In the final episode of our “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we’re getting hands-on with AI platforms. While understanding how AI platforms function is important, it’s when you start using them in your workflows that the real value shines through. This interactive episode walks you through five practical exercises designed to make your daily tasks smoother and more efficient.
The exercises covered:
•Using ChatGPT for quick note transcriptions
•Brainstorming content ideas with Claude
•Conducting market research with Copilot
•Navigating privacy concerns with Perplexity
•How AI can improve communication
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we specialize in working with providers and payors across the U.S.
Today is episode three of our three-part series titled AI 101 for Healthcare Marketers. We designed this series to really allow you and then anyone on your team you forward the series to really understand how AI works, understand the different tools and models that are available to you, understand some core tenants of using AI within your marketing function.
And then really getting your hands dirty and doing some prompt engineering and getting some results. You got to move beyond theory in order to really understand something. So that’s today’s goal. If you are listening to me today, I strongly [00:01:00] recommend that you have me in one ear with an earbud and you have your laptop or computer in front of you, because I’m going to walk you through some prompts that are going to allow you to really get your hands dirty.
So this is really meant to be an episode that you listen to for a second. Pause, listen to again, pause. And it may take you an hour to get through it simply because you are being interactive and working through these different examples. And I think we have six different examples we’re going to be walking through.
But again, I strongly recommend do not skip this and please do not just listen to it and not do the prompts real time, because I know you say you’ll go back and do it later, but I assure you that you won’t because you are busy. An you have a million and one priorities so let’s please make this interactive. So we’re going to use a handful of different platforms.
The reason why we’re going to do that is because I want you to see what the output looks like. I want you to create a free account on a variety of platforms so you’ll go back to it and use it again. And I want you to see what they look like and the outputs that they [00:02:00] generate. So, the first one we’re going to do is Chat GPT, and this is actually something that you’ll need to use with your phone.
So take a moment, go and download ChatGPT, the app to your phone to your iPhone or Android, and it is as of the recording of this podcast so mid December 2024, it’s a little green icon that you’ll want to download. Once you download it, you’ll have to create a free account if you haven’t already. But this is one of my favorite uses, use cases to teach people that are kind of afraid of prompt engineering.
But it is a huge time saver. So I myself, I will show you for anybody watching the video, I am a handwritten note person. A study came out 15 years ago. I think that said, if you write during a meeting, it actually makes the information be cemented multiple parts of your brain. And, you know, I’ve never followed up on if that study is accurate or not, but I am [00:03:00] a believer.
So I’m constantly doing pages of handwritten notes. And then at the end of every day, I’m having to actually transcribe them and text them in in order to share them with my team. So this is a great hack. Using the ChatGPT app, open it up in the lower left-hand corner, hit plus button and go to camera.
So you can take a picture. Take a picture of your page of notes. You also can take a picture of a PDF. Let’s say a handout, like a marketing sales collateral piece. Take a picture. And then once you do that, hit submit, and then it will ask you, what do you want to do with this? And one of the options will be to transcribe.
So respond back. Yes, please transcribe. And then what it will do is actually then will transition that image, whether it’s handwritten notes, collateral, whatever, in to text. So it does such a good job reading handwriting. I have very bad handwriting and it does an excellent job reading my handwriting and trying to decipher the organization of content off my notes.
So if I had [00:04:00] something on the far right, it does a good job putting it where it needs to be in bulleted format. Once it does this, you can actually select the content. You can text it to yourself, jump into Slack, email it to yourself, whatever you need to do. But if you are a handwritten notes person like I am, this could be a great way to use AI technology to quickly eliminate that time consuming task of texting or typing in your notes.
Workshop number two, using AI for content brainstorming. I really like this from a content marketing perspective. So again, whenever we talked about the AI tenents, one of the core ones is not using output as a marketing collateral. Like we’re not going to take something that Claude writes and just use it as a blog post, right?
We’re not doing that for a variety of reasons, legal concerns, quality concerns, et cetera. But it’s great for brainstorming ideas. I really like it because it helps get out of my box in my own [00:05:00] head of the biases I have of what I think matters, what I think people are talking about. So we’re going to use Claude for this one.
So open your browser to Claude.ai, create a free account if you don’t have one yet. And then here is your prompt. So first we’re going to tell the platform we’re going to tell Claude their role, we’re going to give them a little bit of context and then we’re going to do the ask and we’re going to do a general ask and then we’re going to get more specific with the ask.
So here’s the prompt. And again, I’m going to read this. You can pause this podcast and then you can think about how you’d modify it for your own needs. You can type it in as is if you want, or you can modify it based off a project you want to do content brainstorming for your own organization and modify it.
So prompt, you are the chief producer for my podcast We Are, Marketing Happy. We create concise educational videos for healthcare marketers. Please create a visual mind map for all the video topics I [00:06:00] could write on about healthcare marketing for providers and payors. Please include the article title in a short summary for each topic.
Make the title and summary punchy and use lessons from David Ogilvie to craft them. So if you think about that prompt, we did a couple of things, right? Okay. Told Claude who they are, gave them context, and then said what we want the output to look like as far as the format and the copywriting approach.
This is really important because you could also have the copywriting approach be very professional and buttoned up or very casual using slang, modern slang language. There’s lots of ways that you can modify that to have it be appropriate for your brand. And for the output, I actually asked it to do a visual mind map.
Again, you don’t have to do that. It can, when it does the visual mind map, it also creates just like a piece of like written text to accompany it. That could be really helpful. Workshop number three, we’re going to use Copilot for this one. Again, just to get [00:07:00] examples using all the different platforms. So go ahead and open up Copilot, make an account.
If you don’t have one yet and here’s the prompt. This is around market research. I want to open an urgent care facility in St. Louis, Missouri, where my customers can get quick and easy access to care at a standard rate. Act as a market researcher and give me information on the demographics of people most likely to use urgent care in St. Louis, including age gaps or age groups, income, education, gender, and specific location. For queries like this, you’re likely to get back a lot of information that you already know. After all, you have a job as a marketer in healthcare. You’ve been doing this for a while. Some of you for a long time.
I’m 20 years into my career. I’ve been doing this a long time. Of course, I could do that on my own without using AI, but I like it for four key reasons. Number one, it usually adds perspective or other angles to things that I may have missed. Right? Assumptions that I may have [00:08:00] made. It uses language the community uses.
So specifically in that prompt, it ended up naming places like Central West End and other things that are just included in the day-to-day conversations that folks in St. Louis use. It challenges biases the team may have developed internally. So maybe with a specific service line, you think, oh, people come to us for pricing or people come to us because of this, and they always go to our competitor because of that.
Do they, or is that just what you’ve been telling yourselves for the last decade? So prompts like this are helpful for that reason. And then also when you tell it at the very end, if you add, please cite your sources and give citations it can find sources for you that are more likely relevant to your goal.
So there are general market research resources that you may use to pull data, but it also may share information for some lesser-known regional publications or additional contacts that maybe you wouldn’t have found otherwise. So it can be really helpful. The fourth [00:09:00] is around privacy. So for this one, we’re actually going to use Perplexity AI.
And actually, if you want to be if you want to be a little saucy, you can do it on Perplexity and you also can do it on Gemini and you can compare the results. But the prompt in this situation is around privacy. And once you opened Perplexity.ai, the prompt is going to be, please tell me the privacy and user concerns a healthcare business would have using Facebook pixel on their website, considering the most recent HIPAA guidance.
Now, this is interesting to look at the output for a few reasons. First of all, you can see if it’s biased or not, but also, so, again, I’m filming this mid-December. About three weeks ago, HIPAA, sorry, Meta dropped a bunch of additional guidelines around conversion tag usage for healthcare companies. Does Perplexity, Gemini, or any of the other tools share that with you?
How up-to-date and recent [00:10:00] is the information that they’re sharing? A lot of these models can access the Internet, but unless you tell it to, sometimes it just relies on the indexed data that has available. So, should you take any of these outputs as gospel? Absolutely not. But what it can do is actually summarize a lot of the issues around the topic in a tidy bundle.
Once you get that, then you can check into the sources that it cited, make sure that they’re accurate. You can learn some of the legal terms or issues you need to research. So, for example, maybe it will bring up some special considerations within your own state related to private state-level privacy laws, et cetera, so just flag some things you need to dig into and then also can give you a starting point to have a knowledgeable conversation with your other team members, like legal compliance analytics and development.
So whenever we are wanting to step outside of our own area of expertise there’s a whole nother culture and set of acronyms in all these other departments. So the more that you can [00:11:00] understand how to bridge that gap, the easier it will be and these tools can help you do that with queries like the privacy one we just shared.
And if we really want to dig into communication our final examples, we’re doing five, not six, I apologize, is around communication. So, for this one, you could really use any of the platforms that you like. I would probably prefer if I were doing this on my own, I would probably select Claude just because of the how human the responses are that Claude provides. But again, dealer’s choice.
You could even do it on multiple platforms to compare examples, but there are three separate prompts I’m going to give you. So you’d want to do each of them separately, but what we’re going to do is I’m going to tell you the prompt and then I’m going to tell you why you might want to do that prompt or other use cases within your organization or processes.
The first one is how do we speak about service line or disease, let’s say cardiology with the public? What is common nontechnical terminology that is [00:12:00] used? And what are the biggest concerns we should address? So, again, this challenges your organization’s messaging around service lines or diseases. It challenges biases or assumptions.
And it really can help you kind of get out of your own head whenever you’re thinking about how you’re talking about a service line. If you have service line campaigns launching in 2025, this is a great thing to run for all of them to make sure that your messaging is still relevant. Your landing page copy is still as comprehensive as possible.
And you’re being thorough for your patients. The second prompt. I think my business needs server-side Google Tag Manager. Can you explain that to me and help explain it to other people on my team? This is a great one if you’re trying to understand something that another team owns, and you need to be able to walk into a meeting and look like you kind of know what’s going on.
A great example of this is we were at, when our team was actually setting up server-side Google Tag Manager, we are setting it up on a Google Cloud platform. One of our clients. [00:13:00] Their internal team had only used traditional servers. They were asking us a lot of questions about using like traditional server language that just weren’t really relevant for Cloud servers.
And so our team was having some problem bridging the gap. There’d been like seven emails back and forth saying like, no, that’s not how these Cloud servers work. Instead it’s like this. And we just weren’t able to connect based off of that gap in vocabulary. Our team actually used a prompt that actually said, how can I explain this Cloud server set up specifically around X, Y, and Z to a person who’s more familiar with a traditional server structure?
And it gave all the answers, of course, our team read it, fact-checked the technical setup, et cetera, but once they did, they sent it over and the person on the other side of that, oh, awesome. Cool. Proceed. Right. So there was just a communication hump they couldn’t get over. And then the third one, this is great if you are walking into a meeting and you’re going to be expected to be knowledgeable about something [00:14:00] and you have no idea what’s going on, really great foundational knowledge.
So let’s say for example, here’s a prompt. We are interested in media mix modeling. What are some of the pros and cons of this that I should be discussing within my organization? So let’s say, for example, your manager put a meeting on your calendar for next week around a topic. And you’re like, Oh man, I’ve been so busy with these other topics I haven’t even really researched or learned about that yet.
You can type in a prompt like this to one of these platforms and say, give me the 101. What do I need to know to be able to speak on it at a foundational or intermediate level? And these platforms can give you the information and then you can even have a Q and A session to be able to make sure you’re rounding out your knowledge.
So a great way to use it. So why do you, why should we care about this? Right. When the first episode we talked about and we covered about how where we are with AI right now is sort of like where the internet was in the late nineties. People could still do business without it, but my gosh, once you started [00:15:00] doing it, it was easier.
And then once you got to, like, the mid 2000s, you really couldn’t do business anymore without understanding the Internet and being able to send an email. We’re kind of at that point with where, you know, you don’t have to learn it, but my gosh, and I don’t think it’s going to be 10 years from now. I’m thinking 5 years from now based on how quickly everything is growing and ramping up.
We need to learn and understand how to integrate AI into your workflows. And I strongly suggest you start now and going through this three-part series was already a great start, but what’s coming next. In 2025 is my guess we’re going to be seeing three key things.
We’re going to be seeing marketing campaign optimization. We’re going to be seeing a lot of ways that you can be able to optimize your campaign. Assets do a lot of additional testing within your campaigns to be able to optimize performance results. There’s going to be a big jump in the ability to leverage AI-based analytics analysis and reporting.
[00:16:00] So is an analyst job still going to exist? Of course it is. But they’re going to have all of these new AI tools that are going to take them from looking at data for seven hours to looking at it for 20 minutes and having a much better understanding about what is going on. And the third is creative asset development.
So right now, a lot of the creative tools are kind of crappy within AI, right? Like they’re nothing I would put out on behalf of our brand. Besides basically, like, the creation or extension of using a basic template, but in 2025, I really think that’s going to change. I think there’s going to be a lot of tools that are able to take a basic brand design and then framework and then really be able to roll it out to a lot of different assets.
So it’ll be interesting. And what you have to do now is get started now. Make sure you understand all of the guardrails. Make sure you’re really well versed on it. And then, of course, make sure that your organization is bought in and you have all of the different legal things in line. [00:17:00]
So thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series. I really hope this was helpful. We have found again the more you actually dig in and use these platforms, the less scary they are. Just remember to keep privacy top of mind, and I’d also recommend hopping on a couple of LinkedIn groups around using in your daily workflows.
There’s lots of great prompting examples that are shared. It’s just a way to be able, if you’re a LinkedIn user, like, I am, it’s a great way to really incorporate it into a daily bite size learning by using or joining a tool or sorry, a platform like that.
There’s also tons of newsletters you can sign up for, but I think at this point, most of them are created by so they’re not awesome, but it will give you information at least about the platform advancements if you’re interested in that. But thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series and for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.
My name is Jenny Bristow, and I so appreciate you tuning in, reach out for any questions. [00:18:00] jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Have a fabulous day. Take care.
In the second episode of our three-part AI series, Jenny builds on the understanding of AI by covering the six tenets for using AI at your healthcare organization. While AI offers exciting opportunities, it also comes with challenges that require caution and strategy.
The six tenets covered:
1. Approach AI results with heavy skepticism: Even tools like ChatGPT can provide inaccurate information, with hallucinations still occurring about 30% of the time.
2. Do not use AI outputs as-is: AI-generated content should always be reviewed and refined to avoid sounding impersonal or inaccurate.
3. Do not have AI create marketing deliverables: Relying on AI for final marketing assets can be a liability due to inaccuracies, bias, copyright concerns and can cause potential harm to your brand.
4. Be clear in your ask: Use structured prompting techniques to get the best results.
5. Ask for sources: Always ask AI tools for sources and confidence levels to verify their output.
6. Keep privacy a priority: Treat any shared information as though it could appear on a public billboard to ensure confidentiality and compliance.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of this fabulous podcast. I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m very excited today to bring you episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers.
In our first episode, we talked about how to understand AI if a person presents it to you. Trying to understand and categorize the different kinds of AI at a foundational level to give you a better understanding. And the six core platforms that are used most heavily today
What we’re going to do in episode two, is we’re actually going to talk about the core tenants, the 6 tenants of using AI in healthcare marketing. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how to get buy-in within your internal organization about using these tools. So let’s get started.
[00:01:00] Six tenants for using AI in healthcare marketing. The first tenant is approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Even ChatGPT knows it lies sometimes. So it’s called a hallucination. All of these platforms are built wanting to please the user, which is you. So if you ask these platforms are questioned that they don’t know the answer to very often they will lie to you.
They will come up with an answer. So you have to really approach all of them with really heavy skepticism. A great example is at Hedy & Hopp, again, we’re a full-service agency. So we do everything from marketing strategy, messaging, persona work, to activation. So big strategy and activation for campaigns to drive patient volumes.
A great example of this is on the privacy side we were digging in and helping one of our new clients be compliant. They were in a state that we hadn’t worked with before. So, before we called our attorney that we have on retainer for all of our privacy work, we thought, hey, let’s see [00:02:00] if these platforms can give us a good rundown of the current privacy laws in that state.
No, the platforms lied. Specifically, ChatGPT lied. It actually made up a court case, including the name of a court case. So had we not been super diligent and actually fact-checking the result we would have given wildly inaccurate information and it does this for all sorts of questions. It could do it if you ask it a statistic, if you ask it any information that it cannot easily access, even the versions that have ready access to go onto the Internet to search. If they can’t find the answer quickly, they will lie. Now the percentage of times hallucinations happen are drastically dropping. Every time that these models are updated, hallucination rates decrease. I saw a recent study that for in particular, from the prior model to this model, hallucinations dropped [00:03:00] from it was like a percentage in the fourites down to in the thirties. And you may say, Jenny, but wait in the thirties is still super high. And yes, it is, which is why we’ve got to fact-check this stuff.
So again, number one was approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Number two, don’t use AI output. As is it’s not great. It reads like it’s AI. So there will be a time and place where AI models are sophisticated enough where they can do full content creation and copywriting for you. But it’s just not there yet today.
We tested all of the current platforms, but the same prompts and have been doing that over the last year to kind of understand the way that they’re maturing and the way that the models are shifting Tested different prompts, all of these things. You do not want to make any of your users feel as though AI [00:04:00] is talking to them.
So we’ll talk about some ways that you can use AI to compliment your content marketing program through thought partnership, brainstorming, assumption checking, but we’re not going to use the output as is. And number three is do not have AI create marketing deliverables. So a couple of reasons, but the biggest takeaway is it’s a direct liability to your employer or your brand.
There’s four reasons why. First legality. I mentioned this in the first episode when I went through all of the different tools, but ChatGPT is actively being sued because they trained the model using a lot of content where the creator of the content was not given. They did not give permission and they were not compensated.
So, imagine if ChatGPT, you know, next year ends up settling this lawsuit or going all the way through the courts and then being fined, say 2 billion. How do we know that’s not going to roll downstream? And [00:05:00] anybody who used any some certain outputs of ChatGPT are going to be financially liable.
We don’t know that. And so we have to be really careful and understand that using it exactly as is to create a marketing deliverable can be a legal liability. We also are going to bring up hallucinations again, accuracy. We don’t know that it’s accurate, right? We’re not going to trust it more than we trust our own ability to create content or strategy work.
And so that’s important. Bias. AI tools can learn bias from the data and training that it is interacting with. So, you want to make sure that you’re really careful in the way that you prompt, even the words that you use. Maybe creating bias and the results that you’re receiving. So we have to be really aware of that and not using deliverables as is to publish content out on behalf of our brand can protect you from that.
And then fourth attribution and authoring [00:06:00] along with the aforementioned legal issues. If these tools are used to create things that are put into production, there could be an issue. For example, let’s say you’re doing a brand refresh and you’re wanting to come up with a specific tagline. You ask Gemini, for example, to come up with a variety of taglines for you and one feels so good.
It is so awesome. And you launch it. A week later, you find out that’s one of your top competitor’s taglines. No wonder it sounded so good. So again, you cannot take things at surface value. So we’re not going to have it create marketing deliverables for us. The fourth tenant is to be very clear in your ask.
So there’s actually a prompting structure called Risen R I S E N that my friend, Chris Boyd forwarded along to me. And cause I had just kind of been creating all of these prompting structures myself. And he goes, you know, there’s a thing called Risen, right? Like, Oh, thanks, Chris. Yeah, I didn’t. I appreciate you.
But whenever you’re actually creating [00:07:00] a prompt or typing in something to ask the AI model to do something for you, it’s called a prompt. You want to give it clear directions by asking it to play a role, giving it context using specific language, asking for multiple versions, asking for it to cite sources.
Sometimes a prompt or request can be two pages long. So prompting is truly an art form today. Now, will prompting be important in this time in 2025? Probably not. I think back to when again, the Internet was first coming online in the late mid nineties, late nineties. I taught myself. I was in 7th grade in 1997.
I taught myself how to hand-code websites using HTML and JavaScript, and I started a web development business and I built lots of websites in my local community for businesses, schools, and churches. It was really important to know HTML and other coding languages at that point. Today, you can stand up a website using Squarespace and [00:08:00] not have a, any idea about what the code looks like on the backend.
Now, is there still a profession where understanding coding is super important. Of course there is, but again, we’re talking about like the average marketer. And if you need that skillset, I strongly still recommend that if you’re interested in becoming proficient, you should understand prompting and prompt engineering.
There are a couple of different sources. I would recommend Coursera has some great courses around prompt engineering specialization. Udemy has a session called Master AI with Prompt Engineering. It’s 65 bucks. So super affordable. And then LinkedIn learning has lots of new sources. I do know that they run specials from time to time.
If you’re a new user, maybe your employer already has the ability for you to do LinkedIn learning courses. Check it out. Otherwise, they still are really affordable to go through them. It is really important to understand it again now and I still think it’s going to be [00:09:00] important in the future as these models get better and better at kind of like guiding the user where we need to go.
We may not need to know exactly what a prompt should look like at that level of granularity, but it also still helps your brain understand what’s happening behind the scenes. So it’s still a great tool or a good thing to learn. Number 5. This is why I love Perplexity, but also why I think maybe Perplexity may not be around much longer because you can do this for all the models.
You just have to remember always tell within your prompt for the platform to cite its sources. So, you can ask the platform to give you its confidence level and its answer, and then also ask it to provide sources and citations for any information it included the results. So again, Perplexity does this automatically, but all the other platforms, you can just include that at the end of the prompt, and it’s really fabulous.
And then number six, remember, keep privacy a priority. We absolutely have to keep remembering that. Any [00:10:00] information you put within these platforms, imagine it going on a billboard outside of your organization. And if you’re comfortable with that. By all means, move forward with it. The last thing I want to touch on is building consensus within your organization.
So one of the reasons that we created these six tenents is to give our clients and then also just people in the healthcare marketing community, a starting point to have these internal conversations. Just like in the privacy world, if you go to your legal and compliance teams and say, hey, here’s what we’ve been doing with marketing, here’s the diligence we’ve been doing. Here’s the research and the education we’ve been doing. Let’s have a conversation to get aligned. It’s a much more mutually respectful situation than if you go to them and say, hey, will you do all this privacy stuff for me? You know, so let’s treat AI the same way.
Let’s do the legwork. Let’s understand some initial starting points of how we may want to use it within our organization. Let’s help come up with some rules of what we want to see [00:11:00] happen within our marketing team and the usage within our team and organization. And feel free to use these six tenents as a starting point, add to it, modify it, whatever you need to do.
But these are some great guardrails as you’re thinking about rolling it out and implementing it across your team. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers was helpful. Next week we’re going to cover some actual prompts.
We’re going to dig in and actually look at some specific queries you can type in with some real use cases. So when you’re listening next week, be sure to have me in one ear with your laptop pulled up in front of you cause it’s meant to be an interactive session where you can get hands-on and really build your confidence at starting to use some of these platforms. W
ith that, have a fabulous rest of your day and we can’t wait to see you next week on that episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In the first episode of our three-part “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we break down the basics of AI so healthcare marketers can better understand how to use it effectively. Jenny discusses how AI has rapidly evolved—ChatGPT is just two years old, with 56% of adults ages 18 to 24 using it according to YouGov and Reuters Institute—and explains the types of AI, including Narrow AI (used today), General AI, and Superintelligent AI. She also covers how AI learns through methods like supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and highlights its key capabilities, such as natural language processing and computer vision.
The episode introduces the most used platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude, breaking down what makes each unique. By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of the leading AI tools and how they can be utilized.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 this fabulous podcast and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service 100 percent healthcare marketing agency located in the Midwest and we specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
Today I am very excited to kick off the first episode of a three-part series about AI and healthcare marketing. In this three-part series, we’re going to break down a topic that a lot of marketers really find overwhelming. Whenever you’re learning a new technology, that is such a seismic shift from how you work in your normal day-to-day you typically have a couple of different approaches.
You have early adopters, people who love learning new things, making themselves feel vulnerable, and shaking up their day-to-day. And then you have the people that, you know, adopt things in a [00:01:00] standard time frame. They’re not going to be an early adopter.
They’re going to wait and see which tools really shake out, which processes shake out, and how the industry responds. And then, of course, you have the laggards, the people who really don’t want to adopt new technology. I’m hoping this three-part series will help demystify AI and help give you, and hopefully, your team, if you choose to share this podcast series with them, a much better understanding of AI as it stands today.
So late 2024 going into 2025. And really understanding how can we begin using AI effectively within our internal marketing processes today? What does that look like? What do we need to put into place in order to make sure we’re doing it effectively? And you know, where do we start? So our three-part series, episode one is going to help you understand the primary AI platforms right now.
So I’m recording this in mid-December 2024. We’re going to talk about their differentiators and [00:02:00] examples of different tasks where they shine. Episode two is going to be talking about practical ways to really develop some framework around how you roll AI out to your internal marketing team. So we’re going to call it the six healthcare marketing AI tenents.
And we’ll provide some guidance around how you can work with your own legal and compliance teams, and be able to set up some frameworks so you can use them in an approved way within your organization. And the third and final episode is going to be real-world examples. I’m going to have you listen to this podcast, and have your laptop or computer up.
Pause me. Do the prompt on your other window, and then hopefully you’ll feel much more comfortable understanding what you’re looking at and ways that you can incorporate it in a meaningful way into your day-to-day workflows. So with that, let’s dig in. I think one of the most interesting things when you think about AI, I mean, ChatGPT really became available to the public in 2022.
So I’m filming this in 2024. It’s just two years [00:03:00] old. I mean, it is not that old. That’s basically the same amount of time that we as marketers have been worrying about all of the HIPAA guidelines changing. So a lot has been happening in our world. So first of all, take a deep breath and just say, to yourself, it’s okay if you’re not on the bleeding edge of AI implementation, you’ve had a lot of other stuff to worry about, but I do want you to think about, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands, you know, even if you like me, I wasn’t in the business world yet at that time, but I very clearly remember the shift to people being comfortable with using the internet and using email in the business world.
If you made that shift. You were successful. If you didn’t make that shift, it really impacted your career trajectory opportunities. And that’s what I am going to do. So a great quote is by Karim Lakhani, a Harvard professor. It is “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” and that’s very much my belief as well.
I don’t think marketing departments are [00:04:00] going to go away, but I do think we’re going to be expected to move faster and use technology to really expedite our processes and our output. So let’s learn how to do that. Another thing I will say is that in June of 2024, EMARKETER came out with a study, they did a survey to understand how many people are actually using AI in their day-to-day, not just at work, but in general, even for their personal life and 56 percent said of adults, ages 18 to 24, have used ChatGPT, but that number drastically decreases as folks get older.
In fact, if you look at the age range of folks, 45 to 54, only 28 percent of people have ever used ChatGPT. Now, that was about six months ago, so I’m sure that numbers are a little higher at this point, but if you haven’t really dug in yet. That’s okay. Let’s get started. So when I’m learning something new, I like to put a framework around it.
I’d like to understand what am I learning. How am I learning it. So that’s how I’m going to present AI to you [00:05:00] today through the lens of a framework. There is an AI upskilling framework that LinkedIn Learning put out that I’m a really big fan of. They, it’s basically a pyramid shape and each level of the pyramid is a higher level of specialty within this topic.
So the foundational level is understanding what AI is, having some overall literacy around it and understanding what responsible AI looks like. The next level up is actually applying it. This is where you start prompt engineering, start developing a strategy around AI implementation, and really focus on productivity with it.
Above that is where you’re actually perhaps building your own AI models or putting an overlay, a skin over an existing one to be able to build your own interface. Above that, you’re really becoming a specialist at this point. This is where you’re training and maintaining models. You might be, you know, building a machine [00:06:00] learning models, really getting into deep learning and neural networks. So you’re really a technical specialist. And then above that is really where you’re deeply specialized, where you’re at the level of education, where you can even do security and ops specifically around AI. So as we’re thinking about that level of special specialization that you can do with AI, we’re really going to focus on those bottom two levels.
We’re going to focus on understanding and then applying it. So, that’s our goal today. I do want to pause a little bit and give you a general reminder about compliance. I am the queen of compliance. I don’t want to be, but here we are.
I’m always talking about compliance on our podcasts. We’re going to talk about this a lot. As we talk about the actual ways that you can get your hands dirty and start using AI, but a general reminder, unless your organization has set up its own AI ecosystem that you know is private and secure within your own environment, you have to treat everything that you [00:07:00] put into AI as though you’re putting it on a billboard outside of your office.
So for example. Of course, we’re not going to upload patient names, but we’re also not going to upload information like our revenue goals for a service line or our organization’s name. And, you know, what areas we’re focused on for growth for the next year. Assume anything that you put in will be used to train the model, even if, many tools offer this, even if you opt out of allowing it to do that, you still have to make the assumption that unless you have signed a contract with them and you know that it is within a secure ecosystem, somehow the data could be leaked.
So proceed with caution. The other thing that I will say is that Europe is again leading the charge in the world of privacy, and they actually have developed an EU AI act. The estimated rollout is in 2026, and their focus is ensuring that AI is used in a safe and approved manner. And they’re specifically looking at things like [00:08:00] preventing the manipulation of human behavior to circumvent free will and the exploitation of vulnerabilities of a specific group of people.
So fabulous things to put in place. Some things that I know US-based AI organizations have struggled with a little bit because we haven’t put those sorts of guardrails in place. And it’s why we’re going to have a variety of tools to talk about today, because there’s been inner fighting and they break up and start another organization that they think will be more ethical.
But again, Usually, like we saw with GDPR, whatever starts in Europe will eventually make its way over to the U.S. We likely will see some sort of legal framework coming around AI usage in the future, but right now nothing exists. If you go out on the web and you just type in AI for copywriting, there are going to be dozens of tools that come up.
If you do AI for design. Dozens of tools are going to come up, but at the end of the day, most of them are actually powered by just a handful of [00:09:00] models, less than a handful of models. So what we’re going to do today is we’re not going to talk about the 40 cool design apps or this cool app that can help make sure I’m looking at the camera when I’m doing this podcast, because maybe I’m reading off a script, which I’m not.
I always go off-script. Just ask my podcast manager. It drives them crazy. But we’re not focusing on that. I want you to understand the foundation of how AI works because then what you can do is look at any tool that a team member presents to you and you can say, yeah, but what model runs it and then you can understand structurally how it operates.
So I think we’re going to start with understanding the categories of how AI works, learns, et cetera. So the first question you want to ask whenever you’re presented with AI is what kind of AI is it? And there are really three kinds of AI. You have narrow AI, which is also known as weak AI. General AI, also known as strong AI and super [00:10:00] intelligent AI.
The only kind of AI that’s available to the general public today is narrow AI. So any sort of AI you’re interacting with right now, ChatGPT, Siri, or Alexa, all of those are really narrow AI. Strong or general AI is a platform or an AI tool that can really do anything a human can do, like learn new things, solve problems, and understand emotions.
They say this is not yet developed. I believe it likely is created, but it is not yet available for the average consumer. And then the third, which I really hope does not exist yet is super intelligent AI. And this is an AI tool that is really smarter than the smartest human in every single way. So picture a super brain that can solve problems that we can’t even imagine.
That is really what horror movies is made of. So that is a third kind. So all of the AIs we’re going to be talking about today are considered the first category, which is narrow or weak AI. The next question you want to ask when you start thinking about AIs [00:11:00] and how they categorize themselves is how does it learn.
There are again, three ways. But how it learns, you have supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. So supervised learning, for example, is when you show, you want them to recognize it, to learn how to recognize a cat. So you show lots of pictures of cats, labeled cats, and then it understands what a cat is.
Unsupervised is when you actually give it lots of photos of different animals, and then. Without telling it what it is, it kind of figures out based on similarities and context clues. Oh, these are all cats and these are all dogs. Reinforcement learning is more like training like a dog. So if it does a trick correctly, it gets a treat.
If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get anything. So it wants to learn in order to be given a treat of some kind. The next question that I always ask when you’re confronted with a new AI tool is what can it do? So you have four different categories of generally what AI [00:12:00] technologies can do. First is expert system.
So this is an AI that’s like an expert in their specific field. So think like a medical AI that can help doctors diagnose diseases. So they can perhaps look at test results, they perhaps can look at an MRI scan, and they can identify certain things. The next, which is what most people think of when they think of the word AI, is Natural Language Processing, or NLP AI.
So this AI understands and talks in human language, so this is a chatbot that you can talk to, think, ChatGPT. Again, that is an NLP AI. Computer vision AI. This is where AI can actually see and understand images and videos. So think like when you’re flying internationally and TSA doesn’t need to see your passport because it just took a picture of your face and it knows exactly who you are.
That is computer vision AI. And then the fourth category is called robotics AI. And that is when an AI [00:13:00] controls robots to do physical tasks. So think like an assembly line in a factory where it’s assembling cars or the Amazon warehouses where it’s actually picking items for shipment. That is robotics AI.
And the last section that we want to talk about whenever we’re thinking about AI is what kind of interface is it. So you have two. You have an out-of-the-box solution, which is what we’re going to talk about today. So you have ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, or you can build your own interface using one of those existing models.
So, when we think about all of those cool tools, for example, like that tool that can make my eyes look at the camera, even though I’m looking off to the side. That is an interface somebody built using one of the existing models to power it, and you can do the same thing. So once you get good enough at AI and understand how the different models think you could, for example, create a platform to allow your marketing team to interface with [00:14:00] a model that is segmented off into your own secure ecosystem, and it’s trained on your brand voice, and it is trained on your service line priorities and your marketing goals for 2025 and your team can do Q and A with it and get really specific with it. Really exciting and not really that hard.
So, in order to do that, you have to do a couple of things. You have to create a dev environment, decide which model you’re going to use, set up an API. So you can do that. Create an interface. How do you want to look at it and type with it? And then launch. And of course, you have to think about the security through the lens of of course, HIPAA and whatnot.
So your team would have to help you with that but it is not as technically advanced, you know, or scary as it may seem before you get to know how all these models work. So whenever we are talking about all the AI tools today, we’re really talking about are these couple of core models that have chat [00:15:00] interfaces on the front.
So we’re going to talk about 5 models. We’re going to talk about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. So these are the top 5 based off of our team’s usage and trends that we are seeing in the industry. Let’s dig in. The first, one, ChatGPT. This is the tool that when everybody says, do you use AI, this is what they are talking about.
Right now they have a 65 percent market share. It’s pretty astounding. They were the first one in market, they officially launched in November 30th, 2022. So they just celebrated their two-year anniversary, which is really crazy. It was developed by a company called OpenAI. And there’s a couple of specific things around it.
So, you can use the tool without logging in. Which is really nice if you’re wanting to just kind of understand the tool without creating a free account or signing up for a paid account, which you can do. Paid accounts or anywhere from 20 to 30 a user per month. And you also can get a [00:16:00] company account, where then you can create notebooks or the ability to have shared threads with other team members, which can be really helpful.
The next one we’re going to talk about is Gemini. So Gemini is actually a combination of two tools developed by Google. We have Duet AI and Bard. They lived separately and then they were, it was officially rebranded on February 21st, 2024. So this one has really only been around less than a year and it kind of feels that way.
It feels much younger. When you’re talking to it, it also feels like training guardrails have been put in place that make the answers feel a little bit more generic, but then also biased towards Google. So you may have noticed in recent months that Google is starting to include more Gemini responses in its search results.
So if you do a search, for example, saying like, who’s the best orthopedic surgeon in St. Louis. It will try to answer that with AI above the search results. So when people are thinking about and talking about like AI SEO [00:17:00] or AIO, that’s what they’re talking about is how do we get listed up in that area? It’s been a pretty slow rollout simply because of how long it takes to generate the answers.
And users are very impatient when it comes to searches on Google. So they are only rolling it out for some topics and for some users, but they will eventually have a pretty wide rollout. And then Gemini is also been the source of news headlines because of its apparent bias with its tool, especially when it comes to image generation.
If you think back whenever there was that big controversy around a query, such as give me a picture of a land owner. And it was an older white man, like there’s just some biases and the answers that it provides. And there also are biases in the written answers. So, for example, one of the queries we asked all of the platforms during our comparison and testing was information about if Google Analytics 4 was still safe to use with the new HIPAA guidance. And it wrote back and was like, why yes, you can still [00:18:00] use GA4. Whereas all the other platforms were like, proceed with caution. Here’s some information you need to know about it. So the tool is very clearly designed to keep you within that Google ecosystem.
But there are some built in integrations that make it really easy. For example, it’s already built into some of the tools you use on a daily basis such as Google drive, Gmail, et cetera. I will say my 14-year-old son is a huge Gemini fan and he uses it for a lot of his schoolwork. He creates private notebooks or gems for each of his classes.
And then he has it create study guides for him. So he uploads the documents that teachers give him, asks them to create study guides and to quiz him. So it’s really easy that it’s built-in with the existing infrastructure that many of us are already used to. The next platform is Copilot it’s owned by Microsoft and it runs on OpenAI’s GPT 4 large language model.
So what [00:19:00] again is interesting here is once you start seeing, okay, there’s all these different brands, but wait a minute, Copilot operates on OpenAI’s GPT. So you start to see overlap in the technology. It launched in February of 2023 and it replaced Cortana and Bing chat. It’s limited to only five queries a day without logging in.
So if you do want to kind of understand the tool without creating an account, you can dip your toe in a little bit. And then there’s a paid version that integrates with Microsoft 365. So your company may already have activated this. This could be an easy one to play with depending on your company’s tech stack and ecosystem.
It was definitely lesser known overall in the generative AI market, but they’ve done quite a few recent, well, throughout 2024, huge marketing pushes, including a bunch of Super Bowl ads that really increased its awareness. And we also really like that the formatting and prompt responses are pretty easy to read and consume.
So it’s notably different the way that it. [00:20:00] And the formatting it often did bulleted lists versus paragraphs of text. So that’s just an interesting difference in the way that it’s choosing to communicate. It’s also connected to the internet in the free version, which is a very helpful feature. But you have to be careful as it doesn’t have the maturity of ChatGPT, and it could be misleading with its accuracy or confidence levels.
So it hallucinates and we’ll talk about hallucinating a little bit. In the next episode, all these platforms hallucinate but Copilot definitely does. Another thing that I didn’t mention about ChatGPT is. And that’s going to come up with copilot also is that they right now are being sued by multiple different parties as a result of the way that it trained its model.
So, it basically just let it loose on the web and let it digest hundreds of thousands or millions of documents and pages and websites and books and all of these original content pieces created by other people without permission or [00:21:00] compensation. So, lots of lawsuits are happening with ChatGPT.
CoPilot, so, it’s powered by GPT. What’s interesting is they actually have advertised that they will protect any of its commercial customers from these lawsuits based off of their uses of Copilot. So, if ChatGPT ends up kind of going down or being sued for 2 billion dollars, will that roll downstream to its users?
We don’t know yet, but we do know that CoPilot through CoPilot, Microsoft has made a promise to allow it to roll down to its customers. So we’ll see if they hold true to that. The next two are interesting. So we got Perplexity. Perplexity is privately owned by four co-founders. It was launched in 2022 and it leverages OpenAI’s GPT 3.5model and Microsoft Bing’s search engine.
So it is really kind of positioning itself as a search enhancement tool rather than generative AI tool. And one of the things that we really like about Perplexity is how it really cites its [00:22:00] sources for any searches that you do. For example, if you’re going to be doing market research or anything where you really need to understand where the data is coming from, we really like perplexity for those.
Purposes, but we will see how long Perplexity is around as these other models continue to get more sophisticated and people just get used to asking for these models to cite their sources. It may not become as big of a differentiator. And the last platform I want to chat about today is Claude. So Claude is actually my personal favorite platform.
It’s owned by Anthropic, which was started by former members of OpenAI. So at the very beginning of the episode, I mentioned how there was a little bit of infighting within OpenAI because of the lack of consensus around if guardrail should or should not be put around the training models, the kinds of responses and questions that you can ask AI.
And so four people that helped found OpenAI just said, forget about it. We’re leaving. And they started [00:23:00] Claude. They use a unique approach called constitutional AI. And that means it’s focusing on making the models helpful, honest, and harmless by having them self-critique and revise their responses based on the company’s guiding principles.
So we think that they wanted to develop an AI that had more guardrails from the start, as opposed to the direction OpenAI took. The Claude AI models have been developed with a strong focus on safety and ethical AI practices, and they’re designed to be transparent and how and why they share the information that they do.
An interesting thing is that Claude can actually analyze both text and Images and you can even understand complex diagrams. We know that in June, Claude 3 Sonnet was released, but they’re rolling things out continuously. All these platforms are. So I’m not going to talk about specific models for any of them, but they’re continuously releasing new models and updates.
The other thing that I think is interesting is that [00:24:00] the concept of constitutional AI sounds good on paper, but there are some queries. For example, our team asked it, how can I kill all Python processes in my Ubuntu server? That’s a normal thing a developer would ask, and Claude refused to answer it because of the word kill.
So is that a problem with AI model because it didn’t understand that or is that a problem with our prompting and we need to learn to use different language. So something to think about. But again, Claude to me is the most personable and the way that it communicates. So, thank you for tuning in today.
This is the first of three episodes that we’re going to be talking about AI. Today we really covered AI as far as how to understand what you’re looking at from a model or technology perspective and the six core platforms that are used the most right now. Next week, we’re going to get in and talk about the six core tenets of using AI and ways to convince your organization to [00:25:00] integrate AI and allow you to use it.
And then the final episode, we’re going to be talking about specific prompts and give you some tips about how to actually incorporate it into your day-to-day. I hope today’s episode was helpful, and we will see you on episode two of three of AI 101 for healthcare marketers with We Are, Marketing Happy. See you soon.
In this special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny dives into a critical update for healthcare marketers. Google is requiring advertisers to opt into call recording for its Click-to-Call feature, creating potential HIPAA compliance risks. Jenny explains the changes, why they’re a concern, and what steps you need to take to protect your organization.
Key Points:
•Google’s new terms for Click-to-Call could result in PHI or PII being recorded, violating HIPAA.
•The rollout is inconsistent, so accounts must be monitored closely.
•You can contact Google support to opt out of call recording.
Action Items:
•Check if the terms were accepted for your account.
•Share this episode with your team or agency to ensure awareness.
More Information
•Search Engine Journal Article
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
I am not so thrilled to be here with you today, because I’m going to complain a little bit about Google. I had to hop on immediately to record this podcast so we could get it live this week. Today I’m recording, it is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024, and I wanted to record and get this live immediately because this is a huge potential compliance and HIPAA concern for all of us healthcare marketers who are running Google ads.
So if you run Google ads for your healthcare organization, you need to be very careful about any new terms that [00:01:00] you accept within your Google ads account. Google has begun randomly creating notifications within accounts, kind of similar to account verifications, where it’s like no rhyme and reason about when you’re prompted for account verification, we had some clients prompted months and months ago, and some prompted yesterday, right?
So it’s not like it’s being done on the 15th of each month or based on budget or size, you’re just prompted and you have 30 days to do it. They’re doing the same thing. This one is specifically around call extensions. So if you’re doing a text ad within Google ads, you likely have called extensions activated, right?
It is a great way to allow patients or potential clients to click to call in to immediately speak with your team to schedule an appointment, book a service, et cetera. Right? Everybody uses it. Well, these new terms that you’re receiving under the notifications. What it’s trying to do is to force you to accept [00:02:00] call recording in order to continue using the call extension feature.
And why is that a bad idea? Well, we’ve been talking about HIPAA for a very long time. The last thing you want to do is share any potential PHI or PII with a third party such as Google. We’ve done all of this work getting our marketing analytics tech stack set up and now Google is trying to record those inbound calls from call extensions.
So let’s back up a little bit and talk about the history of this. We did a little bit of digging because we didn’t know Google had ever really done this. Turns out, a Search Engine Journal posted an article in 2018 that said they were starting random call recording in order to reduce fraud and spam. So it was not a system-wide thing.
It was not something they did regularly. It was just to try to improve the user experience. There was another search engine journal article in mid-2020 where they [00:03:00] said that within Google ads, it became a feature that you could turn on not turn off, but turn on. So it was off by default is our understanding.
Well, now, what they are doing is they are actually saying that they want you to opt into it being turned on all of the time. And whenever it specifically says about call recording Google monitors and records a small percentage of phone calls that are initiated by call-only ads or call assets for some advertisers in the United States, allowing us to improve call quality for both users and advertisers alike.
Evaluating call quality ensures that advertisers are providing a positive call experience and prevents caller spam and business fraud. So according to that, it sounds like it is not 100 percent of the calls, but is it 1%? Is it 80%? Does it vary by the day? We don’t know. Even one call recorded by Google, if you’re a healthcare organization, is too many.
Because from a privacy perspective, [00:04:00] we don’t want to do that. So where are you? What’s going to happen? Well, just like the Google ad verification, the account verification process, you actually can contact Google support and you can actually opt-out of this if you click on the terms themselves, it specifically has a section around HIPAA disclaimer, and it reads like this, unless otherwise specified in writing by Google, Google does not intend use of the communication features to create obligations under the health insurance portability and accountability act as amended and makes no representation of the communication features satisfy HIPAA requirements.
You and any third party that is advertising on your behalf are so for applicable compliance with HIPAA. So what does that mean? That means you have the ability to actually opt-out and tell Google Hey, we do not want you to do any call recording on our account. What is the concern? The concern and the [00:05:00] reason why I had to publish this podcast episode immediately, we modified our publishing schedule in order to get this out.
If you have an agency or a third party that is managing your Google ads on your behalf, they likely will receive this notification of change of terms and just accept it without understanding what they are accepting that will be opting you into this. And then again, we’ll be creating additional compliance issues and concerns for your organization.
So we’re going to have a variety of links that we’re going to share in the call notes or in the show notes for today’s episode. And what you need to do is if you have a third party managing your Google ads, number one. See if they’ve received a notification and opted into anything within your account, but number two, send them this episode, have them listen to it, and make sure that they are not accidentally opting you into this and creating additional compliance consideration.
Again, these are at the account level. So for example, heavy and hot, we have [00:06:00] hundreds of accounts that we manage. Every single one of them has begun to receive this notification. We received two yesterday. And so, again, just like account verification, it’s going to be a slow roll. You may receive 80 tomorrow, who knows but you need to know about this and make sure that you are not accidentally opting into it.
As always, this should be a great reminder that if you are not working with a healthcare-specific marketing agency to manage your media strategy, this is a great reminder that maybe it’s time to start shopping around. This is a kind of situation where somebody could accidentally opt into something without realizing the potential implications to your organization.
So just a little pitch to wrap up this episode. If you’re currently working with an agency that has not yet brought this to your attention, or perhaps even accidentally already accepted the new terms without realizing what they were doing, call me. You can shoot me an email, at jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
I’d be happy to chat with you about our [00:07:00] media and marketing services. But otherwise please share this episode with anybody who’s managing it, whether it’s an internal team or a third-party team, and make sure you don’t accidentally accept these new click-to-call terms. With that, I will wrap up today’s episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, please like, and subscribe. We really appreciate all of our followers across all of the various podcasting platforms. And I will be with you again next Friday for a new episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
Jenny is joined by Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Paid Media, Miranda Ochsner, to break down the top paid media trends for 2025. They discuss insights from the 2024 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report, including why 72% of marketers plan to boost their ad budgets despite economic uncertainty and the importance of balancing performance marketing with long-term brand building. TikTok’s growing role in healthcare marketing and its impact on cross-platform ad strategies also takes center stage.
They also share some reminders when it comes to remarketing and retargeting strategies including the shift away from website pixel-based retargeting, as well as Meta’s restrictions on healthcare advertising and Google’s new AI-driven bidding tools.
Connect with Miranda:
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandamochsner/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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 and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we’re very proud to be the producers of this podcast.
Today, I am joined by our very own director of paid media, Miranda Ochsner, and we’re going to be talking about some of the paid media trends that are happening in healthcare right now, especially as we’re going into 2025. There’s a lot of moving pieces, new platforms, and lots of changes to existing platforms.
So let’s jump right in. Miranda, to get started, I know that Nielsen released their annual marketing report on the 2024 report. I’d love if you could walk through some of the key insights and trends that Nielsen shared.
Miranda: So, every year, Nielsen releases these reports at the end of the year, just kind of what they’ve [00:01:00] seen over the course of this past year.
But as we’re looking into the future, and it really, helps paid media teams just truly understand what to kind of look out for, especially in our very fragmented media landscape things to your point are constantly changing. So we, you know, we want to make sure we’re staying abreast of all of the topics.
So, there were 4 key insights that we really pulled from that. Really the 1st 1 being an increase in spending. I know there’s been. Some pullback over the last couple of years on paid media budgets and how we’re dispersing those funds and whatnot. But based on this report, about 70, a little over 70 percent of marketers are planning to increase their budgets and a majority of that really being prioritized in digital channels specifically social, but also the retail media network space just from an effectiveness standpoint, really maximizing.
All levels of the funnel with that, whether you’re in the awareness, you’re in that interest phase, or if you’re in the conversion phase speaking of conversion, the 2nd key insight was really focused around performance marketing versus brand building. You [00:02:00] know, we, as marketers always want to aim for that holistic ROI.
But many have been prioritizing those short-term performances which, you know, really leaves this opportunity and potentially miss, you know, this is for brands to do those brand building initiatives. So we really need to make sure we’re focusing on both in that full funnel because we don’t want to risk that.
Really don’t want to risk that long-term brand equity that brands take so long to build up, right? We can’t, we don’t want to, we don’t want to miss those opportunities. And third, the insight we found was just some media strategy challenges. To your point, the channels are constantly changing, targeting, especially in healthcare. You know, the healthcare space, we’re really having to find this balance of traditional and digital media, but we need to truly understand that optimal reach.
What should we, you know, what should we be under investing in and really truly understanding what that balance is. And that all [00:03:00] comes down to audiences and goals and how we’re measuring them across the board. Which leads into the fact that fit, or excuse me, the fourth insight measurement gaps, you know, there are a ton of tools out there.
And marketers really aren’t utilizing tools that are evaluating both traditional and digital channels at the same time. It’s very siloed of looking at the traditional very upper funnel, but knowing that they can trickle down into that lower funnel. And same on the, you know, on the digital side, really focusing on the more bottom-funnel.
And that’s really missing holistic insights. And, you know, when you’re looking at these effective media campaigns and strategies. Especially around messaging and channel placement. You want to make sure you’re looking at everything holistically and how everything is affecting one another.
Jenny: Yeah, I will say those last two points. I feel we saw really strongly with a lot of our new clients coming over from working with other agencies. Over-reliance on digital and not really having a strong traditional. Media strategy in place, which at heady and hop, we do both traditional and [00:04:00] digital. So we’re able to really provide that holistic strategy for them.
And then the lack of measurements and effective reporting is still something we’re seeing every single day. Folks just aren’t really receiving those comprehensive ROI reports to understand what impact their media is having on them.
Miranda: Right. And with those reports, Jenny, you really, you don’t want to just do a data dump. You want to provide some actionable insights and recommendations of what we’re seeing. Because, you know, paid is only one piece of the puzzle, right? There’s it can affect very many different things, right? So we want to make sure that we’re using those advanced analytics, but also Continuing forward with a diverse media mix and not just relying so heavy in one channel or the other.
Jenny: Yep, absolutely. The next topic I would love to talk about is TikTok. So, a lot of our clients and just in general, we, you know, we were at SHSMD and HCIC and we were just lots of chatter around folks beginning to use TikTok through the lens [00:05:00] of course, organic, you know, content creation and posting, but really starting to start looking at the paid opportunities within TikTok.
So I’d love if you could chat a little bit about the platform in general, and then also about their new partnership with Nielsen to enhance the cross-media ad tracking capabilities.
Miranda: Yeah. So, you know, TikTok is still relatively new in this, the social space, if you want to call it that that they, you know, they are listening to they are listening to the folks that are utilizing their platform, whether they’re just scrolling for hours, engaging with content or from the paid advertising side of it, you know, depending on kind of what video you want to put out there.
And you know, you have the option to have a six-second video. You have the option to have a three-minute video. You have the option to have a 10-minute video. So it’s really kind of dependent on from an organic as well as paid, what kind of campaign you’re going after and what kind of audience you’re going after.
Really love the adaptability of the platform as it continues to grow. [00:06:00] Now there are still some limitations specifically around targeting, especially in the healthcare space. But. You know, just there’s the overall privacy concern with TikTok as well as there’s still a new platform and trying to figure out those balances to remain compliant and whatnot.
So, specific and, you know, specific and healthcare you know, TikTok does have a role in health education you know, that the hashtag healthtalk is a big one. I know that there’s hundreds of millions, if not billions of views with that hashtag in place you know, so TikTok, you know, TikTok does trust influencers over medical professionals a little bit more, but, you know, that opens up that misinformation and we really want to be mindful of that if you are a brand that wants to move forward within the TikTok platform you know, healthcare providers, so HCPs in their specialties, as well as pharmaceutical companies, are really leveraging TikTok because TikTok Thinking of it potentially a little bit more, a little bit more upper funnel with that, just from the standpoint of educating and engaging audiences you know, [00:07:00] they’re making leaps, you know, they’re making giant leaps and how they do this targeting and whatnot, but from a healthcare standpoint and from a literacy standpoint in healthcare, we have to be really careful about the management to make sure it is that reliable information.
So there’s still this kind of a balance of, you know, yeah, TikTok’s a great platform, especially for millennial and Gen Z audiences but also understanding to have a trusted professional and make sure that we’re not pushing out misinformation.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And A couple of just general things.
I feel like we have to acknowledge TikTok is still facing a potential ban in the United States in January. Everything that I have read basically indicates that it won’t be an overnight shutdown. But in general, our advice to clients has been. To really leverage more bottom-funnel tactics before you begin spending money on TikTok.
So TikTok definitely can have a place in a strategy, but you need to make sure that you’re really capturing folks who are looking actively, you know, for [00:08:00] the services, the procedures your specialty and the areas that you provide before we start, you know, digging into TikTok. And really also, we generally recommend that you need to have a strong content marketing strategy in place holistically, and then paid on TikTok can support that versus just moving forward with TikTok ads.
Miranda: Right. And with TikTok you know, from what we’re seeing, audiences don’t want to see an overproduced message. They want it to feel very, organic and just very natural, just not so overproduced, which is very different than what we see on CTV and Linear and whatnot. So truly understand that platform and those nuances.
I would recommend before any kind of investment in TikTok, really having a clear content plan in place because it’s not just one video you have to put out there. It’s multiple different videos because with how consumers are consuming media, especially in TikTok and engaging with it, they want fresh messaging all of the time, which then goes into production.
So it has a, you know, it has a trickling effect when it comes to those ad budgets.
Jenny: Absolutely. [00:09:00] I’d love to move now to Google. So Google is constantly evolving, constantly rolling out new products to be able to get all of us to spend more. I saw that for the first time their search share of search ads is going to be dipping.
I think it was below 50%. And let me pull this article up real quick. I want to make sure that I am referencing it correctly. But it’s really going to be dropping. So what they’re actively trying to do is yep. So, let’s see, it was AdWeek launched an article and they said that Google is going to be dipping below 50 percent as far as their share of the search advertising market in the US by 2025 for the first time in a decade.
So they’re kind of in hustle mode, right? Like, what can we do to innovate? What can we do to kind of get some of that market share back? I think it’s interesting. Some of their AI-powered results are beginning to compete with their search results. So the innovation they’re doing for consumers is also [00:10:00] hurting them on the search side, because they’re actually providing zero-click content.
So you can get that information without clicking through to the person’s website who provided that content. So one of the things that they announced was an AI power tool called search bidding exploration as part of its smart bidding suite. And I’d love for you to tell us a little more about what we know about that so far.
Miranda: Sure. So it’s still, you know, it’s still in the testing phase, but you know, it’s interesting. AI is just really you never know what you’re going to get with all of these new AI tools coming in. So, with this specific tool, it’s part of their bidding suite, their smart bidding suite. So it’s, this is really designed to help those larger advertisers optimize campaigns towards TROAS.
So, obviously our return on ad spend, but specifically, there’s this new phrase with the T in front of it. So that’s adding the target return on ad spend as well as those broad match keywords. So, you know, the tool will identify low traffic yet very [00:11:00] valuable search queries and then it adjusts that target row as anywhere 10%.
And then it just kind of expands that reach beyond those traditional search terms. So it’s opening an opportunity of things. You know, we potentially missed in a stride. Your agencies have potentially missed whether it’s content strategy, keywords social listing, are there certain things that folks are talking about that we might not have in messaging, just really, truly understanding how it gives that opportunity to expand what’s currently being searched for.
Jenny: Yeah, and this is a trend that we’ve seen not only with our clients but then also we heard lots of buzz about it at SHSMD and HCIC is agencies seeing traffic volumes changing for their search campaigns. So, for example, those bigger, broader buckets that are more educational and more upper funnel, less traffic coming in there because folks don’t have to click through to understand what a knee replacement surgery is.
Miranda: It’s right there in front of them.
Jenny: And so, I think this is a great [00:12:00] reminder for folks that as they’re thinking about their strategy for 2025, really make sure that you’re beginning to incorporate some AIO so an I optimization and old kind of thing and SEO that an I O and your overall strategy to really compliment that media strategy because, as we all know, everything works in cohesion together.
Miranda: Yeah, it’s just not a set it and forget it anymore. You constantly have to be shifting and pivoting to see kind of what your consumers and whatnot are really going to get, you know, going for when they’re doing their searches what they’re sharing what they’re engaging with.
There are some concerns with this. You know, it’s just it’s restricted to advertisers with very large budgets. So if you have a 5,000 or 10,000 a month budget, this might not be an option for you. But this is definitely some of those bigger ones. Those bigger ad spends as well as the concern just around transparency.
As well as those very granular insights. To your point, folks are seeing performance dip, which goes into that larger concern [00:13:00] of like, how can we optimize? How can we do X, Y and Z? So really what is that balance as we implement this tool?
Jenny: Absolutely. I’m going, I’m saving our favorite. For last, the one that everybody’s freaking out about—Meta.
But I have one other topic that I want to throw into the mix and that’s retargeting. And I’ve talked about retargeting and through the lens of privacy, but for folks that have been ignoring those podcasts because they don’t want to think about privacy, I’m going to mix it into this media conversation.
So you’re going to hear it a general reminder that you can no longer do retargeting or remarketing based off of your website visitors. So we can do in platform retargeting. If somebody has engaged with your ad within Google, you can retarget them in Google or within Facebook. You could retarget them using Facebook’s own targeting platforms or targeting capabilities, but you can no longer put pixels on your website to target them if they visited your site and did not convert.
Miranda: Yes, just remarketing hurts a little bit, but you know, just stay compliant. It’s what you have [00:14:00] to do.
Jenny: Yeah, exactly. So if you’re still doing retargeting or remarketing, you need to cut it out. Stop uploading lists, stop using retargeting pixels. If you’re in healthcare, general reminder. Yeah, now I’d love to end talking about some shifts that we have seen with Meta.
They’re constantly changing. They were one of the main reasons all of this, all of the class action lawsuits happened around pixels and folks being accused of sharing data through the lens of considerations to the sharing user data with Facebook and in return for receiving conversion information, lots of podcasts on that.
But made an announcement that they are going to be really restricting a lot of data specifically for healthcare organizations starting in January. 2025. Now we are really excited about this because our clients aren’t really going to be affected based off the way that we set up campaigns. I’d love if you could give a general overview of what the announcement was and then why our [00:15:00] clients don’t really have anything to worry about.
Miranda: Yeah. So Meta, you know, I believe that came out about two weeks ago, a week and a half ago. It’s still very fresh. And I think to your point, folks are like, What are we doing? What is going on? What do we need to shift and whatnot? You know, so these, I believe these restrictions are going to start January 2025.
So 3 weeks. So it’s coming quick. These you know, these changes are really going to include the data sharing for specific. Healthcare related websites and apps. So, fully restricted properties like condition-specific sites will lose access to conversion campaigns. Mid restricted properties, you know, are really facing limited optimization for those lower funnel activities.
So really anything that is mid low to low. we, you know, recommend rethinking. Like, how are we going to utilize Meta within our strategy? Because it really needs to be a little bit more. It doesn’t need to be. It has to be a more upper funnel. You know, really [00:16:00] recommending as we move into 2025, those healthcare advertisers.
Whether it’s the agency you work with, whether you’re in-house, whatever that looks like, really advise to audit those data sources. You know, we want to make sure that we’re doing our checks and balances to make sure there are no pixels in place, none of, you know, nothing of that lives on the site to remain compliant and really adapting those strategies to focus on those private, you know, those privacy-friendly methods.
Jenny: Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the changes we made. What a year ago, the way that we set up campaigns with Meta and why we’re pretty confident that our clients in a great place going into 2025.
Miranda: Yeah. So we, you know, you never know what you’re going to get thrown with some of these platforms.
So, you know, Hedy & Hopp really took a proactive way of approaching how we’re utilizing Metta, both Facebook and Instagram in our strategies. And it is really focused on those upper funnel engagement metrics versus the lower funnel. We’re really [00:17:00] thinking awareness, really thinking engagement when we are utilizing those placements.
So making sure we’re tracking those metrics properly while completely having nothing to do with pixel placements on the website and whatnot. And if we see those through our audits, we’re raising the flag of like, nope, we don’t recommend using this. We’re going to shift our focus here and really outline those as we go through the media strategy as we’re walking through benchmarks, whether it is more a very upper CTR metric, whether it’s a video view, or if it’s just some kind of engagement within the ad itself.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the things they specifically call out is you can no longer do audience creations for retargeting or lookalike audiences. Thank goodness we’ve been reaching this for so long. Like we shouldn’t be doing this in healthcare friends. Right? So I think the general summary is if you’re using meta and you haven’t really thought about how you’re using it, how you’re tracking conversions, and you’ve kind of been on autopilot now is the time that you need to really take a good look at [00:18:00] your campaigns, the structure, how you’re tracking conversions the kinds of functionality that Facebook offers that you are or are not using to really make sure that you’re going to be in a good place.
Miranda: They’re either going to shut your campaigns down or not let you set them up at all. So it’s better to be proactive. But I know we’re three weeks out till the new year, but really start thinking through that, you know, immediately as these are part of larger, you know, strategy conversations that are starting in January.
Jenny: And even thinking about worst case scenario, if you need to turn meta off or plan on massively restricted spending for the first month or two as you really clean everything up in your account and set to get into a good place. It’s better to be proactive and know that you’re likely going to see massively reduced volume in Meta, you know, then be midway through the month and start looking at reports and, you know, then be just like, what is going on?
Miranda: You know? Let’s be four steps ahead and not six behind.
Jenny: Exactly. Exactly. Well, Miranda, thank you for coming [00:19:00] on today. I think it has been every year in healthcare. 1 of our core values that Hedy & Hopp is pivot with positivity because we’re constantly thrown new things, which all of us find really fun.
It’s fun to find ways to continuously allow our clients to evolve effectively reach folks that need that care. And help them, you know, find the resources that they need to be able to schedule that appointment. So thank you for coming on today to be able to provide a summary of what folks can expect as far as 2025 media strategies for listeners.
If you are kind of unsure. The things you heard today are new to you. Your internal team hasn’t been talking about them. Your agency hasn’t been proactively bringing them to you. Give us a call. Our media capabilities are one of our strongest within our organization, and we work with providers and payors all across the country to help them reach their acquisition goals.We’d love to chat with you. So with [00:20:00] that, thank you so much for tuning in. In please like, and subscribe this episode, send it future episode ideas my way. If you have any, and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this episode, Jenny is joined by Hedy & Hopp’s Account Manager, Shelby Auer, and Marketing Manager, Taylor Fedderke, to recap their time at HCIC24 in Austin. With its walkable venue downtown and amazing food, the conference provided a great setting to reconnect with peers and explore the latest industry trends.
They dive into key themes from the event, including the growing role of AI, how SEO continues to be a game-changer, and fresh approaches to reputation management. They also discuss how organizations are using data to improve provider finders, enhance consumer engagement, and streamline digital strategies, as well as the importance of building authentic brands and maximizing social media with AI tools.
Connect with Shelby: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-wanne/
Connect with Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorfedderke/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
HCIC24 Speakers Mentioned:
•Mike Canonig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcanonigo/
•Jamie Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-ryan-mha-79690521/
•Angela Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angie-taylor-34ab3a173/
•Amy Muehlbauer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-muehlbauer/
•Elizabeth McGonigal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-mcgonigal-999bb739/
•Elise Horst: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elise-kogelnik/
•Emily Mangini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-mangini/
•Nolan Perry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolanjperry/
•Amy Stevens: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydickesonstevens/
•Ryan Donahue: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandonohue/
•Max Freund: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-freund-b4231a2a/
•Adriane Bradberry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianebradberry/
•Chloe A. Politis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloepolitis/
•David A. Feinberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-feinberg-57746a5/
•Sebastien Leon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienleon2/
•Carla Rivera: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-rivera/
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 CEO of Hedy & Hopp, which is a full-service marketing agency that specializes in the healthcare space. We are your hosts for this podcast. I am very excited to have with me today, Taylor Fedderke and Shelby Auer, two teammates of mine at Hedy & Hopp.
We just got back last night from HCIC, which is the Healthcare Internet Conference for 2024. It was in Austin this year, and we wanted to hop on this morning and record a fun little recap for those of you who were perhaps unable to attend, usually attend in the past, or perhaps you’re thinking and wondering what HCIC is all about.
And should I attend in the future? So that’s the purpose of today’s show. Good morning, ladies. Welcome. So we’re going to break today’s podcast down into [00:01:00] 3 distinct areas. The 1st is going to be our experience. So, the H&H team, what did we experience going to a couple of key callouts of things that perhaps are different from other events, et cetera?
We’re going to talk about key themes. That we saw, and then we’re going to do a few session callouts. So if you were unable to attend and you want to kind of understand what were the topical themes, what were the educational themes and what was kind of hip from a session perspective we’re going to cover a handful of those.
So I will actually kick us off. I’d love to chat a little bit about our experience. As all of our regular listeners know, last month, we were at SHSMD. Which was another fabulous conference. If you only had to pick two a year to go to those right now are our two favorites and have been going for quite some time.
But HCIC, there were a couple of interesting things. I have 2 in particular that I want to call out. I think the location and venue for this event were fabulous. It was in downtown [00:02:00] Austin at the JW Marriott. So walkable. It was right on 2nd. At the end of every day, or even if there was like a couple of hour break, we constantly saw people rushing downstairs to try to get outside and go for a walk, and we did the same thing.
It was fabulous. And it was also really awesome because you could in the evening if you wanted to kind of network with other folks, just walk up and down second, and you would run into a handful of people kind of at every other restaurant. So it was very easy to do networking outside of the conference-sponsored events.
So kudos to the event organizers for that. And then I am a food-driven human. I know this about myself. If you ever want a good meeting with Jenny, just bring good snacks. But the conference had fabulous food. One morning there was a Belgian waffle bar friends, a Belgian waffle bar at a conference. I was blown away.
So I know all of us kept just looking at each other and laughing when we saw the food, like what this is phenomenal. So I [00:03:00] just have to give a shout-out to the sponsors. I know I’ve hosted many events. I know how exciting it is to be able to offer food of that caliber. So they really were showing up and trying to use it as a differentiator.
So I know we don’t go for the food, but it absolutely was the icing on the cake.
Taylor: Yeah. Completely agree with you there, Jenny. Some other callouts too. So we had our privacy session with Jenifer Warrell with Quartz Health Benefits. And then of course Jenny as well. And so this was kind of the updated what’s going on in all things, privacy, FTC, state laws, everything like that.
Great session. And it was really fun to talk to people afterward that had been to the 2023 version last year and kind of get their thoughts on, you know, what they’ve been working on and then them coming back this year and wanting to kind of hear about, okay, what’s changed.
They’re really trying to educate themselves. And so it’s a really great conversation after the session. I think all three of us said so that was really another fun little experience we had there too.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s a great point. I [00:04:00] think it was kind of interesting to me. Two things. First of all, the number of systems and providers that still haven’t really done much that had a lot of tactical questions, which, hey, we’re here for this.
Like we are here to be your friends and hold your hands through the process. Do we get it? But the other thing that kind of shocked masterclass was that they still didn’t know what the heck was going on. So another shout-out, like another clarifying point. If you’re working with an agency or a website vendor, you need to be asking them some hard questions because the number of folks that came up after our session, and then at our booth that were asking very basic tactical questions, cause they just still didn’t get it was really high.
It really, honestly, was that kind of concerning for me, for providers that maybe don’t know, and they just assume their partner has it covered. So, time to start asking some hard questions, friends.
Taylor: Yeah.
Jenny: So let’s pivot and talk a little bit about the themes. So at each event, I think you can kind of see a little bit of trends and themes like topical [00:05:00] shifts folks are happening.
I have one I’d like to start with the number of people who came up to me and said, this was the first conference they have attended post-COVID was staggering. I mean, we have, we jumped back in, in 2020. Let’s see 432 2022 was when we started doing in-person conferences again. So for me, it’s old hat, right?
Like I’m back at it, whatever. A lot of organizations are just now kind of getting their feet under them and comfortable doing that. So I’m really excited to see what 2025 is. I think it’s just going to continue building on that momentum of comfortability of being back in person.
Shelby: Definitely. And though people are still discussing AI, of course, and privacy, those were two key kinds of themes across the board still, but there were a couple of additional focuses that we saw across the board.
Reputation management, what you’re doing with your Google reviews. How are you handling that information and how could you really [00:06:00] use it to your advantage and SEO kind of going back to those fundamentals that I think we’ve. Maybe shifted the past couple of years, focusing on what’s going on with privacy AI.
We need to be on top of this technology. Understand what’s going on. There was a lot of great conversation about just very specific tactical strategies around SEO content strategy across the board.
Jenny: Completely agree, Shelby. I think we’re going to talk about it. I have a couple of sessions that I want to call out.
They’re exactly in that vein, meaning people are getting back to the fundamentals for content strategy and media optimize it like all of these areas. Kind of the shiny object syndrome, we saw a little bit of it at this conference, but a lot of it was like back to basics friends, like, let’s not think that we’re so advanced because first of all, in healthcare, we know we’re not as an overall industry, right?
Because of a variety of things we won’t get into today. But it very much was proudly saying [00:07:00] like, hey, let’s talk about content strategies again, right? Here’s some tips and tricks. And it was very well done. So on that note, let’s talk about key session callouts. One that I would love to highlight was a session specifically about provider finders.
So we’re talking about getting back to basics, right? Like one on one help. Patients find a provider on your website and help them schedule an appointment and the session that I want to call out. There are quite a few on this topic actually. But the 1 I want to call out was a new front door, exploring the next-generation provider finder.
And there were 3 providers that presented. Mike Canonigo with Advocate Health, Jamie Ryan was Scripps Health, and Angela Taylor with Atrium Health. And while this was like a low-key marketing play by Sparkle, cause all three of the providers were highlighting the Sparkle platform, right? It was actually extremely well done.
It did not feel like a sales pitch for Sparkle for most of the presentation [00:08:00] and what these three. Presenters did is they really talked about what the data is telling them about how to provide or how patients actually want to find a provider. So, for example, I think it was Jamie’s talk specifically about really highlighting what insurance folks, expect and really having that be a top-level search functionality, which I thought was really important.
And then they also talked about the ability on the back end and the importance of really creating your own best match algorithm and really making sure. Hey, what is the data saying people are actually selecting or using? Like, are they really filtering the data? By gender for a provider, or are they really only focused on insurance like insurance is stable table stakes, right?
Nobody’s going to select somebody that doesn’t have their insurance, but like, how are they interacting with that and the ability and the thought process of really only showing people that have available appointments 1st? And really maximizing the patient experience. So this was one [00:09:00] of those, like back to basics, let’s get the fundamentals, right?
And really think about how users want to find a provider and make sure that our experience matches that. So kudos to the three of them for a very well-done presentation.
Taylor: Yeah. And I have another session that again kind of ties into that consumer journey. This one in particular, the title of it was Enhancing the Consumer Journey with a Data-Driven Digital Content Strategy.
This is with Amy Muehlbauer with Advocate Health. Really kind of just talking about where they’ve gone in terms of creating this full content strategy. One 14 Google searches are now health-related. I mean, if you think about it all the Google searches that are taking place on a daily basis, like millions, billions, so many out there thinking how they all are related.
Knowing a lot of them are related to health. I just, it’s a huge piece of that. And so with that, they really talked about how they want to capture this opportunity with consumer data research. And so kind of that’s the foundation piece for their web content, SEO, content, marketing [00:10:00] efforts. And another kind of tidbit they through, and I really enjoy that they mentioned this and talk about this a lot, I guess, within their organization is that, you know, SEO needs to be a main ingredient, not just sprinkles on top of a cupcake.
And it’s so true to kind of think about that as you’re going through these you know, taking the opportunity to revisit content, all these pieces, making sure that’s at the forefront.
And I think Shelby was in this session as well. And I think you found this one pretty interesting too.
Shelby: Yeah. No, they did a wonderful job really walking through the details of what they’ve done to build their content strategy. I mean, getting down to talking about this kind of content hub approach to all of their service-specific pages and using the most asked questions about those specific.
Services or conditions to build out separate sub-pages that answer those questions specifically. They also are utilizing posts on Google business profiles as a [00:11:00] key way to boost impressions and page clicks, and it’s not. something you have to pay for, but it does look like an ad. So they really talked about being able to make sure that you’re utilizing all of those different options within the Google My Business profile and to advocate for making sure that, hey, we want to put efforts into SEO, but oftentimes leadership is like, okay, well, what is that really getting us?
They calculated how much it would have cost them. Through paid search efforts to boost their rankings like they have done with some of this SEO work which I think is a super key detail that any of us can take away when talking about how do we make sure that this is prioritized as an organization.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. ROI can be really difficult to calculate in some situations. So I think that lens of like what would have paid search costs to do the same thing is a great way to kind of show the value. So a cool call out. One that I’d love to highlight [00:12:00] was An AI session. I sat through many AI sessions.
The 1 that I thought was the most interesting was artificial intelligence and action leveraging AI for enhanced patient engagement. And the reason why I think this 1 was the most interesting to me is the number of people I saw scribbling down notes. So for me, if I’m in a session and I’m like, oh yeah, we do all of this stuff at heady and hot, right?
Like maybe I personally am not writing things down because I feel like our organization is pretty great in that area. Instead, what did I do I look around and I say, what’s that? How is everybody else responding to this? There was a lot of note-taking. So, I will say kudos to Liz McGonigal with Penn Medicine and Elise Horst with Fathom.
They did a great job really highlighting actionable ways that you can take specifically large data sets and use AI to be able to identify trends. So again, it’s not using AI to write content for you, which was the big theme of the no throughout the entire [00:13:00] session. But it was really. Using AI to do a lot of data calculation, and identify abnormalities with your campaigns.
And there was a tool that they called out. It’s actually called Akio, which we had never used at Hedy & Hopp. We actually use a variety of other platforms. And I looked it up and it actually looks like it is a tool specifically for agencies. So I’m not totally sure. I haven’t played with it yet to see how much value it would have for a provider in an in-house team.
But I will say that is one that we’re planning on checking out to see if it has any functionality that’s better than all of the other AI tools we’re currently using. So good job.
Taylor: Yeah. And I had another session here to kind of tie it back to what Shelby had mentioned at the start of this podcast episode about Google reviews being a bit of a hot topic and just like kind of that reputation management piece.
And so the title of the session was How to Request Reviews: The Importance of Google Reviews and Why You Should Ask for Them. Presenting this session was Emily Mangini and [00:14:00] Nolan Perry with Sutter Health and they’ve really implemented and have a strategy at their organization of finding ways, you know, to really build a really robust reputation management plan here.
And so with that, they kind of walked through their experience with implementing this and really growing that and kind of seeing the fruits of their labor. And one thing they had mentioned here too, just again, kind of at the beginning of the session was that of the 200 plus factors, Google considers reviews to rank number three which again ties into kind of that SEO piece.
So all these things are kind of tying into each other. And with that too, kind of talking about, for example, you know, a lot of time with these organizations looking at Google Maps, people trying to find that local care maybe for urgent care as one, they kind of threw out as an example and really where they did some testing with gathering reviews and kind of seeing how that would help with you know, getting them higher up on that map in terms of kind of that review placement there.
But for that, if you think about the map breakdown, there are really only 3 things that are showing us. People are kind of poking around and looking at maps and looking for where they’re going to go. And so [00:15:00] that’s the name of the organization and then also how many reviews they have shown up there too, along with that placement on the map.
And so, you know, Just showing the importance of reviews, which we’re all very aware of at this point, but I think just kind of reminding us of that. And then they kind of walked us through again, how they kind of implemented this in their process through that. But as a whole, I think it was a really great session to kind of just again, remind everybody and then also kind of put some next steps out there in terms of.
Working with your teams, making sure, for example, your responses are you’ve spoken with legal to make sure those responses make sense. And so this can be very different depending on the organization and how they want to tackle that piece. But as a whole, just making sure that you’re, you know, it can really help boost your brand and provide that visibility.
And again, just ties into the reputation of your brand there too. So it was a great session overall.
Shelby: Really interesting and piggybacking off of that, a session that I sat in on was called Consumers as Allies: Utilizing Market Feedback as a Strategic Tool [00:16:00], and Amy Stevens over at Tidelands Health presented with Ryan Donahue with NRC Health.
We work with a lot of organizations that partner with NRC and this specific session really dove into Tidelands Health and how they are. In an area that has grown exponentially over the last few years and how hard that can be to scale your internal processes to be able to keep up with all of that change their local population has become incredibly diverse in comparison to where it was a few years ago.
And they had been inundated with phone calls that they were not built to be able to answer. So they started getting reviews all over the place. I can’t even talk to anybody. Nobody will answer my calls. And instead of you know, there probably was a little panic, [00:17:00] but instead of just leaning into the panic, they really took that as an opportunity to kind of rebuild their internal processes.
They audited every phone tree across their health system to be able to streamline that process. And I know I’ve had conversations with clients of mine that want to start that process. But they kind of started there and then ended up really implementing larger changes, like creating a better patient and family advisory council that was virtual and allowed them to capture more of their growing diverse market than what they had previously.
And I just wanted to shout out Amy and her team because convenience ease coordination and availability were all places they were not ranking well. And those ratings moved from worst in their market to first in their market.
Jenny: Wow.
Shelby: Went through all of these changes. They developed [00:18:00] an app. I mean, again, they really took that feedback as The catalyst to let’s look at our strategic plan.
What can we modify and change to really make sure that we are taking this feedback and even going beyond what we need to do to make the experience better?
Jenny: Yeah, that’s phenomenal. What amazing results for something that feels so tactical, right? But truely has a huge impact. This is another example of going back to the basics and not focusing on the shiny objects.
Let’s make sure the basics are right first. So, one that I would love, and we just have a couple more or a few more sessions but one that I would love to call out was again, back to the basics. So it was a session called Integrating Clinical Content Strategy with Website Design Through a Repeatable Process.
And it was Max Freund with the University of Iowa Health Care and Adriane Bradberry with Unlock and Max did a really great job talking about their organization’s focus on clinical content on their website, what they do, and what [00:19:00] they don’t do. So he shared about 8 percent of the pages on their website are clinical content.
And at first, the crowd was oh, that’s a small percentage. And then he sat back and said, is it like, we don’t want to be top line or people are doing symptom checks, right? A lot of organizations focus really heavily, too high in the funnel, or people across the country or even the world may come to your website because they’re doing high-level research on like, what is type two diabetes?
Right. You’re not going to be the definitive source for what is type 2 diabetes, but you may end up being a great source locally for folks to come in to understand what are the treatment options. What are the different options that they have? So it was really a reframing of how to think about clinical content.
And a great point was the emergence of AI in Google search results, a lot of that super top of [00:20:00] the funnel content is going to be served up in search results as that top AI answer, right? So if you’re going to be spending a lot of energy to build out content, to get people to your site, you have to be a lot more thoughtful about the way that you’re tackling content and where you’re spending your energy.
I can speak to this personally with some content strategies we’ve done for clients going in and looking at. Oh, my gosh, this content piece has gone, you know, viral, which in health care, like viral, it’s thousands of visitors, right? Are visiting this, but then you look at the geography when people are coming in from around the world, and you’re like, they’re never going to come in for an appointment.
So what’s the value of that? And so stepping back and really forcing yourself to have discipline. And the kinds of content are helpful. They specifically shared an 8-step process to incorporate clinical content, and they actually went and talked to subject matter experts or identified me as that clinical expert multiple times in the process.
So, getting with them early and often, and then having them [00:21:00] review it. So he had a very detailed explanation around. creating templates and approval processes and making sure it’s signed off on. And that has allowed his team to be able to get really nitty gritty with the level of clinical information they have and ensure the level of accuracy is there without you know, having to have marketers that can create that level of technical content because if SMEs are involved and they are the ones that can do that.
So, kudos to Max. You did an awesome job on that session.
Shelby: Amazing. Now, when it comes to content and what some of these organizations are doing what I thought was really unique in the space, was David and Chloe over at Mount Sinai Health System shared a session that was titled The Social CEO, and I work and talk to a lot of people in the space who, you know, their leadership, their higher executive leadership want to be involved with marketing, especially when they’re new to a system. [00:22:00]
And I mean, that’s huge for the local community. And so David and Chloe and their team ended up partnering with their new CEO to build a social media strategy for him to be able to push out content to the community. Re-share things that the health system is sharing out on their socials to be able to really kind of grow eyes on their content, but such a special session.
And this is kind of new for them. This is their 1st year doing this. So I’m excited to hopefully hear a follow-up session in the future about how that potential potentially extends beyond just their CEOs. Social profiles, but they really walked through that process of creating manageable workflows between their social team and the CEO.
But I think this is such a great way if you have leadership who want to be involved, but you know, putting their face on a print ad or a billboard might not make the most sense to really [00:23:00] connect with the community. I think doing a strategy like this, that’s more personal on social media would be a great way forward for a lot of systems.
Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And to tie in with that to the content side of things, I had one last session that I wanted to make sure to call out. And this was maximizing social media impacts with AI strategies from Broward Health. So with Broward Health, this was a Sebastian Leon and Carla Rivera. And they mentioned several AI platforms that I had not heard of in terms of just what has worked with them or worked for them on the content side of things.
And so a few ones I wanted to just point out call out was what the first one was Jasper. And so they use this one for a variety of things on the content side. But their biggest help for that is the SEO optimization role plays. And so a lot of times they’ll have it they’ll create some type of content.
And then with that, they’ll have it created for multiple channels so they can really push it out and kind of maximize their time there. You know, but they’re still again, creating that content and writing that in the [00:24:00] first place and then allowing it to create all these different forms. So again, just kind of implemented it in terms of workflow to quicken the process there.
Another one, and then this one that was very interesting to me was Devi. They use it to monitor Facebook groups. And for example, one that kind of mentioned was like maternity side of things to see if there’s these buzzwords that people are talking about for these like mother Facebook groups to where people are, you know, sharing experiences and things like that.
So they’re using Devi to kind of monitor that. And then using those buzzwords and their content to kind of pull it in and really relate to them and connect there. And then another fun one too, which is on the video side. So as we know on the content piece, a lot of times it’s hard to, you know, sit down with physicians and get these videos that are really great and engaging with the eye contact piece that a lot of people struggle with.
They, for this, they use a platform called VEED. And so you’ll be looking like, say, if I was recording and I was looking off to the side here they can plug it into VEED and it will have AI go and create it to where eyes are looking directly at the camera, [00:25:00] whether they’re looking at our script or something else.
And so something very new on the video side that I thought was cool. And then lastly, there were a couple of two, just more on the competitor insight side that they dove into Pathmatic and Nielsen. And they just can get really nitty gritty into just all the competitor research. And those were two I hadn’t really heard of.
But with all this, one person had a really great question at the end of the session. It was like, you know, how do you get the chance to try out all these different platforms? Cause I think that is a struggle a lot of times. How do you get the funding for it? And they’re like, think about all these free trials that are out there.
A lot of them. You can get the opportunity to try that out and see if it works for you. See if it’s something that, you know, has been helpful in your content creation process. And so I thought that was really great to think about because I think as a whole, it can be a little overwhelming to be like, how can I get the funding to try out all these new platforms constantly to see what will work for us?
And so I thought that was just really cool on their end to mention what has worked for them there.
Jenny: Yeah, two quick callouts. We clearly have heard of Nielsen, just not specifically the AI capabilities. So, yes. So just for anyone who’s listening, [00:26:00] like, of course, Nielsen. But that’s interesting.
And then the other thing I will just say as a general reminder for AI. Remember privacy, so do not put things in any of these tools that you are not willing to put on a billboard outside. So, within all of these sessions, I sat in on, they all did a really great job reminding folks about that.
So kudos to presenters for keeping privacy top of mind. I think it can be really easy whenever you create an account with a tool to think like, oh, this is a safe space. No, it’s not. So just a general reminder. If you do start doing all these free trials, do keep in mind that you have to be very careful with any information that you upload.
So, thank you for joining us for today’s recap. We had so much fun. We are all, I think, pretty ready to sit and be in silence for a couple of days after all of the conversations and talks that we had. But so much fun. We’re already looking forward to 2025. So for anyone who is interested in learning more about any of these sessions, note that we are [00:27:00] going to put links to all of the people that we mentioned. We will put their LinkedIn links in the show notes. So if you want to reach out and ask them more about their sessions, I’m sure they’d be more than happy to engage with you. Everybody is just so welcome welcoming and willing to be able to share information with others in the industry.
And on that note, thank you for joining us for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We really appreciate and value your time. We would love it if you could like, and subscribe. New episodes drop almost every Friday and we’ll continue to cover topics that we think are helpful for folks in the provider and payor space.
So, with that have a fabulous weekend, thanks for tuning in and we’ll talk to you soon.
In this episode, Jenny Bristow, CEO of Hedy & Hopp, speaks with Drew Hardesty, CEO of Wonder Boy Media, about how AI is transforming video and image editing in healthcare marketing. They explore the innovative ways AI is helping marketers save time, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency in editing tasks.
Episode Highlights:
If you’re a marketer looking to make the most of AI in your editing process, this episode offers information on how to use these tools effectively—without compromising creativity or privacy.
Connect with Drew:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are the proud producers of this weekly podcast. I am so excited today to have Drew Hardesty with me.
He is the CEO and founder at Wonder Boy Media, which is a full service video production company based out of Owensboro, Kentucky. Welcome, Drew.
Drew: Thanks for having me.
Jenny: Yeah, we actually met at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago. We were in what we like to call the quirky corner area, but we had so much fun talking about all things content generation for providers.
And so I invited you on the podcast today to talk about one specific area of topic that we dug into quite a bit, which is the emergence of AI in both photo [00:01:00] and video editing. Mark Brandes, who is the Director of Technology and Analytics at Hedy & Hopp. He and I did a masterclass at SHSMD about AI and the immediate applications that marketers can use in their day to day workflows.
To improve efficiencies consider things from different perspectives, et cetera. And you and I had a really great conversation about how that applies to video and imagery. So to kick the show off today, I think what I’d love to do is have you really explain the difference to listeners about AI art generation versus AI image and video editing and what we’re going to focus on today.
Drew: Okay. Absolutely. So when it comes to art generation these tools like Dolly. Dolly’s the one I use the most, but Canva does it as well. It’s really using a text prompt but being fairly specific and concise with that and having these machines just generate sometimes [00:02:00] perfect art, sometimes a little off, but for the most part, it does a really good job.
So art generation is based on text prompts. Whereas AI and when it comes to editing is based off of, you know, something that’s already been created a video that’s already been shot an image that’s already been shot or captured. And then using that and some of the surrounding aspects of the image to, you know, generative fill or expand or all these things that we’re starting to hear more and more about.
Jenny: Excellent. That is a really great example. And when, and during the class, some of the folks that were participants, we had a fun workshop area and one of the people actually like said, do a dog looking at a laptop, like this really quirky prompt. Right. And like, it’s really cool to see what AI can do as far as creating that imagery through the lines of art, but it is rarely applicable in our day to day lives as marketers in the healthcare space.
So I’m excited to focus more on the AI through the lens of like editing and process improvement. So, let’s start first talking specifically about [00:03:00] photos. I’m going to chat about photos first. Then I’ll chat about the video second. So talk to me a little bit about marketers when they’re thinking about photography or any sort of static image assets, and what sort of applications there are for AI to improve their workflows or editing processes.
Drew: Yeah. So we exclusively use the Adobe suite. So we’ve got, you know, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, all these famous programs people have heard of. Those can have a little bit of a learning curve. And so for those marketers out there who don’t have that experience or don’t have that time to learn these programs, Canva does a great job with it as well.
I’ve taken images into Canva, their background remover is really good. Their duo tone tool, you know, all these different things that you can edit an image that’s already been shot, you know, maybe it’s a headshot of a physician, but it was kind of a weird background.
You want to take that out and put them in front of the hospital. So, you know, Canva does a really good job of removing [00:04:00] backgrounds and things like that where we would get more into kind of the professional realm would be in Adobe and the AI in Adobe is just taking leaps and bounds like every day.
It blows me away how good it is. Their denoiser, we’ve got a camera that, you know, we’ll shoot some pretty good megapixels, but it typically has some noise there. AI denoiser is unreal. Their generative fill. If there’s you know, a space that you want to expand. You know, put something in like a, hey, put a tree here next to this person, you know, they can, it does a really good job of that.
We’ve used it for expansion. So if you needed just a little more headroom on a shot, or if you needed a little more of a wall in the background, their generative fill and generative expand are just light years ahead of things. Most people would have access to you.
Jenny: That is a great summary.
I was reading an article last week, a little bit about Adobe’s AI functionality, and the person said, I tried to create a list of all the things that don’t do, and I literally [00:05:00] couldn’t come up with anything because it’s expanded so much in the last couple of years. That’s really exciting. So one of the examples that I hear over and you spoke on it, is marketers that have to get a physician’s headshot for the directory and they used to drive or send a photographer that they hired a contract or on staff for hours out to a remote, a rural clinic to get a headshot of that physician. And it was a whole day’s contractors expense. And now, like you said, you can literally take just a photo of them that they submit and then generate it into a standardized headshot imagery.
So I think. Just like you said, whenever I’m thinking about ways that marketers can be smart about it, it’s not so much about getting super creative and doing fancy art. It’s more about how can I clean up processes, reduce the noise or the budget, unnecessary budget of travel and whatnot, just to be [00:06:00] smarter with my budget allocation.
Drew: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s where AI is really well used in the workflow process. So if you have an image of a doctor already, and you just want to polish it up, make it look more professional, you know, there are apps out there that will take just the face and then put them on this, you know, Clean looking professional looking headshot, you know, it’s just, it’s more of a workflow thing.
I think then getting to create right now, the creative side of it is a little wonky, but workflow is where it really is powerful.
Jenny: I love that. Let’s transition over to video. Cause I think we’re going to talk about the exact same thing on video, right? It’s not about generative creating it from scratch.
It’s more about being smarter with your workflow. So what are some ways that folks like yourself, your organization, or marketers within organizations that focus on video editing, what are some ways they can look at integrating AI into their video editing processes?
Drew: The biggest thing right now, at least in our world where we are here in Owensboro, we’re starting video podcast [00:07:00] studios.
I’m actually in one now. And so those podcasts, video podcasts could be an hour and a half, it could go Joe Rogan and be three or four hours long. And where AI really helps there is these plugins that have that Adobe has that will take multi camera angles and edit them in minutes. And just the amount of time that would save me as an editor from basically having to rewatch the whole video that I already saw live in person.
Taking that and editing it within minutes is just. A huge time saver. And I think that’s where, as when it comes to video AI is going to, as is really helping us with time saving just helping that workflow speed it up, get projects out the door faster and accurately. And it does a really good job.
Jenny: Yeah. So thinking specifically about this podcast, for example, thinking about like removing pauses, removing ums and other filler words, right. I think it’s really [00:08:00] important to clarify that there’s nothing creative being done with this editing with AI, right? That’s where the human touch is still so important.
So for a podcast, it’s not as big of a deal because we do a straight shoot here, but if you’re doing, for example, a commercial video you know, for your organization, that’s not something that AI can edit. For you, right? Like that still takes, you know, a person like yourself or a member of your team to be creative, right?
Drew: Yeah. That is. And I mentioned that we talked earlier about some posting I had made on LinkedIn, Instagram, and it’s that human touch. That was, you know, what I liked about that post is that it’s so important especially, you know, in healthcare marketing, when we’re trying to focus on storytelling and the human condition.
It takes that human touch to really make something creative and to tug on heartstrings and to connect with people. Whereas AI isn’t quite there yet. It’s still, you know, I’m not out of a job yet, put it that way. I’m not worried about my job. AI has not taken over my job. You know, there’s still a place for that [00:09:00] human touch.
Jenny: I think it’s just probably letting you focus on the more fun parts of your job.
Drew: Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s. Taking over the tedious work and allowing us to be a little more creative.
Jenny: I love it. So if I were an in house marketer and I were thinking about doing either a video or a image job of some kind with an outsourced organization, what are some questions or things I should ask them to understand if they’re using AI effectively?
Cause I would think that probably would mean that from a budget and timing perspective, they’re likely going to be a better partner.
Drew: Absolutely. I mean, Open AI is, you know, free and, you know, you can use Dolly, Chat GPT. I was doing it earlier. I was trying to come up with some tattoo designs of all things.
And it just spits out, you know, 10 designs right then and there. So that’s completely free. Most, I would say marketers probably have a Canva subscription. And if you have the pro version, then, you know, you have their AI tools as well, that are a part of that. Yeah. You know, Adobe, again, we talked about that can get a little more expensive depending on, you know, your, the learning [00:10:00] curve, how much you know about it.
But once, once you have access to those programs, it’s completely free. I think it really just goes back to creativity. When to use something that’s free and when to partner with someone is when you need to be creative and AI is, you know, going to kind of get you halfway there, but that human touch is what’s really going to set it off.
So if you need to be, you know, spitting out graphics on brand for social media posts, I think AI is great for that. They’re going to get the tone, right. As long as you’re prompting, well, they’ll get the tone, the colors, the brand, all the things, right. But when you need to do something really creative and outside of the box, partnering with someone getting that human touch would really help.
Jenny: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. And one last disclaimer as the self proclaimed queen of privacy, I have to remind everyone to not upload anything into any of these AI platforms that is considered private. So if you’re not willing to put it on a billboard, [00:11:00] outside of your office for your competitors to see, or for the general public to see, do not upload it.
That includes anything specific to patients any sort of financials or positioning information about your organization. You just gotta be really smart about that.
Drew: Yeah, that’s a good disclaimer.
Jenny: Absolutely. Well, Drew, thank you so much for being on. For our listeners, Drew’s organization, we’re huge fans of Wonder Boy and all of the work that they’ve done.
I’m going to include a link to his LinkedIn in the show notes. So if you’d like to reach out to him to chat more about his work or his use of AI in this space, I’m sure he’d be happy to chat.
Drew: Absolutely.
Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Please, as my kids would say, like and subscribe, and share us with a colleague who may appreciate this content. We will see you on a future episode.
In this episode, Jenny Bristow, CEO of Hedy & Hopp, is joined by Suzie Schmitt, Senior Digital Producer, to chat about creative solutions for data integration in marketing dashboards. Building on recent discussions about privacy and analytics at industry conferences, they discuss a workaround that enhances the reporting capabilities of data—while staying HIPAA compliant.
Additional Episode Highlights:
Connect with Suzie:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to be the creators and hosts of this podcast. I’m jazzed to be here today with Suzie Schmitt.
She is our Senior Digital Producer here at Hedy & Hopp. And I invited Suzie on because as we’ve covered in recent podcasts, I was at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago talking about privacy and I’m going to be at HCIC in a couple of weeks talking about privacy, and though our agency does so many things beyond privacy we’ve definitely become known as privacy gurus in this space, which is a hat we’re proud to wear.
But the questions keep coming up about workarounds, like even once you get sGTM or some other analytics solution in place, and you’re really comfortable with the way that you’re marketing analytics or your website data is being collected, [00:01:00] used and stored.
What about those third-party tools that you’re using? And so I was having a fun offline conversation with Suzie and I invited her on to talk about a workaround that our team has created that I thought could be interesting to some of our users or some of our listeners today. So, Suzie, I’d love for you to just give us a little bit of the lay of the land.
How did this technology solution, this process even come about?
Suzie: Sure. So we were looking into call tracking options for one of our clients to track campaign performance and we found that CallRail has a great HIPAA-compliant product, but that reporting on it once you leave the CallRail ecosystem can be kind of difficult.
So when we’re trying to tie everything back into all of our marketing efforts to get a holistic picture, we weren’t able to get all of the data we needed just from the out-of-the-box connector. So what we did is we created an API call that [00:02:00] only calls non-sensitive information. So it all gets written to a Google Sheet that has no PII at any time.
So it’s completely clean and kosher from a privacy standpoint. And it runs on a time base every 12 hours and updates our dashboard automatically. And that was a way for the client to get those specific numbers tied to campaigns and tactics into their dashboard where they could see it combined with all of their other tracking metrics.
And we did that through Google Apps Script, which let us connect that API using JavaScript just to a Google Sheet.
Jenny: Excellent. And I love that. And we’ve been long-time recommenders and users of CallRail. Their HIPAA-compliant version is great. And VOCA is another tool that a lot of our clients use.
Again, they have a HIPAA-compliant version, but what we’re talking about here is that with the HIPAA-compliant version, while the tool itself then becomes HIPAA compliant, it can then kind of be [00:03:00] difficult to get all the data you need into your reporting interface to actually report on campaign efficacy.
So for example, with our clients, most of them use Looker dashboards, and we are the ones that set them up from a campaign reporting perspective. And so if we’re trying to do, you know, soup to nuts from spend to final conversion you know, we got to get that data in. And so what you were able to do then with the call reel data is export it.
Only the data that is non-PHI, and then pull it back into Looker and then associate it with the correct campaign information. So we could accurately report on the number of phone calls and conversions that came in, right?
Suzie: Correct. Yeah. It’s kind of like a little custom Looker connector.
Jenny: Absolutely.
And this can be done really with any platform that has API availability, right? Walk us through, like if a marketer on this call is thinking like, Oh, I want to make my dashboard more robust in the third-party tools that I pull in. How can they [00:04:00] think through what tools this could be applicable for?
Suzie: Really, anything that has an API is an option. But as you go through it, think about the fields you do and you don’t need. So for example, for the calls, we needed the number of calls. We needed the average duration. We needed the time of day that the calls were coming through so we could make sure all of our campaigns were running smoothly, but we did not need any of that sensitive data that CallRail needed. And so once we had identified what we did need, we went to the documentation for the API and matched it up. And if you can see that the documentation has it, the ability to get granular enough so that you can get what you need and not what you don’t, it’s probably going to be a pretty good option for a pretty simple JavaScript API call.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve done it may feel a little manual, but in the end, it’s not manual. We’ve done Google Sheets to feed data into reporting dashboards for lots of different use cases. So this is just another example of creatively pulling data in to customize it for our needs. [00:05:00]
Suzie: That’s correct.
And since most APIs are pretty static and don’t change very often, we have a really low level of maintenance to do with these. And Google also has a built-in way to handle secrets so we’re able to handle API keys securely as well. So it’s been a really great, low-maintenance way to keep our dashboards up to date and make sure that all that data is tying in together and we can tag everything appropriately.
Jenny: Absolutely. So for those on the call, if you’re trying to build out your reporting dashboard for additional data sets or information from other platforms that you use, and there isn’t an immediate way to do it, this is a great way to kind of think outside of the box and kind of problem solve a way to be able to get the data.
Another thing that came to mind for me, whenever you were talking about a solution like this is if you’re an in-house marketer and you create these reporting dashboards and you share them with people outside of your organization, especially people you don’t have a BAA with, this is just another level of [00:06:00] safety to make sure there isn’t any data accidentally being put into those dashboards that you shouldn’t be sharing with third parties.
Suzie: It’s a great clean data source to keep things entirely separate so that you have, if you need to, you can go into CallRail and you could even match that call ID and see those granular details on each one if you need it. But if you want to report and not worry about any of that, it is ready to go. And if it doesn’t have anything sensitive.
So it’s great for reporting, whether it be for a presentation, like it’s something like SHSMD or whether it be to a larger internal team anything where you just wouldn’t want that sensitive data around.
Jenny: Oh, that’s awesome. So what are some watchouts? I know, for example, we were talking through, like, you shouldn’t just go and set this up on your, like, personal Google workspace. So if somebody’s going to pursue the creativity of a solution like this, what should they look out for?
Suzie: Well, the first thing is that we have two BAAs with Google here at Hedy & Hopp. We have one for Google Cloud platform and we have one for our workspace instance, which means that all of [00:07:00] our Google apps for workspace for business are all covered by their BAA.
So this was done on my, on the Hedy & Hopp accounts and not on a personal Google. You can never get a BAA with a personal Gmail account. So you want to make sure that you’re doing this in a secure environment. Anytime you’re dealing with an API, you’re also probably going to have an account number and API key.
And you’re going to want to make sure that you take care of those by using Google’s secrets manager to properly hide those variables. They’re not just exposed and flying out there because that’s kind of just leaving the key to your house in the lock. And then finally, you just want to be really careful about the fields that you pull because you just want to make sure that you’re referring to that documentation and lining it up and making sure that you really are creating what you think you’re creating and that everything that you want to make sure that you’re not just relying on what you think a field name might be.
So those are really my big watch ads for keeping these compliance safe and useful.
Jenny: I love it, Susie. Thank you [00:08:00] so much. And for our listeners, I hope this had you look at the opportunities for data integration to dashboards in a slightly different, perhaps more creative light. I know this is a pretty technical topic to talk about on our podcast, but I like throwing those in every once in a while to kind of encourage some technical thinking and brainstorming, especially because I know based off my conversations over the last few weeks, so many organizations are still focusing on building appropriate reporting dashboards and incorporating as many data sources as possible to have them be holistic.
So hopefully this episode was useful. Please know that if you have specific questions about platform compliance, or even opportunities for what a dashboard could look like please reach out to us. We love talking about this stuff and we’d be happy to hop on a call and talk with you and even brainstorm about specific platforms or tools you’re trying to integrate and see if we can help you problem-solve. So, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode, Suzie.
And thank you listeners for tuning in. [00:09:00] We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
Back from SHSMD Connections 2024 in Denver, CO, Jenny Bristow, Shelby Auer, Mark Brandes, and Taylor Fedderke from Hedy & Hopp share their key takeaways. They discuss the latest trends in AI and privacy, the strong audience engagement in Q&As, and why using data effectively remains a top priority in healthcare marketing.
They also highlight sessions on recruitment-focused marketing strategies, a basketball-themed initiative that improved KPIs like reducing harm events and patient stay times, and a creative healthcare heroes social media program.
From first-time attendees to catching up with old friends—and handing out fan favorite friendship bracelets and art prints at H&H’s booth—the team shares their favorite moments and insights from a successful conference!
Connect with Jenny:
Connect with Mark:
Connect with Shelby:
Connect with Taylor:
SHSMD24 Speakers Mentioned:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We are very jazzed to come to you today to chat more about SHSMD24. My fabulous team that I have on the podcast with me today traveled out to Denver on Sunday, and we attended three awesome days of SHSMD.
It was an amazing conference, so many highlights. And so we thought we would hop on and just record a summary of some of the key takeaways for any of you that were unable to attend. So you can get a feel for what the vibe is at these industry events. So if you’re thinking about adding sessions or conferences to your budget for next year, you’ll have an idea of the benefit that you’ll receive.
So we’re going to jump right into it. Again I’m going to do a [00:01:00] brief highlight of my team that attended with me. Taylor is Hedy & Hopp’s Marketing Manager. Shelby is a fabulous Account Manager and Mark is the Director of Data and Technology. So first I want to talk a little bit about our overall experience.
At the conference, we spoke at two sessions, which we’re super proud of. We started with a pre conference workshop around AI. It was two and a half hours, which at first we were a little like, Ooh, how are we going to make something engaging for two and a half hours? Well, we did it. People stayed like 15 minutes after for Q&A. Mark tell everybody about our workshop.
Mark: Yeah, it went really well. You know, I think people really liked it because it was so engaging. So we not only kind of talked about AI and different tools, we kind of had more of a lecture style, the first half of it but then at the end, we really got into, hey, open up your laptops, bring out your phone, and we kind of had them go through prompts or Jenny, you had [00:02:00] them kind of, you know, take pictures of their notes and had those be transcribed, right?
Showing them some cool stuff that AI can help them with in their daily work. The other thing I liked is that we kind of went through how different tools, whether you have to log into them, whether you can use them kind of in your personal life to help them understand that, hey, it’s not just a tool to say, go write me an email or make me a, you know, a generative piece of content.
It was more about how can these tools actually help you in your daily work? How can you talk to your leadership team? So we gave them a list of tenants, right? So we have these six tenants and we pass those along to the users to kind of say, hey, these are things you can approach your leadership with to say, hey, we’re not going to use this to make deliverables, right?
We are going to make sure we stay skeptical about these things. And so you can have kind of, that conversation to help you maybe get that ChatGTP unblocked, right? Or get access to something like Copilot so that you don’t have to kind of [00:03:00] fight them because we gave them a stat that, you know, like, a lot of people, even though it’s blocked, they’re still going to be using, they’re going to be on their personal device or find another way to use it.
So, you know, it’s better to sometimes embrace these technologies and find ways to kind of put some safeguards in place. And that’s what our tenants are all about. So we had that conversation. I think people really appreciated that because that gave them a takeaway to really take home. And then, you know, they’ve already used the tool now, right?
They’ve already used the technology, the ChatGPT app on their phone, they’ve already gone into Copilot and done a prompt, they’ve already used Perplexity. And so having them already do that, I think really was made it impactful. And I think that’s why people thought it was a really good session.
Jenny: I totally agree. It was really fun hearing the buzz, the whole session about people that wish that they were able to attend that pre conference session. And then the other session that we did was actually one of the last sessions of the whole event. It was at 11 a. m. on the last day. Right before the closing keynote, and we did a 2024 version of [00:04:00] our HIPAA, FTC and state law, but this time we actually brought one of our clients Jenny Bradley from Quartz Health Benefits attended with us, and we talked about a client’s perspective of what it’s like to switch over to server-side Google Tag Manager right before Open Enrollment campaigns launched.
So it was super fun to have a client share their perspective and point of view on something technical like analytics. And she did such a great job. So it was really fun to have her presenting alongside us. Taylor, talk to us a little bit about our booth and what we did this year.
Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Very exciting.
So as a lot of people know, typically when we show up, when Hedy & Hopp shows up to a conference, we have a very colorful booth. Easy to see. This year we did something a little bit more special even so usually we have an artist in residence, you know, each year that we’re bringing art prints to hand out, which is always really fun and people enjoy receiving those.
So, of course, we brought our 2024 Artist in Residence, Katie Mertz, art prints to bring and pass out, so that was great. But we also partnered with [00:05:00] two other artists. So for our backdrop this year we worked with our 2022 Artist in Residence, Jessica Hitchcock, and she created this beautiful backdrop, nice and colorful, kind of tying in our brand colors, and we had a perfect spot on there for our Hedy & Hopp sign, which actually, yes, behind Jenny, if you’re watching, we tied in there too.
And then also for our, outfits, we worked with an artist named Trent Colquitt. He customized our Nikes, painted them. They were super fun. And so kind of did a variety of things to make us stand out a bit more and have the color scheme that really goes with our brand. And then also of course had the friendship bracelets there too, to pass out.
And it’s always fun seeing people walk around having them on. Everybody’s kind of matching if they stop by our booth. And with that art piece there, a lot of systems, as we were talking to them at the booth mentioned that they are building art programs, which was really cool to have those conversations.
I know that’s kind of a separate piece to, you know, from the marketing that we’re usually chatting about. But it was really cool to kind of hear that side and further discuss, you know, the different artists we worked [00:06:00] with for the conference.
Jenny: Absolutely. Yeah. It was like you said, super fun to see our friendship bracelets all over the conference facility.
So let’s pivot and talk a little bit about some of the themes we saw at SHSMD this year. So one of the things that we did the week before SHSMD is we shared the 2023 podcast recording we did. So anybody could listen to it on the plane or on the way there to kind of remind themselves of what some of the topic themes were, because I find it very interesting to kind of pull up to that 10,000 foot view when you’re looking at annual conferences and kind of look at the pivoting and the shifting of topics.
What’s nobody talking about anymore? What is the trend? So let’s talk a little bit about that. Shelby, talk to me a little bit about some of the topic themes that we saw in 2024.
Shelby: Yes. So to no one’s surprise and goes right along with the sessions that we ran this year, AI just continues to be top of mind across the board.
There were many different sessions that focused on different ways that [00:07:00] organizations have been or can be using AI, whether it’s in their day to day or whether it’s larger opportunities to utilize that in their organization. So, it’s really interesting to see kind of year over year. I feel like the last couple of years.
That’s been a key theme, but that just continues to pop up honestly, even more and more. And privacy, it was really interesting. To see last year, compared to this year, how privacy is still being talked about in almost every session, whether it was really privacy focused or not, but really focusing and honing in on what organizations have been doing this last year because last year was a lot of here are all the different opportunities, things you can be doing to help in the privacy space and then.
Organizations were really sharing and talking amongst themselves about what they’ve been considering, what they’ve done, what they’re not sure about. So we just continue to see privacy be a huge theme going forward. And I [00:08:00] think we all know that’s likely not going to change in the years ahead and just a lot of organizations are talking about how they’re using data effectively.
Right? Kind of hand in hand with privacy. Okay. Based on what you’re doing in that space, what, how does that affect the data that you’re able to see and utilize and how are you usually using that to its fullest potential? So it was really interesting to see how organizations are taking advantage.
Mark: Yeah, as the resident data guy, I definitely jumped into a few of those, right? So there were some they were talking about using GIS right? Effectively. There was a lot of talk around some of those more locational data and using kind of 3D kind of views of data to help you understand your region and what the nation looks like, which is really cool.
There was also some talk about propensity models, which was kind of fun. That was super interesting. From a group at CAC at USC, it was very nice. And then in general, like I really enjoyed how people were talking about, you know, how they’re really developing [00:09:00] certain KPIs that are very effective.
It wasn’t just, hey, the standard KPIs. There was some conversation about, hey, how do we actually turn this KPI into something that’s meaningful? It’s something that drives our organization. Not just something we, a number we look at or something we track, but actually make it something impactful. And so there was a lot of discussion around that, which I personally appreciate it.
Jenny: Absolutely. I completely agree with you, Taylor. Talk to me about trends that we saw as far as the humans that attended the event.
Taylor: Yeah. So really a super interesting piece of this as people were coming up to the booth or just us making conversation at different sessions. A lot of them had mentioned that they were first year attendees at SHSMD which is very cool.
And kind of with that, even this one woman had mentioned she goes to a lot of local conferences in her state, but this is her 1st time really branching out and going to a larger conference. You know, that’s further away. And, you know, especially a bigger one at that, you know, there’s a very large event and you can get a lot about a lot out of it.
And so their [00:10:00] overall feedback or kind of thing I was hearing over and over again was that there’s a lot of first years, which is great to see. And then also kind of tying into that, a lot of people were new to healthcare as well. And so just trying to really understand, you know, privacy here. That was something very new to them. They haven’t really spoke too much with their team about. And so just by them attending to getting to hear more about what’s kind of going on in the space and learn about it, which was great.
Jenny: Absolutely. And then 2 other things I’ll add that I thought were really interesting is that every single session I was in had extremely strong Q and A. So people really participated and asked very meaty and sometimes difficult questions for the presenters, and they were handled very well by the presenters. So, there was, I was not in a single session where they said, are there questions and no one raised their hand.
So I think it was a great discussion. Just extremely impactful and really added to the overall experience for attendees. And then it was a busy last day. Like so often you see that the last day is kind of dead because people are catching their flights home. People go [00:11:00] hard day one and day two and day three, they’re like, meh, session attendance is pretty light.
That was not the case. At this year’s event, we did our, like I said, the last real session of the last day. And it was packed. Almost every chair was full in a lot, like probably a hundred or so attendees in this one session, which normally last session of the last day, I’ve been there in prior conferences and like eight people show up because everyone’s already at the airport.
And so, I will say that’s really strong. If you’re planning on attending this event in 2025, do not fly out early. Unless of course you have to for personal reasons, but like the content is strong all the way through the closing keynote on that note, let’s talk about actual sessions. We love attending sessions in order to call out people that are doing really cool things.
I think that’s one of my personal favorite reasons for going to these conferences is hearing about case studies and advancements happening. With providers and payers across the country that they perhaps aren’t like blasting out on the internet and sharing publicly, but they’re willing to talk about it, [00:12:00] conferences and share an inside peek around their processes and their strategy and their outcomes.
So let’s highlight a few of them. Shelby one session that you attended was beat the workforce blues, how to tackle your health systems. Biggest problem. Tell us about it.
Shelby: Yes. So Maria and Christina over at Shepherd Pratt, were sharing a little bit about how they tackled the issue of recruitment, right?
Organizations. Since even before COVID, but COVID and beyond are just struggling to recruit talent. So it was really interesting to hear how Shepard Pratt has tackled this difficulty. I loved one of the nuggets that they talked about was, you know, while recruitment isn’t necessarily marketing’s problem, when recruitment and marketing really joined forces, that’s really where you’re going to see.
A lot of benefit to those efforts. So, for example, they did this and they ended up creating templates for the recruitment team to use and [00:13:00] personalize when communicating to prospects to make sure things are more standard and used the same kind of language across the board. And they really focused on building.
A strong employer brand. So beyond even their own external branding, they work to create an employer brand with personas about their own employees to help them figure out. How should we be messaging? How should we be pushing this out? And they really trained their team on LinkedIn posts when they’re sharing about a new job opportunity, kind of key tips and things they should be including in those posts in order to really make the most of it.
And it was really amazing because they shared with us some stats that their vacancy volume has been at a year over year decrease of nearly 25%, which is huge. They were talking about the organization really hadn’t seen this in years. So shout out to them because it was really amazing to hear the great work that they’ve been doing in that space.
Jenny: Absolutely. We are big fans of Christina and [00:14:00] Maria and Shepherd Pratt overall as an organization. So, we will be sure and put their LinkedIn profiles in the show notes if anybody wants to connect with them. Mark, a session you attended was called Engaging Physicians and Leaders, Data Driven Specific Initiatives.
Tell us about it.
Mark: Yeah, I really enjoyed that one. It was run by Allison Vance and Jani Radhakrishhnan from Regional One Health. And it was great. So they had started talking about, you know, they have been trying to put certain strategic plans in place over the years. They’ve had certain metrics. They’re following what I talked about before.
They had not been seeing a whole lot of movement with those metrics, right? So they were tracking them. They were following them, but they weren’t really seeing anything effective. And so really, they started saying, well, how can we do this? And so I think when Allison and Jenny both kind of started, they were kind of tasked with, hey, let’s make this happen.
And so really, to get at the heart of this, they kind of had to rethink how they were doing their strategic planning. And so what they did is they got physicians involved. 1st of all, [00:15:00] they had administrative people and then they had, you know, the day to day workers, right? The nurses, the people from the food staff, right?
So, like, they would get multiple people from around and they made these kinds of cross functional teams. And then what they were going to do is basically have a break down all these different areas where they want to kind of address and they had certain KPIs tied to that. And then the best thing about this was they made it fun.
They turned it into a basketball theme. And so to get people on their team to go after these certain issues, they had a big draft. And so they had people up on stage and they called them up and there was high fiving. It was very cool. Right? They made some height videos with their clinicians.
Right? And so they had them in basketball gear and. Playing basketball and doing stuff, which is so cool. And then really, you know, they not only did they do that and kind of build the hype around that and have a lot of buy in, but they also then made these cool dashboards in Domo that actually made sure that it was aligned with what this team was trying to [00:16:00] accomplish.
And they realized that, hey, some of these people get this data every once in a while, or maybe somebody gets a monthly, somebody gets a daily, somebody else that gets it, you know, weekly. And so they realized, hey, we can’t have this because that’s really not leading to that change we want to see. And so they kind of identified some of those problems.
Then they turn these dashboards into daily dashboards, right? And now they get feedback when those things aren’t updated every day. They get feedback that it’s not updated, which is a good problem to have. Right. And so what was so great is that not only when they have these dashboards, they were actually able to show us data that, you know, harm events and we’re way down now that they have this in place, right?
Or they were looking at, you know, time of stay at the hospital that was way down, right? So they really, after doing this and getting so much buy in from people around, around the hospital, and then having data to back that up, they really saw some effect. And then the coolest thing was they had big celebrations, right?
So, when they had these wins, they really celebrated him [00:17:00] and then they gave out awards like buzzer beaters, right? Or they gave out the best assist, you know, or highest score, things like that. So staying in that basketball theme which was so cool. It seemed like a lot of fun and it was very effective.
So it was a great kind of session to attend.
Jenny: Yeah, I think that by far is the most engaging implementation of a data improvement strategy that I’ve ever heard of within an organization. So kudos to them. Regional One Health. Great job. Taylor. Tell me about the session you attended, Social Media + Healthcare Heroes, a Dynamic Duo.
Taylor: Yeah. So this was with Carly Cori. She’s the Director of Social Media and Creative Services at Stony Brook Medicine. I will say when I walked in that room was full, it was full to the gills, which was awesome to see. I was really excited for this session just to kind of hear some of their strategies around really working with their healthcare heroes and really promoting them on social media and telling their stories.
So yeah, tou know, showcasing those inspiring stories and how hard their staff is working. And I feel like with this, you know, while we’ve kind of heard some of this before, some organizations [00:18:00] already doing this, I feel like their approach was pretty innovative, which is why I wanted to share this.
But to just help determine who, when, and why they feature a hero, they really tap into their marketing team, SEO, social team, internal communication teams. It’s very collaborative, which is always great, no matter what you’re doing, but I feel like, especially in this space and in social media to kind of hear everybody’s strategy there and recommendations there to really highlight is great. But they create a variety of things. So written vignettes and photos, but they also have social first video clips, you know, which can be a bit more casual and longer form expert videos. And one thing I wanted to highlight here too, they had this like emotional, grateful patient video about his patient or this patient had an experience.
At Stony Brook’s Cancer Center and I could tell everybody was very impacted there in the room. It was very emotional. The patient was very emotional. So it was great that they had some, you know, examples included there too to kind of give people an idea to make you know, more of these social posts more impactful.
But really showcasing those patient outcomes, having everyday recognition programs is something they’re [00:19:00] doing to kind of tie into this strategy. But I really like that they also touched on the more challenging piece, a piece of this, which is getting your employees to really buy in and be willing to share this information.
And so a lot of times, you know, employees aren’t necessarily comfortable being on camera. You know, always that just limited in time piece to where, you know, maybe they can’t sit down to have this video created for a half day or whatever that looks like. And so they had some solutions there. You know, offering and creating a variety of content.
So whether they prefer to do a video or just take some images and do more of a written story and giving them also examples. So they know what to expect some. So from previous videos or anything like that to where they felt comfortable and, you know, kind of ready for whatever it was there or felt or to determine if they felt comfortable to do that.
You know, actually take care of that piece and help out there. Or also I think they kind of threw up this example as well, where one of their physicians didn’t necessarily know if she wanted to do this or was kind of feeling more uncomfortable, but they said, you know what let’s just try it out.
If you aren’t comfortable, we scrap it. But at least maybe we just give it a shot. And so I think that helped out knowing that like, hey, if it, maybe I’m not [00:20:00] feeling it as I’m actually doing it. We don’t necessarily have to move forward with it. And so throwing out some good options there.
Overall, I feel like it was a really great presentation, whith some really great, like actionable takeaways from it and a really great Q&A afterwards with marketers that I could tell were really focusing on like, okay, how do I implement this?
Jenny: Awesome. That’s awesome. It definitely sounds like a strong session.
And then last but not least, Shelby, talk to us about the session opportunities for child mental health within your integrated mark home strategy.
Shelby: Yes, talk about a session that was really special. Everyone that attended this session seem super passionate about children’s mental health. But Donna Teach, who’s the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Nationwide Children’s as well as Breanne Taylor, who’s the Administrative Director for Kids Mental Health Foundation, really talked about how as an organization at Nationwide they realized about 8 to 10 years ago, this looming crisis [00:21:00] that was on the rise. Right?
And they shared a lot of startling statistics about, you know, 1 in 5 kids having a mental health disorder before the age of 14 and how many teachers feel like they are ill equipped and how that impacts those students in the classroom.
And so. Nationwide Children’s ended up kind of making a five year commitment in their strategic plan that we want to focus on behavioral health. We see that this is a need not only in our community, but nationally. So let’s figure out how we kind of combat this. They wanted to partner with a national group that already existed to do this, but they couldn’t find one that was really focused on prevention and stigma breaking.
They found some that were very focused on kind of niche aspects. Specs, but not a little bit more higher level. So they talked to leadership and ended up deciding that, hey, this was something they were going to create. So they kind of started small with a local kind of call to action campaign. That was, [00:22:00] it was called on your on our sleeves and it was talking about how kids there’s a lot.
of stuff behind the surface that you can’t see that it’s not on their sleeves. The creative was really special. They put that out in the local marketplace and then COVID hit and they were like, oh, talk about a mental health crisis. Wow. What did we get ourselves into? So they had to pivot and really focus not only on kids, but the caregivers of the kids at this point. How do you help kids through this thing that we’re also trying to figure out ourselves? So they ended up pivoting by 2023 to a national cause organization called the Kids Mental Health Foundation. And they, guys, it’s been, it was so special to learn in this session, all of the partnerships that they’ve created and all of the material and content they’ve created.
And they’re able to have other organizations license some of that content and be able to co-brand and share it [00:23:00] to their patients and folks in their community. So they now have resources in all 50 states, and more than 18M people have interacted with their content. Huge. That rolled out in 2023, the National Cause Organization.
So, crazy stats of what they’ve been doing and the impact they’ve been able to have. So, spreading the word as much as I can to other children’s hospitals, organizations that want to get involved and partner with them. They’re doing some amazing work in that space.
Jenny: It’s a great case study about thinking about the bigger impact your content can have, right?
Because it’s one thing and it’s very impactful to create things for your local organization, but then licensing it for other hospitals that are like yours to leverage. Not only it gives you the monetization to then be able to perhaps create more content and feed that machine, but then also it spreads your impact.
So it’s a beautiful case study and a great job. Great job by the presenters. So, well, we had such a blast at this year’s SHSMD, we’re already looking forward [00:24:00] to 2025. I think it’s going to be in Dallas next October. So super jazzed about that for all of you that we saw again, this year, face to face our longtime friends.
It was great seeing you and it was fabulous meeting all of the first timers. Hopefully this recap was helpful if you’re thinking about attending SHSMD next year for the kinds of sessions that you can look forward to. And thanks for tuning in. Thanks for just being loyalists. It was really fun.
To be able to hear so many people approach us and say that they really look forward to each episode of this podcast and it made us feel really good that we’re doing a small part here at Hedy & Hopp to drive education throughout healthcare marketers across the country. So, thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy and we’ll see you soon.
Take care.
Epic is one of the leading electronic health record platforms, but did you know it can also help healthcare marketers gain deeper insights into their marketing efforts? In this episode, Jenny chats with Sam Seering, Product Manager of Cheers at Epic, about how healthcare organizations can use Epic’s CRM solution, Cheers, to better understand marketing impact and improve key performance indicators (KPIs).
What’s Discussed:
This conversation highlights the potential for healthcare systems to move beyond basic marketing metrics and understand the full ROI of their services through advanced technology.
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If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, and we are also the organization that produces this podcast. I am very excited to be here with you today to do an episode where we’re going to dig in and talk about how you can get into more in depth marketing measurements and KPIs and what that looks like.
So with me today, I have Sam Seering. He’s the product manager of their suite Cheers and I am very excited to dig in because Epic, as all of our listeners know is the gorilla of the electronic health record space, if you are a provider, a hospital system, many of you listening have Epic and use Epic.
And there’s lots of really cool ways that you can integrate your data into your marketing [00:01:00] tactics and get a better idea of how your marketing is actually impacting outcomes. So welcome, Sam. I’m excited to have you here today.
Sam: Thanks for having me, Jenny. Glad we were able finally to make it work and get me on the podcast.
Jenny: Yes, Sam and I have been emailing about this for, I think, two years.
Sam: Something about like that now.
Jenny: Yeah, so it’s great to have you. And I think there have been a lot of exciting developments on the Epic side in that time period. So I’m excited to bring the most up to date information to our listeners.
So I would love it to get started. If you could just give a little bit of an overview about what marketing measurement is possible what functionality and tools exist for our listeners that work at an organization that leverage Epic.
Sam: Absolutely, Jenny. So there’s a few different options, whether you’re using Epic, dedicated marketing automation capabilities through cheers, or maybe if you’re using other technologies, but you want to be able to [00:02:00] track data into Epic.
I think there’s pathways for marketers to take advantage of that. They might not be might not be aware of. So for as a baseline understanding for organizations that are just using Epic more holistically, not using the cheer suite of tools. Important thing that I would encourage you to start turning on is that if you are using online scheduling capabilities for your patient acquisition efforts, so showing your provider profiles and then linking to their available scheduling slots.
That component that goes on your website is able to ingest parameters coming from the website so that if you’re driving folks there from social media advertisings or display ads, you could actually understand for the folks that booked the appointment on that page, where did they actually come from?
And the nice piece is that information is then stamped on that new patient [00:03:00] record and that encounter. So that you can do back end analytics with that information to be able to tie that appointment schedule to your actual advertising work that you’re doing online. Now that’s something that I would encourage every organization to do because every organization has that as part of their toolbox.
When we start talking about, though, some of the more advanced capabilities that comes with Cheers campaigns, our marketing automation solution, this is where we can get that full end to end journey for that direct engagement. Of course, this is going to cover your more traditional marketing metrics.
Jenny, I think you did a great job of measuring this as part of your KPI 101 podcast that you did recently. And so you could include things like how many folks are you reaching out to? What communications are you sending them? Are they opening the emails or the MyChart messages? Are they clicking the links in the text message?
Your more traditional [00:04:00] marketing KPIs for your outreach campaigns. But because we then have an integrated longitudinal data set about the individuals that you’re engaging, we also can track what were outcomes that occurred before a conversion, a true conversion for the organization. And then what happened afterwards?
And I think an easy way to put this into context, Jenny, is with a real world example where an organization may be doing outreach as part of breast cancer screening initiatives, whether it’s part of a broader population health work, or maybe it’s a cancer awareness campaign that folks are doing.
What you would be able to do as a marketer is be able to understand not only how many folks did you send messages to that needed to get that breast cancer screening completed. But then also, how many folks scheduled a mammogram, how many folks completed it, and then finally, how many of those individuals had a clinical [00:05:00] diagnosis of a malignant neoplasm of breast because of that outreach.
And this is where marketers can start showing their true value to the organization and the clinical impact that their operations are having.
Jenny: Yeah. I mean, when I talk to, it’s one of the reasons I love being in healthcare marketing so much is whenever you go to conferences and talk to all of the marketing directors, managers, CMOs, whatever position they’re in for providers across the country, their number one passion is helping patients access care and helping their community and giving back, being able to access the number of people that actually were diagnosed or receive treatment as a result of your marketing campaign.
I mean, talk about making it real.
Sam: Oh yeah.
Jenny: Right. Right. I mean, that’s where it really becomes emotional. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is interesting whenever we were kind of doing some pre work about this, you’re breaking down all the different ways that marketing attribution can work within your platform is you talk about two different ways to create attribution, right?
So there’s different [00:06:00] ways that you can integrate the data to be able to get it. Analytics as an output. One you said was standard analytics. What was the data extraction suite? Can you talk a little bit about those different pathways so that way marketers could really understand based off of their Epic implementation of the package they have?
Kind of what, how they would access that?
Sam: Absolutely. So in some instances, there is going to be direct analytics that is out of the box ready to go. So when I was talking through each of those touch points of that mammography journey that we were that I was just chatting about, every one of those is a discrete metric that shows up on a dashboard that you can go and look at every single day and drill into the details.
We’ve had organizations that then pull out actual individuals that had that full journey. And then they reach out to them to say, Hey, would you be willing to be part of all their marketing initiatives that we have? So that they can help really promote that brand and that more broader [00:07:00] identity of the organization.
However, there’s definitely instances where you may want to merge the data that you’re seeing through the Epic capabilities with other data. I think a great example of this is if you are doing a search engine marketing campaign, being able to see how many impressions occurred and what was your actual spend then linked to the number of appointments.
And so that’s where, for my example earlier of scheduling an appointment online, you can take that data, which is extracted out to a SQL database, getting a little bit technical, but being able to take that data, and then marry that either in an Epic native warehouse solution, or if you want to bring that into another business intelligence tool, you would have that capability to do so.
So all of the information that we are calculating, both the appointments as well as the campaign activity, is then available in that raw format that you can then take and merge [00:08:00] that with other information as necessary.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a lot of systems that we have worked with, for example, that have their own data warehouses and they have their own in house data teams.
And so knowing that data is extractable and able to live in their own warehouses is extremely helpful. And one thing that I’ll point out here for all of our listeners, when they know that I am the queen that doesn’t want to be the queen of data privacy of marketing, is that the good news about this is that Epic is an organization you already have a BAA with.
So all of this data sharing back and forth is absolutely allowed. And it is absolutely in the best interest of the patient. So just to make sure that we state that everything is done in a safe and compliant fashion.
Sam: Yes, absolutely. And we’re more than happy to talk with organizations that we’ve seen about best practices around that message personalization and segmentation because that’s a powerful thing of having your marketing technology natively integrated with your core electronic health record with an Epic.
That [00:09:00] you have a massive opportunity to get hyper personalized in your messaging. But because of that hyper personalization, you want to make sure that you’re doing it in an appropriate fashion and not exposing information through unsecure channels.
Jenny: Absolutely. Or coming across as creepy because you’re sharing it at an inappropriate time.
I think that’s a fine line that we all have to walk as marketers. How am I helpful, but not making, you know, somebody feel as though I know too much about them, which again, luckily, since hopefully you’ve fostered a positive relationship with your patient you have kind of the benefit of the doubt based on the channel that you’re using.
So. So that’s good. You know, one thing I’d love to hear about is you guys are continuously improving, developing new ways to be able to help marketers and the way that they are able to leverage this data and the marketing automation tools. What’s coming next? What can people look forward to?
Sam: Yeah, two things, Jenny, I think are particularly important for marketers to understand as they’re looking [00:10:00] to grow their native capabilities within Epic.
One is that for the marketing automation that’ll be going through the Cheers platform, we’ve recently added our first version to be able to associate direct revenue with the campaigns that you are running. So now not only just the clinical outcomes that are occurring, But what are the true transactions that are happening?
What’s being billed to insurance and being collected? What’s going through self pay so that you can start actually talking with your finance team and with your revenue cycle team about the broader business impact, not even just the clinical impact that you’re having as a marketer. And we’re really excited to continue to expand that capability in the coming years.
Of being able to tie additional types of revenue as well as bringing in third party data for things like contribution margin to even be able to improve those numbers further. The other piece that we’ve heard from the community [00:11:00] is it’s great. We know our initiatives, but we don’t always have capacity in order to actually get patients in for that care.
And I don’t want to have to know as a marketer that I’m going to go talk with the leader of this clinic to say, all right, now I need to turn on the spigot to increase the volume because they have unexpectedly available capacity. And so a piece that we’re going to be making available in November for organizations is what we’re calling capacity based marketing.
And this is as part of your outreach and as part of your configuration. You define what is the type of appointment that you’re actually asking individuals to schedule. And so, before the system starts sending out those messages, it checks to say, is there actual capacity and then find individuals that live near that location or work near that location so that we’re providing access at the points that are most [00:12:00] convenient to the patient.
I think everybody can has had one experience where they get an email from a health system and I get engaged. Maybe it’s allergy season. You should schedule a consultation with an allergist and you click through and then the next appointment is nine months in the future. It’s a terrible patient experience because you as a health system, you as a marketer, you had me engaged.
But then when I went there wasn’t actually anything for me to do. And so now I’m less likely to engage with your content in the future. And so that’s where we’re going to be incredibly excited for organizations to simply have this always on behind the scenes capability. So that only when there is available capacity, you then are sending out information to the most prioritized individuals so that you’re both filling the slots from a business perspective, but then also providing a great patient experience.
Jenny: Both of those updates, I personally am super jazzed about as a [00:13:00] marketer. I mean, really understanding the true revenue per appointment is the holy grail. Right. I mean, marketers forever have had to create just estimates or averages of what each appointment was likely worth. So that is a game changer.
And then we have manual capacity feedback loops with most of our clients for the different service line campaigns we’re running, where we, like you said, have a text exchange or a message exchange every Monday and turn campaigns on or off. So again, this is going to be a game changer. So it’s exciting that your organization prioritizes these two different areas. So awesome.
Well, Sam, thank you so much for coming on today. It was really a joy to have you. And I think this conversation was really important to have because we continue to talk to systems across the country that are still just now starting to get to basic marketing metrics to be able to understand the ROI for the service line.
Our brand level campaigns they’re doing. So helping them understand really what is possible, bigger picture [00:14:00] as they’re building out their, you know, three to four year strategic roadmap for their marketing organization, they know what’s possible with the technology that they leverage. So thank you for being on today.
It was a joy to have you.
Sam: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jenny.
Jenny: So I’m going to put Sam’s LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So if you’d like to connect with him, you’ll have his information. And for listeners please like, and subscribe. We would love to hear feedback about what you’d like for us to cover in a future episode.
You can reach out to me directly, jenny@hedyandhopp. We always usually respond to requests by recording a show relatively quickly. If it’s a request, we usually prioritize that because that means it’s something people are really interested in. So would love to get your requests.
Otherwise, thanks for tuning in today. And we’ll look forward to seeing you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.