* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf
Hello, everybody. Welcome to our webinar. I'm Stewart Gandolf and I know some people are still, clicking in here, but we have so much to cover. We're going to go ahead and get started. I want to start off today. We've got a lot to talk about, about how to gain a competitive edge through sophisticated health care marketing.

Stewart Gandolf
Some housekeeping things. First of all, there will be a recording of the call available. So you can expect that if you've registered and if you have colleagues that want to see the webinar afterwards, you can for that over to them. They also we will have a brief Q&A at the end. So that's coming as well. So if you have notes.

Stewart Gandolf
Thirdly there is a participant, request Q&A section that you can, respond to. So Paul and I will try to see those as we're moving through the presentation. But if you don't if you don't respond in the middle of the presentation, make sure you just bring it up when we get to the Q&A site. Today I'm excited to mention that we have, this is a joint webinar today.

Stewart Gandolf
Tim, who is an old friend of mine, we've been working together as professional colleagues for a while. And so Tim leads, the, or is a principal for the health care group and maybe the leader of the health care group at Hardesty, LLC, and also leads his own, educational program, a health care financial network of Orange County. Tim. So now we have your audience as well. Just say a few words, if you would, about your organization and what you guys do, and then we'll get started.

Tim de Cou
Yeah. Welcome to, see, everybody. I'm the managing partner. Hardesty. We're an executive management services firm. Through our chart, we have 50 partners around the country. We worked in over 40 states.

Tim de Cou
Or focus more of the what? I would further lower middle market. The, we go the services we provide across the C-suite. Our partners.

Tim de Cou
Are, former seated.

Tim de Cou
Professionals, CEOs, company owners, etc. the services we provide or interim fractional special project and also permanent search. Health care's about half our business. And we have a a focus in, medical practices and also early stage, life science device companies and, always happy to do this with Stewart. We've done this. It's become an annual, in a very, well-received event. But let me turn it over to to Stewart and Paul.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. Tim, thanks a lot. Really think highly of you and your group. There are leaders and, here in Southern California and far beyond. So if you guys are looking for any of these kinds of services, I, you know, urge you to reach out to Tim and his team, about those kinds of things.

Stewart Gandolf
So thank you, Tim. That's great. I appreciate your participation in the webinar and sharing this with your audience as well. So I am looking forward. Okay, so for those of you who don't know me, I'm Stewart Gallup, I'm CEO, House for success. I've been doing this a long time and I'm happy to be leading the group today. Paul is a key member of our team.

Stewart Gandolf
I'd love to have you introduce yourself and talk about your unique combination of passions before we get right into this.

Paul Knipe
Yeah. Thanks, Stewart. Great to be with all of you today. I'm Paul Knight. I'm, director of client services at Healthcare Success. I lead our account team and work very closely with all of our clients to make sure that our marketing programs, our digital campaigns, are as successful as they can be. I also had history as a brand strategist, and I'm very passionate about connecting brand strategy to digital campaigns success, whether Twitter, paid search, SEO, or paid social.

Paul Knipe
So looking forward to delving into some of those connections today.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. So, just a second about our company, just so you know that we're a real, big fan of this company back in 2006. We've got about 40 people. We are one of the largest remaining independent agencies in the healthcare space, certainly in our, the kinds of work that we do. We're on the medical marketing and medical marketing and media Agency top 100 list.

Stewart Gandolf
And, we are truly integrated, meaning very, very deep in strategy, branding, digital, traditional advertising, HCP, referrals, PR, all these kinds of things are what we do every day. So that's the, sort of attitude and depth of knowledge we're bringing to this today. We're going to go through I mentioned I have a way to much very aggressive agenda today.

Stewart Gandolf
Thought I will do this anyway. We're going to talk about the big picture and some of the strategies that, we think are important today. And I'm going to cover this. I'm just going to jump straight into it. So why are we here? Really? Well, the first thing is I speak a lot at private equity events. My tag, my team right now is at a private equity event without me today.

Stewart Gandolf
As well as healthcare events. And the one thing I've noticed over the past, you know, decades of join us for, particularly since maybe 2020, is that health care executives are certainly focused on many things. They share revenue cycle management, recruit training, creating dyno locations, adding service lines. You know, they have it can be SAS companies appropriate device pharma a wide variety of needs.

Stewart Gandolf
But broadly there's exceptions. Of course, a lot of, health care companies just don't really see the value of marketing. They know they need to do it. They look at it as an expense, and they just kind of underestimate the power of growing a business. So I know we have a very broad mix of financial people today and health care leaders on the call today.

Stewart Gandolf
Now, I'm going to ask you to suspend disbelief a little bit. Let me share with you some of the ways that could impact your business, in a very positive way through marketing. I change is never ending. As you guys know, I just went through this little pandemic thing. You may remember that it wasn't very long ago, and that transformed all of health care.

Stewart Gandolf
I would argue today, though, given the changes we're seeing, that excellent operations of financial management are very important as they've always been. But I would argue that's table stakes. And really today, sophisticated marketing is a lever that's going to offer you an opportunity to get a strategic advantage. And finally, you know, this is a big title we had here for this meeting today.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm not going to teach you everything we know. There's lots of great things going on I do not have time to cover, but instead I'm just going to cover some of the things I think will be most relevant to our very broad audience. To give you a sense of what's going on out there, but feel free to follow up with us or ask Q&A about your specific issues.

Stewart Gandolf
First thing is, I've been talking about this topic for years. I remember speaking about this topic at the Patient Experience Summit with Cleveland Clinic back in, I don't know, 13 years ago. And this is new thinking. At the time, nobody was really thinking about the consumer experience or patient experience at that time. Now this is everywhere. And I just want to give you the thought and reminder that consumer is health care.

Stewart Gandolf
Consumers are who we're targeting, not patients. So we may use healthcare consumer and patient interchangeably, but really recognize they are consumers. They've got lots of options. They demand convenience that they get everywhere else in their life besides health care and those that are getting that vote with their feet. So we recognize today, by the way, that we have, businesses with both B2B applications and B2C.

Stewart Gandolf
So if you're on the B2B side, rest assured I'm going to cover B2B and spend a lot later on about half hour presentation a little bit B2B focus. So don't get lost here. But if you're on the consumer side, just recognize that people are digitally enabled, they're empowered, they have huge expectations. Add retail or you know, health care has the power to, change.

Stewart Gandolf
And this will never be the same. So we can't go backwards. Consumers are driving their own decisions, just like HCP is about. The consumer journey now is exceedingly complex. So when we meet with clients talking about the journey, I just got off the phone today minutes ago with a consumer direct, medical device going out to consumers, and we were talking about this exact issue of our current agency is, you know, focused on just the middle of this funnel or the bottom, rather than not thinking about the broader picture.

Stewart Gandolf
And today we need to think about our awareness. How do we get awareness of what it is we do, whether it's B2B or B2C? How do we reach them during the consideration phase, the decision phase, Paul is going to be talking about one of our favorite tools today, Google ads and paid search, which is one of many, as you can see here.

Stewart Gandolf
How do we deliver the right experience on the back? Yeah. And how do we establish loyalty? So it's complicated and it's more complicated every day. And oh, by the way, your competitors are watching this and thinking about these things too. So I would say one of the biggest things that's happened with in the old days when I used to talk about this like I'd say, well, competitors out there, but don't worry, they're pretty terrible too.

Stewart Gandolf
That's not the case anymore. You have to think a lot about competitors. They're coming after you. I saw that movie way back when. They want to drink your milkshake. So you want to really think about private equity, venture capital, corporatization? There are many larger players out there in the marketplace that are looking to encroach upon your territory. Typically, they have deeper pockets.

Stewart Gandolf
Typically they have more savvy for business and marketing, where very often engage to help, you know, as the marketing agency and the client will say, hey, can you help us find a new marketing person? What level of risk should that be? Because they're thinking about that and your agency, if you haven't laid somebody and incredible that we can throw the ball to them and they throw it back to us.

Stewart Gandolf
So this is really an important, development. Now. It's far more sophisticated. It was even pre 2020. Things like, I know I have a lot of financial people on the line today. Things like tracking, analytics, attribution. You're probably. Wait, they're talking about that. Great. Now you're talking my language. So that's really important. We'll try to touch upon that later.

Stewart Gandolf
So, and the last comment here is this is models are evolving. There's new players all over the place, particularly with telehealth and various other models. There are disruptors all over the place. It's an exciting time, but perhaps a little bit of a scary time at the same time. So finally, before I turn the ball over to cloud for a while, you know, given that we're a marketing agency, hopefully this may help you think a little bigger if you haven't thought of some of these things, but we're often talk at the opening phases with a relationship of, okay, how do we create marketing systems at scale that are predictable, profitable, passive?

Stewart Gandolf
Another business I talked to today and multi-location physical therapy today, guys, it's SAP my workload we were talking about. They've got a really strong business development team and physician liaisons. And I mentioned that this idea of B2C marketing is a whole new venue of opportunity for them. And just imagine when you have the B2C side work or the B2B, that's a fundamental business model changing, attributes.

Stewart Gandolf
How about differentiating our business from competitors through strategic branding? Paul is going to talk about that in a moment. Very, very often it's about, okay, we bought a bunch of these businesses, whether it's practices or other businesses, how do we integrate them and grow them or for our provider, how do we do turnover launches? Or how do we ease the older doctor who's phasing out into our brand?

Stewart Gandolf
How do we grow service lines profitably? How do we support field sales reps? Back to that B2B or how do we grow the business for eventual sale? These are at the adult table issues. These aren't the kids tables. These aren't IPOs. Just do a couple of social media posts. This is driving strategy more the business forward. And that's the part we're talking about today is how do we use marketing in a more substantial way that moves the business forward, not as a something?

Stewart Gandolf
Well, we got to do it because I guess we have to do it all.

Paul Knipe
Yeah. Let's dive in. So talking about a brand, right. I feel like everyone has a concept of what a brand really is, and we're going to walk through the basics of what we call a living brand, but weren't doing that before even advancing to the next slide. Yes, a brand is in many ways those basics. It is the visual part, the logo, the messaging.

Paul Knipe
It is the color system you use. It's the way you apply those things. When we talk about a living brand, we imagine and often get excited about the abilities of a brand system that's responsive to customer needs, to strategic needs, and that can shape shift as necessary, retaining the core qualities of the brand that make it strong, while also flexing and being able to adapt to the needs of specific strategies, audiences and business goals.

Paul Knipe
So next slide.

Paul Knipe
I think that there are challenges when we think about branding. All the reasons that Stewart mentioned. It's not always the case that new generations recognize industry leading people and brands. It's always changing. It's an environment that adapts and needs renewal on a regular basis. You know, when you think about all of your audiences, all of those segments, the patients, providers, executives, internal teams, and then the entire ecosystem of audiences surrounding them, what is their perception of the brand abilities that influence their decision making and as Stewart mentioned, there's just such a loud sort of, ecosystem of different entities that make it hard to break through.

Paul Knipe
They get lost in this short attention span and the digital landscape that we have. And this is why a living brand and some of the concepts I'm going to walk through in a moment really are important for consideration. A brand is not, shall I say, a, an isolated, hermetically sealed thing. A strong brand strategy is the foundation you need for a coherent marketing strategy across multiple channels.

Paul Knipe
So is your brand still relevant, and what are you using to define that? Because it's sometimes the case that what we think as a strong brand actually has some opportunities for improvement. Next slide. So this is a quote that gets to the heart of something that I think is very important when we think about good and strategy. Yes, a brand is a logo.

Paul Knipe
It is the messages. It is the color system. But it's incomplete to think of a brand as simply a tangible, concrete thing that you can point to. It often is many things that the brand or organization does to reflect its personality, its character, its values. And when we think about it, our impression of this online app or this system, this is an all this urgent care provider in many ways may come down to how convenient it is, how clear the offerings at services are.

Paul Knipe
And ultimately those are brand propositions. The clarity, the positivity, the experience is ultimately what can create a positive brand experience. Next slide.

Paul Knipe
When we think about this idea of a living brand, let's go through some basics. So it's important to highlight the analogy of a tree like this okay. The idea that you can have a foundation with a trunk that captures some basic, ultimately, rooted values and elements that the brand has to remain consistent with is important, but the concept of branches or leaves or natural growth is really useful.

Paul Knipe
And we think about ways that brands need to adapt and can shift to meet the needs of specific marketing channels, specific audiences, or specific corners of the message that we need to deliver. More than anything, it's very important that internal stakeholders and audiences deal, that the brand reflects them and that that speaks to them, and that it's responsive to the way that they interact with the brand.

Paul Knipe
We have many clients, whether they're multi location practices, hospitals, digital health providers or even some very large national and global brands, manufacturers, they all view their brand expressions differently, but all of them do consider how the brand and its master strategy plays out across all channels. Next slide. When we think about the way I was describing the basic concrete elements of a brand, we can consider that as a static way of looking at a brand.

Paul Knipe
And a static brand demonstrates sort of a cookie cutter approach to every channel, in other words. So the logo may always look the same. You're using the same color palette across every marketing channel. Maybe even the same message appears. You're even trying to reach different audiences. So static brand can sometimes be very limited, even as it's true to its core, it may not be responsive in adapting to the needs of different channels or groups you're trying to speak with.

Paul Knipe
It has, a basic tried and true system that you can use and that you can apply. But the ability is trust. A living brand system is designed to anticipate the unknown, the new and the exciting parts of how you can reach your consumers. In other words, those things that we see as concrete the message, the color, maybe even the execution of the logo can really shape shift and adapt in exciting ways in a living brand system.

Paul Knipe
Next slide. So what does this mean? Let's have a real world example here. So Google oh it's one of the most recognizable brands on the planet right. But Google very early on started taking steps to flex and adapt its visual identity. This basic Google logo with the primary colors quickly, over time became, I think, versatile enough to shift to support milestones, holidays, historical events.

Paul Knipe
And these executions you see in the lower half really do reflect the creativity that Google has tried to bring in expressing its brand. Now, it has a lot of privileges that not every brand in the world has. It's highly recognizable. There's a deep, deep level of brand equity in Google's visual identity, and that allows them to play with it in ways that not many organizations are able to do quite as extensively as they are.

Paul Knipe
But it's interesting to think about the basic principles of what they're doing. They are abilities. We want our brand to reflect a certain ethos, a certain playfulness and a certain inclusion of everybody. So if we just stuck with our straightforward primary color logo, it may not necessarily have that engaging sense of discovery that ultimately is one of Google's brand pillars.

Paul Knipe
So this is a good example just as a starting point. But I'll go into a little bit more detail. Health care success has a wonderful brand strategy team, both internally to developing the brand foundation, the visual side of things and the messaging. And one of our clients, plasma Source, is a plasma donation center based in Chicago area.

Paul Knipe
We develop their brand and the color palette, the visual execution and the messaging has all been exciting in how it's been flexible to interchange messages and for us to almost use the full name plasma source T, the diminutive, the S as wish as we'd like to in different executions. But we're also recommending that the client play with the execution a little bit, that there be, I think, variations in the color palette that allows it to have a freshness and to have that sense of discovery that's so important for a living brand.

Paul Knipe
This brand continues to drive a ton of success for this client, and they're looking forward to expanding into ten cities. Over the next few years. And I think the strength of the brand has been a big part of how they've been able to engage, plasma donors in Illinois. Another example, a client, for many years with healthcare Success was synergetic, testosterone, supplement client.

Paul Knipe
We worked with them to develop pet social, a website and a range of integrated marketing tools. But one of the coolest things about working with this group was that we took the X from their name and really extrapolated it as a visual ability, as we used across different executions like this. In other words, how could we take an element of the brand, a memorable element up the way the brand sounds, the way it resonates, and really bring that in to create it that's meant to reach our target audiences, athletes, men and women who want to live their best lives at their full potential.

Paul Knipe
So taking the basic brand pillars and extending it with this X with these different color variations was a way for us to let the brand sing, to let it adapt, to let it explore that curious and unknown possibility for people that would be fresh in digital ads, website or other channels. Next slide. Healthcare Success I have to say, we use this living brand system and these principles very actively in our own content marketing.

Paul Knipe
As you can see from each of these examples, on the left side of the page, the Healthcare Success logo is not any one color, and each of the ability is a strength and the integrity of that logo. Lock up the remains consistent, but we vary the color according to the execution and we have fun with the different tones, personalities, images that we place our logo against based on the topic at hand.

Paul Knipe
Having the flexibility to play with the brand system like this is something that our creative director, Brett Mauer, just is very well versed in. He has a real instinct for how a brand and adapt visually to meet the needs of our communication. Because if we only took a very straightforward, rigid approach to our brand execution, it would be dull.

Paul Knipe
It wouldn't necessarily land or resonate with people the way that this more flexible living brand system does. I'll walk through some basics here. So a living brand. Imagine this scenario. Your health care brand colors their black and white. Everything is black and white because that's what your visionary brand system dictates. So social ads, they may use that color palette.

Paul Knipe
Next slide here. But if we look at how that extends black doesn't really do well in every marketing channel. Obviously social media advertising, it's flat. It's not going to stand out. If there's contrast, that's great. But instead of using colors that don't work well like the core of your brand system, how could we adapt to something that's more vibrant, where you can retain the elements of your brand, but allow it to live with color variations that may be more appropriate for the marketing channel that you're working with next one.

Paul Knipe
If you think about it, this notion of defining a living health care brand and the ways that it could adapt in terms of color photography, message for a living brand allows for shifting.

Stewart Gandolf
Or those.

Paul Knipe
Results things you didn't necessarily design initially. You want to make your brand flexible and to adapt over time to different circumstances. If you could imagine. Let's think about all of the elements that really can help you, think about a living brand. In other words, these tips for building. First, stay relevant. You have to understand exactly how well you're connected to your communities.

Paul Knipe
You need to be connected to what's important to them, their values and their expectations, as well as their pain points. Second, we have to make sure that the brand's message and visual identity, are not overly static. If they are static, you may lose those opportunities to personalize the message. So the more that it can have that flexibility, it's really important.

Paul Knipe
And then third, I think that to be a real living brand, it's important to be relevant, engaging. You'd have tap your message, your color palette, the things that are relatable to your audience's interests, their needs, their concerns, and having a brand that can do that and understands ultimately what your outcomes are and how your message and created can meet that will succeed with these first steps.

Paul Knipe
Next slide. But a living brand also has to adapt appropriately. It's like any of us if we're in different social settings. If we're at a party, if we're at a sporting event, if were one of our children's disability events, we're going to be slightly different while remaining true and having our core integrity in place. We adapt based on who we are and our comfort and flexibility based on the audiences that we're talking with.

Paul Knipe
So the visual identity needs to be fluid. Part of adapting, appropriately is we want to make sure that the brand can tailor itself, that it can adapt appropriately to whatever channel. If you're talking on a podcast, if you're sharing an Instagram ad, how does the visual system change or the messaging change appropriately? As we've seen from healthcare Success, we do this actively with content marketing.

Paul Knipe
Next. So we talk about the word authenticity, and it's overused in some ways. But a brand has to be authentic because consumers patients can audiences, they really can smell when there is something that is not necessarily true. It doesn't mean that you throw out your core values. It's to be a live in brand, to be flexible. But I think you have to think about demonstrating authenticity, by defining and capturing guidelines that that demonstrate and document your visual and your, your messaging in ways that I think show how you adapt across channels.

Paul Knipe
I think that it's also important that your brand be relatable, that it be an extension of your values. And those values are part of what you define during an initial brand strategy phase. Next slide. So as I mentioned, a brand is a theoretical concept, but it should be the foundation of everything you do. And when we think about digital marketing, I want to go to the next slide to explain exactly how a lot of the things that we've talked about should trickle down and percolate in all of what you do, no matter what your marketing channels are.

Paul Knipe
But there's often a feeling that digital can operate at a bottom of the funnel, get people right when they're able to make their vision, and you don't need to think about your brand very much. The challenge is people who do define their brand positioning, their unique stake in the ground, how they're different, how they're better, how they provide offerings that no one else does.

Paul Knipe
They will always have stronger messages. Those messages are at the core of anything you do with paid search advertising, with content marketing, and also with SEO. So not all platforms are created equal and only some will be right for your brand. But the truth is that if your brand positioning and strategy is solid, you already have an automatic competitive advantage.

Paul Knipe
When you think about how you set up your ad campaigns, how you position the architecture of your website, and ultimately how you create a voice in your online social media presence. So you should be using all of your brand strategy insights, your positioning, your audience, your competitive landscape to shape your keyword targeting and geographic strategies. Next slide. So one of the things that health care success does so well, building upon brand strategy that we built for our clients, is paid search essentially Google ads.

Paul Knipe
And as Stewart mentioned, in that long trajectory, we have, I think at our core, an incredible amount of success with paid search. I'd like to walk through paid search as a basic concept in a little bit more detail, and then talk a little bit about how AI has transformed abilities to actually target and deliver results in ways that are cost effective for our clients and their success.

Paul Knipe
You can go to the next slide. So okay, AI is everywhere. I feel like I'm using it all day, every day now. And it's down to the point where, you know, my partner and I compare notes at the end of our work, dance around, you know, did you use Claude? Did you use Gemini or did you use ChatGPT?

Paul Knipe
And now they're aggregating tools that give you results, combining all of them. Obviously it's it is something that creates great efficiency, but it also is something you have to monitor and proofread very closely. But photo editing, ideation, I really feel like it's an incredible tool if you know how to harness its power. It's also revolutionizing how we put our bidding strategies together from a digital marketing standpoint.

Paul Knipe
So next slide. But what does that mean? Stewart talked about paid search and I talked about that. And if we think about Google ads paid search basically allows advertisers to appear on the top and throughout search engine results pages SERPs along with organic results. We see this every time we're online. Advertisers only pay when searchers click. That's the pay per click acronym that we always see.

Paul Knipe
And your position on the page, your ad rank is calculated based on your quality score, the expected click through rate, the relevance, the landing page experience, the bid amount, and other factors. It's really important that ability be a strong connection between the ads, the users intent, and the ultimate landing page or website where you're pointing users to click to Google looks very, very closely to make sure that we're not hoodwinking anyone that there's an appropriate relevance.

Paul Knipe
And that's something that Healthcare Success is particularly skilled at balancing. But Google Ads is by far the dominant player. Microsoft is a close second. A lot of these, AI tools are going to be introducing their own search engines very soon. So that's going to be a crowded landscape. It's going to be very interesting to see how things work, whether we're on our phones, tablets, desktop, we know what these results look like.

Paul Knipe
Everyone sees these results and it's an auction. It's a bidding system based on a lot of the factors I just mentioned. And like I said, how you positioned yourself is an extension of brand strategy. But how I works together, paid search is really important. There are a lot of tools at our disposal and they're just getting better over time.

Paul Knipe
Some specific terms to maybe take away performance. Max a campaign type that uses AI functionality. It basically has signals within a campaign that can make recommendations for you. We often use smart campaigns to use local data and AI informed ads, serving as often a really appropriate for clients who want to take advantage of multiple Google channels have a very limited budget.

Paul Knipe
They're also smart bidding strategies like maximize conversions, maximize clicks, and maximize conversions with a target CPA. You know, we really do feel like we're learning. But what I does is it often takes the data and serves recommendations and provides results on the basis of what is succeeding. So we don't have to do that manually. Again, work in progress, but it's become an essential part of how we do our paid search.

Stewart Gandolf
Not excellent. Well excellent job Paula, as always. And why is it not advancing too fast? But all right. So I was going to take a little break and I'll join for a while. Bob. Excellent job. Right on time. Everything. Good job. So I'm going to take the B2B section. And I mentioned at the opening here, a lot of our clients are B2B.

Stewart Gandolf
They're not really marketing directly to consumers at all. So we have both and a lot actually market to both both audiences, both B2B and B2C. But I want to talk about B2B and share with some things that for us or every day kinds of activities, but maybe new to a fair number of years. So first of all, inherently in healthcare, we know that, you know, marketing to doctors, HP's other health care professionals, executives is difficult, and providers in particular are insanely difficult.

Stewart Gandolf
Right? Everybody wants a piece of them. Our device reps, pharma reps, real estate agents, jewelry salesmen, I mean realtors. Everybody thinks the doctors have money already and everybody knows doctors have influence. So everybody is reaching out to them. This is before pandemic, of course. Now the doors have slammed shut. There's, access is even harder now because of, corporate, you know, practice is just say no at the door.

Stewart Gandolf
So it's bar, and it's harder and harder and harder to reach. Anybody in health care, especially doctors, but really anybody. Everybody's protected. Everybody has gatekeepers. It's a thing. Right. And what do you think it'll be next year? So the, to make matters more challenging, it's if you're talking about, you know, more complex B2B sales, almost always a complex decision making process, long sales cycle.

Stewart Gandolf
You know, I mentioned my team is in, Charleston, Spokeo spoke a fair number of them at a private equity conference, will be making relationships there that may result in a new client in the next week or two, but more likely may be a year of down the road or to these, there are long sales cycles here.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm very fragmented. Audience. Healthcare is still pretty fragmented. There's niches. Everybody has. You know, it's funny, referred to a couple of our clients. We have a very, very prominent brand name and a consumer packaged goods category. And you would think that they have big budgets and that's just not the case. Just because they're big doesn't mean they have a big budget.

Stewart Gandolf
Educating and empowering buyers, like all of these things are things that are really key. The focus of on our holiday that are going after either hospitals, you know, going out to pharma. We've had, other manufacturers going after doctors, you know, recruiting doctors, recruiting staff. All these things are out there. So if you remember, early on, we shared the the consumer journey.

Stewart Gandolf
For the on the consumer side, think about almost same thing are the B2B side. And what we talk about internally a lot is surround sound marketing. I want you to keep that concept in mind. Surround sound marketing means we're going to make the job of your sales team a whole lot easier. Whether it's physician lays on detail reps, or rather by being in front of those doctors, being in front of those executives all the time, like, okay, they're not stuff so easy to knock on that door anymore, but we'll be there in other ways.

Stewart Gandolf
So really, when we get into B2B, couple things, one is a it requires investment. You know, when I hear people say, I'll tell you, we want to reach 100 doctors this month and it can be canceled, but doesn't happen. Like, okay, B2B marketing isn't for you. That's requires investment and a long term perspective. But when you have that, magical things can begin to happen.

Stewart Gandolf
So typically, you know, Paul mentioned paid search and that's, you know, oftentimes part of our media mix. And we're going after B2B, paid social, programmatic display and geofencing. We'll talk about some of these things a little bit later. Content marketing offers direct mail, email tradeshows. Congresses, all of these things are ways to reach, your providers or your, target audience.

Stewart Gandolf
One of the things I always talk about with new and prospective clients is the bad news is there's only 5000 people in the entire country that would appreciate what you do. And then I say, the fantastic news is, there's only 5000 people in the entire country that you have to target, right? You don't have to be Coca-Cola and have everybody.

Stewart Gandolf
No, you're just those people that matter. So that means that in B2B, it's all about that database. How do you get the database to release the database if you're going after physicians? We work with like Cuba as a primary provider and some others, these are, you know, investments into these lists, but they have incredible amounts of data, prescription data, treatment data, you know, referral data.

Stewart Gandolf
So the data is really easy. And then we usually rent or lease list, we usually build to that with our salespeople. We do inbound marketing, but that B2B marketing is all up against the database. We want to think about our CRM and our marketing automation. And that takes that next level. So, you know, a lot of companies kind of dabble with this, but almost nobody does a very good job of taking advantage of their marketing automation.

Stewart Gandolf
It's more like a dumb email. They're true. Marketing automation will help alert your salespeople and interests and prospects are consuming their content. They can provide them. Oh, you like this? What about this? I can respond to people when they're hot. It can help identify people what they're much more likely to buy. Like this is a I could do a whole hour on marketing automation easily.

Stewart Gandolf
I don't have time for that today. But marketing automation at the heart of it is a way of reaching your doctors through or other providers or other executives through email, you know, through text, direct mail. Integrate that with your CRM so you can see what they're doing, where your sales reps are doing. It becomes very powerful. Key concept a lot of people don't know is that today, and email address and other information can identify doctors on a 1 to 1 basis.

Stewart Gandolf
So today it or other people anybody that you're trying to target. So if you're going after every entity in the country and you have a list of all those people, then you can target them as they travel online, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, or on social media, on, Fox Sports or New York times.com. So this is an incredibly powerful tool on a 1 to 1 basis.

Stewart Gandolf
Typically, we can match between 60 to 80% of your audience online as they travel about. I'm flying through this today because we have so much ground to cover. But you know, LinkedIn has tremendous opportunities. You know, we see right about coterminous with the decline of Twitter. LinkedIn has just become a thing in B2B marketing. It's far more powerful than it was pre-pandemic.

Stewart Gandolf
There are social media strategies with LinkedIn. How do you build thought leadership? There are page strategies. There are recruiting strategies, content strategies, advertising strategies. Again, this is probably a topic of a, webinar another day there. So typically is a combination of working with your marketing team, your sales team, prospecting, like that as, as Matt, availability.

Stewart Gandolf
But again, most people underestimate the potential for advertising. We often advertise for, you know, we have, pharma companies, we advertise, multi-location practices, consumer packaged goods companies, all targeting people on LinkedIn. So this is a deep area of opportunity. I alluded to programmatic advertising and programmatic advertising. Essentially, if you're not familiar with it, is a way of the old days.

Stewart Gandolf
You would hire a media buyer to talk to the radio station and, TV station in your town, maybe a newspaper. They would negotiate a contract, but on the internet, there's millions of potential places to advertise. So human beings can't contact a million advertisers. So instead, this is all done digitally through networks. And it's called programmatic advertising. And essentially it's a way that we can reach, anybody, whether it's consumers or B2B audiences.

Stewart Gandolf
Again, as they travel about online virtually anywhere. This is a very sophisticated topic, that we can talk about if you're interested in. But things like Spotify or Pandora or native advertising embedded within the news or display ads or radio ads, and you can even advertise on TV, which I'll come back to in a second. None of our favorite programmatic strategies is to reach your target audience when you're doing tradeshows.

Stewart Gandolf
This is called geofencing. So, for example, we've done this many times for clients where they want to target, for example, colleges that the Community College Alliance, we can target people in that building while they're milling about and afterwards on their cell phones on a one time basis. So you can see that the sophistication of marketing, it's out there today is so much more.

Stewart Gandolf
Again, we can't touch on that. We need we know what many 20 minutes of this webinar, but just letting you know these things are out there to target these individuals in a highly a fairly specific basis. Imagine activity on different platforms like Hulu. You can advertise and you can even target doctors or executives while they're watching TV at home or different other, streaming capabilities out there.

Stewart Gandolf
So it's just amazing what's possible. This gets prices. You start doing all these things, but they are all possible. And depending on your strategy, like the key thing is how does this fit all together? This is just an example of some work we did for AmerisourceBergen. It's a leading company. Most of you probably know if you're in health care.

Stewart Gandolf
This was exactly as we just described doing it both for social and programmatic, where we were targeting an ecologist at the Community Ecology Alliance in this case, this a source for any trade show or any different, format. Also really interesting point. Paul was talking about Living Brand. They came to us with brand guidelines.

Stewart Gandolf
They said, call these brand guidelines. And then we showed them back what they wanted us to. And they said, can you make it better? Right, Paul? So they gave us the opportunity to do some loving brand work with an established company like that. And, we'll be working with them again soon, I'm sure. This is another sample campaign to show you what's possible.

Stewart Gandolf
This is a, white paper e-book we wrote for a company called biology. And the point here was to create the science, along with the motivation of why, biogenic hardwoods are not only ethical, but something that's unethical if you don't provide it to patients. So this is just the culmination of a huge program with blogs, e-books, white papers, plus infographics and just walking it through.

Stewart Gandolf
This was a combination of ads. Work started them online, through Facebook, through programmatic, by being able to reach exactly the doctors we wanted to, to grow the, interest and generate leads from these doctors throughout. In this case was a California program where we had lead forms, programmatic advertising, email. This is examples of over here, we have a mailer that we sent to people.

Stewart Gandolf
We created. Tradeshows. Dinner, dinner meetings, ongoing, you know, at many, many touches, ball driving to landing pages, generating leads. This is the marketing automation, sending bounceback emails to the doctors that were retargeting, and of course, alerting the sales reps. I'm going to talk, I think for the sake of time, Paul, I'm going to talk about analytics a little bit, and then I'll turn over the Heppell to you.

Stewart Gandolf
All these topics again, as I said, are very deep, but I'm just trying to give you a by on some of the things that we're doing with state of the art marketing today. So every client we've been doing analytics and, testing and recording calls for years, really since our, since we began inception, the, but the key to successful marketer is optimally optimizing your ROI and looking at data.

Stewart Gandolf
How many people clicked? How many people inquired, what is your conversion ratio of actual customers? Do they buy? It's different. Kinds of analytics are different for different kinds of, clients. We have ecommerce clients, clients working with doctors, just looking through referrals. Others are looking to sell services. Others are looking to get, patient inquiries. But all of this should be available on a 24 hour platform.

Stewart Gandolf
Cost accessible data like, you know, not just to how many exposures but how many people called. What's your return on ad spend? How many people collect, you know, off of, organic search versus social versus paid social versus any other source? Again, 24 hours. This should all be available. And this should be this is table stakes.

Stewart Gandolf
This isn't that new. But you did the I think about our turn the ball to you in a second here about how this is interpreted and how you and your team do this. Also hyper compliant platforms have been out there for a while. I just talked to a potential everyone today. So, you know, being able to actually monitor calls if you would have people if you're answering calls at the office level or through a call center and you've never monitor your calls before, I suggest putting some pillows around your chair just in case.

Stewart Gandolf
When you can start listening. When your fall out, they are hurt yourself because that's usually pretty scary where you're going to hear and so but you don't. You can't improve what you don't understand and don't know about. I'd like you to take a moment before I talk about the hippo side of this, just to share maybe a minute on the how this works in the real world with our clients and what you recommend just in general, for to demand for analytics and reporting.

Paul Knipe
Yeah, it's very important. You know, when we talk about tracking, performance tracking for our campaigns, the ideal scenario is that, you know, we could identify every single appointment, that comes in from our campaign in partnership with our client, connecting systems on the client side with the ad platforms that we're using to run. But the truth is, is that sometimes our clients don't always have the right infrastructure internally.

Paul Knipe
And from a call monitoring standpoint, that's where we can fill in the gaps. If we have the ability to see what calls come in from our campaign, what form fills come in from our campaign ads, and then we can partner with our clients to actually identify the conversations that are taking place to determine what we can attribute to our campaigns.

Paul Knipe
But also issues that come up along the way. Sometimes patients may have expectations for what a clinic, a provider, a hospital is actually able to provide. But they they don't do that. That can be useful for us because it can help us negate terms in our campaign strategy that may be confusing to users in the future, can also be very useful if we can see the following manner and the ways in which, intake comes to a practice, so that we can offer suggestions and best practices for, onboarding prospective patients more successfully.

Paul Knipe
If we're going to talk about HIPAA compliance, because this is something that is somewhat recent in the last couple of years and that our agency has to take very, very seriously. So, you know, I think there are links that our team can provide for the highlighted areas here if you're interested. But in 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights clarified their guidelines of what constitutes personal health information.

Paul Knipe
And essentially, I'll get into this more in a moment. They determined that IP addresses, those identifying IP addresses, constitute personal health information. And any time any of us go online, visit a website from a device, whether it's a phone, an IP address identifies us. This ruling and this clarification of guidelines is really important to those of us in the healthcare digital marketing space, because it essentially means that if we're using pixels from Google, from meta, Facebook, Instagram, to track user behavior, which is essentially how we are able to do a lot of the tracking and, and, data analysis that we do that that is no longer HIPAA compliant.

Paul Knipe
So it's an industry wide issue that is affecting, health care providers everywhere. But essentially the initial ruling was that if you are using a Google Pixel for analytics for ads, you are not in compliance. So we have, as an agency developed a solution that I think is worth talking about in some detail. Next slide. When we think about the fact that IP addresses are considered high as part of this guidelines clarification, and those pixels are at the heart of why that tracking is problematic.

Paul Knipe
What do we do? Well, there are a lot of possible solutions. One is spent a few hundred thousand dollars and have a team of engineers develop a solution that extracts the pixel, but still allows you to use some other mechanism to gather, user data. We found a great partnership with an organization called Fresh Paint, which is, Bay area, they strategy team that has essentially found a way to extract the pixels from these ad platforms and replace them with a code snippet, and then stores all of the user data in a HIPAA compliant server.

Paul Knipe
So we've been able to successfully roll this out to a number of our clients. It allows them to carry on to be HIPAA compliant using digital marketing tools. And it basically means that we just need to establish a bar with these clients and in some cases, encourage our clients to establish a more robust contract with fresh paint for this user base.

Paul Knipe
If they're monthly users on their websites exceeds a certain level. So we're pleased that this solution is there. It really is, important because when we think about all of the things that fresh paint does, it's essentially a way for us to protect our clients and also allow for the integrity of the data analysis we need. So thank you for hearing out that last HIPAA piece.

Paul Knipe
It's certainly a moving target in some ways, but it's nice to have a solution.

Stewart Gandolf
You have this to me too. I would just add to that that the, recently, if you're following along on this particular topic, Barb mentioned, this first became, well, hip has always been an issue for as long as I can remember. I certainly, you know, since a long time, 20 years or but this particular issue of digital tracking technologies really became in the spotlight back in 2022.

Stewart Gandolf
This year, there was a ruling, in by a district, court in Texas that is, kind of question just this specific IP address, but everything else remains. I should say. There's also class action lawsuits out there. This is a deep, deep discussion that involves more than just CMS, as the Department of Health and Human Services, that, involves the FTC.

Stewart Gandolf
So, if your concern about the HIPAA issue or the privacy issues, there are answers out there. In terms of questions that we don't have any yet because we do have some nice compliments, though, so that's cool. So, Paul, like, while we're waiting here for questions, I'll keep the questions and answers open while we're waiting for any questions.

Stewart Gandolf
So let us know if you guys have any. Oh, I think you know, what I'd like to do is just because you're such a resource, you're on the ground with the clients more closely than I am these days. I'm up to the 2000ft level near maybe at the 40,000 level with you on your team, but certainly working day in and day out.

Stewart Gandolf
Let's talk about I mean, I put you on the spot here, but any of the innovations like today was really about, I guess, innovation, in health marketing that our audience may not be familiar with. And also maybe just the power of marketing that may be lying beneath the surface that, you know, they kind of don't understand. So maybe some anecdotes, anything at all, some of our stories, something to keep our audience entertained here as we, come to the last couple of minutes.

Paul Knipe
Yeah. And I mean, I think one headline and response to that, that broad topic is you have to constantly be ready to embrace change because what worked 3 or 4 years ago may no longer even be it. And I think that examples, you know, that I think have emerged maybe post-pandemic are now just entrenched as tools that as, strategists on the marketing and brand side, we have to think about, you know, I think the notion of personalized marketing is an innovation that's emerging quickly and it's basically this concept that we could tailor messaging and services in digital marketing channels, the individual needs and how that could become increasingly important, could involve using

Paul Knipe
data to create targeted campaigns that resonate with specific demographics. I just love that kind of possibility. And I will certainly play a role with that. I think that telehealth has emerged across many sectors of health care, from our work in mental and behavioral health, even to urgent care multi-location practices we work with. And one of the the real opportunities is not just to say the word telehealth, but to really talk about the emotional and practical benefits that that could have.

Paul Knipe
That's a brand messaging opportunity for many organizations. It's not enough sometimes to recognize shifts, opportunities, innovations in technology. You have to think about what it means from a practical and emotional level for your audience. And, so.

Stewart Gandolf
So I go ahead and.

Paul Knipe
Just a couple of quick ideas. I think it's always important to, to recognize that sometimes the old fashioned ways of doing things sometimes has value, too. We love to balance our digital work with traditional, where we can radio, print, direct mail. Sometimes it's just where the rubber meets the road, so we'd never leave that off the table as a technical team, we're always looking at every channel we can recommend to our clients to succeed.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. And Tim, I'm glad you got back in because you guys have such a variety of clients. And I'm curious if you have any comments or questions. And like, you know, you brought us to this meeting today. Why do you think this is valuable for your client? Yeah. So, you know, the the classic in, in health care is we have some, you know, Uber smart people, physicians and scientists and engineers and, many of them just don't get the marketing side.

Tim de Cou
You know, they're just they're not trained that way. But, you know, they're the smartest people in the room. We love them as clients because it's always fascinating and it's always something that, you know, it's great to learn, but, there's a great opportunity to be able to present it better, communicated better. And, boy, that's that. That's the future is reaching people on whatever level, you can so that you can connect with them and they can use your service.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah. I appreciate that. But, you know, it's funny because I one of the things it's just fun about having done this for so long, it's just, you know, I feel like when I'm working with people like that, I can finish their sentences for them often because I know their world.

Stewart Gandolf
Like today we're talking, I mentioned in talking to the, Pete group, and I was mentioning that I bet you they're a little shy working with the MDS. Like how you know that that's absolutely true. And it's like, because we've just done this. So, that knowledge base is so deep. And so the idea there then is to be able to, you know, recognize where the business is, recognize what the objectives are.

Stewart Gandolf
And I'm just arguing that in most cases, there's an arc where the marketing can be a real, the marketing we're talking about today, the more sophisticated, thoughtful strategic marketing is more than just running some social media ads. You know, I'll give you another example. Maybe I'll refer these guys over to somewhere. But I have a big, multi-location business in LA that will probably, work within a couple of weeks there that, you know, it was mentioned to me was they're great.

Stewart Gandolf
I really like them. And they were saying, you know, with that social media. And I asked why I'm like, great question. You should ask that, right? There should be a reason behind everything you're doing, not just because you think you should. And so again, I just you have the right to demand more and you should demand more. But that opens up opportunities.

Tim de Cou
Just like the other thing I would add to that too, was I loved your comments on the call centers. What is critical to us and the health care practices that we say, is to pay attention to every source of communication you can get on your business. You know, it's just you can't you can't just be focused on one silo. You need to help them, you know, keep your eyes and ears open head on as well.

Stewart Gandolf
So I think metaphor that as we wrap up your team is that we see it every day. Somebody drives the ball 98 yards, 98 yards down the field or at the two yard line. You know, we got the marketing, the work there on the phone.

Stewart Gandolf
They probably inquire they want to book an appointment and the front desk goes off and leaves the, you know, leaves the game and goes or does a pizza or something. And you also that it was the game. Like, that's how I think good wealth management like it's like at the last second, you're out of all the way to calling you that.

Stewart Gandolf
You blew it. So it's a big deal. We're the only agency I'm aware of that actually has trainers that we bring in. It's not a big revenue center for us, but it's so critical to our the success of our clients. We even bring in trainers to help with that. And today I spoke to a friend of ours, Kathy Devers, who is a consultant who builds call centers for people if they need to do this on sort of an organizational standpoint.

Stewart Gandolf
So that's just, again, the way we do things, guys, we're out of time. I Tim, thank you for, introducing us to your audience. Thanks, everybody. We'll look forward to seeing you next month. And yeah, good deal. Thank you guys. Bye bye. Thank you.