Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today, I’m excited to be here to chat with you about competing for attention on sensitive topics. As healthcare marketers, we have the pleasure and joy of helping patients find the care that they need.

But what do we do whenever that care involves a sensitive topic? So these are my, this topic is for my friends that are focusing on service lines such as behavioral health, addiction treatment, oncology, bariatric or sexual health. Patients may be private about their needs and the services that they may be looking for, or they may be avoidant, looking out for services that are available for them at all.

So let’s talk a little bit about how you can approach it. First big takeaway is to shift your targeting from the condition to actually targeting the movement. So you shouldn’t, for example, try with all of your targeting tools online to target folks that fall into a category such as people with depression. But what you can do is you can build content around searches people actually make, say, at 2 a.m. so if they are a person with depression, they may be going online and searching for things like, why can’t I get out of bed?

Or if it’s a partner, how to help a spouse who won’t get help. So really thinking about that intent-based search that people with those sensitive service needs may be looking for is definitely a strong starting point to really sidestep a lot of those platform restrictions. On that note, market to the circle, not just the patient or the individual that may need services.

So for example, with addiction, behavioral health and memory care, the decision maker is often a family member and not the patient themselves. All of our friends in peds know this story, right? Campaigns have to be broader and more strategically focused at caregivers. And also, it’s important to remember that in sensitive topic scenarios, caregivers are likely going to face fewer stigma barriers, although there still may be some there depending on the topic.

But they likely will convert better because they may be more of a problem solving mode instead of actually being in the depths. So thinking about how you can modify your call to actions, or how you can create content that actually focuses on caregivers of the potential patient, is a strong way to be able to hit that objective. Third, lead with normalization, not services.

So, for example, content should speak in such a way that makes them feel like, hey, this is normal, this is common. You’re not broken. It builds the trust that is required before anybody is actually going to click through, or even consider submitting their information to potentially learn more or to schedule an appointment. Fourth, think about designing the landing page experience for privacy.

So clear messaging about confidentiality. Discreet contact options like text or chat instead of a phone call or even an email provides a lot of comfort for those folks, because it may be on a singular device that they feel like they have more control over. Absolutely no invasive form fields before someone is ready. So, for example, if it is a behavioral health scenario and you have a prospective patient “learn more” field, be very considerate and thoughtful about what fields are even included in that, let alone which ones are required upon submission.

And then always, always, always lead with empathy for the patient or the caregiver. And remember, the goal of health care marketing is really helping patients find the care that they need. So making sure that every step that you’re asking them to do, every piece of content that you’re putting out, view it through the lens of empathy before anything goes live, anything that is too clinical-reading or that removes the human experience from it, is not going to be helpful for these patients, you know, as they’re trying to be able to find care in a way that also feels comfortable.

I want to share, along the same topic, an eMarketer article. So just this week, eMarketer released an article that was titled Healthcare Marketers Can Make Patients Laugh If They Listen First. And this really goes hand in hand with our topic today of sensitive topics. And they have four core points that they shared that I think are really valuable and tie hand in hand with our topic.

Today, we’ll share a full link to the episode or to the article in the show notes if you want to learn more about it. But the first point that they made was to listen before creating. So in the case study they shared, they said that they spent 6 to 8 months listening to conversations within the diabetes community, including Reddit threads, before leaning into humor.

So something that may seem like humor when you’re first entering a community may not actually be humor. You need to make sure that you have a little bit of longevity of listening, instead of just taking things at face value. And then a reminder is, if you’re leaning in with humor, make the situation funny, not the patient. Humor can help build connections, but the patient should never, ever, ever be the punchline, right?

It should be the situation that they are in or that, you know, the shared group finds themselves in. Awareness doesn’t always drive action. In this case study that was highlighted, the group did two years of educational messaging. And then they recognized that emotional barriers, not a lack of information, was actually likely what was preventing patients from getting screened.

And that leads to our last point is trust comes first. So brands need to understand their audiences and earn the right to use humor, particularly when navigating sensitive health topics. All of these different pieces of advice really kind of go back to the heart of why we are healthcare marketers to begin with. You don’t get into this field just to be able to accomplish KPIs.

Those are real humans. Those are real actions. So really leaning in through the lens of understanding, compassion and going above kind of the basic tactics and thinking strategically about what that care circle looks like, how you can really assist in education, and creating a comfortable situation for the patient to be able to reach out is really going to lead to much more successful campaigns.

If you’re in one of these sensitive topic areas. And thank you so much for tuning in today. Very much appreciate it. If this topic was useful for you, or if you know a marketer that deals with a sensitive topic, send this over to them, hopefully it will give them a couple of little tidbits of ways to maybe view the work they’re currently doing differently, or come up with something additive to the work that they’re currently doing.

And as always, like and share the episode very much. Appreciate you, friends. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here with the team from Hedy & Hopp that attended SHSMD last week. We are so excited to come back with some learnings from some of the great sessions that we attended, and share a little bit of our POV of the conference overall.

So we’ll start by just a quick round of introductions. Marissa, I’ll let you kick us off.

 

Marissa: Hello, I’m Marissa Gurrister, Director of Growth for Hedy & Hopp. 

 

Sarah: I’m Sarah Cutcliffe, I’m the Director of Epic Services for Hedy & Hopp.

 

Lindsey: And hi, everyone. I’m Lindsey Brown, the VP of Integrated Marketing. I oversee our Paid Media, our Content Creative and Epic Services divisions.

 

Jenny: Yeah, so our team had so much fun. Per usual, SHSMD is one of our favorite events every single year. This is, I think, like our seventh or eighth year going. So we always look forward to it. Always have a great time. We did for our session this year. We actually did a lunch workshop. So Sarah and I presented From Access to Action.

It was a 90-minute workshop on how to pull patient appointment and revenue data out of Epic, put campaign UTM parameters into Epic to be able to form a complete picture of your campaign’s performance. So, Sarah, this was your first time presenting at SHSMD, clearly not your first time ever presenting, but I’d love to kick off by getting your thoughts on the session that we presented and some of the Q&A, because we got into some pretty in-depth Q&A with the attendees.

 

Sarah: Yeah, I was really excited. I knew that we were going to have a full house. We had wonderful attendance. And having that many people that are coming because they’re hungry for Epic information, you know, you’re going to run the gamut. And I’m sure you felt this way, too. It was very clear, watching the reaction of the audience that different groups were at different points in their Epic journey on how they’re using it, the tool.

So I found that to be really helpful to know, like what type of information we can share in these presentations or in these podcasts. Because some of our friends are much more mature in their Cheers journey or their other Epic tools, and they need a little bit more advanced meat and potatoes. So it was exciting to get that read.

And also, yeah, the questions were wonderful. It’s also very clear to me that there are themes that are not specific to any customer that like, everybody is feeling, marketing is getting to know it. I.T. is getting to know marketing. And how do we make that the most lovely transition possible? Because it can be really hard and confusing sometimes if you don’t know who to work with.

So I found it to be informational for me, even though I was sharing some information. Yeah.

 

Jenny: Yeah, I agree, it was kind of fun because we structured the presentation where we could have it be more high level introductory, but also kind of get into the nerdy weeds a little bit, depending on how we were getting feedback. And we got kind of nerdy and people were following along from a Q&A perspective. So it was very cool to see the difference in experience and even awareness.

Some folks in the audience were writing notes down when we were introducing the names of different tools. Right? So they were very early, which is totally understandable. Whereas other folks were making detailed notes whenever we were talking about some really specific technical implementation tips.

 

Sarah: So absolutely, I totally agree.

 

Jenny: Yeah. Very helpful. Marissa, I would love for you to share more information about the booth. This is your second year going to SHSMD, and we had a pretty fun booth presence this year. What did you think?

 

Marissa: We had a super fun booth. Well I think our booths are always super fun, but it was beautiful. We had a beautiful rug backdrop that was handmade by a family in India. So we’ll add a photo down below and you can check that out. And it’ll be in the newsletter. But it was so pretty. It was so fun.

Loved chatting to folks as they came up to see it and feel it and touch it. I was a little nervous. I was like, don’t touch it. It’s so heavy. I don’t want this thing to fall over. But we did it. And it did not fall over. It was beautiful. And then, of course, we had our Artist in Residence artwork.

Haley Gearo is our Artist in Residencies here. We distributed her prints. It’s so fun. We had several ladies come up and say, “Oh, I’ve been collecting these for years. Like, I can’t wait to add it to my gallery wall”. I know Sarah, like, one woman mentioned to you, this was her powder room artwork. She’s gotta hang it up on the wall, which I love it.

It’s so fun to hear that. And we gave out bracelets. Year after year folks are still coming with their friendship bracelets, so that’s super cool. But honestly, I just loved connecting with folks. Like you said, this is my second year, so there was definitely familiar faces. It’s our first full fall conference, so it was great to get back and see folks who we had seen last year and who I know will be at HCIC. 

So it was just really cool to get to be there and reconnect with folks and have some good conversation.

 

Jenny: I love it. Well, let’s jump in and highlight some of our favorite sessions and I will actually kick us off. One of my favorite sessions was actually by Ohio Health. They did a session that was called From Acquisition to Acceptance: Building Awareness and Preferences in New Communities, and it was all around the work to integrate newly acquired and rural hospitals into a broader system ecosystem.

So they touched on things like communication strategies, but also talking about some prior lessons that they had seen or experienced through previous acquisitions and how that positively influenced the work that they did. It was really helpful. M&A is something that is quickly changing the landscape of the healthcare ecosystem and continuing to talk about what our role is as marketers to be able to support M&A, is something that I think should just be a steady theme at every conference that we go to.

So great job to both Cody Albert and Christina Thompson who spoke on behalf of Ohio Health. That was a great session. I’ll kick it over to Linds. What was your favorite session?

 

Lindsey: So one of the ones that I attended was on the last day. It was put on by Dayton Children’s Hospital. It was called Nine Lessons from a Values Driven Culture. And part of what I really loved about this particular session is being able to translate like what a system is doing from an internal perspective, and how that can translate to like what we do here at Hedy & Hopp.

We’re very much a values driven culture, and it’s really important that we have that pull through from even the people that we employ and that we hire to how we manage those folks, how we keep that culture going in a virtual environment. So it was very, eye-opening, I think, in understanding really how your brand can’t, you can’t just go through a rebrand.

We can’t just have these values that we stick up on a wall or stick in a virtual background or on our website, or, you know, that we talk about in a monthly all hands. It really needs to like, pull through in terms of calling out people that are doing an amazing job for specific values, making sure that they’re opportunities for people to have a little bit of joy throughout the workday.

That is really reflective of the values and the culture that, you know, our organization has. So I took a lot away as a leader here at Hedy & Hopp in ways that we can ensure that we are really following and and pulling through those values that we do every single day. And there’s always room to improve there.

But what I also loved about it is, as someone that oversees our creative division that helps organizations go through rebrands so often, the rebrand that also comes with a new brand promise or modified values or something like that. We think about what that’s going to look like externally. What is that going to look like for patients? What’s it going to look like for our internal leadership?

But we don’t always get to how am I going to pull all the way through to the employees that work here, not only in the marketing department that are heavily involved, but all the way through to the clinicians, to the nurses, to the support staff, to the people behind the front desk. And just making sure that we are being good partners with those clients that we work with on rebrands that we’re not forgetting about the implementation.

And one of the things they mentioned in that session is that, you know, those kinds of brands are not like a one-stop shop, like there’s an end date. There’s no end date to that. It continues on and on and on. So the metrics that you use have to evolve on how you’re driving that success, how you’re reinforcing those values.

And again, just a lot of really great information. And I believe it was a two-woman show. So power to the two women that meet that happen. It was Kristen Bowser and Ashley Junkunc. They they were amazing presenters. They had amazing ideas and just major kudos to how, dedicated they were to seeing this vision come to life and ensuring that the employees at Dayton Children’s really were feeling and living that culture.

So Bravo ladies.

 

Jenny: I love it. That’s great. Sarah, what was your favorite?

 

Sarah: I, women’s health is near and dear to my heart as a woman, obviously, but as a woman owned company, too. I attended one called The Playbook: Where Rivals Unite to Champion Women’s Health as a Strategic Priority. It was extra interesting because Ohio State and Michigan partnered for this, which I can’t say was ever on my bingo card.

Whether that would be in athletics or, in a health care conference. But they both institutions talked about how they reimagined providing care for women at their institutions. I found it to be really powerful because obviously it was data driven. They could see that they were having poor outcomes with the existing structures that were in place. Especially surrounding like maternal health was a big ticket item for both of them.

And they were able to say, okay, we know this is wrong, both by data and feel and feedback. How can we reimagine this for better outcomes, not just for our institutions, but for our patients and the success that both of them could demonstrate in better outcomes for babies, for moms, for women in general. And just like expanding the idea of what women’s health is, it was just a very powerful presentation.

And I learned a lot. So it it inspired me to in the way that we can support our clients, like when something feels right, when we know that this should be a priority. How do you find the data to support what is working, what isn’t working, and how do you take that leap to reimagine how you can, you know, change for the better?

And then, I mean, they felt so strongly that they, these rivals came together to talk through this, this wonderful development for both of them. So that was Luanne Thomas Ewald, Jennifer Dauer, and it was moderated by Priya Bathija. And she is like, she works with both institutions as an outside consultant. It was a wonderful experience.

 

Jenny: Very nice I love it. Marissa brings home.

 

Marissa: Yes, of course. So I attended a fabulous session called Beyond Automation: How Human Centered Community Engagement Builds Trust in an AI Era. And that was with Rachel Conley from Rochester Regional. This one specifically spoke to my little heart. I started my healthcare career on the events team doing healthcare events for a large system, so it was really cool to get to sit in and hear how Rochester Regional was utilizing their local sponsorships to really build trust in the community and hear from them some of the innovative ways that they were really smart with their sponsorships and extending their reach.

Sometimes it is truly quality over quantity. So they were really focused in on doing some super fun things and activations, some key events they held like a jazz festival, which is really cool, which I want to go to. It sounds so fun. And then also a big 5K race. So super fun to hear from them.

All of the innovative ways. AI is obviously a really hot and sexy topic. I think we heard a lot about it at conference, but it was just really refreshing to actually just like go back to our roots for a second and think, like, if we’re going to be at these events, like, what can we do to connect with our community on a really personal level?

And not always have to have, like AI involved in every single thing we do. So it was a really refreshing topic. Great to hear from them. It was her first conference presentation and she absolutely crushed it. I was so proud of her, so it was really fun. I loved that one.

 

Jenny: I love it. I will say that actually brings up a really interesting point, Marissa. I feel as though AI was woven into some sessions, but it was not the star of the conference like it was last year or the year before. The novelty has really worn off, where you can’t just say AI in your presentation topic and you’re automatically going to get a spot to speak, or, you know, the room is going to be packed.

At this point, people care more about what was the actual meaningful outcome. And how did you really keep the patient and your team front and center as you were doing this implementation? So very good point about that. And I’m interested to see, we leave in what, two weeks, we’re going to be in Orlando for HCIC. So we’ll do a similar recap then.

And we’ll share and kind of have that be a string that connects the two of what is the trend of AI content there? Is it a similar approach where maybe it’s part of the broader conversation, or are there going to be sessions and more tighter conversations where AI is more of a star? So stay tuned, listener, we will give you an update on that in a couple of weeks.

And besides that, thank you again for the entire team. They did a phenomenal job organizing this conference. Once again. Great to see so many familiar faces and we are already looking forward to 2027. And with that, listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We appreciate your time. If there’s any topics that you want us to cover, give us a holler.

We would love to do an episode featuring a topic that is of interest to you, whether it’s going deeper into one of our Epic topics or one of the other areas that we love getting nerdy on. But that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to tune in next week for a fresh episode.

Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have with me Sarah Cutcliffe. Sarah is Hedy and Hopp’s new Director of Epic Services. We are so excited to have her join us, and she’s going to be joining us at SHSMD this coming weekend.

So we wanted to do a quick little podcast episode for those of you that are attending SHSMD, it’ll give you a little bit of context about who we are, who Sarah is, what we’re going to be talking about so you can come prepared and excited. And if you’re going to, unfortunately, miss SHSMD, you’ll get a little bit of an understanding about what is happening and be able to connect with us.

If there’s anything that we’re going to be talking about that you won’t be able to hear in person. So first of all, Sarah welcome so much. We are so excited to have you join Hedy and Hopp. You’ve been here for a few months now. Really enjoyed having you integrate with the team. Let’s kick off by having you talk a little bit about your background and how you fell into this world of Epic expertise.

Sarah: Yeah, well, the excitement is the same on my side. I’m super jazzed to have joined Hedy and Hopp. I’m excited to be meeting everybody, both from our team here at Hedy and Hopp, as well as all of our friends at SHSMD and beyond. My Epic background, when you say I fell into this, it literally was that.  I’m going to date myself.

I put my resume on Monster.com after grad school. And Epic reached out to me the next day and said, hey, would you like to apply? And I had no idea what Epic was at that time. I did know that I had friends who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, so I took the interview. And now I’m looking back almost 20 years later and can’t believe that this has turned into my career.

But I started at Epic as a revenue cycle trainer, so I got to teach people how to use the software. It was an incredible experience. Once I left Epic, I ended up in healthcare consulting, and it really gave me a great new perspective of understanding how Epic customers actually use Epic. There’s a big difference, and Jenny.

I think you know what this difference feels like, between this is a software and how can we use it? And then looking at how customers actually use it, what is functional, how do we achieve our goals using this incredibly powerful tool? So I was able to work for several healthcare systems across the country, both as a trainer.

And then I moved into the analyst space. So I was doing the build and working with my internal operational teams to make sure that Epic did the things that they needed. And my most recent role was at Hospital for Special Surgery. I was the Director of Performance and Optimization, and I was able to take really complex projects and bring them to life in Epic.

So across many different teams, I was able to bring people together and execute on like pretty hard and, not always the most fun, stuff but we were able to put together some really, wonderful and impactful projects, like enabled paperless billing for the hospital. We were able to retool, our we had no, “no show late cancellation” policy, for example, and we were able to execute on that.

So my background is really understanding Epic, being able to talk to operational teams, marketing teams, understand what they need and then be able to translate that in how it can be executed using Epic. And anybody who’s dipped their toe in the Epic world, you know that it has its own language, its own teams, its own processes.

I’m very familiar with what those are, and I think that I’ll be able to bring that knowledge to Hedy and Hopp and be able to help us, be able to support clients as they navigate using this new tool in the marketing space.

Jenny: You already have, Sarah. Teams and clients have already spoken so highly about working with you. At this point we’re working with systems across the country, helping them leverage and understand marketing analytics and marketing automation tools that are available. And so being able to have somebody that actually understands the vocabulary, terminology, how to ask for something, using the right language, it’s really a gamechanger in helping our clients move a lot faster and more confidently navigating those conversations.

So, so excited to have you on board. We are very excited about SHSMD. We are doing an hour and a half long lunch session on Sunday. The title of the session is from Access to Action Turning Epic into a Growth Engine for Health Care Marketing. And if you are not yet registered, I am sorry to say it is sold out.

This was a registration required event and it sold out very, very early. So that’s really exciting. We are in the works of planning a webinar repeat. So if you are attending SHSMD and aren’t able to go, or if you are not going to SHSMD and you’re having FOMO, keep an eye on our socials will be announcing a link to be able to register for a free webinar for a repeat, but we’re really going to be about all of the different analytics and data tools that exist within the Epic tool suite, and how to use that to be able to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way.

So very excited to dig into it. One of the things that I’m most excited about is we’re leaving about 30 minutes for Q&A, because whenever we did our Summer School Webinar Series, there were so many questions submitted, we had to do follow up emails to respond to all of the questions because we just ran out of time. So with this session, we’re really allowing a lot of time for folks to be able to dig in, ask questions, really understand the material in a meaningful way before they head home.

So, should be pretty fun.

Sarah: So I’m excited that it is on Sunday, because that gives us an opportunity to be able to talk through those questions over the next few days of SHSMD as well.

Jenny: I completely agree. I, one of my favorite things about presenting at conferences in the first day or two, is being able to have folks be able to come to our booth, schedule lunches, coffee. So we’ll just have one-on-one and talk about their implementation questions or their tactical questions related to the content that we presented.

So I completely agree. It should be fun. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, kind of what you are excited about with SHSMD, what you’re looking forward to. This is the first time you have gone to SHSMD, right? So yes, I’ve not gone to an industry event that is focused on marketing before, so this will be new to you.

So what are you interested in?

Sarah: I’m really excited to learn more about how Epic can fit into this space overall, and meet needs of our, like, future clients or any health care systems. I’m also excited to meet people. I’m a people-person I like really feed off of getting to know people. And because this is my first like marketing for a, I get to meet a lot of new people, which I, I know I’m really gonna enjoy, but I also am excited to see, what health care systems are there because I have a pretty wide experience.

I have a suspicion that I’m going to actually meet people that we’re connected based on where I’ve already been before, or people that I know who work at different systems. So really jazzed for people. Also, I went to grad school in Maryland, so crab cakes, baby. I’m jazzed to grab some good seafood when we’re in the Baltimore area.

Jenny: Same. I am so excited. That will definitely be a highlight. Yeah, so. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. We are very much looking forward to SHSMD. Sarah, we are so excited to have you join us in person. So clients will be able to meet you in person. And then folks in the industry can start chatting with you about your POV and how we are bringing all of these tools to life for systems.

Sarah: Yeah. Can’t wait.

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy! Share this episode with anyone you know that will be attending SHSMD. Be sure and stop by our booth. We have a very uniquely handmade backdrop this year as Hedy and Hopp often does, we’re bringing the vibes. So swing by to be able to check it out, as well as some super fun swag that we are known for that you will love wearing around the conference.

So thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers. Bye.

Jenny: Hi Friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to be here to chat with you today about repositioning marketing inside your health system. We get calls from senior marketing folks within health systems all of the time, and they are frustrated because they are stuck as an order-taker within their organization.

So I’m sure many of you have at least heard of, if this hasn’t happened to you directly, but heard of marketers being asked to quickly create a flyer for something by Friday or get a billboard over here. There’s no strategy. There’s no downstream measurement impact for this activity, and you’re really stuck in an order-taking trap. Today isn’t about working harder.

As a marketer, what we’re going to talk about is being seen differently. You want to be seen as someone who drives revenue, not just designs postcards. So if you have been frustrated that you have not been invited to the leadership table, this episode is for you. So we’re going to talk about five concrete moves that can help leadership see your marketing function as something valuable to the growth of the organization starting this quarter.

Starting right away. Right? So let’s start first. First tip: when you’re building your marketing strategy for the year, make sure it ladders up to the organization’s strategic roadmap. This is something that we see as misses all of the time when we’re brought in to work with a new health system, is the CMO, or head of marketing, put together a marketing strategy that really was based off of the prior year strategy with a little bit of refinement.

The problem with that is if leadership is focused on a handful of service lines or organizational growth goals, and your strategic roadmap does not ladder up to that, it is a huge missed opportunity to make sure that you’re speaking the right language and focused on the right priorities. So get a copy of your organization’s strategic plan, or annual priorities.

This could include everything from service line, growth targets, market expansion goals, quality or access initiatives and literally map your marketing plans objectives to it line-by-line. For every marketing objective, be able to answer things like which strategic pillar does this ladder up to? If you can’t answer that, question whether it belongs in your plan. This is what is going to make you sound like you belong in leadership rather than ladder up to leadership.

So because what you’re going to start saying is not here’s the activity that we’ve done, you’re going to say, here’s how marketing drives the three priorities that you already set.

Next, stop reporting activity and start reporting outcomes. It can get really, it can be very difficult to transition from reporting and talking about activity-based metrics such as “we published 12 posts and created three fliers” to outcome based conversations, like “for service line X, we saw 14% lift in appointment requests,” right? It’s very difficult to make that vocabulary change.

It used to be that it was difficult because the data didn’t exist. Now it’s difficult because the data isn’t something that system leaders are comfortable referencing because it’s new. It hasn’t been around that long, and it isn’t part of your reporting frameworks and the way that you talk. So first of all, you have to address the objection up front.

Yes, healthcare attribution is messy. Multi-touch journeys, long consideration cycles, offline conversions. But you have to insist that imperfect attribution still beats vanity metrics. So we’re going to assume that these metrics that we’re looking at, once they’re fully vetted and set up, of course, are directionally correct, and they’re tied to a business outcome that outperforms a perfectly-tracked impression count every time, every time it’s going to be better to be able to have something that directionally informs us about real business growth than a vanity metric that’s about impressions or clicks.

So here’s a practical tip, is pick 2 or 3 metrics that you feel comfortable that you can confidently connect to a service line’s actual patient volumes. So for example, call volume to a scheduling line, perhaps you use CallRail or Invoca you can confidently talk about the number of inbound calls that were over 30 seconds and led to an appointment.

Appointment request form fills, new patient volume in a specific specialty, and report on those consistently quarter over quarter. Really make it clear that marketing is driving this growth and these different impacts that we’re communicating on. So an ideal world, once you identify the 2 to 3 metrics and identify the strategic roadmap and how you’re going to communicate, rolling up to leadership, a mini script that you could use is something along the lines of, you know, instead of saying, “we posted 12 times this month,” say “our campaign for orthopedics was associated with a 14% increase in appointment requests, and we can trace roughly X in downstream visit value.”

Big difference. Right? So we’re changing the way that we talk about our strategic priorities, and we’re changing the way that we’re incorporating data into the conversation. And that takes us on to the next tip. Tip number three: learn to speak CFO. We talked about this a little bit in our board episode a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, go back and tune in.

It was how to make sure that your strategy sessions land when you’re talking to your board. But it’s still true if you’re just thinking about your leadership team. You need to understand leadership’s dialect. So marketing has its own vocabulary, impressions, engagement, reach. Leadership doesn’t care about any of that. They care about revenue margin, acquisition cost. You need to be bilingual.

You need to be able to speak both. So what you need to do is translate your campaign results into terms that they already track and care about. So downstream revenue: what’s a new patient worth across the full episode of care? Not just the first visit. Patient acquisition cost, which is marketing spend divided by new patients generated by service line, and then contribution margin, which is what specialties are actually profitable to grow, helps you really understand, for example, that if you’re driving new patients to ortho and imaging, it’s going to be much more effective to help the organization grow revenue and profit than primary care.

So a simple habit is before your next leadership team meeting, take one campaign result and rewrite it twice, once in marketing language, and then write it out again in finance language. And then notice how different the room’s reaction is whenever you’re talking in finance language, it’ll be received much more warmly and positively. We already talked about in the episode around boardrooms that you need to have a relationship with finance and strategy early, so asking them and understanding what data sources within the system they trust, where they’re getting their numbers and use their exact terminology, not yours.

So if your system has a finance or decision support team, request their existing service line profitability reports as a template for the what language leadership speaks internally, because that will be a really big clue as far as what reports they’re looking at and how they’re communicating with each other. Okay. Tip number four is pick one winnable proof point.

You are not going to be able to convince everyone that your marketing is doing great everywhere all at once. And honestly, it may not be. You may have some campaigns that are performing stronger than others. So win one visible battle first, in order to begin getting credibility. So choose a single high margin service line. Ortho cardiology and imaging are great examples because there’s clear volume metrics and there’s a real financial upside.

Definitely likely that it is one of the high growth areas that your system is looking to target. And then run one measurable, well-scoped campaign for that service line. Keep the goal singular, like grow appointment requests and joint replacement consults by X, right? Be very very laser focused and then instrument it well from day one. Make sure all of the tracking technologies like call tracking, UTM tag landing pages, a dedicated phone number, whatever you have access to, make sure it’s fully integrated so you know that you’re tracking and attributing as much as possible throughout this campaign.

If you are an Epic-based organization, I’ve got to give a shout out again to our UTM connect tool. It can help you put the UTM campaign parameters into the patient record, and then we can help you pull it back out into a dashboard so you can have actual number of appointments and amount of revenue driven within your dashboard.

So very, very useful. Give us a holler if you aren’t already working with us to build that out for your organization. And then after you allow it to run, turn it into an internal case study. So one pager or a couple of slides, one chart, one clear before and after. Use it in the next leadership conversation as a proof of concept.

This is what marketing is able to accomplish whenever we have all of the tools and technologies in place. So again, this is definitely not about forcing your hand to do only a specific kind of marketing campaign, like a service line volume, for example. But it’s about showing when marketing has all of the tools and processes in place, not only can it be executed,

But the technology can help us track exactly what we should be given credit for, or how marketing contributed. And then you can scale that across different kinds of campaigns. And then tip number five is get in that room earlier. Perception shifts whenever you show up with market insights before anyone asks for it. That’s the difference between oh, we made a bunch of fliers this month to they know the market.

So some concrete examples of what to bring unprompted to strategy meetings is search trend data. So what are patients in your market searching for? Perhaps there’s a rise of interest in a procedure, a competitor service line, a symptom cluster. Pay attention and figure out where you can get this kind of data to be able to help see trends before perhaps strategy or your leadership team sees it.

So then you can help provide some strategic recommendations about how to capitalize on that opportunity. Patient sentiment, themes from reviews, patient satisfaction comment, social listening, and then competitor moves. If there’s a new health system billboard campaign, a competitor opening a new rival outpatient location, perhaps an ad spend shift or a new social media content strategy, have all of this content together and bring it to them before they ask for updates on the market.

So how would this look in execution? If I were in your shoes, I would go to my agency partners and I would say, what data can you provide to me on a recurring basis to help me have some useful insights for my leadership team? Lean on them. That’s what your agency should be doing, is they should be providing you with these resources and these data points.

They likely have access to a lot of subscriptions and tools to be able to do this exact kind of thing. So ask for them to do it. Carve out some time in your marketing retainer to have them prepare slides for you in advance, and then have a simple one-pager or slide, or a couple of slides, and send it to leadership proactively, monthly or quarterly without anybody asking for it.

Give them a couple of bullet points in the email, and then have them open it to be able to review it. Proactively showing up with insights before you’re asked for those insights is what’s going to flip the tables where they then begin asking you to be involved in these conversations. So when you show up with market intelligence and you can speak in financial terms, you’re then going to really shift from a doer to a strategic participant.

So hopefully this was helpful. So many folks are dealing with this right now. Marketing has become so technically complex and strategic that this is a pivot we all have to make. We have to move from the order-taker to a strategic contributor. And hopefully these five tips will give you some useful things to think about as you’re making your own career and department transition.

I would encourage you to pick one of these five and try to implement it before, you know, within 30 days, before your next leadership team meeting, whenever it is, whether you’re invited or not, I’m sure you know when it is, proactively try to get some content or something out to them ahead of that meeting, and just pick one of the five that you focus on first and then begin inching in.

One other thing that I would recommend as a tactical tip is as you’re going through all of these steps, don’t hesitate, while it’s ideal to have somebody in finance be your right hand, and I love when I see that that’s happening for marketers, sometimes finance is unnecessarily,

You know, not willing to be able to, or unable, to share time with marketing, to be able to talk about things like data points and strategic positioning. Talk to Claude or an AI tool whenever you’re trying to learn different vocabulary and the way that a different function thinks, it’s really great to practice and to get some quick gut checks from a tool like Claude or Gemini or whatever tool.

Now, this could be your own personal account on your own personal device, because we’re not going to be uploading or sharing any sort of proprietary hospital information or health data. Instead, you’re going to say, you know, right now I’m working on strategic roadmaps. I’ve been stuck kind of sharing information from an order-taking perspective, here’s what I plan to share next month,

How can I have this resonate deeper with leadership, and then see how it helps. Do not copy and paste what it gives you. Again, nobody wants to read AI-generated garbage, but the vocabulary and the framing can be a good starting point for you to really reimagine how you should be putting content together and just challenge some of your vocabulary and framing perspectives.

So I hope this episode was helpful. If somebody else in your industry or on your team is struggling with a similar issue, please share this episode with them and like and subscribe. New episodes come out almost every Friday, so thanks for tuning in to this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you next week! Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully health care marketing agency. I am so excited today, friends, I have the biggest VIP on the show that we have ever had. It is my very own son, Owen Dibble. Owen, welcome.

 

Owen: Hi. It’s nice to be here.

 

Jenny: I’m so excited to have you here. So a little bit of background and context. Owen is 16 years old. He is going into his junior year of high school, and he spent his summer interning at Hedy & Hopp. So I invited him on to be able to share a little bit of Gen Z’s reality check on marketing and AI. 

So at the end of the internship, he did a nice presentation to the entire team at Hedy & Hopp talking about some of his big learnings of what his expectations were coming into the internship and then his different perspectives leaving the internship. So for all of you healthcare marketers that have children and they think they know what you do, have them listen to this episode and say, here’s actually what we do.

Described by a 16 year old tech savvy person who was in the trenches over the summer. We’re also going to talk a little bit about an AI intensive camp that he went to, and some of the cool things that he learned, and how it has influenced the way that he thinks about business operations and efficiency. So, first of all, Owen, welcome.

Very happy to have you here today. I would love to have you start by describing to our listeners kind of what your expectations were, like, what did you think mom did at Hedy & Hopp?

 

Owen: That’s you know, that’s a good question. And honestly, before I ever did this, I kind of thought it all was just like, you know, emailing clients back and forth. And I don’t think there was much, like, backend work, if that makes sense. I never really imagined there’d be so much, like, quality control and boring steps.

I thought it would just be like, the client wants this, so we’ll do that. And then we emailed them back and say, we did that. You know what I’m saying? So I never really thought there’d be so much steps and rigorous, like, testing and make sure everything works perfectly. So yeah, it was very, very, different than I imagined.

 

Jenny: Yeah. You mentioned in the end-of-internship summary that you thought it’d be a lot more fun strategy sessions and making pretty things, right? Like pretty ads or pretty new logos for organizations. And you also made an interesting point that you thought everything that we would do operationally would run through Google. So talk to me a little bit about your interest, because you’re very tech savvy for a 16 year old.

Talk to me a little bit about our marketing tech stack here at Hedy & Hopp, and kind of what surprised you about all the different tools that are involved to make a marketing team function?

 

Owen: Yeah. So whenever I first, like, the first couple weeks, I realized how many, like, different apps and systems that you guys use and it really surprised me. I did not expect there to be so many different, like, channels and ways you guys communicated, and it was a little overwhelming to be honest. It was my first time doing stuff like this, so I just, I felt like there was maybe ways we could streamline it, in my opinion.

But now that I’ve done the whole summer with you guys, I realize it’s the best way we can do it. And it works really well, I. I thought it would just be like, we have a way to talk to one another, each person, and then we’d have a way to do changes to websites, and then we’d have a way to reach out to clients.

But there’s a lot more stuff involved than that. So yeah, that was really eye-opening to me.

 

Jenny: Absolutely. Talk to me about one of your favorite daily activities.

 

Owen: I really enjoyed doing quality control. That was really fun. I didn’t think I would enjoy it. I thought I like doing, like, back-end stuff on sites and making the actual edits, but I really enjoy just the daily, you know, making sure clients got the right thing every single time. And, you know, it was fun.

It was nice to see everyone’s sites and working on it a little bit myself, too. So yeah.

 

Jenny: Yeah. One of the projects we were working on, during your internship was helping an oncology health system launch a new website. So we helped them build and publish hundreds of pages for this website, and talk to me kind of about your perspective of that, because you’ve built a lot of websites before doing this internship at Hedy & Hopp. How was our process and the way that we think about enterprise-level websites different from what you had done previously?

 

Owen: So I never imagined how many pages each site had. I thought each site would be very simple. I didn’t realize that there had to be a page for, like, almost everything. And looking back, I just, it was such a surprise. You guys had like almost 500 pages or so. It was a lot. It was a big number that I had to go through and check, and it just made me realize, like how much backend work there is.

And it’s still kind of a surprise to me now. So.

 

Jenny: Yeah. And one of the things that you did too is quality control through the lens of, like, different browser rendering, different screen sizes, those kinds of things. So had you ever thought about that before?

 

Owen: A little bit, but not different browsers. And the scope of everything was just way larger with you guys. I did like a few, like, mobile and, like, desktop, like quick-checks for my own sites, but I never went through every single browser and every single device. So it was a drastic difference in scale.

 

Jenny: Yeah. So you kind of mentioned your site. So, one of the things, one of the reasons why we had you do this internship is you really have been very innovative and driven in doing things like website design and development, learning AI on your own, really building businesses on your own. You have a car detailing business.

You have a perfumery that you started, and so you’ve done all of the marketing for that yourself. And that was why we had you do the internships so you could learn more. Are there strategies and tactics in different channels that you’re thinking about differently, that you’re going to go back and maybe use throughout the year for your own businesses or perhaps for, Jeremy, my husband owns a residential garage door business,

You help him with his website and some of his, like, Geo and stuff. What are some things you might do differently now?

 

Owen: Yeah. So I think I want to, so as I left this internship, I have made a lot of edits to my own sites. I’ve made, I’ve done a lot of like, SEO and backend stuff because I realize all my sites have like none of that. They’re very lacking in all the backend stuff. They’re very more just, like, very basic, very, like, I may have five pages max.

They get the job done, but they’re not great for marketing. So I’ve gone through and tried to fix everything that I can so far. And yeah, it’s been a big difference. And we’ve seen a drastic increase in sales for the garage door business. So it’s been going good.

 

Jenny: Yeah, that was wonderful. That was actually pretty fun because as part of your internship, you actually worked with our GEO team at Hedy & Hopp, and they did an onsite technical audit and some content recommendations, explained those to you about how they did them, and then you actually did all the implementation. So it was kind of cool to see it from beginning to end, right?

 

Owen: Yeah. It was, it was really cool.

 

Jenny: Yeah. And it was, it was like the next week we started getting calls from the geographies that you were optimizing for. So it was really satisfying, right, to actually see things come to fruition for something you had your hands on. So let’s pivot now and talk a little bit about the AI-intensive camp that you went to. Talk to me a little bit about what the camp was and why you decided to go.

 

Owen: Sure, so, I think right before school ended and, like, four months ago, I received an email from my school district that was, they’re offering some camp during the summer. It was like, like a week long camp. And you kind of just go and learn everything about AI. So I was already pretty interested in AI, at that point.

So I felt like it’d be a really good learning experience. And I joined and, well, I guess it was more like an interview-type situation, but I sent a request to join, and they accepted me, and, yeah. So the camp was like, roughly a week long, like I said, and then you would be there for a good chunk of the day, and you would learn everything from Python to all the backend stuff and just how the AI models actually work.

And I’ve learned so much that way. I never imagined how much backend, and it’s like I never thought of it like how it is. It’s more like a math problem than anything else. It’s just predicting what the next word most likely will be. So that was a big shock to me and how that works. So it was very interesting and I learned a lot.

And I definitely feel like there’s a lot of things that can be applied to marketing using these AI skills that I learned. So it’s very interesting.

 

Jenny: Absolutely. I think one of the neatest things is after you finish the camp, one of the first things you said was, mom, I want to take some of the money I earned from the internship to buy a Meteor MacBook so I can download and run and train my own models. So I know that’s what you’ve been working on the last couple of weeks.

Anything that you’ve learned about running your own model locally?

 

Owen: So I learned, I learned a lot about running my models locally. I think the biggest thing that shocked me, it was just how much computer power is needed to run these big models. So it was a real big shocker. I also feel like I learned how to train them myself.

So now that I know how to train models, I can definitely help them, like, be more properly applied to marketing and healthcare and know what to do and what’s really bad. So that would definitely help. 

And then I also learned, I tried, so I tried using models and training them to be, because they weren’t listening to my commands. They said some of the stuff I was trying to get them to do was a little bit too unsafe, unsafe. So I tried “jailbreaking” it, is what it’s called, and turning off all the model’s restrictions, but it actually made the models really dumb as a result.

And so instead of that, I actually reverted the process and trained a safe model to do some things that were unsafe instead of trying to do the other way around and training an unsafe model to be safe. So I definitely learned a lot that way.

 

Jenny: Oh, that’s, it was so fun to hear your feedback and thoughts as you were going through this whole process. One thing I think our listeners would love to hear your perspective on, I love how into AI you are, like you are me whenever I was your age, super into technology. For me it was hand-coding websites right? Maybe I had a WizzyWig to build a website.

That’s what I was doing when I was your age. Now you’re doing AI. So totally different level of technology sophistication, but I feel like you’re an anomaly for your age. And I feel like a lot of people in your generation actually have a negative perception of AI, and they don’t want AI to really continue to advance. I don’t know if it’s because of fear of their profession, future professions, or jobs not being as stable, or if they don’t trust it.

What are your thoughts on Gen Z’s perspective in AI and why you have a different perspective?

 

Owen: Yeah. So I think, I think a lot of my generation is kind of using AI at the surface level. They don’t really, like, learn how it works and how they can use it more to their advantage. And a lot of people just view it as like a thing that can take their jobs. And I feel like that’s a really bad way to view it.

It’s it’s kind of like, Google or internet when it early came out, a lot of people were afraid of it then. But now it’s just, it’s like, the requirement for working. Now you have to have a computer and you have to use the internet and all sorts of these things. So I feel like it shouldn’t be something we’re afraid of, but it should be something that we’re trying to use to our advantage to work better.

So I definitely feel like my generation, some of us are doing that, but I feel like definitely a lot of us are just using it to cheat on school and things that it shouldn’t really be used on. So it’s very interesting. And Owen,

 

Jenny: What’s interesting is that maybe because their teachers don’t understand how it works, and so teachers can’t explain to them what is below the surface if they don’t know what is below the surface. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how education shapes, you know, the perspective of the generation over the next couple of years, and if it changes as they’re entering the workforce.

 

Owen: Yeah, I agree, I really hope there is some, some some minor educational reforms. I wish we had more, a lot more classes on this stuff. I feel like if there’s schools that are teaching computer science and stuff, I feel like there definitely should, those same schools should be teaching stuff on AI. I feel like it’s such an important skill that students should be learning everywhere.

 

Jenny: So yeah, yeah. You actually participated in our local school district’s advisory committee. There were two students, a couple of parents and some teachers, I believe. And then together as a group, you began, you created some recommendations for the school board, new AI usage policies. So, but at the time, you knew much less about AI than you do today.

So your recommendations probably would shift at this point based off what you know?

 

Owen: I yeah, I totally think they would have changed. But I mean, there’s a lot of boring school stuff that kind of limits what they can do. So it’s tricky. 

 

Jenny: It sounds like healthcare, like healthcare marketing.

 

Owen: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

 

Jenny: Awesome. So let’s wrap, Owen, with just a piece of advice, if you could give one piece of advice to either high schoolers or college students that are thinking about going into marketing or leveraging AI within their profession, what advice would you give them? What would you have them think about, or what would you tell them

to really keep into consideration as they’re going through their schooling?

 

Owen: Sure. I think the best way to learn is you have to just sit down and play around with these things. You can’t learn by just watching someone else do it. So I think it really helps if you just sit down and just ask it weird questions, or go through all the healthcare apps and systems, all that stuff, and just figure out where everything is and how it works and how it’s set up.

I definitely like that. That’s the best thing you can do right now, for sure.

 

Jenny: I agree completely. I think there are some classes that are available. If you need to understand the basics of how something’s structured, that’s great. Otherwise just get in there. In a compliant way, friends, do not do it within your system. Just do it on your own computer using personal-only accounts and no data that is questionable.

So, Owen, thank you so much for joining. It was a joy having you intern this summer and watching you grow, you know, as a marketer and an AI user. So, excited. Hopefully you’ll join us again next year. But good luck in your junior year of high school.

 

Owen: Thank you.

 

Jenny: And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us on today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to like and share this episode with any of your colleagues or any students, that maybe you’d like to help shape their perception about what healthcare marketing actually is behind the scenes. Have a great day, friends.

Cheers!

 

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today, I’m very excited to be here to chat with you about how patients actually find and trust health information today. So your patients aren’t Googling you and landing on your site anymore.

That foundation has shifted beneath us. And as marketers, especially tech savvy marketers, we’ve really seen this coming. But the moment that we all have been kind of fearfully anticipating is officially here. Instead, what patients are doing, instead of going directly to your site, is they’re asking AI, and what AI serves up is increasingly educational, not promotional. So as you’re developing marketing strategies and thinking about resource allocation, the shift really needs to go towards creating educational and helpful content for patients that then AI will want to quote to make sure that you’re showing up in the search results.

So let’s dig into this. Let’s first start by talking a little bit about the AI search shift. And this is happening fast, folks. If you are not an adopter of AI, you may not understand how quickly this is happening. But at this point, AI Overviews within, say, Google search results, 88% of health care related queries now have an AI Overview included in the search result.

It’s at the very top of the page. It’s the first thing that folks see after they do their search; organic click-throughs drop more than 50% when one of these shows. And at this point, health care site referral traffic from Google is down about 35% year over year. Huge drop in referrals. Folks no longer have to go to your website to get their question answered.

Things are changing. That isn’t how the patient journey happens anymore. And if you are not yet one of those people, just know that a lot of other people are those people that are using these tools to try to answer high level health questions. Right now, the most recent statistics say that 1 in 4 adults have used AI tools for health information, and about 40% of patients now use AI directly to research providers.

So when you’re thinking about content creation, one of the first things you need to understand is when and how are these AI overviews are triggered in Google search results? The answer is whenever it’s longer, more specific, or think like a researchery query, right? Somebody trying to ask something, figure something out on their own and they want to get the answer quickly.

So they show for those queries 74% of the time, compared to 36% of the time for a short query. So for example, if they say “dermatologist near me,” that result is likely going to be unaffected for now. As of what is this, August 2026? Compared to “how do I, how can I tell if a mole on my arm is potentially cancerous?”

Right. That is likely to trigger, much more likely to trigger, an AI overview then if somebody is specifically trying to find something. So but the upshot, the goal, then shifts from being from getting a good ranking, a top three ranking in search to being cited. And that’s where answer engine optimization, or AEO, also called GEO, really comes into play.

So, what is that and how does it work? We’ve had a few episodes that really dug into the technical details about how GEO and AEO work, but as a marketer, what you really want to be thinking about is creating content for your website that is really helpful to patients. Help answer their questions. One of the things that has been difficult for marketers for a long time is kind of walking that line of, do we put resources into the top of the funnel, where it’s broad queries that are answering questions and likely will be served to a lot of folks outside of our service area, or do we focus on more specific ones that are

geographically related and perhaps more promotional in an attempt to be able to drive traffic? Well, with the shift of AI overviews, the answer really is both. You certainly do not want to stop those optimizations that will get you to rank for phrases like “dermatologists near me.” But more and more patients are now researching a lot of their symptoms or potential solutions or what providers they should be seeing before they’re actually looking for that exact provider.

So as you’re developing your strategy, really keeping the EEAT model in mind (where it’s experience, expertise, authority (authoritativeness) and trustworthiness), it’s really the standard for AI in Google of how they rate, and evaluate health content. So think real clinician involvement, cited sources and dated reviews. Those are three components that are really important as your content is being indexed and cited for showing up in these AI overviews, or as an answer in an AI tool.

So this really lines up also with what patients already respond to, right? This isn’t anything new. We’ve been creating this content for more than a decade. Most of us. Right. And historically, educational posts always get 2 to 3 times more engagement than promotional posts and patients who engage with this content are also 60% more likely to book and 40% more likely to refer others.

So definitely have the business case in place to be able to invest dollars into creating this educational content. And also, it’s important to keep in mind that in general, content marketing is a lot less expensive than traditional advertising. So it’s up to you and your marketing leadership to be able to create a budget that allows you to properly allocate resources between the two.

So let’s close it out and talk about what to actually do about it. First recommendation is actually, if you’re already doing content creation, go and audit your last quarter of content and ask yourself, what is the percentage here, is why you should choose us versus here’s something useful to know, right? Because the here’s something useful to know is what’s going to get you cited in AI overviews.

So with that in mind, start creating content that is structured around real patient questions. So clear direct answers up top not buried. Lead with the answer. Don’t bury it four paragraphs down. AD schema markup so AI systems can parse and understand your content appropriately. Get clinicians visibly credited, meaning buy lines and review stamps is both a trust signal and an AI citation signal.

So you really want to make sure that you’re helping all of the AI tools understand, hey, this is credible information. A doc signed off on this or a clinician signed off on this and it’s recent, because recency is really important when rankings and mentions come into play. And on that note, make sure that you keep your stats and clinical information current. AI drops outdated sources fast.

So if you have stats or sources on your website, set a monthly or at maximum quarterly reminder to go back through and look at all of those things that are cited and update all of them appropriately, because recency definitely is a big factor in showing up in these AI overviews. So again, you conceptually understand as a marketer that this is happening, right?

But sometimes it can be really helpful to be able to see the numbers and get some really clear guidance on what to be focusing on for content creation. So again, we’re going to answer the question around “how can I tell if this mole is cancerous?” while also making sure the schema and information is there for queries like “dermatologists near me”.

Right?  We’re trying to do both at the same time. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this was a useful episode and got you thinking a little bit about how to make your content, strategy, and production process more useful internally to be able to leverage it across multiple platforms. Thanks for tuning in today. Please share this episode with a colleague who may find it valuable, and we’ll see you next week on a new episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to join you. I just finished doing our very last session, so session four, of our four-week Summer School, Epic for Marketers webinar series.

We had phenomenal attendance from leaders and marketers within health systems across the country, and really just phenomenal feedback from all of the attendees about what they learned. So I wanted to do today, just a brief little summary of a couple of the analytics tools and reporting options that are available to you within Epic today. So if you’re a marketer that uses an Epic system, first of all, you should absolutely go back and sign up for our Summer School series.

We will send you a link to watch the four episodes, the recording of each of the weekly episodes, and then, you will have all the information that you need to get a deep dive. But today, what we’re going to do is I just want to talk a little bit about the different names of the tools and the databases and the reports that are available within Epic.

So if you are a marketer on a health system that uses Epic, all of these tools already exist. One of the cool things about Epic’s marketing tool suite today is that you have the ability to put data into Epic and pull data out of Epic to be able to do your marketing campaign reporting. So what does that mean?

That means, let’s say that you’re doing a campaign for mammographies on paid media, and you can put a UTM parameter, which your marketing teams use for all campaigns already, on the ad when they click on it, and then go to your website and then schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter will actually be added to their patient record. And then you can actually do an export from that patient or from that database to be able to do a dashboard to show your marketing campaign ROI.

So you can show we spent X dollars on, say, this Google campaign. Here’s the number of clicks it received. So that’s campaign data. It lives within Google, right? And then here’s the number of landing page visitors that we received. Here’s the number that booked an appointment. Here’s the number of folks that actually completed that appointment. And then here’s the downstream revenue associated with it.

So that information all lives in different places, right. So what you have to do is put data into Epic and then pull data out of Epic to use your own data visualization tool. So a couple of different names of tools and terminology that you should know, is first Chronicles. That is a real time live transactional database. So it runs Reporting Workbench which is where a lot of pre-built tools, or sorry, reports live that you could access.

And it’s a great tool to answer questions such as “did our campaign today spike my chart activations today”? Otherwise, what you’re going to be looking at is Clarity, which is a relational database that does nightly data extracts, and Caboodle, which is the data warehouse that lives within Epic. So this is really great. If you want deep campaign analysis, this is where you actually want to see how many appointments were scheduled yesterday, what the downstream revenue is for the last 90 days after your campaign was launched, etc..

So LinkSource is the tool that Epic uses and it’s a native Epic tool. Again, you don’t pay for this. It just comes with Epic and whatever you send out. So you get that mammography campaign either it’s a Cheers campaign or maybe it’s a media campaign when somebody goes to the landing page for mammography service line and they schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter is appended to their patient record, along with the appointment ID, and then you can pull it out to be able to visualize it within your own data visualization tool, to be able to see all that information.

So you have the ability to put some information into Epic, but you don’t have the ability to visualize the data within Epic like most groups will want to see it. So we want to figure out exactly what data fields can we put in, and then how do we pull them out? One of the really interesting things, and some benefits that we’re seeing right now is whenever you manage your marketing teams and partners, really cohesively, you have the ability to be much smarter about media spend and patient acquisition approaches.

So for some of our clients, for example, if you’re able to manage paid media and Epic Cheers campaigns, let’s say again that mammography campaign will have an understanding of the amount of access that is available, and then we can actually send out a Cheers campaign to try to try to drive demand with our current patients, get them those appointments that we know they are up for, that they need to be scheduling to be able to stay on schedule with the proactive care.

And then also, we could do a paid media campaign to try to bring net new patients in. And if you have a centralized ability to be able to view access and availability, then you have the ability to understand, hey, we have more current patients responding to our Cheers campaigns. We’re actually going to pull back on our media budget a little bit until more appointments open up, and then we’re going to ramp it up again.

So there are some great dashboards that are already available within Epic. You can go to it’s called the Analytics Catalog. And that’s like a search engine for existing reports. Otherwise you can use SlicerDicer or the Reporting Workbench as other tools to be able to pull up data to be able to understand what’s happening as far as appointment scheduling and campaign response within your organization.

So this is just the tip of the iceberg. If what you’re hearing on this podcast all sounds like a foreign language to you, but you are with a system that uses Epic, please, please, please sign up for our Summer School series. It’s free. We’ll immediately send you the links to all four episodes. The first covered MyChart and Hello World.

The second episode dug into Cheers. The third episode talked about how you and your IT teams need to collaborate to be able to get all of this technology rocking and rolling and some different considerations of things that IT wished you understood about how their processes worked. And then the fourth was all around analytics data and dashboards. So again, it’s free.

The link will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining. Hopefully this gave you a little bit to think about. If you’re already on Epic as your system, there’s lots of data that it really is at your fingertips and just waiting for you to begin leveraging to be smarter about the way you’re conducting outreach and the way that you’re measuring performance of campaigns.

Thank you for joining us today on this episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. I will see you next week. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m really excited to come with you today and chat a little bit about speaking to the boardroom, how to pitch marketing metrics to the C-Suite.

So we have had lots of conversations with our clients about this over the last couple of months as folks kind of prepared for budgeting conversations or progress update conversations with their board. And one of the things we really enjoy doing at Hedy & Hopp, as being a true partner to our clients and helping prepare even the content, the slides, making sure they have access to the metrics that they need to be able to justify the progress that they are making with the marketing investment, even outside of what Hedy & Hopp,

Maybe we are their media partner, but perhaps in how they manage organic or social. We are happy to help them, you know, put together that story about the progress that we’re making. And we have seen, you know, time and time again, it’s really difficult to make the transition from the marketing metrics that you’re used to talking about with your team and with your agency partners to metrics and data points that the C-Suite care about.

So today we’re going to talk about exactly that. We’re going to talk about the disconnect. We’re going to talk about and identify three financial metrics that your CFO is actually going to care about. We’re going to talk about building the executive-ready dashboard. And then we’re going to talk about how you can use these same metrics on the defense.

If you’ve been told that your budget is going to be cut. How can you actually frame the cost of inaction? So let’s jump in. Typically, as marketers, we’re always talking about things like, you know, more upstream metrics to be able to understand the reach that a campaign may have. And then, of course, getting down to that cost per lead metric.

One of the things that has been very difficult to actually accomplish in healthcare marketing is actually fully understand the revenue that marketing’s leads are driving, the growth that can be directly attributed to marketing’s work. And that has been because historically, there’s been a bit of a firewall kind of around the EHR and all of the, you know, clinical metrics.

That is shifting rapidly. We have successfully been able to put tracking metrics like UTM parameters into patient records within Epic, and then pull campaign reporting out. That allows us to understand the number of patients and the downstream revenue that specific campaigns drove. So the days of having, you know, that that walled garden and not being able to fully report on the entire journey and revenue that your campaigns are driving, luckily, is over for most organizations.

You just have to act to be able to stand up all of these different reporting technical capabilities. But once you’re there, what we need to focus on are a couple of different things. First, really understanding. And instead of talking about cost per lead, reframing it as a patient acquisition cost. So this is still on the cost side of the equation versus the revenue.

But it’s really important to be able to understand how to calculate the patient acquisition cost by service line. So as you’re talking about, to the board, objectives for the organization to be able to drive volume, you can actually put some dollars behind it through the lens of what is it going to take from a marketing dollars investment at a certain patient acquisition cost to be able to accomplish your goals?

So that’s the first metric. Second is really fine tuning it from downstream revenue, which again, we’re excited to even have in healthcare nowadays. So downstream revenue for many organizations is going to be a win. But if you really want to win the hearts and minds of the board, switch that over to contribution margin. So the board knows that revenue itself can be misleading.

So if you phrase it through the lens of contribution margin, that is the revenue generated by marketing driven patients minus the variable costs of their clinical care. So that helps them understand the true financial impact of the patients that marketing was able to drive. And then finally service line ROAS which is return on ad spend. So don’t look at a blended ROAS for your campaigns.

You really want to break it down and identify specifically those high margin clinical procedures like cardiology or orthopedics and neurology, where the financial return is going to be the highest, because that will absolutely enable you to be able to help justify additional dollars for some of these, service lines, especially if there’s additional, access to bring in additional patients.

Next. Second, let’s talk about an executive-ready dashboard. So the golden rule of a board presentation is less is more. You do not want to have to spend five minutes explaining a slide. That means it’s too complex. You’re trying to communicate too much. So an easy way to think about this is really like a three-column framework. Tell a story in five seconds.

First the input. What capital was deployed? What was the marketing spend by service line? In the middle is what is the output, the clinical volume that was generated. Again you can pull EHR, verify new patient encounters. And then third is the impact. So what does it mean for the bottom line? Hopefully you’re able to pull again contribution margin.

And then also estimated lifetime value. This is a really easy way in a screenshot. You know on a one slider to be able to quickly explain what progress marketing is making to achieving those operational and organizational objectives. A couple of things I want to call out. I failed to mention this in the first segment. In order to truly get to contribution margin, you’re going to have to become BFFs with your CFO.

So to actually be able to understand what that calculation needs to look like, what are those variable clinical costs? To be able to do that calculation, you need to become BFFs with them, help them understand what you’re trying to report on, because for them, they want that data just as badly as you do. So really working together to be able to report at that level of granularity is a big success for both of you, so it should be a pretty easy conversation.

And then finally, let’s talk about the defensive play. Let’s talk about the cost of inaction. So right now we are seeing budgets being slashed across the board in healthcare. Regardless of if you’re a privately held organization, you know, PE-backed whatever. Budgets are being slashed right now. So how are you going to help the board understand the impact of these budget cuts?

So marketing often is first on the chopping block. So it is your job to defend it. So first talking about and framing it as a market share leakage. So what happens if marketing stops actually calculate the patient volume that will be turned off if you turn off or reduce marketing budgets and really phrasing it not as a, you know, this is we’re saving money, but this is what’s happening.

But hey, we’re ceding market share to our primary competitor down the street. You know, here the number of patients that our marketing is absolutely going to no longer be bringing in the door. So big impact there. And then finally showing the board the direct correlation. If your hand is forced and you do have to reduce budget, actually look at and track the financial implications of what happened, what was the trajectory of, say, high margin elective procedures for a three month time period if marketing was turned off compared to what your expectations were, based off of that strategy that you had presented probably a year ago.

You know, based off those patient volumes, you expected that it would drive so really phrasing it as a choice. Like we can reduce our spend by 20% in order to hit this quarter’s cost cutting goal. But our historic models show we’ll reduce the 150 K drop in surgical contribution margin next quarter. Right. It’s data. And then if they still need to or want to reduce it, that’s fine.

But you’re actually making sure that they understand and meaningful numbers what that impact is going to be. So again this is a difficult mindset shift for marketers that have reported with different metrics and terminology their entire career to all of a sudden be talking to a completely different audience that oftentimes doesn’t care what the campaign is. They don’t care what the creative is.

They just want to actually know if it, you know, drove and contributed to growth of the organization. So definitely encourage you to step back, kind of think about the data points that you’re using, think about your analytics tech stack. Do you have the data pipelines in place to even accomplish reporting at this level? If not, give us a call.

We’d be happy to help you, but once you have it in place, then actually start reporting on it, and I guarantee your seat at the table will be much more valued by others than when you’re simply talking about marketing metrics, which they may consider vanity. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope this was a helpful episode.

Share this episode. If there is a colleague that you think would find it helpful, please share with them. Please like and subscribe and we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to be here today to chat with you about human-led AI and paid media. So lots of folks are still talking about AI conceptually.

They’re talking about how organizations need to be smart, about how we’re integrating AI into your marketing processes, that compliance needs to be top of mind, and everybody’s doing it. But not many folks are actually pulling back the covers and sharing with you how they’re doing it, what steps they’re actually using to implement AI into their processes, and the results that they’re seeing.

So we thought today that we would focus specifically on our paid media division at Hetty and Hop and share our five pillars of AI integration. So at Hedy & Hopp, our stance on AI is it’s truly a core part of the agency’s DNA. So a couple of ways this shows up is we have a full-time employee who owns AI implementation throughout our agency.

It is her full time job that is all that she is focused on, is making sure that our processes are optimized, we’re being smart about the way that it’s being integrated. We’re following compliance regulations and that we’re being innovative. Our golden rule at Hedy & Hopp, however, is that AI accelerates and informs, but humans own the strategy and validate the outputs.

So the entire way that we think about AI has to be through that lens. We also look at it through two different bookends, if you could say. First is, is it improving our internal processes or is it improving our customer’s experience? Or patient experience? If we’re talking specifically about media being delivered? And so as we consider our prioritization of AI processes and tool usage within our organization, that are that is the two different ways that we think about how and what we prioritize as an organization.

So paid media has been a big area that we’ve been focused on finding efficiencies and improving the output of our clients media spend. So paid media is huge at Hedy & Hopp. And we manage millions and millions every month on behalf of our clients. We manage digital, but also traditional across the country. Buying billboards, radio, TV, all of the things to be able to make sure that our clients are really showing up where their patients need to find them.

So that really presents an opportunity, right? How can we use AI to be able to improve the budget allocation and the results? While also making sure that we are compliant? So the five pillars of AI within paid media that we’re going to talk about today are first, smart planning and budgeting, precision persona building through the lens of compliance, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimizations.

So let’s dig in. First, let’s talk about smart planning and budgeting. So typically whenever you’re looking at setting up a paid media strategy, there’s a couple of different ways, or steps that we do upstream as we’re doing research to provide recommendations for a client. One of the ways that we were able to improve this process and use AI to increase the efficiency and the strategic output, is use a variety of tools to be able to analyze over 400, 1st party data points, and then use real inventory data and performance signals to dictate exactly how budget should be distributed across those channels.

We wanted to make sure every dollar had a specific role, and in that full funnel that we were designing for our clients, and AI helped inform that with a lot of data points that would have taken hours and hours to be able to review and aggregate together in a traditional fashion. So one of the tools that we used is called AI Digital.

It is a favorite of ours. We use it in a variety of different parts of the process, but we have other tools that inform this step as well. But what it allows us to do is really move past those platform- suggested default. So for example, if you’re going in for a service line campaign and you’re trying to understand, you know, for orthopedics, perhaps we have 25 different DMAs that we need to show up for.

Google or Meta will tell you what’s available from an inventory perspective based off of your targeting. We like to go at this point deeper than that, and use additional first-party data points to really understand what the best optimized approach is to be able to drive those conversions and appointments. Next, let’s talk about targeting. So developing personas for each of your campaigns is foundational, right?

We’re going to be looking at a paid media brief really making sure that we understand the audience and the purpose for doing this campaign strategy and placement. But as budgets get larger and there are more moving pieces, often we found that there may be a primary persona, but we’re missing out on the opportunity to have more personas that allow us to do deeper level targeting.

So with some of our tools, we now have the ability to actually create precision personas, focusing on some granular audience data around demographics, median age, household income, and personal values across Google, LinkedIn and other platforms. And then once those personas are developed, our team then pressure tests them. Makes sure that they are accurate based off of the information that we understand within the health care landscape and the specific audiences that we’re looking at.

And then we have the ability to do a lot more strategic targeting across a variety of platforms using these personas than we would had we not had the ability to create additional personas at scale. So this really allows us to leverage many more personas and have precision targeting against those than if we were using old, more standardized persona developing processes that are a lot more time consuming to review data aggregation at scale.

Next, let’s talk about emerging channels so everyone understands that at this point, consumers are going to ChatGPT or other LLMs, and they’re asking healthcare-specific questions. They’re trying to find answers before they book that appointment. Well, at this point, we’re recommending and we are placing our clients in those LLMs as results. So in ChatGPT, for example, we can actually do placements within ChatGPT results.

Of course, we have the entire organic AIO/GEO optimization. We do that for a lot of our clients. I did a previous podcast episode about how successful we have been about having our clients show up organically in LLM recommendations, so that is a separate work stream. That is very important. But we also can prioritize placement through paid media placements, and that is always something that we’re thinking about now whenever we’re doing paid media recommendations, really guaranteeing those placements.

Sort of like if you think about Google Search, you have organic and you have paid. Kind of think the same thing about LLMs, now you’re going to have organic, then you also want to try to have paid whatever it’s available on that specific platform. Real time Insights is the fourth pillar. So we’ve never been an agency that would wait until the end of a flight to be able to talk about what worked right?

We are always an agency that’s going to be bringing up recommendations at a, at a minimum monthly, depending on the size of the budget, because sometimes if it’s a smaller budget, you can’t do insights faster than that. You need time for things to run to be able to have statistically significant results. But the cool thing about integrating AI into our custom Data Studio dashboards, which, by the way, for a lot of our clients, now includes Epic patient appointment and revenue data.

Using our UTM connect tool, we’re able to put those paid campaign UTM parameters directly into the patient records and then export them. So our campaign dashboards now often include full ROI, right? We’re not only looking at the number of people that attempted to book appointment, we’re looking at the number of people that showed up to the appointment and the amount of revenue that was driven. Right? Full cycle. Within these dashboards. 

We now have AI layering on top of these dashboards. And the raw paid media data to be able to understand trends before the human eye could actually identify them. So that’s one of the cool things about the capabilities of AI, is the massive amount of data that it can ingest and be able to identify trends faster often times than humans can.

Even if you have a dedicated analyst, having AI look, when you’re having, you know, dozens of campaigns and ad groups or placements across a variety of channels, AI accelerates those insights. So we’re able to have faster feedback loops and faster optimizations, because AI is identifying and flagging those insight opportunities for us at a much faster rate than was available traditionally.

And then finally, pillar number five is creative optimization, something that we have begun integrating recently that I am really, really excited about is actually including the creative production within our paid media fee. So it used to be that, all creative was outside of paid media management fees. But what we have found is whenever we actually include it, we can now use a variety of different AI tools to do quick, say, regional variations for a service line campaign.

And it drives much stronger results. And whenever we just include that in the fee, our team can act much faster because it’s all inclusive. So we have a variety of tools that we use for creative asset production that allow us to do those iterations that really speed up the optimization and results of campaigns. A huge, huge, huge caveat: we will never use AI for creative concepting.

We very much believe concepting still needs to be done by humans. So for us, when we talk about creative optimizations using AI, we’re really talking about creating versioning. Again, a perfect example is regional variations for a service line. If you want to have that specific neighborhood or specific DMA name in, and you have say, you know, 40 different areas that you’re optimizing for, you can, you know, crank that out in less than five minutes with some of these great AI tools, and then a human will QA it before it goes live, can save you a lot of time and money.

Then if you were trying to actually have a human go in, you know, and type in all of those individual DMA or city names. We are very excited about the direction that AI is going. I think this is probably our fourth or fifth podcast on AI, and it really is reshaping the way that marketers think about processes and optimization opportunities.

We still firmly believe humans are not going to be replaced in marketing. Sort of like when the onset of digital and the internet happened. Humans still are very, very important. But if you are not actively looking at ways that I can improve your speed to market and the results that you’re getting for your paid media management, then you’re really missing a key opportunity.

So again, the five pillars: smart planning, precision personas, emerging channels, real time insights, and creative optimization. This isn’t just about automation, it’s truly about smarter, human-led paths to performance for paid media. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. If this episode was helpful to you, we would love if you would give us some stars.

Some comments. Share it with a coworker that you think may find this episode helpful. Subscribe so you receive a notification when future episodes drop. And if you want to chat with us more about either how you are currently working to integrate AI into your own marketing processes, or about how Hedy & Hopp can help you with your paid media management.

We would love to hear from you. Shoot out, shoot us a message and give us a call. We would love to dig in and chat further. That’s it for us today on this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to chat with you soon. Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. Today we are going to talk about scaling shared services. So we have been inundated over the last couple of months with inquiries about rolling out a shared service model to local offices.

So this really can come into play really usually about three distinct areas. So first you have the private equity play. And that’s in situations where groups have been acquired, but decision making and budgets are still partially left then individually acquired offices. So they’re still able to hire their own marketing vendors, make their own marketing creative, etc.. Next would be an M&A hospital system scenario, and this is when health systems that have experienced rapid growth through M&A still may have some marketing control at the local hospital level, so they still hold some regional power.

There are still some local nuances. And we also have found often that within hospital systems, you may even have certain departments that are trying to go rogue with a pink t-shirt, for example, that is completely off brand. Everybody has heard that horror story, right? And then another final example is nationwide organizations or health plans that are nationwide, but they have a lot of state or regional departments, decision making powers around marketing, positioning, lots of autonomy to really be able to drive their own marketing strategies and tactics.

And there’s also different regional regulations that they’re working with. So let’s talk about best practices here. This is something that Hedy & Hopp has been leaning in on and helping organizations figure out for over a decade, and we’ve gotten pretty good at helping folks really walk the line, because one of the mistakes that we see often is folks trying to force the hands of those, let’s call them local offices, right?

Just picking a word division, whatever. But these local offices, if they have autonomy or believe they have autonomy, the worst thing you can do is try to force their hand and force them to do what you want them to do with marketing. Unless you have a decision coming from the very top down that is literally stripping them of decision making and marketing ability, then you need to think of them more as your clients and get them excited about collaborating on marketing and advertising initiatives.

So let’s talk about four different pillars or strategies of ways that you can kind of pull them in and get them excited about collaboration. The first is making sure that you have an easily accessible, self-serve brand toolkit. So you really need to have some easily accessible brand guidelines and templates for really inexpensive, print-ready local customization. This is how the hot pink t-shirt that Sally had her neighbor print 30 versions of end up happening is because there isn’t a way for folks to be able to easily create things within brand standards.

If it’s too difficult, if it takes too long, or if it’s too expensive, they’re going to go rogue. So you got to figure out how to make it easy for them, make it easier for them to actually use the tool that you want them to use than to go rogue, right? So one of the first things you want to think about is a DAM or a digital asset management tool.

There are tools like Canva Enterprise or Mark where corporations can really lock down the logos and fonts and the template if you will. But local teams can swap out things like headshots, local phone numbers, etc. to really customize it for what they need. That is way easier for folks in trying to design something from scratch. If it takes a local office three weeks in an email chain of 20 people to get a flier approved, they’re going to go rogue.

So a DAM is absolutely the way to go here. And there’s lots of different options. Now, it’s your decision, at that point, if you just want to allow them to access the templates, the brand templates, do some customization and then take the print ready files and go to their own printer that they may have a relationship with. Or, if you even want to lock down the production where they actually have to use your t-shirt vendor, your print company, etc. That is a separate decision that you’ll need to decide. But as you’re setting up your DAM with all of the different templates, you could really make that decision about how much autonomy you give them on that last step of the production process. 

The second pillar is the network effect or knowledge sharing. So one of the things that we find the most valuable is making sure that if folks are pooling their resources or participating in some sort of a joint marketing campaign, that they know they’re benefiting from the learnings of others.

So give it a catchy name or productize it in some way. Call it like the “marketing laboratory effect,” where you’re going to be testing out strategies like perhaps a TikTok strategy or a YouTube pre-roll strategy within one market. And then once you have a win, you productize it and roll it out to locations B through Z, right? That way, the offices aren’t just buying menu items, they’re buying collective intelligence and processes that you know are going to be successful.

They will be much more excited if you productize and systematize the rolling out of that. If you do it quietly behind the scenes, they won’t know that it’s happening and you won’t get the credit for it. So you really have to figure out a way to productize it and then evangelize it, as you’re working with all of these different offices.

The third is centralized strategy with local execution. So figure out a way for the headquarters to absorb the heavy lifting. Think strategy development, creative concepts, even asset development. So it’s financially worthwhile for those local markets to opt in. This is really the carrot versus the stick dynamic. You’re saying, hey, you’re going to save a lot of money.

If you work with us on this, we’re going to do all this upfront heavy lifting. We’re going to work with an agency or we have in-house talent to be able to do all the big picture strategic thinking, and then we’ll be able to hand over the things for you to actually do the local media buy. So if they have the local radio relationships, or they’re really passionate about placing in local newspapers, they can still do those things.

But you will know that the creative assets have been taken care of, and they will feel confident and excited about it, because that’s honestly where a lot of the upfront money and time goes in getting campaigns to market. So it really will become a financial no-brainer for them to participate. 

And then finally thinking about a shared dashboard of some kind, a lot of groups that we work with to put together a shared services model, really find a lot of value in building with us a reporting platform that allows leadership to see the macro view, so the total ecosystem spend and results while letting local teams drill down into their specific microperformance so you can see what the spend is per tactic or across your entire campaign, what the results are, what the patient volume and revenue is that’s been driven. 

And then you can drill down either per tactic across the entire network or per local office. That makes it really helpful because then you can understand, and they get value, because reporting and analytics is a really difficult thing to be able to set up from an infrastructure perspective, if you’re just at a local office, you they may not have the relationships or the technical access to be able to set up something like that.

So if part of participating in the shared services models, also getting access to a reporting dashboard that they simply have to log into to be able to see the results, it’ll be very exciting for them and wonderful for your leadership team to be able to then actually understand financially what is happening. So everybody’s had situations where local offices go rogue.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas about how to better structure a shared service model. So it is a win for Corporate and a win for all of the local offices. If this episode was helpful, please give us a like. Give us a follow. Share this episode with a colleague who you think may find it valuable, and give us a follow because we drop new episodes every Friday.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you soon! Cheers.