Ensure a Healthy Bottom Line with the Marketing Minimum Daily Requirement

Stewart Gandolf 

Hi, everyone. Stewart Gandolf here with my associate colleague, strategist, Kathy Gaughran. 

We've worked together for a long time together. Tonight, this is the, if you're listening to this, you won't get this, but if you're watching this, you'll see this is a limited edition nighttime conversion recording after hours because we're so busy coming back in the road, teaching in a bunch of conferences. 

So, this is the first web that we're going to cover that is sharing the content of three conferences Kathy and I've spoken at, and we've been studying about six or seven last couple weeks. 

So, this is for, even though some of these may be about addiction, mental health or about senior living, the basic ideas apply to most of the kinds of people who are equipped. 

So, the first one we're going to cover in this episode, we're talking about presentation I gave in Las Vegas this time. 

like, was it Dallas, Atlanta? It Vegas. SMASH and SMASH is a marketing conference for senior living. I was one of the many speakers there and Enjoyed the time that I was there. 

My small friends made some new ones and I want to share our topic today So again, this is a real-life presentation Just completed and I will be leading most of this and Kathy on this one will be giving color commentary and let's just begin So this particular webinar we just created was about really multi location providers So while the examples and the presentation if you're watching this on the YouTube version See some examples here if you're listening, you'll certainly be able to understand this from the podcast side of this We're seeing the summary so while the talk the concept of the headline was ensure a healthy bottom line with the marketing minimum daily requirement What that really means is how do we mark in a multilocation business? 

SCREEN SHARING 
Stewart started screen sharing 

That's what this is really about a multilocation So again, this was for SMASH talking about senior care with these concepts apply 

for any multiplication business. So, on this particular session, because this was about me, I did the presentation as a steward of CEO of healthcare success or leading top 100 medical and healthcare marketing agency. 

And we work across branding, digital marketing, traditional marketing, experience, professional roles, PR. like I said, Kathy and I have worked together for years. 

And we've got quite an agenda here. And I'm just going to jump straight into it. So the first thing we talked about in our meeting, is why is marketing important to senior care? 

Or really, why is it important to any multi-location business? So, the first of all, one of the things that Kathy and talk about a lot is that most of the time we're working with investors, like private equity owned businesses, there's got a lot of time thinking about profitability levers, like revenue cycle management, contracting, acquisition. 

cutting cost, and these are all very, very valid. These are all really important things. But they also oftentimes really don't get marketing the attention that it deserves, because marketing can also be a tremendous profitability driver. 

One of the things we talk about a lot is that excellent marketing can actually give you a competitive advantage, and particularly in the world of senior care, it's a little behind some other specialties and professions that we work with. 

So, marketing can give a great advantage, and marketing can reduce your reliance on various referral sources. in senior care, a place from home and caring dot com are really important. 

But, for example, let's say you have many of your referrals are from one health plan or from one large primary care group. 

So, again, it's not we strategies. So, we see that when we're working with multi-location businesses of any kind, Sometimes have multi-location objectives where we want to grow the value of the business through marketing was a common thing that we see. 

Attracting more residents and patients, growing priority service lines, enhancing new and building existing brands is pretty common, creating an appropriate strategy for all your new acquisitions and de novo and including transitions as well. 

do we transition? How do we promote specific locations or sometimes specific doctors or services again? And identify the most appropriate platforms and tactics for optimal campaigns scaling. 

Kathy, love you to carry this next topic. 

Kathy Gaughran 

Yes, I love this slide. Thank you. One of the things I wanted to weigh in on is when we work with a multi-location client, one of the factors we really focus on is making sure that you're getting in front of the searches that are happening already. 

You're blocking and tackling. So, it's critical that you're making sure each location can get found for local searches. We look for earned media as well as paid media. 

But Stewart and I, as you mentioned, we've worked with groups of providers for a couple of decades, and things have changed so significantly. 

But more often than not, providers are still involved in the conversations as it relates to marketing. So it's critical that they feel involved in the process, the executive team, local managers and staff, business development and sales, but really important year providers. 

The doctors need to feel like they've got their time in the sun, that they've got attention that's equal to all the other locations. 

And we have worked in this space and really understand how frustrated the doctors can get. Stewart and I have seen several occasions where one single doctor can try to take down a whole campaign because it didn't feel that that practice was getting enough attention. 

So, it's just really important that everybody across the board feels your love, feels attention and that they're part of the campaign. 

Share regular KPI reports, tracking analytics data, feedback on how their team is doing on inbound phone calls. Be sure to include marketing efforts that are going to be visible to them. 

You don't want people calling and responding to campaigns. your stuff isn't prepared to handle that particular call. And continually market to your internal audiences so that they don't feel neglected. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Yeah, so another topic we want to talk about a lot, or we do talk about a lot rather is that people are making their own decisions today. 

Thank you very much. So, health care consumers review multiple options. In the senior market, there's family involved oftentimes, but whether it's the patient or the resident or the consumer, they're taking their own decisions. 

And people have higher expectations, retail, the retail-ization of health care, meaning that health care is far more mistakes are higher, just because 

Healthcare no longer gives you a pass. People expect things to be nice, clean, good service, be treated well, not to be feeling like they're upon in somebody else's game. 

People that are digitally enabled are looking for convenience, cleanliness, safety, compassion. And another thing we talk about a lot is things need to be customized by market, by competition, service line. 

All these journey. 

Kathy Gaughran 

Yeah, we talk a lot, Stewart and I, when we're teaching about pushing poll marketing. And when you look at the front end of the consumer journey, a lot of that is really around push. 

Push marketing is pushing your information at people who are likely candidates, but not yet actively engaged in search. Poll marketing is being king of the hill when they are, so that you're the first opportunity for a solution that they come across. 

So it's critical to recognize all of the messages that they'll be exposed to throughout this consumer journey and knowing your competition, understanding what their unique value proposition is, what their key strategies are, what you do that's different or better. 

your staff, you and your staff can address questions and address the specific issues that that caller might have when they're reaching out. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Very good. Another thing that we see a lot of this isn't surprising with all this new consolidation in the marketplace and certainly whether we're working in addiction or with practices, multiplication practices or senior care, private equity and venture capital are there. 

These partners demand, they have deeper pockets, they have more business savvy, they're thinking about scaling, they're willing to invest in leadership and marketing. 

They have much more focus on results, analytics, ROI. And we find that the stronger businesses tend to win, both in marketing and just sort of the long game. 

So, the minimum daily requirement is a concept we came up with pretty recently, we've been doing this before, we just found this was a nice moniker. 

basically, the concept is this, that every location, no matter how busy it is, deserves some love on an ongoing basis. 

this is tricky because a lot of times in addiction or a lot of times in senior care, if somebody is, you know, they say, well, I've got three locations or eat patients, but everybody else is at full census, we shouldn't do any marketing. 

I would argue that when somebody goes searching for care, even if you're full, they're low to find your competitors or you, which would you prefer they call, right? 

You want to be there or not. So, I'm not saying you spend the same amount of money on marketing for every location, but each location deserves a little love, right? 

it needs a lot of deserves love ongoing. And then that gives you the opportunity to double down in those locations that need more. 

And so some of things we're going to talk about today include like about the website pages, local search, page search. 

I'm not going to cover everything today that we know in this very short talk. We are going to talk about some of the critical success factors. 

So when we think about how much should we invest per location, the point I made in this particular meeting because it was about senior care was, well, what if I'm spending $50 per location for a large change? 

So, it's $1,500 per month per location. So, if you have 100 locations it'll be $150,000. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 

Well, I don't is it a lot? Well, let's say the average locations, in this case I was talking about assisted living, I checked out the national status, the average location is bringing in $3 million a year. 

That's 0.6% of sales, right? That's not a huge number. So it's like, obviously, when you have more locations, the budget is going to have to reflect like that. 

Looking at this another way, what is your return on Like what's your ROI? So at the average new patient or new resident is worth, let's say, $10,000, you're spending, you know, $3,000 a month, or no, I'm sorry, in this case, $1,500 a month, so what, six, seven, eight to one ROI, is that a good deal? 

I'd say so, right? we bring you one patient a month, what if we bring in two? just double that. 

getting away from just the gross number and thinking about, you know, what does it take to be competitive? What is our return on that? 

And what is that on a percentage of sales basis? And just remember that minimum are exactly at just minimums, right? 

So, the next slide here, I'd like to talk to Kathy, or like Kathy Kerry goes about the swap budget. 

Like what does that mean? 

Kathy Gaughran 

Well, what budget? 

Stewart Gandolf 

I think we've called swag, didn't we? Those guys were talking about like being a SWAT team. 

Kathy Gaughran 

other words, we're joking here. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Like maybe look at the notebook as the emergency response plan. 

Kathy Gaughran 

How do we give those locations that no really need some extra labs? some of those cases. Yeah, so new locations, you know, it's interesting. 

I was thinking when Stewart was bringing up a topic little ago. It's critical that you understand how your campaigns are performing. 

Attribution can always be difficult, tracking can be difficult, so we want to make sure you're making decisions. Stewart was talking about your return on ad spend that's actual. 

So, it's really critical that you get alignment internally on tracking and attribution, so you can be making smart decisions moving forward, which then brings us to your emergency response. 

We deal with a lot of multi-location clients. We love that. That's kind of a sweet spot. Stewart and I've got decades of experience in working with these individual practices, so it's been awesome to have the market collide into us. 

So, in an emergency response plan, if you're rolling in a new location, you've got a de novo. It's critical that you take a look at your ender. 

forming locations, what key service lines have a mad demand in certain markets or your competitors meeting that demand. But really getting to the root of what's going to make each individual location do better than it's doing now. 

And this is a lot of what we are charged to do when we onboard new groups. We often will get a new acquisition, a new brand that's been acquired, and we're trying to make it profitable. 

And the first things that we look at are essentially how effectively are they optimized for local search. Getting in front of the searches that are already happening in the markets is one of the quickest things you can do. 

And then start to push towards the keywords that are dominant in that market. We take a look at your competitor strategy. 

So this is an area we really dig deeply so that we can get right after the low hanging fruit and make sure that we can optimize the locations out of the gate. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Great. So, one of the things that comes up a lot for us is brand architecture, because we're often working with, sometimes we work with 

Single brands and there's a work with many brands sometimes who work with brand transitions and just as a sort of marketing Maybe 201 not quite 101 but 201 the brand architecture and you may have heard these terms before Maybe quite familiar with them But the idea of a branded house on one hand that is the same name across all different types of services or products on the flip side The classic house of brands is Procter and Gamble where they have Gillette and Pampers and a million other consumer package goods And you have sort of variations between like Apple has its own branding system or endorsed brands like we talk about Kellogg's So these are different brand strategies and the answer isn't necessarily which one's right They all can be right. 

It depends on the context another fun example Just because I haven't to get SMASH I picked we're at a Marriott, so I picked an area at brands right there's a lot of different Marriott brands and each of those brands means something different But it's still unified if you're 

a member of the Bond Boy club like I am and Kathy are like, we're familiar with every single one of these brands. 

is right. This chart came about when they were merging. But these are all different brands with different purposes. And just some other examples in senior housing or senior living, whether you have Brookdale has all of its different services, independent living memory care. 

All the way across the boards, just under Brookdale Center Living, whereas atria has different names for each of its primary products. 

So, this is pretty common. Kathy, you can talk about, I guess, just quickly the US fertility as an example too. 

Kathy Gaughran 

Right. So, I was having detailed conversations with a director of marketing from US fertility. At the time US fertility was merging nine very large IVF groups from across board. 

the country and they were trying to determine the appropriate brand strategy, and they were looking to name the business US fertility when one of these single brand shady grove at you know 10 times the brand resonance and traffic that any of the brands did also obviously lot more visibility than US fertility. 

So, it's just important that you do table setting understand you know what the brand strategy should look like what you're shooting for your shooting to try to centralize the brand into one central brand but be careful about kicking anything to the curb that has brand resonance. 

want to use another example Stewart and I worked with a big with PD group up in the Seattle area and they went through a rename and they used to be the team doctor to the Seahawks and the Mariners and when they made this switch they lost the name that was so prominent around the athletes, and it really significantly tanked their brand resonance. 

So, look to the traffic, resonance, how long has it been in the market, how recognizable is it before you make any of those important decisions? 

Stewart Gandolf 

Okay, I'm going to share some more examples of this kind of thing in just a moment here. So, another thing we talk a lot about, in this case again, this meeting in SMASH was all about multi-location. 

So, another topic that comes up a lot is, what do we do with the website? So, there are different ways of doing this. 

So, and if they're not, there's no one way to do it. There's different ways and different strategies and different pros and cons. 

But for just laying this out, we can have a single branded website that has a unified look feel for everything. 

You're going have an umbrella site that ties multiple brands together on one website. It's a little tricky for can be done. 

You're going to have several websites grouped by brand, location or service lines. So, you can have two or three websites and try to tie that all together, or you can have dedicated micro sites for each individual location. 

Kathy's been working with me for years and one of the favorite examples is Pacific Dental, which now has over a thousand, um, locations, uh, every single, their brand strategy is every single location has its own name. 

It's, it's a community based field and they have local marketing, they have community marketing, and they have retail signage. 

And this goes back, Catholic insulted to them back when they had four locations. So, it's worked well for them having these many locations. 

And then Kathy also, uh, led this relationship with us with Gulf Coast, uh, was a multilocation skilled nursing facility company. 

And, um, Kathy, think you can talk about the advantage of having all these different brands. 

Kathy Gaughran 

Right. Um, so when we did this, uh, campaign restructure, um, one of their locations, I don't remember the exact location, it was down in the south of Florida, but they lost 17-19 lives during COVID. 

Um, and it was highly visible in the media. Um, you know, we worked with of the Crisis PR team to eventually get it tamped down, but it was really difficult for admissions for quite some time, and it did not impact the overarching brand because it had its own brand for that location. 

So that's a definite example of when that would be a benefit to have a house of brands versus a brand in-house. 

Both of these are house of brands examples. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Yeah, another thing that's really important just to cover about websites, it's really important, which other strategy you have, that you have really flush, built out location pages. 

That is the center of so many things. All this other stuff is a waste. If you just have the name of the location and the address, you need to build it out, have the appropriate SEO stuff, the title tags, the description tags, the schema markup, all the different SEO tools that are really important, especially content. 

And ideally, content that's local on a very relevant basis. Another thing we see, it's important when you have brands that you want to create consistent branding. 

Now, this is tricky because you want to have consistent, like a lot of times, may have a single branded house where you want to keep a message across all locations. 

the same time, make it a little more consistent on a local basis. bring out the brand personality of each individual location, but the big picture is it all fits together. 

So, this is the kind of thing that we work with a lot. So, we have one brand name, for example, or related family of brands, but each location has its own feel sometimes, and different audience, different demographics, different people you're appealing to, and so that could be really important. 

And so, when we're talking about to kind of expand this and explain what I mean, every location has its own community, has its own demographic mix, each location oftentimes has different service mixes, a different facility. 

The thinking about like, what would be your, you excelling for each location and the thing we talk about a lot in our company is the idea of a living brand and the living brand essentially is a brand that has a unique message, a unique look and feel but it's flexible enough to account for different locations or even different media like Facebook versus Instagram versus LinkedIn. 

So, we really want to be thinking through these branding message is really really important. Another thing that's really important today is multi-cultural marketing, just recognize now that everybody's a white male. 

It's kind of a big story here. So, you really want to make sure you're appropriate and sensitive to the marketplace. 

one of our clients, this is to have new me as of about an hour ago, is we have a very successful basketball business and international radiology business that is in multiple markets and then this week we're talking about how to reach Vietnamese and Houston. 

like these are the kinds of targets that you really need to think through like What is your cultural response in this? 

Is your marketing not just targeting these people, but relevant to them. They may be non-English. You have different family demographics. 

for example, the Hispanic, most, and by the way, if you know one Hispanic audience, you know one Hispanic audience. 

Columbians who look at themselves very differently than Mexicans who look at themselves differently than, I don't know, Panamians. These are all different countries of their own mindsets. 

But typically, multicultural marketing for the Hispanic audiences are much more family-driven. Family members are involved. can say this for sure with clarity because my Abuelita is like really reliant on my wife. 

My wife is still a first generation that she grew up here. So, she was able to speak Spanish. She really leads Abuelita in her decision-making. 

Kathy Gaughran 

So just think about that when it comes to your marketing. And one other thing on that topic, Stewart, is that is also true outside of multicultural is the influencers. 

important. You're using SMASH as an example for skilled nursing. Your influencers are very important in that decision-making process, also the same for mental health, especially when it comes to residential programming. 

So just important to identify influencers in their decision-making journey as well. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Right. another thing we talked about at the conference and we're sharing with you here is idea of enhancing your website to personalize it more and just making better. 

So, in this business, we're talking about virtual tours, interactive surveys, recorded webinars, videos. And the videos can be professional, user-generated, quizzes, video testimonials. 

These are all ways of bringing your multiplication site to light. And then again, I talked about the living branches for moment. 

Again, it's like, it's just such a difference when you can actually target based upon the medium that you're in. 

Like if you have like, for example, a blue and white logo and you go put that on to TikTok or Instagram. 

It's probably fall flat. So we had to find a way to stay with, so it's not just chaos, but bring that living brand to life. 

Anthem Memory Care is another client that our team has been working with. They had a prior company, they didn't want it like the way they were contracted, they wanted to come up with a new look, a new marketing sort of agreement with us. 

So, this is a large, very well respected living care. And the example here is that we talked with, just for those of you who able to see this, better navigation, primary and secondary navigation, because each of their locations had its own brand name. 

So how did we develop the brand name of Anthem Memory Care along with, for example, Chisholm Place? And so that was a big issue. 

We want to make sure that there was easier or better integration with the CRM. We included quizzes, we have the main site versus community sites, like there are a million different things that have happened here. 

It's But our team worked with our client, in this case, to show before we went and created a new website, here's like the pros and cons of this approach. 

I mean, shared examples. Here's the pros and cons of this case. So, we worked with a teamwork with our client to really nail how that website should be designed. 

can look it up if you want to online. We're very proud of how that worked out. So, another thing that we talk about a lot and get in there speaking with all the time is how do you win the Google war? 

Or how do you show up locally? How do you show up on a per-location basis? And just as a reminder, these days, the search and the results pages are very, very crowded. 

Typically, with the paid search ads or pay-per-click ads at the top, oftentimes they may have featured snippets or knowledge graphs or different kinds of additional content, carousels, Google business profile. 

We lovingly call the map path. And then that's those search results. So, there could be a lot of different forms, but the three that we're most concerned about today is the page. 

search ads, the Google business profile, the natural search. And sometimes we also get like people also ask. So, there's a different categories. 

And the question is, you know, want people also ask, do I want snippets, do I want the knowledge graph? 

Like, I don't pay, I don't want all of it, right? we can't talk about all of it today, but so we'll just categorize this in the most important, but all of these things can be important, right? 

love position zeros, they say. And we're going to cover this just for a few minutes and talk about this. 

When you look at search, it's even more competitive. mean, the pay-per-click ads can often take its first three or four swipes. 

And you add extensions to it. So, you know, that's a very, very competitive marketplace. And when we talk about multi-locations, we paid search is especially powerful because we can target each brand, or location can have its own budget. 

We're going to have immediate results. We instantly can rack above our competitors. We can double down on the areas that need it, the budget's flexible, you can protect your brand. 

One of the challenges at this particular conference is a place where mom is an aggressive advertiser, and they can advertise legally for people searching for your name. 

So, if a place where mom is there and you're not and they're looking for you, but they go to a place where mom you're paying a commission now, I believe they should have been yours. 

So, it's really important to think through this paid search strategy and we have lots of different webinars and more data on this. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this today, but just recognizing this can be an extremely powerful tool to use paid search. 

Local search also is owning the map pack making sure that we recognize that how do we get map back and how do we optimize and the key today we're just going to talk about pretty quickly a couple things. 

First of all, Google as a special local algorithm based upon relevance, distance, prominence, meaning like how prominent are you in market. 

Citations means that anybody else talk about you in the main authority. So, Google is using a different algorithm than it does for the local, the other search results. 

By the L3 albums, they're different. The paid search, the natural, and the local. But when we're talking about local search, we really are talking about that map back. 

You also to make sure that the various directories or our consistent helps Google know what's actually going on. You want to claim and verify your listings. 

And Google pairs a lot about experience, authority, experience expertise, authority, trust. The keep in mind that your website, this is all built into your website landing pages. 

You want to make sure you have proper Google profile. And Kathy, you see this a lot, kind of changes to the program? 

Kathy Gaughran 

Oh, absolutely. I'd like to use an example to this summary that sort of sharing is for a big multi-location Durham group. 

And, you know, some of the challenges they would have locations right next to each other, we would need to be evaluating how to allow two practices to be aggressive and not step on each other's toes. 

But one of the examples I like to use for Google Business Profiles, I was going to a personal Durham down here in the Southern California market. 

I had an appointment at four o'clock and I was looking at my directions to get down there and it said that the office closed at 3.30 on that day. 

So, all of this information is really critical because it's part of that user's journey, your directions, your ability to get a hold of you, your reviews are folded in here. 

So, this really shapes your profile and is often accessed a lot more than people realize. So, really critical to have all this cleaned up and working 

for you and there's ways to work in here too to optimize the exchange and what they're getting out of the information. 

Stewart Gandolf 

So another thing we talked about a lot and to talk about this conference is the difference between technical SEO and creative SEO and just thinking about technical SEO is the part that most people think about technical SEO and oftentimes make a mistake of thinking like I'll just have some tech guys in India do this work and like well the tech guys in India can be great whether they're here in India or in any place else the tech guide is really important it helps Google understand what the site is all about that's only half of the equation at best so the content is everything making sure that we're thinking about what content we even do what's our brand voice what's our keyword and topical alignment how do we optimize existing content what content do we need what is our social strategies do we have a backlinks you know how do we premiering in social all these things work together 

for to make your SEO work and another thing that I think is really an interesting concept that we've been talking about a lot, our head of SEO, if he says if you have this one thing that's going to make your SEO better, it's to stop thinking about keywords, thinking about queries and the point here is the way that people have searched over the past decade has changed and so today people ask questions like instead of just assisting their living center near me, I tested this in a row whoa, find me an assistant living center near me that has high ratings, excellent food, nights and a fitness center and guess what, it found somebody near me and those of you that can't see the website I'm showing, had grab and go food, outdoor dining and find private dining all at an assisted living. 

So, for your that what's happening is the large language models and AI are getting better and better handling these complex queries. 

So, if your website doesn't have this kind of content, you won't be included. So I just think, by the way, Kathy, this is in testing. 

Kathy Gaughran 

This is a real website I found. That's right. It's free from a house. 

Stewart Gandolf 

That's funny. 

Kathy Gaughran 

know this one. 

Stewart Gandolf 

the Kathy and I both love in testing. So, the content needs to engage users and have the content that people are looking at every step of their buying journey. 

So, as we're getting a little close to stuff a bunch to do, we're keeping this moving quickly today, tonight. 

When it comes to organic social, if you're at a multi-location business, just remember that every location can and often should have its own social media pages, especially like with Facebook, has a way of scaling Facebook pages. 

So always maybe is a little strong, but most often, one of the people in the audience asks, like, we have a small team up here. 

Okay, maybe that'll have to wait. But you know, with Facebook in particular, Because it's so engaging and so interactive, it's a little easier to have manage location. 

There are trade-offs. If you do that and you're trying to manage 60 profiles and you're a team of one, you may not be worth the effort. 

So, these are the kinds of decisions we have to think about. But we also think it's important to know that usually we recommend organic be led internally by the client because we don't know that somebody's having puppy day at the local nursing home. 

Or Kathy was it with another one of our strategists, Jacob, at a conference where they had a therapy slot. 

That's a social media. But we're not going to know that you had a therapy slot at your addiction center. 

So, we often say, we work with our clients on the organic side to create policies. They definitely need talk to legal and create policies and then arm and teach the local people how they can work within your larger marketing platform. 

So, a lot of variation there, a whole, you know, higher on time. on how to do that, but just keep in mind, usually we like to see local done at a local basis. 

It's just easier to bring it to life. 

Kathy Gaughran 

And also wanted to mention we do have a social webinar if you wanted to access that on our website. 

There's a lot of good webinars at the back of our website that Stewart and I have done as well as a number of our specialists in the agency. 

So, if you're interested to hear more about social and Italian Stewart did a great presentation on social media. 

Stewart Gandolf 

So, we're going to come to paid social which we do a lot for our clients. You're leveraging the challenge with organic is that you come up really, really hard to get a thousand followers like really, really, really hard, but only maybe two to four percent of the followers will see your message when you post. 

Facebook, especially in meta, Facebook, Instagram, doesn't really reward that as much. So it's hard to really break through. You have to be, everybody wants to be an influencer, but the people that are influencers because it's large, right? 

probably won't be here. So, we oftentimes then want to do pay to, instead of reaching, you know, 20 or 50 people to reach tens of thousands cost effectively very quickly. 

So paid social is very powerful for getting the word out, doing messaging, building the brand. For those of you who can see this, the example I'm showing now is from Anthem Memory Care, we got the word out, we did 80 different versions with different creative approaches across 15 locations. 

So, each location with a strategy of okay, and we test it and we adjust based upon how it performs. 

Video is great for social media, so we like to share examples when we're speaking live with clients. We oftentimes will use pay or video to really enhance and stop people in the feed. 

And then finally, I'm going to set this up and I'll let Kathy talk to this last section because it's her fay. 

So, we'll do the quick version, Kathy, but one of the things my favorite blog post was written recently is something I've always talked about in my seminars, finally came up with a visual way of showing it. 

So essentially, we often think about four puzzle pieces and the four puzzle pieces intertwined, and the first puzzle piece is just basically the demand, the demand for the service or product you're selling. 

The second piece is all the work that goes into the machine of the Google AdWords campaign or who adds campaign, the meta campaign, all the work that goes into that machine. 

The third is the landing page that you're driving people to. What does it say? What are the benefits all about? 

the final category is the conversion process. you're driving people to self-schedule or you're driving them to a call center or you're driving them to the answer. 

And the key concept here is each of these things is equally important. And in fact, it's a multiplicative result. 

So that means that if you can do 20% better. your campaign management out the back and 20% more patients or residents. 

If you can do 15% better landing page, now a lot of times, by the way, the landing page, can do twice as good if you do a better landing page. 

immediately for the same budget, you just doubled your results. also works in the negative. So if you're both terrible and you're sending everybody to a bunch of grumpy, uninformed, untrained staff and nobody ever picks up their own phone, well, that's a zero and a zero times whatever else you did means it's still a zero. 

The other metaphor I use a lot is like it's like taking the ball 90 yards down the lot down the field. 

If you're looking at a football metaphor and they drop the ball or go get a soda a pizza instead of fishing the game out. 

So, it really matters all these things. So, Kathy, love you to finish up with some thoughts on the patient conversion process. 

Kathy Gaughran 

Yeah, well, one of the things I always speak to is I look at your practice or your business like an upside down pyramid balancing on the. 

end of the finger of the people answering your phone. They're responsible for the lifeblood coming into the business. So, Stewart has mentioned this in this talk already, but it's it is a critical part of the conversion process. 

So, it's and then people are also reaching out to you in different ways. Some are texting, some are emailing, some are calling, but we do get a lot of phone calls. 

I did a mystery call research project for a couple of mental health groups recently and it's shocking what we hear on the phone when we call. 

So, it's critical that you've got the right people that they understand your business. It's great if they're a patient and understand your product and how you deliver it, that they are your advocates, that they are passionate about getting people converted because they really are the backbone to the success or failure is making sure that those calls are shepherded through on phones that come through the phone lines. 

So, really critical to keep all this managed and my and then we talked a little bit earlier about attribution, also important to follow this all the way through and see which campaigns are generating kinds of patients you want. 

But we've got to be able to convert each call that comes in or make a decision whether not it's a fit. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Yep. And when we work with clients, the first slide here is that essentially phone inquiries are just one way to handle inquiries. 

Sometimes you may have online forums, you may have online patient scheduling. You may have a special quarter with a lot of you do for patients. 

I do want to point out though the patient portal is a terrible place to send new patients that are not yet patients because they'll never go through the work to try to figure that out 

Kathy Gaughran 

a good point to bring up. And you know, we've had a couple conversations around this recently. One group thought nobody uses the phones anymore. 

There's a mix of people in every category. So, we want to be equally prepared across the board. So, we're not anticipating all the calls coming in through the phone 

all the calls coming in through email or online. 

Stewart Gandolf 

So, it's important that you're diversified with how you're addressing all these leads. Yeah, and one of the things that, you know, with Kathy and I just, I, I guess, complain, commiserate. 

My friend Rob Clindry said a survey about the patient experience and what's most important and where is satisfaction? What's most important? 

So just imagine a hierarchy and it turns out that the most important and least satisfied was online and phone appointment setting. 

Like this topic right here is the most important and least satisfied topic in the patient experience. Press Gainey came back with similar data. 

Number one problem for searching for a healthcare provider was difficulty contacting office long hold times. Number one, so this is an area that drives patients or customers crazy. 

You know, Kathy now can talk about, you know, what is routine for your team. terrifying for the patient. My mom's losing her memory. 

That's terrifying. It's not retained. Empathy and active listening skills matter. And this is the patient's first experience to you right after the website. 

So, it's really important. Kathy, I haven't talked about the fact that new inquiries are the top priority. This is some training we can do. 

By the way, this is the top I've been teaching for years and it's never going to get better in my career. 

So we'll just have to say that some quick tips to help you treat new inquiries like a top priority. 

The objective should be to set the first appointment. I'll give out three medical advice. The best way to educate them is in the office. 

Make sure you transfer new patient calls away from busy front death. Nominate your best people to handle inquiries. Consider handling after our inquiries. 

your interact. 

Kathy Gaughran 

So, all these are really important. Kathy, any quick comments on that? Yeah, it's really important. important that you're watching your conversion percentage. 

This is another tracking point is false to appointments. That could either be, you know, the targeting, the marketing, not reaching the right people, or it could be, you know, the wrong services, insurance issues, cost issues, we never want it to be the staff. 

So, it's important, again, that they're prepared to handle shoppers and shoppers are going to approach very differently than a referred patient would. 

They're a little more scrutinizing and often adapt don't like that. Sometimes that can come across in their vocal intonation. 

So, it's that everybody recognizes that this is the main way people will find you is through inbound phones or increase online. 

So, it's shaping that patient's perception of your brand as well. 

Stewart Gandolf 

So very critical that their engagement is very positive from the onset. Yeah, I did mention call centers. So for one of the biggest challenges, we see. 

is that as businesses evolve from like there's a critical period, probably 10 to 20 locations, at that level we begin to see professional management get invested, we see scaling, we still things like that, locations are become more consistent, operations become more consistent. 

Going back to living brand, think of Starbucks, like each location, the Starbucks has its own brand on a national level, but also on a local level. 

And it's the same for phones. the problem with, as you start getting into a dozen or more locations, those staff, generally speaking, it's a really difficult to train one staff, let alone 20 or 50, so quality control becomes a real problem. 

So, these days, I'm often recommending call centers. And if you need help in building your call center or looking to outsource that we have people we know that we think are best in class for those kinds of things, we don't do that, but. 

It's really important, especially as you scale to figure out, and we actually can think of it as a contact center at a call center because they're often doing text, email, chat. 

It's more than just calls. So, Kathy, that was the end of my presentation there, but I just wondered, I'd like you to ask any to bring up any questions you think, you know, based on your experience someone might have on any of topics we just described or any final thoughts. 

Kathy Gaughran 

No, I think you really covered that well Stewart. There's obviously a lot more on strategy. You know, we also work in the traditional space, B2B. 

There's a lot of internal things that you can be doing. I encourage businesses to try to balance out their new patient streams into a 30, 30, 30 profile so that you're never getting all of your eggs into one basket. 

30% of your patients coming from professional referrals, 30% coming from patient-to-patient referrals, and then 30% coming on their own. 

So, just important that you're done. Diversified with your outreach that you're optimized to the bone for local search. I can't stress how important that is. 

You want to be in front of the searches that are happening right in your communities now. So it's critical to get that blocking and tackling up work with an agency that will do a deep dive right onboarding so you can identify all the low hanging fruit. 

We just did an onboarding a few weeks ago and we were able to identify through lack of proper content that this particular website missed like three million searches in the category of care that they're looking to attract. 

So important that you're in alignment in terms of search demand that you're representing all of your service lines and locations. 

You've got your reviews and alignment so just making sure across the board that everyone's tidied up and prepared for visibility in their respective markets. 

It's exciting. There's a lot that we do in the multi-location space. We love it. We're really good at it and it's tough. 

It's you a tough challenge, but we've got the team and the experience across all these different channels to identify the most efficient way to optimize all the locations and work within, you know, your brand guidelines if needed, but just making sure that out of the gate that you're visible to local search. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Yep, and I would add to that they're interested in reaching out to us. You can reach out to me at [email protected] or Kathy at [email protected].  

I did this presentation, which is why Kathy's estate is not on here, but anyway, so you can reach out to either one of us and Kathy, great job. 

That was fun. Yeah, that was fun. We will see you on the next presentation. 

Stewart Gandolf 

Thanks for listening.