Healthcare Marketing in the Post – COVID “New Normal”*

* Transcript below was machine generated by Adobe Premiere Pro’s speech-to-text feature, and is not 100% accurate.

Kathy Gaughran
Good morning. We’re happy to be here with you this morning and looking forward to sharing our market updates on health care marketing in post-COVID New Normal. A lot has changed over the past few years and we have pivoted through some really interesting challenges. So we’re here to share with you our observations on what we’ve been seeing and what we’re working on for our clients, specifically moving forward.

Kathy Gaughran
So in our presentation today will be I’ll introduce the team, Stewart, Kathy and Josh, we have on the call here today. We’ll talk about from pandemic to endemic our observations being in the space. We’ve all got decades of experience in health care and this has been a challenge like we’ve not been challenged with before. We’ll talk a little bit about branding and messaging, the cornerstone of your marketing, why it’s so critical to have your unique selling proposition or your core values evident and everything that you do.

Kathy Gaughran
You want to give people a reason to choose you outside of just convenience insurance or accessibility We want to make sure our message is resonating and our differentiation is standing out. We’re also going to talk about paid search, SEO and local SEO traditional advertising. A little bit about the traditional space B2B, optimizing your all important phone conversions, and then also digging a little bit into our wonderful tracking and analytics and attributions and reporting that we’re able to provide.

Kathy Gaughran
So with that being said, I’m going to introduce Stewart Gandolf, our CEO. He’ll be kicking off the presentation today. Stewart will introduce himself and tell you a little bit about his background and credentials here in just a minute. My name is Kathy. I’ve been a senior strategist running alongside Stewart for a couple of decades now. We’ve been all over the country excuse me, with health care, strategic strategy, strategic planning and planning, implementation.

Kathy Gaughran
Stewart and I have both worked with thousands of clients, as has our colleague Josh. Josh is our digital specialist and we’ll be talking to you about digital strategy and a little bit about what’s happening in the market space today. And then our other colleague, Jacob, won’t be attending today, but is available to field calls or questions if you have them following our presentation today.

Kathy Gaughran
So with that being said, I’m going to pass the baton over to Stewart Gandalf, our CEO, to talk a little bit about the impact of COVID19 during the emergency response phase of the pandemic. So, Stewart, I’ll pull.

Stewart Gandolf
That out now. So can you back up a couple?

Stewart Gandolf
Hi, everybody. I’m Stewart Gandolf. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for joining us. So we have a really good attendance today. So it’s always so the I can get on the air health care successes. Kathy mentioned we’re doing this for a couple of decades. One of the terms of our firm we are a truly integrated agency. You’ve got about 40 employees.

Stewart Gandolf
We work nationally, actually internationally. We have some clients in places like England. So we really do everything from branding to digital to traditional to professional referral building, lots of things, not in any way someone to talk today in this opening slide. I think it’s important to set the context. Some of you may have seen me do webinars or speeches before.

Stewart Gandolf
I often start off with a little context as to kind of where we are, what’s new, what’s happening. And I thought this was timely now and some of our long time blog subscribers and readers may have seen our webinars through, especially during the beginning of Pandemic. We did a whole bunch of webinars very well attended because obviously nobody knew what to do.

Stewart Gandolf
And we did a lot of thinking about, okay, where are we? What makes sense to do now? And so that’s really what we’re seeing. And we haven’t really done one like this for a while, but I feel we are at a turning point, and I wanted to cover over what’s real and what’s happening and what we’re what do we do now?

Stewart Gandolf
Because things are different. So one of the first things is I would like to point out is while we all are maybe over over it with COVID, it’s not done with us. Next slide it the right now this is a headline I’ve got from The Guardian about us. And it was saying essentially that it could be up to 30 times higher than reported and it’s already being reported a lot.

Stewart Gandolf
In other words, last time I looked at rolling seven day average is around 100,000 cases of COVID. But the problem is people don’t go to urgent care anymore. People don’t go to official places anymore. They get home text and there’s very little reporting from context. So most people that are COVID positive have just sort of suck it up and hopefully self-isolate, but that the source of data is now missing.

Stewart Gandolf
So the government really doesn’t know where we are and nobody knows where we are in terms of COVID. And we know that it’s likely much, much higher than the case rate is now. I know personally almost every other day someone I know personally has with it. So this is happening a lot. I mean, it’s so sample size of one, but I’m just telling you, it wasn’t like that in the early days of COVID where people came down so quickly.

Stewart Gandolf
Fortunately, fatalities are way down because obviously there’s been some improvements in care and people have had it or been vaccinated. And so but still, it’s definitely not over with us. Even though we’re in the summer camp, COVID is still spreading pretty aggressively. Next slide. Health care systems. It’s funny because, you know, everybody on this call or almost every fall follows from health care.

Stewart Gandolf
And we understand this. You know, the public thinks, oh, this has been a great opportunity for health care systems to get rich. And of course, it’s been exactly the opposite effect. Right. All those elective surgeries pose problems, all the disruption. And, you know, I’m reading even some of the most notable prestigious or prestigious brands out there are facing or as a result of the hangover from COVID or staffing shortages.

Stewart Gandolf
One of the key things we talk a lot in our friends over on the hospital side especially, but also on the multi-location provider side, staff shortages are all over the place. And that’s across the board in every industry. But health care is really being hit hard. And one of our long term care, skilled nursing chains is talking about to us repeatedly about the challenges of how to convince someone to come in at night at $15 an hour when they can make more money at, you know, at a fast food restaurant.

Stewart Gandolf
It’s really difficult to hire for. Given where we are today. Let’s put this is the offer. I hate to make this the first slide but these are just threw out is that we’re living with right now. And so we have mass shootings. We have division. There’s war crime. You’re right about back stabbing. So there’s mental health challenges arising from all of this.

Stewart Gandolf
Mergers and acquisitions are happening. We see this a lot. This is something that is really, really important. The across private equity and health care, health systems and even physician groups are merging and merging again and merging it down and getting bigger And we just recently did a blog to watch the data on this. Essentially, the not very long ago, most doctors were in private practice.

Stewart Gandolf
A couple of years ago, about half were remaining in private practice. And as of some recent data. 74% of doctors now work for somebody else. So those numbers have changed dramatically over the past just a couple years and a lot of that to recover and all these other things going on. But that is fundamentally changing our marketing, right?

Stewart Gandolf
If we have that kind of an environment where providers are being rolled up, it will impact how we do our marketing. Next slide, the next bullet inflation is high interest as you’re aware of this next slide below. This is in summary this morning. Some analysts this is from Korn Ferry, which is a consulting firm. Some analysts believe that the job hiring binge is going to go backwards to shutting by end of year.

Stewart Gandolf
Next slide Google. This is another article I read this morning about Google searching for their Holy Grail. In other words, they’re trying to find hybrid. But the net of all of this is there’s a lot of uncertainty right? This is a lot. There’s good news and bad news right now. It feels certainly very stressful for a lot of people.

Stewart Gandolf
A lot of people are still isolated. Health systems, obviously, are long past being in the, you know, everybody. Yes. Most a lot of companies now are back to work as normal. People like Google are trying to figure out how to get back to work. This is you know, a lot of things are happening. But the main thing I want to take away from this last bullet, which is even all of this stuff, it’s we are now seeing that people we feel that we see it everywhere, that businesses are really getting back to business.

Stewart Gandolf
They’re the patients, the waiting has happened and they’re now moving forward. I think that’s really important. So what you know, some things were obvious during pandemic and some are going back to the mergers and acquisitions that was happening constantly. And because we are at the pulse of that and work with, you know, some private equity companies, we work with these multi-location providers.

Stewart Gandolf
We were seeing this throughout the pandemic. But now, you know, a lot of other organizations may have not been fully engaged with these kinds of things, are thinking about marketing, but we are seeing just a huge influx in interest and marketing. We’re the busiest we’ve ever been in terms of new inquiries and new clients. And there are and lots of my colleagues at other firms that I know are facing the same thing.

Stewart Gandolf
So the reality is that we are in a new reality. And so that’s the purpose of the day is to talk about, OK, we can’t wait anymore. And in fact, if we wait, we’re going to be left way behind. So I wrote a cover today, some new ideas, some old ideas, that we need to address off some ideas with some context about like what are some of the key things we are seeing the successful businesses embrace right now?

Stewart Gandolf
So with that I’ll turn it back over to Kathy thanks.

Kathy Gaughran
So we want to talk a little bit about why you and why messaging is so critical in today’s changing environment. It’s foundational on establishing a presence and a voice for your brand. Again, we want people to choose you based on your unique, your uniqueness, what you bring to the market what you bring to your patient population, not just strictly price.

Kathy Gaughran
And sometimes it’s those with the deeper pockets win. So we want to make sure that we’re setting up a strategic approach to brand creating brand resonance defines who you are and how you are uniquely different from a competition gets people reasons to choose you. And keep in mind when we’re looking at basic health care decision making, women are making 80% of the healthier decisions for the family.

Kathy Gaughran
And we tend to be emotional decision makers. We make decisions and choose things and buy products we connect with and we feel is an appropriate fit. So making sure that that messaging connects with your buyer is critical to optimal conversions with your campaign. It helps them understand why a select select you and as I said, connects with your audience.

Kathy Gaughran
It also helps guide your internal team. We were talking a little bit about through a little bit about the difficulty with staffing, and a number of our groups have actually reached out to us to develop culture websites that talk about the culture of the organization. And then these sites are used for recruitment. So there are strategies and tactics to deal with today’s changing environment.

Stewart Gandolf
I wouldn’t say anything. It’s not a quick I’d say just a quick note was that, you know, bringing us back also, that was a great point about the cultural upset. I hadn’t thought of that. The other thing is that one of the big things that we’re seeing now and Kathy and you speak to this, the brand House versus House of Brands with the acquisitions, it’s something we talk about, right?

Kathy Gaughran
Yeah. Thank you, sir. So we do have a number of articles. I’m sure many of you are subscribing to our newsletter, but this deck will be available. And these are some fantastic articles that we’ve written on branding and our approach to branding. And then it’s just really important to diversify not only your delivery networks, but your your vision on how to resonate and reach these independent audiences.

Kathy Gaughran
You’ve got multiple audiences. We talk about trying to achieve a 30, 30, 30 ratio. I know that’s not exact and you’ll never going to see it that flat. But 30% of your patients coming from patient to patient word of mouth referrals, 30% coming from patients suffering girls and 30% coming from professional referrals. When you see a lot of professional referrals, that’s great.

Kathy Gaughran
That means you are highly respected in the medical space. But that tells me you are potentially not optimizing those other channels. So we don’t want to diminish any of those channels that you’ve got, you know, top producing and driving, driving patient volume, but you absolutely want to look at untapped opportunities when it comes to reaching out to consumers directly or optimizing your internal, you know, your advocates, your ambassadors, that can refer to you if you just stimulate them and reward them for doing so.

Kathy Gaughran
So your messaging is set. Now, let’s drive that message through a diverse content delivery network. You want to articulate your brand’s message across many channels. You want to achieve a content delivery network that reaches your entire demographic population and their varying buying patterns. And how they absorb information. You want to start with a strong differentiating online property as strong as SEO and optimize local most medical searches are.

Kathy Gaughran
Local people are looking for a doctor near me. Although many of you may reach beyond a traditional trading zone, most of your immediate revenue and business is going to come from your local market, and that is consistently changing. And Josh is going to talk about that in detail. Page search and page social. You want to integrate a push and pull strategy both online as well as traditional.

Kathy Gaughran
And we’re going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute, but you want to optimize your opportunities to be visible where people are searching. But also pushing your message where people aren’t. And those messaging strategies are very different. Drive up your response three to 5% by layering in traditional media. We’ve got a fantastic media planner and it’s so much fun to layer in traditional opportunities and watch how much that impacts the growth of the website traffic as well as resonates on our digital and SEO strategies as well.

Kathy Gaughran
I mentioned culture training. It is critical that your staff understands your uniqueness, your mission vision value we look at a practice like an upside down pyramid, a hospital and institution balancing on the end of the finger of the people answering your phone. They are responsible for whether or not all of these leads and referral opportunities are converted. So it’s important that they’re properly trained and that they understand how vital their role is to your organization.

Kathy Gaughran
And to your growth. Make sure you’re securing rivers revisits and referrals from patients by optimizing your internal strategies. There’s many, many of those that you can execute. It’s more of a workload on your staff, but you want to keep in touch with them, keep them up sold on additional services and product lines that you offer, and then make sure you’re optimizing your professional relationship to be to be outreach with a nurturing content strategy.

Kathy Gaughran
Content is king, and the key is to provide enough content so that we’re not having to sell what we’re informing. And as a result of informing, they are consistently coming closer and closer to you as a thought leader. And we have a few examples. Sure. If you want to talk about these for just a minute, these are three of our recent launches, Diverse Representation we work in all specialties.

Kathy Gaughran
We literally work with thousands of hospitals, practices and institutions across the country and our over 30 year tenure. So here’s a couple of recent different strategies. We had a large dermatology group that merged multiple practices under one umbrella. So another engagement that we work on with a number of our clients and actually are doing quite a bit of consulting is in the house of brands or branded house strategic approach if you are acquiring new businesses that come with their independent brand and that brand may potentially have resonance, it’s really important that you have a strategy in place to determine how to absorb that brand.

Kathy Gaughran
Are we going to take all of these acquisitions and the noble opportunities and put our mark on them and brand them as your own or will we let them maintain that independent brand? That has resonance and probably the reason you’re acquiring that business, do we need to let that stand as well? So that’s also something we can help with this creating a brand extension brand scaling strategy to make sure you’re optimizing each acquisition opportunity and not hurting either brand in the process.

Kathy Gaughran
So Stewart, do you want to talk about these creative executions for a minute? Sure.

Stewart Gandolf
I just I guess more broadly at this point for the sake of time, but we mentioned earlier today with all this upheaval, you know, it’s changed people’s buying habits. Right. And so before, you know, the trend towards health care, consumerism was already vastly underway. Pre-pandemic. Thank you very much. But now post pandemic ish, we’re in right now endemic is what the proper term as I guess the people have really become even more consumer direct.

Stewart Gandolf
So I guess my main point here is the bar has risen like the health care used to the ACA. Really not very good competition, right when back in the old days when we would talk about competition. So the bad news is you have competition the good news is most competitors don’t know what they’re doing. That’s not the case anymore.

Stewart Gandolf
So competitors are strong. So these are without going into detail about these particular clients, these each of these websites was designed for a different objective. You know, the Illinois dermatology was consolidating, updating, building a brand as a foundation for future growth, the one to know there is a men’s health business and doing extremely well. And we wanted to update the brand in the image as communicated by the website.

Stewart Gandolf
And then we have addiction, which is very common. And we want to do both things of both informing people from an intellectual point of view why this is better, from an emotional point of view, why this is better, keeping in mind the audiences include people like not just patients, but of course their families. But not just that it could be social workers, good people records, it could be, you know, relatives.

Stewart Gandolf
It can be many different things. So the biggest point I guess I can make for the second time we have today is the competition based upon all the things we discussed, especially the consolidation is the highest it’s ever been and the consumer direct health care consumerism is the highest it’s ever been. And both of those trends are growing next door.

Kathy Gaughran
All right. I’m going to pass this over to Josh and Josh, if you could also give a little introduction about your background as you begin your talk.

Josh Weum
Yeah, I’m Josh, ma’am. I’m an account director for health care success. And I had a career at Google for many years speaking as a conference speaker essentially expounding on the merits of paid digital and specifically Google ads. But today, I want to talk a little bit about some key points that each of these platforms, Google ads, should be the primary.

Josh Weum
But there are a couple others that everyone needs to be aware of and aware of what the new you know, the new version of these are. So starting off four years old, this summer, literally next month, Google Ads is four years old. And and I say that because it actually had a name change a significant name change in July of 2018 from Google AdWords which many of you heard that term still very ubiquitous to Google ads that change was made as a result of AdWords essentially meaning on the term keyword and Google ads evolving to become a lot more functional with regards to marketing and advertising.

Josh Weum
There’s a lot of things that aren’t keyword based basically. So incorporating a lot of that huge ecosystem that Google has is is part of what Google Ads has done over the last ten or 20 years. We’re talking about YouTube, we’re talking about Google Maps all of these things now work together to to increase your brand awareness online. Google reviews are critical as well.

Josh Weum
We all know there are different places where people can review your business a Google review. Is this prioritized in a lot of different ways that helps you elsewhere? Right, with Google Maps, with with your business profile that you have there, a YouTube presence is very critical. And I’ll touch a little bit more on that momentarily. But Gmail as well, a lot of folks don’t realize that you can do massive effective Gmail campaigns within the Google ads.

Josh Weum
Interface. The fourth bullet here, I did this intentionally. This is a jargony sentence that I want to just kind of break down, catalyzes brand growth. And then blend effectively. That is exactly what Google Ads does. Yes. We want ideally, we want people to find this organically to look up our, you know, what we do and find us at the top you’ve really got to use ads to get to that point if you’re a newer business or if you’re new to the online advertising ecosystem there.

Josh Weum
When you when you use Google ads, you’re you’re getting a lot of data that guides your SEO growth. You know, increasingly we’re seeing that it’s getting tougher to get data from people. Privacy is becoming more and more prevalent and that’s a good thing. But when we’re talking about advertising, you know, we use a lot of that information. So when you’re using Google ads right now, you’re getting information that can guide your SEO growth where otherwise you might not have that data.

Josh Weum
Google wants more control. This is going to be a constant. They’re going to continue to ask for, you know, the Keys to your account. We want to show you insights. We want to give you guidance. And while most of that is generally positive, when Google is asking for control, they’re usually asking for more of your money. And our job is to allow you to use that interface properly without giving them more money.

Josh Weum
You know, there’s a lot of advantages that you can get out of Google ads when you’re not allowing it to be automated, completely specific and know the tracking that you get from ads is significant. And I mentioned this before in Google Analytics. Right now, it’s tough to get data on on what your, you know, your website users are doing.

Josh Weum
When you’re using Google ads, you’re getting a lot more of that data. You’re paying for it, but it’s valuable as well. And then lastly, this platform does require proper management to produce ROI. If Google runs this for you, you might get two to one. You know, you’ll give them 100 and get 200 back. When you’re having a professional management firm handle this, you usually are looking at two or three times that are online.

Josh Weum
So yes, there’s a lot of automation involved, but it’s best to have the right folks handling this for you. Next slide, please.

Josh Weum
YouTube. So the Google Marketing Summit happened about a week ago for 20, 22 and YouTube was a very big part of it. I’ve been talking about the merits of YouTube for years, and one of the main things it does, it allows you to create a YouTube channel for your brand for absolutely nothing. Anything online like this. It’s free right now.

Josh Weum
I would urge everyone to take advantage of that. Your YouTube channel ties in quite a bit with Google’s ad networks and allows you to serve ads in different areas and allows people to engage with your brand very quickly. One of the things that we’re seeing a lot, you know, over the last few years especially is, you know, the YouTube when YouTube comes up on on the TV, you know, people are doing a lot of casting, a lot of over the top cable.

Josh Weum
You’re going to see send to my phone you know, right now when people are viewing YouTube videos, it’s happening a lot more on TV screens then you know, it has before it was briefly the large largest search engine in the world. It’s number two now. But basically YouTube is a lot of people are searching the YouTube search bar.

Josh Weum
And right now, if you search for anything really on YouTube, you’ll find ads above your video recommendations that happen below that. So what what I’ve been telling people when it comes to the media buy that YouTube has and you’re getting it at a digital cost, which is extremely low in comparison. But this audience is shifting more to the TV media.

Josh Weum
As I said, you’re getting a lot of this YouTube viewership on a TV screen where they’re actually able to send that to you to their phones. Usually we see costs of five to $0.07 per view. Whenever anyone skips an ad, you’re not paying for that. So there’s a lot of what I call, you know, pre-roll branding happening there.

Josh Weum
If you have an effective first 5 seconds of your YouTube videos, it’s always going to be a free impression to whoever says that when they skip it. So you know a lot of value on this platform. I can’t say enough about the importance of YouTube moving forward. Next slide, please. Just add to that real quick. It’s now again that buying habits today are changing and have now become during during pandemic a much bigger YouTube user.

Stewart Gandolf
It’s a big part of my life now and it’s funny how I think we’re seeing again with streaming and of course, cord cutting. But Google YouTube was big before when we were speaking about this. It was. Yeah, I sorry. Go ahead. No. And then, you know, one of the things that they’re looking to do right now, YouTube ads are evolving a little bit.

Josh Weum
They’re looking for smaller ads for what’s called YouTube shorts, injecting these ads into different places. And and yeah, I’ve been I’ve been saying this since I was at Google, actually. But but we definitely want to encourage people to develop a good YouTube presence and procure that online, especially when it’s free to set up a channel and develop that identity.

Josh Weum
Thirdly, I want to go into Google business profiles. You may know these as Google my business or GMB or if you’ve been around for a while like I have, I Google Places. What’s the previous name? A lot of name changes over the years. That’s something Google is very good at. But the important thing to recognize here is that these profiles are more important than they ever have been for not just digital advertising.

Josh Weum
They have a place there, but they do tend to rank very highly with local SEO. And then organic rankings are also bolstered by these profiles. So what they are, you know, they offer that free local marketing asset that drives a lot of local traffic. Very, very critical for health care. These profiles are again free, but you do have to do some things to build them up and make them a little bit more visible and more effective.

Josh Weum
So one of the things they do, they immediately give people easy links to get to your locations. They give you a button to tap for a phone call and a lot of other functionality right there on the search engine results, page, ratings, reviews, things like that. All of that shows up organically and it’s also free to set that up.

Josh Weum
So one of the things you can do with GMB, Google Business profiles, GBP, however you want to call it, you can encourage people through that platform to leave you high profile Google reviews. Once again, those are going to help your SEO. They’re going to help your brand growth. A Google review is the preferred place to have people reviewing your business.

Josh Weum
It also allows a lot of social interaction. You’ve got photos and videos, a Q and a a back and forth for patients. So that dialog the previously was one sided business to the consumer is now two sided. And, you know, Google business profiles really allows you a great tool to do that. Google Maps I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve had from people over the years asking me how to get on Google Maps.

Josh Weum
Well, you can’t you can’t say, I want to place this ad on this maps page. What you can do is have your criteria in place for Google to allow you to show up on maps. In this case, that means having an ad campaign, running a location extension, kind of that ad campaign possibly a smart campaign. There are a couple of different things that you can do to tell Google, Hey, I’m local.

Josh Weum
I have a business that’s relevant in this context of the search that’s being made here. And I want to show up. So we oftentimes guide people on how to meet those criteria so that you have an ad showing in places, effective places, like Google Maps last. I do think that and I’ve been saying this for a while, but it’s it’s usually pretty predictable when Google acts the way they have been with this platform.

Josh Weum
Oftentimes they’re moving towards monetizing this kind of thing. And all I will say there is that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Usually monetization comes with different tiers of value. And, you know, impacts. I would say, though, that we want to be ready for that. You want to have everything that you can for free built up. And, you know, it’s as strong as it can be in advance of anything they may do to bolster this product and add more features.

Josh Weum
Next slide, please. So a couple of insights from from these these three slides. Here is your PPC over branded. A lot of folks will not have a lot of insight into what their paid search is doing. They’ll get, you know, a rudimentary report and take a cursory glance at that once a month. It’s important to know what over branding is if if a vendor is handling your PPC and it looks really good and sure that you’re not using your brand name as the main driver of that success, you know, there are a lot of instances where you want to show up for your brand, another competitor, maybe try to use that as a keyword that

Josh Weum
happens all the time. What you don’t want to do is have the lion’s share of your marketing going to a known entity like your branded keywords. It should be there in some context, but if your numbers are extremely strong, it could be representative of over branded paid search. What is conquest thing and is that happening to me? We all know what it is.

Josh Weum
The term is not always as known. So conquest thing is when another person is using your brand name as a keyword to get business. Some people don’t think that’s allowed. It actually is allowed. Coke will bid on the term Pepsi, Ford will bid on Chevy. You know the other brand be competitive. Brands want to give an option to someone who may be looking for a service or a product.

Josh Weum
So it’s going to continue to happen. You know, a competitor who sees value in your name is allowed to use that as a keyword. What they cannot do is put that in their ad copy so no one can actually, you know, take your copyright or your trademark. But in the context of over branded PPC, if you’re not using your brand at all as a keyword, there’s a chance that someone else is and thus is usurping you on that, on that, you know, search engine results page, we don’t want that the rise of telehealth search volume is is extremely noticeable.

Josh Weum
You know, mental health is the biggest driver of that. But alcohol is also right there in line with it. Obviously, fentanyl and other drugs and other, you know, mental health and significant number of urgent care visits have have seen large spikes in search volume as well. So telehealth is here to stay it came about, you know, more so as a result of COVID.

Josh Weum
But a lot of people are seeing the long term value of telehealth in both the effectiveness of it and in how far you can reach out to to help folks with with that kind of service force add extension usage and importance. One thing I want to touch on here, a lot of folks tell us that Groupon deals are one of the best ways they’ve ever driven patients, whether it’s through their business profile or another, you know, Groupon deal, you can actually do promotions and things like that within Google ads.

Josh Weum
There’s an ad extension called a promotion extension that you can use to offer free screenings, you know, $39 screenings, for example, right there within the ads. So while Groupon has been really good for a lot of folks and tends to drive business in some ways, there are other things that proxy, that same dynamic that we can be using now without you know, paying anything.

Josh Weum
Extra landing pages are important. I know we showed a few of of, you know, some of our Web work earlier, but it’s important to recognize that when Google is giving someone a search result, they’re pointing them to the page that matches what they searched. The lower that relevance is that the lower they’re going to ding you. So we want to ensure that when you know, someone’s looking for urgent care near me or, you know, a dermatology doctor, that they’re going to a page from that ad that matches with what they were looking for you know, years ago.

Josh Weum
You could send people to your main site and, you know, give them options to look at anything that you do or any service you have today. We know that if someone is looking for, you know, specifically for off therapy or something, they’re going to want to go to a page that has that Google ID verification. All I’ll say there is that you know, there are a lot of things that Google asks of advertisers and some of those things can be convoluted and problematic.

Josh Weum
We handle all of those Google verifications policy. You know, there are a lot of different rules to be conformed to when it comes to advertising on Google, keyword match types of negatives you know, this is negative keywords essentially tell people I don’t want to show up ever when someone is searching for this word. So if that is free for you, maybe you don’t take a certain insurance.

Josh Weum
You know, we don’t want people who are looking for Medicare, for example. Negative keywords are very important. Keyword match types are also important. But I don’t want to get too nerdy here. But the last thing I’ll say for these strategic insights is conversion tracking. And I will touch on this at the very end as well, a little bit more.

Josh Weum
But, you know, too many people aren’t tracking where their phone calls are coming from. They aren’t tracking what their ROI is on these different marketing efforts. And we feel it’s critical to have that in place early on and to engage and monitor the effectiveness of each campaign with conversion tracking estimates to do that.

Josh Weum
Next slide, please. And this is just a buzz term I wanted to touch on. We’ve all heard the term a geofencing. Essentially, a geo fence is a virtual boundary that you know, you draw around an area that you want to target people. If that is a certain neighborhood, if that’s a certain, you know, building an event, a college campus, a hospital system, an airport park, you know, there are different ways where you can find the folks that you’re looking for in a very specific area and target an ad to that area and to that specific group of people that’s very relevant to them in that moment.

Josh Weum
So geofencing is a buzz word that it’s really just targeting the people that you want within a fenced area.

Josh Weum
Kathy I’ll hand this back over to you or sorry, Stewart for you.

Kathy Gaughran
Josh Yeah. It’s going to take over. So appreciate your feedback. Josh and Stewart, you’re up.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. So going to talk about ASCO in just a moment. I did want to add another thing that occurred to me as Josh was talking. So you mentioned telehealth and I realize we didn’t set that up in the opening and that is the way health care is being delivered is also changed. So I probably should have gone on the opening slide.

Stewart Gandolf
But today, retail health care centers like CVS, Walgreens, you’ve got telehealth, you’ve got pure plays that are coming out and there’s disruption everywhere. So it’s just part of our landscape. And I feel like it’s interesting. Yesterday we were talking with one of our new clients, which is yet another disruptor, and talked about geofencing around retail clinics and how we do that.

Stewart Gandolf
So it’s really, really important to recognize that things are changing and we have to adapt. So with as CEO, again, going back to our topic here post COVID, this is some of these principles were before, but they’re even more important now. So right now we want to make sure that with our ACA strategy, it’s really thought through not just raw traffic, we can get lots of raw traffic, but are we in the right places?

Stewart Gandolf
What’s our local SEO strategy versus our national sales strategy and what are we searching for? Content based keywords versus educational keywords? And the answer is usually a combination of both. The purpose know what? How are we trying to position ourselves as a thought leader, either in our own market or nationally or worldwide? These are some of the decisions we have to make of that SEO and by the way, SEO is one of my very favorite topics.

Stewart Gandolf
I’m an SEO nerd, love paid search to. I have literally been at conferences where math has something in a jump in the air, like excited and that’s just like what a nerd I’ve become. So I love this stuff with our own company with SEO. So let’s jump straight into the content here.

Stewart Gandolf
So one of the things that we break down SEO in a variety of different ways depending on the context. But when we think about SEO, we see again insights as clients that come to us and things change today. You know, every client we work with has websites every client has some. Our SEO could be good or bad. Oftentimes we’ve been paying for SEO and it doesn’t have the most basic functionality built in.

Stewart Gandolf
And that’s why as far as me that’s the most basic stop. The layoffs are being ignored. So the technical SEO is something that most people think about SEO and it is really important. But things like how do you structure navigation it is absolutely vital. When we migrate websites from an old website to a new website, that stuff is absolutely vital.

Stewart Gandolf
I’ll give you guys a little secret here. We’re about to relaunch a website, the first version of our own website in a long, long time, and that planning is under way right now. All those links, what exactly is going to happen step by step by step and the good of our clients as well. One of the websites we showed earlier received a 30% bump when we when we relaunched to the website, which is, you know, if you don’t do it right, you can throttle your SEO presence.

Stewart Gandolf
So doing all that crap and work to make sure that watch is being done properly can actually help you. And if you don’t do it right can really, really hurt, you know, things like internal linking a new URL URLs and page speed as a performance issue. Google cares a lot about page speed and it cares a lot about mobile responsiveness.

Stewart Gandolf
Now today about two thirds of searches are mobile. So it’s really, really important to be thinking of all of these things. And then we start thinking about, OK, that’s all the technical stuff or how do we build our brand through this? And one of the things we talk about a lot with clients and when we do speaking in different venues is that when we’re talking to Google or when we’re doing websites about I had this conversation with one of our clients when we were talking about a website.

Stewart Gandolf
The challenge is anybody can write, but the problem is we need to write for multiple audiences on websites. So we especially need to write for the health care consumer, right? That’s obvious. We think, well, we also have the right for caregivers in many cases. OK, that’s another audience, but we’re actually have to write for a professional first. OK, that’s another audience.

Stewart Gandolf
And then really a really important we have to write for Google. We have to be written in a way that Google understands what’s on the page. Oh, by the way, on health care, it needs to be factual and it needs to be captivating and motivating. So writing the content side of Google is vital. But the other day you can have all this technical stuff done if you don’t have the right content it’s just not going to be successful.

Stewart Gandolf
And then how do you get good at SEO is to create great content and content that other people want to link to and I don’t have time for today. And the whole story of Google’s billions comes down to one insight, which is that the most important research papers are cited by others in Google in a similar way, found that sites with more links and better links and more relevant links are more likely to be authoritative.

Stewart Gandolf
So this is a lot. This is never a one step race. This is a never ending marathon with SEO. But the good news is as you go over time, it gets stronger and stronger, becomes a valuable asset like cyber, looks like this is just a sneak peek at how what this looks like, because when we work with clients, we do Deep Dove audits into every all of these different types of things.

Stewart Gandolf
So we want to look at content and linking and navigation and redirects and new URL structure and silos and lots and lots of technical stuff beyond the scope of today. But the key point here is that again, when we see in today’s environment, again, every website, every client has a website, every provider or every health care system that we work with already has a website.

Stewart Gandolf
But typically there’s a lot of low hanging fruit that is sort of real. I guess that’s a good point to make. Many times as they go through these audits, the first thing we find is like, Oh, this is the good news about us. The bad news is this was done horribly, but the good news is when we fix it, we can get a real boost of results so many times before we worry about writing new content.

Stewart Gandolf
For example, we’ll go in and technically change the way that content is created or the way it’s structured and leverage what you’ve already got. Find low hanging fruit for some quick wins. So that’s really, really an important step. So that’s something that we look for a lot. Like sign local search. So local is different and local is really considering the actual algorithm with Google is different for local search.

Stewart Gandolf
Josh talked about Google profiles and we all laugh internally how hard it is to get away from you’re being just for lots of time, but you know, I just show up well on maps on the organic side of this because that’s all about the type of business, the proximity and the credibility of the local business. They call it prominence in the Google parlance.

Stewart Gandolf
And so it has a separate algorithm. The things some of the things just on the organic side of this what helps? Well, first of all, just tell you to make sure that your listings are consistent across all types of listing, not just Google. Secondly, because I’m talking about the name, address, phone number is classic because Google has a hard time understanding what the source of truth is out there.

Stewart Gandolf
So making sure you have that handle number two making sure that those profiles are robust with every possible field that you can fill in. So this is harder and more important as you get into multi-location businesses. Like we often work with. It’s one thing to do a one off versus another to do 50 or 100 or 300 offices.

Stewart Gandolf
So the importance of this just gets more and more. Then if you start thinking about are we going to include our providers and how are we going to do that? So I know it sounds easy, but it’s not always. And so you have to think about how to scale that. Another thing to think through is review, not just reviews that Josh alluded to earlier, but responding to reviews.

Stewart Gandolf
Google’s come out and officially said it will favor websites that not only have good reviews or have a lot of reviews and good reviews that favors sites that where someone is responding to reviews. So this is a whole other area we’re looking at. We don’t have a SERP here, a search engine results page on our back. But if you look at a typical search engine results page with the paid out to the top and the Google local search in the middle and the natural results below, people ask all the time where it ought to be.

Stewart Gandolf
And I’m like, hey, I’m a page not on all and so those are you really do want them all. I those are three different strategies. The next slide I mentioned mobile first and just for the sake of time I’ll go through this quickly. Mobile is just dominating search these days. And I mentioned earlier roughly probably two thirds of searches we’re seeing that varies some of our like in the more contemplated purchases like cancer might be closer to 60% but something like urgent care might be 80% mobile.

Stewart Gandolf
So mobile is dominant. I can’t think of a client where desktop is more prominent in terms of number of searches for any of our clients. So I can’t think of a single one. So it’s always is the most important but sometimes it’s really really really really important. So we want to make sure that we have our mobile strategy figured out some of the things we talked about here.

Stewart Gandolf
A voice search, voice search is an opportunity now it’s funny, we have a Google home speaker downstairs. We have our life is built around that at times is when it’s time to give. Our dog is Matt. You know, we ask him to play music all the time and we also ask, you know, for like, hey, where is Target’s address or whatever?

Stewart Gandolf
So we use things that are localized based. I also use cereal on time with my phone on my watch. So the those searches, if you design it right and oftentimes it’s sort of an epic sure matter can be more likely to shop for Google Voice and Mobile first indexing. What this site is referring to is back in 2015 or 16.

Stewart Gandolf
I think it was 16. They called it mobile getting one little first said we really care a lot about mobile first. But at 20, 21 it started and mobile first indexing. So these are big deals and big changes for today like so the yeah, what this is really referring to is we want to play both. So having high organic rankings increase of being a local local tax.

Stewart Gandolf
In other words, if your web site is strong and the way it’s designed, you actually do better with Google Local on the Google business partner for them profile. So the and I mentioned some of these other things. So you really just got to play it on local search focus. And again, going back to the endemic, all we’re seeing is just so much more sophisticated search.

Stewart Gandolf
It used to be a couple of years ago pre-pandemic that, you know, if you’re competing against a multiple another multi-location provider that their Google stuff was kind of all over the border. You know, it’s like sometimes their listings were good, sometimes they weren’t. Nobody was really paying attention to the reviews nowadays not not only do you have to focus on your own, you have to recognize your competitors are taking this very seriously.

Stewart Gandolf
And if you haven’t looked at competitive searches around your locations lately, I suggest you do like OK. I will add before I just do sort of a speed dating here for the rest of the time because I want make sure we have time for that. You want to cover any specific topics out of this? We’ve got about 15 minutes left and a few minutes left for Q&A.

Stewart Gandolf
So we’ll cover which.

Kathy Gaughran
Is got three little sections left. So I want to get through these so traditional we mentioned earlier that really marketing falls into two categories push and pull and layering on traditional into a digital strategy improves your search results, improves traffic to the website and improves brand resonance. So make sure that we’re not omitting traditional to old school thinking because the pendulum has swung back and the integration of the two traditional and digital is really optimal for full market presence.

Kathy Gaughran
And then we also do a lot of work with B to B, B to B has really changed obviously through COVID, that was difficult to get in to meet potential decision makers. So we have developed multiple different strategic approaches to be the air war to your ground troops, if you will. We can create a strategy that makes their visits last longer that resonates further.

Kathy Gaughran
It also helps warm up the businesses that they’re calling on. So it’s good to have a layered strategy targeting your B to B candidate. You also have the opportunity to do geofencing and target a specific campus or an event. As Josh mentioned earlier, there are a lot of B2B targeting opportunities that are available digitally as well as an email list you’re able to target on social media with pretty good accuracy and consistency on an email list.

Kathy Gaughran
So again, there’s a lot of different ways that we can layer in B2B to help support your outreach team. And then as I mentioned, you have the opportunity to target them not only on social media, but we can do retargeting. So building in a layered approach on top of marketing automation and email marketing on top of your trade shows and conferences that you’re attending, and then making sure that your team is trained and that they’re executing proper strategy and tactics and follow up so you can optimize those opportunities as well.

Kathy Gaughran
The difference with B2B is you’re dealing with a much larger price tag on those relationships than you are with individual patient. So if one of those relationships is mishandled, that can cost the business hundreds of thousands of dollars and lost revenue. So it’s really important that your staff is polished and understands the importance of their role in your business.

Kathy Gaughran
And then this is an example of our recent we just redid our backdrop and have been having a lot of fun at the conferences Stewart suggested that we raffle off this Fender guitar, which just gives the whole environment a little bit more personality, makes it fun for your staff. As well as people coming by the booth. So it gives you something interesting to talk about.

Kathy Gaughran
So also critical that you build a strategy for your conferences and events that you’re attending, not just showing up and hoping for engagement, but putting things out there that are far more engaging and interesting and provocative that they can talk about following the event all right. And then optimizing phone conversions. I mentioned earlier that we look at the practices, businesses, hospitals, like an upside down pyramid, balancing on the end of the finger of the people answering your phone.

Kathy Gaughran
They need to be aware that each new inquiry is a top priority. Establish rapport with the perfect greeting, making sure they understand your mission vision value, and they’re communicating that on each and every call because each call is an opportunity. Discover the caller’s need. Don’t make it all about you. Establish value, though. Make sure that they take something away from that call that makes them remember you and understand why they should choose you as opposed to their alternatives.

Kathy Gaughran
Dual alternative pillows try to minimize those decisions for them and be sure to answer their objections. There’s a high level of emotion. Selling health care is very different than retail. You’re selling something people don’t want to have to buy. They’d rather not be sick or not need surgery or not need the services that you’re offering. So there is a very high level of fear and emotion especially leveled on top of everything Stewart talked about in our intro.

Kathy Gaughran
Set your stuff up to succeed. Make sure that they’ve got training. Make sure you’ve got the right people in the right positions. If they’re telling you they don’t want to be on the phone, you want to hear them. So it’s important that you’ve got the right personalities and people and track every single inbound lead. And we’ve got lots of ways to do that automatically through tracking call numbers and devices, through attribution that we set up.

Kathy Gaughran
But you also want the staff aware of where these calls are coming from and then analytics and reporting. We also make sure that we’re very transparent. It’s critical any agency partner that you have remained transparent with their planning and their tracking so that you can do the tracking real time on a dashboard that allows you to see how well the campaigns are looking.

Kathy Gaughran
And I’m going to have Stewart and Josh talk about track tracking and analytics. Josh is in the center of it, and Stewart really drove the build of this. So with that being said, either of you two want to take the lead?

Josh Weum
Yeah. As far as the dashboard that we offer, I mean, we want we want to ensure that we’re always looking at things like cost per inquiry, cost per click. How much of the impressions we’re getting, the overall traffic boost and a lot more. Our dashboard, our reporting dashboards are available. 24, seven. We definitely want clients to be in there taking a look at things very transparent and that way tracking numbers are one of the most important things you can do regarding any of this marketing.

Josh Weum
Your Google My business, your website and your ads should all have different numbers or YouTube should have its own number, et cetera. Call recording and call tracking platforms are important as well. They tell you which of your marketing efforts are actually driving our way and which ones you should put more effort into. And then things like caller ID call length, you get a lot of data from these.

Josh Weum
We share all of that. It helps to guide the decisions that grow your business.

Kathy Gaughran
All right. Thanks, Josh. And that concludes our presentation so we did have a couple of questions. Come in.

Stewart Gandolf
Go ahead. I’m sorry, actually, Katie, before we get to we didn’t we haven’t brought up yet because you’re afraid of me. So we offered we decided to make an offer for anybody who is on their call today. We call it a SDR, a digital checkout. So if you’re interested and it’s not a full audit like we referred to earlier, but if you’d like to speak to Kathy or Jacob about some of our how your presence is showing up for some of your locations or location, your Web site, how it’s doing in terms of SEO especially, but also page search reputation or what have you, you can reach out to us and we will happily give

Stewart Gandolf
you the SEO digital checker. So, Kathy, you want to read off the questions or you want me to go? I would like to go through.

Kathy Gaughran
And I’ll let you do that if you go ahead and.

Stewart Gandolf
Read it. Perfect. All right. So the first one was submitted to Josh and he was asking where your Google listing be monetized by AdSense. What are the requirements

Josh Weum
yeah. And so for that, it’s speculation the Google business profiles will be monetized soon. That would not have a tie in with AdSense. Most likely AdSense is going to be what puts ads on to your website and how you accrue revenue from that.

Josh Weum
In this case, we’re talking about Google business profiles evolving from a free only version to something where you have the free variant and then you’ve got different tiers of value or you’re paying a little bit for extra features more. So that kind of a dynamic then your profile, having ads on it or being monetized itself is very good.

Stewart Gandolf
The somebody asked for an email address for the offer. Sure. So if you do send it to info, info, info, at health care success dot com and it Tanya will help you coordinate the online checkout. So Kathy, let’s see another question came in. What are your thoughts on direct mailing for virtual practice or for any kind of business?

Stewart Gandolf
Actually, I can speak to that too.

Kathy Gaughran
Yeah. Well, you know, direct mail kind of falls into that. We were talking about push and pull marketing. Direct mail has benefits and drawbacks. It can be costly. You need to have household multiple times in order to have residency so often three to five times. So it’s really important that you build out a strategy, make sure your list is accurate.

Kathy Gaughran
That’s the one of the biggest criteria in looking at the variables. Testing of strategy like that is the accuracy of that list. Then your messaging and your offer and your timing are also critical. But we do a number of direct mail campaigns as a layer on top of other strategy so it’s more of an integrated approach. I haven’t done a standalone.

Kathy Gaughran
I know that was part of the question. So you’d want to make sure that you’re not just putting all your eggs in one basket and you’ve got a little bit of a of diversity in your outreach.

Stewart Gandolf
And I’d like to add to that too, because I’ve done about early in my career, I probably was involved with about a half a billion pieces of now delivered four great big banks and people like that. So Mail today is fun. Next week it’s in a renaissance. It’s a reawakening because it was, you know, when we started way back when, you know, digital was nonexistent or nascent, and then it became digital, digital, digital.

Stewart Gandolf
And we were way ahead saying let’s go to digital is to digital. And then eventually the world caught up and now we forgot about the traditional mailings and traditional things like that. So it’s funny as as a CEO, of a company, I rarely get it right now. It’s crazy. And so it’s a great way. I got hundreds of emails a day, but I only got a few pieces of direct mail.

Stewart Gandolf
So direct mail giving us intrusive nature can be really effective. The key is with direct mail is to have the right lists. It comes down to the right list. We always used to talk about the right list is at least 40% of the effectiveness of it. So the right offers maybe another 40%. The creative itself is maybe 20, but it’s a list because without the right list it’s going to be dead on arrival before it even starts.

Stewart Gandolf
Next question is about I think Josh will give that one to you. OK, you got into it on the WordPress question.

Josh Weum
Yeah, it was WordPress, a great flat platform to use. Some argue that it’s outdated even in health care. I would I would contend that it’s still an industry titan WordPress allows. The biggest feature that WordPress allows is integration and plug ins to almost every app or feature that you want to plug into when it comes to call tracking customer management systems, WordPress is going to be, in most cases, the easiest.

Josh Weum
And I’m not shilling for WordPress, right? We use all kinds of different platforms, but I’ll tell you that it’s not dead by any means, and it has a lot of functionality that some of the other web hosting and building platforms, you’re going to have a lot of finishes. One I we’ve got actually a time for looking. Yeah, I’m sorry, Josh, that new question might be a good one for you.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah. So I’ll answer a couple of things here. The the question is if opening other health care clinic in a different location, what should be the focus online presence, B2B or B2C? And the answer is it depends. Unfortunately, because it depends what kind of business you have. Like, for example, if it’s an urgent care center, the focus should be on making sure you have a fantastic location.

Stewart Gandolf
Was really good signings. Make sure you’re delivering a great patients experience, making sure that you have some digital like certain SEO, local SEO and paid search around that clinic. It’s really straightforward. These things we’ve done many, many, many times before, if it’s a medical specialty practice, like for gastroenterology, you want to do all of those things probably in some part.

Stewart Gandolf
But building relationships with the referring doctors is key and making sure in fact, before I even chose a location, I would want to see if the referring doctors in the area perceive a need for whatever a service we’re offering. So that’s a pretty complicated question that one might be better off line security. Seven Talking to catheter Jacob about that with Jacob, by the way, the strategist we introduced earlier, they can go into more details on sports medicine.

Stewart Gandolf
Physical therapy is the focus OK that yeah so that’s a pretty hybrid. It’s funny, I went to a for my shoulder, which hurts all the time. I guess that was the question. The answer was it was a sports therapist or a physical therapy practice. So in that case, you just want to make sure you have the contracting figured out.

Stewart Gandolf
You want to make sure you have the right facility, I would say. And that is an explosively competitive marketplace. Now, there is a few national chains that have hundreds of locations. So if you’re one of those larger brands, some of the things we talk about a lot is how do we integrate brands? As I said, de novo practice, is this a you know, are we taking over a series of other locations?

Stewart Gandolf
What’s the branding strategy? Again, it’s a pretty complex question that we see all the time. The last question I’ll just throw in here, because I know this is something, Kathy, that our clients ask about a lot. And since you’re on your ear to the ground more than you know, even me or Josh, because you’re talking to clients every day for the multi-location businesses, what are just sort of the top two or three things that just tend to come up in conversation when, you know, new people are reaching out to you, whether it’s a health system or notification provider, what are some of the things that just are, you know, table setting.

Kathy Gaughran
But I think one of the main conversations we have is branding. Naming conventions is making a determination when you’re purchasing either a single practice or group of practices the most appropriate way to go after that, that brand and communications strategy, I’d say second to that would be call centers and training for call centers. If the phone calls are all coming in to a central location being rather than being individually handled by each respective phone team, that’s a real important criteria to determine.

Kathy Gaughran
And then also supporting that brand with your mission vision value, just making sure everybody’s in alignment around that. And then a strong digital strategy foundationally being driven and driving traffic to a brand driven website. So you start with your visibility online, your messaging and then your SEO and digital, and then you layer on top from there. So that’s really your foundational starting point.

Kathy Gaughran
But the naming conventions are really a big challenge for a lot of these large mergers. That’s that seems to be the number one very good.

Stewart Gandolf
Well, hey, everybody, thank you for joining us today. We’ve enjoyed this. This was a race to cover a lot of it’s just our nature. We like to give as much value and information as we can in a short period of time. I would just finish with the last thought is that our world really has changed. We’ve lived through a crazy couple of years.

Stewart Gandolf
It’s changed our lives and it’ll change life as we know it. I will never go back to what we had before. There’s been some bad news. Clearly, there’s been good news, right? Health care a lot of things that would have never happened and health care changes that were necessary have happened as a result. For example, telehealth, right? Telehealth went from zero to full speed in a matter of weeks, and it would have taken decades probably to get consumers and providers to embrace it.

Stewart Gandolf
And today, even though it’s not as prevalent as it was at the height of the pandemic, it’s still three times higher than it was at the beginning. So usage in terms of the marketing, the product, the strategy, it’s all changed. So it’s an exciting time, even if sometimes it feels a little unsettling. So I want to thank you again for joining us.

Stewart Gandolf
We’ve enjoyed it. And if you’d like to reach out and get your discussion with Kathy or Jacob, thank you for thanking us for the people in their comments here. Just send an email to info and health care success and we’ll set up a time with you. Thanks so much.