On this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” our CEO & Founder, Jenny Bristow, speaks on a topic that’s been brought to light on a lot of our calls with clients and prospects recently – competitive insights. With the new fiscal year creeping around the corner for many, it’s crunch time to deep dive into competitive intelligence. We’re talking about more than just keeping pace; understanding your competitors’ approach to marketing helps you fine-tune yours. Tune in for actionable insights on how to tackle this item on your to-do list!
Highlights from Today’s Episode:
[00:45] – The Critical Need for Competitive Insights – We discuss why understanding the market through competitive insights is not just beneficial but essential for healthcare organizations looking to fine-tune their strategies effectively.
[02:00] – Choosing Your Competitors Wisely – Jenny guides us through the strategic process of selecting competitors for analysis, emphasizing the importance of including local and leading digital-first players to ensure a well-rounded perspective.
[03:15] – Decoding Competitors’ Marketing Tactics – Explore the various tools and methodologies to analyze the marketing efforts of your competitors, from ad placements to content strategies, using platforms like Wappalyzer and SEMrush.
[05:00] – Understanding Digital Priorities – Learn how to dissect and understand the digital focus areas of your competitors, which can reveal a lot about their strategic priorities and budget allocations.
[06:30] – Navigating Access to Care and User Experience – Jenny sheds light on evaluating competitors’ tools and user experiences, emphasizing how these components can significantly impact patient access and care journey.
[07:45] – Unpacking the Marketing Tech Stack – Discover the importance of understanding the technological tools and platforms your competitors are using, which can offer insights into their marketing prowess and capabilities.
[09:00] – Assessing Reputation Management and Industry Promotion – We conclude with a look at the value of understanding how competitors manage their reputations and promote themselves within the industry, which can provide clues to their focus areas and strategic initiatives.
Links & Resources
Tools for competitive analysis mentioned: Wappalyzer, SEMrush, BuiltWith
Learn More about Hedy & Hopp’s Competitive Intel Program
Book Time With Jenny
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with providers and payers all across the country to help improve patient’s access to care.
Today, we are going to talk about a topic that we have received multiple calls about over the last few weeks. Some people are just starting to begin thinking about this. Others are wondering what’s even possible. We’re going to be talking about competitive insights. So, this is one of those marketing projects and processes, depending on where you are in your organizational sophistication, that sometimes is put on the back burner for a year or more.
The best organizations are doing competitive insight regularly, whether that’s a monthly cadence, quarterly cadence, whatever. It’s important to understand what’s happening in the market so you can [00:01:00] pivot your marketing correctly, whether it’s tactics, messaging, budget, et cetera. But a lot of organizations that are reaching out to us right now have not really prioritized on this since COVID.
And I get it. Like a lot of stuff has happened since then, friends. And a lot of these marketing teams are just now kind of realigning and getting back to, a comfortable place so they can start thinking about growth. But, a lot of people are asking about this because they’re going into the new fiscal planning.
A lot of folks have a new fiscal starting July 1st. Many people are having to start turning in budgets. And a lot of people are really saying, you know, “Maybe we want to do some competitive insights before the new fiscal to help guide that, or maybe just incorporate it into our new fiscal as a thing that we begin doing on a regular cadence.”
And so, today I wanted to talk about if you’re thinking about competitive Intel, or if you’re not, maybe you should be so, you’re, you’re welcome. I appreciate you. We’re going to talk about five key areas that you want to begin [00:02:00] thinking about.
So, first of all, before we get into the five areas, let’s talk a little bit about selecting which competitors you’re paying attention to because one of the top things that I see people doing wrong is only looking at people in their own back door and looking at people who geographically, a patient or a customer could choose from, but at this point, and with this market, and the way health care is today, you have to also start thinking about who else is truly in your market mix as far as somebody that a customer could choose to go with.
So, for example, if you are a provider group maybe One Medical, Amazon’s offering, is a competitor to you now, maybe you need to start looking at them and understanding how they compete with you and specifically in what areas they compete with you. So, the one thing I’d recommend is picking out at minimum three competitors.
More is better, but each one takes a lot of time. So, starting with a minimum of three, one to two in your own backyard. And then at least one [00:03:00] nationwide digital first. Competitor, if that is something that your particular sub-segment of the industry has to think about or compete with. So let’s get into the five.
There are five key questions that are really helpful to be able to answer about your competitors. The first one is: “What tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team?” So, the really neat thing about marketing online the way that we are in 2024, is there are a lot of tools that allow you to scrape the web and understand where your competitors are placing ads. What kind of content they’re creating? Where they’re placing it paid media insights. How much are they spending? What platforms are they spending money on? Are they using video? If so, how are they utilizing video, and what’s their video strategy?
So understanding what tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team is really helpful because it can point out areas where they may be reaching those patients or customers where you aren’t. So for example, often we see people really excited to think about patient [00:04:00] acquisition campaigns using Google, maybe they’re not thinking so much about Bing, right?
Like this is a really basic example. But, a lot of older people use Bing. So depending on your demographic of your typical customer or decision maker for the care or healthcare purchasing decision being may end up being just as valuable to you as a Google ad placement and maybe that’s something that you see a competitor is doing that you’re not. So, the bottom line is really spending time using online tools that are available to you. Some of them have really small monthly subscriptions. Some of them are free. There are tools like Wappalyzer or Builtwith that allow you to see what tags are placed on people’s websites and that often give you clues about the kinds of campaigns that they’re running.
Highly recommend you do that as a first step for any competitors you’re looking into. And then you can use tools like SEMRush. There’s tons of them out there to help you understand from a paid media and organic perspective where they’re focusing their energy. So again, understanding [00:05:00] what tactics their marketing team is leveraging is the first question you want to ask and understand.
Number two is what are the digital priorities they’re focusing on? So, the two ways we like to break this up are service lines or business units. Like where are they spending their money? If they are, let’s say a children’s hospital and they’re only promoting three service lines that really tells you a lot about their budget, perhaps, but also the prioritization is an organization.
So it’s really helpful as you’re doing that first analysis of tactics to weave in the purview of understanding messaging targeting around service lines. Things that you want to understand are their focus areas for service lines through, uh, activity, budget, and content frequency. Again, maybe they’re geographically in your back door, but if they’re not even promoting the things that are your priority service lines, then it’s important to know that they’re there, but maybe you keep an eye on them, but kind of look at another competitor that maybe is pushing harder to gain market share.
The second one under [00:06:00] is organic content trends. So what kind of content are they creating for their service lines? Sometimes perhaps they don’t have the budget or they’re choosing this as a tactic. Maybe they aren’t doing a lot of paid media to push a service line forward, but maybe they have a content strategy like a podcast or a video series around a service line and that may be driving lots of engagements and organic growth within that service line and the traffic that they’re bringing in. So, again, understanding the big picture number two is what digital priorities are they focusing on with service lines and organic content trends underneath.
Number three. access to care or user journey experience. What’s in their tool set? Let’s say I again, one that I’m going to keep using that same example. Let’s say I need to go to a children’s hospital and I need to find out a doctor and or schedule an appointment. What tools are they using? How easy is it? How integrated is it into the service line pages of the website? Do a little work researching a specific condition treatment or provider and see how [00:07:00] easy it is to get where you need to go.
They may have a user flow or some UX that they’ve integrated that’s really making it amazing for the person finding and scheduling care to be able to find what they need quickly. So, it’s really important that could absolutely shift market share if you’re not aware that they’re implementing and testing something like that.
Number four is their marketing tech stack. So. Again, I mentioned Wappalyzer, but there’s also lots of tools that allow you for free to be able to look at the code of your competitors’ websites. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because you can see what marketing tools they’re using. Are they a Salesforce Marketing Cloud organization?
What website analytics tools are they using? Do they have their own app that they’ve built that allows scheduling functionality that perhaps can make it easier for somebody to find or schedule care? Do they have some other CRM or marketing automation that they’ve implemented to be able to guide people through the process?
[00:08:00] Marketing budgets, strategies, and executions are not just in driving traffic, but it’s also optimizing the journey once they get there. So, understanding that access to care patient journey experience, as well as what tools they’re using. Super important, and really helpful to give you that North Star of where you may be falling behind.
And then the fifth one, this one’s my favorite because what people say about themselves publicly is where they’re focused. They’re not going to be promoting or going and talking about a service line or a campaign or something that isn’t an organizational priority. So, the fifth and last one is reputation management and industry promotion.
So, the first one is external looking in. What are patients or customers saying about this organization? What does it look like they’re doing from a review solicitation perspective? Does it seem like they’re using like a Press Ganey or reputation.com to be able to solicit reviews? And if so, like, what volume and velocity are they doing for those reviews?
But the second component of that is, are they [00:09:00] going and speaking at industry conferences? If so, what topics are they speaking about? Are they doing it with a co-presenter? If so, who is that co-presenter? Maybe a technology they’re partnering with or an agency that’s driving a lot of success for them.
So that’s, again, just helpful to understand where they’re thinking and prioritizing things as a marketing organization. To help you make better guesses and understand what may be coming next for them.
So again, the five things you should be thinking about if you’re running a competitive Intel program is what tactics are being leveraged by their marketing team, number one.
Number two, what digital priorities are they focusing on? Number three, their access to care, their user journey experience, what’s it look like? Number four, their marketing tech stack, and number five reputation management industry promotion. These are all things that can help you really understand where your competitors are.
And again, it’s not that you want to copy them. We’re not out here copying people, but you want to understand and not be surprised if somebody suddenly gains market [00:10:00] share or jumps ahead of you or, you know, Whatever, you know, they continue succeeding. If you’re falling behind, you need to be able to better plan and prepare in order to go into the upcoming fiscal.
I am very excited to say that Hedy & Hopp’s actually launching some one-time programs around competitive Intel. So, if you are interested in learning more about what it looks like, we’re actually going to be linking to it in the show notes. So, if you want to learn more about what it would cost to have an agency like mine lean in and do this competitive intel for you with all of our technical expertise and subscriptions to back-end programs and tools, uh, give us a shout. We will put a link in the show notes that will allow you to schedule a Zoom with me and we can chat more about what you are interested in learning your budget and your timeline. We’d love to work with you.
So again, thank you for tuning in today to this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Please, please, please [00:11:00] subscribe. Please give us a rating on whatever platform you are listening in on. And if you have any content suggestions, shoot them to us. We’d love to create content based off of your feedback.
That’s it for today. See you on a future episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
In this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” the podcast that brings joy to healthcare marketing, our host, CEO, and founder Jenny Bristow, dissects a topic that’s stirring up the digital marketing world alongside Mark Brandes, Hedy & Hopp’s head of all things analytics and decision science.
This episode sheds light on the mixed feelings surrounding GA4, digging into its challenges and revealing how to harness its full potential. Jenny and Mark go beyond critique, offering practical advice for organizations deeply invested in GA4. Whether you’re grappling with catch-all tracking, seeking clarity on website performance, or looking to beautify your data analysis with Looker Studio dashboards, this episode is packed with actionable solutions. Join us as we transform technical hurdles into opportunities for joy and insight, ensuring your marketing efforts are both happy and effective.
Episode Highlights:
[0:45] – Introduction to GA4’s Mixed Reception: Insights into the digital marketing community’s varied reactions to Google Analytics 4.
[1:20] – The Challenge with GA4: Mark and Jenny discuss the steep learning curve and common frustrations with the new platform.
[2:55] – Embracing Measurement Planning: Highlighting the importance of a well-crafted measurement plan for accurate data analysis in healthcare marketing.
[4:10] – Implementing Dashboards for Better Analytics: How custom dashboards can make data from GA4 more accessible and actionable.
[6:00] – The Future of Healthcare Marketing with GA4: Optimizing Google Analytics 4 for enhanced decision-making in healthcare marketing.
[7:30] – Practical Tips for GA4 Transition: Jenny and Mark offer advice for organizations adapting to Google Analytics 4, focusing on setup and tracking strategies.
Links & Resources
Connect with Jenny
Connect with Mark
Check out more about how Hedy & Hopp can help you do more with your data!
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host, but I am also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full-service fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with healthcare providers, payers, and innovation groups all across the country.
And I am so excited today to have our very own Mark Brandes join us. Mark is the head of all things analytics and decision science here at Hedy & Hopp. So, welcome.
Mark: Yeah, thanks for having me on Jenny.
Jenny: So we’re going to talk about a really fun topic today. And that is that a lot of people basically are feeling like Google Analytics 4 sucks.
So what are your thoughts about that?
Mark: They are, and I can’t say I fully disagree. But I do think there are some things that are great about Google Analytics 4, but I also understand where people’s frustrations come from, because I have the same frustration, especially working at an agency [00:01:00] where we have to move around from different clients, and I need quick information out of those tools. And GA4 is not something you can get quick information out of. You have to really put some effort into it, build some things to have the reporting be the same to access some of the data. And so I, I agree.
And I think what we’ve seen is that you can actually, um, create measurement plans that help you really understand what you can measure. And I think that helps really identify what you’re pulling out of the platform that can help. You can also then extend with things like dashboards. So we can talk a little bit about how that would work.
Jenny: Oh, I love it. I love it. And I know we give a little levity to the topic, right? But like, I think the reason why it’s important to address it is there’s a lot of organizations that for one reason or another are tied to using Google Analytics, even with all of the HIPAA and. The patient privacy stuff with a lot of the workarounds, for example, the one that we implement with server-side Google tag manager.
We developed that [00:02:00] program because a lot of people wanted to stick with Google Analytics simply because of the sunk cost of time and energy they’ve already put into setting up the tool and or integrations or dashboards they’ve already set up. So I think on today’s topic. I think we’re going to set aside the fact that yes, there are other tools you can use, right?
The Piwik Pros, the Mixed Panel, like there’s lots of other analytics tools that you could use, but today let’s focus on if you are using Google Analytics for whatever reason, organizationally, if your team has decided you’re sticking with it, then how can you make the most of it? So I’d love for you to start, if an organization is sticking with Google Analytics 4, and they’re just generally frustrated, what’s the first thing that they should do?
Mark: Yeah. And there’s a comfortable nest there, right? Like they’re kind of comfortable. You’ve been using GA and I think that’s one of the things that makes GA more tough is because the interface makes people uncomfortable and you kind of lose that comfort that you had. Right. And so that’s, I think pretty jarring for people.
But yeah, what [00:03:00] we can start to do is for one, when we work with clients, we see a lot of implementations where either their team or an agency or somebody else has come in and they’ve set up what I call just kind of, catch-all tracking. Right? So they’ve gone in and said, we want to track all these links.
Okay, well, let’s track that the link happened and we’ll grab what page it happened on and what page is going to and that’s great until it comes to analytics time, until it comes to the time to the analysis and then things become more difficult. You have to start piecing through all that. You have to pull stuff out.
You have to see was that this link? Was that link? You also have times where it’s not as easy as that. Sometimes it has a JavaScript that comes through. Right? Because you opened up a window instead of opening up a new page. So there’s different things that can break when you do that kind of tracking and that doesn’t really get caught when you kind of just do a throw it all catch it all type of tracking.
So, from our position, it really helps to understand, okay. what are the things that are really important to us on our [00:04:00] website? What’s our website there for? And I think that is a place that we help with having those conversations with really getting down to the heart of, What is this website doing for our business?
And then how can we tie things on the website back to the success of our business? And we do that through a process called measurement planning. So it’s really detailed out and we define, okay, we want to track when this thing happens on the site. Well, we can help define what does that mean in terms of Google Analytics is this event with this parameter on it.
So we can help define all that. And not only that, but it also helps. Catalog everything and really put it into place. I’ve had so many clients tell us, this is amazing. We’ve never seen this information. We’ve, we know all this, but we’ve never seen it in this format and it helps them understand like, okay, I get what we’re doing now.
I get what we’re tracking. I get where this is coming from.
Jenny: Yep, absolutely. And I think whenever people think about measurement planning. That sounds like a step that’s a “nice to have”. So I think reframing that conversation internally [00:05:00] where it’s not a nice to have it’s a “must have” if you’re spending money online and need to understand what the ROI is, etc.
So, when you start with the foundation of a strong measurement plan, let’s talk a little bit about how that enables you to make really accurate and detailed, reporting or dashboards.
Mark: For sure. So a good example is when we moved to GA4 well, in UA, you used to have events that had event category, event action, and event label.
Everybody was so comfortable with that. It made sense, right? You could categorize all this. You could drill down inside your reports. All that’s gone now because everything is an event inside of GA4 and you only have one field for the name. And so you have to either shove all those category, action, and label into that name, which we’ve seen some people do.
We’ve also seen them do, the label as the event and then put category and action as their other parameters to get added onto it. But those are difficult to pull out of the actual interface itself. Trying to drill down into those isn’t the same. When you click on an event, it doesn’t take you to those [00:06:00] next levels.
It takes you to another screen where, yeah, you can look at those levels, but it’s difficult. And you can go into, say, the Explorer reports inside of GA. For you can set up a table there. You can set up a pivot table to help you look at all those different things. But that takes time and effort understanding how the tool works a sense of what pivot tables are, which isn’t the easiest topic for everyone.
And so getting to some of that information, and that’s what I mean by a GA4 feels like it’s terrible, right? Because I can’t get anything out of this. I can’t find the information I’m looking for anymore. And from my perspective. Usually, the information is there. We just haven’t identified what it is, and we haven’t made it easy to bring it out.
And so, yeah, once we have that measurement plan in place, what we can do is really set up a dashboard. And I know sometimes in some circles, dashboards get a bad rap, but I think the way that we approach them is to really have them be an extension of GA4, to bring back some of that reporting field that you had inside of UA, right?
You can drill down into here. You can look at this specific [00:07:00] topic. You can look at your, your month or your date range breakdown. You can see a time chart over that for those specific things. And so that’s something that’s missing at a GA4 currently is your ability to do that. And we can bring that back.
And then you can add it back with adding on something like a Looker Studio dashboard. The great benefit is that Looker Studio is free. So, it’s something you can add on. It’s really the time and effort that takes to set it up and that’s again where we can help with our expertise. We can help you once you have that measurement plan in place, we can help you set up the dashboards. We’ve got somebody on our team who makes beautiful dashboards. Their works of art, in my opinion, but even better. The reason I love that is because it helps you want to come back to the dashboard. It’s not just a spreadsheet looking thing that you come and you just kind of get through.
It looks nice. It’s appealing. And so you want to come back to that dashboard. It’s like, yeah, I do want to go check my dashboard. It’s nice to look at. It’s got my. Yeah. Brand colors. It’s got a good feel to it. And so that’s something that I [00:08:00] find is great because it doesn’t make going through the data at shore.
It makes it kind of a little more happy, a little more fun.
Jenny: I love it. Our whole focus of our brand is infusing joy. And I think our dashboards definitely do that one thing. Whenever I’m talking to prospective clients and I’m sharing some examples of our dashboards, we see their jaws drop because some examples you can literally drill down by business type.
Or by location. So let’s say you’re a 60-location specialty provider. You can see how one particular location is performing as far as traffic spend campaigns, et cetera. And that’s all because the measurement plan that was done up front made sure all of the tracking and implementation was set up correctly.
So definitely a step not to be missed.
Mark: Exactly.
Jenny: Yep. Well, thank you, Mark, for being on always appreciate your perspective and ability to turn something super technical into something that’s easy to digest. So thank you again for being on this week. I love it. And for listeners, thank you so much for tuning in this week.
Be sure to tune in for a future episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Have a great day.
In this week’s episode of “We Are Marketing Happy,” we explore the dynamic world of healthcare marketing and the impact of COVID-19 on physician referrals. Our host Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, discusses the shifts and trends in healthcare systems’ marketing strategies with Lindsey Brown, our esteemed Director of Digital Activation. Together, they delve into the nuances of referral marketing in a post-pandemic landscape, offering invaluable insights for healthcare marketers looking to enhance their referral processes and improve patient care through strategic marketing.
Links & Resources:
Enhancing physician search functionality on healthcare websites:
Doximity: https://www.doximity.com/
Sermo: https://www.sermo.com/
Connect with Jenny
Connect with Lindsey
Thank you for tuning into today’s insightful episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Your engagement and curiosity fuel our discussions. If you found this episode insightful, please subscribe for more thought-provoking content. We’re eager to hear from you – share your thoughts, questions, or topics you’d like us to explore in future episodes. Your input is invaluable as we strive to create content that resonates with you. Don’t forget to rate, follow, share, and review if you enjoyed today’s discussion. Join us next week for another dive into the evolving landscape of healthcare marketing. Stay marketing happy!
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp, a fully healthcare, full-service marketing agency. I am so excited to have with me today, our Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown.
Welcome, Lindsey.
Lindsey: Hi, happy to be here, Jenny.
Jenny: Lindsey manages all of our actual implementation work for clients. So once the strategy is developed, she manages the team that actually brings the campaign to life. So as a result, you really have your ear to the ground of what’s happening in health care systems, right?
Whether it is a, you know, standalone single practice, or if it is a regional system, you really got the insight. So one thing that I’m excited to talk about, a trend that you’re seeing, is shifts in how physician referrals are being handled within marketing teams. So give us the lowdown. What are you seeing?
Lindsey: So, this trend has been happening for quite a few years ever since COVID. A lot of [00:01:00] trends have changed in healthcare since COVID variety of ways, way patients are accessing care, the way that Physicians are interacting with their patients how much information patients are willing to give to digital platforms to, like, improve their health and understanding of their overall health.
So, lots of things are different. 1 thing from a business perspective that really has been trending since COVID and shifts in resourcing shifts and staffing AKA downshifts and staffing, unfortunately, is some of those new business development positions have been eliminated or have been changed a bit.
So, where pre-COVID, you may have some new business development with every single service line that you have or within individual clinics that you have that are really responsible for getting physicians to refer their patients to that clinic for specialty services or for other services. Now, they’re either being reduced up staff so that they have to think about the system overall.
So that’s a lot more for them to manage or those positions are going away completely. And they’re relying mostly on the marketing team to help bring in those patients [00:02:00] from physicians in a more targeted way in a more business to business or B2B fashion. So that’s really kind of what we’re here to talk about today.
Jenny: Yeah, I love it. And whenever we talk about physician referrals, there really are categorically two different types, right? There’s not only getting referrals from outside of your organization, so complementary services coming in. So let’s say a primary care group into a specialty services, but there’s also within your own system referrals as well, right?
So there’s B2B focuses externally, but when we’re thinking about marketing holistically, it’s important to understand. The two differences. Yeah, exactly. So what are some things that a marketing team that’s been handed this new responsibility that’s never had to think about it? What are some things that they should be thinking about to be more effective?
Lindsey: Yeah. So first and foremost, as marketers, I think that the general process isn’t going to change for how to figure out how do you reach physicians that can refer new patients to your practice. You’re going to start with the audience. You’re going to start with the opportunity. So [00:03:00] looking at the data that you have available to you, like, what are your top referring positions?
What is common about those referring positions? What are things that kind of make them linked? And then there are other physicians that kind of mirror those kinds of characteristics that you can then target and go after essentially. The other thing you want to look at is the opportunity. So are there service lines that used to receive a certain amount of referrals, but now their service lines have seen a pretty significant downshift.
What is the reason for that downshift? What is the reason for that reduction? Is it maybe your practices have changed? Maybe a new competitor entered the market and is stealing your share. What are those opportunities that are available? And kind of using those two things again, like we would marketing to patients, what’s the opportunity?
Who are we talking to? You implement the same kind of campaign. Your tactics might be a little different. I think with B2B, it’s really important to note that relationships are really important. You may not be able to build those 1 to 1 relationships with your patients right away, but physicians can and do network with one another, they have conversations with one another.
And so something that your physicians can [00:04:00] do and something as part of your marketing plan can make sure you’ve got cohesive messaging that your physicians, when they’re talking with other potential refers or existing refers, that they’re keeping that relationship moving forward and they’re keeping that positive relationship.
The other thing to think about is like we do with B2C marketing is how do you stay top of mind? So making sure that you’ve got the right content that you’re distributing to your referring physicians or the target physicians that you’re looking for, what kind of information is going to be most helpful for them to see your practices when they want to refer their patients to.
And last but not least, is making sure your information is all accessible. You know, physicians are people, too. They peruse the Internet just like normal humans do, and they read publications and they engage in social media. They do all sorts of things that normal humans do.
Right? So how do you make sure that simple things like your website is up to date? Your Google, my business listings are up to date and have the right information in the right hours. How do you make sure [00:05:00] that the way someone can refer is really clearly visible and it’s a really easy to use referral system.
So things like that are really important to keep in mind as you’re thinking about reaching that audience and seeing some traction.
Jenny: Yeah. And I love that Lindsey. One thing that I’ve heard multiple times from groups that have spent the resources and really just energy improving their physician search functionality on their website is the biggest lift they saw was internal referrals improving because the doctors and office managers within their own systems were using that to find out who to refer within their own organizations.
So especially if you have a larger regional system. We talked to some folks that physicians within their groups don’t even know they have this specialty because it’s something recent. So I think not forgetting the basics and the foundations, the things that help consumers also help physicians or their office managers or whoever is in charge of facilitating that is a really great point.
Lindsey: It is a really great point, [00:06:00] Jenny, because I think oftentimes the opportunity is within your own system. Now, if you are in a large system, it’s. You’re not going to know every single physician that’s there. You’re not going to know when someone new comes on board. Someone doesn’t. So there’s some internal marketing things that you can do, like making sure that you’re announcing when a new physician joins the staff or making sure that you’re announcing big wins in your specialty.
If you’ve won awards or if you’ve ranked really high or improved your ranking in certain services, making sure that communication is throughout the hospital. And I think something that you know, we can consider is that patients that are within a system already. You know, that if there’s continuing to be in that system, that likely insurance is going to be available.
So if you go outside your system, you never know if you’re referring a patient to a practice that may not be covered by insurance. And that’s something that patients really care about and really want to make sure that referring physician is thinking about. So staying within your system is also kind of the kind of first easiest way to go.
And so make that easier for them as part of your internal marketing efforts.
Jenny: Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. So I think let’s end on, if [00:07:00] you’re going to be launching a patient referral marketing program, what are some things that marketers should be thinking about as they’re developing the strategy?
Lindsey: Yeah, so first and foremost think about your audience and your opportunity. So we talked about a little bit earlier, making sure that’s your foundation. You should already have an idea of what that is. But if this is a new thing that your marketing team is bringing on, that’s your first step.
Do some discovery, do some analysis and where your area of opportunity is. Second, make sure that those foundational elements are in place and intact, that your listings are up to date, that your profiles on your physicians are up to date, that you have those internal comms kind of ready to go and what that’s going to look like.
And then third is you’re in your planning mode. So what are some paid tactics that you can employ? Things like search or other areas to help you with that. Especially if you’re a clinic that needs support. external help from referring physicians. So you’re not part of a large system. You’re in a smaller system, not discounting the need for branding efforts.
So you are a smaller clinic and you don’t have a [00:08:00] huge voice in the area that you’re in. Make sure those branding efforts are out so that your lower funnel tactics will be more successful because people know who you are and they know what you do. And make sure as part of that messaging, you’re really touting.
What your specialty is, but also how great you are at that specialty. Why working with you and referring the physician or the patients, excuse me, to you is going to benefit the patient and make sure that you’ve got those comms intact so that there’s always going to be a feedback loop. The referring physician is not going to lose track of the patient, not going to lose track of what’s happening.
There’s a potential for that feedback loop and making sure that again, as part of the process and part of the messaging as well.
Jenny: I love that. And one other thing that I’ve heard you talk about before that I’ll add is for marketers that are new to thinking about B2B marketing and physician marketing, really exploring and understanding all the different targeting that is available when you are kind of going into that whole paid.
Campaign execution, like targeting by NPI. For example, you can really get granular as far as what physicians you’re targeting, and [00:09:00] there’s a lot of physician specific publications you can do marketing on. So it’s a whole nother world that if you have not done that yet, definitely lean on your agency partner or other people within the industry that can educate you about all the different tactics you can employ.
Lindsey: Yes, 100%. There are physician-specific platforms out there. I think about things like Doximity or Sermo. They have physician referral programs that are available. Those are just to name a couple. There’s a variety of others out there. There’s also a variety of tools to help make sure that you’re implementing this and keeping track of your progress so that you can show success.
Because again, as marketers, we always have to show like, how are we providing value? How are we improving? And then we’re also going to be improving our bottom line. So using tools like your CRM platform or something else to that effect will help you track your progress and see additional areas of opportunity and ways to optimize.
Jenny: Oh, I love it. Well, Lindsey, as always you came bringing the intel. So I appreciate it so much as I’m sure our listeners do also. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in today in this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Be [00:10:00] sure to subscribe and don’t forget to reach out with any content ideas, things you’d like to hear us talk about or cover in future weeks.
We create this content for you. So if there’s something you’re struggling with, there’s something you’d love to get a different industry point of view on, give us a shout. We’d love to cover it. So on that note, have a great rest of your day. And we’ll talk to you on next week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
Take care.
In healthcare marketing, leaders often face the challenge of helping their teams become more efficient in a field full of regulations and diverse patient needs. Balancing new regulatory demands and accommodating diverse patient needs requires finding smart ways to streamline processes and maximize productivity. In this week’s episode, discover how to amp up your healthcare marketing team with Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp.
Jenny explores innovative approaches to streamline workflows, maximize collaboration, and amplify success. She hits on project briefs, scorecards, case studies, and in-house knowledge-sharing to revolutionize your approach. Tune in to learn how to utilize these actionable steps and empower your team toward greater efficiency.
Jenny’s book Recommendation: Traction by Gino Wickman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
00:02
Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with payers, providers, and folks driving innovation in healthcare all across the country.
I’m really excited to be here with you today and share some insights. We just wrapped up our monthly all hands. So once a month, our entire agency gets together to be able to talk about status updates for ongoing initiatives within the organization. We do shout outs related to our core values. One of the things that takes up a big part of the agenda though, is talking about ongoing operational improvements. And an interesting conversation I have often with the marketing leaders that are our clients or folks wanting to be our clients is ways that they can improve their own marketing team’s performance.
01:06
So we’re a marketing agency, right? We work with marketing teams within healthcare companies. Sometimes those teams are two or three people teams. Sometimes they are 40 to 50 people teams. It really varies based off of the size of the organization and the budget prioritization of marketing within that organization. For example, we have a variety of children’s hospitals that are clients and at one maybe they have a five person team and at another they may have a 40 person team. So you can see big variations even with the same category within the healthcare space. But often folks come and ask me, you know, Jenny, “How can I manage my team more efficiently? What are some ideas to be able to kind of tighten up our deliverables, work more effectively with your agency or agency as a partner?” And as we are going through our all hands today, I jotted down a couple of things that I thought could be really helpful to share.
02:05
So if you manage an internal marketing team at a healthcare organization, here are four things you can consider to incorporate into your processes or the way that you view your work that can make your team more effective. The first one.The very first thing my team does whenever we land a new client, whether it is a project, a one-time piece of work that has a set timeline, as well as a set deliverable, is we create a project brief. And that’s again, if they’re a project or if it’s an ongoing retainer client. A project brief is a simple document that outlines why the project or work needs to exist, what the objective is, how we will know if it’s successful. And then often it will include details such as geography, service line, or any business unit information that you need.
It’s designed to be one piece of paper that you can hand say to senior leadership if they’re asking why you’re spending money or time on work, a contractor or an agency, if you need somebody to lean in or even another member of your team, if they’re net new coming into a project or a piece of work, they can read the brief and easily understand what is going on. We create the brief right after the scope of work is signed, in conjunction with the client kickoff meeting. And then that brief for us is the north star for that work. We’ll update it throughout the life of the work if we get additional facts from the client or any additional information just needs to be added to provide clarity for the team that’s either working on it or that will be reported to.
03:48
So if you are not yet creating a project brief for your internal work with your internal team members, pause and ask yourself if creating a brief for all of the asks, all of the work that you do before you begin working on it, could help reduce the chaoticness or the confusion within your organization. And I’m gonna bet the answer is yes, ’cause there’s certainly a reason why we do it here at Hedy & Hopp and most agencies do it. It’s a pretty standard practice.
So again, number one, number one tip for making your internal marketing team more effective is standardizing the creation of briefs for every single project or piece of work that goes out your door. And maybe you have, you know, a campaign brief and then some tactical pieces are underneath it. You don’t necessarily need to do a brief for a newspaper, a local newspaper ad that you’re doing, that should roll up to a bigger brief that more summarizes the work.
04:44
That’s number one. Number two, scorecards. So at Hedy & Hopp, we are an EOS organization. So EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. There is a fabulous book called “Traction” and it walks through the importance of measuring what’s important. Not only measuring it, but also providing visibility throughout the organization. It helps ensure that everybody is truly rowing the boat in the same direction.
We’ve been an EOS organization for about two and a half years, and the standardization of processes, the ease of communication within teams and our ability to set and achieve goals as an organization has increased massively over those two and a half years. So, I’ll link to the book itself in the show notes, but think about if you were to create a scorecard to be able to measure the effectiveness of your team at doing their jobs, what are some things that individuals and the departments within your team could actually report on or on a weekly or a monthly basis?
05:46
So for example, here at Hedy & Hopp, some of the things that we report on are; are projects being completed on time? What is the quality? And we have a variety of ways to measure quality within our agency. So, you could come up with your own quality factors, but is the quality of work at a standard that we are setting for ourselves? Is the work being done on budget and on budget? It doesn’t necessarily mean need to mean out of pocket dollars. It could also mean hours. So did you estimate correctly as far as how many hours it would take your team to complete something. And then results. One of the key ways, whenever marketing leaders come to me and say, “You know, Jenny, we historically have not been a data driven organization. I’m a huge believer of being data-driven. What are some ways I can improve the way that we are talking about and sharing metrics within our organization and measuring results within a weekly and monthly dashboard within our team?”
06:48
By far, one of the number one ways to make that happen is you’re setting a standard about what your expectations are for how campaigns should be managed and reported upon within the organization. And it’s a really great way to do it. So, that also ensures you go back to the brief. Number one, you have to report on what the expectations are for performance and the brief in order to report on and to see if you hit that goal in the weekly or monthly dashboard that you’re creating. Again, this doesn’t necessarily have to be something that you share with senior leadership. It can just be something within your own team structure that you report on to understand like what makes your own week, month, and quarter a success for the marketing team. It can be something you can hold yourselves accountable to or as a leader you can hold your team accountable to. But I would totally recommend looking into setting up some dashboards.
07:37
Number three case studies. So this is something as an agency, of course we create case studies, right? We wanna highlight the work that we’re doing so we can help more patients access care. We wanna work with even more providers, payers, and innovation groups across the country. We’re very passionate about it, right? So for us to showcase our work means we can get more work. But as an internal marketing team, showcasing the success of your work and do a couple of things. And there’s a couple of different reasons that you wanna start thinking about standardizing the development of a case study after specific and certain kinds of projects wrap within your team. The first is, again, if you’re trying to become a data-driven organization, it certainly will help if you have people within your organization report on the results.
08:27
If in the brief you said you needed to have X number of leads come in for a specific service line, if in your weekly monthly dashboards you’ve been reporting upon that, and let’s say you hit the ball outta the park, gosh, that’s a great case study to be able to put it together and then showcase not only to your entire marketing team, ’cause perhaps only a certain percentage of them worked on that piece of work, but you can highlight it and say, this is the way we view success within our marketing team, right? We view it by having an understanding of the number of patients we wanted to reach and then achieving that, and we’re gonna share that. But number two, it also allows you to have some really great ammunition to be able to share with leadership to be able to say, here is why you approve that marketing budget that we requested. Here is the impact we are having on revenue today based off the new patients we’re bringing in the door.
09:16
And then a third exciting one is, as a marketing leader, it’s also an opportunity for you to be able to submit your work for awards. And again, if you go back, there was an episode I did about why and how you submit to awards. This is a great example though. If you wanna showcase your team’s work as far as being data driven, really excelling by maximizing your budget, driving certain service line success, having a case study will allow you to submit for those awards and then really make your team feel super proud of the work that they did. And then fourth and final, one of the things that we actually measure within Hedy & Hopp is our subject matter experts within our organization sharing their subject matter expertise, right?
09:58
We are an organization that is very focused on continually growing, learning, and expanding our skill sets. We have the ability to do a lot of education and training even just within our own ecosystem, and you do too. So creating some sort of system where you’re doing lunch and learns, maybe it’s a morning zoom session every other Tuesday where certain team members have half an hour to be able to showcase a new technology they’re using, a smart way to integrate AI into your processes (There’s episode coming on that soon), or perhaps it is somebody giving an update on Google’s algorithm changes and how that potentially could impact your budget planning for the balance of the year. A lot of expertise lives within your own team. And finding a way to standardize the sharing of that in a way that, again, twofold not only helps your entire team, but also helps your individual team members get experience sharing and talking about their expertise.
11:07
One thing that great leaders know is that by helping other people become more comfortable at public speaking and sharing their knowledge, that’s gonna help them tremendously with their own professional career. Short and long term, even after they leave your organization, they are gonna be a better communicator of ideas and thoughts because of their time working with you if you implement something like that. So it’s really a win-win.
So if you are an internal marketing leader within an organization, again, four things I’d recommend integrating, thinking about how you can make this standardized during 2024. A brief, every single thing that you do needs to roll up to a brief within your organization. Weekly and monthly Scorecards, how are you reporting on the work that you’re doing and how do you know that it’s up to the standard that you want your team and your organization to perform for? Number three case studies, you’re doing great work. Get into the process of standardizing and talking about it internally and externally. And then number four, knowledge sharing. You have lots of smart people on your team. Really find a way to be able to help them and you shine.
So that’s it for today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, I’m gonna share a link to the book, “Traction” in the notes, show notes if you are really wondering and curious about how you can make your department more data driven. It talks about becoming an entire organization that follows EOS, but if you’re just really thinking even about your own department, there’s a lot of great practices that you can integrate that could make you more effective and efficient at communicating. So thank you again for tuning in. We will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great day.
When you find out you have a budget that must be spent by end of your fiscal year, how should you spend it? We outline Foundation vs. Acquisition activities and the framework we use to help our clients spend the funds in a way that can help the entire fiscal budget of next year perform better.
In this week’s podcast, Jenny talks about utilizing end-of-year budget surpluses. One way is through Foundation activities, or one time projects that have a defined start and end time that set your organization up for success next year. The other are Acquisition initiatives, which help your organization finish out the current year in a strong way. Jenny offers advice on how to choose where to put that extra budget and how to choose the projects that will have the biggest payoff in the long term.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing, Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m really excited to be here with you today to talk a little bit about end of fiscal year budgets.
I’ve received three phone calls this week. Today’s Tuesday. I’m recording on a Tuesday will be released on Friday, but I’m recording on a Tuesday. I’ve received three phone calls already from folks that have end of year budget surpluses, and they’ve called me and they’ve said, Jenny, we really want to brainstorm and talk about ways that we can invest this for our patient acquisition work.
And so there’s a structure and framework that I use to help people decide the prioritization of where to spend their budgets. And I wanted to share that with you today. So first, let’s set the stage. Let’s imagine, you have a new [00:01:00] fiscal year starting July 1st, and you just realized you have a budget surplus that you need to spend between now and June 30th.
So that way your budget for next year stays the same. We’re not going to talk about if you should just give it back or not. We’re going to assume you want to spend it, and you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize your marketing for the year. So you’re going to spend it.
There’s two different approaches. You have either foundation or acquisition work that you can do. So I want to walk through that thought process. Vast majority of the time, I advise folks to spend that excess budget on foundation activities. What can we do between now and the end of the fiscal that will help make all of next year’s fiscal more successful?
So those activities may be something along the lines of patient journey mapping. What is their experience coming to your website, learning about a specific offering or service [00:02:00] line, and then actually finding a doctor, scheduling an appointment, mapping that out and identifying where you can improve the digital user experience.
Perhaps, it’s a Google local listings audit and optimization that could be a really impactful one-time activity to again, improve your entire program for next year and marketing budget success. Perhaps it is a content marketing strategy, doing an audit of the assets you have now and prioritizing maybe what you want to develop next year.
Maybe you need to clean up your messaging and you need to really become clear on the way that you talk about your organization, persona development, really figuring out who you’re talking to for your service lines or your offerings and really cleaning that up going into next year. Those are all foundation activities.
You can think of them as like one time projects that have a defined start and end time. And again, they’re going to benefit your entire 2025 fiscal [00:03:00] marketing output. On the other side, if you feel really great about your foundation. Maybe your conversion rates are super strong. You’ve already invested in all of those.
Then you can start proactively thinking about acquisition. Maybe you want to drive a really strong end of fiscal campaign performance. Maybe you want to test out some additional marketing tactics. I want to walk through again, the framework of how I help our clients think about where to put excess budget if it’s again, acquisition focused.
So you feel like your foundation is good. Now you want to focus on the actual acquisition of patients. Paid media is one place that a lot of folks want to put those dollars, some framework to think about paid media bottom of the funnel is really where people already know that they need what you’re offering and they’re just trying to find a doctor, they’re trying to schedule an appointment. They’re trying to get in. That’s Google and Bing and other search media, right? That’s pay per click. That’s really putting the money in [00:04:00] Google and making sure whenever people Google orthopedic doctor near me, they are able to find your services and schedule an appointment.
Interesting things you can test that maybe go above and beyond that, really thinking about social media. How do you, what, maybe you want to test some certain campaigns, maybe you haven’t done social media in the past, but that’s an opportunity for you to really be thinking more about who your average customer is or your patient is thinking going back to that persona that hopefully you have developed already.
How can we reach those folks? On a variety of channels online, and maybe you want to test out some fun channels like Spotify and Pandora, uh, streaming ads. Maybe you want to test there’s a variety of tactics that maybe are on your wishlist podcast advertising. Maybe there’s a variety of things that are on your wishlist that maybe you want to do just a little sprint for to be able to test the performance leading into the next year’s fiscal.
The one thing that I would always advise against and this is 1 thing that we’ve had a lot of folks ask us about is simply trying [00:05:00] to do awareness campaigns between now and the end of the fiscal and that may be something like a Facebook campaign that doesn’t have smart persona targeting or doesn’t have a good content strategy or patient journey behind it. It’s really just trying to get your brand out there.
Unless you’re maximizing and ensuring that every single patient who’s proactively trying to find you online can find you and schedule an appointment easily. I would never advise you to spend money on awareness. Ever. A lot of agencies would be happy to do the money, put it on programmatic.
Stop it. Stop it. Don’t do that. I actually don’t even allow our clients to spend money on programmatic unless it’s a very specific use case. And we feel really confident that they’re maximizing media otherwise. I’m not even to get into all of the privacy potential concerns with programmatic platforms.It really is just very low effectiveness um, and difficult to prove from a brand awareness perspective.
So, if you are finding yourself in this really fun [00:06:00] position, like a lot of folks are, end of fiscal have some budget leftover want to maximize it.
I strongly encourage you to think about foundation projects that you can do between now and the end of the fiscal year that can help make all of 2025’s fiscal output more successful. What have been your hiccups? What have been areas that are impacting your overall success. Is your cost per patient acquired too high with your media campaigns? Dig in and find out why if you can do foundational activities and improve the cost per new patient by 10%, that essentially gives you 10 percent additional budget for next year. With all other things equal. So if you are finding yourself in this fun position of having budget left, call me. I’d love to brainstorm and give you some ideas of what we see other folks doing. But again, I strongly recommend that you spend some time focusing on that patient journey and maximizing it.
One time [00:07:00] projects, maybe content audit strategies to improve searchability. There are so many ways to tackle it. It just depends on what your individual organization is struggling with. But again definitely recommend foundation versus acquisition activities. Thank you for tuning in today.
Hopefully this gave you some good food for thought. If you’re one of the many folks in this fun position right now, and as always we’d love to be your partner. So if you’re currently working on a patient acquisition campaign and perhaps looking for a new marketing agency partner, give us a call. We are a full service agency.
And we would love to work with additional providers and payers across the country to help you maximize your marketing budget. Thanks for tuning in today. Have a great rest of your week. We will talk to you soon.
In this week’s episode, Jenny discusses candidate recruiting and how marketing teams can lean in to help build a full and successful candidate pipeline.
Healthcare marketing is a pendulum. On one end, marketing efforts are focused on new patient acquisition. On the other end, HR and recruiting teams need to invest time and resources into finding quality providers to deliver the care you are promising new patients.
Jenny outlines three key steps for recruiting marketing:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host. I am the CEO and Founder here at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare-exclusive marketing agency based in the Midwest. And we are the Founders and the hosts of the podcast.
So thank you for joining today. I’m going to jump right in. We’ve been having a lot of really interesting conversations over the last three weeks around candidate recruiting. So as far back as we’ve been doing healthcare marketing. So eight years ago, whenever we, whenever I started the agency we realized this, it’s a pendulum, right?
You’re either doing marketing for patient acquisitions. You’re trying to help patients find the care that they need within your organization, or you’re actively trying to find and hire providers to be able to make sure you can deliver the care that you’re promising to patients. So, we’re kind of that pendulum is [00:01:00] swinging back.
We’re having lots of conversations right now about how marketing can lean in and assist HR and the recruiting teams to be able to get a more full and successful candidate pipeline. So I want to talk a little bit about that process. And there are three key steps in the process that I want to outline.
We have strategy, user journey, and optimization. So I’m going to go through each of them briefly. So the first one, strategy, it’s so important whenever you’re leaning in as a healthcare marketer to assist the HR or recruiting teams, if you’re leaning in to be able to help them be able to more fill the patient funnel, let’s say you are a
system or a provider group in Colorado, and you desperately need more RNs. The first thing you should do is spend some time on job boards finding out what the other offers are. So if I’m an RN in [00:02:00] Boulder and I go on Indeed, what are the competing offers? What is the pay? What are the main value propositions?
What are the differentiators? Just like in marketing, how you have to figure out how you’re going to have differentiators for your patients. To have them choose you for care, you have to do the same thing for recruiting. It is way too tight of a job market to assume that you can simply put a job posting together, throw it up on Indeed, and you’ll have a whole funnel full of candidates.
You have to be very strategic. What we recommend is spending a few hours going through and really documenting what are the different opportunities that those roles or those individuals for those roles have? What are the decisions that they can make if they’re looking for an open position? So really documenting what are the pay ranges that you see?
What are the key differentiators? Is it schedule flexibility? Is it hiring bonus? Is it retention bonus? [00:03:00] Whatever. There’s financial and non-financial reasons why somebody may choose to work with you. So document the decision matrix and what other options are out there outside of your organization.
Then create another document or part of the document that lists out all of the different things you can offer and figure out what is going to make your job posting actually stand out. What we love doing is once we’ve created this matrix is really identify three to four key messaging and positions that you can test.
So, perhaps leading with different differentiators or testing different financial structures. Of course, you always have the hourly or the salary, but then maybe you’re leading more heavily with the hiring bonus because that’s what everybody’s doing in that market, so you have to do that as a bare minimum or whatever it may be, but identifying what those three to four testing components are and then making a variety of job postings that reallyhighlight those different [00:04:00] positionings, the different ways that you can stand out.
That is a very important step one. Step two is documenting the user journey. So anybody who has been in the job search process recently knows it is so frustrating! I have a lot of friends and prior colleagues that are actively job hunting.
Or even if you just go on LinkedIn, you see so many people complaining about how difficult it is to even just apply for a job because of the clunkiness of the technology. So put yourself in that candidate’s shoes. Actually go through your application process and understand how many clicks does it take before you can actually submit your application?
How much information do you have to have handy? Do you have to upload your resume and manually enter your information? Is it possible to do the application on a mobile device? Is there a separate landing page for this specific role that you’re trying to fill that really outlines those key differentiators and puts them right into a quick [00:05:00] apply situation online, documenting the journey and then identifying opportunities to be able to improve it through smarter marketing, whether it’s landing pages, quick links, et cetera, or technology improvements.
A lot of the candidate tracking software is actually have a new functionality where you can maybe have somebody when they begin the application, enter their cell phone number or their email. And that will initially start their file. So your recruiter can follow up with them in case they don’t actually finish the application.
So there’s all these like technical tricks that you can do to really increase the volume. And then you’re going to be relying of course, on HR and recruiting to have a strong follow up process, which of course, you can lean into as far as communication, timeline, cadence, automation, all that fun stuff.
But the third one is once you have, you know what you’re saying and how you’re standing out, you know that the technology is there, then actually starting promoting. So just like when you’re doing patient recruiting, you have two separate ways people will find you. The first. Is that they’re actively looking for a new position.
So this is on job boards.[00:06:00] Even honestly, in Google, there’s a variety of paid media opportunities. You can make sure that your job posting is front and center, but there’s also the right person, right credentials that isn’t actively searching. And that’s where additional media opportunities, such as Facebook or Meta ads.
Even on TikTok, if you have a strong TikTok presence for your organization, there’s lots of different ways that you can target folks based off of their experience, credentials, et cetera. And then it’s all about optimization. So something we strongly recommend is really viewing it just like the patient acquisition funnel.
How can you measure the dollars you’re spending on marketing for recruiting through the number of applicants that you receive, interviews, and then new hires with one of our prior clients, we actually even had it go through 30 day retention. So we really knew candidates were strong if they not only are interviewed, offered, hired, but then 30 days later, if they were still there, that’s the kind of candidate that our marketing optimized towards.
So making sure you’re measuring [00:07:00] things and optimizing appropriately, treat it just like patient acquisition. You got to make every dollar count.
Last thing, I had two separate people ask me this question yesterday with all of the patient privacy and analytics rules of the changing and the analytics set up the tactics that we can do.
What in the world does that do to candidate marketing? Is candidate marketing beholden to these same rules? Kind of. Is the short answer. So, in an ideal world, you will have a separate recruiting or careers website or micro site that is completely separate from your organization’s website that patients access.
In that situation, you often can get away with using Google Analytics 4 right out of the box. You might even be able to do directly Facebook and Reddit conversion tags on it. If there is no patient-related information. It’s strictly a recruiting and careers website. For most people though, it’s actually a page tab, a section of their current site, [00:08:00] in which case you have two choices, you can bifurcate your website and have some of it have certain kinds of tags and some of it have the other we recommend just going full tilt safe.
Yeah, let’s treat everything the same, figure out what your new solution is, whether you go with our privacy solution, the server side tag manager, hit me up if you want to talk about that. Or if you go with a CDP or a new analytics tool, whatever it is, it’s really easiest if you just do it across the board.
One thing I’ll say is that server-side tag manager is Hedy and Hopp’s privacy oriented solution. We actually have the ability to integrate meta and LinkedIn’s conversion APIs. So you can still get full conversion data on everything, but you’re not unnecessarily collecting IP addresses, device IDs, all of that fun stuff.
So, really can go on the other side. So, thank you so much for tuning in again. If you have any questions about candidate recruiting your HR marketing campaigns, give me a call. We love brainstorming this stuff. We [00:09:00] love sharing ideas. And definitely happy to share some case studies for some cool work that we’ve done recently.
But thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy.
Today, Jenny welcomes Hedy and Hopp’s own Director of Analytics and Decision Science, Mark Brandes to talk about the difference between GTM (Google Tag Manager) and sGTM (Server-Side Google Tag Manager).
Mark states that, while many healthcare marketers utilize traditional web GTM as an essential analytics tool, the tool is really focused on adding information to send between platforms. GTM doesn’t offer a ton of options for removing information, which is a critical consideration when it comes to sensitive PHI/PII that might get shared.
With Server-Side Google Tag Manager, the container lives on your server that you control, making it a safer place where you can make changes in a compliant environment. SGTM is a solution that allows you to continue using platforms like GA4 in a compliant and safe way.
This episode does include a visual presentation, so if you’re just listening in, you can download that presentation here to follow along.
Connect with Mark:
https://www/linkedin.com/in/markbrandes/
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am so excited to have Hedy and Hopp’s own Mark Brandes. He is our Director of Decision Science and Analytics. Join us today. Mark is going to walk through and explain the difference between Google Tag Manager versus server-side Google Tag Manager.
This has been a technical explanation we’ve been doing a lot for folks that have been inquiring about our patient privacy package that we’re now offering and just understanding the technology and how it functions can be really helpful to understand how it’s able to safely protect patient information.
So I will say this is one of the rare podcasts that we actually do have a visual cue. So if you’re listening on Spotify or any other audio-only platform, please know that there’ll be a link in the show notes to access the deck. Otherwise you can always go to our YouTube channel and actually watch the whole video recording [00:0one:00] as well.
And with that, Mark, I’ll hand it over to you.
Mark: Yeah, great. Thanks for having me on Jenny. So, yeah, we wanted to have a conversation about GTM and sGTM because there’s still some confusion around it. People are still getting kind of used to what both technologies are some people think it’s a replacement for one or do I need them both?
And so we’re gonna help out with that today by giving you a little bit of a background on GTM and then kind of walk you through SGTM. So, it starts off with a software we’re all kind of familiar with which is GTM. A lot of us have used it or are aware of it, have seen it on our websites.
But really the idea with kind of a traditional, web GTM tagging container. The idea is that you’re gonna have this container on your website, and it’s gonna have multiple different tags. They’re all going to be assigned to say different events or different platforms. So when somebody downloads a form or goes to a page, that’s going to signal something in your GTM container, what they call a trigger.
[00:02:00] And those triggers are then going to tell the tags to then send data. To whatever platform you want to. So if you want Facebook to know that this form was downloaded, you would send that signal then to a tag, which would send that data to Facebook or to Google Analytics or to something else. So, you also have 3rd parties in here.
Some people send stuff to Pardot. Some people send stuff to a click tracking platform, like HotJar. So that’s really what’s going on here. It’s kind of sending all these individual signals to all these different platforms.
Jenny: And GTM stands for Google Tag Manager. Just for those of us that are listening in the call that maybe it’s not their day to day technology, GTM is Google Tag Manager.
Mark: That’s right. Thanks, Jenny. So, yeah. And with that I think what we’ll see from a privacy standpoint is that with Google Tag Manager in the slide for you, as if you were watching, I’m kind of showing you an example of what one of those tags that might look like inside of GTM. And for those of you listening, I’ll kind of explain [00:03:00] it a little bit, but basically the idea is there’s several fields where you can basically put information in.
You can say what I’m going to tell whatever software this thing is. So, the one I’m looking at right now is a tag in GTM that would send data to Google Analytics for. To tell them somebody clicked on a link to click to email. So that’s usually like some email link somewhere on your page. Somebody clicked it to send an email.
So we’re going to send that trigger to our GA4 to let that platform know that this event happened. And so what you’ll see in this image is that there’s a lot of different ways to add data to GTM tags. So that’s usually the way I explained it as, you can add different variables. You can add more information.
You can add if there’s other what the link was, what it said what kind of style it was in. So there’s a lot of different fields on a lot of different info. You can add on to that tag. The thing is, there’s not a whole lot of ways to remove information in these tags. There are some there’s some abilities you [00:04:00] have to say, cut out certain pieces of data, but those aren’t always available. And usually it’s all about adding more information to the tag and not necessarily removing it. And so what that tells us is that kind of the compliance we’re looking for, based on the new HIPAA guidance, based on some of the new guidelines we’re following, it’s difficult to remove things like IP address or certain device information from a tag like this within GTM.
So that brings us to sGTM. And so just like Jenny explained, this is now a server-side Google Tag Manager instead of just Google Tag Manager. So what we just showed was kind of what we call a web GTM. So the idea is it’s on your site. It’s based in Google servers. So it’s a web-based GTM, based in Google servers.
The difference here with sGTM is now it’s a server-side Google tag manager and we call it a server-side because now we’re [00:05:00] placing it on your client’s or your server. And so it’s in a place where you control, you have the keys to that server and therefore it becomes a safer place than say, putting it on Google server.
So now. You have the ability to make changes where you kind of control the environment. And that creates kind of a safe Harbor for that data.
Jenny: And one good point is that it still may be a Google server, but it’ll be a Google server only for your organization. And Google will sign a business associates agreement in order to promise that they’ll keep that information safe and secure.
Mark: That’s right, Jenny. And so even though, yeah, the server technically is owned by another property, you can have those business associates agreements in place with them to actually make sure that’s still a safe environment for you. Okay, so what sGTM is, so it really is a separate container.
So, how we talked about GTM being a container on your site that holds all these tags. Well, this is going to be a separate container apart from that. [00:06:00] So the idea is they aren’t replacing each other. They work in tandem. So the idea is you can still continue to have your GTM container that has all your tags already set up.
What you’re going to add to the equation now is this SGTM container, which is now going to accept the signals from your GTM container and enable you to make some data transformations. So I’ll show an example here in a second. So again, reminding you just real quick, because I feel like it’s good to just do a quick switch here.
This is our traditional web tag. We just talked about. So now when we’re watching. When we switch to sGTM, you can kind of see that change that happens. Right? So instead of all those individual tags, sending their data straight to each platform. Now, all of that data is going to your cloud server instead, inside of your sGTM container.
And now what’s going to happen is within there, you’re going to accept those pieces of data into your and now, when they’re in there, sGTM gives you a chance to actually adjust some [00:07:00] of that data to change it up. And then once you’ve changed it now, you can actually do the same piece of movement that you did before.
Which is take that data and send it to the platforms. So you can continue that process after you’ve cleaned the data. So we’ll show a little bit what’s going on behind the scenes. This gets a little bit more technical for everybody. But the idea is if you were to go in when you’re on a website with the choosing, say, Google, GTM or Google Analytics 4, what you’d see if you went saying to the network information is you’d see little packets of information that are getting past the different places. The one that GA4 typically sends is the one that we see with that pink arrow headed to it up at the top there. It’s that collect kind of statement.
So the idea is that’s what GTM is helping to send to Google Analytics 4 to tell it all the different things that you’re collecting and all the different pieces of [00:08:00] information. So, one of those in there could be your IP address. It could be data. It could be the name of the event. So there could be all kinds of pieces of info.
So, what’s happening here is all this data instead of it going straight to GA4, like we showed with the Web GTM. With sGTM, it’s now coming into that container and what happens is you can see that next step down where it says GA4 client there.
What happens is that client is now going to split all those variables out, so we can see them all and therefore we can adjust them. So we may have that field one equals value one there. That could be, your IP address and then what the IP addresses is. And then what we can do is basically take that, adjust it and change it. So we can remove some pieces of, some pieces of information from that IP, they call them octets so it’s in between all those little dots.
So we can remove a couple of those to make it more vague. Right? So we can still know, maybe a city, maybe a state, but we wouldn’t know that person’s [00:09:00] specific IP and their specific location. And so now we’ve helped kind of anonymize that a bit. And so we can send that data instead to GA4. Which is helping not identify the person, but still give us some of that data.
And so what we’ve done is we’ve basically made that data transformation. We’ve taken in that variable. We’ve changed up the value and then we’ve sent it out. And so that doesn’t have to just be necessarily IP address. You can say, remove a page URL. So if that’s something you don’t want, say, Facebook to have access to, you don’t think it needs URLs.
Well, you can remove those URLs. You can hash them and send those along to Facebook then. So it wouldn’t actually know what page this event happened on. So you have a way to kind of clean your data in different ways. And so what data available, what things you can kind of transform are all different based on the software you’re working with.
But that’s one of the wonderful things about is it gives you kind of list. You can see all these variables. You can see the values in them, [00:one0:00] and then you can make rules to change each one of them. And so, in that way. That’s how kind of the two softwares work together. You’ve got GTM doing its kind of standard triggering and tagging.
And then basically that data is getting now sent to this SGTM server where it’s kind of making these adjustments for you.
Jenny: Yeah. And I think one thing that’s really interesting is whenever we are doing a patient privacy implementation, we have the ability to work with our client and their legal and compliance teams, and really align on exactly what data needs to be cleaned.
What data they are comfortable sharing, because some people are more conservative than others based on their state and the subindustry within healthcare, et cetera, but it does allow you then to continue using platforms like Google analytics for in a compliant and safe way, because a lot of clients and folks are coming to us because they’ve already invested lots of time and energy on getting dashboards and reporting infrastructure set up.
And so this is a way to kind of continue that, but in a safe way.
Mark: Yeah, that’s exactly right, Jenny. And we do have those conversations quite often. [00:oneone:00] There’s always going to be a little gray area there. So there’s, different legal counsels can have different opinions. And until some of this really, gets into case law and we have some kind of judgments there, we’re going to kind of still live in that gray area.
And so I think this is what’s so nice is, yeah, we can list all those out and we can make decisions, we can document it all. So it can be shared, it can be referred to which is a really handy thing.
Jenny: And modified. Right, in the future. So whenever a case does happen, we have all the documentation and then go back and modify it, which really cleans things up that you don’t have to do a whole other audit, a year or two from now, whenever some clarity is released.
Exactly. Yeah. So, well, Mark, thank you so much for our listeners. I know this was a slightly more technical episode than we typically do, but for those of you that are heads down trying to figure out your patient privacy solution, understanding how the technology actually works and functions can really help empower you to make the right decisions for your own organizations, marketing tech stack.
So, as always, if you have any [00:one2:00] questions or you want to chat with the Hedy and Hopp team directly. Reach out to us, go to our website, fill out the contact form. We’d be happy to talk to you about your own marketing tech stack implementation and any specific questions you have about how to make sure that your patient’s information is safe.
And with that, thank you for tuning into this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” We look forward to seeing you on a future episode. Bye.
In today’s episode, Jenny breaks down the fundamentals of building a successful content marketing strategy, using the example of the multi-pronged content marketing strategy Hedy and Hopp built for St. Louis Children’s Hospital with two key components:
Jenny shares a few things to keep in mind when building a content marketing strategy from the ground up, which include the following:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
St. Louis Children’s Hospital Case Study:
https://hedyandhopp.com/case-study-momdocs-2/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of we are marketing happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of the podcast and also the CEO and Founder of Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare marketing agency that absolutely loves the work that we do. So I am thrilled to be here with you today.
One of the topics that we continue to see coming across our desks here at Hedy and Hopp is content marketing strategy. We have really developed a couple of best practices that we find work really well to build a foundation of content. And then also really be able to expand that content out across your entire digital presence as well as a key social media platform, so I thought I’d share that with you today, and I’m going to use one of my favorite projects that we work on with St. Louis Children’s Hospital as the example. So, St. Louis Children’s Hospital is a longtime client of Hedy and Hopp.[00:01:00]
We absolutely love the work that they do. I’ll put a link to the case study actually in the show notes, you can go check out not only the case study, but the live site itself. But I want to talk a little bit about why it works. So when the decision was made to do a content strategy for St. Louis Children’s Hospital, one of the first decisions was to actually create a separate standalone website to house that content.
And that happened for a couple of key reasons. The first was that it really helped with creative flexibility. I’m sure all of you marketers tuning in know that whenever you are within the constraints of your primary website, there’s a lot of formatting options that you don’t necessarily have flexibility with.
You may not have flexibility with URL structure, from an SEO perspective, et cetera. And usually a content marketing platform just has a different feel for a consumer than one where they’re actively trying to find a provider. So in this situation, [00:02:00] we chose to make a separate standalone site, Children’s Mom Docs.
And the entire concept was that we were going to have physicians answer questions that parents were struggling with at that time. So again, built a separate website to house all of this content. One of the reasons why we felt it was really important to have a separate website is because we know that social media trends shift, right?
When the website was launched, Vine was still a thing, right? Like imagine had we built the entire website or the entire strategy on the foundation of Vine. It just really could put you in handcuffs as far as future expandability. So what we always recommend is have a separate website or a subdomain of your current site, whatever, from a digital ecosystem management policy you may have within your organization do that. And then definitely need to make sure that you consider what social media platforms you want to choose to [00:03:00] expand to and then realize that you have to do editing for that content according to the different social media rules.
So we’ll talk about that in a moment. So a few notes of things that you need to be thinking about from a workload perspective and priority perspective. I have six. First one content strategy. So what we do with St. Louis Children’s Hospital is every month we look at search trends. So what are parents actively searching?
This could be related to children’s health in general, it could be related and kind of focus down to key service lines and topics that fall within those service lines. You’ll have to make that targeting decision yourself of how broad or narrow you want to be based off your content marketing strategy and goals, but we always recommend to our clients that even if you create an annual strategy of like how often you’re going to post and the format of how you’re going to post, you need to refresh the topics at a quarterly basis at minimum, because, as we’ve all seen over the last couple of years, life comes at you fast.
And so the topics and things that parents are going to be searching [00:04:00] for are going to shift rapidly. So your processes need to adapt to that. Second optimization strategies vary by platform. So it could be content, length, style, optimization approaches. What’s going to work for Tik TOK is going to be very different than what’s going to work on YouTube, but guess what?
It can be the same topic. It can be the same question, and then it can be shot multiple times or shot once and then edited down according to the channels. So really thinking about what is our POV or what is our topic and point of view that we want to talk about for this day or for this particular content piece. And then how are we going to optimize per channel?
Next is goals. The original goal for St. Louis Children’s Hospital back when this originally started eight years ago was to improve brand perception by the community. They wanted their brand to feel more approachable, more likable. And so our solution was actually putting the doctors out front and center answering the questions.
Let’s make them real. Let’s make them real humans. Instead of a faceless, scary building. And it’s worked [00:05:00] really well. Brand perception studies that have been done over the last few years have really shown that it has really increased the likability and comfortability with folks going to St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
But maybe yours is different. Maybe your goal is to promote a specific service line, or maybe your goal is to raise awareness for a specific service line that is new. Sometimes you may see that a goal, and we’ve intertwined this with some of the work at St. Louis Children’s Hospital is when a new doc comes on board.
By featuring them in the series that can fill their schedule up pretty quickly because it makes them more well known. And really get some visibility out into the community about that doc. So gotta to keep your goals top of mind. Number four, you got to support it with paid organic optimization is phenomenal.
And a huge volume of traffic for St. Louis Children’s and their content series is organic, but we find having a short term push of each new content piece. And this goes beyond just Children’s. This is for all of our clients. We do content work for short term pushes of paid really accelerate the [00:06:00] organic optimization and listings.
And we all know, theoretically, like that shouldn’t exist. Like paid shouldn’t help organic, but it does. So we recommend really figuring out what kind of paid can you use to support this content and what channels and in what frequency or duration do you want to do it? Is it going to be per episode?
Is it going to be per month? Figure that out and stick to it, but you have to have some sort of paid to ensure there’s eyeballs on your content. Five, video production. Video does not have to be highly produced folks. One of our most successful content series was a Facebook live that we shot on our iPhone.
It was great. Had hundreds of people tuning in every single week, engaging, asking questions during the video series. It was extremely successful. That was on an iPhone. Now I will say that not only with St. Louis Children’s, but also with some of our other content clients, they do choose to use video production services or vendors for [00:07:00] some content pieces, perhaps content pieces that they know would get additional visibility, or they want to be higher priority.
But then you can actually do lower quality video content or use the resources that you have within your own team for other pieces. So do not hinge a content strategy and a video strategy on if you have internal video services or a video agency that you really like. That should not hold you back.
People do not expect that. And in fact, some studies have shown that people actually trust video content more when it isn’t highly produced. Good thing to keep in mind. And number six, the final tip is patient privacy still matters. So even if it’s a separate website, you still have to pay attention to all the patient privacy stuff happening right now.
HIPAA rules, state laws, all those things still apply, especially if you’re talking about service line specific content and then linking to the schedule and appointment now. On your main website. So whatever patient privacy solution you’ve implemented on your main website, you need to carry those best [00:08:00] practices over to this content platform to be able to make sure that patient privacy is still top of mind. And number one.
So hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully these tips give you a little bit of an idea about if you’re thinking about doing a content strategy, some ways that you could optimize it. One thing that I want to give a quick shout out on is if you are still struggling to figure out patient privacy and what you want to do moving forward, please call us.
Q4, we launched a patient privacy solution where our team is implementing server side Google Tag Manager. You’ll have a BAA with Google. You’ll have a BAA with us. It’s the most cost effective and compliant solution out there. You’ll still get to use Google Analytics but all patient information, PII as far as device ID, IP address, et cetera, location, et cetera. All of that will be wiped as part of the server side tag manager solution. So, we are leaders in this space. We’re helping lots of folks overcome this hurdle. And if you’re still in the decision making process of, what path do we go down?
Give us a call. [00:09:00] Let us help out. We’d love to be here for you. So thanks for tuning into this episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Hope to see you on a future episode. Take care.
In today’s episode, Jenny shares her top three reasons to spend energy and resources toward submitting for awards: for recruitment, for credibility, and for ego.
Mentally categorizing award submissions into these three buckets each year helps her understand where her energy is going, and if it matches her goals.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of the podcast and I’m also the founder and owner of Hedy and Hopp, a full service healthcare marketing agency. I am excited to hop on today to chat with y’all about a topic that actually came up in a SHSMD forum.
So for those of you that have attended SHSMD in the past, you’ll know that there’s an awesome forum that folks within the industry hop on, ask questions, and then other folks in their field could then answer questions and give advice or recommendations. One of the questions was from a marketer within a healthcare system, and they were really toying with the idea of, should they spend the energy and the resources to apply for one of those “best places to work” for their organization? As healthcare marketers, y’all wear many, many hats and one of them sometimes can be [00:01:00] deciding on and submitting to awards. At Hedy & Hopp, we actually have a philosophy about awards. And it also kind of leans into speaking opportunities as well.
So I thought I would share that here. So there are really, in our mind, three reasons to spend energy and resources on either award or a speaking opportunity. And the first one’s for recruitment. So for your organization, if you are on a hiring spree, if you’re trying to fill a lot of difficult to fill positions I know the nursing shortage has eased a bit, but a lot of y’all are still really trying to fill some of those really difficult to fill positions.
“Best places to work” awards can be a good solution to be able to give yourself some third party credibility for being a place of employment that’s candidate friendly. So for recruitment is one of them. I will say that you usually have the option of looking at things like your local business journal.
They usually use a third party organization that [00:02:00] you have to pay a few thousand dollars to do surveys for your team members. There are also other “best place to work” awards that don’t require expensive third party survey process and you can just do your due diligence and figure out which one makes the most sense.
You definitely wanted to be one that has credibility within your own geography, so it could be a industry-specific, a healthcare-specific one as long as you have the ability to really leverage and utilize it and intertwine it with your open position promotion that you do. The second one is for credibility.
So again, first one for recruitment. Second one for credibility. So, um, a lot of organizations once a year kind of spin up the big initiative to be able to apply for the best children’s hospital in the nation award, or trying to win awards for specific service lines
For your marketing campaigns, for example, there may be a situation where you want to actually [00:03:00] apply for some awards to be able to get credibility for some of the work that you’re doing. Perhaps to validate it for your boss that your work is good. So credibility could be for internal or for external purposes. So you kind of have to use a filter and figure out when it makes sense to apply for something for credibility.
Usually it’s going to be through the patient’s lens and that it gives your facility or your service line or your physicians additional credibility. And then that’s something that you can intertwine throughout your annual marketing strategy as far as figuring out how to really maximize it. The third one, and this is a reason why or this is a reason a lot of people overlook, but it’s for ego.
Right? So the first one’s for recruitment, second one is for credibility, and the third one’s for ego. So you cannot overlook ego. Maybe there’s a doc within your organization that’s really great on camera, but they’re kind of grouchy and difficult because they don’t really see the value of doing content marketing.
Maybe submit them for an award for a [00:04:00] podcast they were on or for a content series that they did. Sometimes an ego boost by being recognized by peers can be enough to get somebody to shift their point of view to be more willing to do a part of the process or engage in your work in a way that can really help the entire organization.
So this isn’t one that you want to leverage very often, but it’s definitely one that you want to keep in your back pocket as a reason to apply for something. So again, as you’re thinking about your year, the awards that you want to actually spend energy and resources to apply for, because again, awards not only cost the time to identify them, prioritize them, and fill out the application.
Sometimes those applications could be meaty and could take hours, but they all always have a cost associated with them that can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. And especially for those of you with shrinking budgets, you got to figure out how to prioritize it. So again, as you’re thinking about your award strategy for 2024, I strongly recommend that you create an Excel [00:05:00] spreadsheet with a couple of columns and one of those columns needs to be what’s the purpose?
Why are we applying for this? Is it for recruitment for credibility or for ego? So hopefully that was helpful. Thank you for tuning in this week. And we look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Take care.
Today Jenny welcomes Jeff Stewart, VP of Strategic Marketing at CHRISTUS Health. Jeff discusses CHRISTUS Health’s strategic journey to grow brand equity through streamlining each of CHRISTUS Health’s twelve distinct health systems under one united strategic vision.
Jeff offers advice for striking the right balance between consolidating marketing initiatives and finding the right partners who perform specific functions really well, as there is no single agency that can do it all really well, each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, Jeff shares his advice for marketing leaders who are tasked with consolidating teams, agencies, and initiatives. Jeff shares a “both and” strategic approach to marketing that enables CHRISTUS Health to drive a unified brand message at a large scale, while also offering unique, localized selling points for each health system within CHRISTUS Health.
Connect with Jeff:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jstewart1759/
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. And I am so excited to have with me Jeff Stewart. He is the VP of strategic marketing at Christus Health. Jeff, welcome.
Jeff: Thanks for having me excited to talk to you.
Jenny: So we, my team fell in love. We saw you speak at a conference this year and you’re just a very succinct and eloquent speaker. So you and I connected afterwards. And one of the things that we really got into some detail on is the strategy around building an internal team. So as you joined Christus and began you know, over the last few years, kind of reshaping things together, talk to me big picture about some of your objectives in doing that. And some of the key steps you’ve made.
Jeff: Well, I think the motivating factor comes from what will be familiar to everybody in the industry right now, which is cost pressure and labor pressure. Right. When you have labor costs that are [00:01:00] skyrocketing with no end in sight, really, even when they plateau, I doubt that there’s any real significant reduction to come.
And obviously, the first priority is always our clinical staff, which means that marketing becomes something that gets a real hard look. And so that cross pressure was very real. And it justifies, I think, in the minds of the executives, why we do things. But when you look at the strategy part of it, Christus has helped at a real opportunity to grow our brand equity and to have a tighter control.
Essentially we had in, in each of our sort of individual health systems, we had a marketing team that was dedicated to that area and they were empowered to certain levels over the years to execute what they needed to do to market for that individual health system. They had our brand guidelines. They could go to any agency. They knew what our logo was, but they could kind of use any logo on any piece depending on whatever. So it really created as we now step [00:02:00] back in a digital world and think, you really can only have one brand identity in a digital world in healthcare. But yet we have 12.
And so how do we begin the work of pulling that together? And I think that starts by getting us all on the same page and getting us all under the same structure, all under the same authority. And then bringing in a lot of that work that was out. And we also transitioned from treating our brand guidelines as a set of rules.
And that if you possess these rules, you can therefore stick that into the marketing machine, pull the lever and out comes Christus. And I think if brand guidelines, are just at that, they’re guidelines. And so we have rules, but the rules need to be stretched and broken and grow and evolve. And you can only do that with a more central authority.
So we did it to answer the labor pressure, the cost pressure, to deal with the reality of the fact we were never going to have staffs of five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 in any particular hospital at any given time. But we also recognize that was creating [00:03:00] strategic problems for us on the other side.
So we have a goal of being a strong brand of Chris’s health. We weren’t going to get there. As a bunch of independent teams.
Jenny: Absolutely. Over the last eight years at Hedy and Hopp, we’ve seen a lot of systems centralize their marketing teams. What balance did you walk as far as centralizing everything versus maybe leaving a little bit of the tactical or execution work at the location level? Where did you fall?
Jeff: Oh, Yeah. So, and I think we’re still on that journey and it continues to be a journey. But what I would say is, our executive vice president, chief strategy officer is such a great guy. And we really appreciate the guidance and vision that he gives us. One of the things is he really views that, like, get everybody on board, right?
Like make this a positive thing. And I think so often, and I hear this, and it was a tendency to do this of like, Well, system says so, right? Corporate says so. And if they become edicts and that didn’t, then everybody feels like they weren’t heard. They didn’t have the chance to talk about why they want to [00:04:00] do what they want to do or how it’s set up that way.
And so we’ve really focused on bringing the things along one at a time with a compelling case. And so we’ve gone back a number of times and done some additional research on any particular consumer, narratives. One great example is we recently moved the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio, which is a Christus hospital.
And it’s a wonderful freestanding academic children’s facility, women’s and children’s hospital in San Antonio. We moved them over to be Christus Children’s and bring them into the brand part of the centralization part of bringing them close to the family. But in order to do that, we could certainly, I guess, tell them to do it, but that.
No, but it’s never going to go well right, but instead, we conducted research and one of the key things that came out as we asked 100 people in San Antonio, who owns Children’s Hospital San Antonio, what network are they associated with? And the answer was not Christus. What we were first. We weren’t second.
We weren’t. We were third, right? And so that [00:05:00] becomes clear. We got to make it Christus Children’s. They’ll give them the why. And so, we did that on the marketing people, right? Moving our teams, re centralizing our teams here out of Irving, Texas, and the why that made sense. And we’ve made a number of other, we’ve centralized our creative services.
We give the why, and it makes sense. And now, we’re on, we’re in the process of looking at it. media planning, media buying, budgeting, but all of those continue to be a series of successive conversations as they make sense so that we’re never doing too much at any time.
Jenny: That makes a whole lot of sense.
One thing that I think was interesting that we hear all of the time is that again, 12 locations have the freedom to choose their agency partner. That may mean you’re working with 24, 36 individual agencies, so as you’re going through and cleaning things up right like how are you choosing and selecting how many partners you have, the areas of expertise that folks are leaning in on [00:06:00] versus what you’re keeping in house?
Yeah, sure. I’d love feedback.
Jeff: Yeah. Right. So, we didn’t want to get down to one, we know one is too few, right? But we know 11 is too many. So where’s the in between? And really we just work with the people that we’ve had a really successful and great relationship with. And one of our partners we use for a decent amount of creative work has been with Christus.
Christus turned 25 in three months and I believe he’s actually done 30 years worth of work because he was with one of the systems prior to Christus. And he’s great. He really knows us and understands us and knows our challenges and has had the opportunity to work with a number of different ministries, health systems over the years.
And we have a strategy creative agency that we’ve used now we brought that I brought on after I started here we did an RFP and found them and we continue to use them, and they have gone through other systems on this journey that we’re on as well and so you’re getting a lot of understanding of how other systems have tackled service line planning and transitioning or involving corporate led campaigns with.
With health system led campaigns, what that blend and [00:07:00] process looks like. But then on the digital side, I think that’s where we had some real opportunity that since I’ve started I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find one agency who does it all. And you got to find the agencies to do certain things really well.
And so, I’ve had the opportunity to work with an SEO agency over the last 10 years that I just think is, just hands down, not just healthcare, across everywhere, one of the smartest agencies around. And so they’re really good at that, but they’re not, they may not be our best option for say web development.
And actually we use a couple of different web development agencies, some that are better on the infrastructure side, because we’re an Azure SAS world, and that’s its own animal and then some that are better on the Sitecore side and some that are actually better on integrating with Sitecore. And then we have a mobile app partner.
And that, is that a pain too? Sometimes it is, because sometimes you have overlaps and how do you make the decision, but also that creates competition and helps keep us on our toes. But, I think specifically [00:08:00] digital niche is the right move.
Jenny: Absolutely. I think one thing that’s really interesting and that successful leaders do is really viewing their agency and vendor partners as humans and extensions of their teams, because everybody has strengths and weaknesses, right? In areas that they really shine in. I think you talked about bringing multiple agencies with you.
I think that’s the biggest compliment an agency can get is when somebody leaves, goes to a new organization and chooses to bring you over.
Jeff: When I use the word partner advisedly. We mean that, right? We’ve had a recent conversation with one of them.
I said, if anybody, any agency partner who listens ever worked with me, I tell you all the time, if I’m wrong, I’m counting on you to tell me. And if we get to a point where you can’t tell me I’m wrong, this relationship won’t work. Right? It absolutely has to work. I depend on you.
And in fact, where I look back where things haven’t always gone well with agencies. One of, one of the challenges we find is they don’t want to challenge us and, or they get to a point where the [00:09:00] communication begins to break down and we just really struggle, then, to ever get to a point where we’re benefiting from them or where they’re not able to say, like, we’ve worked with other partners who’ve done this, but don’t have to be healthcare.
Right? It might be somebody who says, look at the web. The best way to schedule appointments on the website is actually to take from say A service some sort of service industry, like a moving service, sorry, like scheduling, moving vans, like scheduling an appointment. And, we solve that challenge for them this way.
We think it could apply here. I need that to come inside. Cause if I just talk to the group sitting out here, I’m not getting that right?
Jenny: Absolutely. Especially a number of folks have been in healthcare for a long period of time in house, it can be really difficult to be exposed to innovation. So that definitely makes sense.
So last question I have is for any marketing leader that is being charged with doing a consolidation of their marketing teams, agencies, initiatives, what advice would you give them?
Jeff: I’m going to [00:10:00] plug something real quick, but it’s a book that I’ve recently been reading. It’s called Both/And Thinking and it’s by Marianne Lewis, who I actually took a classroom at the University of Cincinnati and Think very highly of her, but it’s that. We really, this is a paradigm that I’ve tried to bring to the team is how do we make both things true?
Because quite often the centralization conversation is an either/or conversation, right? Which is either we’re going to do it all locally. Or we’re going to shove system stuff down, down their gullet. Right? And that’s not the way to look at it. It’s both. Right? And so if we can understand the dilemma that we’re faced with the competing sets of goals and incentives that exist at the local level and existed at the system level.
When we think about it in that sense, we can find a way to make both things true, right? So we look at, we’re on the verge of launching in the first quarter, it’s all approved, ready to go. Our first system led cardiology campaign. Now it’s [00:11:00] my, or my first slide. We’ve done it a few years ago and they did it the way that I think a lot of places do it, which is here’s your heart commercial, or I think it was actually oncology, here’s your cancer commercial, and it’s going to run in all our markets, and that’s it.
Or maybe, well, we could swap out the logo at the end. That’s not answering the real need. And so when we came back, it’s not answering the local level where they really want to feel like the reason to buy locally is there, right? We got the system, we got the brand, but we didn’t get the local. And so, and I think oftentimes you hear presenters, we can do a localized campaign or we can do a system and that’s not true.
We can do both. Right? Because we look at where your greatest efficiencies are in a system led campaign. They are in the top level broadcast, right? And the broadcast multimedia doing the big shoots, where you get, the lighting trucks and sound, but you do the whole deal, right? You only want to do that once.
You don’t want to do that 12 times, but we think about further down the funnel. And as you get from the far away to the [00:12:00] closer. When you get down to social and when you get down to search, you have the ability to present unique reasons to buy for each of, in our case, for each of our ministries, right?
So we can say, we can do the hard work up top to say Christus equals heart. We just want to drive that emotional connection. Christus and heart care are linked together and that we are there to care for you and your family. That’s easy to do and broadcast big dollars that work in all of our ministries because that’s true across all of our ministries.
But when you get down closer and closer to the point of conversion to the point of care, you have the opportunity to increase your localization of reasons to buy, right? So there we have in, let’s say, East Texas. We have the only dedicated heart hospital in all of East Texas. That matters. If you’re doing a heart commercial, that’s not mentioning that you have a hundred bed heart hospital in Tyler, Texas with almost 50 employed cardiologists to support it.
You’re [00:13:00] that’s almost a criminal negligent, right? Like you have to do that. But for somebody who is in Corpus Christi or in Beville, Texas, Alice, Texas, they’re a little bit further out. There’s not really a connection to that, but they have their own local reasons to, to understand where Christus provides dedicated heart care in their area.
And so we’ve focused on making both things true, high level system, brand efficiency and localized assets that matter at the point of care to the consumers.
Jenny: I love that. It makes me think of a huge access to care campaign that we did a few years ago where it was similar it was very large, not nationwide, but as nationwide as systems get, and it was large, big production, creative.
And then whenever you would actually begin going down that digital experience, individual landing pages with the access to care information that then could point out the individual differentiators. So there’s a way you have to get really [00:14:00] tactical in the execution of it down into the weeds.
But that’s such a great reminder that both/and I’m definitely going to buy that book.
Jeff: So it’s really good. I appreciate it. And I know Dr. Lewis or took her class but it’s really helped. I think our team reconceptualized, I had many of my team come up and go, I’m an either or person.
I didn’t, I guess I get that. And I’ve always sort of accepted it with this both and it’s like there, and we keep coming back to it. And it’s so fun when you get an idea that lives with the team and they can take it and say, Hey, Thanks. And let’s make two things true. We can make two things true at once.
We can look at a dilemma and face the paradox and find ways to get through it.
Jenny: Oh my gosh, Jeff, this has been such a fun interview. Thank you so much for being on today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m gonna put Jeff’s LinkedIn link down in the show notes.
So if you have any questions for him or want to connect, find that information there. And until next week have a fabulous time, go make a difference. And we’ll see you on [00:15:00] future episodes.