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

Stewart
Hi everyone. Welcome to our webinar today about multi-location health care marketing. I'm really excited to cover this particular topic with our audience today. Apparently you guys are to got a really good registration today and I think you're going to find this topic very insightful and very helpful. And so we will be starting now. Bye. And for those of you who do not know me, I am Stewart Gandolf.

Stewart
I am CEO of Healthcare Success and my colleague and friend and sidekick on the call with me today has been working with me for a couple decades or more. So I have got I'm CEO and founder or co-founder of Healthcare Success. And Kathy to introduce yourself.

Kathy
Yeah. Hi, I'm Kathy Gaughran. I'm the senior strategist at Healthcare Success. And we are looking forward to sharing a lot of experiences we have in this multi-location market and digging in. So thanks for coming today.

Stewart
Right. So before I dig into the agenda here, a couple of housekeeping things. Number one, yes, this call is being recorded or this webinar is being recorded, so feel free to come back to it again and share with your colleagues. Two, Yes, there will be a Q&A section at the end. So these are the common questions we get every time.

Stewart
So yes, there'll be a Q&A at the end as well. And number three, very important, the audience here, just so you know that you're in the right place today, we have a very broad audience and a large audience. We have a very broad audience. And so the audience includes multi-location providers of all people from organizations of all kinds.

Stewart
So it's addiction, skilled nursing, specialty practices, hospitals and health systems, other people, too, but predominantly, as you would expect, given the title, multi-location people involved with multi-location health care businesses, the principles apply to other kinds of businesses. But today is truly focused on a multi-location secondarily. We have people that are at the executive level. We have people that are in the private equity based investment sort of category, and we have marketers, professional marketers, and we have people that are very, you know, sort of knowledgeable and skilled in this area and people that are completely new to it.

Stewart
So the it's a pretty broad mix of audience. So today we're going to cover the insights that we have from working with as so many multi-location businesses. We're an agency where, as I said at the opening here, truly an integrated agency. But a big part of what we do is the strategy and the understanding of the bigger picture.

Stewart
And so we're going to share a lot of insights. We can't teach you everything we know in 45 minutes, but we can share some important insights to help you understand the landscape today and as it's evolving and recognize is on each of these topics that we're about to cover, which can be a full other webinar. So for example, we'll talk about page Search for about 2 minutes.

Stewart
And we just did a webinar last week on paid Search. So again, we can't possibly teach you everything you need to know in 45 minutes plus a Q&A, but we can share some really important insights on how this all fits together. And we will be giving you still a, you know, drinking from a firehose kind of information. I'm going to hit you with a lot.

Stewart
And it's a pretty broad audience today. So I want to start off with the health care landscape today and to give you a better sense of what's happening in health care. We're going to talk about some of the common multi-location objectives that we hear all the time. Brand architecture is a huge issue when it comes to multi-location businesses.

Stewart
We'll talk about websites and why they're so important. A concept that we coined a while ago, we like to call it the minimum daily requirement. We'll describe that and talk about the user journey, paid search and paid advertising, and then some other strategies, doctor referrals and patient experience, analytics and reporting reputation. So there's a lot there. We're going to cover a lot of ground.

Stewart
And in typical Stewart and Kathy style, we're going to go pretty quickly and also still have time left over for answer question answers at the end. So excited to dive into it today. And the before I turn the ball over to my colleague Kathy, you know, why is this even important, right? Why are we talking about marketing and this is particularly well, probably resonate especially with the private equity people on the call today.

Stewart
Kath and I both speak at private equity conferences we work with, by the way, multi-location providers that are nonprofit. We work with doctor owned locations and they also work with private equity. And what I find though is oftentimes people are looking at, especially if they're looking at it as an investment, they're thinking about things that are really important, like revenue cycle management and collections and billing and coding and, you know, cutting costs and all those things.

Stewart
And those are really important drivers. We're not denying the importance of these issues at all. They're very, very important. However, I would argue, and I often do, and we're speaking in private equity conferences, that marketing is really an underappreciated, underestimated tool that can really grow both revenue and profits predictably at scale. And so that's really what we're here to talk about today is, okay, you know, whether or not you're a nonprofit or doctor owned or, you know, hospital owned or private equity owned marketing has tremendous opportunity to help drive businesses.

Stewart
And that's, in fact, increasing. And the last point I'll make here before I turn the ball to Kathy is if you choose not to do this, just recognize that you're choosing not to recognize that you're also creating a void in the marketplace for your competitors and multi-location marketing is challenging and it requires specialized expertise and just recognize that this is an opportunity for either you or someone else.

Kathy
Kathy great back one. Thank you. So we also want to look at the consumer's journey. Things have changed dramatically. Can you go back one there? Things are things have changed dramatically as far as how we make our decisions. They're no longer patients who simply follow referrals or their doctor's orders. It's an era of consumerism. We have options online.

Kathy
We have options through referrals, and consumers are demanding convenience. So it's critical that you're looking at what the market is demanding and making sure you're in alignment with those expectations. They're digitally empowered and enabled. This allows them to connect with you and also review you look at reviews, making sure that you're on all the channels and platforms that they're utilizing.

Kathy
They have much higher expectations. They demand more and they often eagerly explore competitive options. I have seen I've witnessed one. I've been visiting some of our clients, people in the waiting room looking at competitive options while they're sitting there waiting. They have an option to refer you positively or negatively. So that entire user journey, every touchpoint, every step along that consumer journey needs to be identified and enriched.

Kathy
You must target specific audiences and niches so that you're relating to their needs and their their personal biases. It's retail ization of health care. Next. Also, competition is increasing dramatically. I'm sure you feel it in your local market. We see it all the time. Private equity and venture capital have changed the health care landscape dramatically, and we work with a number of these private equity backed groups, as Stewart said, as well as those that aren't private equity backed.

Kathy
And one of the things that that's brought to the table is a demand for granular, very granular tracking and attributions. So it's important that we know how the campaigns are performing and that we're reporting back with transparent data that allows us to demonstrate the traction that we've been able to achieve. So tracking and analytics are critical. Stronger businesses with appropriate models have done better.

Kathy
Those that hire the right leadership, that execute the right types of strategies and do the right types of research in the market. Also understanding competition. And then doctors are very much part of the conversation. So if you're looking at a at a private equity backed group of subspecialists, those physicians are still very much a part of that consolidation.

Kathy
So we'll talk about that a little bit more later. What competitive forces are you focused with? Is it an actual competitor? Is that an alternative solution or could be doing nothing? So it depends on the space that you're in. Also, private practice is consolidating at an astonishing rate, and this has been going on for some time now. Dominant players have included private equity and physician on groups, but we've seen the hottest segments in the highest price point.

Kathy
So if we take a look at the average case size within these subspecialties, that tends to drive the investor. So consumer direct women's health, vascular endovascular, cardiovascular addiction and mental health is huge orthopedic surgery, pain management, skilled nursing. So there's a variety of different groups that are investors have their eyes on and that continues to evolve. So the demand for specific specialties, we've seen a bit of an evolution and sometimes they're focused on one subspecialty over another.

Kathy
Had and new disruptors have emerged. There's a slew of new businesses empowered by regulation changes that we saw as a result of code fit online pharmacies, consumer direct niches such as ED, Addiction, men's health, telehealth providers, including mental health and addiction. People want convenience and accessibility. Medicare Advantage and Medicare partnerships, retail chains like CVS, Amazon, Walmart and Walgreens.

Kathy
Which disruptors have applied to you and your local markets and what have you done as a result of that? So Stewart, so now we're going to talk a little bit more. I'm taking the next couple and a little bit more about common multi-location objectives. I sit in the seat probably, you know, five times a week where we're talking with groups that really just don't know how to start, where to approach a multi-location plan.

Kathy
Their objectives remain pretty consistent. They want to grow the value of the practices through marketing, attract more demonstrable patients that they can report back, grow priority service lines, profitable service lines, enhance and build new and existing brands, or create an appropriate brand strategy for new acquisitions or turnovers, including those transitions. We're going to talk about brand branding conventions in a minute, promote specific locations and doctors is appropriate.

Kathy
We've got some groups that'll onboard a new provider or several new locations and they want to give that area some love. So it's important that we're focused and treating each individual location or area as its own business. You want to grow your professional referrals. We like to try to encourage balancing out your new patient revenue streams into a third, a third and a third, making sure you're optimizing opportunity is for both professional referrals, actually all three patient to patient referrals and patient self referrals, and we'll talk about that in a little bit.

Kathy
You never want to put all your eggs in one basket. You want to diversify your opportunities for people to find you accurate and timely reporting is of paramount importance. Drive demonstrable growth and identify the most appropriate digital platform strategies and tactics for scaling. How do we know what to do as we continue to scale and grow and grow?

Kathy
And I had fun with this last night. Beware of neglecting your stakeholders. I mentioned that at the beginning. This is experi ence that we've had. If you've got 40 providers that are all being merged under one centralized brand, you're still dealing with humans that have egos associated with the brands that they came to with. So it's important that you're in alignment.

Kathy
It's important. They are important. They understand what you're doing. Be sure to engage them in your planning process, including setting and understanding expectations. What are they expecting from all of your efforts? Share your communications, vision and timelines. Share regular KPI reports with explanations and adjustments so that they can see your efforts. Be sure to include marketing efforts which are visible to them and continually market to your internal audiences so they don't feel neglected.

Kathy
I don't know, Stewart, how many times we've received received a phone call from a client that cannot find themselves when they search. So you want to be aware of the savvy of the group, what their expectations are, and then communicate with them, give them local engagements, make sure that they feel like they're part of the strategy, or you're going to end up with a ring leader that could really catalyze the plan.

Kathy
So.

Stewart
Yeah, I was just going to say, Catherine, I again, we do this every day. One of the keys, I think, is as you're navigating this, is just making sure that you overcommunicate on the front end and back end during every other stage. And it helps if you end up due if you work with an agency that have a partner that understands it, speaks this language so they can bring expertise to the table.

Stewart
What we have found from experience is that stakeholders appreciate knowledge and expertise. And so if your agency can demonstrate that that helps with this issue because it's very, very real.

Kathy
Right. And if you don't, that's what it feels like. That's I really feel like the money they're investing into their central brand is not benefiting them. And you definitely don't want them in that position. So brand architecture, this is also a big challenge that Stewart and I run into very, very frequently. What is your brand architecture? Do you have a centralized umbrella brand?

Kathy
Are you a branded house where everything under that brand that touches that brand is part of that brand architecture? We also look at endorsed brands where the the parent brand and the sub brand is both visible in our endorsed brand and sub brand options. That tends to be where we live. And then you also have a house of brands where all the brands are unique and independent of that main umbrella brand.

Kathy
So there are there are pros and cons to all of these brand strategies. It's important that you know how they will impact your local market. A couple of examples. We worked with a skilled nursing group in Florida throughout Copan pandemic, and unfortunately they had one location that lost 19 lives. So because they had a house of brand strategy, that news story did not topple the entire brand.

Kathy
So from this particular standpoint, they came to us wanting a brand refresh, wanted to have dedicated properties to the communities they were serving. It's a very local culture and feel to be admitting your loved one into a skilled nursing facility. So we were trying to capture that essence. So this was a very effective campaign that we were able to execute with individual brands in a branded house of brands.

Kathy
And then a branded house is essentially, as I said, everything falls underneath that umbrella brand. We had an example here previously of Pacific Dental Services as well that also executes the house of brand strategy. So you want to make a determination on the front end of your website development and your location pages and your brand consolidation, which direction you're going to go.

Kathy
You want to understand what brand has the most resonance and not lean into a brand that is brand new. Stewart and I had an experience. I've got a slide in here that talks about one of the fertility mergers. Yep, there we go. So in this particular example, I'm going to share two examples. Shady Grove has got the dominant brand resonance in the United States.

Kathy
There are other fertility groups that have hefty brand resonance in the markets that they serve. But if you're consolidating all these brands together, would you choose a new brand or would you fall into the brand that has the greatest the largest footprint? So those are some of the determination you need to look at what's the visibility, what's the history with the brand?

Kathy
We worked with an orthopedic group up in the Pacific Northwest who used to be the team doctors to the Mariners and Seahawks. They went through a merger and when they merged, they went with a lesser known brand and lost a tremendous amount of brand equity that was affiliated with those sports teams. So you want to be very cautious when you make these decisions that you understand the brand's resonance and the implications of a brand consolidation.

Stewart
And I'm just saying that where you get this, this is at the strategic level. We work with our clients all the time, and the answer is, which is better, right? Should we do the House of Brand or Branded House or some merger? And the answer is it depends on the situation. And these are very real discussions to work with clients.

Stewart
And we'll talk about websites in just a moment too. These are really important strategic decisions, like we're not worried about pay per click at about like what is the messaging, what is the strategy, how we appreciate our approach in the audience going back to stakeholders. You know, if you're acquiring a bunch of different businesses, there's emotion wrapped up in the previous name of that business and some, for example, private equity businesses allow practices they acquire to keep their names forever or for a period of time.

Stewart
Others transition immediately. There's lots of notifications on this, and these are the kinds of things we talk about with clients every day. And there are pros and cons of each. And so when you go through this kind of process, it's really important to understand all the pros and all the cons and make an informed decision. So this is really vital to getting started.

Kathy
Thank you. All right. Back to you, Stewart.

Stewart
So, you know, Cathy did a good job speaking through some of the major issues that we see every day. This is another one. So this one dovetails really nicely with what we just discussed about branding. So we see this all the time. And so there's different models here. You know, one of the things we talk about is that websites are really the epicenter or cornerstone of your marketing program.

Stewart
It's like if everything starts there and ends there today, right? You're going to people are being referred by another doctor to your business. The first thing they do is go check you out online, right? So that website is like the most important thing. And sadly, every way, I don't know, maybe at least once a month, maybe once a week, somebody calls is like, okay, we just got a website.

Stewart
Do not write a market cap in our site. Know who it is. The most important thing is not you don't do your website then market. You're got to think about that from the beginning. So some of the options that we work with all the time is the easiest case is when I have a single brand and they have a single brand website, it has this unique look and feel.

Stewart
It's unified, Everything's great. That's awesome. That's really, you know, sort of best case scenario, all the S-so you have works towards one end and it's a very clean effort. However, sometimes we have a case where we have multiple brands within the same organization. Each brand is keeping their identity. And so the discussion is, Well, do we want to keep, you know, have five different brands and five different websites, which is an option?

Stewart
Or do we want to have a singular brand of singular website with the individual brands underneath that? The advantage of the latter is that you actually will have the CEO instead of trying to optimize five websites, you're optimizing one. So sometimes we go with a hybrid approach again, depending upon budgets and competitive forces and a whole bunch of factors that are at the strategic level.

Stewart
So we have a single brand site, we have an umbrella site with multiple brands or do we have several sites, We have different brands or different locations or different service lines. Sometimes we have web, you know, many multiple sites, many sites on a very hyper local basis where we have different brands, different locations, different service lines. So again, that's a strategic decision.

Stewart
The the as you can imagine now. And the more you go down this hierarchy or continuum, the more websites you have, the harder it is to establish authority with Google and dominate search from a national basis. But sometimes we don't care. Sometimes we're just trying to win on a localized basis. And, you know, the both strategies can work.

Stewart
Some are more expensive and harder than others, but they all can work and it depends. So going back to Pacific Dental, they have, I think, 900 locations and above these days. They have to have a enterprise level system software and a lot of people to manage that. So that's a strategic decision and it's the the marketing tactic needs to be subordinate to the strategic to the larger strategic imperatives of the business.

Stewart
And again, these are all the kinds of things you should be thinking about before you start building a website, right? What exactly is our larger term strategy?

Kathy
And then we've also with one of our multi location clients built by service line, and that's how we're scaling. So there's again, a lot of different ways you can go. You just want to make sure you set your strategy properly in the front end so you can count on that infrastructure moving forward.

Stewart
Now, one of things to talk about in just a moment is local law school. And so the when whatever decision you make about the larger websites strategy, you really need to think about those location pages. They are vital for a lot of reasons, especially local search. So Google wants to know what kind of business you have. And so you want to make it easy for Google to know what kind of business you have, or you ignore Google at your own peril.

Stewart
So each location page has really two different objectives. One is to help Google understand that this is a business with multiple locations and to have all the facts organized in a way that tells Google what this is all about. That's really, really important. But number two, number two is we want to help consumers understand what is there. And so it has to be really easy.

Stewart
And the user experience and user interface has to be really clear where is this? What services are located there? Ideally, sometimes what does the facility look like? By the way, if you do show facility photos, make sure they're good, you know, so this gets complex. If you suddenly have to take 100 photos or 100 different office shoot, that's complex.

Stewart
There's a lot of moving pieces here. So I would just say the point here today and again, we can't teach everything we know in a 45 minute webinar, but the key is to have really well thought out landing pages there are far more important than they appear on the face of it. So you need the calls to actually book appointment, you need the information, their hours, everything that you as a consumer want to know needs to be there and you need a way of updating that.

Stewart
So and again, the more you know, if you have 20 or 30 locations, that is as big of an issue. If you have hundreds of locations, again, you start getting into different kinds of solutions. So it depends on the case, but somebody has to keep this stuff updated and it's surprisingly often we find that when we first take on a client, oftentimes they don't know, like the marketing team doesn't have a single source of truth of what their locations are.

Stewart
So it's really, really important to get that down.

Kathy
And I want to make this connection real quick start so that it's like their invitation to your practice with an appointment just a couple of weeks ago to a dermatologist down here in Newport Beach. On my way down, I noticed that their office that it closed at four and my appointment was at 430. A lot of people would have just turned around and gone home as a result of that so that that information is their way in.

Kathy
So it's really critical that it's accurate and updated. The deaths of that is neglect. So it's it's really important, you have a team that's dedicated to keeping all that updated. Thanks to it. Back to you.

Stewart
You did hear what I just said. I was like making sure I had a lot of that.

Kathy
There was, but we came right back on.

Stewart
All right, great. Okay. So another thing we see all the time when we're looking at websites, oftentimes the websites we see them when we first see them, are DOA dead on arrival before you even start. And that's sad. So obviously many times they're invisible online and there's other problems. But one of the things that's more subtle to the uneducated eye is messaging.

Stewart
So oftentimes the messaging we talk about the importance of branding and getting that down. And, you know, when we go through beyond the brand strategy, we often are involved in creating the messaging pillars and the message, the brand guidelines and the look and feel and all that, which is the topic of last week's which part. So we talked about that recently on a different webinar.

Stewart
But the point I want to make here is that as we get our messaging, once we have our brand guidelines and our messaging clear to ourselves, then you go back to that website and see if it's clear there because use what it's not or oftentimes it's not. So many times we see websites that, for example, it's really clear.

Stewart
I'm like, Oh, so you had a SEO guy recently because every headline was written for SEO, not people. So that's like, Oh yeah, how do you know? Said, Well, because every headline sounds like it's written for Google, not people. So we want to make sure we were writing for people. And the trick is when you're doing websites, you need really expert writing.

Stewart
The writing is the most underestimated use category in the creative space. Everybody does and it's pretty, but the writing is really what drives it. And so when we're writing, think about your audiences. So you have patients or families or both, depending on the specialty that you're at, or you have referring doctors, you have current employees, and then you have a larger institution and you're especially these days and most of the professions who are out recruiting as a huge issue dermatology, autism, different professions or specialties, really, really important dentistry.

Stewart
So that's also important when you're at scale, you know, alumni and advocates, for example, on addiction and then Google. So this is just an if you're a nonprofit donor. So you have many audiences when you're writing and you need to find a team that can write the sort of threads, the needle to give all the audiences what they need.

Stewart
And it's just really vital to have that messaging right, to have that consistency there. Another topic I want to talk about, which is one of my favorites, is the minimum daily requirement. What does that mean? And those of you that remember zero commercials from the past used to always talk about it has 100% of the minimum daily requirement for niacin OC There you go.

Stewart
So when we're talking about multi-location market, we're talking about the minimum daily requirement, meaning what is our thinking about? Every location you have is its own business. And this is one of the key factors when it comes to multi-location market. The Mexican eight. We take on a new client. We don't have a new client. We have 100 new clients, right?

Stewart
They have 100 locations. We have a bunch of different locations. Each one has its own business. They have their own competitive set, they have their own services, they have their own unique characteristics. And tricks and idiosyncrasies. So if you add in, the more you get, the more important it is to think about this from a scaling point of view because you can't ideally you would have a separate story for every single location as you end up with dozens or more, and it gets harder and harder.

Stewart
But you have to find a way to build that local appeal, and especially when we start talking about the promotion of on a very hyper localized basis. So we're going to talk about in a few minutes here about, you know, the paid advertising. I want to talk about the local search. Just remember that each has its own business, its own location, its own competitive set.

Stewart
So we also therefore recommend that you think about your business. Each location deserves love. And if you don't think so, tell your doctor at location acts. They don't deserve any path, right? Everybody deserves some love. So and that means that really every location should be have a minimum daily requirement budget to support it. So even if they're busy, I want to stress this even that's like well or dental practice and 80% of them are busy.

Stewart
Great. I love that. That's awesome. So if if somebody searching for dentist near me, do you want to be there or not? My argument is, even if you're busy, you want to have a reasonable amount of budget dedicated to every location because you want to be there. Otherwise, even if you're busy, otherwise you're competitors are there and you're not.

Stewart
And that sets into a sea of events, things that you do not want long term. So I would start thinking about every location deserves a minimum daily requirement. So when we think that way, we say, okay, so what are the topics? And we're going to cover some of these tactics in a moment. But, you know, we already just ask different pages or websites for each location.

Stewart
We're going to talk about local SEO, rent management a little bit paid search. These are some of the things we have available to us. But when we work with a client will often talk about their situation and we'll talk about these kinds of things and we'll say, okay, well, what's the minimum daily requirement? We need to have at least tax dollars per location.

Stewart
And so, you know, that depends. Do we want it? In a lot of times we'll think through, like the most important stuff. Well, I definitely want to show up on page one with Google. So let's do that so that we'll say, okay. And then let's look at local search and let's look meaning both paid search and organic. What kind of budget is going to take us to be in the game, to shop in those most important searches?

Stewart
So at least we're there even if we're busy. So that varies how much that money is. But the budget I'm going to use here right now is an example of a thousand bucks. Let's say we decided that a thousand bucks per location is a reasonable budget. Now the first thing is when you get to like scale, that can be a big number, right?

Stewart
So if you have $33 a day minimum daily requirement, a thousand bucks a month. So but if you have a location that's $100,000 a month. So that works out to $1.2 million and is like, oh, so what are you talking about here? Is that that just sounds like a lot like, well, I don't know. Is it? Well, let's see.

Stewart
You have a you know, let's pretend that the in this case sample case, the average locations, right. Is $1,000,000, which is certainly not unrealistic. Not for most locations we work with. So that's 1.2% of sales. You know, secondarily, we recommend looking at it from a return on investment. So if you're spending a hundred thousand a month or you're bringing in a million a month, that's a pretty good deal, right?

Stewart
I'll play that. I'll play it that card game all night. And the third category is what are your competitors again, if you choose not to be there, if you choose not to be on page one of Google or your competitors, well, so I would argue that you're looking at this from a conservative protect Your thing is a different word.

Stewart
Your budget, check, your location because your competitors are eagerly hoping that you do not think so. I would argue all day long that you need a minimum daily requirement does have to be 1000 bucks necessarily. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. But I also want to recommend that you consider that with the minimum is whatever you come up with is just the minimum.

Stewart
You may want to invest more. And we often do on the underperforming locations, or if we have a new provider, a new PaaS or a new now, or we have priority service line. So the concept is again, how much you can invest per location on a monthly basis, and then from there, how are you going to promote locations additionally.

Stewart
So in that user journey, then for local CEO, some of the things that let's see we're going to talk about here, this is still my section capital few more and the sorry, but.

Kathy
One thing I want to add in really quick and we get to this, but these local searches are happening already, so we just want to make sure we're visible and dominating in the markets that you serve for activity that that is already. So anyway, back to you. And I just wanted to kind of hit that point.

Stewart
Yeah. And so for the sake of time, I'm going to go pretty quickly again, we can't reach everything, you know, and 45 minute webinar. So I'm going to just touch on these things. But the you can see today that this user journey is extremely complex and this is probably the topic of a future webinar just to go into this in more detail so that we'll focus on that point of action, a decision, you know, the landing pages, the page search page, you know, appointment setting, these are all different factors that we have to consider.

Stewart
But the first priority usually is to dominate page one of Google, right? We want to be there when a patient is actually searching. This is a sample search that we did recently, a spine surgeon in Irvine, California. And for those of you that dealt with this every day, these are the page search ads also known as pay per click.

Stewart
That's one whole category of strategy. The second category over here is the Google profiles. And I Google my business. So the Google business profiles are here. This is what we also affectionately call the map pack. This is the natural search. Results are organic and this is constantly changing right now. In fact, you have sort of an infinite scroll.

Stewart
I'll just keep giving you more ads, more content, as opposed to page one. We still use the refer to page one, even though there's an infinite scroll today of being, you know, before you get to the ads again. So it will have ads, backpack, naturals, results, ads, then it kind of repeats again. So this game, this is mobile and you can see how important the ads are.

Stewart
Even more important here we're going to cover today just two of these, the map pack, the local search and the pay per click ads. So when I get to the map pack, this is organic, meaning that you're not paying. Usually you can pay, you can upgrade with Google, but you're not usually paying for this. So the map pack is a completely separate game.

Stewart
So there's a specific algorithm for the map pack that you want to play. You absolutely want to rank here and just recognize that Google has its own algorithm and it has its own set of rules. All three of these games have different rules. And which one do you want to be in the natural section? The maps are the ads.

Stewart
I'm a pig. I want to be in all of them. Right? I want to dominate that first page of Google. So just touching on this briefly, you want to make sure that you are have your very clear to Google what's going on. So you want to have consistent name, address, phone number and website across all properties, not just Google Profile but other directories and other your landing page and so forth.

Stewart
You want to continually monitor and respond to reviews. You want to make sure you're thinking about the proximity in the search area. So accouterments like video and photos can help are ongoing, adding continually adding to your profiles. Google cares a lot about experience, expertise, authority and trust. So how can you communicate that on the website of these properties?

Stewart
This is a again. And so the focus of the ad, another webinar, just this one particular game, some of the other recommendations we talk about is, you know, again, we mentioned the website. Having strong content is very, very important. Having localized content on both the profile and the website, you know, the whole Google business profile, claiming your profiles, optimizing them, creating a process to keep them up to date.

Stewart
These are and then consistency across all directories. We do have a tool like this is just one tactic of many within local search that can give you a sense of how you look to Google and other providers. So there's a little QR code, if you will. I'm talking here and take a quick photo of that or you know, you can take it when you watch the recording, but this will actually show you how you show up in Yahoo versus Bing versus Facebook or MapQuest or Google business profile.

Stewart
You want be show up ideally accurately and consistently across everybody everywhere. And typically, I don't know, Cathy, 60% of the time it's a semi when we do this. So it's really, really important.

Kathy
The QR code on here will take you to our tool that will give you a similar report.

Stewart
Cathy This is a actually a quick again for the second time. A quick.

Kathy
Yep. So we just wanted to show you the granularity of just business profile tracking. We've got a group up in the Chicago market, Illinois, that's got over 40 locations. It's a behemoth to track this and monitor it, make sure that you're responding to reviews and providing feedback. So we just wanted to show you, you know, what our tracking proposition looks like.

Kathy
And then the next slide kind of denotes the summary of what we were able to achieve. New searches were up 21%, number of use clicks to website. So this is all part of our, you know, surround sound marketing. We want to make sure that we're reaching them, we're engaging, we're eliciting response and making sure that we're demonstrating that we, you know, we focus on patient care.

Kathy
So this is an important piece of your local strategy.

Stewart
Right? Got paid. Search is again, another way to dominate local search. You know, when I first started our own business, we were immediately focused on SEO and paid search. And that's how that was the and beginnings of our, you know, largest business was doing practicing exactly what we preach. So I became expert at both SEO and paid search personally before I hired people that are even better.

Stewart
But these are the things that I love about page Search number one. It's immediate results, so you can begin start getting calls and appointments within days. You can instantly rank above your competitors in the organic listings. You can generate highly qualified leads. So we typically focus our paid search or pay per click advertising at bottom of the funnel.

Stewart
People are ready to buy looking for a doctrinaire me kinds of terms. You can control everything the geography, demographics, the time of day. You can test like crazy. I mean the and it's budget is flexible. You can do it on a per location basis. It is so precise that it's really another day. I'll tell you when we have time about how just fantastic it is compared to marketing tactics of your when everything costs $200,000 or half a million dollars to test things.

Stewart
And now you can test in a matter of days. It's just a fantastic tool to supplement the Google local search. Again, this is I'm not going to spend any time on us today at all. We just covered this a couple of weeks ago on paid search and how to play this, how to get the right location, the right keywords, the right copy.

Stewart
How do you work with a I? This is a big, big topic. How do you rate conversion rate optimization? Big, big topic. I do want to point out that one of the things we talk about a lot, this is a brand blog, and if you're curious, Cathy, actually you're going to find this on a blog and if you have a minute and at some point I will send it to you at the end.

Stewart
This concept, which is essentially when you start thinking about digital advertising, whether it's consumer demand or whether it's paid search or really any of these things there, break it down this way. The first part of the puzzle is consumer demand. That's largely fixed, although you can change that with advertising, which we'll discuss in a minute. The campaign management is the part and the machine that we that's the part that, you know, our engineers do or other engineers do to really play into pay per click paid search game, for example.

Stewart
But equally important to that is the landing page where you're sending your traffic to. And then equally important to that is the conversion process. In other words, how do you actually handle those inquiries and book appointments? And the point I make with this is every single one of these categories is equally important, and it's multiplicative, meaning that if you do twice as well with your campaign management, your results will be twice as good.

Stewart
If you do twice as well through landing page results will be twice as good. So if you're better at answering the phones as your contact center, your results will show. So this is really, really important to our results. And again, Cathy, I know I cut you off right on that. We don't have time for it. We'll just conclude that in our guide.

Kathy
So if you want access to that blog, it's in the chart right now.

Stewart
Okay, So thanks for your time. That's great. On Page Social. So we talked about page search, we've talked about local ACR, page, social, predominantly most cases going to be focused on Facebook. Instagram is a way of adding demand. So instead of looking for think about it this way with page, search and page or local SEO, people are looking for you.

Stewart
They know they have a problem, they know they have a need. They're searching. It's social as a way to reach out to people on a very calculated basis, to your community around each location to get the word out. And it's an extremely cost effective way of doing that. Now, again, there's another thing right now with the Facebook pixel, so there's some big challenges here.

Stewart
We've removed the Facebook pixel for the people that are more advanced in the call. So tracking due to HEPA has become more difficult, but it's still a and again, a topic for yet another webinar. It's still a very powerful tool to get the message out on a very granular basis. When I'm talking about paid social here, not organic.

Stewart
Organic is also important. Organic is something that you can do as a supplement, but if you're trying to get the word out, instead of reaching, you know, a thousand maybe people who already know you can reach immediately with paid social, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who don't know you. So we oftentimes are using paid social as a way of getting the word out in conjunction with organic search and in conjunction with paid search as a way of again, if you think about what is our minimum daily requirement, we're giving each location low and it cost effective way.

Stewart
And so this is just an example of some recent campaign we did with a highly successful client. And so typically doing a combination of static ads, video works better. So these days, most of our ads are going to be video. But again, it can be a combination depending on the situation. We're trying to win the war in a feed to grab attention.

Stewart
So it's really important to think through. Okay, what is our strategy? How are we going to stand out from the crowd? Another very different campaign. This is from maternal fetal medicine practice. Again, always thinking through how do you stand out in the feed? One of our recent webinars is about living brand and how do you stand out in the feed?

Stewart
How do you stay within your brand guidelines but then also adapt to the realities of the social feeds which are just, you know, wild bazaars, fighting for information or fighting for attention?

Kathy
And then real quickly on that last social campaign, this is a maternal fetal medicine specialist, which is typically a subspecialty, very downstream referral provider. And we have been consumer direct for a number of years with them getting on the radar of the voracious female searcher and fertility. So it's it's part of an overarching campaign and just a beautiful execution of our creative.

Stewart
So so as a reminder, it's about 44 minutes into the Orissa Academy. Give us we'll give Kathleen goes us about five or 6 minutes to cover the last few sessions and then we'll have time for you. And I actually got quite up to baton for these remaining slides.

Kathy
All right next. Perfect. So and traditional advertising is an additional layer you can consider for localized marketing. There's some hub and spoke opportunity as if you've got a number of locations that are in a specific GEO or DMA. But if they're often a rural population, you've got direct mail, you've also got outdoors there a variety of different localized tactics that you can layer on to a lot of the infrastructure that we've been talking about.

Kathy
Local events are also a great opportunity to be visible in the local community. It speaks volumes about your commitment to that community and also gives you an opportunity to get out and meet and greet with your local people. So these are layers that you can add in, but it's critical that you start with that infrastructure of the website, your local SEO page, search and page social before you layer in traditional.

Stewart
Right. Typically this is not part of your minimum daily requirement. This is when you start expanding beyond that. So the external advertising particularly works well If you're in a marketplace where you have multiple locations within a given DMG, you start getting more cost effectiveness versus having one location and going on TV. And then New York is not going to be super cost effective for you.

Kathy
And then building doctor referrals, I mentioned earlier that it's really important to diversify those channels, that you're not really putting all your eggs into one singular basket. And some groups that we work with have got a lot of relationships built with B2B opportunities. Some have zero. So it's important that you have an a force out there that you've got visibility within that B2B market.

Kathy
It's crucial for establishing trust and nurturing relationships since it's expanding channel obviously, versus getting one single new patient from a recruitment strategy versus getting a physician to start referring. We know how how much grander that is in terms of volume of patients, some of the things that reach these doctors, scalable content and digital marketing can support your sales efforts.

Kathy
We act as the air war to your sales team. So B2B is about a relationship. It's like you're courting someone. So if you've got a relationship that's fractured, that's one approach. You've never spoken to them before. It's another approach. So you want to really build out a strategy and make sure that you have a team that can effectively represent your brand.

Kathy
So your digital will leverage, your reps time, it's easy to track an attribute. It can look omnipresent and build the brand to a highly defined audience and then content marketing and content is king here reinforces that brand, tells your story and keeps you on the radar. So a combination of the two is a nice way to keep that brand visibility going.

Stewart
Now it's when I have something to clarify. The again, most today, most of the larger, more sophisticated providers have physician leaders on, as they're often called. We call them a salesperson or a physician liaison. And a physician liaisons job is to generate referrals. And back in the day, even hospitals do not do that today. I also the practices and routinely have physician liaison teams.

Stewart
And again, I agree with Cathy, we do this. A lot of the physician liaisons are out in the ground talking to doctors every day. But that's really hard to scale. And so we usually as a digital as a way of supporting their efforts so that we have, say, omnipresent in front of those referring KPIs. This is Cathy is your favorite topic.

Stewart
We're talking about that again some day.

Kathy
So let's talk about this. It's a really yeah, we definitely need to have a webinar and B2B and then also patient experience. So, you know, these are these are your most important asset businesses that prioritize internal marketing, patient experience and patient focused care have higher retention, higher referral rates. You have the 8020 principle applies here in getting patients actively referring.

Kathy
You've got to stimulate that and reward that behavior. But your current patients are your best customer as they can. You should be asking for referrals, executing recalls and making sure they're coming back for their timely appointments, cross-selling additional services that you offer email campaigns will keep you on their radar and will do all that. Keep them away from the competition, Reminded of services that you offer and upselling additional services within the brand point of purchase Signage is great.

Kathy
Again, education of all the diverse offerings that you have, use local social media and reputation management also to help that communication, stimulate that communication and get those advocates talking about you so they have the opportunity to post reviews, as we know. And these reviews are critical. People often look at just the stars alone. So it's important that we take that strategy and campaign seriously.

Kathy
So we've got and Stewart, you can weigh in on this a little bit. We've got we recommend a variety of different platforms that we like to have our clients use. You want to monitor, solicit it and respond so that the different variety of platforms that we use depends on a lot of clients come to us with a preexisting reputation management strategy.

Kathy
Others, as I've said, don't have one. So we have a platform that we utilize that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it depends on the complexity of what you're trying to achieve with this review strategy. The Baseline Stars is critical, making sure that you're asking and that that's engaged, but there are additional layers that we can get into.

Kathy
But those platforms are a great way to do that.

Stewart
Yeah, I just say that, you know, to do reviews and the names that are out there are common and we'll probably do yet another webinar with one of our friends in that space. But today I'm going to say that most of our clients that are multi-location, I do have a platform for reputation. They're using Reputation.com or using Yext or somebody else or familiar with all of those and use Yext, for example.

Stewart
A lot. We have others that we use depending on the situation. So the reputation platform is vital. It's such an important part of multi-location marketing and it's just not realistic to try to do this in a one's B2C basis to be effective. And what this is something that we oftentimes, when we talk about the dress, those of you that are more sophisticated and are familiar with, for example, you work with a platform like Jax for multi-location businesses, we oftentimes will partner with them.

Stewart
So it's throwing the ball back and forth to each other. Will like, we'll do we'll do our part. They do their part. And it's teamwork to keep this stuff up to date, to have the responses ready. In fact, Yext, for example, now has some AI response review stuff that you can use to manage. And so this gets complex pretty quickly.

Stewart
But it is really important that you have a strategy. You have a platform that you manage this stuff like crazy, but then even with a platform claiming those reviews on Google, claiming those are sorry that the reviews claiming or claiming the listing on Google or Microsoft Bay or you're claiming it on Yelp, I mean, all this is just complex.

Stewart
It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. There is no easy solution to platforms, table stakes. But really we partner with our clients to maximize the value of this because it's not about the platform. When you have one or two locations, the platform is really helpful, but when you get into big locations, it's a huge concerted effort and also a vital one.

Stewart
And again, this is an example of one of the draft boards is what happens to be these are the options that are out there to help manage reviews. And if you're interested in these kinds of topics, we're happy to talk to you in more detail.

Kathy
Your on reputation is very much part of your brand. So again, that's just critical that you manage to monitor that and then analytics and reporting, it's it's important to have transparent reporting, making sure again that we're pulling in those stakeholder platforms form the foundation of data driven success. You want to evaluate your data from all of your channels, Google being Facebook and programmatic campaigns, performance data continuously informs you what's working and what's not.

Kathy
As long as you're all aligned on your KPIs and you customize that dashboard based on what's important to you, testing, optimization and analyzing those campaigns will ensure you maintain an optimal budget and be sure to target your best keywords. So important to track what's working and what's not and pivot accordingly.

Stewart
I would say something here to the when we work with multi-location businesses and particularly private equity on and also in addition for example, are the ones that have very high case sizes. They're often interested in not just tracking the cost per inquiry or the cost per conversion. They're interested in figuring what's the ROI all the way back so that the patient convert, become a patient, how much they spend.

Stewart
That is possible and we like to do that. And so just recognize that that's the complexity skyrockets when you do that. And so again, it requires teamwork on our teams part, our programmer's part. Oftentimes we need a database in the middle there. You know something? We use Salesforce or different databases so the reporting can get incredibly granular. It also gets more complex.

Stewart
So everybody deserves and everybody needs and everybody gets in the location, that kind of track. And it shows the cost per click, the cost per inquiry, the cost for, you know, all of those kinds of metrics. But in some cases we're especially have the budget and the complexity. We can go track it actually to the patient. So again, that's a topic for discussion if you're interested in that.

Stewart
So we did it. Cathy I think we should give ourselves a high five virtually over here, 7 minutes to go so we can either break earlier. If we have some questions, we're happy to respond to them now. So Cathy, can you check to leave the question part?

Kathy
Yes, I see one here. That is how to determine brand resonance. So if you're if you're looking at consolidating brands, the question is how to determine brand residents. And I think, you know, to answer that, Stewart, weigh in as well. I think it's a combination of factors. You definitely want to take a look at your online footprint, but there are other factors that impact your brand resonance, your B-to-B partnerships and relationships, your reputation and the medical community.

Kathy
So you would want to do due diligence and research, and we can certainly help with that. But it's important that you don't sacrifice a strong brand for a weaker one as you're setting up your strategy.

Stewart
So another question is where do I start? And that's certainly an understandable sentiment, right? We just had a firehose, so it depends on the situation with the client. But the way we would typically handle that is there's really a rapid start with one piece of the puzzle or the other and just sort of navigate through. We usually start with the big picture.

Stewart
So when we have the luxury, we recommend starting with a, you know, marketing audit discovery plan. And then the metaphor is this is equivalent of a patient history exam diagnosis and treatment plan. And that's really the best place to start. So usually if you're new to the multi-location marketing and you have your, you know, you're looking at where do we start, we would want to start off by, you know, interviewing all the stakeholders, doing the competitive due diligence on what's happening competitively.

Stewart
We typically recommend reviewing all the different platforms you have. Do you have a local platform, reputation platforms? You have paid search, Do you have social You know what we would audit or at least do a mini audit on the website. So we identify all do a really thorough, thorough workup and then come down to and we look at all the typical things like budgeting and target audiences and differentiation and positioning and all those things.

Stewart
And then you know, at the end of the day, we recommend putting your marketing plan and organizing it oftentimes. And we're doing that. We do it based upon the what we call the six major strategies. So we look at what what is your brand strategy like? What are what are those typical issues? The second category would be digital marketing, which is what everybody's interested in these days.

Stewart
So certainly a digital strategy and that's everything. Digital really. So it's not it's the whole gamut. Third, category B, traditional advertising, if that's applicable. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not fourth category of very, very importantly as doctor referral building. And so most agencies don't even think about that. And that's just, you know, for a lot of our businesses, that's number one most important.

Stewart
So doctor referral building is really crucial. And so that would be another whole category of strategies to be thinking through the fifth category is patient experience and internal marketing again. And it's like it's a lot more than just pay per click advertising that we're trying to be successful. So thinking through how does that work, how does that fit?

Stewart
And then finally, the other strategy, which is sort of a broad one, would be public relations, and that could include community events that can include, you know, getting into local press, you know, reputation, all these kinds of topics. So those are really the best place to start in many cases where we really want to. That's by the way, the marketing planning process is a fantastic way to involve your stakeholders, like we were talking about earlier with our funny little slide from by the way, I'm going to give credit to Frankenstein, the original practice where you grab that photo from the you know, because when you're doing that legitimately, your stakeholders deserve to be heard.

Stewart
They deserved an important. So that's why you can get their input congeal and get everybody's it's not so much a well we get everybody's input and then come back with a rational smart plan attack based upon everybody's input and come back with a very clear consensus on what we should do. So that's usually the first step. If we have the luxury.

Stewart
Now, some will say, I don't have time, but I can do something to take over my paper collection management. So that's yeah, yeah, we can and we do all the time and I certainly involved with thing to do. But if you're asking where do I start usually, especially if you're taking over like let's say you're a new executive for a multi-location business or you just did a bunch of acquisitions, you know, it's like a Sound of Music start.

Stewart
I'm not going to sing it. Let's start at the beginning. It's a very good place to start. So that's where you would start. Cathy There's another question or two.

Kathy
Well, there's actually quite a few there's a several questions on elaborating on digital marketing tactics for referrals. So we can we can address that, but we will plan to have a B2B webinar because it's a very complex answer. It depends on the list, depends on targeting. The granularity of targeting for digital is crazy. What you're able to to drill down into.

Kathy
So we will have a follow up webinar on that.

Stewart
But I would say the cities, the audiences that I know today with list partners, like for example, we work with like Cuba as another friend of ours, you can target based upon what they're prescribing, what they're diagnosing and how they're treating. So you can target and figure out which orthopedic surgeons you need to talk to or which primary care businesses are doing all the business.

Stewart
And then from there we're often doing a layer of content or an advertising to reach out to those communities. So that's a huge topic. And we do have an old webinar four day, if you want to watch it. It's outdated. Now about marketing doctors during COVID that actually came out in the middle of COVID or the very beginning of COVID, but we're updating that in a couple of months.

Stewart
So it's a big topic. And if you're interested in that more specifically, you know, I want to drill down with us. You can contact us through the information up here and we can talk to more about it was the.

Kathy
List and targets are key. So it's important that you figure that out on the front end and then reporting platforms. What are a few of the reporting platforms you use that pull in data from various analytics programs. They struggle with having to interpret data from multiple sources and often overwhelm the C-suite when presenting marketing data. We've been in.

Stewart
That we use me as a platform specifically designed for agencies and so that's out there. It's called Agents Analytics. You can look it up and I think it's an agency only platform. We use that one as one of ours that we will pull all of our information together. There's lots of them out there, there's Ninja Cat, there's different platforms out there.

Stewart
It's not so much. And the key here on this kind of stuff is having I'll give you this, it's not about the platform. It's about having a partner who really cares about accuracy and is really passionate because this stuff gets really complex really fast. And so like with our firm, we don't just have, you know, people that are expert at the page search impaired or all these different advertising platform topics.

Stewart
But we also have people that are analytic specialists. Our lead in analytics came to us from Google. We also Netanyahu to do a quick little intro which were started, is fantastic at this and they are absolutely passionate about making that data good because it's one thing to have data, it's another to have accurate data. And this gets complex really fast and alluded to and we're doing a webinar about some of the challenges with the API coming up here in a few weeks talking about that.

Stewart
You know, it's like having the right data is absolutely essential and it gets complex. So even going all the way back to, you know, go analytics versus, you know, there's challenges there because Google site and yeah yeah so and but having the right platform matters I just gave you a couple of platforms. There are others out there. Again I would just caution you the platform is important, but so are the people who put the data into it and set it up appropriately.

Stewart
It's really easy to make mistakes and then you're making bad decisions based on bad data.

Kathy
Very good. And it looks like we got there's one more question on disapproval that we will shout a response to. You'll have a link that Natalia will send to you about that process. And if you want to have a longer conversation, you can reach back out and we'd be happy to answer any additional questions you have.

Stewart
Yeah, if you want. If you're interested in doing business with us, which you know, I hope some of you are always has fun side up on bonus here. Yeah. If you're just in a partner with us, I would just reach out to us or contact information is there. This is what we do every day. We are absolutely expert.

Stewart
I'll put a stop against anybody on the planet. We're happy to help you if you guys are interested. So it's been great work with you today. Hopefully these insights were helpful to you. We really wanted to primarily share with you the insights and the sort of war stories that we reach out to every day. And we're happy to talk to you and look forward to talking to you again.

Stewart
Thank you.

Kathy
Thanks so much.