At Hedy & Hopp, pediatrics is one of our passions, and in this week’s episode, Jenny talks about developing a pediatric content strategy. One thing that makes pediatric content so different from other types of healthcare content is that, instead of talking directly to a patient, often pediatric content is aimed at the parents of a patient.
With that in mind, Jenny offers five pillars for pediatric content marketing:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
WAMH58 video
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host today, and I’m also the CEO and Founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we love producing this show to share some industry insight and nuggets with our listeners.
Today, I’m really excited to create an episode specifically to help out those of you that are focusing on pediatric marketing. So at Hedy and Hopp, we have five areas of passion. They are regional healthcare providers, regional payers or insurance companies, oncology, women’s health, and peds. So we’re going to be weaving in specific content for each of those five areas of passion.
If you have specific content questions or things that you’d like to see, shoot me a note. This episode was actually inspired by a note sent in by a listener. They are in the middle of [00:01:00] creating a content strategy for a new video series they’re doing for pediatric hospital, and they were interested in getting our insights into different ways to approach a content strategy.
So let’s get let’s dig in. Let’s get started. First, I will say that we are longtime fans of doing content marketing in the pediatric space. One of our very first customers was St. Louis Children’s Hospital and we did a really phenomenal content marketing program for them where we took an old dormant blog that had been sitting unused for quite some time and repurposed it into a dynamic video based content platform.
It was a really great place for them to be able to showcase new physicians as they entered the organization to help fill their schedules, but it also allowed them to create kind of have a hub for all of their content. And then, of course, that content would be distributed out across whatever social media platform they were leveraging at the time, which, as you can imagine, [00:02:00] it’s changed a lot in eight years. Started out, we would do some Facebook lives series and then things moved over YouTube has been continuously popular throughout that time.
But we’re not going to talk necessarily about platforms today. I just want to share five specific content pillars that are really important in the pediatric space as you’re beginning to think about a content strategy. So again, as we’re thinking about the pediatric space, you aren’t necessarily talking specifically to the patient.
Sometimes you are, if it’s an older patient, but most of the time you’re going to be talking to the patient’s parent or caregiver. And so a lot of these content themes you’ll see directly are speaking and providing reassurance to that caregiver. And so that audience pivot whenever you’re working in pediatrics is really a really important thing to keep in mind.
So first pillar, we’re going to walk through five pillars. If you’re doing a content strategy, these are five pillars in pediatric content that you [00:03:00] absolutely have to include. The first understanding the diagnosis. One of the main reasons people will end up landing on your website is because they’ve Googled a really scary diagnosis they’ve recently received.
Perhaps it’s symptoms that will lead to a diagnosis, but it also may be the diagnosis itself. We have found in a lot of the work that we’ve done over the last eight years, that having a content strategy specifically focused on specific diagnoses that you are able to actually address within service lines within your organization is really important.
So, for example, having a video specifically about type 1 diabetes in pediatrics. Walking through here are the symptoms. Here’s how it’s frequently diagnosed. And then, oh, yeah, here’s how you can schedule an appointment within this team within our hospital to be able to begin working with us to have additional care or a second opinion.
If it’s early in the [00:04:00] diagnosis. So it really helps guide that parent’s fact finding journey all the way through from answering a preliminary question to allowing them to seek care. So that’s number one, understand the diagnosis. Number two, a trend that we’ve seen work really, really well is preparing for surgery.
That is a very scary thing, especially for parents that have never had to put their child under, as people say. They are very afraid about having their child leave them and go back behind with the doctors and nurses, not have their child in their sight, they don’t know what to expect the day of. So a very popular and useful YouTube or content series that you can create would actually be one that is categorically.
Preparing for surgery, and then within that actually creating a video for all of the common surgeries that you do within your organization. This video can be [00:05:00] referenced within your specific service lines on your pages within your hospital to reference what to expect before or during this kind of surgery.
It also could be shared with the by the care team to the patients at the appointment before the surgery as an asset for them to review at home to prepare to feel more comfortable for it. But we’ve seen tremendous success. And really easing parents’ concerns and giving them reassurance that they’re going to the right place with a preparing for surgery content pillar.
The third content pillar and this is one that feels so obvious, but whenever you work somewhere and you’re so familiar with the way it’s laid out, it isn’t something that always comes to mind: hospital and facilities tours. This is so popular on all of the content series we’ve produced over the years, a simple tour where you’re walking people through here’s where you park, here’s admissions, here’s [00:06:00] the hallway to the bathroom, here’s the hallway to the exam rooms.
It seems so basic, right? Always some of the most popular videos. Many times there’s a lot of anxiety around accessing care or actually physically going to a new location for parents, especially if their child isn’t in a great place health wise. And so being able to watch a video about a particular location they have not been yet and helping them understand what signage to look for and where it is and what color it is ahead of time can be really, really helpful.
So again, hospital tour and facilities tour. Super easy but very, very helpful to be able to have. One thing for this one to keep in mind is that you want to flag with your internal processes whenever you do update signage or do any sort of like opening of a new location. You’ll want to be able to produce additional content to cover that to add it to that library.
Number four is emotional support and counseling. And this is actually one that I can speak to personally. [00:07:00] My first son was born at 27 weeks. So he was very, very early. He was a whole trimester early. And we spent 77 days in the NICU. There was a wonderful support system for NICU parents. But in many pediatric hospitals have wonderful support networks and resources for parents of a variety types of situations and diagnoses.
So actually creating content around that, perhaps interviewing somebody who is very passionate about it, who’s organized the meetups or the resources and getting them to share additional information with links online can be really helpful. Often it’s very overwhelming when you’re a parent in that moment.
So for example, with the NICU support group, they met on like Thursdays at 1 PM. I was very rarely able to actually go because I was also running a business at the same time, but there was information online I was able to access that was really helpful to support me through that journey. So, think about a specific parent, specific diagnoses or [00:08:00] resources you have available.
And then think about if you’re sitting at home, scared on the couch, what kind of content can we deliver them to make them a little bit less scared in that moment. And then the fifth one, something that also is, you know, that scared parent sitting on the couch, trying to Google something at 1am figuring out, do I need to go to the emergency room right now or not is post procedure care and follow up.
So, go through and look at all of your procedures, identify and prioritize them. And then create some videos around post procedure care and follow up. What should you expect when you go home from a bone break surgery or whatever. It is clearly as specific as you can within each of your different service lines and prioritize things appropriately, but creating content to help them understand when to reach out for help and what is normal and what is to be expected.
And if they do need to reach out for help post procedure, how to do that is extremely helpful for parents to have very popular content. And then the sixth bonus content pillar. I, I only [00:09:00] said there was going to be five cause this one for me feels more like a content format versus a pillar, but we have found that interactive Q and A’s around specific service lines or areas of focus are extremely popular.
So we’ve done everything from back in the day, we’d do Facebook Live and have hundreds of people tune in, but there’s ways now that you can do it on Almost every social media platform, you can go live, promote that you’re going to go live in advance with a doctor or somebody within your organization that could speak to the particular topic that that theme is for that event.
And then say you’ll be online for 30 minutes answering questions. Of course, you always want to have prepopulated questions in case attendance is slow, but that information or that session can actually be recorded. And stored for long tail value for people to then view many, many days, months, and years after the live event itself has ended.
So hopefully if you are in peds and you’re in the middle of thinking about [00:10:00] content pillars, these five slash one bonus will help you start putting a little bit of framework around the low hanging fruit and the highest value content that you can create. We have gone through and created a content for our clients for many, many platforms, everything from static blog posts to you know, Facebook and Instagram to TikTok to YouTube, everything, the core emotions and questions that parents of pediatric patients, our experience are going to be the same, regardless of what platform you’re on.
So we really challenge you to focus and spend a lot more time on this part of the process. And then figure out your channels and promotion strategy as a second step. So as always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please follow, like, and rate this podcast. We have received so much great feedback around the content.
It’s honestly humbling how many people [00:11:00] have reached out to me to say that it sparked ideas or challenged assumptions or educated them on something technical that we feel just really lucky to be able to produce this content every single week. We’ve received lots of great user feedback. Submissions around different content ideas.
If you have something you want us to cover, shoot me an email, Jenny at headyandhop. com. I’d love to hear from you. Otherwise have a fabulous rest of your day and we’ll see you on another episode next week on We Are Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In today’s episode Jenny talks about the six core tenets of using AI in healthcare marketing, including
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are the company behind this podcast. I’m super excited to be here with you today.
I want to talk about something that is very buzzy in the healthcare marketing space right now and that is AI. A lot of questions, concerns, lots of different ways that you can have an opinion about AI, but a lot of conversations are happening right now at the leadership, as well as the individual contributor level with marketing teams, trying to figure out how, when, and if to incorporate AI into their processes.
[00:01:00] There are lots of resources talking about specific AI tools, best practices for each of those tools. We’re not going to cover that today. Instead, what I want to talk about is six tenets or core approaches to keep in mind as you’re beginning to think about how, when, and if to incorporate AI into your marketing team’s processes.
I’m excited and certainly willing to do future episodes about AI. At Hedy and Hopp, we actually have an internal team that is becoming experts on all the different tools, how to use them appropriately, et cetera. So if you want an episode about a specific tool, about a specific use case in the future, et cetera, holler at me.
But right now we’re going to talk about six core tenets. So for anybody who has begun using an AI tool, played around with it a little bit, you know, there are lots of weird considerations you have to have. They operate a little bit like a search engine, but also [00:02:00] very different from a search engine in their outputs and capabilities.
So as you start talking about, you know, how should we begin leveraging AI to make our internal teams more efficient? The first thing I want you to think about is to approach AI results with heavy skepticism. There’s something in AI results called a hallucinate, a hallucination. And, a hallucination is whenever AI basically makes it up.
They don’t know the answer, but they don’t want to sound dumb, so they make it up. So, the information is not always factual, and it can be very difficult to actually discern when this information is a hallucination. So, for example some of the testing that we have done and work that we’ve done, they’ll actually cite specific court cases with specific numbers.
It looks very real until you begin looking for a source, and it doesn’t exist because it’s a completely made up court case. So the first thing is to approach it with healthy skepticism. [00:03:00] Start by assuming the information AI is providing to you is not accurate versus assuming it’s accurate and moving forward with that information.
Number two is do not use the AI output as is without reviewing and adjusting. This should be super obvious based off of tenet number one, but if you have it generate an internal email, for example, don’t just copy, paste, and send. You need to read it thoroughly, make sure that it communicates your points effectively, doesn’t use vocabulary that you wouldn’t use normally.
And another issue is that AI often steals content. There’s lots of copyright infringement lawsuits happening right now. And so it’s a form of plagiarism often in using AI generated output and using it as your own online. So, what do you do instead? Well, tenant number three is don’t have it create deliverables.
If you’re working and saying having to do some social media copy and you wanted to create different versions for all the different [00:04:00] social media platforms based off of the word count. Awesome. That can be a V1, but then take it and edit, edit, edit. It can do some of the groundwork for you. And that’s a great way to do it.
And we may come a day where we pass this and we’re able to use the specific output, but there’s just too many lawsuits and things at play. We’re using the content as is for internal or external purposes. Is not a good idea. So again, do not have it use do not have it create specific deliverables internal or external facing.
Number four is be very clear in your ask. So asking whatever AI tool you’re using, giving it clear directions. Asking it to play a role, such as a world class healthcare marketer, for example, using specific language, asking for multiple versions, et cetera, the more information that you give it in the prompt, the clearer and better that your results likely will be.
A study was actually published. I’ll see if I [00:05:00] can find it to be able to reference it in the show notes, but it actually said, if you’re polite to AI, it actually is more willing to help you and gives you much more comprehensive results than if you do not say things like, please. And thank you. So being very clear in your ask, communicating to it, like you would a human, so being appreciative, asking for the level of comprehensiveness that you need for the results, et cetera, are all super important as you’re beginning to test all these different platforms.
Number five, ask for sources. Some platforms like Perplexity do this really well where if you ask it a question, let’s say for example if I was working on a campaign, a patient acquisition campaign for pediatric Orthopedics in the St. Louis area, and I wanted to understand the population within certain zip codes of people under the age of 18.
I could ask it, but then also ask it to cite the source like where did you get the information and that will help provide comfort that it’s not a hallucination and made up data and you can click through and [00:06:00] actually see the source quote the source, make sure the data and information is accurate. And so it can be helpful for that upstream research, but again, always ask for sources.
And then the final one, and as your neighborhood healthcare privacy pros, I have to mention this one is keep privacy a priority. Anything that you enter into these AI platforms, can be used for training their model. So for example, you never ever want to upload anything that is proprietary information, anything that is PHI, anything that you wouldn’t necessarily just like, you know, share on a billboard with an AI platform because that essentially is what it could be doing in the future, it could be incorporating it.
So for example, to test this theory we’re using chat GPT and I started using the platform, a paid version, to brainstorm content ideas for Hedy and Hopp. For the, “We Are, Marketing Happy” podcast, trying to get sources to make our information more comprehensive.
[00:07:00] And over time, we noticed the results it’s giving us is actually leveraging the Hedy and Hopp branding. So it’s using our own terminology. It’s using the way that we talk and the way that we phrase sentences and structure sentences. And so it very much takes the information that you share and reuses it.
So do not put anything in it, unless you have a private instance on a server that you can control and your IT team has given you the stamp of approval. So again, what are the six tenants to AI privacy? Number one, approach it with healthy skepticism. Assume some of what it’s telling you is a hallucination versus assuming everything is factual.
Number two, do not use the output as is without reviewing and adjusting. Number three, don’t have it create deliverables internal or external. Number four, be clear in your ask. Give it clear directions. Be polite, be comprehensive and specific in what you’re wanting it to do. Number five, ask for sources, tell it to cite sources and give you a link.
So you can check [00:08:00] fact check the information and number six, keep privacy a priority. I’m going to end this episode on a fun little comment. I actually did a LinkedIn post last week that a lot of folks got a good chuckle at. My oldest son is a freshman in high school and he missed an in-person event because he was doubly committed that night for afterschool sports commitments.
He had to write a five page paper. He was very proud when he told me he used AI to write the paper. And I was very clear to him that your teacher is immediately going to know it is AI written. He said, nah, mom, nah, she won’t know. He immediately received an email back because the homework submission tool had an AI tool that really just was able to read the content and identify quickly if it was AI generated or not.
My kids put their teachers emails into these tools to see if the emails and notes home are generated by AI and they often are. Those tools are not a hundred percent accurate, but just know [00:09:00] that from a credibility perspective, the last thing you want to do is kind of shift your mentality where everything you do is going to be generated by AI, because that is noticeable and people can tell.
When the format structure, the terminology vocabulary you’re using just doesn’t match the way that you normally talk. So, word to the wise, be a little careful with it. But there are ways to incorporate it like we talked about that you can, but do not copy and paste. So thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode.
Hopefully these six tenets gave you some ideas about ways to talk about AI with your team, brainstorm ways to use it safely and some things not to do. Again, if you have a specific topic within the AI realm that you want us to cover, shoot me a note. We’re happy to dig into more specifics. Things are changing really fast.
So we’ve kind of avoided platform specific conversations up until now, just because by the time it publishes, it may be out of date, but we are very happy to dig in and have that conversation with you. So thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of [00:10:00] “We Are, Marketing Happy.” We’ll see you in the future.
Take care.
The team at Hedy & Hopp has been busy the last six months, flying around the country to meet with prospects in-person, as they choose a new agency partner. In a recent RFP meeting, an executive leader questioned whether a boutique-size agency could actually bring full-service to the table. It was a fair question, and they were surprised by our answer.
Being a large size agency doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting full-service. More people doesn’t necessarily mean better work, more innovative work, or better serviced work. There are benefits to working with large agencies, like cost-efficiencies, scaled locations, etc., but there’s more clients should think about when considering full-service and how a boutique size agency can deliver.
Tune in to today’s episode to hear from Maggie Piasecki, H&H’s SVP, about what being a boutique agency means, including:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Maggie:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiepiasecki/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Good morning friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And, we are the producers of the podcast. And I am so thrilled to have my right hand with me today, Maggie Piasecki.
She is our SVP and she is the reason why our agency runs so smoothly on a day-to-day basis. So welcome Maggie.
Maggie: Thank you, Jenny. What a lovely introduction. Hello everyone. Great to be here.
Jenny: So Maggie and I, as well as a handful of our team members, a rotating cast of characters, we’ve been on the road a lot over the last six months meeting lots of new folks, onboarding lots of new clients.
And, we had a really interesting conversation with an executive at one of our recent onsite visits, and we thought it’d be worthwhile to kind of [00:01:00] examine that conversation because I think it’s one that likely a lot of organizations talk about and grapple with as they’re trying to decide who to go with when they’re doing a new agency selection.
So Maggie today, I’m excited to talk about what being a boutique agency means.
Maggie: Ah, it’s an interesting question. And, Jenny and I, along with another colleague, were in an executive room a couple of weeks ago and met with one of the executive leaders of the marketing department. And they just very point blank directly asked, what does it mean that you’re a boutique agency?
Does that mean you’re small? Does that mean you can’t really provide full service? And, it was the first time I think we’ve been directly asked that question. And so it really gave us a platform to have a really engaging conversation with their full marketing team. And I think they were surprised by some of the answers that we brought to the table.
And so, as Jenny and I, we were coming back along with one of our colleagues. I was like, you know what? I feel like we need to maybe categorize the way we answered that question. [00:02:00] And maybe share on the podcast just what it means to be a boutique agency. Small doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not full service.
And so it really just got us thinking about, like, what that means to our clients, especially clients that are coming from maybe larger agencies and exploring what a smaller boutique agency may be able to bring to the table. And so thought we’d just run through kind of a few key areas of benefits and just a different way of working that our clients may experience with that boutique size.
Jenny: Yeah, I love that. And I will say if any individuals from that organization are listening today, thank you for asking the question.
Maggie: It was a great question.
Jenny: Yeah, I love it whenever individuals whether they’re a current client or a prospect of ours, just point blank ask questions that they’re thinking.
So many times, maybe there’s an underlying question or uncertainty that people are worried about bringing up, so thanks. It’s really triggered a lot.
Maggie: Thanks all around. I mean, that conversation was one of the most fruitful and engaging conversations I think we’ve had within an RFP process. So, yeah, but when we think about it, I think the biggest [00:03:00] question that they had was, what is size mean?
And like, if you’re smaller, can you actually deliver on full service? And I, one of the ways that we categorize this is, big or one size doesn’t necessarily mean that it fits all. I think when we think about boutique and we think about our specific types of clients that really fit our model, who are, regional health care systems, regional payers, cancer centers, pediatric centers.
These are organizations that have a very similar type of services, but have a very unique profile and geographic set of like the type of patients they’re engaging with. They really need an agency that comes in and really ebbs and flows to the needs of their market to the needs of the patients that they’re serving.
It’s not going to be the same from like county to county, for example. Yeah. And so I think it’s really important to think about like boutique. What we’re able to bring to the table is that we deliver a model that really fits within their organization. So it’s not a one size fits all. And we talked a lot about that with this [00:04:00] particular prospect that we were engaging with.
That means that an account service person is really going to get to understand the needs of your business and really mold their team to align to the needs of their business. We’re not going to force kind of a boxed solution on our clients. And I think that really perked up their ears a bit and led to some really interesting conversations around process.
Like how do we integrate them into our process. How do we integrate into their process? And I think really that boutique model enables them to have that, not a one size fits all model that really applies better to their size and their organization.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I will say from our perspective we decided and have been very specific on who we serve and what we do.
Right. So even if we don’t have a 200 person head count, for us boutique actually means that we’re really specific in what we’re good at, right? It’s like, we’re not going to pretend to be video production company because we do not do that. We have great partners. We’ll refer, bring in, but like the specificity of what we [00:05:00] offer.
And my perspective is why we decided to go this route and how that we built the organization and you worked at most of our team members have worked at some really large agencies. And so you definitely know, you know what that is like versus what it’s like to work at a boutique agency.
So I think it’s just interesting having the perspective of both sides as we have built Hedy and Hopp.
Maggie: Yeah, I think that’s, yeah, that is important. And I will say there are positives to larger size agencies and boutique size agencies. I think Jenny and I have a really exciting opportunity here that we are building the agency that we’ve always wanted to build.
And we want it to purposely be boutique and very, specifically focused. And I think that’s made it a lot of fun in terms of the types of clients that we engage with in the team we build. So, yeah. I will say the other thing that you’re making me think of is just, at a larger agency, clients are really going to get the benefit of like large-scale production based services.
And we talked a lot about that with this specific client, because they had a good amount of work that was going to be flowing through the business. And I think one thing that we talked about [00:06:00] is, within Hedy and Hopp, we are more of an extension versus production. We’re an extension over production.
So coming to us, you’re not going to get that very large scale production kind of flow through work, but what you are going to get is a true extension of your marketing team. And that really means that like, we are another headcount for you in a sense, right? So we’re sitting in on internal meetings, I think one of the things that our clients really like about our group is that we help navigate a lot of the internal politics within maybe the organization or a lot of like the different stakeholders and the different points of view.
And that’s really because we are an extension of the team. So we’re not sort of an agency that’s sitting over here and it’s kind of ping pong about what the conversations look like, or when the challenges come, like, we really are down in the trenches with our clients as a true extension of their team.
And I think for those, regional providers, regional payers. That makes a really big difference in terms of just, how we work together, how we move projects through, how we strategize together, how we [00:07:00] work through problems together.
Jenny: Absolutely. And one thing, I mean, I think it, one thing that I’ve been thinking about is we’ve been focusing on.
So where I’ve mentioned this alive in a couple of LinkedIn posts about it, we’re an EOS entrepreneurial operating system based agency, which means we’re very focused on operational efficiencies, processes, really fine tuning the who we are and why we exist question. And so one thing, even though we don’t offer pre packaged, like you’re not getting, okay, you come to us, you get this box of deliverables, right?
There are a lot of best practices that we bring to the table. For example, I’m thinking about some of the recent clients that have onboarded and immediately I’m thinking, Oh, this is, I need to tell them about a best practice that worked at another region for another regional provider, because that definitely could help with their patient acquisition efforts for that service line that they’re struggling with.
Right? So by being really blinders on, you really do get that benefit of the shared experiences and that overall lift of best practices.
Maggie: [00:08:00] Definitely. Yeah. EOS has been a really critical component to building Hedy and Hopp over the last two and a half years. We’ve been around a lot longer than that, but we’ve been an EOS implementer now for almost three years, actually.
Yes. And that’s super exciting. I can’t believe that’s gone by so quickly, but I think, with EOS the way that we have implemented a lot of those various components, it means that the account leads are having, they have a lot of autonomy to run their business, right? So one of the beautiful things about EOS and the way that we’ve implemented is it removes a lot of the hierarchy of decision making, and it really provides autonomy and empowerment to our teams to move things forward.
And from an account perspective, from a client perspective, that means that, when challenges come to our team. They are owning the solve. They’re figuring it out and they’re moving it forward. They’re not having to come to a leadership team member to get approval or talk through how they may go through that challenge.
They’re getting together as a group. They’re figuring out the solve and they’re moving it forward. And that means that there’s a lot of better forward, quicker [00:09:00] movement, I think, for our clients because those account leads really do have that empowerment and autonomy to move things.
Jenny: Okay. So that brought up another point I wanted to talk about, because you just mentioned own the solve.
Let’s talk about culture.
Maggie: Yeah. Culture. I think this, when you look at sort of a boutique size agency and what that means from a day to day interaction with clients, to me, I think the biggest thing is that those clients really experienced the culture of that agency. Culture’s big, no matter where you work, right?
But I think at a, at some point. Smaller boutique agency culture really is woven into the day-to-day, every piece of engagement. And when we think about how that’s delivered to our clients, own the solve is one of our values. Culture for us really means living by those values on a day-to-day basis.
And so. Kind over nice is another value. Assuming good intent, own the solve and then pivoting with positivity. I think owning the solve and pivoting with positivity are the things that our clients experience the most because we are that boutique agency. We [00:10:00] hire and fire based off of those values. And we really are true to that.
Right? So, when you are a client working with us especially in healthcare marketing, like, You’re going to change a lot, right? There’s a lot of market changes. There may be a new physician that, a regional healthcare provider is able to bring on board, and we’ve got to completely change the marketing strategy for the next quarter to really promote that physician.
And our team will pivot with positivity in terms of how we work a lot of the different marketing tactics, etc. So it kind of infuses that joy, if you will, that we try so hard to bring to the table. But culture really, I think, plays a huge role in terms of what it’s like to work with a boutique size agency.
Jenny: I totally agree. I think it really is. From what I hear from clients after they’ve worked with us for six to eight months, I almost always get a phone call back saying, wow, I do feel your culture. You told me you would, or you told me I would, but I really do feel your culture calls and emails.
Yeah. So it’s very, it’s a very fun phone call to receive.
Maggie: Yeah. Joy doesn’t just start or [00:11:00] stop with Jenny. It really is infused, I think, in all of the day to day engagement with our clients.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Maggie, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a really, it was a very fun podcast and fun conversation to have for all of you tuning in.
If you have any questions or want to chat with us directly, please feel free to reach out. We would love to hear from you. If you have any topics you’d like for us to cover in a future episode. Send me a note, and please don’t forget to follow our podcast, rate us, and we’ll just keep showing up every Friday with new podcasts and new topics for you.
But until next time, have a wonderful and safe rest of your day and we’ll see you soon.
In this week’s episode, Jenny chats with Hedy & Hopp’s own Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown to talk about rural marketing. They discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that working with regional hospital systems or payors in rural communities present:
Challenge 1: Channel
Lindsey states that access to channels may differ from marketing in urban areas. Rural areas may have more limited or no access to things like fiber internet, cable TV, and even billboards and signage. However, that doesn’t mean rural areas are disconnected, the opportunities to connect are just through different channels:
Challenge 2: Content
The second challenge Lindsey brings up is that the framing of content looks a little bit different in rural areas. Rather than focusing on messaging like “24/7” or “Get Seen Today,” which may not be feasible in rural areas, rural audiences may respond better to practical messaging that promotes convenience, scheduling ahead, or social determinate of health topics like transportation or cost.
Finally, Jenny and Lindsey offer a few areas to research if you are marketing in a rural community:
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
WAMH 54
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am super excited to be here with you today. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I have with me today, our Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown.
Lindsey: Hi, Jenny. Hi, everyone. Great to be back.
Jenny: So, Lindsey, our team has been so busy. You and your team have been so busy developing media strategies and marketing strategies to be able to activate on behalf of our clients. And, quite a few of them have at least part or all of their audiences in rural locations.
So, we started talking about rural marketing because it’s very different, right, than how you would approach a heavily populated metropolitan area. And I loved it, whenever we were talking, you really broke down rural [00:01:00] marketing as far as two major challenges, the channel and the content. So tell me about that.
Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. So, it has been an honor to really dig into sort of a new audience set for us at Hedy and Hopp, or at least in my career. A lot of times in my previous life, you know, I’ve been working really with hospital systems that are in very densely populated areas and their audiences are usually, you know, in that general vicinity.
So it’s been really great to learn more about the rural communities, how best to reach those potential new patients for some of these regional hospital systems and payers that really reached that rural community. And so one of the key challenges that we really uncovered quickly is how are we going to reach this audience just based on the limitations in wireless access? Even though a vast majority, so we’re looking at 95, 99 percent of those in a rural community do have access to internet.
The kind of internet access that you have may not [00:02:00] be as robust or as powerful as you might be able to get in the city. Things like fiber are not available in those rural communities, by and large. Other things like television, so most of these communities don’t have cable. So cable television is not an area where we really can explore.
Same with billboards. In a smaller area, there’s fewer opportunities to have your message in a billboard because you have much fewer literal billboards or even digital billboards available to you and gas stations and things to that effect. So, these kinds of things really are areas of, I guess, limitation, but then opportunity to really think about marketing and reaching these folks in a different way than we’re kind of used to doing in more densely populated areas.
So, thinking about local communities. So, something that has been really impactful for a couple of our current clients is really partnering with local schools, even the high school where, you know, football or other sporting events are really big. And having your name associated with that local community can be really impactful as a nice reinforcement, but even [00:03:00] some kind of partnership with local businesses or other places that can have flyers or other kinds of like partnership abilities with those local areas can be really impactful again to just build awareness, name recognition, make sure that folks know about your capabilities and your services and how they can access them, which really comes to like the 2nd point, right? The content.
So then. What do we talk about it? You know, we can’t necessarily go to market with the same kind of messaging. Like, book your appointment now, we can see you in 24 hours. Like, that kind of stuff probably doesn’t really work in these communities because they may need more time to figure out transportation, to figure out who’s going to cover for them while they’re out, whether they’re, you know, they’re working and they don’t have as many folks to back them up or, you know, they’re owning their own business.
So they can’t get away. So, things more about convenience scheduling ahead of time so you can plan for that time out. And things like how to, you know, reach the hospital. What kinds of transportation, bus lines, [00:04:00] or other modes of transportation are available. That will drop you right at the front door.
So some of these more practical messages might actually resonate more with these communities where it’s the practical things that are actually limiting them from accessing your services.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I know one of the things that we always talk about with our clients as we’re developing messaging and communication strategies is that social determinants of health, right?
Is there certain levels of poverty or income limitations within the regions we’re talking to? And that can happen in both, clearly, highly urban areas as well as rural, but often if we’re looking at like some of our clients, historically, if we’re looking at super large rural areas, oftentimes there’s also a pretty large percentage of the population that does have some sort of social determinants of health that’s going to impact their ability to access care. So figuring that out upfront and having them be part of the core messaging is super important to make sure that your services are accessed.
Lindsey: Absolutely, and that you’re showing up to them in the right way. Because again, if your message is all about, [00:05:00] I’m going to use the 24 hour example again.
If your message is all about that is not going to resonate with a rural community. Someone that just, you know, doesn’t have that kind of flexibility in their time. So making sure that message again resonates with what they’re living with day to day. Ways to you know, expand upon how you’re active in that community again, through those partnerships and things like that really help to, let those potential new patients or those potential new customers really see you as part of the community and not just some big company that’s way out here. They don’t know what I’m dealing with. They don’t understand who I am and who we are here in this town that can really help kind of bridge some of those gaps and make those connections.
Jenny: Yeah. And I think what’s interesting, I loved watching this. Some of the campaigns that you put into market middle of middle beginning of last year did still, even in rural markets still included things like streaming services, so putting ads on Netflix and Hulu. So just because people are in rural areas does not mean, you know, I grew up in a rural area.
My parents live in a very rural area. I guarantee you, they still have all of those same services. So [00:06:00] I guess, Making sure that you don’t, you know, view those people as, Oh, they only have, you know, satellite TV, and they only have landlines or dial up internet. You know, you just can’t go into it. You need to actually get the data because each rural area really can have its own sort of you know, personality as far as how tech savvy they may or may not be.
Lindsey: Yeah, and a lot of those Internet service providers really offer the correct speed that you need to run things like Netflix, but they may not have the correct speed to run things like, you know, gaming. So there are avenues, like connected TV is a perfect example of where you can reach this audience because they will be watching those services.
Generally, that’s where the population is moving. You may not be able to get them through cable. You can get them through connected. Another way to think about that too, is in YouTube. So this is a highly, this YouTube is a highly used channel among this population. Really all social media is really highly used around this population.
So those are channels where you can really make some impact. And again, start to build some engagement and build some [00:07:00] reputation based on the content that you’re sharing, ensuring that it is localized, ensuring that it does feel authentic. And like you’re coming from that kind of a place will be really important there.
But those are huge channels for this audience as well. So do not discount those digital mediums at all.
Jenny: Okay. I’m going to totally put you on the spot here. Okay. So you’re so good at on the spot questions. I’m excited to ask this. If I were a marketing manager at a regional or a, you know, rural oriented provider or payer, and I was thinking about what my media plan should look like for the next six months, let’s say I have a kind of limited budget and I perhaps haven’t tested very many interesting tactics, but maybe I’ve like only really done radio and billboards so far. If you had to provide a couple of recommendations of platforms, just to dig into, to learn more and research more around, not that you’re saying this is what you want to do.
Everyone should do but like here’s the areas you should research to see if it matches your demographic. What are like the four to six ones that you prioritize? If it [00:08:00] is, if it’s performance oriented. So if their main goal is to drive signups or new patients.
Lindsey: So again, I’m going to, I’m going to talk about social media.
So I feel like social media is one place where you are going to get a big bang for your buck there. It’s not always seen as the most conversion driven tactic, but that I think is not the case when we get into the rural communities. Again, if we’re talking about folks that are engaged with each other in social media, this is an area where you need to explore, especially if you’ve only been doing a couple of broadcast mediums like radio or billboards, where you’re probably not getting a ton of reach, which means your opportunity to kind of see results from those tactics are going to be pretty small.
Doing something really simple, like social media, where you can really easily pivot and start to learn a little bit more about your audience. I would actually spend some time on the social media platforms. Like, look at Instagram, look at Facebook, look at TikTok, look at all of those platforms just to see what are some of the key businesses in those areas.
What are they doing? How are they [00:09:00] reaching those particular communities? Do a little bit of competitive Intel, maybe not with a good direct competitor to you, but like, For others in that area, how are they speaking to those folks? And then, you know, what are they using? So social media, I’m going to say is going to be really important.
I also don’t want people to discount like the need for programmatic or some kind of programmatic advertising again. Not always the best conversion driver, but that’s where that message is going to be really important. So if you make sure that message is direct about either booking an appointment or booking a consultation, that you have a variety of appointments available, something very quick.
Likely, you’re going to see better conversions than you would if you just kind of did general brand awareness that didn’t really have a call to action. So programmatic, don’t discount it. Make sure your message is really tight and has a purpose. And then the last thing I’ll say is, you know, do some due diligence and looking around over the next 6 months on what those what, like, key events are happening.
Where are some areas where your brand could actually show up? What are there any partners? You can look at partnering with or, you know. Companies, you can [00:10:00] look at partnering with to kind of co brand, maybe a message or something that could be distributed at that event or help with signage something like that.
The next 6 months are going to be tough for every single advertiser, whether you’re in a rural community or an urban community. I don’t know if, you know, but we’re in an election year. So, you know, some of those paid opportunities are going to be limited. So you have to be a little bit more creative about what partnerships or other things you can use that don’t require a physical ad space, for example to kind of think outside the box there.
Jenny: Yeah. What about paid search? Is that a bottom of the funnel, like always on thing in your mind?
Lindsey: Of course, of course. I don’t know why I forget about that channel.
Cause it’s probably the most important channel, but absolutely your paid search is going to do wonders for you. You have a lot of capabilities in terms of the type of messaging that you can execute. You can test different things, especially if you’re making a switch from branding to more convenience messaging, something like that.
Really easy way to test that out. And it could be a really low spend. So really nice economical choice as well to kind of get those [00:11:00] appointments moving in.
Jenny: I love it. Well, Lindsey, this was extremely helpful and fun to talk about. If you are a rural marketer and you’re trying to figure out where in the world you should focus, give us a call.
We’d love to chat and share some more ideas offline about some things that have worked for our clients over the past few years. Things changed so fast. So that what worked six years ago, isn’t what’s going to work now. So we’re happy to share and brainstorm a little bit specifically for your organization, but as always, thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”
We will see you next week.
In this week’s episode, Jenny discusses conversion rate optimization (CRO) for paid media. CRO may benefit you if you are running a paid media campaign where results have stalled, you aren’t getting the conversions you expected, or you have campaigns that are underperforming.
Jenny brings up her time at Amazon and details the CRO Amazon employed to increase purchases. She then describes the 5 different types of CRO tests you can run to test the efficacy of your paid media.
Five Types of CRO tests:
1. Credibility/Authority
2. User Experience
3. Social Proof
4. Value Proposition
5. Risk Reversal
It’s important to run CRO tests to figure out what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to paid media performance. You never know what types of optimizations will have the greatest impact on your campaigns until you put it to the test.
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 and Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency, and I am your host. I’m very excited today to be on to talk a little bit about conversion rate optimization for your paid media programs.
This is a topic I used to speak on quite often at healthcare marketing conferences, and I have really pivoted away from this topic just because there are so many other more timely and urgent topics, but I think it’s really worth revisiting. This will be relevant for you if you’re running a paid media program, and your results have stalled.
You’re not really getting the conversions that you expected, or perhaps some campaigns are underperforming than others. And so we talked a lot about developing paid media strategies, maybe service line or business line specific. There are other episodes on that, but whenever you [00:01:00] have your paid media campaign set up and running, and it’s actually driving people to a landing page or a page on your website, that’s where the fun begins.
So in a prior life before starting Hedy and Hopp, I actually worked at Amazon. It was an amazing roller coaster ride of an experience, but one of the things that was the most interesting to me is I got to see behind the scenes and really understand how they leveraged data. So, at Amazon, every single page had dozens of optimization tests running at any given time.
So there was either an A/B test or multivariate test. They were testing one variable or multiple variables at any given time, always with the objective of trying to get people to be more likely to check out, to add more items to their cart. So to increase that shopping value of that shopping trip for that individual.
And it was really interesting to me because at the time this was back in like 2012. At the [00:02:00] time, this practice wasn’t really standard in the digital marketing world. So whenever I started Hedy and Hopp, I was very passionate about bringing this knowledge and strategy and insight over into healthcare marketing and help people in healthcare really think about their marketing work as being more data driven.
Part of that work is really thinking about how to continuously improve the efficacy of your landing pages or the pages on your site that you’re sending people. So there are five different types of tests that you can run. [00:03:00]
So let’s start from the top. So when we’re thinking about a conversion rate optimization program, what we’re really talking about is either doing an A/B. So you’re testing one variable or multivariate where you have have multiple components on your landing page changing at one time. We strongly recommend that you always have at least one test running on your landing pages.
Simply because there’s always opportunity for improvement. So you’ve designed what you believe is the perfect, let’s say service line specific landing page. Let’s say it is a pediatric urgent care landing page, and you have designed what you think is perfect. There’s always going to be variables you can change as far as messaging, user experience, et cetera.
So we recommend going through this process, and then using a tool to continuously test it. So one visitor receives one version, [00:04:00] the next visitor receives the next, and you see if it positively or negatively impacts their likelihood to convert. So. Let’s talk a little bit about the five different types of tests that you can run.
The first is any related to credibility or authority. So for example, if we’re going back to that pediatric urgent care example, perhaps this is a new company that has just launched and we didn’t really have much credibility. We’re a new brand in the market. So perhaps it could be something along the lines of “10,000 patients served.”
Something like that, some sort of number or language or some sort of messaging or visual that actually gives you additional credibility as an organization and makes the user feel more comfortable proceeding with that purchase. That’s number one. Number two is user experience. So this is altering the layout, design, or other user interface components to make it easier for the more streamlined for the individual to move forward.
So for example, pediatric urgent care, perhaps we test the [00:05:00] location of a phone number to be able to call to be able to ask questions. Phone number is a terrible example for pediatric urgent care. So instead, perhaps it’s a form to be able to get in line virtually, testing the location of that form, or perhaps it’s a click to be able to get directions.
There’s a variety of different things that you can do from a user experience perspective that can help the user. Achieve their end goal faster, which is getting the care or whatever that they need. Number three is social proof. This is building trust by showing other people’s experiences. This is testimonials.
This could even be photos of people, real people. So it doesn’t look like stock imagery in your organization. If of course you have all the appropriate disclosures. But social proof is really helpful. Number four is value proposition. This is overall messaging and the value. So perhaps pricing like a flat
$150 fee for all urgent care visits, including imaging, or here’s the insurance plans [00:06:00] that we provide, or we are open these hours 24/7, whatever it may be, that’s a good value proposition message to test. And then five is risk reversal. So this is any sort of warranty guarantees or assurances of safety.
So perhaps this could be something along the lines of talking about a larger system that you’re associated with. It could there’s lots of different things that you could do from a healthcare organization. You just brainstorm something that’s relevant for you. So what we recommend is using these five types of tests.
And brainstorm all of the different kinds of things that you could test within each of these five categories. Rank them according to what’s most likely to drive a change. And then again, slowly begin testing and working through them. Some you will find actually do not have an impact on conversion at all.
Some you find may actually bump conversions up by a point or two. We find that by continuously having conversion rate optimization tests [00:07:00] running while campaigns are live, it allows you to fine tune and really understand what messaging is working, what user interface is working, and you can take those learnings from that service line.
You can begin testing them throughout your other marketing campaigns to see if the same lift appears. So again, just to kind of summarize, If you’re seeing stagnation in the performance of your paid media campaign, you’ve already looked at the campaign itself and everything looks fine. Take a minute and look at your landing page or the destination where you’re sending users.
Consider setting up a conversion rate optimization test. There’s lots of platforms out there that you can choose or not. I’m not even going to go into that because there’s just so many of them that are available to choose, but brainstorm and create different types of tests you can run that are based off of number one, credibility, authority to user experience.
Three social proof for value proposition and five risk reversal and begin testing. I’ve seen some really huge jumps for some things that we did not think would have that big of an impact. So it’s always [00:08:00] fun. But set your expectations where some tests were really met, not much of an improvement.
Some may actually have a negative improvement or like a negative impact on the results of your campaign. So monitor them quickly, set rules for how long those tests are going to be run within your organization, within your campaigns, and then you know, just keep on live at all times so you can continuously optimize the performance of those programs.
As always, thank you for tuning in today. I hope this gave you some food for thought. And hopefully you’ll go back and start revisiting your campaigns through the lens of continuous improvement. Please like, favorite, star, download, follow this podcast. And if you have any ideas for future episodes, give me a shout at Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
Until next time, have a great rest of your day and keep marketing happy. Take care.
With updated HHS guidance rocking the healthcare marketing landscape, our analytics operations team conducted an audit to see what marketing tools folks are still using in 2024.
Our team analyzed 118 websites from payers and providers nationwide to see how people have responded to HIPAA guidelines. In this week’s podcast, Jenny provides a snapshot of the current state of healthcare marketing tools:
Overall
Google Analytics
Media Tracking and Tags
Forms
Privacy-Forward Solutions
While these numbers illustrate that many providers and payers have taken the first steps toward privacy-forward, compliant analytics and tracking solutions, there is still so much room for improvement. As we begin to see more enforcements related to HIPAA compliance,
HHS’s restructuring to focus on enforcement: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/02/27/hhs-announces-new-divisions-within-office-civil-rights-better-address-growing-need-enforcement-recent-years.html
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’m the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency that works with payers and providers across the country. I am very excited to join you today to be able to share some interesting audit findings.
So we have really robust marketing analytics and operations in-house here at Hedy and Hopp. And occasionally I’d like to just ask my team to run some industry audits, to be able to understand what’s going on, who’s using what tools, how have people shifted as far as platform utilization and loyalties, etc.
And so over the last couple of weeks, I’ve asked our analytics operations team to dig in. So they did an audit of about 120 [00:01:00] websites, it was 118 websites. And it was folks that went to SHSMD and HCIC last year. So we went in, we looked at all of the different provider and payer groups that attended. It was a really nice sampling of folks across the country.
So we had everything from really small, single location children’s hospital, critical access hospital systems, all the way up to large regional providers that are very well funded. So it’s a really nice cross segment snapshot, we believe. And I had our operations team go in. Our analytics operations team go in and really conduct an audit to understand what marketing tools are folks still using?
How have people responded to all of this updated guidance from health and human services related to the new HIPAA guidelines saying we no longer can collect IP address or device ID, et cetera. I’ve spoken [00:02:00] about this so, so many times. There’s tons of podcasts. If you don’t really know what I’m talking about, go back and look at the HIPAA and FTC 101 recorded in March of last year.
It’s a really great foundation of like why folks have to change the platforms they’re using. So we’ve seen people shifting platforms over the last year. We have helped a lot of folks shift over. The solution that Hedy and Hopp offers is a server side Google Tag Manager implementation. You can still use Google Analytics, but that server side implementation on a server with Google where they will sign a business associates agreement, it strips out. We set it to identify all of the variables that are flagged as no longer secure.
Or. You know, potentially a problem because of the new guidance strip all of it out. So once it gets to Google Analytics 4 it’s safe. So that’s the tool stack that we recommend, but let’s dig into the numbers. Let’s see what folks have done. So the first really [00:03:00] fun number is that 11.86, almost 12 percent, of these organizations have removed every single marketing analytics tracking tag from their website and they still have nothing on there.
So almost 12 percent of people in the industry and healthcare marketing are flying blind. They have not been able to choose a new solution. They have not implemented changes to their analytics stack, they are simply flying blind and they do not know why people are converting, what campaigns are working, et cetera, 12%.
That number was shocking to me. 70% still have Google Analytics 4 on their website. So 70 percent of folks in the healthcare marketing world provider and payer are still going with the old standby Google Analytics 4 again, here at Hedy & Hopp, we’re okay with that. We put in a nice little filter to make sure no bad data gets to Google Analytics 4, but that’s a pretty high number.
In my opinion, of folks that are still using it because only, 2.5 [00:04:00] percent are using server side Google Tag Manager. So there’s a huge gap there of folks that are still using the old standby Google Analytics, but have not implemented any sort of changes to make sure it’s no longer collecting information that it shouldn’t be accessing.
Out of that 70%, about 45 percent still had Universal Analytics tags on their website. We saw this a lot whenever folks are rolling out GA4, they wanted to put UA tags on there so they could compare the data side by side, the way that Google Analytics 4 measures sessions is foundationally different from Universal Analytics.
So a lot of folks wanted a while to like run them simultaneously. It’s stopped tracking for a lot of folks. So I’m surprised we’re still up at 45%. It’s going to begin stopping for everybody. I believe in July, they keep pushing it back. But most people it’s already stopped gathering and collecting information.
So that tells me that a lot of people just aren’t staying up with the tags that are put on their website and aren’t [00:05:00] regularly cleaning them. 0.85 percent about 1%. There’s one poor soul, one poor soul that only has universal analytics tags on their website. Nothing else. It is unclear if that website is still getting any data pulled in, or if they are one of the websites that UA has shut down for. I will be sending that person a one on one email after this, letting them know that they have a problem.
Because I do not know if they know that they have a problem, so I will be reaching out to them. Again, 1 percent has that. And then 55 percent still have media or ad tracking tags on their website. 55%. That is mind boggling to me with all of the conversations that have been happening in the industry that 55 percent still have conversion tracking tags from media platforms on their sites.
It’s crazy. 6.78 percent are using a form that is not HIPAA compliant. So almost 7%. Are collecting information on a form that’s not HIPAA compliant, [00:06:00] another 6.78%, so another almost 7 percent are using Gravity Form and Gravity Form has a version that can be compliant. They’ll sign a BAA with you. It’s an additional small fee you have to pay.
We can’t tell if they’re using the HIPAA-compliant version one or not from the outset. But again, another, almost 7 percent are using Gravity Forms. 1. 69 percent have Freshpaint. On their website. We love fresh paint. We love the guys over at Freshpaint. The guys and gals are doing a phenomenal job.
They have a really cool healthcare privacy tool that they’ve implemented. It’s pretty sophisticated. It’s more for organizations that have a CRM are really wanting to leverage additional deeper data about their users, but we love what they’re doing over there. So it looks like 1.7 percent of folks have transitioned over to Freshpaint out of out of this cross segment we reviewed.
2.54% so about 2.5 percent are using Piwik Pro. So again, Piwik Pro is another great [00:07:00] option. It kind of has an interface similar to Universal Analytics, what we all were used to with the old Google Analytics interface. They also will sign a BAA with their Pro version. So that’s a really easy way to foundationally move over implementations pretty smooth.
You’ll lose a lot of the dashboards you’ve built. If you run Google Analytics 4 before, so you have to kind of make that business decision at the, if it makes sense to do that or server side implementation like we offer here at Hedy and Hopp. But again, really interesting. So with this, I think the biggest takeaway is that if you as your organization have done something to become HIPAA- compliant, you’re way ahead of the curve.
Between 50 and you know, 70, 66 percent of people haven’t done anything yet. You know, they still have non compliant forms on their website. 50 percent have Or 55 have media tracking and conversion pixels on their website. So a lot of folks haven’t moved yet. And I know that for a lot of folks, it’s because of the [00:08:00] time it takes to be able to wrangle legal and it within their organizations and align on what the best platform is moving forward, but if you are one of those people in that group, I strongly recommend you begin moving forward. We’re continuing to see more and more enforcements related to using media-based conversion pixels and collection of these new variables that are not PHI compliant or that are HIPAA compliant.
If you have any questions, contact us. Even if we aren’t the right solution for you, we’re happy to point you in the direction of other ones that are industry leading and really doing right when it comes to healthcare marketers. So again, I hope this was insightful. I’m going to share all of these statistics and percentages in the show notes.
So if you want to go back and kind of see how it all breaks down please do so. And if you have any questions about this or want to dig in deeper to our methodology or the cross section we evaluated, just give me a holler. Until next time, have a great rest of your day. Please give us a review, give us some stars and we’ll continue [00:09:00] producing this podcast content for you.
Have a great rest of your day. We will see you soon.
Picture this:
If you can relate to any of these statements, your organization is in need of digital glow-up. In this week’s episode, Jenny outlines a realistic three-year roadmap to become digitally sophisticated within your marketing organization.
Year 1 – Build the Foundation
Year 2 – Get a Bit More Sophisticated
Year 3 – Fine-Tune with More Data!
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with payers and providers across the country to help patients better find and access care.
I am Jenny. So thrilled to be here with you today. This is episode number 51, which is a huge milestone for us. Super excited to officially be over the hill of 50. And, I was having some internal conversations with our team and a topic just came to me of something that I really wanted to share with our listeners.
It feels almost like something that I should have talked about already. So I first of all, apologize it’s taken me until episode 51 to get here, but I want to talk about the three-year roadmap to digital sophistication. So it’s really interesting, regardless of the [00:01:00] size of the organization or the size of the marketing team and our almost 9 years of being a healthcare marketing agency.
We have seen a trend of it taking about 3 years for a marketing team to become digitally savvy. And there’s a variety of reasons for that, but I think I’d love to talk today about those three years, what the theme of each year is and what some core accomplishments are in each of those three years in order to progress.
So, Stepping back a little bit, I think it’s really exciting for people to be able to create huge goals about, you know, coming into a new healthcare organization, say a regional hospital system or a regional payer as a new head of marketing coming in and saying, wow, you know, this marketing organization is kind of, Behind the times they’re doing a lot of things that really are not best practices anymore, perhaps not being smart with their media [00:02:00] buys or not having a really sophisticated website and then wanting to completely transform the organization in a year.
And I love the excitement of moving fast. I mean, anybody who knows me will say that is the core of who I am as a human being, but I also think it’s realistic to understand what it takes most organizations from a time perspective. And in what order they accomplish things. So this episode is for you if your current state includes these four things. Number one, you have lack of helpful reporting or real time insights.
When somebody asks, how did that media campaign perform last month for this business unit or service line? You can’t really answer it or perhaps it takes a long time to be able to answer it and even then you don’t really feel confident or confident about your answers or feel like it isn’t as comprehensive as it should be.
Number two, you feel as though you have a clunky patient interface for your website and specifically lack of ability to act online. So if you are in healthcare, pay your provider and you say, you [00:03:00] know, our people call in. To schedule or to buy, no. In healthcare, it’s the consumerization of healthcare.
That’s the age we are in. If people are calling in to buy from you, it means you’re missing out on a huge market share that you could be capitalizing on. So if they are calling in that means there’s a lot of potential. Let’s focus on it. Number three, you don’t have personas or a data driven media plan.
So we talked to a lot of folks who are working with agencies. Typically they do a little bit of healthcare, but healthcare isn’t really the big bread and butter, the main area of focus, and they really aren’t targeted. It’s more like awareness marketing and media planning. I did an entire podcast. It was just the last one about, um, awareness agencies or brand agencies versus performance agencies.
And if you’ve been working with a brand agency, then you definitely have not had a persona-driven or data-driven media targeting. So that’s number three. And number four, if you’re doing reactive versus proactive planning. So if you’re [00:04:00] deciding, you know, in February, what your budget for the year should be, whether it’s your team’s issue from a timeline delay, or perhaps it’s finance or some other group within the leadership team, then this also is something that could be a great episode for you.
So we’re going to talk about three years. It takes three years, in my opinion, and from the hundreds of healthcare organizations on the payer and provider side that I’ve seen in order to become digitally savvy. Year one, The theme is build the foundation year two the theme is get a bit more sophisticated and year three the theme is fine tune with data.
So let’s talk about year one. In year one, there’s a handful of things that you’re going to focus on the first one being creating. Or if it already exists, revisiting your company’s messaging and personas. Who are you as an organization? What value do you provide to patients?
What are your differentiators? Who are the people that you’re targeting? What are their pain points and the reasons why they would [00:05:00] choose to go with you? All of that really needs to be fine tuned before you begin doing anything else as far as a marketing strategy, because you want to make sure that you’re positioning yourself appropriately and really talking to your target audience appropriately.
So that’s number one. Number two is making a measurement plan and making sure that you are compliant with all of the recent changes in HIPAA, FTC, and state laws. So many people that are not yet digitally sophisticated, one of their biggest frustrations is lack of measurement. So that’s why this is number two.
You really need to understand your marketing tech stack, what you can measure with the tools you have now, and what tools you need to add in order to effectively measure your user or patient journey. So a measurement plan.
Number three is launching a conversion oriented media plan. So I’ve talked in a prior episode specifically about media. And when you’re thinking about marketing strategies and media plans, you have upper funnel, that’s really like awareness and brand [00:06:00] building, medium middle of the funnel where you’re really reengaging people that know of you and making sure you stay top of mind. And then bottom funnel is when people are actively trying to find your product or service and they need to make a decision.
They need to find a provider. They need to buy an insurance plan. So that’s. Where we consider conversion oriented media. For year one, we recommend, let’s say you have a million dollar media budget. We recommend repurposing a hundred percent of that media buy to conversion-oriented media with really good measurement on it.
You need to understand if you really focus on the bottom of that funnel where people are actively trying to fund you what sort of revenue you can drive and what sort of conversion rate you’ll see. Of course, tons of disclaimers. You need to do competitive intelligence. You need to do media research to be able to understand what your individual market is and what saturation looks like.
But as much as possible, your media in year one should be spent on conversion oriented tactics and keywords. [00:07:00] Next is you need to really focus on the local marketing optimization. So one of the things we see people overlook often when they’re not a digitally savvy organization, yet, is they really fail to optimize all of the local listings so that one that comes top of mind.
First, of course, is Google local listings. There’s a variety of other ones in healthcare. You want to think about but Google local listings really picks the lion’s share of you know, searches and engagement. And you want to make sure that you’ve claimed all your listings. You have a review solicitation process set up.There’s a big checklist you want to take care of to make sure that you’re foundationally strong when it comes to your individual listings. It’s a great thing to tackle in year one.
Next is you want to set up user journey tracking on your website to better understand user flow. So, you know, you’re launching these conversion oriented media campaigns.
You have your measurement plan in place. Let’s understand how your current website is performing. Where are people falling off in the conversion cycle? You know, when [00:08:00] they land on a landing page, what are they doing? How long are they staying? Are they clicking through? We want to collect all of this data and we’re going to use it in year two.
And so really the theme of year one is building that foundation and measure going into year two, it starts to get a little bit more exciting, right? You’ve probably built a lot of internal buy in because of the speed at what you’re pivoting and the refocusing within marketing to really make sure that you’re reaching as many patients as possible with your marketing programs, probably have had some really exciting new dashboards and reports to share within your organization. So you probably have a lot of buy in. It’s really an exciting time. Now is the time to focus on a website rebuild and acquiring and integrating a CRM. So first let’s talk about the website.
Many people that have more of a less sophisticated marketing team internally, their website probably is five plus years old, and user flow probably isn’t great, probably takes way too many steps to be able to actually buy from you [00:09:00] online. So prioritizing a complete website build beginning of year two, clutch super important.
I also mentioned a CRM because at this point you want to begin aggregating data within your CRM to prepare some for some exciting things later in the year and year two and primarily in year three. So a CRM allows you to effectively nurture those prospects. And then also nurture them once they are actually patients of yours to be able to continue the relationship, really speak to them more intimately one to one.
There’s a lot of things you can do because it is within a HIPAA world as far as nurturing them and giving them a more one to one relationship that you just can’t if it’s outside of a CRM. So that’s another reason it’s important. And then you also want to begin focusing a little bit higher up in that conversion funnel, still maximizing when we’re thinking about paid media, still maximizing the conversion-oriented tactics at the bottom, but perhaps beginning to invest a little bit more one step up in that funnel, [00:10:00] perhaps something like paid social, where you’re really targeting the right person at the right place that maybe they’re not actively looking for you, but you can start building more of that brand awareness.
So that’s year two. Year two is getting a bit more sophisticated. Year three, this is when you can really fine tune with all of that data that you have. So at this point, going into year three, you have a new website. Your CRM is integrated to your, with your website. So you’re getting new patient prospect information submitted.
You have a really healthy database that you’ve started. At this point, you can start doing some more sophisticated user or patient journey nurturing, including your current patients or customers through the CRM. So for example, if you’re a health plan coming into open enrollment or AEP, perhaps you’ll start targeting those people that are your current customers, encouraging them to renew with you.
So there’s a lot of more sophisticated things that you could do if your data is clean and you have some really good user journey mapping and content strategies. And then third, now you [00:11:00] finally can start thinking more about broader awareness media, because you’ve really understood how much you can get.
If it’s strictly a conversion play, how many patients can you get? How many new patients can you get? If you broaden that a little bit more to the right person, but maybe not the right time and then higher level. Now let’s do some broader brand awareness but not taking money away from those bottom funnels.
That’s only if you have net new media dollars that you need to spend. So again, hopefully this was helpful. We see people all the time try to do all of these things in one year, and it always ends up taking three years, so we thought it would really be helpful. Again, if you are in a situation where you don’t have good reporting or insights, your website’s pretty clunky.
You don’t have personas or data driven media strategies and you’re reactive and planning, sit down and start thinking about what it would look like within your organization to put forth a three year plan like this, and where you would be, you know, going into 2028, if you were able to kick this off and accomplish it, as always, we’re [00:12:00] here to chat.
I would love to chat with you more. Feel free to give us a call or shoot us an email and Hedy and Hopp would be thrilled to chat more with you about your individual marketing needs. As always, please rate this episode, leave a review and shoot us any future episode ideas as well. Until next time, continue showing up and doing your best to make patients lives easier and impact as many people as possible through your work.
Thank you again, and have a great rest of your day.
When it comes to payor marketing, or marketing for insurance companies, planning for the year falls into two primary periods of the year: your open enrollment/AEP period and the off-season.
In this week’s podcast, our CEO Jenny Bristow breaks down how to plan your marketing efforts for these two stages of the year to maximize marketing success:
Always On
During your slow time of year
Open Enrollment & AEP
During your busiest season
Implement the right marketing tactics at the appropriate time of year to leverage both stages of the payor marketing year.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
https://calendly.com/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 and Hopp, a full service and fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited to chat with y’all today about payor marketing. So often, we talk about marketing for patient acquisition for providers, but a lot of the work we do here at Hedy and Hopp is actually on the payor sides of health insurance companies.
It’s something we’re equally as passionate about, and we’re doing a lot of strategic planning and some great conversations right now with clients. And there are some baseline fundamental best practices that we do here at Hedy and Hopp in the way that we think about payor marketing that I thought I’d share today.
So today let’s dive in and talk about the two stages of payor marketing. So as anybody who is on the health insurance side of the health care marketing [00:01:00] world knows there is an open enrollment period in the fall, whether you are doing Individual and Family or Medicare plans, there is a flurry of activity in the fall when folks have an opportunity to change the plans they are enrolled in.
And then there’s typically a more dormant time, which we are in right now. So, open enrollment for both Individual and Family or Medicare is in the fall, bleeds a little bit into January. But then it really closes up. And some folks still, of course, still apply if they have a change of circumstance, or if they turn 65 and newly qualify for Medicare, but in general, it’s a much slower period of time in the spring, leading into the fall.
And so we at Hedy and Hopp really start thinking about two different stages of the yearly cycle. And I wanted to talk about those two stages and the activities that we like to think about and approach in each of those stages. Because too often we see folks kind of tackling projects at a weird point [00:02:00] of time throughout the year, where we would actually recommend doing it at a different time of year for a variety of reasons.
So let’s dig into it. The two stages are open enrollment, which is in the fall, like I just talked about, and the rest of the year we like to call “always on.” So let’s talk first about always on. So the dormant or slower time of year where you are having some people sign up, but in general, it’s relatively quiet because you don’t have most people in your area looking to switch plans.
A couple of things, there are six core things we recommend doing during this time of year. The first is continuing a media program for brand awareness and for that chunk of the population that still is able to enroll in your programs. The biggest problem we see folks doing is actually going dark with their media planning.
It’s much more difficult to turn a campaign on for open enrollment when you don’t have some you know, wind in your [00:03:00] sales as far as Google’s algorithm and all of your other media placements, it’s much more difficult to turn something on and then turn it back off again than it is to have something on at a lower level and then ramp it up, you know, in time for open enrollment.
So, again, always have a media program going that’s focused on brand awareness, keeping your brand top of mind and building that consumer affinity leading into open enrollment. Number two, now is the time to do website updates or redo your website. The traffic to your website is going to be massively lower this time of year.
So if you’re wanting to build a completely new website, build a new user journey, new landing pages for your plans, whatever it may be, now is the time to do it. Number three, investing time and resources in the measurement planning and dashboards. This is a great time to do it. So looking back at what worked and didn’t work for your last enrollment period, and really understanding, you know, through the lens of reporting on my campaigns, what were the gaps?
What were some things that my leadership team asked for that maybe I wasn’t able to get to the level of granularity that they wanted? [00:04:00] Or perhaps there’s things that I would like to just proactively report on about campaign efficacy that I wasn’t able to do last year. So stepping back and really making sure you’re measuring your campaign success.
Your dashboard or whatever reporting functionality you’re using is technically set up accurately. Something I would do here is a little sub bullet is any patient privacy work you need to do. So any cleanup to make sure that your analytics tools are not collecting IP addresses, device IDs, et cetera, that’s part of that measurement planning and dashboarding.
Number four, any new tool integration. So if your company is wanting to roll out a CRM, for example, or a new email marketing tool, now is the time to do it. You do not want to roll out Salesforce during open enrollment, your busiest time of year, you’re going to have way too many priorities. Do it during your slower period where you really can have time to invest in the infrastructure and the rollout in an appropriate way.
Number five, persona development and user journey optimization. Coming [00:05:00] out of your busiest time of year, you’re going to have a lot of data, fresh data at your fingertips. Now is the time to really dig in, look at it and try to fine tune your personas. Better understand who your customer is, who are people, who’s the average buyer?
Who is the person that, you know, is going through and perhaps getting close to enrollment, but not actually completing that action. And what can you do as far as your user journeys on your website to improve it next year? It’s a great time to invest in those sort of research programs. And then number six, roll out and test content marketing strategies.
So if your persona, uh, marketing work that you did, and you develop some new personas and some content strategies rolling up to it, begin rolling it out. Now, roll it out during the slower period, begin putting a little bit of media budget behind it to increase invisibility and see what kind of engagement numbers you can get.
Again, you want to do it earlier in the year. So you have time to fine tune it leading in. To when it’s time for open enrollment, but testing new content marketing strategies [00:06:00] during this time of year is really great. So you have these six priorities, things that you want to tackle kind of during your slower time of year, and then it’s going to get chaotic for open enrollment.
So everybody now is thinking about actually going and switching their health insurance plan. You have, you know, ACA actually like running, uh, nationwide broadcast campaigns around it, raising visibility and awareness that now is the time to do it. What should you be doing as an organization to really look at the volume of new users and customers that you can get into your plans.
We limit this to three. Core areas. The first is conversion oriented media programs. Now is the time to kind of dump those awareness campaigns and get into conversion oriented campaigns. I have an entire episode on media strategies and talking about awareness campaigns versus conversion campaigns and what that means.
Now is the time that if your budget is limited, you’re going to dump that [00:07:00] awareness and you’re going to dive directly into conversion. If you have the budget to support both, that’s fabulous. They really can feed off of each other to really keep people in that conversion consideration. If they perhaps come to your website and then don’t make a decision immediately, you can perhaps pull them back in again.
Uh, not with retargeting though. Remember friends, retargeting is dead to us. So if your agency is doing retargeting or in house, stop it right away. Message me to learn more about why, but don’t do that anymore. Number two, we’re going to limit website changes testing. and tracking right now. Like we’re not going to make any changes to any of that, right?
We had like a whole part of the year at the beginning of the year to do that, and now is the time to just kind of sit. We can collect data, right? We can have a conversion rate optimization tool on the site, begin collecting a lot of user data. Perhaps we’re going to begin doing a little bit of A/B testing on landing pages as far as headlines and call to actions.
That’s all great, but we’re not doing any widespread website changes right now. We’re not launching a new website in November, for example, [00:08:00] I’m not going to do that. And then the third is to really begin testing that persona based work that you did. So any you know, reasons to believe or core messages that you landed on now is the time to test that and market.
So think about your media, creative, uh, landing page, creative, and ways that you can test that to be able to understand with real world data, what can improve conversion rates on your website. So again, we find it really helps if you think about your year as two separate phases. If you’re a healthcare marketer in the payor space, you’re going to have a more dormant time of year, which we think about as always on.
And then you’re going to have a busy time of year, which we like to think of an open enrollment. You’re going to do all of your research, big changes, structural changes, et cetera, during your dormant always on period. Then we’re going to buckle down and focus on conversions. For that always on or for sorry for that open enrollment.
So if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to reach out. We’re really passionate about pair [00:09:00] marketing here at heading and hop. We think that our work with providers is only good if people have health insurance to actually be able to afford that care. So we really see it going hands and hands.
And please do not forget to rate. And, uh, review. We are marketing happy. We have received lots of feedback recently from folks that have tuned in and found the content helpful. So if there’s a specific topic you want us to cover, shoot me a note, uh, Jenny at heady and hop. com. We’d love to hear from you.
So until next time stay, we are marketing happy, stay joyful in the work that you do, and we’ll see you for a future episode.
In this week’s episode, Jenny compares the two primary types of marketing agencies: brand agencies and performance agencies. Brand agencies are focused on big-picture, brand awareness efforts to make sure your brand is well known. Performance agencies, like Hedy & Hopp, focus on the finer details to make sure campaigns are driving strong results.
There are three aspects to consider when considering working with a brand or performance agency:
A brand agency will focus on awareness tactics, like TV and programmatic, to make sure your brand is well known. On the other hand, campaigns from a brand agency will be specific and conversion-focused. Performance agencies may work to develop specific personas to make sure your brand’s message is effectively reaching the right audience.
With a brand agency, don’t expect a lot of detail when it comes to reporting. Brand agencies aren’t necessarily results-focused, whereas performance agencies are. Performance agencies produce robust reporting, measured all the way to conversion, with a heavy focus on ROI. Performance agency reporting can get very granular to let you know what’s working and how campaign performance can be optimized for even better results.
Simply put, brand agencies may have gaps when it comes to technical knowledge. Since brand agency campaigns emphasize brand awareness, they aren’t built to know everything about website conversion tracking or how a website tool works, whereas a performance agency is.
Both brand and performance agencies have specific strengths to consider before working with them. While H&H primarily operates as a performance agency, we do have team members from brand agency backgrounds to fulfill your organization’s brand awareness needs, too.
Connect with Jenny:
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare marketing agency. We work with providers, payers, and those driving innovation in healthcare all across the country.
I am joining you today; I just felt inspired. I had a really interesting conversation with a prospect that’s really unhappy with their current agency. So we hopped on a call. This is, I think our third conversation, had a really great chat and they kept just comparing us to their current agency. And there were such broad gaps.
I began poking a little bit and it became very clear their current agency is a different kind of agency. There’s really two different kinds of marketing agencies. And so I thought it would be helpful for those of you that aren’t super familiar with the two different kinds of agencies to get a 101 [00:01:00], you know, what are the different kinds of agencies there’s more than two, but we’ll focus on the two primary today.
And how do you tell the difference between number one, what you have right now? And if you’re going shopping to find the new agency partner, how do you confirm the new agency partner is the kind that you’re looking for? So let’s jump in. And first for anybody who was watching the video, I have to just say yay for female empowerment.
I just got back from getting a facial. I am fresh faced. I don’t even have mascara on. So yay for female empowerment. If you ever wanted to know what Jenny looks like without makeup, Today’s the day, but I was too inspired to wait. So I had to record today. So let’s jump in. So, the two different kinds of marketing agencies, or two primary kinds,
There’s some secondary and tertiary, but if you’re really shopping as a healthcare, in house healthcare marketer, and you’re trying to find an agency partner, you’re going to come across two different kinds. You’re going to come across a brand agency and a performance agency. So Hedy and Hopp, we are [00:02:00] performance agency.
And lots of folks that come to us frustrated with their marketing agency are actually working with a brand agency. So their goals really aren’t aligned. So let’s kind of break down the differences between how they work. So first, if you’re working on a campaign strategy. Let’s say you’re developing an annual strategy.
You’re breaking out your different business units, service lines, et cetera, really figuring out prioritization campaigns, tactics, et cetera. A brand agency is really going to be focusing on awareness. So top of funnel strategies, think like traditional TV, out of home, think programmatic or broad digital buys.
They aren’t really going to be focusing on super specific search engine marketing, conversion-related terms. They’re not going to be spending as much time developing personas and understanding the consumer or [00:03:00] patient journey to actually book that appointment. It’s more about making sure your brand is well known in your area. So again, it’s not that either approach is bad.
It’s just that some companies. Like I’m a Jeep lover, for example, Jeep is not doing ads specifically to try to get somebody who’s interested in a Wrangler 4XC to the landing page, to be able to buy one online, right? They always do broad awareness campaigns. Cause they want you to be aware of their brand and be top of mind, but then they also want to make sure that you’re high level aware of either, either any financial specials they have going on, like financing deals or any new vehicles that they’re launching for that year.
But that’s very high level. You know what I’m saying? So if you’re really thinking, you know, what kind of agency do I want to work with? Think about your goals. Are you trying to become really well known in your area? Or are you trying to drive specific campaign [00:04:00] outcomes, specific signups, conversions, etc.
The next difference is going to be the level of reporting specificity you receive. So one of the huge complaints this prospect today said, but also we hear this all the time is their reporting sucks. They just said like, this much spent on a programmatic. We have no details. We have nothing. We don’t know even what service lines or whatever we’re promoted.
It’s just like a bucket. This is programmatic. If they even get that, sometimes it just says “digital.” There’s no reporting down to the number of phone calls or form fills or scheduled appointments. None of that fun stuff. Because again, that’s not what the agency is structured to produce. Whereas a performance agency, you’ll typically see much more robust reporting.
You usually will see the ability to measure all the way to the conversion and really much have a better understand and focus on overall ROI with your campaigns, and they’ll talk more on the language of, you know, what’s the average cost per conversion [00:05:00] per service line per campaign. So you’ll get much more into that level of granularity with a performance marketing agency.
The third one is technical ability. This is something that I can speak to personally. We have been brought in to actually partner with some brand agencies. Sometimes folks are wanting to actually bring in a new, say, paid media agency or digital agency and they’ll call Hedy and Hopp and bring us on but perhaps they have an existing relationship with a brand agency that’s going to do their big picture campaign creative for the year.
We love partnering with other agencies, always happy to do that. In those situations there’s always a tremendous gap in technical knowledge because again, that’s not what that brand agency is built to do. They’re not built to understand, you know, when a pixel fires on a page or you know, exactly how your Find a Doctor tool works and, you know, how to maximize or reduce the number of steps on the UX.
So they’re going to come up with perhaps some really beautiful campaign creative, but perhaps not be able to [00:06:00] execute it in a way that’s friendly, maybe on a mobile device or something, you know, super technical specifications. So those are the three differences again, campaign strategy, you know, broad or specific reporting specificity, and technical ability.
I will say, there are outliers in every situation. You’re going to find brand agencies that have a couple of really technical folks they’ve brought on and they’ve really made that part of their organization really robust. And you’ll find performance agencies like Hedy and Hub that actually have a variety of senior leadership that came from a brand agency.
So we’re able to do that big picture creative in addition to the performance execution. So there’s always going to be outliers, but in general, vast majority of agencies are going to fall into one of those two buckets. So if you are currently on the hunt for a new agency, I really suggest you pause for a second, think about your own organizational goals, what you want to be able to do and accomplish, figure out what direction you want to do, and then create some questions around those three [00:07:00] sections for those prospective agency partners to make sure you’re truly getting what you think you’re getting.
A good way to do that is ask for examples of reporting. You know, ask for project timelines and how quickly you’re going to be able to get into market. Ask for examples of campaign strategies. They result for people like you in the past. Just ask for some examples to be able to see if it’s at that level of granularity you’re looking for.
Because again you know, agency relationships. It takes a while to stand one up sometimes. And it, you know, usually the goal is for it to be a longer term commitment. So you certainly want to make sure you’re making that right decision. So hopefully for those of you that are actively thinking about new partnerships, this information was helpful.
As always, please give us a rate, some good ratings. Follow our podcast and subscribe. And if you have any future topic ideas, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up at jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com. Have a fabulous day. Thanks for tuning in.
In today’s episode, Jenny shares her top four tips for marketing on a budget. The vast majority of folks in the healthcare space operate on a smaller budget, and Jenny shares the following tips for maximizing marketing performance when budgets are tight:
This episode is worth the listen, as Jenny shares all the details marketers need to know when marketing on a budget.
Book Time With Jenny:
https://calendly.com/jennybristow
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Learn More about Google Ads Grants:
https://www.google.com/grants/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. Welcome to today’s episode of “We Are Marketing Happy.” I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and owner at Hedy and Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here today to talk to you about marketing on a budget. So, often, we talk about regional systems, national payers, all of these organizations that really have a higher level of marketing budget.And along with that comes marketing sophistication.
But, the vast majority of providers and payers and folks in the healthcare space have a way smaller budget. So today’s episode is going to be dedicated to y’all. So if you have a marketing budget of $30,000 a month or less, this is for you. Some folks we talk to have marketing budgets of $15,000 or less.
Again, this episode is for you. So let’s dive in immediately. I’m going to give you four tips to be able to make sure that you’re really being as strategic and smart as [00:01:00] possible with your marketing budget. So the first thing we want to talk about is again something that people often overlook when they have smaller budgets. Whenever people have smaller budgets when they approach us and talk about how we might be able to lean in, a common trend we see is that they have overlooked what we believe to be the most important step and that is knowing your audience.
Persona development and developing your messaging against those personas is really important. It can be very easy to step over this step and immediately start developing a go-to-market strategy or marketing campaigns. But if you have a smaller budget than every single dollar you spend really has to resonate.
So we strongly suggest if you are a smaller budget marketer, definitely pause, and spend some time really refining who you are marketing to. Who is the patient or the decision maker that needs either your care or your health insurance plan? And definitely make sure [00:02:00] you understand what are the emotions that are the key drivers?
What are barriers for them to make a decision? What’s their age? What is their typical web browsing behavior and decision making process for care that you provide? Once you document that you will then be able to really refine your entire marketing program. And, every single ad you deliver will be massively more effective. So number one, know your audience.
Number two, pause and create an annual plan. So often folks with smaller budgets, we see that they’re always playing catch up. They feel as though this is what they’ve shared with us. They are more of an order taker. Where they have the CEO or somebody who runs a service line really more dictating what they need to do from a month to month basis, and there’s no big picture strategic plan.
Again, pause. A great time to do this is ahead of a fiscal or a calendar year, but really pausing and saying what are we doing for the [00:03:00] year, two key questions you need to answer in that annual plan are, what are the service lines? or the business lines we’re going to be focusing on? and what are the goals? How are we going to measure and understand success?
You then can, of course, build out campaigns and tactical execution underneath that. But mapping it out on the annual plan really helps you look at it big picture. Avoid pivoting quickly without strategy. So kind of being told top down what you need to be doing, you will have already created a plan, shopped it, had it approved by senior leadership.
And you have then aligned on the service line or business line prioritization throughout the year, taking into account seasonality, et cetera. But then you’ll have a much stronger foundation to operate against versus going on a month by month or quarter by quarter basis.
Number three, friends, if you have a limited budget, you’re a bottom funnel marketer. And I mean that with so much [00:04:00] love. Quickly let me verbally for those of you watching the video visually define what I mean by bottom funnel. If you imagine a funnel on the bottom funnel are people who are actively trying to find you. So people who are going to Google or Bing and typing in “healthcare provider near me” or “health insurance plan,” “Medicare plan available to me.”
They’re actively trying to find you and solve a problem that they have. Those are your customers. Those are your immediate buyers. That is bottom funnel. One step up is people that are like your typical buyer. So they match that persona, but they aren’t necessarily trying to solve a problem immediately.
So they aren’t in that decision making pivot at that time. They’re not actively researching solutions. They just happen to be in your right Demographic and psychographic for your typical buyer. And then upper funnel is much more brand awareness. So think even things like out of home, broad [00:05:00] programmatic, if you’re thinking about digital, et cetera.
Not a whole bunch of targeting goes into it. Some does, of course, geographical, but you aren’t really usually going down to a demographic or psychographic level as much. So if you have a limited budget. Friends, bottom funnel, you want to maximize people that are actively trying to find your services. And that means Google ads, Bing ads, and really making sure from a Google local listings perspective that you’re optimized and really maximizing reviews.
Here’s a good call out. If your organization is a nonprofit, make sure you’re leveraging Google Grants. So Google Grants is additional media spend, $10,000 a month, available for nonprofits. A lot of healthcare organizations are nonprofit entities. And if you are, if you’re a 501(c)(3), go to Google Grants, we’ll link to it in the comments, and apply.
And that can secure an additional $10,000 a month to your media budget. Now you have to have somebody manage it for you [00:06:00] that knows how to manage Google Grants because you have to have certain performance metrics to really maximize that budget or else they take it away from you, but it’s free money. So definitely go and apply.
And the last thing I want to say is, my friends, have a measurement plan and a dashboard in place you can understand performance. You need to make sure all of your key actions on your website, whether it’s a form fill, a phone number, whatever, are actively tracked. You need to understand how many new or how many prospective customers.
And then hopefully if your data is clean enough, how many actual customers you drove in the door with your marketing campaigns. That is the way to be able to effectively optimize. And make sure you’re marketing in the right places and then be able to ask for more budget if they want to market more, because again, you’ll have a case that you’re doing a really clean and efficient job and they will be able to delegate more dollars, perhaps to additional business units or service lines to expand [00:07:00] marketing’s overall scope for the organization.
Do realize that there’s lots of technology you can integrate to improve tracking. For example, there’s a lot of call tracking software, CallRail, Invoca. All of these organizations have HIPAA compliant call tracking, basically changes the number on your website. When the person calls, uh, it’s marked according to how they found your website.
So you could accurately track that, say, a Google ad drove a phone call. So it’s very easy to implement. You can do form tracking for conversions through a web analytics event. All of these things are easy to do, but it takes a strategy to sit down and pause and figure out what are those key actions on our site that show marketing is working and then an action plan to actually implement it.
So again, friends, if you are a small budget marketer, these are the four things you should be actively doing. Number one, know your audience. Slow down, figure out if you need to prioritize specific service [00:08:00] lines, what the goals are for each of the different audiences. Slow down and get aligned. Then develop an annual plan and take into consideration any service line focus, any seasonality, actually document any tactical or campaign pivots you need to do according to seasonality, get that approved, and get aligned throughout your organization.
Number three, be a bottom funnel marketer, you got to focus on those tactics where folks are actively trying to solve a problem. It’ll be the least expensive conversion that you’ll pay for with your marketing budget. And number four, develop a measurement plan and a dashboard. So each month you can report on the number of new conversations and new customers you actively drove through the door.[00:09:00]
So again, Hedy and Hopp, we are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We work with organizations of all sizes. We love working with large regional and national players, but we also are really passionate about helping smaller organizations. So if you are, you know, a marketer with a smaller budget, reach out, grab some time to do a one on one with me.
We’ll put a link in the show notes for you to schedule an appointment. I’d love to chat about your strategies and any questions you have about being more effective with your marketing spend. As always, be sure to give us some love on whatever streaming platform you’re listening to. We’d love some stars and some comments.
And let us know if there’s a topic you’d like for us to cover in the future. Have a great day. And thanks for tuning into today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy.”