Transforming Healthcare Marketing with Storytelling that Connects

Stewart Gandolf

Hello again to our podcast. Welcome. And today, I'm, pleased to interview Skip Hidlay. I originally saw him speak in Orlando at the healthcare marketing physician, Strategy Summit, and he was beyond being a great speaker. He is actually today, the chief communications and marketing officer for the Ohio State, Wexner Medical Center and some of our perhaps longtime Podcast listeners and subscribers to our newsletter may know I actually went to Ohio State for undergrad. So, I think that's really fun to hear the point of view of what's going on at Ohio State, even though these days I'm in California. So, 1st of all, welcome, skip.

Skip Hidlay
Hey, Stewart, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited to be here and share a little bit of what's going on at the Ohio State, Wexner Medical Center and the James Cancer Center, with, you know, with your listeners and your viewers. This this will be fun.

Stewart Gandolf
Awesome. I think so, too. So, Skip, when we were talking offline as we were preparing today. And one of the things that you reminded me is, hey? I started out my career as a journalist, and that's going to be relevant to our discussion today. So, I'd love you just to give, you know. Expand on that. Tell people about your background some of the things you've done to set some context, and then we'll dive into some more discussion here.

Skip Hidlay
Yeah, thanks, Stewart. I really appreciate the opportunity to share my story. And really it's all about storytelling at heart. I still view myself as a storyteller and editor and a storyteller and a publisher. So, I started as a newspaper reporter many, many moons ago, and worked my way all the way up through various roles up into leadership roles as an executive editor, and then eventually a business unit, CEO as a president and publisher. But throughout that experience. What was so interesting is, I was able to lead the digital transformation of 3 different newsrooms from a traditional print centric model to a you know, it was never quite 24, 7 publishing, but it got to be, you know, around you know, 1518 HA day of publishing and publishing the news when you had it. So, I was at the forefront of the arrival of the Internet, and then and then the transformation of news from traditional print models into online. And the reason I mentioned that is the beauty of the web, as all healthcare marketers know, is the ability to understand what people are reading, and what people like to see and measure their engagement with the content. And one of the things I remembered from my early days, and looking at what people are interested in and from consumer surveys, is that people are always interested in learning more about healthcare, about health and wellness, about medicine and science that always ranks in the top in every study I've seen of what people kind of content that they're working on.

So when I decided to leave the news business after 30 years at the end tail end of the great Recession, and I moved into healthcare marketing and communications. What struck me is that we, as healthcare marketers and as healthcare systems, are sitting on a gold mine of expertise and content that consumers are very much interested in. So, I started my healthcare marketing career at Via Christi health, which is now part of ascension in Wichita, Kansas, the largest health system in Kansas. I was there for 6 years and then moved from there. The University of Chicago medicine led their rebranding to use Chicago medicine and was there during the 1st half of the pandemic, and then I moved to Ohio State where I've been for coming up on 5 years. But in all 3 places what I did was I focused on looking at, how do we create a platform, a web platform that could be a brand storytelling platform to really serve up the kind of content that I know people are looking for on the web, and that you know all of the data shows they're looking for as a way as a way of building the brand, humanizing the brand, and meeting people where they are.

Stewart Gandolf
So I love that background skip. And it's funny. Very few people know this. But back in my undergrad days I was at the just at the beginning of the transformation online. And so, I wrote a newspaper or an extra credit paper on the eventual demise of newspapers, and I worked at the Columbus dispatch in both the advertising and circulation departments when I was there. So, I think that's really funny that it wasn't. You know, that brilliant. It was kind of writing on the wall, but that was back. It was just beginning to start. CompuServe was the thing back then, and Columbus, I think, was like where CompuServe was actually headquartered. And so, they were. They were just beginning to experiment with interactive cable TV. I remember when I was there so very interesting times. So as that transition, before I go into Ohio State, I have to ask this.

You know the transition from print to; you know online to sort of everywhere as a journalist did the storytelling change? Or was it the same thing? Just communicate in a different way, like, what have you learned about humans and interest, you know, sort of by medium, and what things are true in any medium, what things are different. I'm just. It's an extra question. But I thought I'd ask.

Skip Hidlay
No, no, it's a great, it's a great question. And what I would say is that that over time, I think what what has happened is, we've become, you know, sort of a nation, and a and a globe of sort of skimmers and scanners, you know, thanks to various social media platforms and the and the advent of you know this, this computer in our hands, right.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, so.

Skip Hidlay
The issue is, people are looking at it, but what I find is people still will gravitate to human interest stories and wanting to understand people's personal journeys, and they will read longer form content. And in fact, Google in its search algorithms gives more credit in in some cases to longer form content if it's considered authoritative and authentic. So we've leaned into that in different places. And so, we try to try to create a diet, you know, or a menu, or a Smorgasbord, if you will, of different lengths of stories, different topics of stories we lean into. We do a lot of research every day into what are the trending topics online and try to put our experts in the middle of answering those questions that people are answer, asking in Google and Bing, and now increasingly on the on the AI platforms, perplexity, Gemini copilot. And so it's been, you know, a great, you know, a great sort of strategy for us, but then we also produce a lot of human interest stories about the interaction, you know, looking at, why does somebody devote their life to finding the newest treatment for lymphoma or adult lymphocytic leukemia, like what drives someone from a human interest standpoint to spend 8, 1012 years of their life, getting a getting, you know, a medical degree, going through Residency fellowship and then becoming deeply interested in research as part of clinical care. And there's a lot of fascinating stories that we've uncovered. But at the heart of it still comes back to what I learned as a reporter. People love reading stories about people and the more you lean into that, the greater the success will be.

Stewart Gandolf

That totally makes sense. And the attention span issue is so pervasive. We forget it's like air, right? We just don't think about it anymore. But it's different than it used to be. You know, we used to back in the old days on the marketing side. Talk about the more you tell the more you sell, and now, like you would just lose people in a heartbeat if we tried to communicate the same way we did in the past. So, I want to talk more about storytelling in a moment. But there were some challenges at Ohio State when you came to Ohio State, and you know it's a respected institution. It's known throughout the State of Ohio, but you had some challenges that you wanted to, or objectives you wanted to solve, and some challenges you wanted to overcome. I'd love you to kind of give us some grounding. There.

Skip Hidlay

Yeah, so, so great question. So, so, one of the issues is Ohio State is a very large, complex institution, large public university in its own right. One of the, I think, usually the top 5, if not the top 3 in terms of you know student enrollment. Then you have embedded within the university. This massive academic medical Center, a freestanding the James Cancer Hospital is actually the 3rd largest hospital by admissions. 3rd largest cancer hospital by admissions in the country, you know, you know, led only by Md. Anderson and Memorial, Sloan Kettering. And then you've got all you've got 7 health sciences, colleges all together on the same campus. It's kind of an extension of the main Ohio State campus in Columbus. And so, as you can imagine, there's a whole array of websites devoted to different parts of the healthcare enterprise, different parts of the science enterprise, different parts of the education enterprise and what I found was that none of them were really telling in a global way the overarching story of Ohio State as an innovative institution of healthcare and scientific discovery and ground, you know, sort of innovative approaches to teaching the next generation of physicians, nurses, and other clinicians.

So, I came upon the idea. You're not going to, you know, politically, in an organization as big as complex as that. It's going to be a fool's errand to try to combine websites and create something bigger. So instead, I came up with the idea of creating a brand new Content engine web storytelling platform which we which we called Ohio State health and discovery. And if you're game I'll share my screen. Here.

Stewart Gandolf

I'd love to, sure.

Skip Hidlay
This. This will work for a minute. Do that.

Stewart Gandolf
So. And I just mentioned to our listeners, if you're on video on YouTube, that's great. That'll be easy for you. If you're listening, you can. Also, we'll try to talk about what we're sharing along the way. And you can see the deck. I'll post that on the Healthcare success website along with a link to a video where we're going to be talking about a little bit later. So go ahead, skip.

Skip Hidlay
Yeah. So, we branded this website, Ohio State Health and Discovery because it spans more than the Wexner Medical Center. It looks at the James Cancer Hospital, the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is an NCI-Designated Conference of Cancer Center and the work that's being done in the 7 Health sciences, colleges, covered medicine, pharmacy, public health, veterinary medicine, and several others. And so, what we do is we designed this website to really target what we call health news consumers. And here you can see here some screen grabs on the screen of just different stories that we've done that really lean into both the topics that people are, you know, sort of asking, you know, in search engines, such as, Why am I having allergy symptoms in the winter to other things like really deep stories about doctors and scientists who are at the leading edge of their particular, their particular specialty, and what drives them and the work that they're doing, and what's meaningful about that work, so that when people need help.

I mean, we really consider this part of our mission. Stewart is, is as storytellers to put out into the into the larger global ecosystem content that really helps answer people's questions, make them better educated, but also that is there. When they are really searching, they have a real, serious, healthcare challenge, and they're trying to find what is the answer to my challenge. And where should I go for care, or what should I know about in terms of things being the latest? You know the latest in terms of the latest in terms of treatment. So, if I can get this to move. So here's kind of how we targeted this when I say the health news consumer and I'm assuming you can see my second slide, Stewart, just.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, we're doing great.

Skip Hidlay

Yeah. So, we kind of broke down the idea, we're not really. This isn't a a brand storytelling platform aimed at, really, You know, it's really much at top of the funnel, but it's not really aimed at directly recruiting new patients in. We will get new patients as part of this on, you know, undoubtedly. But we're really targeting the health news consumer. Someone who's regularly engaging with health content, you know, in their online content, consumption habits every day, and we sort of broke them into 4 categories. The deep learner people who want to learn a lot more about scientific topics, medicine topics. People who have the loyalty to Ohio State and the Buckeyes alumni like you, Stewart, we want to make sure that we're providing content. You're interested. Obviously prospects people who might eventually have some affinity to the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and want to become patients. And then the really, you know, particularly great area of influencers, people who within their own network, not influencers in the traditional sense of social media influence, but people within their social networks who are looked to for answers, who are who are respected and revered because their knowledge, you know, because of their knowledge of topics.

Stewart Gandolf

I love this. By the way, I think that's such a good sort of context to begin your mission to keep coming back to that slide every day, or that idea of those different target audiences. One thing I didn't see on there, for example, though, was referring doctors. Do you look at that as part of the deep learners? Or how would you characterize the other piece.

Skip Hidlay

Definitely be part of the deep learners. So, what we're doing is we consider health and discovery sort of our content engine and then feeding into that engine are these type of inputs. What are our marketing priorities? What are 1st and only treatments that we provide or discoveries we've made that are that would also be conveyed in a news release. What are gaps that we're identifying in high volume, search, content, where there are a lot of questions being asked in Google or Bing or other search engines. And yet there isn't a lot of high quality content to answer those questions. So, we try to fill those gaps. Other one is advancement priorities. What are the areas in which our advancement department? You know those who engage people in philanthropy are interested in exceptional patient stories. And we can talk about one of those trending search topics. And then, obviously, the news media, we know that this has become a source of story ideas for the for the regional news media in Ohio. So then, if you dial it down to the next level, it's kind of what are the outputs.

So, you have those inputs coming into the engine, which is sort of shaping our daily mix of content and our long range planning and storytelling with our teams of writers and videographers. But then you look at how do we spin this out? And this is really where the, you know, sort of the genius happens of this, this idea of a content engine and a flywheel. So, we use it to feed, you know. Obviously, our pitches to the media because we're out. We have writers out identifying great stories. Just the way reporters would we build enhanced service line pages on our core Wexner Medical center site and our core, James Cancer Hospital site, which I like to describe as the encyclopedia of our treatments and services. So, the content we're putting on. Here we provide relevant links and thumbnails in those areas. It helps shape leadership communications. Internally, it feeds our intranet and our internal communications. It feeds all of our own media products, such as our monthly and bi-monthly E-newsletters. As I mentioned it, feeds advancement communications a huge huge area, as all the social media channels were on. So, it provides great content to keep those social media channels and feeds humming. And then we use it as fodder for paid campaigns, such as Google Pmax and demand gen, so that's been wildly successful. And please feel free to react to that. If this raises any questions for you that you think your listeners might have.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, that's a great question. You know that I mentioned a moment ago. I did like the different target audience breakdowns. One of the questions that is related to this, I think, is as an academic medical center. You have a unique spotlight, you know, especially within Columbus and Ohio and elsewhere. Like as you're creating your strategy, you know. How do you break down your priorities from within these, you know, on a regional or national basis? So, for example, you know you could be. Say, well, I'm only going to pay money directly in, you know, within these counties within Ohio. But I want to have a broader, you know. Scope of press nationally. Do you have? Do you think that way like, how do you break these things all down into sort of a geography as well.

Skip Hidlay

Yeah. So, we obviously, you know, are trying to extend our reach across the you know, the entire State of Ohio. Our core market is Central Ohio, but we pull in lots of referrals from around the State, and so, we want to have good visibility, and the brand of Ohio State University is very, very strong across the State of Ohio, as you as you would know as an alum. You know great affinity for the brand, so that that puts us in a in an enviable position. But the other thing is part of what we're thinking about now that we've created the content engine is, how can we start to get the word out and build our brand regionally outside of Ohio, in, in adjoining States, where people may find that they have a serious enough condition that it that it warrants traveling to the James or to the Wexner Medical Center. And then are there other places that we want to build. You know visibility and knowledge to what a great team of physicians and scientists we have here, and what an up and coming and innovative place for science and discovery. Ohio State is so through that we do a variety of use of Google paid tactics, boosting on social media.

And then a lot of earned media. So, we pay a lot of, you know, pay a lot of attention to our earned media placements. We do a lot of work to get into the into the national discussion. One of the innovations that after we built the website, one of the innovations that I that I worked to develop was a, you know, a national consumer surveying or polling capability. And so, for the past 2 years we have done periodic surveys on kind of close to the news health topics. So, we have a team, that kind of brainstorms, those. And then those health news polls sort of create fodder. And then we build a whole array of content around it, some video content, some word content, photography content. And then we spin that out and we found great success in getting that into people. So, for example, one of the ones that we did in the past 12 months was one a poll around. Whether how many people believe they may have adult, you know, may have how many adults believe they may have undiagnosed ADHD, and it was a surprising number like 38%. So, then we had a whole array of content around, what would you do like? What should you do if you believe you have undiagnosed ADHD, what are the signs of it, you know. So, we kind of we're not just putting out the, you know sort of the news hook of the poll or the survey. We're then adding in expertise to help people understand and interpret it, and more importantly, how to act upon that information. What action should I take to, you know? Improve my health. And so that's been a very, been a very, very successful tactic that we've used.

Stewart Gandolf

Great. I'd like to ask also, prioritization. If you're in an academic medical center, I mean you almost anything you could cover right? And every institution only has, 1st of all, so many resources. So, you always have to prioritize. And you know, in other fields we come back to that in a second. Just curious about this question. So, you may, you know. And typically, in even any hospital environment, there may be different service lines. They want to promote more because we're just really good at it. They may generate revenue. We have doctors that were either, you know, leaders that want to get busier or just they want to. They're so talented and they have such a unique thing. We want to get the word out. How do you do this like? How do you prioritize? And your resources with so much going on at a big institution like yours?

Skip Hidlay

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So, it's a little bit of alchemy. It's the idea is, you know, first, when we were 1st deciding who to concentrate on. As we launched the site, we focused on physician scientists who already were kind of well-known in their field and highly respected in their field and focused on telling their stories. Some of them were already in leadership roles. They may have been experts in Oncoimmunology, certain types of surgery, whatever the case may be, and we'd always try to find the story. I'll give you one that was fascinating to me, actually give you 2. We did a profile of the of the new chair of ophthalmology, and you know the question. I always prompted the writers, as I always did as an editor in the news business is, what's the sort of core story here? Why is somebody doing what they're doing? What's the story behind it? And to really press the physicians to try to learn about them on a personal level. Well, it turns out our chair of ophthalmology, Dr. Sai Moroy. She was inspired to go into ophthalmology because her father suffers from glaucoma, and she's driven to find a cure for glaucoma, or at the very least, new treatments for glaucoma that can help people like her father.

We have another really prominent neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, Dr. Shahid Nimjee turns out his grandmother when he was 15, growing up in India died of a hemorrhagic stroke, and that inspired him to devote his lifetime to finding, you know, better treatments for stroke and better prevention strategies for stroke. So, it's fascinating when you, when you look at it through the human storytelling lens, and then we would blend in the science and the research that they're involved in. But you kind of find that interesting, that interesting human interest talk. And then we look at the strategic priorities. The organization cancer is one of our biggest programs. So, we, you know, find a lot of stories to tell around cancer, heart and vascular neuroscience. As you can imagine, orthopedics and sports. Medicine is a big area at Ohio.

Stewart Gandolf

Oh, yeah.

Skip Hidlay

Right. But also, you look at the lens of really good stories. So, you know, one of the ones that that we talked about in that I shared a video of during the conference presentation. I think you're going to put that video on your site was a story that we found out actually from someone on the advancement team where there was a family from Dothan, Alabama, who, the father was a physician practicing down there, and there was a tragic accident where their teenage son, you know, there was kids playing in in the house, and somehow the son ran through a plate glass window and a door like a like a sliding door and suffered a very severe, nearly life-ending wound, and they, life flighted him. The University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham, you know, they were able to 1st save his life and then save his arm. But unfortunately, the aftermath was he because of the nerve damage to his arm and the tendon damage. He lost the use of his right arm, you know, and he was at an age where he played sports, piano and things, and so the father was not satisfied that that there couldn't be someone who could help his son, and so he started asking colleagues, you know, if you could name 3 to 5 people who I should go talk to see if they could help my son anywhere in the country. Who would those be? And the one physician who came up on everybody's list was Dr. Amy Moore, who is our chair of plastic surgery. Now you think plastic surgery, you think, think nip and talk and aesthetics, and that there's a whole field of plastic surgery that academic medical centers are practitioners of which is to really help people with very serious injuries, you know, be reconstructed. There's obviously breast reconstruction for people who have breast cancer, and in Dr. Moore's case. She is a world renowned nerve microsurgeon, and we have a team that does a lot of work helping veterans overcome the pain of amputations, you know where they have residual pain. So, he came to visit Dr. Moore, and she performed an operation on his son Byron. This is the Heersink family and restored full use of the young man's arm. And we have this beautiful video of him now, you know, dribbling a basketball shooting hoops with his dad, you know, playing the piano. Just a miraculous recovery. And we actually sent, you know, a team, a writer and 2 videographers down to their home in Dothan, Alabama, to get that story, and we did that because it illustrates a something we have here that no one else has. It's a great human interest story, and it lets people know from a destination medicine standpoint that if they have this type of rare you know, rare challenge in their life that there are answers out there.

Stewart Gandolf

That's fantastic. Yeah, that was a very moving video. And I'm looking forward to putting that on our site. I think you should watch it. I know it's about 4 and a half minutes long, but it's an excellent video. You guys did a great job with that, and it's worth the time to watch as a listener and as just a human interest story as you mentioned. You know, going back to the doctor. Part of this, you know, like, when I started working with in healthcare a few decades ago, you know, doctors were insanely. Every single one was very skeptical about marketing that I talked to even people that paid money to come and see me speak about marketing, I mean people back. Then Skip would literally pay money to come and see me speak about marketing, and travel to a city and sit there for 3 days with me, leading a seminar and argue with me. It's like, wait you paid to come and see me and back. Then I remember one of my earlier clients said, You're not going to put my face on a billboard, are you? And so now you have this dichotomy where younger doctors are often pushing more for social media, or people do literally want to be on the billboard, and then you still have people that are very, very conservative. So how do you navigate that in an academic medical center? Because, you know, again, if you're prioritizing. I'm assuming you're going to focus on the people who want to cooperate versus convincing the people who don't. But like how do you? And then you also have to manage a lot of different priorities. So, I guess maybe what? Maybe you could share some secret sauce of, you know, helping doctors that are at least willing to participate to get that story out, and, you know, help them in the best light.

Skip Hidlay

Yeah. So, 1st off, I think a lot has changed over the last 2 decades. And I would say that probably the majority of doctors now really do appreciate marketing and really appreciate storytelling and want to have their story out. So, we get enormous cooperation and collaboration from our physicians. But we also have a philosophy of you know, we work with the willing. And so, somebody, you know, if we're chasing somebody down, and they say they're interested, and then they just keep ghosting. The writer. I just say, move on. We've got many, many other stories we can do, and whenever they circle back well, then, we'll put them back on the to do list. So, it's that work with the willing. That is kind of our mantra and the other, you know the other thing. I often say, you know there's always the old joke that we always sell marketing about the doctor wanting to be on the billboard.

And so, part of what our approach is, that is, that when we get requests for marketing. Again, they're often in the narrow focus of some physician trying to solve this problem or that problem within their practice. And so, I always, you know, coach the team, you know. We should never say no. Let's always say yes to something slightly different than we're asked. Let's find out what is the challenge, what is the business problem that the physician or the physician leaders trying to solve? And then let's design a program that could help them solve that. And that program may be as simple as some content around what they're doing that could then be amplified, amplified on social or in a in a Google campaign or a combination of both that isn't super expensive and not, you know, a whole lot of effort to produce and create. So, I think you can do a lot of this work on a low budget and be highly effective at it.

Stewart Gandolf

That's really, really smart with all this storytelling. And you actually talked about this a little bit. So, I'd like to transition a little bit to. How do we get these stories out? Particularly through Google and the ChatGPT and all those things? So that's clearly got a lot of people's attention these days. The 1st thing is, you have all these websites that you're, you know, managing as you went through and began focusing on one building, a major your flagship site, you know. Have you spent a lot of energy on? How do we leverage all this content? How do we, you know, combine content, you know, like from an SEO standpoint, what kinds of strides have you made there to bring this to light, and to get the maximum exposure.

Skip Hidlay

Yeah. And that's the key to the whole kingdom. What? You've just what you've just described. So, we're blessed here in that we had one person when I arrived who was who was well versed in SEO on the team. We've since added 2 more people to that, so we have a small but mighty 3 member SEO team, and that's the entirety of their work. We also have a good, a good digital marketing. You know, partner, you know, agency partner, that helps with that work. But we spend an immense amount of time focusing on schema. We've trained all of the writers and editors how to do some basic work. You know, some of the basic behind the scenes, you know, architecture work that's needed to be done. And then we consistently update our standards and our methods based on what's changing in the algorithms. And now we've really moved into really focusing on and tracking how many mentions we? We get into Gen. AI. You know, knowledge snippets, you know, both in, you know, from Gemini, from copilot, from perplexity, and from ChatGPT. And so, it's really making that a key part of your process. And I actually think I have a slide about that down a little bit further. I can see if I can find it.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, I'll just share. I've got a couple more questions, but I'd love you to share any other highlights of the deck you put together, because it was such a compelling presentation, and.

Skip Hidlay

Value.

Stewart Gandolf

I know.

Skip Hidlay

Posted on your site. So let me let me see if I can get this back up, yup like that one. For example, you talked about. I'd love to hear more about this one. It's just this is kind of another way of looking at us, feeding all of the different channels. But I wanted to talk through trying to get it to advance. Now, there we go. Okay, let me just zoom ahead here a minute. So, this is examples of you know how we are using deep storytelling to highlight the innovative people and program. We have a huge initiative around veterans and helping wounded veterans recover. This is the case. Study about the Dothan, Alabama boy, and that's the video. But what I really wanted to try is this, so this is kind of the team that we have, you know, put together, you know the whole idea that content doesn't happen by access, by accident. So, if you look at the infrastructure, we've surrounded one story. So, you've got basically the, you know, the writers starts with them. They'll partner with videographers. If we think video, you know, video is appropriate. We have editors that then do the editing of the story photographers brought in to do it. But then you really, the real magic here is bringing in the SEO team and the and the user experience design team to really bring the story to life in the web platform. And we're really proud of the design of the site. And then the digital marketing and analytics to look at the results that have been that have been returned at, you know, after the story has been out for a while and a lot of this, we're not looking for viral blockbuster content if we get it. That's fine. But what our experience has been, steward, is that this really deep, authoritative content just gains ground steadily over time, and you know it may start the initial launch. You get a few 1,000 page views, and the next thing you know, you're cresting 18,000, and then you're up in the mid-twenties because the content has an extreme shelf life and you surface it at key moments. In time, you know, when people are looking for answers, or there's some kind of trending topic. And that's a that's a technique. Candidly, that I borrowed from the from my days in the news business.

Stewart Gandolf

No.

Skip Hidlay

I think that's probably the best for now, because I know you have some other questions, but that gives everybody. I think, a little bit of a flavor of what? What we are, what we are up to here.

Stewart Gandolf

So, I would say another question. I think that's really important. And really, as we kind of close up our time together today, let's talk about the future. What are the priorities, you know? Obviously you've come in. You've done a great job of bringing together. By the way, I think I admire of any time you're working in Academic Medical Center. It's not like there's, you know, if you get a bunch of very smart people, there's always going to be politics. There's always going to be a lot of different in any institution in the world of, you know, priorities. And so, managing, that must have been a real challenge. But at this point now you've been able to demonstrate successes one after another. And so, I'm curious as now, with your successes, you know what opportunities and challenges has that created for you? And where do you see the future going.

Skip Hidlay

Well, the I think we’ve already overcome one challenge, as I think everyone in the field. And when I say the fields, anybody who's a content creator and producer experience. When there were a number of Google algorithm changes, and then the ascent of ChatGPT and the and the movement to sort of the whole, you know, sort of zero click strategy, you know, with the with the major search engines trying to keep all of the eyeballs on their own site. We all experienced dips in traffic, so we doubled down on our on our SEO work and on our schema work, and we put together a strategy, and we and we were very disciplined, and putting it that in place and continuing to upgrade, you know, kind of our behind the scenes infrastructure to make us more findable, visible, and appealing to the you know, to the to the bots, and to the now to the you know, to the Gen. AI you know, sort of gatekeepers, if you will. And so that's really we've had some. I almost say we've had blockbuster success. But we've overcome the dips we're regaining, regaining you know, page views and engagement and users, you know, month after month.

And so that's been positive, and we are tracking. You know our number of mentions in the snippets. But that's really the future. And I think that's what everybody's trying to figure out is, how do we continue to build authentic content? And I do think there's always going to be a role for human, generated, human, created content, separate and apart from content that can be created by AI, and that you know I don't know that I'm in the minority in that view. But I know that's a very debatable point, you know, but I think the challenge of everyone in a marketing leadership role is going to be to sort out what's the right uses for AI. What are the responsible uses for AI? How do we always make sure that there's human curation of the AI generated work and human eyes on it, because great mistakes can be made and so that's I really think that the challenge in our team. We've upskilled everyone on our team to use AI over the last 12 months. And we're very much an AI-focused shop. We're in that 1st year finish the 1st year of the of the maturity model that Gartner and others have put out. Now we're trying to figure out, how do we embed it more broadly into our work processes as a team? And that's a bit of a challenge, because each discipline has different work processes. So, what might work for the designers won't necessarily work for the marketing managers, etc., etc., you know. So, we're trying to figure that out. But I think that's the future horizon. How do we make AI, an embedded part of the tools that we use as marketers and communicators and digital strategists every day and show value to our organizations and continue to advance. You know the mission, the vision and the strategy of our organizations in a responsible and ethical way that ultimately helps patients and helps health news consumers. That's really what it's all about is helping people find the answers they need when they're in search of healthcare, or they have a question that they're trying to get answered.

Stewart Gandolf

I totally agree. And, by the way, that you know, being in the agency business, this conversation comes up at least daily, sometimes hourly, either with clients or internally. And one of the things that we've noted is, you know, organizations vary by their acceptance of AI individuals always do. And any crowd of people. There's going to be some people that love innovation, love new things people in the sort of late majority, early majority, late majority laggards like that model is just out there. But I feel like the answer is to use it smartly and to be able to think through. You know, there are things, for example, that we do. We use humans. And I'm going to come back to the human part in a moment to write our content, but to use it for ideation or to do things at scale, or you mentioned earlier. You didn't call it this. But content gap analysis like what's not written out there. That should be these kind of things. You can use AI much faster. And so, what's great for us is, it's not that we're spending less time on our clients. We're being able to deliver more for the same money, and you have to be competitive. It's an arms race. Otherwise, you're being left behind. Right, if you're still doing this the way you did stuff before.

But I guess the last question I'll ask you is, and I'm not sure if there's an answer that you can even directly answer. But you know, as we speak about this AI particularly the AI overview, zero  click, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of these, you know, the Academic Medical Center is uniquely in a great position to be there, for where we are. So, we break it down when we're talking to respective clients. I'm doing a webinar on this pretty soon into the categories, just keeping it simple technical SEO content. Local SEO, which is, you know, driven by directory sites, especially Google business profile reputation management. You know, we want links that go back to the very beginnings of the Google Algorithm. These are all things that are really important. But what seems to be really important today is the thought leadership. And the brand again, were important before. But they're especially important now, and as an academic center you have both right. You have a brand. You have authority, you know, experience, expertise, authority, and trust any other ways, any insights you can have of leveraging what you guys have to your advantage? Or is it the storytelling or just being super disciplined at the basics? Because, you know, it's like, not everybody has the benefit of being in an academic medical center in terms of the credibility of it all.

Skip Hidlay

No, no, and we appreciate that. And we take that responsibility very, very seriously. Again, we use our, we have a very. We have a small but, you know, very mighty media relations team. And so, we try to. We get a lot of requests for media interviews, and we try to always be responsive to those and put our experts out to the media to help educate them. You know their news consumers. So that's 1 way that that we try to be thought leaders. We will, you know, author Op-eds, when, whenever that's possible, from time to time on different platforms. And then, as I mentioned, you know, part of what we're trying to do is, is, you know, more purposefully insert ourselves into kind of the national brand consciousness. And again, one of the ways we do that is trying to use, you know, responsible polling and surveying on topics that that will help illuminate and then put our experts in a position to comment on those topics. So that's you know, one way we do it. That's, you know, maybe different from sort of your traditional paid, you know, paid marketing, you know, marketing campaigns. So it's that combination of sort of earned media, owned media, social media, you know, and putting the experts out there to answer the questions at the right time. One of the innovations that we did we haven't talked about was again, as we talked about the idea of people being scanners and skimmers. Video content increasingly, is consumed in short doses. Now, you know, even though this is a longer form podcast, that I'm sure I'll get great viewership, you know, because of your personal brand, Stewart. But we actually, you know, done a lot of study of what health content works on YouTube. And what we found is anything that's kind of like a minute or less that fits into that shorts category gets a lot of views. So, we've developed a what we call health explainer, short form videos. We'll pull in one of our experts and we'll produce, you know, 7 to 9 of these that will then spin out. You know, little 1 min sound bites that educate people on a topic, and those are getting great traction. So that's a way of using our brand to help be, you know, people become more educated on, on important, you know, health topics.

Stewart Gandolf

Skip. This was fun, and hopefully you had fun, but it was fun for me, and it was just as informative as I expected. I appreciate your time today and hope to see you at one of the conferences, or in Columbus. Someday soon so good talking to you.

Skip Hidlay That's great. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it very much.