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