An interesting trend we see at H&H is the pendulum swing between candidate recruiting marketing and patient acquisition. Right now, we are seeing candidate recruiting marketing gain momentum as organizations shift their focus slightly from patient acquisition to recruitment. In this week’s episode, we plan to guide you through the key aspects of developing a successful recruiting marketing strategy.
In a previous podcast episode, we discussed the foundations of recruiting marketing, emphasizing the importance of the internal marketing team partnering with HR to understand marketing and positioning goals. Today, we tackle specific questions and provide advice to help you succeed.
Questions Answered:
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Give the previous podcast mentioned a listen if you haven’t already!
Unpacking Candidate Recruiting Marketing
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very passionate about helping patients access care by leveraging our talents to make it easier for them to find and book that care online. So we work with providers, payers across the country and are very passionate about that work.
A recurring trend that I’ve seen over just the last few weeks, I’ve had more and more conversations with folks that are necessarily shifting their attention from patient acquisition, but they’re definitely adding attention to recruiting marketing, and this is an interesting pendulum swing that we’ve seen happen quite often over my career in healthcare marketing. I actually started my career 20 years ago in healthcare recruiting. So that is near and dear [00:01:00] to my heart. And most of the work we do is focused around patient acquisition, but it feels as though the pendulum swings as far as internal focus on patient acquisition, and then you’ll see it shift over and more budget will be going over to candidate recruiting marketing. So that’s what I want to chat about today. There’s a prior episode, I’ll link to it in the show notes, where we talk about the foundations of recruiting marketing.
So I’m going to link to that 101 or a primer, but a couple of best practices and things to think about is, basically, what we’re talking about is your marketing and communications team within your organization partnering with HR and viewing HR really as another service line that you’re working with.
So helping them really understand their messaging, their positioning, their channels and tactics about how they’re going to go to market and accomplish their goals. They’re not doing patient acquisition work, but they do have specific metrics they need to hit as far as filling open [00:02:00] positions so we very often see within larger organizations Marketing and HR partnering to be able to make that a better applicant experience. So listen to that first podcast.
If you haven’t already, it’s a great one on one. Today what I’m going to do is just answer some really specific questions and kind of have it be a Q&A, because I’ve had a couple of specific questions.
I’ve seen rise to the top or a couple of assumptions that folks have been making about candidates recruiting marketing that I’d love to chat about. The first is, do we need a recruiting or career section of our website? Can’t we just link out to the third party job board that we have acquired or begun using?
The answer is yes, you absolutely need a section of your site. Some organizations go as far as creating a microsite or a subdomain where it’s really the entire ecosystem of that digital property, but this is your opportunity to really tell the story. Why should people want to work at your [00:03:00] organization?
Definitely having things like testimonials from current employees, really talking about the benefits, talking about the differentiators. We talked a little bit in the previous episode I’m linking to about understanding the competition. So, for example, if you’re actively trying to recruit RNs, really understanding what benefits do you offer that are different from the guy up the street or the gal up the street that’s an employer and making sure that you communicate those really clearly.
So, number one, do you have to have a section of your site dedicated to recruiting? The answer is absolutely yes. If you want to have a successful campaign rollout, you absolutely need to have a home base on your own digital ecosystem or property. I definitely recommend creating a content strategy around it.
So having it be, you know, just like if you were promoting a service line, what would you know, how would you build out that content strategy? What’s the call to action going to be? How are you going to highlight specific departments or functions that you’re trying to recruit [00:04:00] heavily for, and then build the content using those organizational priorities.
The next question or kind of uncertainty that I see a lot in conversations is marketing teams often feel like HR owns the job descriptions. And the job promotions and in the most successful rollouts that we have seen and that we’ve worked with. That is not the case. HR and marketing needs to work collaboratively.
So think about that content strategy, the benefits, all the promotional language that you used within that new microsite or landing page that you designed. All of that needed to be reflective in your job description. So, again, just like if you’re doing a patient acquisition campaign, you can’t necessarily guide a person’s journey.
You can’t guarantee they go to that landing page before they apply or see the job description. So you definitely want to make sure that the language tone, the overall vibe of what you’re putting out in the market matches throughout that candidate experience. [00:05:00]
The next thing that I want to share, nobody’s has asked me about this recently, but this is just a great tip. Apply yourself. So again, many times HR has picked an applicant tracking system because of the ease of the back end. Of qualifying candidates, organizing candidates et cetera. But often they have not had the bandwidth time, et cetera, to actually apply themselves to a position and see how many clicks it takes.
With one of our recruiting campaigns, we actually applied for that position ourselves, and we reported back to the client that it actually took over five minutes to get through the first couple of qualification screens. It was a terrible experience. It was really bad on mobile because of the way that the pages loaded.
So understanding most people will be applying on a mobile device, testing that out, seeing what you can do. Most applicant tracking systems actually allow you to really modify that application process. So for [00:06:00] example, a common thing that we love to do, if it’s possible, is to have them select what position they’re interested in and enter their name and cell phone number, and then go to the next screen, but you’ve captured that information so if they do not finish the application, you can then text them to encourage them to finish the application.
So little things like that, again, going back, put your patient acquisition marketing hat on, right? Like, what are we going to do to fill the funnel and then work people through the funnel? Exact same thing here for candidate marketing.
Another thing that we have done quite a bit. And this again, you have to really make sure that you are working closely with HR in a really positive way because this step can get a little tricky. But you need to measure the time it takes for your HR and recruiting teams to actually follow up with a candidate once they have submitted an application.
These people have a lot of options. There’s not a high unemployment rate in nursing. We all know this, right? Like getting candidates through the door is really hard work. So if they’re [00:07:00] taking four days before they respond, you’re likely not going to have a positive recruiting experience or have a lot of success bringing folks through the door.
Okay. So I always recommend and what we do with candidate marketing campaigns that we work with clients is we actually kind of secret shop it and be submitted ourselves. And then with a blinded email and then we wait and see how long it takes for somebody to reach out to us and then we report that back to our client.
And then you can have a really positive conversation with HR and say hey let’s set a couple of things. Number one let’s set some expectations, how long should it take? What is your goal of followup? And then number two, what are some automations that we can put in place? If your team is so short staffed that it will take four days, what are some automations you can do as far as drip email content, telling them that their application is being reviewed, that we’re excited to talk with you, right?
Like, again, if you can’t get a patient on the phone right away to schedule an appointment. Same thing, you’re going to try to nurture them, right? Let’s do the same thing with candidates and see what we can do [00:08:00] to shorten that window. And then if there’s only a certain point to which it can be shortened, then figure out what automations you can put in place.
Okay, let’s talk about channels. This is the last little thing I want to touch on. I’ve seen lots of folks ask me recently about using LinkedIn for recruiting. Folks, nurses are not on LinkedIn. They are not on LinkedIn. The marketing people you want to hire for your marketing team, Are on LinkedIn. With actual clinical folks very few of them are on LinkedIn unless they are entrepreneurial and they’re starting a business. You will not find them there. So it’s not to say that LinkedIn shouldn’t be part of your content promotion strategy, but it’s sure certainly should not be the primary. You really think about where those people for those roles you’re trying to fill, spend their time.
Often you’ll see campaigns, a foundation may be in Meta. So thinking about Facebook and Instagram, those are great channels. There can be [00:09:00] some programmatic spend in there targeting people based off of interest or profession. Google search for people that are proactively trying to find it and then also job specific promotion to be able to increase the visibility of somebody’s out there searching.
There’s a lot of different things that can go into a promotion strategy. But I’ve had a couple of organizations reach out to me and say, “Hey, we want you to create a LinkedIn specific content LinkedIn specific candidate recruiting Program for us. Oh, and we’re trying to hire nurses.” I have to tell them “no, you don’t want to do that. Cost per lead will be very high and visibility will be very low.” So even though Linkedin feels like it’s super relevant for job searchers, that’s because we’re on the business side of the house. We’re not in the clinical side of the house. So just kind of remember that differentiator.
And as you’re thinking about a promotion and outreach strategy, really think more like where the people that we are trying to recruit spending their time and then develop channel specific [00:10:00] strategies in order to reach them. So hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully it gave you some things to think about.
Again, I strongly recommend you listen to the first episode in this series to be able to get a foundation and then hopefully today gave you a little bit of additional things to think about as you are perhaps revisiting a candidate recruiting strategy that you already have in market and looking to optimize or fine tune it. Or you’re thinking about building one for the first time.
So thanks so much for tuning in today. Please give us a rating, give us a follow, share this episode with anybody in your organization that you think would find it relevant. And as always, feel free to reach out. I would love to chat with you.
If this is something you are working on within your organization and you want to bounce any ideas off of us. My email is jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Have a fabulous rest of your week. We’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
If you a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is beginning the process of tackling a website rebuild, this episode is for you! Jenny shares five essential steps to focus on before you dig into the desired design of the website:
After these steps, you can move on to wireframing and designing, either with your internal team or a third-party vendor.
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I am also the CEO at Hedy and hHopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to bring you this content every Friday. Today’s episode is not necessarily for all of our listeners.
If you have redone a website recently, you might not need to tune in today, but if you are a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is in the process or talking about tackling a website redo, and you haven’t done one in quite some time, and you’re not quite sure where to start, this is a great episode for you.
Today, what we’re going to talk about is the five things you need to do when you’re starting to think about and are beginning to dig into a website redesign project before you even start thinking about what the website is going to look like, we’re going to start much [00:01:00] more upstream and focus much more heavily on the strategic part of your website redesign project.
So let’s dig in again. We have five core things we want to talk about. The first one is spend time centering on your why, why does your website exist? The two core questions you want to answer is who are the audiences and what are the call to actions or what are the things that you want them to do on your website?
Typically, most folks in healthcare are going to have multiple audiences. You want to identify who is your primary audience, your secondary, and then sometimes you’ll have a tertiary. A good example of this is if you are a hospital system, your first, most important audience is going to, of course, be your patients.
Second audience might be HR or careers from a staffing perspective, trying to make sure that you’re really talking about the benefits of working at your organization. And the third might be foundation or fundraising. It’s up to you and your own [00:02:00] organizational objectives to identify these audiences, and then identify what you want them to do.
So for example, for patients, perhaps the primary call to action is to book an appointment. And don’t think about technology yet and how you want them to do that. We’ll get to that in a later step, but you really want to think about for your primary audience, what are the core things you want them to do? And then make sure you document it.
Next we’re going to actually start getting tech savvy. Now we’re going to start thinking about technology. So now that you have your audiences and the core call to actions identified, how can technology help? You first really want to outline what are the current technologies that we’re leveraging that we want to keep either from a functionality or maybe it’s a particular vendor that you really like working with. The technologies work well so far.
Make sure and document that, but then brainstorm and say, you know, maybe we want to move to the point where patients can actually schedule appointments online, or if you’re a payer, perhaps you want to get to the point where they actually can compare plans or [00:03:00] perhaps request a quote or do the first step of signing up for a plan on the website.
Don’t let technology necessarily hamper your brainstorming here, really think about the bigger picture. And then you’re going to go and try to find technology solutions, either within your current technology ecosystem, or perhaps a partner that you want to bring in. But you definitely want to start with the big blue sky.
What do we want to accomplish? And then you can figure out the technicalities as the second step. Within this part of the process, once you’ve done that, we understand who we’re talking to, what we want them to do and what technologies are going to be required. Then we actually want to design the site architecture.
And this is a really fun step because it allows you to, again, completely reimagine things from the ground up. Maybe your current website was built 10 years ago, and maybe you’ve had acquisitions or added service lines or whatever, and it’s kind of been mish-mashed and just added on to since then.
This is an opportunity to rip off the band aid and really, [00:04:00] again, blue sky it. I strongly encourage you if you have additional micro sites or domains that live outside of your primary, this is a great time to consider if you want to consolidate. It’s really great from a user experience and domain credibility perspective to do that. May not always make sense for your brand, but now is the time to talk about it.
I also would recommend making sure that you look at your current analytics and understand what content are folks using on the site, what content is ranking well for SEO, what content is not being utilized. At all. And is that because of a lack of visibility or because perhaps it’s not relevant anymore?
And then also identify content gaps. What should we be providing perhaps at the service line level or the plan level? That’s information we’re not really offering right now that we think may result in a better, stronger user experience. So do that and spend the time mapping it out. This is a great activity to do on a whiteboard with sticky notes and really [00:05:00] understand how you want the user flow to layer in.
And then the next step is actually layering SEO strategy on top of it. So now that we have the site architecture structured out, we understand. You know, how the content is going to flow, what the main navigation and secondary navigation is going to look like. Now we’re going to layer SEO on top of that and make sure that from a technical perspective, we’re keeping in mind those technical requirements that will make sure our website is really easy for search engines to index make sure that the content flows in an anticipated way and that we’re going to rank well.
It’s important here ranking well, again, not only for a traditional search engine, but we just did an episode on generative AI and viewing that as an alternative version of a search engine for your users. So again, thinking about it through both of those lenses, as you’re kind of reviewing that site architecture for a second time.
And then the final step is developing a measurement plan. So we’ve talked so much about patient privacy here at Hedy [00:06:00] and Hopp, and you know, our perspective, even with you know, that little bit of a I don’t want to say pause, but potential reconsideration of the OCR bulletin because of the American Hospital Association court case, we still strongly recommend you move forward at this moment in time with a patient privacy forward analytic solution.
And redoing a website is a perfect time to do that because you’re removing all historic tags, all tracking that may be living on the site that maybe you forgot about. So spend time now figuring out what analytics solution are you going to use? What events need to be tracked and measured? How are we going to do reporting or dashboarding? And what technology do we have, or do we need to make that work?
You’ll see, as you’re start laying these things out, that the measurement plan rolls directly up to those call to actions that you identified in the first step. So all five of these pieces really layer upon each other to help lay out the roadmap [00:07:00] and the strategy for your website.
Once you’re done with these five steps, then you can begin moving on to wireframing design, start thinking about the imagery and your way that you’re going to represent your brand visually on your website. But you shouldn’t be doing any of that until these five steps are completed.
These five steps are steps that can be completed by your internal marketing team, or it’s a great process to have a third party vendor come in and be able to partner with you to walk you through the steps. But either one works well. I would only recommend doing it in house if you have a person in house that is tech savvy enough and has done a process like this recently enough that they can really speak in to the opportunities from a technology perspective.
Because the last thing you want to do is go through this process and then rebuild the website and realize, oh, there are these really cool technologies or integrations that were available, but our leader the person that led this project perhaps [00:08:00] didn’t know they existed because they hadn’t gone through this process recently enough.
So even if you just bring in an outside consultant to speak into it, I strongly recommend getting a second set of eyes to be able to help guide you and make sure you’re thinking big enough, because a lot of these technologies and integrations. aren’t necessarily budget breakers anymore. A lot of them can be done pretty cost effectively, or just, you know, are an easy thing to integrate if you’re thinking about it strategically upstream enough before you start actually building the website itself.
So again, hopefully this was a helpful episode. If you’re in the process of thinking about doing a website, redo for your organization, or if you’re in the beginning phases, strongly recommend you walk through these five steps. And as always, I would be happy to give you any advice or feedback or thoughts if you’re in this process and stumbling over steps, or would just like some guidance, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. As always, [00:09:00] please give us a like, and a follow share this episode with other members of your team. If you’re in the middle of this process, it can give you some joint shared vocabulary and processes to be able to collaborate on versus having to educate them from the ground up yourself.
As always, have a fabulous day. Thanks for tuning in for this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!
When you hear “reputation management,” what comes to mind? For some, it’s online review management, which is indeed a vital component. However, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. In today’s episode, Jenny dives into the second crucial piece: shaping the online narrative about your organization. This is often intertwined with PR as it dictates how people perceive your organization. To effectively manage this narrative, follow these steps:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host today, as well as the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hop. Hedy and Hop is a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are proud to be the creators and sponsors of this podcast.
Today, I’m excited to chat a little bit about reputation management for a healthcare organization. I’ve had a couple of conversations with folks over the last few weeks around reputation management, and in general, it really falls into two specific camps. So we’re going to talk briefly about one, but then really focus and hone in on the second.
So, the first area for reputation management is really driving online reviews to be able to differentiate yourself and show yourself as a five star healthcare organization online in the online review sites. We’re not going to talk about that [00:01:00] today, but there are some great organizations like Press Ganey and Reputation and Raider 8 that offer those services.
You can integrate them into your online technology stack and they can automate the texting or emailing of links to your patients post appointment to ensure that you’re getting as many online reviews as possible. Whether it’s for a specific service line or business line, or for your entire organization, great platforms, really great service.
What I want to talk about today instead is the second type of reputation management, and that’s really owning the online story that people are saying about your organization. This can kind of be intertwined a little bit with traditional PR of, you know, how are people talking about your organization?
How are people framing up those conversations? Is it good? Is it bad? And there are some things you can do to help try to control that narrative. So let’s talk about it. So the first thing you’re going to want to do, [00:02:00] if you’re going to tackle reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization is to do a survey to be able to baseline perceptions.
This could be perhaps a survey of current patients or customers. It could be of current team members or it could be of your communities. There’s lots of different surveying tools. So you’ll have to decide what audience you want to survey, but really understanding the baseline of your organization’s perception will help make sure that you understand if your work is impactful or not.
So that’s the first step for the next step. You’re going to want to actually develop the strategy, and I’m going to break this down into four specific steps. The first is understanding your core messages. So before you go out and actually do any sort of reputation management or storytelling on behalf of your organization, you have to know what you’re talking about.
Are there specific service lines or business units that you’re going to be focusing specifically on? And if so, what’s the messaging behind and around that? Are you talking about [00:03:00] quality? Are you talking about outcomes? Really understanding and creating messaging guidelines around your campaign will be really helpful to make sure you’re consistent in the kinds of content you’re bringing out into your campaign and that you’re really reinforcing those core messages that you’re wanting people to hear in your community.
Next is understanding who the personality is going to be. When you’re thinking about content marketing through the lens of controlling your organization’s reputation, there’s got to be a face. There has to be a face. So, for example, with We Are Marketing Happy, I’m the face, right? Jenny Bristow. For your organization, it doesn’t have to be one person.
For example, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, we did a really big reputation management focused content program for them for quite a few years called Mom Docs, and they had a couple dozen physicians that were excited to build their own personal brands, and they participated in this content series and it really reduced the level of effort from each participant, [00:04:00] and it allowed St. Louis Children’s Hospital to really diversify. So they weren’t putting all of their eggs in one basket in case that individual left the organization or whatnot. So you have to decide as part of your strategy, who’s the face or how many people do we want to be the face and what are those guidelines? Do we need to make sure that they are big advocates of our brand? Do we need to make sure that they have a specific tone that they speak in, that they’re representing our brands in an appropriate way, whatever that is, as you’re developing the guidelines for personality, make sure that you define that clearly so you follow it throughout the life of the program.
Next, you have to figure out what channels you’re going to use to be able to distribute this content. I always recommend having some sort of a hub. Having a hub for the content allows you to really control where it lives. And then you can modify the other channels from a distribution strategy perspective based off of the ever changing social media and digital ecosystem needs.
So for [00:05:00] example going back to the St. Louis Children’s Hospital example, whenever we first launched, Facebook Live was a really big thing, right? But now it, I don’t even know if it exists anymore, but it certainly isn’t as popular as it was back then. Same thing for our own podcast. We Are, Marketing Happy.
You know, we have a Spotify hub. We’re It links out to all of the other podcasting channels, but then we promote it on LinkedIn and Meta an a variety of other channels. But our hub serves as a place where the content continues to live regardless of what other social media trends may be happening at that time.
So deciding about that and deciding if you’re gonna build it, leverage an existing platform that’s on the market or whatnot is definitely an important step. Next is understanding your promotion strategy and figuring out, you know, if you’re going to be promoting this and your goal is reputation management and storytelling, what audience do you need to hear it?
A big thing that we talk about with folks is, you know, your board may be thinking you’re not showing up in the right place, but is your board the right demographics of people that will actually be using your [00:06:00] service? It may be massively different. And if so, you have to explain to them, “Hey, you may not see our ads on Instagram because Sally, you’re not really our target demographic for our patients. We’re actually targeting people in their twenties and thirties for this specific service line. And you’re in your middle fifties.” So helping them understand that if you need to is important, but make sure that you’re actually building a promotion strategy based off of the people whose perception you’re trying to shift is massively important.
Another thing that you want to think about is for promotion is if you want to actually incorporate some traditional PR strategies. So when we think about content promotion through the lens of reputation management, really think about digital owned media content that you’re pushing out to be in the right place at the right time to hit the right person, but you also could go through the lens of traditional PR where you’re having an organization pitch your stories to show up in national or regional news outlets, and that can be a really beneficial way to build your reputation.
At that point, your strategy is done. Let’s start [00:07:00] launching. So launching and optimizing. I always recommend that you have a minimum amount of time that you kind of promise you’ll be creating that content for. Usually a year is the minimum I’d recommend any campaign go. Maybe you could do six months if it’s really narrow and focused, but you need quite a bit of time to be able to see if it’s actually working to shift the perception of your organization before you throw in the towel.
A month, two months isn’t going to do much. It has to be an ongoing effort, and at that point, you’re ready to resurvey. So let’s say you gave yourself six months as initial run, use the exact same survey methodology used originally and see if there’s a change in perception again, whether it’s organization wide service line availability, quality, whatever it may be resurvey and see if there was a lift.
If not, change your strategy. If there was, keep doing what you’re doing and double down on it. Congratulations. You have a successful strategy. This is a program or a general framework that really can be applied as large as an organization or as small as a [00:08:00] specific service line. So if you have a situation where maybe a service line isn’t super well known, maybe that’s not a reputation problem and it’s awareness problem, the same framework can really serve well to drive awareness.
So hopefully today was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@headyandhop.com. I love to chat with you more about this or any of your burning marketing questions. Do me a favor and please rate and share this episode.
We are so thankful for how popular this podcast has become and how well listened to it is. So if you could please rate it, share it, we would absolutely appreciate it. Until next week, thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
Healthcare marketers were thrown for a loop again a couple of weeks ago when the final ruling was released for the lawsuit by the American Hospital Association (AHA) against the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The ruling threw out a key part of the 2022 bulletin but left marketers confused about what, if anything, they should do to modify their marketing analytics setups.
Listen in to learn:
If you’re struggling to answer questions to your leadership about how and what should change with your analytics setup, this is a must-listen-to podcast!
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Mark:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbrandes/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow, and I am here with Mark Brandes. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And Mark is our Director of Analytics and Decision Science.
So welcome Mark.
Mark: Hey Jenny, thanks for having me.
Jenny: So first, I have to acknowledge anybody watching the video Mark and I are twinning today. We are both wearing Hedy and Hopp Artist in Residence t-shirts. So that’s a rare occurrence and I almost changed but I think it’s adorable. So we’re going with it.
Mark: It doesn’t happen to me very often, Jenny.
Jenny: It doesn’t. But here’s the thing. We’re talking about a pretty serious, heavy topic today. So if we can give some levity with matching t-shirts, we’re going to do it. So the topic today we’re going to talk about is the recent AHA and OCR ruling and the impact on patient privacy.[00:01:00]
As many of you know, in the healthcare marketing space, a ruling came down a couple of weeks ago. With the American Hospital Association lawsuit against OCR around the bulletin that was providing you guidance around HIPAA and the impacts it was having for healthcare marketers and our use or lack of use of marketing analytics tools.
We have been really leaders at Hedy and Hopp around helping healthcare organizations understand the bulletin that came out in 2022. Really making sure that we provided, at first it was just straight guidance and understanding of what tools were on the market. And then we pivoted and we actually created a solution because we wanted to put forward a low price, quick-to-implement solution.
So we did a Server-Side Google Tag Manager implementation offering, which we’ve helped now many healthcare organizations across the country [00:02:00] become compliant with that bulletin. And now, parts of that bulletin don’t matter anymore. So Mark, do you want to give us a rundown around kind of what happened a couple of weeks ago with the ruling and some big findings?
Mark: Yeah, for sure. So yeah the news was interesting. We knew there eventually might be a decision based on the lawsuit that was out there, and really our reading of it and talking to our legal team. Kind of feels like maybe only a small part of the bulletin was really kind of ruled against.
And so I don’t have all the legal terminology, but my understanding is that really, when you look at the part about the guidance that talks about IP addresses, along with specific health information, the ruling really said that that was an extension of HIPAA rules and not necessarily living within those correct rules that were already stated, right?
And so there’s a process for updating those rules and changing those rules. And that wasn’t really followed for that. And so that’s kind of what, how we look at that. And so [00:03:00] really it’s just that thin part of, if you have IP address, It’s mixed with something like specific health information, like, say, on a web page that has actually been vacated, but there’s still a lot in the bulletin that got kind of saved and still is there.
So it’s kind of interesting that it was only that sliver. And so we’ll see how the government kind of responds if HHS feels like they need to appeal that. But there’s also a sense that maybe they won’t appeal because it is such a sliver of a judgment and not necessarily so broad to take out the whole guidance.
So we’ll have to keep watching and see how that goes.
Jenny: Yeah, I think an interesting thing that I took away is that in the bulletin, OCR said that regardless of intent, you had to treat that combination of IP address along with a health condition as PHI. So for example, If you are a behavioral health center, your entire website talks about behavioral health problems and symptoms and treatments and services [00:04:00] that you offer.
If anyone goes to your website with that IP address, that should be considered PHI because it’s clear that they were coming to be able to research a behavioral health solution. But what was really interesting is that it said that no. Inference is required. So you have to infer the intent about why they were visiting, that was for themselves or for someone else.
And I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is this again, opens up and creates even more gray area. There was so much gray already, right? In the legal interpretation of the bulletin, but this is even more gray area of like, how do you define intent? And are people going to use that specific language to be able to say, well, we’re just going to begin going back to the old analytics setup and tracking that we had because you know, this is gray enough that we think we can play in that space.
I think another clarification that I’ve had a lot of questions submitted to me is because it was in the federal district court in Texas. A lot of folks were asking me, does this only apply if we are in Texas? And it does not, this is [00:05:00] nationwide implications, because it is OCR nationwide guidance and enforcement.
And so even though it was the federal state or federal court in Texas, this is a nationwide implication. One thing that I think is interesting is you talking about, you know, will health and human services actually come back and fight this? And try to push it forward. And I think this opens up another question of gray and frustration for marketers because it could take a long time.
I mean, I know we have talked about, we talked with our legal team around what it could look like from a timeline perspective, and it’s years. Right. I mean, could you talk, I would love to hear your perspective, Mark on, you know, from a marketer’s point of view about kind of the pros and cons of backtracking analytics, trying to play in the gray and kind of the weight of waiting years to get a solution.
Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I feel like the people that have taken steps are ready to put in a compliance solution [00:06:00] or move to a compliance solution. I feel like they’re a step ahead still. And I don’t feel like they’re losing much right now. Some people have turned off their analytics and some of their tracking completely.
So those you know, companies can consider, hey, do we want to put that back on? If that’s your kind of solution needs to have it on or off, then, I mean, you can kind of make those kind of black and white decisions if you need to. However, for ones that have already kind of implemented certain solutions, like SGTM or moving to a compliance software, that’ll sign a BAA with you.
Right? If you move to those solutions, I don’t think you’ve lost anything instead. I think you’ve just allowed yourself to not feel the pressure of some of these decisions, right? So. If you already have that in place, you’re not really feeling like this decision is going to make a huge difference to you.
You might feel like, hey, maybe we didn’t have to do this, but I feel like it’s a different way. I feel like you’ve put the infrastructure in place that you need to then actually make those changes. So if it does get appealed, then we’re right back to this. Right? So, like, that kind of up and down roller coaster.
You might be on if you can put a [00:07:00] solution in place or move to something compliant have BAAs in place. You don’t really have to be concerned anymore. So there’s not like watching, you know, watching on the horizon to see what’s coming down the pike. You can kind of feel comfortable in what you’ve done. And so we’ve talked about there’s other pieces of legislation out there are other entities out there that also affect this.
And so it’s not just HHS. Now, that was the match that lit the fire in this sense, but I think we now understand how many other things are involved here. There’s civil lawsuits, there’s the FTC, their state laws.
And so I know we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. Jenny.
Jenny: Yeah, let’s talk actually about state laws. So there are at least I think there’s more than this, but there’s at least 19 state privacy laws on the books now. If I’m a healthcare marketer in you know, let’s say Virginia. And we don’t need to go specifically into state laws, but like, let’s say I’m located just within one state. Like, how should I be thinking about state law now?
Mark: So Virginia is an interesting one, because it actually talks in there [00:08:00] about how if you’re treating your data like PHI, then you can actually be exempt from Virginia’s law. So however, if, based on this ruling, companies and clients decide to move back to maybe the original way they were tracking stuff.
Well, they might actually now be pursuing under the Virginia law because they aren’t treating all their data like PHI, right? So there could be ways that gets invoked. Now there’s some other states where it doesn’t matter how you treat your data. It just matters how you’re kind of classified. So all that kind of has to be taken into account.
However, a lot of them do have carve outs for HIPAA and covered entities that are following HIPAA rules. And so if you are still following that, putting in a compliance solution, you can actually not really have to be concerned about some of those state laws. However, if you aren’t, and if you leave kind of your site up to the old way of tracking, You actually really need to be careful in how you’re doing that.
Whether you’re following the state laws, you need to be [00:09:00] on the lookout for any new states that are coming. So it’s kind of another one of those things. Where do you want the peace of mind that? Hey, we’re doing things the right way and can kind of just leave it alone. Or do we want to keep kind of jumping every time one of these things pumps up.
Jenny: Yeah. And a nationwide privacy law was actually introduced. I know it’s still going through the legislative process. It is nowhere near being finalized, but I mean, something that I think is interesting is will we see healthcare entities now need to be compliant and not have a carve out in any sort of national law because of this ruling?
So I think you bring up an excellent point that, you know, I think brands really have two choices. Continue down the path of being privacy forward. Making sure that everything’s compliant, then you have way less concern around watching the legislative landscape, or continue playing in the gray, because you, for some reason, think it’s worth it.
And then you’ll just have to continue staying up to date with all of those different legislative changes. How about the FTC? I know, you know, last year, health and human [00:10:00] services and the FTC kind of like sent a nastygram out to 130 systems saying, hey, we’re watching you. You’re not doing good things with patient data.
Well, how do you think and how is our legal team kind of shared information about how we think the FTC may respond to this?
Mark: So, the FTC is an interesting one, and it’s still a little unclear how this is going to affect this because they have their own definition of what they mean by health information.
Right? And so they kind of went along with that same definition of HHS, which is if I have an IP address and have specific health information, putting those 2 together is personal health information. So, like, they still, maybe follow that direction? We’re really not clear. But what we do know is the FTC is still very strong in that privacy landscape and basically making sure that companies are following what they say.
So in your privacy policy, if you list that, hey, we’re not sharing any of your personal information with third parties, you better be sure that you’re not doing that. And one way to do that would be to have a privacy solution in [00:11:00] place or BAAs in place that you know that you’re covered there because that’s really where the FTC is going to get you.
If you are doing something and you are being, you’re misleading your users, I think is the way that they put it, that’s when they’re going to start to have a concern. And so still having a good sense of, hey, what are all the softwares on my side and what data are they sharing? I think that’s still a good exercise to go through.
To have an audit and make sure that, you know, all the things that your website is sharing. So you can put those in your privacy policy. Doesn’t mean you have to stop doing some of those things and just make sure you need to be clear with your users. And so with the gray area with HHS, maybe you lean to be more having more data sharing happen, but there are times where if you’re doing that, for example, with Cerebral, I believe that latest lawsuit from the FTC, Cerebral can’t share any data with 3rd parties. Now, they’ve really kind of lock them down. It looks like, based on our reading of that judgment. And so that’s not something companies want to happen.
Right? So you want to make sure that you’re being [00:12:00] clear as possible and still being up front with what you’re doing and what you’re sharing and make sure those privacy policies are up to date.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And quick plug. We do do those audits. So if you are a new listener and haven’t heard us talk about this yet, one of the things that we began doing immediately upon the bulletin landing is doing really comprehensive marketing and technology stack audits to help you understand every single technology that’s running your digital property website and all of your ad platforms.
So reach out if that’s a concern. Otherwise, I believe there’s a podcast talking about how to do it yourself. If it’s something your internal team wants to tackle, but you absolutely should be on top of that. Let’s talk about civil lawsuits because that’s another thing that’s been really interesting.
And one of the things I have done in all of the trainings around HIPAA and state law, FTC, et cetera, is encourage people go to the website builtwith.com type in their domain, and you can see every single technology that is powering your website or a large percentage of them at least. Talk a little bit about the [00:13:00] civil lawsuit landscape that healthcare organizations are experiencing right now.
And if you think that’s going to go away or not with this new ruling.
Mark: I don’t think so. I think that kind of train has already left the station so to speak. Yeah, it’s interesting. You bring up kind of Built With there’s a lot of tools out there like that. There’s some extensions. You can add to web browsers, like Ghostery or Wappalyzer.
There’s some other things that tag checkers you can add. They’re going to see all the things that are happening. Right? And so. We really made this akin to you know, kind of how the legal system moved toward if you have an accident, right? There’s a lot of people willing to kind of, help you out with that, right?
Get your legal case in the system. I think similar things are going to start to happen with data. So you’ve seen a lot of civil lawsuits where people are like, Hey, I just saw in my little web tracker that this website tracked this and send it to there. It’s easy to do and it’s free and they can do it individually.
And so. That one person can then raise their hand and say, Hey this client, this [00:14:00] hospital, this service shared my data with this 3rd party, check your privacy policy out. So, I mean, there’s so many things like that can kind of get you when you’re not really looking or paying attention to that. So that’s why some of this vigilance makes a lot of sense.
And the thing is, with these civil lawsuits. It’s not just stuff with HIPAA. There’s also things with like, the Video Privacy Act, right? There’s some of these esoteric kind of laws out there that we really don’t pay attention to that were put in place a long time ago, and they are coming back now because of the influence of the Internet and all the things we can find on websites now where that data is shared.
So it really need to keep that in mind when that stuff happens. So having again, a good inventory of what data is being shared and then having solutions in place for those, having your privacy policy updated to make sure anything that is in a gray area or things you feel like you still need or don’t want to remove from your system that those are covered under that.
So it’s still great to have that overall policy in [00:15:00] place. And once that’s there, then you can kind of go about your business and you don’t have to be concerned to have it on the back of your mind all the time. Like, oh man, it’s our website doing this? You can feel a lot better moving forward that yes, we feel comfortable with all the things that we’re sharing and what we’re doing.
Jenny: Yeah. I just, a quick anecdote on that. I was flying to Vegas to speak at a conference. And as the plane landed, we were stuck on the tarmac for like 20 minutes. So I pulled up social media to kill some time. And as I pulled up Facebook, I was served an ad by a law firm that said, have you received care at X hospital?
If so, your information may have been shared improperly with third parties, submit this form now. And so it was real life, sort of like the, have you been in a car accident? It’s happening already. And so I think that’s just a really important consideration. Let’s kind of shift a little bit to more fun forward thinking information.
One of the reasons that I always tell people get your stuff cleared up now is number one, you don’t have to worry about and stay up at night because of the legislative landscape, but also it opens you up to do some [00:16:00] cool stuff in the future. I mean, let’s talk about a little bit about like AI marketing optimization software, and there’s some cool stuff happening right now.
Mark, what’s your POV around, you know, if the organization has already cleaned up their data and they know that they’re safe Could they be more comfortable perhaps leveraging a marketing campaign optimization tool whenever those tools are available and on the market?
Mark: Yeah, I think so. I mean, we’ve seen SHSMD had an interesting webinar series this last week that we were a part of.
And one of the groups in that, that had a talk talked about implementing an AI within your CRM, right? And having that actually help you. And so if you have that on lockdown, you go with a piece of AI that, you know, is safe and it’s just in your own Personal space, that’s something that could definitely work and can really help you kind of, level up, you know, your marketing in those cases, then there’s also situations where, yeah, with third parties, if you’re sharing data with them, or not sharing data in this case, then, you know, what’s in there isn’t any kind of [00:17:00] concerning privacy data.
So, when you share that with a tool, if you’re comfortable with that, you don’t have to really worry about some of that data getting out there, because you’ve already made sure that what you’re sharing with it is safe and good, and so there’s definitely room there, but that kind of ecosystem having a lockdown on what you’re sharing and where you’re sharing it is so important, because once you start pulling in 3rd parties, especially something like AI, which can sometimes have a mind of its own and start training and doing things on certain data.
You didn’t realize having a lockdown on what is important and what shouldn’t be shared is really good for introducing those kind of tools to your system.
Jenny: Yeah, I that’s such a great perspective and I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I’m going to end with our sixth category of potential impact and that’s really around brand positioning when it comes to privacy.
I was on site with a client last week and I was so proud of them because we started talking about the implications of this and the first thing they said to me was. Honestly, Jenny, [00:18:00] at this point, now that we know what the data holds and what we may be sharing with meta or whoever by sharing these pixels, it’s a brand promise that we have made to our patients to not share that data.
We care more about a brand promise than about an OCR fine. And I was so proud of them, because that’s the kind of organizations we love working with. And so I sent an email out to all of our clients kind of explaining our POV on this ruling and whatnot. And I kind of said, you know, maybe it’s a Pollyanna worldview, but I think it’s really valuable for a brand to be able to make that brand promise to all of their patients and consumers saying, you know, hey, even if this isn’t the law, we know what’s right and wrong.
We’re going to keep your information as safe as we possibly can. And that’s something that you can expect from us just as a tenant of our ethics and values within our organization. So, definitely something impactful.
Mark: For sure. And I, you know, I think to myself you know, you go and some [00:19:00] user signs up for a bariatric surgery and you share that data with Facebook knows that person, you know, once or needs bariatric surgery.
Like, there’s just a sense of trust there that you’ve kind of broken. Like, how did they find that information out when all I did, it was on this website. And so I agree with you. I think there is that brand promise, but there’s also just there’s kind of a feeling of, you know, GoodRx, I think is going to be all on our minds for forever because of this situation.
Right? And whether or not in that situation, you read their ruling. They didn’t know about some of these things. They didn’t realize this was happening or that was happening, but that didn’t save them in the end, right? They still had to kind of, deal with that situation at the end. So, I think now that we know about it, there’s even less reasons why you would say, oh, we’re still going to keep doing this.
We’re going to still keep doing that. Like your client you talked to mentioned, right? Once they know about it, it’s oh, well, we should be doing something about this. We should make sure that we’re caring for our patients’ privacy the same way that we do everything else. Because I think that’s where digital information is going.
I think we’re all clear [00:20:00] now. We’ve seen what happens over in Europe with GDPR. Things are getting very strict there and very specific. And I think some of the HHS guidance got us on that road, but I think there’s still more room to do and that’s what we’re seeing with state laws coming through and we’re seeing just with individuals and tech companies are allowing you to block stuff directly.
So, I mean, I think a lot of people are heading down that path. And so the more proactive you can be, yeah, the more you’re going to have your customers appreciate your brand and appreciate what you do, especially because if you can talk about that and say, hey, we’re doing this proactively. I think that makes a big deal to customers.
Jenny: Yeah. I completely agree with you. Well, thank you, Mark, so much for joining us today. I know this is an extremely complex, difficult to understand topic. If this isn’t what people do in the day in, day out, I’ve had almost a dozen people reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask if we would do it. Episode on this topic to help them digest and understand specifically because their senior leadership is asking for answers and it’s difficult to digest all the information and know those answers.
So I [00:21:00] hope for listeners, this was really helpful. I hope it helped you reframe all of the new information coming at you and allow you to create your own POV that you now feel comfortable sharing with your marketing team and senior leadership as needed. As always, if you have questions or want to pow wow about your specific situation, please reach out to us.
You can reach me at Jenny@hedyandhopp.com. We’d be happy to chat with you and give just some advice and recommendations. Again, we’re very proud of the low cost solution we put on the market. Our perspective isn’t to make a ton of money off this solution. It’s really to help folks kind of put this problem behind them and get back to marketing.
But there’s also lots of other great solutions on the market, like FreshPaint. And we’re always happy to refer people over and kind of share the pros and cons. Around each approach. If that’s still an internal question you’re battling with of what is the best approach for your team and your scenario?
So as always, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” and we will see you on a [00:22:00] future episode.
One of the things we love to do at Hedy & Hopp is getting time in front of our clients’ boards or leadership teams to present our marketing successes. It’s an exciting opportunity for us to share the story of how we’ve collaborated with our clients to support their organization’s business goals. In this podcast, Jenny outlines six tips for presenting to your board or leadership team.
1. Understand your audience
2. Understand why you are there
3. Link to organizational goals
4. Key themes/Specific output:
5. Simplify language
6. Presentation style
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We are an agency that specializes in working with payors and providers across the country and helping you develop and activate a marketing plan.
I’m jazzed to be here with you today to talk a little bit about tips for when you have to go and present in front of your board or senior leadership. At Hedy and Hopp, one of our favorite things to do is actually go in front of the board at our clients’ locations and actually meet with them and share our successes.
It’s wonderful to be able to get that audience. They are very busy. They have a lot of priorities. Marketing is one of the many, many things that they are thinking about when they’re thinking about driving the organization forward.
And so there are some key things that we do at Hedy and [00:01:00] Hopp to help make the most of our time when we’re presenting in front of a board or a senior leadership team, where the functions are primarily outside of the marketing role. So I wanted to share that with you today. Today, we’re going to cover six tips when you’re presenting to your board or your senior leadership team. So let’s dig in.
The first tip is to understand your audience. And this may seem like a no brainer, but it’s an area that we often see people overlook. If it’s possible to get a list of board members or members of the senior leadership team that you’ll be presenting to in advance, please ask for that. There’s a couple of key things that you want to understand.
First is their background. Do they have any marketing background or are they more on the clinical or operational or finance side? That’s really important because it’ll help you understand where or how they may categorize the information that you share with them, and the way that they may process the [00:02:00] information.
The next thing you want to understand is their tenure. How long have they been on the board or the leadership team? Um, and how much experience do they have in background with the organization? Third is specific areas of interest. So whenever we go and present in front of a board, especially if marketing has been a big topic of conversation at the board level, a thing we always want to understand is which board members are really jazzed about the marketing work that is happening, what are specific questions or areas of interest they have brought up in the past because we want to make sure that we address that and talk about it in our update.
That way they understand that, hey, your marketing team, which again is not heading up, it’s the internal marketing team, your marketing team heard you shared the information and it is a priority.
So as the agency, when we’re coming in, you know, of course, we’re wanting to kind of toot Hedy and Hopp’s horn. We did a good job, but we really want to make sure the internal marketing team looks good. So this can be one of those easy ways to connect the dots and making sure that, hey, internal conversations that are [00:03:00] happening are reaching us because the internal marketing team really does care about your priorities.
And we’re helping just tie all the pieces together and a part of that collaborative process. So that’s first, understand your audience. Next is. Understand why you’re there. So there are a couple of components to this. Understand your reason for being there, number one. Why did they specifically ask you to come in and do a presentation?
What is the expectation of that? Number two, understand how much time you’re allotted. Is it five minutes? Or is it 20 minutes? It’s a very different type of presentation depending on the time that they want you to be there. And the third is the depth of content that they want you to present. Are they really just wanting the bullet points of the key outcomes?
Or are they wanting to understand your strategy and the work that is really going into place and what they can expect to see over the next couple of months? So really getting that understanding will make sure that as you’re putting the slides or your presentation together, that it’s going to match what they are hoping to see, and they, it will be a very fulfilling [00:04:00] experience for both you and the board or leadership team.
Third is when you’re talking about what you’re, you’ve accomplished and you know what they want you to talk about. Let’s say for example they want you to give you, give them, so it’s, it’s June as this podcast is being recorded. So let’s say they want you to come in for the board meeting in June or July and give a mid-year update.
What have you accomplished? So you know that is the objective. The third tip is to make sure that when you’re talking you’re laddering up to organizational goals. So if your organization has a strategic plan they have put into place, try to ladder up to that. In the information that you’re communicating.
So, for example, if there’s a specific service line or a specific product that is really a priority for the organization, make sure that you reference, you know, this part of the strategic plan is to drive X percentage growth within the service line are marketing campaigns are supporting that by doing A, B and C.
So connect those dots don’t come in just with a lot of different tactical pieces of information and [00:05:00] expect them. To piece it together about how you’re strategically aligning with the organizational goals, make it easy for them. Again, they are likely sitting in that boardroom for three or four hours.
You are just a blip in that overall agenda, so do not make them try to digest and process that information on their own. Make it easy. So ladder up to the organizational goals or strategic plans. Fourth is approach your presentation through the lens of storytelling. Do not go in and just share tons of metrics with them, lots of numbers on the screen.
Again, step back and say, what is the story I am trying to tell over the, let’s say they’ve given you five minutes to present and they want a mid year update. What is the overall story? Try to condense it down to two sentences and then build your slides or your presentation around that. You want to make sure that the big picture story is the first thing you align on.
With what you’re presenting and then actually [00:06:00] pull in the, um, campaign information, the strategic information about how you’re accomplishing those goals. And then any KPIs or tactical information should be last. Remember again, like they are big picture. They don’t want to, they don’t want to know, um, you know, how your Google ads campaign is set up.
Instead, they want to know that you were 20 percent within the allotted budget. You were provided and that aligns to the organization’s strategic goals because it’s a priority service line. That is how you make a good impression. Number five, please remove all jargon and acronyms. You may talk with specific acronyms, for example, even something as simple as the phrase SEO.
We expect it to be common knowledge because it’s been around for so long, but I assure you again, you do not want them to have to try to, um, decipher anything that you’re saying. If you are talking specifically about even the phrase KPI, Key Performance Indicator, of [00:07:00] course they probably know what that phrase is, but just get rid of it.
Any acronym. Any words that are specific to the marketing function, try to remove that and try to truly have it be as though you’re storytelling to somebody who doesn’t understand what you do on a day to day basis. Of course, many board members are very well educated and they understand how marketing works, but you’re trying to drive home specific points, not the tactics you use to get there.
And then the final and sixth tip, and this is one that is overlooked the most, I think. Um, I actually had a really fun conversation. So I drove to go present at a client’s, um, board meeting on Monday. So much fun. I absolutely loved doing it. They have an amazing marketing team and board. So I always love going out there to be able to do that.
But on Tuesday, I had a chat with another client and I told her that I had, you know, been out all the day on Monday because I was presenting. And she said, That she had been asked in her role to do multiple board presentations, and she was really embarrassed because nobody ever [00:08:00] taught her how to do it.
Nobody ever told her what the presentation should be, what the board was looking for, and she was pretty junior in her role. She had just started, so she didn’t feel the confidence in order to ask these questions. And the biggest thing, so these tips actually kind of came from that conversation with her, but the biggest thing that she just figured out in this conversation, as I was sharing how I prepare personally, is the sixth tip. Show up with energy and confidence.
So if you do these steps 1 through 5, you should be confident in what you’re presenting, in the story you’re telling, and who you are telling it to. So even if you have to do one of those power poses, where you have your hands on your hips, where it’s like the studies show it psychologically improves your confidence, even if you’re the kind of person that has to do that in the hallway before you walk in, do it.
Because you need to be able to radiate confidence and show them that the marketing for the organization is in good hands. You’ve got it. [00:09:00] You’re going to be prepared for questions because you’ve prepped, you know this information in and out, um, and they can truly trust you to continue holding the reins of the organization through the lens of advertising and marketing.
So again, those are the six tips. We’re going to list them out in the show notes. If you have any questions, give me a holler. I’d love to chat through it.
Specifically, if you have a board meeting coming up, you’re trying to figure out, you know, what to focus on, how to present the information. It’s a topic I love chatting about because again, proving that what you’re doing is truly helping to drive the organization’s growth is key in us as marketers doing it in the future.
So, thank you so much for tuning in today, as always, if you please, please, please could rate and subscribe for future episodes to notify you on whatever platform you listen to, I would so appreciate it. Give us five stars on Spotify, um, asked to be notified of new episodes. [00:10:00] Um, I’m really proud of the audience we’ve built and the folks that we reach on a weekly basis.
But I would be so honored if you would take just a moment or two to give us a rating and a follow. And on that note, I will see you in a future episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.” Thanks for tuning in.
One thing we enjoy covering on this podcast is up and coming tactics and terminology you need to know as a healthcare marketer. Though you may or may not choose to prioritize new tactics, knowing about them and not being surprised during a hallway conversation is key.
Today, we will cover the basics around SEO for generative AI platforms, specifically discussing:
As promised, here are the resources we mentioned on the podcast:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and I am the host of your show. I am jazzed to be here with you today. And I’m going to be talking about a topic today that I’m going to be honest, I never thought this was a phrase that would come out of my mouth, but we’re going to be talking about SEO for AI.
So, one of the things I’d love to do on this podcast and that I do regularly with all of our clients is I raise the flag and help them be aware of different trends and buzzwords that are coming into our healthcare marketing vernacular, because the last thing you want to be as a healthcare marketing leader is surprised in a leadership team meeting or a meeting with one of your peers in your organization, when they ask you about something, and you’ve been so busy doing your day to day job, you aren’t even [00:01:00] aware that it’s on the radar.
So that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to talk about the trend of trying to optimize content marketing for AI platforms. So what does that mean? That means trying to have your organization show up in ChatGPT results, for example, as the most foundational example. And there’s a couple of things we’re going to cover today.
We’re going to start by talking about what SEO for AI is. I’m going to cover the acronyms you need to know, because this is a fast moving space and there’s a couple of acronyms floating around to try to cover this practice. Nothing’s been settled on yet. So we’re going to go through them. We’re going to talk about high-level how large language models work.
I am not going to get scientific on you today, but I am going to share some resources if you want to learn about it later, but I need to give you a 101, because we’re going to talk about four areas to focus on. If you’re wanting to start experimenting and testing out SEO for AI platforms, what are the areas you should be leading your [00:02:00] team to research, begin testing, et cetera, to start seeing how it can work for your organization.
So let’s dig in. First, what is this? So I’m sure you’ve heard about AI. It’s all over. Generative AI is something that you really can’t get away from today. It is going to be impacting our roles and our functions in the marketing world, especially in healthcare marketing. AI has really come on the scene strong on the clinical side, but we’re also seeing it creep in on the marketing side.
In fact, SHSMD is putting on a multi part series on AI. I’m actually speaking. In the virtual series. Um, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, uh, next Friday, with my colleague, uh, Mark Brandes, and we’re going to be covering basics, like what different kinds of AI are there? What are some ways that you can begin incorporating AI into your marketing processes today, et cetera.
So all of this is new and fast moving, but in essence, what we’re [00:03:00] talking about is trying to help make your organization show up in generative AI results. So if a consumer in your market area were to type, who’s the leading Oncology center for breast cancer, positive outcomes. You want your center to show up along with studies or data to be able to back that up.
So that’s the foundation of what we’re talking about. How do you get your information to show up more and more consumers are using platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity as search engines instead of going to Google or Bing. So you want to make sure you’re relevant. As far as acronyms, there are four adorable little acronyms.
Uh, acronyms floating out in the space, just like when SEO started, uh, way back in the nineties, it’s a wild, wild west and four that you need to know about that you may see floating around. The first is LLMO, which stands for large language model optimization. [00:04:00] The second is GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization.
The third is GAIO, Generative AI Optimization. And the fourth and the one we’re going to be using today, because it’s just cute, is AIO, which is AI Optimization. So that’s the one we’re going to be sticking with. But I’m going to put all of those names in the show notes again. So in case you want to just see them so you can remember them and process them easily.
If you see them referenced in any sort of industry publication or by your peers, you’ll quickly realize what they’re talking about and referencing. A little bit of history, for those of you that maybe were on the communications or PR side of the marketing world coming into your careers, whenever SEO first came around, it was in the nineties, whenever consumer facing search engines first became popular, it really was the wild, wild west.
There was no documentation about what worked and what didn’t work. Um, I actually started a web development company [00:05:00] in seventh grade. And so at that time that was a 1997 through 1999, one of the popular methods was literally typing the phrase you wanted to rank for in Google or whatever the search engine of the time was that you were aiming for a hundred times at the bottom of the website with white text on a white background.
The user couldn’t see it, but the search engine could see it. It was really rough, right? Rough around the edges. But what you were trying to do is help the engine understand what your website was. Was about what information are you helpful for, for people that are searching? What information do you want to show up for?
It quickly became much more technically sophisticated than that, but it started out really basic. And so going into AIO. Oh, it feels weird to say that. But as we’re thinking about AIO, there’s a couple of foundational things from the SEO world that you’re going to see transition over really cleanly.
Um, one, an acronym you need to be aware of [00:06:00] is EAT. It stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. And that’s an acronym that really guides an SEO practitioner’s best practices as they’re thinking about content creation, website optimization, et cetera. If you really do well on expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, you’re much more likely to rank for those phases.
And that’s going to be true based off what we’re seeing for AIO as well. So really important to understand a lot of the foundations from SEO do carry over for AIO based off what’s being seen today. So let’s talk a little bit about, um, LLMs, large language models and natural language processing. So, a lot of these generative AI platforms and tools, you’re thinking about ones that consumers use today.
Again, like ChatGPT, that’s one of the easiest examples and most frequently cited, but there are many other, their training [00:07:00] models really are a black box. They do not share with people how their models are trained, but there’s a couple mathematical components that are generally understood to be part of that formula and really understanding natural language processing is important if you’re thinking about semantic search and how people use words.
All of this is really common sense as a marketer. They just put lots of different technical language around how the math is calculated. But if you’re using a variation of the keywords you’re trying to rank for and the proximity of those keywords are close together, then you’re more likely, um, to be relevant for those sorts of queries.
So there’s a really wonderful article, um, by search engine land. We’re going to list it in the show notes. It is a very long article and it really breaks down visually how, um, LLMs work, how [00:08:00] the databases and models are trained, um, and lots of helpful information. If you want to dig into the scientific side, but the end of the day, they really are trying to, use those words to train their models about relevance.
Because again, what they’re wanting to do is give the most relevant information at the most relevant time. So the data you put in, as far as the keywords and the way you structure it, just like with SEO, is going to be, again, the foundation of how you have to think about it. So that’s, as far as we’re going to get into LLMs, I don’t want to get any more technical than that, but hopefully that information is helpful.
So if you’re wanting to get started, how in the world are you going to get started? Well, um, I was jazzed whenever I saw this last month, but there is a study. Um, actually done through Princeton University. It was a group of students, and they actually did a study on how to optimize content for generative AI.
And again, I’m [00:09:00] going to link to the study in the show notes. But they really found a handful of things to be most relevant. Search Engine Land also has a handful of things that are most relevant. And then my internal team has been doing a lot of testing, so there’s a handful of things that also we think are the most relevant.
So I’m going to share with you four areas to focus on. If you’re going to want to begin testing AIO within your own organization, but I do have to share a really big caveat. Even in the Princeton study, they were very clear that, hey, these models are moving fast. Their training data is moving fast. The way that they’re aggregating and sharing results is really moving fast.
So what works today may not work tomorrow. And for anybody in the SEO world, you already know that that’s exactly how Google is today. What you do to rank well today, you may be number one today and tomorrow you may fall down to page 10 because they changed their algorithm. So we’re used to that uncertainty.
If you’re a marketer that does [00:10:00] anything within SEO. But again, that’s just something to keep in mind. What works today isn’t necessarily going to work tomorrow. But with that in mind, here’s four areas that you should focus on. First, you should hopefully be doing this as part of your overall content marketing within your organization, but getting much more robust in your research and your keyword identification.
So really understanding the queries consumers have that are relevant to you that you can help answer and then the variations of keywords. So instead of just oncology center, breast cancer, also cancer center breast cancer. Lots of these variations of the ways that people actually speak and talk. I remember back whenever I was doing work, um, for a hospital system, we were trying to optimize the cardiology section of the website and we wanted to put “heart doctor” in a few pages and the physician that was in charge of the department got really angry and said that that is not what they were called and we had to show them the data that that’s what consumers are calling you.
They don’t maybe know the [00:11:00] word cardiology. So you have to have that same lens on your research and your strategy as a step one. What truly are people asking that we can provide, um, credible information and help about, and then what words are they using? It isn’t necessarily the words about what we call our services.
What are they calling it and making sure that we include that in the execution of the content. So that’s number one. Number two is get official. Remember that EAT acronym: expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Here’s where you really can focus on that you want to make sure that you’re including citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics.
So anything that you can include to show that you’re not just talking, what you’re sharing is relevant and real, and you’re referencing third parties and you’re including statistics to really make sure the information you’re sharing is accurate. Anything around that authority and trust is important to include in your content marketing and the work that you put out.
Number three [00:12:00] is making sure you’re technically sound. Kind of going back to when I was talking about SEO in the 90s, search engines literally had no way to understand what you did if you didn’t put the words in the website. That’s still true today, but today you need to be a little bit more technically structured in the way that you include it in your content.
So thinking about snippets and structured data or schema markup. So in the code, in the website, or in whatever platform you’re publishing content on making sure that you’re putting the right keyword and keyword variations within the code. So that way the AI platform and the models can ingest your information appropriately.
And the fourth thing across the board, both the Princeton University study and Search Engine Land’s website said that traditional marketing and PR. So the work you’re doing around your content marketing and around your organization builds authority and trust. And it’s really important and valuable to continue doing that [00:13:00] because the more signs that these AI platforms see that you are trustworthy and worthwhile to quote, the more likely you are to be included in these studies.
Or these outputs for the queries. So again, I do not recommend that you completely change what you’re doing today from an SEO perspective to try to adhere to starting to show up in these generative AI outputs. But if you do already have a content marketing team within your organization and you have an SEO function, I would strongly share this podcast recording with them, encourage them to read all of the articles and studies I’m going to reference in the show notes, and encourage them to put some thoughts together and share it with you as far as how they’re going to start testing these different strategies with the content your organization is putting out.
Foundationally, it’s not very different from what you’re needing to do from an SEO perspective, but there certainly are different, uh, test queries that [00:14:00] you could use to be able to see if your content begins showing up as far as an output from a reporting perspective.
So, I hope this episode on AIO or LLMO or GEO or GAIO was helpful. Things are moving fast. I promise to do a follow up episode, um, when additional meaningful information is shared. But as of today, I hope this gave you a good foundational understanding of what it is, why you need to start paying attention and how you can start dipping your toe in.
Thank you again for tuning in. As always, if this episode was helpful, please subscribe, like, share, give me feedback on future episode topics you would like to see. And until next time, have a fabulous rest of your day and I’ll see you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy. Cheers.
At Hedy & Hopp, pediatrics is one of our passions, and in this week’s episode, Jenny talks about developing a pediatric content strategy. One thing that makes pediatric content so different from other types of healthcare content is that, instead of talking directly to a patient, often pediatric content is aimed at the parents of a patient.
With that in mind, Jenny offers five pillars for pediatric content marketing:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
WAMH58 video
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host today, and I’m also the CEO and Founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we love producing this show to share some industry insight and nuggets with our listeners.
Today, I’m really excited to create an episode specifically to help out those of you that are focusing on pediatric marketing. So at Hedy and Hopp, we have five areas of passion. They are regional healthcare providers, regional payers or insurance companies, oncology, women’s health, and peds. So we’re going to be weaving in specific content for each of those five areas of passion.
If you have specific content questions or things that you’d like to see, shoot me a note. This episode was actually inspired by a note sent in by a listener. They are in the middle of [00:01:00] creating a content strategy for a new video series they’re doing for pediatric hospital, and they were interested in getting our insights into different ways to approach a content strategy.
So let’s get let’s dig in. Let’s get started. First, I will say that we are longtime fans of doing content marketing in the pediatric space. One of our very first customers was St. Louis Children’s Hospital and we did a really phenomenal content marketing program for them where we took an old dormant blog that had been sitting unused for quite some time and repurposed it into a dynamic video based content platform.
It was a really great place for them to be able to showcase new physicians as they entered the organization to help fill their schedules, but it also allowed them to create kind of have a hub for all of their content. And then, of course, that content would be distributed out across whatever social media platform they were leveraging at the time, which, as you can imagine, [00:02:00] it’s changed a lot in eight years. Started out, we would do some Facebook lives series and then things moved over YouTube has been continuously popular throughout that time.
But we’re not going to talk necessarily about platforms today. I just want to share five specific content pillars that are really important in the pediatric space as you’re beginning to think about a content strategy. So again, as we’re thinking about the pediatric space, you aren’t necessarily talking specifically to the patient.
Sometimes you are, if it’s an older patient, but most of the time you’re going to be talking to the patient’s parent or caregiver. And so a lot of these content themes you’ll see directly are speaking and providing reassurance to that caregiver. And so that audience pivot whenever you’re working in pediatrics is really a really important thing to keep in mind.
So first pillar, we’re going to walk through five pillars. If you’re doing a content strategy, these are five pillars in pediatric content that you [00:03:00] absolutely have to include. The first understanding the diagnosis. One of the main reasons people will end up landing on your website is because they’ve Googled a really scary diagnosis they’ve recently received.
Perhaps it’s symptoms that will lead to a diagnosis, but it also may be the diagnosis itself. We have found in a lot of the work that we’ve done over the last eight years, that having a content strategy specifically focused on specific diagnoses that you are able to actually address within service lines within your organization is really important.
So, for example, having a video specifically about type 1 diabetes in pediatrics. Walking through here are the symptoms. Here’s how it’s frequently diagnosed. And then, oh, yeah, here’s how you can schedule an appointment within this team within our hospital to be able to begin working with us to have additional care or a second opinion.
If it’s early in the [00:04:00] diagnosis. So it really helps guide that parent’s fact finding journey all the way through from answering a preliminary question to allowing them to seek care. So that’s number one, understand the diagnosis. Number two, a trend that we’ve seen work really, really well is preparing for surgery.
That is a very scary thing, especially for parents that have never had to put their child under, as people say. They are very afraid about having their child leave them and go back behind with the doctors and nurses, not have their child in their sight, they don’t know what to expect the day of. So a very popular and useful YouTube or content series that you can create would actually be one that is categorically.
Preparing for surgery, and then within that actually creating a video for all of the common surgeries that you do within your organization. This video can be [00:05:00] referenced within your specific service lines on your pages within your hospital to reference what to expect before or during this kind of surgery.
It also could be shared with the by the care team to the patients at the appointment before the surgery as an asset for them to review at home to prepare to feel more comfortable for it. But we’ve seen tremendous success. And really easing parents’ concerns and giving them reassurance that they’re going to the right place with a preparing for surgery content pillar.
The third content pillar and this is one that feels so obvious, but whenever you work somewhere and you’re so familiar with the way it’s laid out, it isn’t something that always comes to mind: hospital and facilities tours. This is so popular on all of the content series we’ve produced over the years, a simple tour where you’re walking people through here’s where you park, here’s admissions, here’s [00:06:00] the hallway to the bathroom, here’s the hallway to the exam rooms.
It seems so basic, right? Always some of the most popular videos. Many times there’s a lot of anxiety around accessing care or actually physically going to a new location for parents, especially if their child isn’t in a great place health wise. And so being able to watch a video about a particular location they have not been yet and helping them understand what signage to look for and where it is and what color it is ahead of time can be really, really helpful.
So again, hospital tour and facilities tour. Super easy but very, very helpful to be able to have. One thing for this one to keep in mind is that you want to flag with your internal processes whenever you do update signage or do any sort of like opening of a new location. You’ll want to be able to produce additional content to cover that to add it to that library.
Number four is emotional support and counseling. And this is actually one that I can speak to personally. [00:07:00] My first son was born at 27 weeks. So he was very, very early. He was a whole trimester early. And we spent 77 days in the NICU. There was a wonderful support system for NICU parents. But in many pediatric hospitals have wonderful support networks and resources for parents of a variety types of situations and diagnoses.
So actually creating content around that, perhaps interviewing somebody who is very passionate about it, who’s organized the meetups or the resources and getting them to share additional information with links online can be really helpful. Often it’s very overwhelming when you’re a parent in that moment.
So for example, with the NICU support group, they met on like Thursdays at 1 PM. I was very rarely able to actually go because I was also running a business at the same time, but there was information online I was able to access that was really helpful to support me through that journey. So, think about a specific parent, specific diagnoses or [00:08:00] resources you have available.
And then think about if you’re sitting at home, scared on the couch, what kind of content can we deliver them to make them a little bit less scared in that moment. And then the fifth one, something that also is, you know, that scared parent sitting on the couch, trying to Google something at 1am figuring out, do I need to go to the emergency room right now or not is post procedure care and follow up.
So, go through and look at all of your procedures, identify and prioritize them. And then create some videos around post procedure care and follow up. What should you expect when you go home from a bone break surgery or whatever. It is clearly as specific as you can within each of your different service lines and prioritize things appropriately, but creating content to help them understand when to reach out for help and what is normal and what is to be expected.
And if they do need to reach out for help post procedure, how to do that is extremely helpful for parents to have very popular content. And then the sixth bonus content pillar. I, I only [00:09:00] said there was going to be five cause this one for me feels more like a content format versus a pillar, but we have found that interactive Q and A’s around specific service lines or areas of focus are extremely popular.
So we’ve done everything from back in the day, we’d do Facebook Live and have hundreds of people tune in, but there’s ways now that you can do it on Almost every social media platform, you can go live, promote that you’re going to go live in advance with a doctor or somebody within your organization that could speak to the particular topic that that theme is for that event.
And then say you’ll be online for 30 minutes answering questions. Of course, you always want to have prepopulated questions in case attendance is slow, but that information or that session can actually be recorded. And stored for long tail value for people to then view many, many days, months, and years after the live event itself has ended.
So hopefully if you are in peds and you’re in the middle of thinking about [00:10:00] content pillars, these five slash one bonus will help you start putting a little bit of framework around the low hanging fruit and the highest value content that you can create. We have gone through and created a content for our clients for many, many platforms, everything from static blog posts to you know, Facebook and Instagram to TikTok to YouTube, everything, the core emotions and questions that parents of pediatric patients, our experience are going to be the same, regardless of what platform you’re on.
So we really challenge you to focus and spend a lot more time on this part of the process. And then figure out your channels and promotion strategy as a second step. So as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please follow, like, and rate this podcast. We have received so much great feedback around the content.
It’s honestly humbling how many people [00:11:00] have reached out to me to say that it sparked ideas or challenged assumptions or educated them on something technical that we feel just really lucky to be able to produce this content every single week. We’ve received lots of great user feedback. Submissions around different content ideas.
If you have something you want us to cover, shoot me an email, Jenny at headyandhop. com. I’d love to hear from you. Otherwise have a fabulous rest of your day and we’ll see you on another episode next week on We Are Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In today’s episode Jenny talks about the six core tenets of using AI in healthcare marketing, including
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are the company behind this podcast. I’m super excited to be here with you today.
I want to talk about something that is very buzzy in the healthcare marketing space right now and that is AI. A lot of questions, concerns, lots of different ways that you can have an opinion about AI, but a lot of conversations are happening right now at the leadership, as well as the individual contributor level with marketing teams, trying to figure out how, when, and if to incorporate AI into their processes.
[00:01:00] There are lots of resources talking about specific AI tools, best practices for each of those tools. We’re not going to cover that today. Instead, what I want to talk about is six tenets or core approaches to keep in mind as you’re beginning to think about how, when, and if to incorporate AI into your marketing team’s processes.
I’m excited and certainly willing to do future episodes about AI. At Hedy and Hopp, we actually have an internal team that is becoming experts on all the different tools, how to use them appropriately, et cetera. So if you want an episode about a specific tool, about a specific use case in the future, et cetera, holler at me.
But right now we’re going to talk about six core tenets. So for anybody who has begun using an AI tool, played around with it a little bit, you know, there are lots of weird considerations you have to have. They operate a little bit like a search engine, but also [00:02:00] very different from a search engine in their outputs and capabilities.
So as you start talking about, you know, how should we begin leveraging AI to make our internal teams more efficient? The first thing I want you to think about is to approach AI results with heavy skepticism. There’s something in AI results called a hallucinate, a hallucination. And, a hallucination is whenever AI basically makes it up.
They don’t know the answer, but they don’t want to sound dumb, so they make it up. So, the information is not always factual, and it can be very difficult to actually discern when this information is a hallucination. So, for example some of the testing that we have done and work that we’ve done, they’ll actually cite specific court cases with specific numbers.
It looks very real until you begin looking for a source, and it doesn’t exist because it’s a completely made up court case. So the first thing is to approach it with healthy skepticism. [00:03:00] Start by assuming the information AI is providing to you is not accurate versus assuming it’s accurate and moving forward with that information.
Number two is do not use the AI output as is without reviewing and adjusting. This should be super obvious based off of tenet number one, but if you have it generate an internal email, for example, don’t just copy, paste, and send. You need to read it thoroughly, make sure that it communicates your points effectively, doesn’t use vocabulary that you wouldn’t use normally.
And another issue is that AI often steals content. There’s lots of copyright infringement lawsuits happening right now. And so it’s a form of plagiarism often in using AI generated output and using it as your own online. So, what do you do instead? Well, tenant number three is don’t have it create deliverables.
If you’re working and saying having to do some social media copy and you wanted to create different versions for all the different [00:04:00] social media platforms based off of the word count. Awesome. That can be a V1, but then take it and edit, edit, edit. It can do some of the groundwork for you. And that’s a great way to do it.
And we may come a day where we pass this and we’re able to use the specific output, but there’s just too many lawsuits and things at play. We’re using the content as is for internal or external purposes. Is not a good idea. So again, do not have it use do not have it create specific deliverables internal or external facing.
Number four is be very clear in your ask. So asking whatever AI tool you’re using, giving it clear directions. Asking it to play a role, such as a world class healthcare marketer, for example, using specific language, asking for multiple versions, et cetera, the more information that you give it in the prompt, the clearer and better that your results likely will be.
A study was actually published. I’ll see if I [00:05:00] can find it to be able to reference it in the show notes, but it actually said, if you’re polite to AI, it actually is more willing to help you and gives you much more comprehensive results than if you do not say things like, please. And thank you. So being very clear in your ask, communicating to it, like you would a human, so being appreciative, asking for the level of comprehensiveness that you need for the results, et cetera, are all super important as you’re beginning to test all these different platforms.
Number five, ask for sources. Some platforms like Perplexity do this really well where if you ask it a question, let’s say for example if I was working on a campaign, a patient acquisition campaign for pediatric Orthopedics in the St. Louis area, and I wanted to understand the population within certain zip codes of people under the age of 18.
I could ask it, but then also ask it to cite the source like where did you get the information and that will help provide comfort that it’s not a hallucination and made up data and you can click through and [00:06:00] actually see the source quote the source, make sure the data and information is accurate. And so it can be helpful for that upstream research, but again, always ask for sources.
And then the final one, and as your neighborhood healthcare privacy pros, I have to mention this one is keep privacy a priority. Anything that you enter into these AI platforms, can be used for training their model. So for example, you never ever want to upload anything that is proprietary information, anything that is PHI, anything that you wouldn’t necessarily just like, you know, share on a billboard with an AI platform because that essentially is what it could be doing in the future, it could be incorporating it.
So for example, to test this theory we’re using chat GPT and I started using the platform, a paid version, to brainstorm content ideas for Hedy and Hopp. For the, “We Are, Marketing Happy” podcast, trying to get sources to make our information more comprehensive.
[00:07:00] And over time, we noticed the results it’s giving us is actually leveraging the Hedy and Hopp branding. So it’s using our own terminology. It’s using the way that we talk and the way that we phrase sentences and structure sentences. And so it very much takes the information that you share and reuses it.
So do not put anything in it, unless you have a private instance on a server that you can control and your IT team has given you the stamp of approval. So again, what are the six tenants to AI privacy? Number one, approach it with healthy skepticism. Assume some of what it’s telling you is a hallucination versus assuming everything is factual.
Number two, do not use the output as is without reviewing and adjusting. Number three, don’t have it create deliverables internal or external. Number four, be clear in your ask. Give it clear directions. Be polite, be comprehensive and specific in what you’re wanting it to do. Number five, ask for sources, tell it to cite sources and give you a link.
So you can check [00:08:00] fact check the information and number six, keep privacy a priority. I’m going to end this episode on a fun little comment. I actually did a LinkedIn post last week that a lot of folks got a good chuckle at. My oldest son is a freshman in high school and he missed an in-person event because he was doubly committed that night for afterschool sports commitments.
He had to write a five page paper. He was very proud when he told me he used AI to write the paper. And I was very clear to him that your teacher is immediately going to know it is AI written. He said, nah, mom, nah, she won’t know. He immediately received an email back because the homework submission tool had an AI tool that really just was able to read the content and identify quickly if it was AI generated or not.
My kids put their teachers emails into these tools to see if the emails and notes home are generated by AI and they often are. Those tools are not a hundred percent accurate, but just know [00:09:00] that from a credibility perspective, the last thing you want to do is kind of shift your mentality where everything you do is going to be generated by AI, because that is noticeable and people can tell.
When the format structure, the terminology vocabulary you’re using just doesn’t match the way that you normally talk. So, word to the wise, be a little careful with it. But there are ways to incorporate it like we talked about that you can, but do not copy and paste. So thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode.
Hopefully these six tenets gave you some ideas about ways to talk about AI with your team, brainstorm ways to use it safely and some things not to do. Again, if you have a specific topic within the AI realm that you want us to cover, shoot me a note. We’re happy to dig into more specifics. Things are changing really fast.
So we’ve kind of avoided platform specific conversations up until now, just because by the time it publishes, it may be out of date, but we are very happy to dig in and have that conversation with you. So thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of [00:10:00] “We Are, Marketing Happy.” We’ll see you in the future.
Take care.
The team at Hedy & Hopp has been busy the last six months, flying around the country to meet with prospects in-person, as they choose a new agency partner. In a recent RFP meeting, an executive leader questioned whether a boutique-size agency could actually bring full-service to the table. It was a fair question, and they were surprised by our answer.
Being a large size agency doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting full-service. More people doesn’t necessarily mean better work, more innovative work, or better serviced work. There are benefits to working with large agencies, like cost-efficiencies, scaled locations, etc., but there’s more clients should think about when considering full-service and how a boutique size agency can deliver.
Tune in to today’s episode to hear from Maggie Piasecki, H&H’s SVP, about what being a boutique agency means, including:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Maggie:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiepiasecki/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Good morning friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And, we are the producers of the podcast. And I am so thrilled to have my right hand with me today, Maggie Piasecki.
She is our SVP and she is the reason why our agency runs so smoothly on a day-to-day basis. So welcome Maggie.
Maggie: Thank you, Jenny. What a lovely introduction. Hello everyone. Great to be here.
Jenny: So Maggie and I, as well as a handful of our team members, a rotating cast of characters, we’ve been on the road a lot over the last six months meeting lots of new folks, onboarding lots of new clients.
And, we had a really interesting conversation with an executive at one of our recent onsite visits, and we thought it’d be worthwhile to kind of [00:01:00] examine that conversation because I think it’s one that likely a lot of organizations talk about and grapple with as they’re trying to decide who to go with when they’re doing a new agency selection.
So Maggie today, I’m excited to talk about what being a boutique agency means.
Maggie: Ah, it’s an interesting question. And, Jenny and I, along with another colleague, were in an executive room a couple of weeks ago and met with one of the executive leaders of the marketing department. And they just very point blank directly asked, what does it mean that you’re a boutique agency?
Does that mean you’re small? Does that mean you can’t really provide full service? And, it was the first time I think we’ve been directly asked that question. And so it really gave us a platform to have a really engaging conversation with their full marketing team. And I think they were surprised by some of the answers that we brought to the table.
And so, as Jenny and I, we were coming back along with one of our colleagues. I was like, you know what? I feel like we need to maybe categorize the way we answered that question. [00:02:00] And maybe share on the podcast just what it means to be a boutique agency. Small doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not full service.
And so it really just got us thinking about, like, what that means to our clients, especially clients that are coming from maybe larger agencies and exploring what a smaller boutique agency may be able to bring to the table. And so thought we’d just run through kind of a few key areas of benefits and just a different way of working that our clients may experience with that boutique size.
Jenny: Yeah, I love that. And I will say if any individuals from that organization are listening today, thank you for asking the question.
Maggie: It was a great question.
Jenny: Yeah, I love it whenever individuals whether they’re a current client or a prospect of ours, just point blank ask questions that they’re thinking.
So many times, maybe there’s an underlying question or uncertainty that people are worried about bringing up, so thanks. It’s really triggered a lot.
Maggie: Thanks all around. I mean, that conversation was one of the most fruitful and engaging conversations I think we’ve had within an RFP process. So, yeah, but when we think about it, I think the biggest [00:03:00] question that they had was, what is size mean?
And like, if you’re smaller, can you actually deliver on full service? And I, one of the ways that we categorize this is, big or one size doesn’t necessarily mean that it fits all. I think when we think about boutique and we think about our specific types of clients that really fit our model, who are, regional health care systems, regional payers, cancer centers, pediatric centers.
These are organizations that have a very similar type of services, but have a very unique profile and geographic set of like the type of patients they’re engaging with. They really need an agency that comes in and really ebbs and flows to the needs of their market to the needs of the patients that they’re serving.
It’s not going to be the same from like county to county, for example. Yeah. And so I think it’s really important to think about like boutique. What we’re able to bring to the table is that we deliver a model that really fits within their organization. So it’s not a one size fits all. And we talked a lot about that with this [00:04:00] particular prospect that we were engaging with.
That means that an account service person is really going to get to understand the needs of your business and really mold their team to align to the needs of their business. We’re not going to force kind of a boxed solution on our clients. And I think that really perked up their ears a bit and led to some really interesting conversations around process.
Like how do we integrate them into our process. How do we integrate into their process? And I think really that boutique model enables them to have that, not a one size fits all model that really applies better to their size and their organization.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I will say from our perspective we decided and have been very specific on who we serve and what we do.
Right. So even if we don’t have a 200 person head count, for us boutique actually means that we’re really specific in what we’re good at, right? It’s like, we’re not going to pretend to be video production company because we do not do that. We have great partners. We’ll refer, bring in, but like the specificity of what we [00:05:00] offer.
And my perspective is why we decided to go this route and how that we built the organization and you worked at most of our team members have worked at some really large agencies. And so you definitely know, you know what that is like versus what it’s like to work at a boutique agency.
So I think it’s just interesting having the perspective of both sides as we have built Hedy and Hopp.
Maggie: Yeah, I think that’s, yeah, that is important. And I will say there are positives to larger size agencies and boutique size agencies. I think Jenny and I have a really exciting opportunity here that we are building the agency that we’ve always wanted to build.
And we want it to purposely be boutique and very, specifically focused. And I think that’s made it a lot of fun in terms of the types of clients that we engage with in the team we build. So, yeah. I will say the other thing that you’re making me think of is just, at a larger agency, clients are really going to get the benefit of like large-scale production based services.
And we talked a lot about that with this specific client, because they had a good amount of work that was going to be flowing through the business. And I think one thing that we talked about [00:06:00] is, within Hedy and Hopp, we are more of an extension versus production. We’re an extension over production.
So coming to us, you’re not going to get that very large scale production kind of flow through work, but what you are going to get is a true extension of your marketing team. And that really means that like, we are another headcount for you in a sense, right? So we’re sitting in on internal meetings, I think one of the things that our clients really like about our group is that we help navigate a lot of the internal politics within maybe the organization or a lot of like the different stakeholders and the different points of view.
And that’s really because we are an extension of the team. So we’re not sort of an agency that’s sitting over here and it’s kind of ping pong about what the conversations look like, or when the challenges come, like, we really are down in the trenches with our clients as a true extension of their team.
And I think for those, regional providers, regional payers. That makes a really big difference in terms of just, how we work together, how we move projects through, how we strategize together, how we [00:07:00] work through problems together.
Jenny: Absolutely. And one thing, I mean, I think it, one thing that I’ve been thinking about is we’ve been focusing on.
So where I’ve mentioned this alive in a couple of LinkedIn posts about it, we’re an EOS entrepreneurial operating system based agency, which means we’re very focused on operational efficiencies, processes, really fine tuning the who we are and why we exist question. And so one thing, even though we don’t offer pre packaged, like you’re not getting, okay, you come to us, you get this box of deliverables, right?
There are a lot of best practices that we bring to the table. For example, I’m thinking about some of the recent clients that have onboarded and immediately I’m thinking, Oh, this is, I need to tell them about a best practice that worked at another region for another regional provider, because that definitely could help with their patient acquisition efforts for that service line that they’re struggling with.
Right? So by being really blinders on, you really do get that benefit of the shared experiences and that overall lift of best practices.
Maggie: [00:08:00] Definitely. Yeah. EOS has been a really critical component to building Hedy and Hopp over the last two and a half years. We’ve been around a lot longer than that, but we’ve been an EOS implementer now for almost three years, actually.
Yes. And that’s super exciting. I can’t believe that’s gone by so quickly, but I think, with EOS the way that we have implemented a lot of those various components, it means that the account leads are having, they have a lot of autonomy to run their business, right? So one of the beautiful things about EOS and the way that we’ve implemented is it removes a lot of the hierarchy of decision making, and it really provides autonomy and empowerment to our teams to move things forward.
And from an account perspective, from a client perspective, that means that, when challenges come to our team. They are owning the solve. They’re figuring it out and they’re moving it forward. They’re not having to come to a leadership team member to get approval or talk through how they may go through that challenge.
They’re getting together as a group. They’re figuring out the solve and they’re moving it forward. And that means that there’s a lot of better forward, quicker [00:09:00] movement, I think, for our clients because those account leads really do have that empowerment and autonomy to move things.
Jenny: Okay. So that brought up another point I wanted to talk about, because you just mentioned own the solve.
Let’s talk about culture.
Maggie: Yeah. Culture. I think this, when you look at sort of a boutique size agency and what that means from a day to day interaction with clients, to me, I think the biggest thing is that those clients really experienced the culture of that agency. Culture’s big, no matter where you work, right?
But I think at a, at some point. Smaller boutique agency culture really is woven into the day-to-day, every piece of engagement. And when we think about how that’s delivered to our clients, own the solve is one of our values. Culture for us really means living by those values on a day-to-day basis.
And so. Kind over nice is another value. Assuming good intent, own the solve and then pivoting with positivity. I think owning the solve and pivoting with positivity are the things that our clients experience the most because we are that boutique agency. We [00:10:00] hire and fire based off of those values. And we really are true to that.
Right? So, when you are a client working with us especially in healthcare marketing, like, You’re going to change a lot, right? There’s a lot of market changes. There may be a new physician that, a regional healthcare provider is able to bring on board, and we’ve got to completely change the marketing strategy for the next quarter to really promote that physician.
And our team will pivot with positivity in terms of how we work a lot of the different marketing tactics, etc. So it kind of infuses that joy, if you will, that we try so hard to bring to the table. But culture really, I think, plays a huge role in terms of what it’s like to work with a boutique size agency.
Jenny: I totally agree. I think it really is. From what I hear from clients after they’ve worked with us for six to eight months, I almost always get a phone call back saying, wow, I do feel your culture. You told me you would, or you told me I would, but I really do feel your culture calls and emails.
Yeah. So it’s very, it’s a very fun phone call to receive.
Maggie: Yeah. Joy doesn’t just start or [00:11:00] stop with Jenny. It really is infused, I think, in all of the day to day engagement with our clients.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Maggie, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a really, it was a very fun podcast and fun conversation to have for all of you tuning in.
If you have any questions or want to chat with us directly, please feel free to reach out. We would love to hear from you. If you have any topics you’d like for us to cover in a future episode. Send me a note, and please don’t forget to follow our podcast, rate us, and we’ll just keep showing up every Friday with new podcasts and new topics for you.
But until next time, have a wonderful and safe rest of your day and we’ll see you soon.
In this week’s episode, Jenny chats with Hedy & Hopp’s own Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown to talk about rural marketing. They discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that working with regional hospital systems or payors in rural communities present:
Challenge 1: Channel
Lindsey states that access to channels may differ from marketing in urban areas. Rural areas may have more limited or no access to things like fiber internet, cable TV, and even billboards and signage. However, that doesn’t mean rural areas are disconnected, the opportunities to connect are just through different channels:
Challenge 2: Content
The second challenge Lindsey brings up is that the framing of content looks a little bit different in rural areas. Rather than focusing on messaging like “24/7” or “Get Seen Today,” which may not be feasible in rural areas, rural audiences may respond better to practical messaging that promotes convenience, scheduling ahead, or social determinate of health topics like transportation or cost.
Finally, Jenny and Lindsey offer a few areas to research if you are marketing in a rural community:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
WAMH 54
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am super excited to be here with you today. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I have with me today, our Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown.
Lindsey: Hi, Jenny. Hi, everyone. Great to be back.
Jenny: So, Lindsey, our team has been so busy. You and your team have been so busy developing media strategies and marketing strategies to be able to activate on behalf of our clients. And, quite a few of them have at least part or all of their audiences in rural locations.
So, we started talking about rural marketing because it’s very different, right, than how you would approach a heavily populated metropolitan area. And I loved it, whenever we were talking, you really broke down rural [00:01:00] marketing as far as two major challenges, the channel and the content. So tell me about that.
Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. So, it has been an honor to really dig into sort of a new audience set for us at Hedy and Hopp, or at least in my career. A lot of times in my previous life, you know, I’ve been working really with hospital systems that are in very densely populated areas and their audiences are usually, you know, in that general vicinity.
So it’s been really great to learn more about the rural communities, how best to reach those potential new patients for some of these regional hospital systems and payers that really reached that rural community. And so one of the key challenges that we really uncovered quickly is how are we going to reach this audience just based on the limitations in wireless access? Even though a vast majority, so we’re looking at 95, 99 percent of those in a rural community do have access to internet.
The kind of internet access that you have may not [00:02:00] be as robust or as powerful as you might be able to get in the city. Things like fiber are not available in those rural communities, by and large. Other things like television, so most of these communities don’t have cable. So cable television is not an area where we really can explore.
Same with billboards. In a smaller area, there’s fewer opportunities to have your message in a billboard because you have much fewer literal billboards or even digital billboards available to you and gas stations and things to that effect. So, these kinds of things really are areas of, I guess, limitation, but then opportunity to really think about marketing and reaching these folks in a different way than we’re kind of used to doing in more densely populated areas.
So, thinking about local communities. So, something that has been really impactful for a couple of our current clients is really partnering with local schools, even the high school where, you know, football or other sporting events are really big. And having your name associated with that local community can be really impactful as a nice reinforcement, but even [00:03:00] some kind of partnership with local businesses or other places that can have flyers or other kinds of like partnership abilities with those local areas can be really impactful again to just build awareness, name recognition, make sure that folks know about your capabilities and your services and how they can access them, which really comes to like the 2nd point, right? The content.
So then. What do we talk about it? You know, we can’t necessarily go to market with the same kind of messaging. Like, book your appointment now, we can see you in 24 hours. Like, that kind of stuff probably doesn’t really work in these communities because they may need more time to figure out transportation, to figure out who’s going to cover for them while they’re out, whether they’re, you know, they’re working and they don’t have as many folks to back them up or, you know, they’re owning their own business.
So they can’t get away. So, things more about convenience scheduling ahead of time so you can plan for that time out. And things like how to, you know, reach the hospital. What kinds of transportation, bus lines, [00:04:00] or other modes of transportation are available. That will drop you right at the front door.
So some of these more practical messages might actually resonate more with these communities where it’s the practical things that are actually limiting them from accessing your services.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I know one of the things that we always talk about with our clients as we’re developing messaging and communication strategies is that social determinants of health, right?
Is there certain levels of poverty or income limitations within the regions we’re talking to? And that can happen in both, clearly, highly urban areas as well as rural, but often if we’re looking at like some of our clients, historically, if we’re looking at super large rural areas, oftentimes there’s also a pretty large percentage of the population that does have some sort of social determinants of health that’s going to impact their ability to access care. So figuring that out upfront and having them be part of the core messaging is super important to make sure that your services are accessed.
Lindsey: Absolutely, and that you’re showing up to them in the right way. Because again, if your message is all about, [00:05:00] I’m going to use the 24 hour example again.
If your message is all about that is not going to resonate with a rural community. Someone that just, you know, doesn’t have that kind of flexibility in their time. So making sure that message again resonates with what they’re living with day to day. Ways to you know, expand upon how you’re active in that community again, through those partnerships and things like that really help to, let those potential new patients or those potential new customers really see you as part of the community and not just some big company that’s way out here. They don’t know what I’m dealing with. They don’t understand who I am and who we are here in this town that can really help kind of bridge some of those gaps and make those connections.
Jenny: Yeah. And I think what’s interesting, I loved watching this. Some of the campaigns that you put into market middle of middle beginning of last year did still, even in rural markets still included things like streaming services, so putting ads on Netflix and Hulu. So just because people are in rural areas does not mean, you know, I grew up in a rural area.
My parents live in a very rural area. I guarantee you, they still have all of those same services. So [00:06:00] I guess, Making sure that you don’t, you know, view those people as, Oh, they only have, you know, satellite TV, and they only have landlines or dial up internet. You know, you just can’t go into it. You need to actually get the data because each rural area really can have its own sort of you know, personality as far as how tech savvy they may or may not be.
Lindsey: Yeah, and a lot of those Internet service providers really offer the correct speed that you need to run things like Netflix, but they may not have the correct speed to run things like, you know, gaming. So there are avenues, like connected TV is a perfect example of where you can reach this audience because they will be watching those services.
Generally, that’s where the population is moving. You may not be able to get them through cable. You can get them through connected. Another way to think about that too, is in YouTube. So this is a highly, this YouTube is a highly used channel among this population. Really all social media is really highly used around this population.
So those are channels where you can really make some impact. And again, start to build some engagement and build some [00:07:00] reputation based on the content that you’re sharing, ensuring that it is localized, ensuring that it does feel authentic. And like you’re coming from that kind of a place will be really important there.
But those are huge channels for this audience as well. So do not discount those digital mediums at all.
Jenny: Okay. I’m going to totally put you on the spot here. Okay. So you’re so good at on the spot questions. I’m excited to ask this. If I were a marketing manager at a regional or a, you know, rural oriented provider or payer, and I was thinking about what my media plan should look like for the next six months, let’s say I have a kind of limited budget and I perhaps haven’t tested very many interesting tactics, but maybe I’ve like only really done radio and billboards so far. If you had to provide a couple of recommendations of platforms, just to dig into, to learn more and research more around, not that you’re saying this is what you want to do.
Everyone should do but like here’s the areas you should research to see if it matches your demographic. What are like the four to six ones that you prioritize? If it [00:08:00] is, if it’s performance oriented. So if their main goal is to drive signups or new patients.
Lindsey: So again, I’m going to, I’m going to talk about social media.
So I feel like social media is one place where you are going to get a big bang for your buck there. It’s not always seen as the most conversion driven tactic, but that I think is not the case when we get into the rural communities. Again, if we’re talking about folks that are engaged with each other in social media, this is an area where you need to explore, especially if you’ve only been doing a couple of broadcast mediums like radio or billboards, where you’re probably not getting a ton of reach, which means your opportunity to kind of see results from those tactics are going to be pretty small.
Doing something really simple, like social media, where you can really easily pivot and start to learn a little bit more about your audience. I would actually spend some time on the social media platforms. Like, look at Instagram, look at Facebook, look at TikTok, look at all of those platforms just to see what are some of the key businesses in those areas.
What are they doing? How are they [00:09:00] reaching those particular communities? Do a little bit of competitive Intel, maybe not with a good direct competitor to you, but like, For others in that area, how are they speaking to those folks? And then, you know, what are they using? So social media, I’m going to say is going to be really important.
I also don’t want people to discount like the need for programmatic or some kind of programmatic advertising again. Not always the best conversion driver, but that’s where that message is going to be really important. So if you make sure that message is direct about either booking an appointment or booking a consultation, that you have a variety of appointments available, something very quick.
Likely, you’re going to see better conversions than you would if you just kind of did general brand awareness that didn’t really have a call to action. So programmatic, don’t discount it. Make sure your message is really tight and has a purpose. And then the last thing I’ll say is, you know, do some due diligence and looking around over the next 6 months on what those what, like, key events are happening.
Where are some areas where your brand could actually show up? What are there any partners? You can look at partnering with or, you know. Companies, you can [00:10:00] look at partnering with to kind of co brand, maybe a message or something that could be distributed at that event or help with signage something like that.
The next 6 months are going to be tough for every single advertiser, whether you’re in a rural community or an urban community. I don’t know if, you know, but we’re in an election year. So, you know, some of those paid opportunities are going to be limited. So you have to be a little bit more creative about what partnerships or other things you can use that don’t require a physical ad space, for example to kind of think outside the box there.
Jenny: Yeah. What about paid search? Is that a bottom of the funnel, like always on thing in your mind?
Lindsey: Of course, of course. I don’t know why I forget about that channel.
Cause it’s probably the most important channel, but absolutely your paid search is going to do wonders for you. You have a lot of capabilities in terms of the type of messaging that you can execute. You can test different things, especially if you’re making a switch from branding to more convenience messaging, something like that.
Really easy way to test that out. And it could be a really low spend. So really nice economical choice as well to kind of get those [00:11:00] appointments moving in.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Lindsey, this was extremely helpful and fun to talk about. If you are a rural marketer and you’re trying to figure out where in the world you should focus, give us a call.
We’d love to chat and share some more ideas offline about some things that have worked for our clients over the past few years. Things changed so fast. So that what worked six years ago, isn’t what’s going to work now. So we’re happy to share and brainstorm a little bit specifically for your organization, but as always, thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
We will see you next week.