space. And so I want to do just a little bit of a one on one episode today and kind of give you some things to think about, hopefully set a baseline of [00:01:00] understanding.
That way, whenever you go to tackle this project yourself within your organization, you’ll have a better understanding of what to look out for and the questions to ask. So let’s get started. I want to start super, super high level and talk just a little bit about terminology. We often see terminology like dashboards and reports kind of be thrown around interchangeably and I want to start out just by giving a little bit of a definition.
So a dashboard is usually if you think about like the dashboard on your car, it’s real time. It’s providing real time feedback and information about what’s happening, whether it’s how fast you’re going or how much gas you have left left in your tank.
It’s real information being fed to you in real time, whereas a report is really a snapshot in time. It could be generated from the dashboard or it could be manually created using other data sources. But usually that would be, let’s say right now it is August. Let’s say we’re putting together a [00:02:00] July campaign performance report that is a snapshot in time, looking exactly at those date ranges and really talking about performance, whereas the dashboard is more real time information.
And so, first of all, that’s high level, the difference between those two terminologies. As you’re starting to think about dashboarding and reporting first of all, don’t forget about patient privacy and all the different things you need to do to potentially clean up your data feeds and analytics tools.
We have lots of great episodes about that, so I’m not going to talk about that at all. We’ll link to some episodes in the show notes you can go listen to. But I do want to stress that everything we’re talking about today is absolutely possible to continue doing while keeping patient privacy, top of mind, so you can implement all the best practices, remove all the potential PHI or even just personally identifiable information from the data feeds.
And you still can get this level of granularity we’re going to talk about today. So let’s just assume that you’re moving forward with patient privacy handled. So if you’re going to start [00:03:00] building a dashboard for the first time, our organization always recommends when we go through with our clients, what we call a measurement plan.
So it sounds simple, right? Like, of course we know what we want to measure. It’s a campaign. We want to measure how many clicks we get. We want to measure how many form submissions or phone calls we get, but it actually can be a lot more complex than that because that may be the first instinct. About what you want to report on.
But if you take a step back and what we do with all of our clients is we say, okay, maybe that surface level information is what you want to know today. But think about at the end of the month, what do you have to report up to your leadership team? What would you love to be able to report to your board?
So it’s almost a wishlist of performance metrics of the information you would love to have at your fingertips to be able to showcase how well your campaigns or your work in the marketing space are doing. And so what we do is we go through when we first understand, you know, what are the business [00:04:00] objectives?
If there’s a strategic plan in place, we really like rolling up the measurement plan to that strategic plan. Just so again, everybody’s using the same vocabulary, same you know, foundation for how we’re talking about success, but then we get to the conversation and be breaking it down by service line or by product offering.
Do we need to break it down by location? How do you, how do you talk about success within your organization? How do you have to report back success? So really getting to that level of granularity of how we need to present the information. And then what actual metrics need to be included at that level of filtering and detail.
At that point, we go in and actually make sure the analytics tool we’re using is set up to measure those things. For example, a call tracking software, is it actually set up on all of the correct service line pages? That’s the call to action. Are there forms that should be tracked that aren’t? Are there other call to actions like downloading an informative PDF about your service lines that need to be reported [00:05:00] on?
Maybe that event isn’t set up yet. So you make sure that really the on site website tracking matches that measurement plan and what we’re trying to accomplish. Once that’s done, then we get to really the fun part where we’re talking about visualization. So when you think about visualization, often we’ll be talking to folks and I’ve had so many clients come to me and say, well, I bought Domo, but it didn’t work.
And I totally understand that frustration because if you look at the websites of these data visualization tools, it really looks like it’s plug and play and it’s going to be super easy. Right. But the interesting thing is that all data visualization tools are at the foundation level the same, right?
They’re going to visualize data in the way that you ask it to visualize data. So that measurement planning process where you’re getting organized and figuring out exactly how you’re going to tell that data story and how you’re going to visualize it has to be done within your organization before you can get to the pretty part about actually setting up those visuals.
So, we love Looker. as a [00:06:00] visualization tool. We actually have used Looker way before it was used by Google or owned by Google, but there are lots of other ones. We have folks that use Tableau, Domo. It really, the list just never ends of the different tools you can use. I really like Looker. If you’re just getting started with data visualization and dashboarding, because it’s free.
So you can spend your funds from a budgetary perspective on training your team, but how to use the tool or bringing in third party experts to be able to make sure everything is set up correctly versus paying just to access the tool itself. So that’s the data data visualization side. The other thing that I wanted to explain that I think folks kind of overlook or get confused about sometimes is how is the data coming into the visualization tool?
And really, there’s two different ways for this to happen. First is a straight data feed. Usually this is through an API. Most of the tools on the backend have a way for you to really just enter your login credentials, say to Google Analytics 4 or whatever, you know, analytics tools you’re using.
There’ll [00:07:00] be a variety that you’ll need to connect, whether it’s Google Ads, Meta, whatever. You enter that in and then the data feeds begin connecting and then you can make modifications about how it actually is visualized. The other way is a much more sophisticated option. So I don’t recommend starting here but it’s actually having a data lake and then doing backend calculations.
So you’re actually pulling the data together into one super large database. So then you can actually do data connections. And you can actually understand by IDs, different steps of the patient or the user journey and really connect it together. So you can get a bigger picture understanding about how that individual is engaging with your marketing on the front end or your organization on the back end, depending on if your analytics is really just focusing on the marketing side or your entire organization.
It’s much more sophisticated. So again, I wouldn’t recommend that you start here. If you’re just starting out and getting used to [00:08:00] showcasing formants of your campaigns, and you really just want to start showing ROI, I definitely would start with the easier version, but then once you are ready then you definitely would need to either have some pretty sophisticated talent within your internal team.
So this isn’t really just like a marketing person. This is more of a developer role to be able to set up that data lake. You can actually include some back end calculations, whether it’s ROI calculations, et cetera, to then be able to visualize the data in a super specific way for your needs.
Hopefully that was a really helpful overview. I could talk about this for hours and hours but I really wanted to create an episode that would be helpful for folks that are just starting to dip their toe in. So hopefully this gives you a framework if you’re going to begin moving forward with it. A couple of questions that you want to keep in mind if you are working with your in-house team to develop a dashboard for the first time, or perhaps you’re working with an agency that’s doing it [00:09:00] is acouple of questions.
First, what’s the timeliness or refresh rate of the data? You can make data, you can make dashboards real time. All of our dashboards that we do for our clients are real time so at any time whenever you log in it will be information up to that day. But others they update maybe every Sunday night for the week prior.
It just depends on how they’re building that dashboard. So always understanding what is the refresh rate or the timeliness of that data is super helpful. Understanding if it’s straight data feeds or if there’s any back end calculations, that’s super helpful. Understanding the data sources with all the dashboards that we create.
We actually on the first page, it’s kind of introduction to the dashboard. We list every single data source including like the property IDs. That way, if there’s ever a question about data matching or numbers not quite syncing up, we can understand exactly where the data came from and really be able to quickly understand any discrepancies.
And then the final thing I would say is if you’re building a [00:10:00] dashboard definitely do not skip that measurement plan and really challenge your team to make sure that every action you want to track within your marketing ecosystem is set up to be trackable so you can report upon it appropriately within the dashboard.
And really, if you haven’t yet start thinking about things like call tracking, form submissions through events and any other sort of interaction, whether it’s an online chat or whatever it is, make sure all of those interactions are captured in a way that’s measurable.
So you can really track out that patient or user journey on your website. So you can properly optimize it. So thank you so much for tuning in today to this episode of we are marketing happy to our dashboards. One on one. If you have any questions, reach out to me, I’d love to chat and answer any specific questions you have about maybe a dashboard or analytics project you’re tackling within your organization.
If you’re running into any roadblocks or any frustrations and we’re just like a second point of view, we would be [00:11:00] happy to chat with you. You can reach out to me at Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com. So until next week please like, and save this podcast so you can get our weekly updates, new episodes drop every Friday.
And we’ll see you next week on our next episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
We’re celebrating a significant milestone at Hedy & Hopp. We’re proud to announce that our Senior VP, Maggie Piasecki, has officially become a minority owner of our woman-owned healthcare marketing agency as of August 8! This milestone perfectly coincides with National Happiness Happens Day, highlighting the joy and impact Maggie has brought to our team.
Since Piasecki joined forces with our CEO, Jenny Bristow, three years ago, she has played an important role in our transition to work exclusively with healthcare organizations. With the announcement, we’re not only marking a key moment in our journey but also looking forward to a bright future together.
Read the full press release below to learn more about this exciting development at Hedy & Hopp. Book time with Jenny (Hedy & Hopp’s CEO) for additional questions.
Contact: Jenny Bristow – Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Aug. 8, 2024 (St. Louis, MO) – Hedy & Hopp, a woman-owned healthcare marketing agency, announces that Senior Vice President Maggie Piasecki has signed on as a minority owner of the company, effective August 8, 2024. This date holds special significance as it marks three years since Piasecki joined CEO Jenny Bristow to pivot the company’s focus entirely to healthcare and two years since the launch of the Hedy & Hopp brand.
“Maggie’s journey with Hedy & Hopp has been nothing short of transformative,” said Jenny Bristow, CEO and Owner of Hedy & Hopp. “Her leadership, passion, and dedication have been instrumental in our growth and success. Having her as a minority owner is a natural progression and a true reflection of her impact on our company. I couldn’t be happier to continue this journey with Maggie as an owner and partner.”
Maggie Piasecki, who has been with Hedy & Hopp since August 2021, has played an important role in the company’s evolution. Reflecting on this milestone, she shared, “Becoming a part-owner of Hedy & Hopp feels like the culmination of a journey that started many years ago. I’m deeply honored to solidify my commitment to the agency and continue shaping our future alongside Jenny and the impactful team we’ve built together.”
Piasecki’s history with Bristow dates back nearly two decades, working together at a healthcare recruiting company. Their professional paths separated but always seemed destined to intersect again. In 2021, when Bristow bought out her business partner and sought to rebuild her leadership team, Piasecki was the first call she made. Piasecki’s proven success in building agency teams and her experience in healthcare marketing, enabled Hedy & Hopp to successfully rebrand and restructure the agency in healthcare. As a result, the agency gained dozens of healthcare clients and expanded their capabilities to full-service. Together, Piasecki and Bristow have been a driving force behind Hedy & Hopp’s success, embodying the company’s core values of kindness, positivity, good intent, and owning the solve.
About Hedy & Hopp
Founded in 2015, Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. The company helps healthcare organizations tackle their biggest marketing challenges with full-service solutions that bring the results — and the joy. Hedy & Hopp is an SBA-Certified Woman-Owned Business and was named a 5-Star Workplace in 2023 by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. Bristow was also named a Top Women Business Owner in St. Louis by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. Learn more at HedyandHopp.com.
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In this episode, we dive into the digital patient journey, focusing on mapping success. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had numerous conversations with systems and providers across the country who are looking to rebuild their websites and make their digital front door easier to access. Many face budget or approval constraints, so we’re here to bridge that gap by focusing on interim action items such as content and technology adjustments.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to redo your website entirely. However, if a full redesign isn’t feasible right now, here are some steps to improve the patient journey in the meantime:
Activity:
Key Discussion Points:
While a new website might be the best move eventually, these steps can help enhance the patient journey and improve your digital front door experience even without a complete overhaul.
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And today we’re here to talk about the digital patient journey specifically about mapping success.
We have had a very large number of conversations in the last few weeks with systems and providers across the country who are wanting to redo their website. They’re wanting to make the digital front door easier for patients to access, make it easier for folks to be able to find them online but the problem is a lot of these folks do not have budget approval to move forward with a full website redo.
So what we’re doing is really coaching them and helping them kind of build a bridge. You don’t always need a complete website redo in order to improve the digital patient journey. There’s a lot of interim steps [00:01:00] that you can do revolving around technology implementation and content strategy that can really help you move that project forward and move patient access forward without necessarily having the budget or time to commit to a large website redo. Now I will be the first to say that sometimes it is time to redo your website, right? Sometimes your website is outdated. Sometimes it’s not mobile friendly.
Sometimes your information architecture is a disaster because it’s been just Frankensteined over the last how many years and you really need to clean it up. So this is not an episode saying don’t redo your website. This is really an episode saying friends, if you cannot redo your website until 2025 or beyond, then here are some things that you can do in the interim to help really improve that patient journey. So let’s get started. So first I have an assignment for you. While you’re sitting at your desk, whether it’s at a home office or actually in the office, take some time and write down your primary service lines. So perhaps you [00:02:00] have an organizational strategic plan where there are certain service lines that you’re really wanting to drive patient volumes or improve patient access.
Write those down. Then take your cell phone and only your cell phone. Go to your car in your driveway or your parking lot and try to find that try to find each service line individually, pretend you are a patient and you just walked out of an appointment with, let’s say, primary care provider and they said, you know, “Hey, you need to go follow up with a cardiologist. Here are some recommendations, but you also can go, you know, to somebody else that you find online.” Whatever it may be. And you’re on your cell phone trying to find it. Spend some time and actually understand what that experience looks like. Do not use your own brand name/ organizational name.
Instead, use your service line name. Again, let’s say it’s cardiology or dermatology or whatever it may be. Use near me phrases in Google. Like you’re actually searching and trying to find something or [00:03:00] a provider that you could book an appointment with really put yourself in that patient’s headspace about what they would be Googling to try to find a provider to book an appointment with and map your journey.
Figure out number one, do you show up on the first page? Are competitors showing up? above you. Do competitors have more reviews than you do, et cetera. Just take notes of the overall experience. And that is a really great starting point. Just understanding the landscape through the lens of a patient trying to find care.
So that’s the first assignment. And then you want to step back and we want to remember a couple of things, friends, right? First of all, 88 percent of appointments are still booked by phone. We want it to be online. We want that fancy find an appointment button to work, but right now still only 2.5 percent of appointments are booked that way.
So while as an organization, you may want to get to the point that you’re offering that solution. And I strongly recommend it if your [00:04:00] EHR you know, allows you to integrate that way. Absolutely. Let’s focus on doing that. But you don’t have to start there. We can still improve things for patients and 88 percent of those folks are going to prefer to call as of today anyway.
So the first tip that I’d give you as you’re kind of digesting all of the search results that you saw and where you may or may not have shown up is to really thinking about optimizing for micro-moments. Think about those search terms you typed in. Let’s say for example, it was, you’re focusing on dermatology.
Was it just dermatologists near me? Think more about symptoms or other search friendly terms. Terms maybe like, weird mole. How can I get a weird mole checked near me? Right? Like you need to dig into your search terms with your SEO team member on your team, or, you know, go and just explore using some tools like Semrush to really understand what people are searching for.
It isn’t [00:05:00] always going to be. The big picture service line or physician title terminology. For example, with cardiologists, we actually found that folks very rarely use the term cardiology. They searched for heart doctor, which really pained those cardiologists to hear that, but we have to show up where the user searching and where they are showing up.
So number one, optimize for micro moments. Number two, simplify the path, reduce the friction, right? So let’s say you were able to find your website and those search results while you’re sitting in your car and you were able to click through the service line page. How many clicks did it take you to actually get to where you could call to schedule an appointment?
Figure that out. And then figure out within your existing website ecosystem. How can you make that shorter? Is it something as simple as adding a call to action button? Call now to schedule an appointment or click here to schedule an appointment. If you can offer that sometimes as easy as kind of thinking about your content through the lens of creating shortcuts could be really beneficial.
Next, I’d really [00:06:00] recommend for you to go beyond your website. Right. If we’re trying to really improve patient volumes here, it doesn’t have to be your website. In fact a large percentage of folks will never even visit your website. They’ll either click on your Google Local Business listing or other online directories that are listing providers.
So make a note of while you’re doing those searches, what other websites showed up that were online directories that you can be listed in a lot of organizations like, and we do as well offer overall web visibility optimization services. So it’s not just your own website. It’s also making sure your organization and providers really are showing up where they need to on third party directories.
And then finally, I would say really think about mobile first if you’re on your cell phone and your car and it says call here to schedule an appointment, is functionality built into your website where you can actually click and it will call or do you have to like copy and then go to your phone to call and then call? These are really simple [00:07:00] dev tweaks on the backend that can really improve the ability for folks to leverage that information from their cell phone. So go through and make note of that. Are there simple things that we can do from a development and content perspective to be able to shorten that journey, make it easier on a mobile device, to be able to call the schedule and appointment things that you can do within your own ecosystem today that are not necessarily going to be the budget or timeline of an entire website redo. And then the last thing that I would share something to consider is spend a little bit of time doing a competitor deep dive. Again, we’re not necessarily looking at like what social media platforms are they on? What’s their content strategy? We are only thinking about digital patient journeys. How are folks able to find them online and schedule appointments for those same service lines? Because I guarantee if I am trying to find a dermatologist appointment and they have 300 plus five star reviews and your organization only has eight because you haven’t spent the time or energy on it, they’re going to get my phone call. And so really make note of that [00:08:00] within each service line, it may be a different lift that you need to do. Some may be more review oriented. Some may be more you know, content and just access oriented to show up in those search engine results. So make a list of kind of what you need to focus on per service lines.
You have a little bit of a direction versus trying to do the same level of energy across all of the different service lines. So hopefully this was helpful. Again, sometimes doing a completely new website is the right move. A lot of the folks we’ve chatted with recently haven’t redone their website since pre-COVID and there are a lot of improvements and changes that need to happen in which case, awesome. But if you are struggling to get organizational buy in, if you’re struggling to get the budget approved to move forward with that, do not think that you can’t improve your digital patient journey and front door experience.
So hopefully these tips helped. As always like and subscribe. Thank you so much for tuning in today and we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. [00:09:00] Cheers.
In today’s episode, Jenny welcomes iHealthSpot Director of Practice Marketing, Bill Riley, to share some very exciting news that will advance the offerings of our agency—Hedy & Hopp has acquired iHealthSpot. iHealthSpot is a healthcare marketing agency that specializes in helping local providers establish and grow their marketing footprint to increase brand awareness and drive patient engagement. At Hedy & Hopp, we work with more regional providers and payors, so this acquisition gives us the capabilities, processes, and technologies to serve smaller groups, expanding our impact to improve how patients find and access care through smarter marketing campaigns.
During the episode, Jenny and Bill discuss:
Connect with Bill:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Heddy & Hop. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And today we’re coming with a really big, exciting announcement.
This has been posted all over our socials. We want to do a podcast episode specifically on it because we’re just super jazzed about it. And with that my guest today is Bill Riley. Welcome Bill.
Bill: Thank you, Jenny. Great to be here.
Jenny: So the exciting announcement that we’re making today is that Hedy and Hopp has acquired another healthcare marketing agency. So that agency is iHealthspot and we are super excited about it. I’m having Bill on today to chat a little bit about his perspective of the acquisition. Bill ran iHealthSpot, and he’s joining Hedy [00:01:00] & Hoop to continue running the practice marketing business under the Hedy & Hopp umbrella.
So I wanted to start by kind of backing up a little bit. I’m talking a little bit about the three different ways an agency can grow. Cause I think it’s really important if you’re not in the agency space, you may not have the perspective of like, how does an agency grow besides you just landing new clients?
What does that look like? And really there are three different ways agencies can grow. The first one is new business sales, right? Like brand new organizations you’ve never worked with before coming in the door, wanting to work with you. And we have Hedy & Hopp has killed it with that this year. We have over 15 significant new clients coming on board this year.
Actually that’s a couple of months old. I think it’s higher than that now. But we’ve done a really good job with onboarding net new clients. The other way is organic growth and client retention. Hedy & Hopp is also excelling in this space. We have 88 percent client retention over the last four years since pivoting to healthcare [00:02:00] exclusively.
That is a very high percentage. Especially when you take into consideration that some folks just come to you for a one time project and they’re included in that calculation. So we are really proud of that 88 percent retention. The other way, the third way, and what we’re talking about today is growth through an agency acquisition.
This is something that has been really on our radar is something we wanted to tackle, maybe next year or a year down the road, but it was not something we were actively thinking about right now. However, an agency would do an acquisition of another agency if they’re trying to add a service line. Or a capability or add customers or revenue.
And for Hedy and Hopp, this acquisition really made sense on both sides. Bill and I actually met at the HCIC conference. He attended my session about HIPAA and immediately came up afterwards and said he loved hearing about the topic and we’ve, you know, stayed in contact ever since and that kind of is how that acquisition [00:03:00] came to us.
We were not out actively hunting to buy an agency. It really just organically came our way. At Hedy & Hopp our five areas of passion as far as the kinds of clients we love working with are regional providers, regional payers or health insurance companies, pediatrics, oncology, and reproductive health.
And Bill, I’d love for you to chat a little bit about iHealthSpots area of focus, because it really, if you take our regional providers bucket, it really is exciting how deep it’s going to allow us to go from a client base and area focus perspective.
Bill: Yeah, thanks, Jenny. I think it’s a beautiful fit between the two agencies.
Generally speaking, broadly speaking, Hedy & Hopp has, let’s say, fewer clients in the grand scheme of things, but these tend to be much, much larger organizations. Where as iHealthSpot is very much the [00:04:00] opposite. There will be several hundred clients that we will bring transition over to Hedy & Hopp.
Majority of these are very small, like, like single location practitioners or specialists or what have you. There are some, you know, multi location clients. We have some regional hospitals, but the vast majority are smaller ambulatory practices. We have a number of primary care, probably 15 percent of the base are primary care related clinicians.
The majority are specialties. Those that, if you think about. Don’t have direct line of sight to the patient or they don’t own the patient is not necessarily attributed to them. So these are organizations that really need to lean into marketing to accelerate their patient acquisition efforts. In many ways, you know, we’re healthcare [00:05:00] only just like Hedy & Hopp but in so many ways many of our tiny clients will behave from a marketing standpoint are behaving just like a local retailer in a town or in a neighborhood or whatever.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a really great point. And I think it’s the timing is just so interesting because over the last 18 months, we’ve had a large number of groups just like that come to us and want to work with us. But our people, processes and technology are really built to service larger organizations. So for example, our clients that come to us have media budgets of hundreds of thousands on the low end, up to like five to 10 million plus annual, right, because they’re statewide or multi state.
And so it’s really difficult to just take that and shrink it down for one location. So we were actively building a small practice marketing service, like a division when you approached us. So I’m really excited that we’re going to have the opportunity to both continue to service [00:06:00] those larger groups, and then also appropriately service the smaller ones, helping them really focus exclusively on patient acquisition and getting those new patients through the door.
Bill: Yeah, it’s a great point. And, you know, in many ways, The nuts and bolts, the blocking and tackling of digital marketing is often the easy part. What, where we do a lot of work, especially with a new client is around just education, you know, at a larger organization, a larger enterprise they will have some sense of a marketing organization or marketing team that is responsible for the branding and the presence and awareness of that institution.
When you’ve got a tiny orthopedic practice or dermatology practice, they don’t have the wherewithal to do that. So we’re you know, we’re often working with the physician owner themselves or the office manager and you know, just like any discipline, there’s a vocabulary and there are [00:07:00] acronyms and, you know, this is something that we learned from early on it’s very easy to talk past each other.
You know, if you start throwing around all these words about PPC and SEO and keywords or keywords with a long tail, you know, people get kind of frustrated and they don’t know, right. So part of the process, a huge distinction between a large enterprise and a tiny practice is just, first of all, helping folks to understand what all the digital channels are, assessing who they are and how they fit in their local neighborhood with patients, with other competition.
And then, you know, not just evolving a strategy, but just helping them to understand teaching along the way is a big thing that we try to do for the smaller clients.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s kind of interesting because I’ve had a few episodes about this, but the heart of [00:08:00] Hedy & Hopp truly is education also. Right, cause even at the larger size, they also need education, but it’s usually a different kind of education. Right. But like at the heart of it, if you’re truly a smart and joyful, I will say marketing agency, educating your client and bringing them along for the ride. As far as actually understanding what your strategy means and what you’re executing is such a big part of it for relationship building and helping them just be successful.
So awesome. Well, what I’d love to talk about then is our transition strategies. So, like you said, there are hundreds of my health spot clients. There are, I believe around 450 coming over, so quite a significant client base. And so what we’re planning to do is we’re actually going to continue. Bill is going to continue running our practice marketing business formerly known as iHealthSpot, keeping the health spot branding for now, but he’s going to continue running that business.
Most of the teams are coming over. So same faces, same processes, same technology, nothing is changing. Same thing with Hedy & Hopp. All of our clients [00:09:00] can continue having the same team members, same processes, same everything. And then over the coming months, we’re going to be looking at understanding how can we combine teams?
How can we begin offering some of those technologies that we offer larger groups to those smaller groups and vice versa? I personally was really passionate about building a business unit to be able to service smaller groups because I’m very passionate about improving patients’ access to care and the ability to find the care that they need.
And often that isn’t necessarily through large groups. Sometimes it is, like you said, like the orthopedic group on the corner. And so having the ability to service both appropriately has been really near and dear to my heart. So very excited about this.
Bill: Yeah, agreed. And just to Emphasize your point, I’d say our number one focus is making this transition for our clients as seamless and as simple and easy as possible. Jenny, like you mentioned, that the same staff that is delivering the [00:10:00] services. The same faces, the point of contact for our clients, the same help desk staff, all coming over along with all of the underlying infrastructure.
So, for clients that have websites with us or other marketing services, social media, paid ads, you know, listings, reputation management, what have you, all of that infrastructure is coming over as well. So we plan for as simple and seamless a transition as we can.
Jenny: I love it. I love it. And Bill I would love to hear just your perspective of company fit because I mean, I have my perspective, but I’d love to hear more about your thoughts as you’ve met the Hedy & Hopp team members and just learn more about, you know, our organization and the cultural fit between the two groups.
Bill: Yeah, no, this one to me is a pleasure to answer. You know, you can look at, you can look at things, opportunities like this from a few different dimensions, right? You can look at, of course, we’re in the same vertical industry, and then we look at [00:11:00] segments of clients, and there’s some overlap there, there’s some adjacency there, so that’s a great opportunity.
We can look at synergy between services, right? I’m excited because there are a number of services offered by Hedy & Hopp that we’ve not figured out or we don’t offer. And we’ve been asked for and I think the same is true with respect to eye health spots. So, okay, that’s interesting.
But to me at the end of the day, it’s about the people, right? The product here from our combined teams. You know, the product is the people and the people delivering the services, the people being the point of contact for the customer, being the advocate for the customer.
That’s really in my view, what makes or breaks a successful client and client relationship. So, easily what I’m most excited about is what I see is wonderful alignment and just cultural fit between our team [00:12:00] at iHealthSpot coming over and joining Jenny, you know, yourself and the rest of the team at Hedy & Hopp.
It’s wonderful. Everything I’ve seen is focus on teamwork. It’s a focus on being positive. Of course, there might be challenges or issues that come up. Of course there are. But you know what? We’re going to roll up our sleeves. We’re going to work together. We’re going to help each other out.
We’re going to celebrate the success and then we’re going to go on to the next one. That’s something we’re very passionate about and I see if not the same, perhaps even more from Hedy & Hopp. You know, we had other, I will say, there were other avenues that iHealthSpot was considering, and Hedy & Hopp was by far the best fit, and I would say the cultural alignment is the highest priority in my mind.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Bill, welcome to Hedy & Hopp. We are so excited to have you in the entire iHealthSpot team members as [00:13:00] well as clients on board and really look forward to just a super exciting future together.
Bill: Thank you, Jenny. Let the adventure begin. Thank you.
Jenny: And for all of our listeners, if you have questions about our expanded capabilities, or if you’re a smaller group, who’s been wanting to work with Hedy & Hopp, but perhaps didn’t know if your budget would be a match now’s the time to reach out. Give me a call or an email at jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com and we would love to chat with you, but thank you again for tuning in, please give this podcast rating, give us a review of subscribe and let us know if there’s any topics you’d like for us to cover in the future until next time.
Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll talk to you soon.
Today, we’re sharing some fantastic news. As part of our ongoing commitment to improving patient access to care by improving how patients find and access care through smarter marketing campaigns, Hedy & Hopp has acquired iHealthSpot.
iHealthSpot is a healthcare marketing agency that specializes in helping local providers establish and grow their marketing footprint to increase brand awareness and drive patient engagement. They offer a wide range of digital marketing services to smaller medical practices, including website design, development, hosting, SEO, digital ads, social media, and online review management.
“Since shifting our focus to 100% healthcare four years ago, we have focused primarily on larger regional providers and payors,” says Hedy & Hopp CEO and Founder Jenny Bristow. “We recently began a business unit to help smaller healthcare groups grow, and this acquisition fast-tracks that focus and expands our footprint and capabilities.”
Read the press release below to learn more about the acquisition or book time with Jenny (Hedy & Hopp’s CEO) for additional questions.
Move Boosts Practice Marketing Client Base, Services
Contact: Jenny Bristow – Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Aug. 1, 2024 (St. Louis, MO) – Healthcare marketing agency Hedy & Hopp has acquired healthcare digital marketing agency iHealthSpot from parent company, Aledade. The deal, which boosts Hedy & Hopp’s growing Practice Marketing business, closed Aug. 1, 2024. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition positions Hedy & Hopp for immediate and future growth with smaller medical practices, adding 450 clients to its roster. Those practices include independent physicians, specialists, physician groups, nurse practitioners and Federally Qualified Health Centers.
“Since shifting our focus to 100% healthcare four years ago, we have focused primarily on larger regional providers and payors,” says Hedy & Hopp CEO and Founder Jenny Bristow. “We recently began a business unit to help smaller healthcare groups grow, and this acquisition fast-tracks that focus and expands our footprint and capabilities.”
Hedy & Hopp will offer a wide range of digital marketing services to smaller medical practices, including website design, development, hosting, SEO, digital ads, social media, and online review management.
“Smaller healthcare providers typically do not have in-house marketing talent. When they are ready to grow and drive new patients to their practice, hiring a marketing agency that specializes in this work helps them grow their patient base at an affordable and predictable pace,” Bristow says. “iHealthSpot’s processes and technologies offer smaller practices patient acquisition marketing services at a budget they can afford.”
Founded in 2015, Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. The company helps healthcare organizations tackle their biggest marketing challenges with full-service solutions that bring the results — and the joy. Hedy & Hopp is an SBA-Certified Woman-Owned Business and was named a 5-Star Workplace in 2023 by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. Bristow was also named a Top Women Business Owner in St. Louis by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. Learn more at HedyandHopp.com.
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An interesting trend we see at H&H is the pendulum swing between candidate recruiting marketing and patient acquisition. Right now, we are seeing candidate recruiting marketing gain momentum as organizations shift their focus slightly from patient acquisition to recruitment. In this week’s episode, we plan to guide you through the key aspects of developing a successful recruiting marketing strategy.
In a previous podcast episode, we discussed the foundations of recruiting marketing, emphasizing the importance of the internal marketing team partnering with HR to understand marketing and positioning goals. Today, we tackle specific questions and provide advice to help you succeed.
Questions Answered:
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Give the previous podcast mentioned a listen if you haven’t already!
Unpacking Candidate Recruiting Marketing
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very passionate about helping patients access care by leveraging our talents to make it easier for them to find and book that care online. So we work with providers, payers across the country and are very passionate about that work.
A recurring trend that I’ve seen over just the last few weeks, I’ve had more and more conversations with folks that are necessarily shifting their attention from patient acquisition, but they’re definitely adding attention to recruiting marketing, and this is an interesting pendulum swing that we’ve seen happen quite often over my career in healthcare marketing. I actually started my career 20 years ago in healthcare recruiting. So that is near and dear [00:01:00] to my heart. And most of the work we do is focused around patient acquisition, but it feels as though the pendulum swings as far as internal focus on patient acquisition, and then you’ll see it shift over and more budget will be going over to candidate recruiting marketing. So that’s what I want to chat about today. There’s a prior episode, I’ll link to it in the show notes, where we talk about the foundations of recruiting marketing.
So I’m going to link to that 101 or a primer, but a couple of best practices and things to think about is, basically, what we’re talking about is your marketing and communications team within your organization partnering with HR and viewing HR really as another service line that you’re working with.
So helping them really understand their messaging, their positioning, their channels and tactics about how they’re going to go to market and accomplish their goals. They’re not doing patient acquisition work, but they do have specific metrics they need to hit as far as filling open [00:02:00] positions so we very often see within larger organizations Marketing and HR partnering to be able to make that a better applicant experience. So listen to that first podcast.
If you haven’t already, it’s a great one on one. Today what I’m going to do is just answer some really specific questions and kind of have it be a Q&A, because I’ve had a couple of specific questions.
I’ve seen rise to the top or a couple of assumptions that folks have been making about candidates recruiting marketing that I’d love to chat about. The first is, do we need a recruiting or career section of our website? Can’t we just link out to the third party job board that we have acquired or begun using?
The answer is yes, you absolutely need a section of your site. Some organizations go as far as creating a microsite or a subdomain where it’s really the entire ecosystem of that digital property, but this is your opportunity to really tell the story. Why should people want to work at your [00:03:00] organization?
Definitely having things like testimonials from current employees, really talking about the benefits, talking about the differentiators. We talked a little bit in the previous episode I’m linking to about understanding the competition. So, for example, if you’re actively trying to recruit RNs, really understanding what benefits do you offer that are different from the guy up the street or the gal up the street that’s an employer and making sure that you communicate those really clearly.
So, number one, do you have to have a section of your site dedicated to recruiting? The answer is absolutely yes. If you want to have a successful campaign rollout, you absolutely need to have a home base on your own digital ecosystem or property. I definitely recommend creating a content strategy around it.
So having it be, you know, just like if you were promoting a service line, what would you know, how would you build out that content strategy? What’s the call to action going to be? How are you going to highlight specific departments or functions that you’re trying to recruit [00:04:00] heavily for, and then build the content using those organizational priorities.
The next question or kind of uncertainty that I see a lot in conversations is marketing teams often feel like HR owns the job descriptions. And the job promotions and in the most successful rollouts that we have seen and that we’ve worked with. That is not the case. HR and marketing needs to work collaboratively.
So think about that content strategy, the benefits, all the promotional language that you used within that new microsite or landing page that you designed. All of that needed to be reflective in your job description. So, again, just like if you’re doing a patient acquisition campaign, you can’t necessarily guide a person’s journey.
You can’t guarantee they go to that landing page before they apply or see the job description. So you definitely want to make sure that the language tone, the overall vibe of what you’re putting out in the market matches throughout that candidate experience. [00:05:00]
The next thing that I want to share, nobody’s has asked me about this recently, but this is just a great tip. Apply yourself. So again, many times HR has picked an applicant tracking system because of the ease of the back end. Of qualifying candidates, organizing candidates et cetera. But often they have not had the bandwidth time, et cetera, to actually apply themselves to a position and see how many clicks it takes.
With one of our recruiting campaigns, we actually applied for that position ourselves, and we reported back to the client that it actually took over five minutes to get through the first couple of qualification screens. It was a terrible experience. It was really bad on mobile because of the way that the pages loaded.
So understanding most people will be applying on a mobile device, testing that out, seeing what you can do. Most applicant tracking systems actually allow you to really modify that application process. So for [00:06:00] example, a common thing that we love to do, if it’s possible, is to have them select what position they’re interested in and enter their name and cell phone number, and then go to the next screen, but you’ve captured that information so if they do not finish the application, you can then text them to encourage them to finish the application.
So little things like that, again, going back, put your patient acquisition marketing hat on, right? Like, what are we going to do to fill the funnel and then work people through the funnel? Exact same thing here for candidate marketing.
Another thing that we have done quite a bit. And this again, you have to really make sure that you are working closely with HR in a really positive way because this step can get a little tricky. But you need to measure the time it takes for your HR and recruiting teams to actually follow up with a candidate once they have submitted an application.
These people have a lot of options. There’s not a high unemployment rate in nursing. We all know this, right? Like getting candidates through the door is really hard work. So if they’re [00:07:00] taking four days before they respond, you’re likely not going to have a positive recruiting experience or have a lot of success bringing folks through the door.
Okay. So I always recommend and what we do with candidate marketing campaigns that we work with clients is we actually kind of secret shop it and be submitted ourselves. And then with a blinded email and then we wait and see how long it takes for somebody to reach out to us and then we report that back to our client.
And then you can have a really positive conversation with HR and say hey let’s set a couple of things. Number one let’s set some expectations, how long should it take? What is your goal of followup? And then number two, what are some automations that we can put in place? If your team is so short staffed that it will take four days, what are some automations you can do as far as drip email content, telling them that their application is being reviewed, that we’re excited to talk with you, right?
Like, again, if you can’t get a patient on the phone right away to schedule an appointment. Same thing, you’re going to try to nurture them, right? Let’s do the same thing with candidates and see what we can do [00:08:00] to shorten that window. And then if there’s only a certain point to which it can be shortened, then figure out what automations you can put in place.
Okay, let’s talk about channels. This is the last little thing I want to touch on. I’ve seen lots of folks ask me recently about using LinkedIn for recruiting. Folks, nurses are not on LinkedIn. They are not on LinkedIn. The marketing people you want to hire for your marketing team, Are on LinkedIn. With actual clinical folks very few of them are on LinkedIn unless they are entrepreneurial and they’re starting a business. You will not find them there. So it’s not to say that LinkedIn shouldn’t be part of your content promotion strategy, but it’s sure certainly should not be the primary. You really think about where those people for those roles you’re trying to fill, spend their time.
Often you’ll see campaigns, a foundation may be in Meta. So thinking about Facebook and Instagram, those are great channels. There can be [00:09:00] some programmatic spend in there targeting people based off of interest or profession. Google search for people that are proactively trying to find it and then also job specific promotion to be able to increase the visibility of somebody’s out there searching.
There’s a lot of different things that can go into a promotion strategy. But I’ve had a couple of organizations reach out to me and say, “Hey, we want you to create a LinkedIn specific content LinkedIn specific candidate recruiting Program for us. Oh, and we’re trying to hire nurses.” I have to tell them “no, you don’t want to do that. Cost per lead will be very high and visibility will be very low.” So even though Linkedin feels like it’s super relevant for job searchers, that’s because we’re on the business side of the house. We’re not in the clinical side of the house. So just kind of remember that differentiator.
And as you’re thinking about a promotion and outreach strategy, really think more like where the people that we are trying to recruit spending their time and then develop channel specific [00:10:00] strategies in order to reach them. So hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully it gave you some things to think about.
Again, I strongly recommend you listen to the first episode in this series to be able to get a foundation and then hopefully today gave you a little bit of additional things to think about as you are perhaps revisiting a candidate recruiting strategy that you already have in market and looking to optimize or fine tune it. Or you’re thinking about building one for the first time.
So thanks so much for tuning in today. Please give us a rating, give us a follow, share this episode with anybody in your organization that you think would find it relevant. And as always, feel free to reach out. I would love to chat with you.
If this is something you are working on within your organization and you want to bounce any ideas off of us. My email is jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Have a fabulous rest of your week. We’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
If you a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is beginning the process of tackling a website rebuild, this episode is for you! Jenny shares five essential steps to focus on before you dig into the desired design of the website:
After these steps, you can move on to wireframing and designing, either with your internal team or a third-party vendor.
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I am also the CEO at Hedy and hHopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to bring you this content every Friday. Today’s episode is not necessarily for all of our listeners.
If you have redone a website recently, you might not need to tune in today, but if you are a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is in the process or talking about tackling a website redo, and you haven’t done one in quite some time, and you’re not quite sure where to start, this is a great episode for you.
Today, what we’re going to talk about is the five things you need to do when you’re starting to think about and are beginning to dig into a website redesign project before you even start thinking about what the website is going to look like, we’re going to start much [00:01:00] more upstream and focus much more heavily on the strategic part of your website redesign project.
So let’s dig in again. We have five core things we want to talk about. The first one is spend time centering on your why, why does your website exist? The two core questions you want to answer is who are the audiences and what are the call to actions or what are the things that you want them to do on your website?
Typically, most folks in healthcare are going to have multiple audiences. You want to identify who is your primary audience, your secondary, and then sometimes you’ll have a tertiary. A good example of this is if you are a hospital system, your first, most important audience is going to, of course, be your patients.
Second audience might be HR or careers from a staffing perspective, trying to make sure that you’re really talking about the benefits of working at your organization. And the third might be foundation or fundraising. It’s up to you and your own [00:02:00] organizational objectives to identify these audiences, and then identify what you want them to do.
So for example, for patients, perhaps the primary call to action is to book an appointment. And don’t think about technology yet and how you want them to do that. We’ll get to that in a later step, but you really want to think about for your primary audience, what are the core things you want them to do? And then make sure you document it.
Next we’re going to actually start getting tech savvy. Now we’re going to start thinking about technology. So now that you have your audiences and the core call to actions identified, how can technology help? You first really want to outline what are the current technologies that we’re leveraging that we want to keep either from a functionality or maybe it’s a particular vendor that you really like working with. The technologies work well so far.
Make sure and document that, but then brainstorm and say, you know, maybe we want to move to the point where patients can actually schedule appointments online, or if you’re a payer, perhaps you want to get to the point where they actually can compare plans or [00:03:00] perhaps request a quote or do the first step of signing up for a plan on the website.
Don’t let technology necessarily hamper your brainstorming here, really think about the bigger picture. And then you’re going to go and try to find technology solutions, either within your current technology ecosystem, or perhaps a partner that you want to bring in. But you definitely want to start with the big blue sky.
What do we want to accomplish? And then you can figure out the technicalities as the second step. Within this part of the process, once you’ve done that, we understand who we’re talking to, what we want them to do and what technologies are going to be required. Then we actually want to design the site architecture.
And this is a really fun step because it allows you to, again, completely reimagine things from the ground up. Maybe your current website was built 10 years ago, and maybe you’ve had acquisitions or added service lines or whatever, and it’s kind of been mish-mashed and just added on to since then.
This is an opportunity to rip off the band aid and really, [00:04:00] again, blue sky it. I strongly encourage you if you have additional micro sites or domains that live outside of your primary, this is a great time to consider if you want to consolidate. It’s really great from a user experience and domain credibility perspective to do that. May not always make sense for your brand, but now is the time to talk about it.
I also would recommend making sure that you look at your current analytics and understand what content are folks using on the site, what content is ranking well for SEO, what content is not being utilized. At all. And is that because of a lack of visibility or because perhaps it’s not relevant anymore?
And then also identify content gaps. What should we be providing perhaps at the service line level or the plan level? That’s information we’re not really offering right now that we think may result in a better, stronger user experience. So do that and spend the time mapping it out. This is a great activity to do on a whiteboard with sticky notes and really [00:05:00] understand how you want the user flow to layer in.
And then the next step is actually layering SEO strategy on top of it. So now that we have the site architecture structured out, we understand. You know, how the content is going to flow, what the main navigation and secondary navigation is going to look like. Now we’re going to layer SEO on top of that and make sure that from a technical perspective, we’re keeping in mind those technical requirements that will make sure our website is really easy for search engines to index make sure that the content flows in an anticipated way and that we’re going to rank well.
It’s important here ranking well, again, not only for a traditional search engine, but we just did an episode on generative AI and viewing that as an alternative version of a search engine for your users. So again, thinking about it through both of those lenses, as you’re kind of reviewing that site architecture for a second time.
And then the final step is developing a measurement plan. So we’ve talked so much about patient privacy here at Hedy [00:06:00] and Hopp, and you know, our perspective, even with you know, that little bit of a I don’t want to say pause, but potential reconsideration of the OCR bulletin because of the American Hospital Association court case, we still strongly recommend you move forward at this moment in time with a patient privacy forward analytic solution.
And redoing a website is a perfect time to do that because you’re removing all historic tags, all tracking that may be living on the site that maybe you forgot about. So spend time now figuring out what analytics solution are you going to use? What events need to be tracked and measured? How are we going to do reporting or dashboarding? And what technology do we have, or do we need to make that work?
You’ll see, as you’re start laying these things out, that the measurement plan rolls directly up to those call to actions that you identified in the first step. So all five of these pieces really layer upon each other to help lay out the roadmap [00:07:00] and the strategy for your website.
Once you’re done with these five steps, then you can begin moving on to wireframing design, start thinking about the imagery and your way that you’re going to represent your brand visually on your website. But you shouldn’t be doing any of that until these five steps are completed.
These five steps are steps that can be completed by your internal marketing team, or it’s a great process to have a third party vendor come in and be able to partner with you to walk you through the steps. But either one works well. I would only recommend doing it in house if you have a person in house that is tech savvy enough and has done a process like this recently enough that they can really speak in to the opportunities from a technology perspective.
Because the last thing you want to do is go through this process and then rebuild the website and realize, oh, there are these really cool technologies or integrations that were available, but our leader the person that led this project perhaps [00:08:00] didn’t know they existed because they hadn’t gone through this process recently enough.
So even if you just bring in an outside consultant to speak into it, I strongly recommend getting a second set of eyes to be able to help guide you and make sure you’re thinking big enough, because a lot of these technologies and integrations. aren’t necessarily budget breakers anymore. A lot of them can be done pretty cost effectively, or just, you know, are an easy thing to integrate if you’re thinking about it strategically upstream enough before you start actually building the website itself.
So again, hopefully this was a helpful episode. If you’re in the process of thinking about doing a website, redo for your organization, or if you’re in the beginning phases, strongly recommend you walk through these five steps. And as always, I would be happy to give you any advice or feedback or thoughts if you’re in this process and stumbling over steps, or would just like some guidance, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. As always, [00:09:00] please give us a like, and a follow share this episode with other members of your team. If you’re in the middle of this process, it can give you some joint shared vocabulary and processes to be able to collaborate on versus having to educate them from the ground up yourself.
As always, have a fabulous day. Thanks for tuning in for this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!
When you hear “reputation management,” what comes to mind? For some, it’s online review management, which is indeed a vital component. However, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. In today’s episode, Jenny dives into the second crucial piece: shaping the online narrative about your organization. This is often intertwined with PR as it dictates how people perceive your organization. To effectively manage this narrative, follow these steps:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host today, as well as the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hop. Hedy and Hop is a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are proud to be the creators and sponsors of this podcast.
Today, I’m excited to chat a little bit about reputation management for a healthcare organization. I’ve had a couple of conversations with folks over the last few weeks around reputation management, and in general, it really falls into two specific camps. So we’re going to talk briefly about one, but then really focus and hone in on the second.
So, the first area for reputation management is really driving online reviews to be able to differentiate yourself and show yourself as a five star healthcare organization online in the online review sites. We’re not going to talk about that [00:01:00] today, but there are some great organizations like Press Ganey and Reputation and Raider 8 that offer those services.
You can integrate them into your online technology stack and they can automate the texting or emailing of links to your patients post appointment to ensure that you’re getting as many online reviews as possible. Whether it’s for a specific service line or business line, or for your entire organization, great platforms, really great service.
What I want to talk about today instead is the second type of reputation management, and that’s really owning the online story that people are saying about your organization. This can kind of be intertwined a little bit with traditional PR of, you know, how are people talking about your organization?
How are people framing up those conversations? Is it good? Is it bad? And there are some things you can do to help try to control that narrative. So let’s talk about it. So the first thing you’re going to want to do, [00:02:00] if you’re going to tackle reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization is to do a survey to be able to baseline perceptions.
This could be perhaps a survey of current patients or customers. It could be of current team members or it could be of your communities. There’s lots of different surveying tools. So you’ll have to decide what audience you want to survey, but really understanding the baseline of your organization’s perception will help make sure that you understand if your work is impactful or not.
So that’s the first step for the next step. You’re going to want to actually develop the strategy, and I’m going to break this down into four specific steps. The first is understanding your core messages. So before you go out and actually do any sort of reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization, you have to know what you’re talking about.
Are there specific service lines or business units that you’re going to be focusing specifically on? And if so, what’s the messaging behind and around that? Are you talking about [00:03:00] quality? Are you talking about outcomes? Really understanding and creating messaging guidelines around your campaign will be really helpful to make sure you’re consistent in the kinds of content you’re bringing out into your campaign and that you’re really reinforcing those core messages that you’re wanting people to hear in your community.
Next is understanding who the personality is going to be. When you’re thinking about content marketing through the lens of controlling your organization’s reputation, there’s got to be a face. There has to be a face. So, for example, with We Are Marketing Happy, I’m the face, right? Jenny Bristow. For your organization, it doesn’t have to be one person.
For example, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, we did a really big reputation management focused content program for them for quite a few years called Mom Docs, and they had a couple dozen physicians that were excited to build their own personal brands, and they participated in this content series and it really reduced the level of effort from each participant, [00:04:00] and it allowed St. Louis Children’s Hospital to really diversify. So they weren’t putting all of their eggs in one basket in case that individual left the organization or whatnot. So you have to decide as part of your strategy, who’s the face or how many people do we want to be the face and what are those guidelines? Do we need to make sure that they are big advocates of our brand? Do we need to make sure that they have a specific tone that they speak in, that they’re representing our brands in an appropriate way, whatever that is, as you’re developing the guidelines for personality, make sure that you define that clearly so you follow it throughout the life of the program.
Next, you have to figure out what channels you’re going to use to be able to distribute this content. I always recommend having some sort of a hub. Having a hub for the content allows you to really control where it lives. And then you can modify the other channels from a distribution strategy perspective based off of the ever changing social media and digital ecosystem needs.
So for [00:05:00] example going back to the St. Louis Children’s Hospital example, whenever we first launched, Facebook Live was a really big thing, right? But now it, I don’t even know if it exists anymore, but it certainly isn’t as popular as it was back then. Same thing for our own podcast. We Are, Marketing Happy.
You know, we have a Spotify hub. We’re It links out to all of the other podcasting channels, but then we promote it on LinkedIn and Meta an a variety of other channels. But our hub serves as a place where the content continues to live regardless of what other social media trends may be happening at that time.
So deciding about that and deciding if you’re gonna build it, leverage an existing platform that’s on the market or whatnot is definitely an important step. Next is understanding your promotion strategy and figuring out, you know, if you’re going to be promoting this and your goal is reputation management and storytelling, what audience do you need to hear it?
A big thing that we talk about with folks is, you know, your board may be thinking you’re not showing up in the right place, but is your board the right demographics of people that will actually be using your [00:06:00] service? It may be massively different. And if so, you have to explain to them, “Hey, you may not see our ads on Instagram because Sally, you’re not really our target demographic for our patients. We’re actually targeting people in their twenties and thirties for this specific service line. And you’re in your middle fifties.” So helping them understand that if you need to is important, but make sure that you’re actually building a promotion strategy based off of the people whose perception you’re trying to shift is massively important.
Another thing that you want to think about is for promotion is if you want to actually incorporate some traditional PR strategies. So when we think about content promotion through the lens of reputation management, really think about digital owned media content that you’re pushing out to be in the right place at the right time to hit the right person, but you also could go through the lens of traditional PR where you’re having an organization pitch your stories to show up in national or regional news outlets, and that can be a really beneficial way to build your reputation.
At that point, your strategy is done. Let’s start [00:07:00] launching. So launching and optimizing. I always recommend that you have a minimum amount of time that you kind of promise you’ll be creating that content for. Usually a year is the minimum I’d recommend any campaign go. Maybe you could do six months if it’s really narrow and focused, but you need quite a bit of time to be able to see if it’s actually working to shift the perception of your organization before you throw in the towel.
A month, two months isn’t going to do much. It has to be an ongoing effort, and at that point, you’re ready to resurvey. So let’s say you gave yourself six months as initial run, use the exact same survey methodology used originally and see if there’s a change in perception again, whether it’s organization wide service line availability, quality, whatever it may be resurvey and see if there was a lift.
If not, change your strategy. If there was, keep doing what you’re doing and double down on it. Congratulations. You have a successful strategy. This is a program or a general framework that really can be applied as large as an organization or as small as a [00:08:00] specific service line. So if you have a situation where maybe a service line isn’t super well known, maybe that’s not a reputation problem and it’s awareness problem, the same framework can really serve well to drive awareness.
So hopefully today was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@headyandhop.com. I love to chat with you more about this or any of your burning marketing questions. Do me a favor and please rate and share this episode.
We are so thankful for how popular this podcast has become and how well listened to it is. So if you could please rate it, share it, we would absolutely appreciate it. Until next week, thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.