Healthcare Marketing Trends Continuing in 2022

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinals experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Good morning, afternoon, evening. Not sure when you are on the way to work or the grocery store to pick up your kiddos, but thanks for joining Ignite. I’ve got not one, but two of the smartest people in the world with me today. We’ve got Rich Briddock, our SVP of Performance Marketing, who’ve been with me eight years and knows everything about paid media, analytics, creative, incredibly stable genius. We got Lauren Leone, our SVP of Healthcare Marketing who talks to all of our clients, helps strategize on a front end, and onboard. Absolutely brilliant. Both who have been with me eight years, way smarter than me, and so, I will talk very little and allow them to steal the show. Rich and Lauren, welcome to Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Hey, Alex.

Rich Briddock: Welcome.

Alex: All right, so this is going to be fun. We’re going to do a three-part podcast recording. We’re going to talk about what’s been going on, trends continuing from 2021. Then, on the next segment, we’re going to talk about the top challenges healthcare works they’ve struggled with this year. Then finally, on the third, you’ll have to listen to that one, new parties and investments for 2022. All of them will build on each other. Do not skip ahead, be kind, rewind. Let’s get into it. Lauren, digital transformation is continuing. Would you say that’s a trend going from 2021? Do you see that happening in the future? What are we thinking?

Lauren: Yes, this is probably the year where I have received the most phone calls from prospective clients saying that they need help revamping their digital presence. That could be redesigning the website, improving the user experience, doing conversion rate optimization, or helping to revamp some of their offsite profiles as well. We saw that start last year when everyone slowed down and didn’t really know where to go, and now, I think everyone has made it a priority.

Alex: Everybody’s made a priority. Yes, accurate. Rich, talking about technologies and things, this digital transformation, every agency’s digital is doing very well, so is Accenture and Deloitte, because everybody’s trying to expedite this stuff. What kind of technologies and initiatives have you seen that you feel like well, keep up or slow down, or what?

Rich: In terms of client-driven technology side, I think we’re seeing more and more healthcare clients introduce CRMs now. We’ve had a number of CRM onboardings in the last couple of months with major clients as they get more serious about that marketing layer. I think a lot of that has been driven by nurturing the patient through the journey. They’re working with agencies like us to drive that initial awareness point, but then they realize now that they have to provide these more personalized journeys for the patient throughout the journey. They’re starting to look at their lead-to-patient conversion rate, and that’s becoming very important there and trying to minimize that as well.

I think CRM is definitely one of them. I think with that too, we’re also seeing the rise in some internal analytics programs. I know Salesforce has the relationship with Datorama, and we’re seeing more and more clients asking us about that. We actually set up some dashboards by Datorama for a healthcare client in the last six months. That was pretty inspiring to get visibility.

Alex: Why did we do that? What’s the end result going to be from that?

Rich: You can visualize your Salesforce record data and marry it up to your initial marketing touchpoint and see it all with inside Salesforce. We have other solutions around that as well. We’re utilizing a tool called Ruler, which is platform agnostic. It doesn’t matter which CRM you have, but again, it does the same thing where you’re tying back your outcomes and your patient information to that initial market.

Alex: More cost-effective than Datorama. Is that why we’re using it?

Rich: It is more cost-effective. It’s also like I said, it’s CRM agnostic, so you don’t have to have sales force.

Alex: Oh, but you should. Is it important to know how many actual patients you’re driving, the leads that you’re driving are good enough to just run some marketing campaigns and you drove leads and we’re good, go to sleep at night?

Rich: I think if you can get to the end with the close-loop marketing, it’s absolutely critical if you can do it because essentially what we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years and what we will continue to see is that algorithms are going to play a heavier, heavier hand in the buying of media. The signals that you send those algorithms, if you can send the signals of actual patients driven versus just a lead, you’re actually setting up that algorithm for success. It is critical. It’s probably more critical than ever. Again, there are hurdles that you face, especially if you’ve got a more antiquated PMS system or EHR, so integrating those can be tricky. It’s something that you’ve really got to think about and look at the cost-benefit analysis there and see if that’s worth pursuing or not.

Alex: Man, it makes marketing so much better when if that lead actually became a patient. Lauren, it feels like everybody’s redesigning their website, why is that happening? Is it going to continue?

Lauren: It’s not a project that happens overnight. The concept that your website or you’re or experiences just done at any point in time is old school. You need to be constantly evolving, whether that’s integrating new technologies, like Rich mentioned, or keeping up with the latest and greatest mobile design capabilities, just always looking at your site as a way that you can put your best foot forward. You can always be improving it. It shouldn’t ever end.

Alex: Yes, it never ends. Why do you think it happened? All of a sudden, everybody, because they found out all their patients are going online. Oh my gosh, it’s that much more important.

Lauren: Yes, they were relying on patient referrals or provider referrals, patient referrals, word of mouth, people driving by their location. There are so many ways you can get a new patient and a lot of that stopped last year. The digital search became number one and you realize, “I cannot send them to a site that I’m not proud of.” That became a really important part of the marketing strategy.

Alex: I look at my website now, I’m like, “Oh, I want a new one too.” Everybody wants one. I get in a new car, it’s exciting.” All right, very cool. Everybody’s getting on the website redesign bandwagon here. It’s something traditional. Lauren, there’s something cool that happened the other day. I was trying to make an employment for a physical with a PCP. I’m trying to find a new PCP here in Brookhaven because the one in Piedmont, absolutely terrible, won’t name names, but they had me waiting there for two hours, gave me false positive, outside, crazy, crazy stuff. I tried scheduling with another big department here and also that one was terrible.

You know what? I found a local practitioner where I scheduled online and they use Athena. All of the follow-ups are coming through there and stuff. That was nice, schedule online. Do you see everybody scheduling online? Is that something everybody has embarked upon?

Lauren: They’re working on it. Not every group has a scheduling system, unfortunately. Sometimes they’re still using just the intake through a receptionist and jotting things down in a notebook. That’s perfectly fine if you’re a small enough practice that can handle it, but if you have the capacity to think about onboarding a new technology, no matter how big or small, and integrating that with your website, think about the operational efficiencies you’re going to get from that, your patient experience, retention, it can play a huge role beyond just getting the new patient.

Alex: We’ve got the online schedule making sure you can show up in any other way. Rich, what other technologies features, what do you see is really important? Anything else that our provider groups need to be embarking upon? That’s going to be a big trend that happened this year.

Rich: Just making sure that you’re giving your audience, you’re there in ways that they want to communicate and using the mediums that they want to communicate in. I know that live chat and chatbots have been around for a while, but again, that’s a way that most millennials, most people under the age of 35, want to communicate with it. Most people are somewhat averse to picking up the phone these days. I think from a communications platform, you’ve really got to keep going and meeting people where they are and where they want to be in terms of their communication style. I think that’s something that we’ve talked to a couple of our healthcare providers about is manning live chats, or at least thinking about it, potentially developing a decent chatbot that can answer and triage some of those initial questions.

The other thing from, I don’t know if it’s a technology piece but more of a strategic piece is, and we’ve probably talked about this a lot and I know it’s human, we did the webinar on it as well, but it’s just pulling CRO platforms for post-click testing. Obviously, that’s a platform, that’s a technology that we’re utilizing, but trying to hone in that user experience and provide a more personalized one-to-one patient experience by utilizing A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization on your landing pages or on your full pages.

That has been something that we’ve been deploying a lot with our big healthcare clients and we are continuing to sell into more healthcare clients because it has such a massive impact for a relatively minimal outlay. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but it can drive a lot more bang for your buck than constantly tweaking media over and over again. Especially if you have some pretty mature campaigns out there.

Alex: People are going to expect a very customized, beautiful patient experience going forward because we’re not going to interact in person as much, we’re not going to see traditional marketing as much, so digital is got to be on point. Not cheap, not easy, but Rich is saying, get moving because your competitors will. Lauren, Rich, thank you for joining me on Ignite. On the next episode, we’re going to be talking about top challenges healthcare orders have struggled with this year. You’re going to be hearing it because they’re going to tell you what we’ve done to help them overcome. [unintelligible 00:10:00] See you on the next one. Thanks.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing, subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.