Inside Scaling Up 2025 and Healthcare Marketing’s Next Chapter

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: What’s up, everybody? October 28th and 29th. It’s that time of the year again, it’s trick or treat, but this is only a treat. The Healthcare Performance Marketing Summit is coming back to you, scaling up. We’re going to have 2,000-plus healthcare marketers, 50-plus experts, makers, and 20-plus awesome sessions.

The cool part about this year is it’s 100% free. Last year, I donated all ticket proceeds last two years to a non-profit here in LA. I’m still going to make a big donation, but it’s 100% free. We’ve already hit the registering count of last year, and we’re still a month out. It’s going to be huge. Lauren, who’s going to be there?

Lauren: We’ve got some awesome provider groups really focusing in on big brands in the space, Hertland Dental, Action Behavior Centers, Wall Street Urgent Care, Confluent Health, a couple hospital systems, Hackensack Meridian, and Oshner will be there. We’ve got a great array of people focused on different things and a lot of great topics.

Alex: Our local Piedmont Health System, where my biggest baby was born. That’s exciting.

Lauren: That’s awesome. It’s so great to see a local brand here in Helena.

Alex: That’s going to be awesome. AEG Vision, 500-plus locations. This year, we lean more into the provider groups than the health systems than in years past. We know that’s what you guys are focused on, performance, marketing, and driving patient acquisition. We are going to be even more focused than last year.

This speaker lineup, I was going on it last night, and I just kept scrolling, top-notch speaker after top-notch speaker. I know you think I’m saying that because it’s promotional, but it’s cool. This year, the sponsors have been coming to us. Can we sponsor? We see this year’s going to be off the chain. That’s cool because we had to sell our souls the last two years to get a [inaudible 00:01:52]

Lauren: We’ve got momentum.

Alex: Yes, we’ve got momentum. You got to be there this spring. Just register because you’re going to get the recordings anyways. I know you like to pet your dog, walk your dog, and listen to these sessions, so it’s all good. Lauren gave us some awesome large provider group in health systems that are going to be attending. What are two of the sessions you’re most pumped about?

Lauren: I personally, selfishly, love to see the people that I know best leading sessions. We’ve got Rochelle from AEG Vision, who was our client previously at one of the other groups. She’s now taking over the Vision world. That’s exciting, doing a lot of really cool stuff with HIPAA-compliant tracking and measurement, one of our more advanced clients. I’m very excited there.

Then we’ve got another client of ours, Matt, from Action Behavior Centers. Talk about scale, some really incredible stuff that they’re doing to measure and drive volume for their business. Two big leaders in their spaces.

Alex: They’re going to be giving case studies this year, not on panels, case studies. We’re going to actually walk through the magic of how they did it. Cardinal’s very tactical. We’re going to show the actual wizardry.

Lauren: As much as they’re willing to share with us, we’ll find out.

Alex: Which is just about everything. I promise they will. We didn’t even mention we have the largest DSO in the country, Heartland Dental. Sherry and James will be there too. It’s just amazing. This is going to be awesome. You know what sucks about scaling up? Is that we–

Lauren: We don’t get to listen or no.

Alex: We don’t get to listen.

Lauren: I know. Then I never go back and listen to it. I don’t like the sound of my own voice, but I at least get to hear my own panels. You get to hear your own panels.

Alex: Yes. The biggest negative feedback we got last year was that they wanted me to stop talking and let the panel speak more. Guys, we’re working on the criticism. We’re going to let the speaker speak more this year. This year was awesome for the sponsor thing because the last few years we had to do lots of favors.

I love some of our friends that are now sponsoring for the third year because they’ve seen value. Maybe they just love us. I don’t know what it is, but thank you so much. Three presenting sponsors line. Lead call tracking pseudo CRM. We love Charlie and the crew. Have lots of joint clients at Lumen. One of the best DSPs out there. Drag and drop journeys. It’s a beautiful thing.

For us, you guys know, healthcare privacy platform that hosts more events than anybody you’ve ever seen. We love having the three of them. Lauren, who else we got?

Lauren: We’ve got some new sponsors this year who we’re going to get to hear from. Ours Privacy. We’ve got Viant, another great DSP that a lot of our clients are using, and Invoca, another leader in the call tracking space for healthcare. Then one more, Patient Prism. There’s a lot of variety there if you’re looking for lead tracking, call tracking, HIPAA compliance solutions. We’ve got it all.

Alex: We only bring the best and the people that also pay us the most, but mostly only the best.

Lauren: We only invited the best to pay us and then some of them pay us the most.

Alex: That’s right. That’s what they said to me about joining a fraternity. I was like, why should I join your fraternity? It was Pike. They said, because if you’re going to pay for friends, buy the best.

Lauren: Pay the best friends. Yes, I got you. These are the best friends.

Alex: These are the best friends that paid us. You’ll love them. They really are the best. We recommend them all to our clients. Sometimes we’ve gotten pushback from discovery calls after with net new client prospects and I say, it just sounds like you’re selling tech. Without the right tech, without the right partners, we can’t do our marketing wizardry. It really is the foundational pieces.

These guys are phenomenal at what they do and everything we would recommend is HIPAA compliant and we’ll sign BAAs. We’ve asked them this year to come with clients and give case studies.

Lauren: No demos.

Alex: No demos. It’s funny when people ask us to demo RevRx. That is for a different day. It doesn’t really exist like that. No demos, actual client case studies, actually showing how the stuff works. I’m very pumped and hopefully they’re going to get a good kick out of this and so will you. It’s not just tech for the sake of tech. It helps propel patient acquisition. We’ve seen it time and time again and we don’t work unless they work.

This year, we also have something called the Flockies. We’re doing our first ever award show. Oh, yes, it’s right there. Look, the Flockies. What are the Flockies, Lauren?

Lauren: Awards for excellent work in the space. My favorite, innovative AI strategies. That’s something I’m definitely going to be asking about on all my panels. Rising stars, who’s leading the space, what are they doing, how are they elevating. Website launch, we want to see all the really cool new websites that were launched this year and some great campaign work, so best campaign.

Alex: We’re largely a media company, so there’s going to be tons of media work that we want to see and it’ll be fun to reward healthcare marketers that are connecting patients with care. This is an altruistic journey we’re on and we want to make sure patients are getting connected with care. We worked with our event partner, Steve Turney, in Term Productions, and they gave us the ideas for the Flockies, which I was really pumped for, and the idea.

I had this idea for years. We’ve never done it well. This year, hopefully, we do networking. I really wanted to bring the community more together. We have thousands of healthcare marketers attend this thing. How can we put people in cohorts so that they get some benefit after scaling up? We get them to go into little rooms together.

They’ll just meet and get to know each other a little bit, and then they can be friends on LinkedIn and ask each other questions for years to come. Is that what we’re doing?

Lauren: Yes. Last year, I hosted a broad networking room and we did little breakouts, and we had questions, but there was people from all different backgrounds. That was cool to get to know each other, but we didn’t really get to get in the weeds on what’s plaguing dental marketers, what’s plaguing hospital marketers, what are they doing, how are they innovating.

This year, we’re going to take that a step further. We’re going to break it out by vertical, get you guys cohorted together. Some of you may know each other, and if you don’t, you can get really specific with those people on what your businesses are facing.

Alex: Joining the networking stuff. You’re not going to be put on the spot or anything, but you’re going to make some friends that you can hit up on LinkedIn. Then I have groups on LinkedIn where we ask each other healthcare marketing questions, and I always say, go talk to Lauren. As you guys know, we have different tracks and themes like every conference.

What you should do, though, is fill out the healthcare marketing quiz to find out what kind of healthcare marketer you are. Then Emily and the crew came out with this awesome thing, not just a quiz, but you’ll find out. You’ll get your tracks and sessions laid out for you, whether you like tech more, strategy, creative type. That’s pretty cool. Walk us through–

Lauren: I know you elder millennials, you miss your Buzzfeed quizzes, so this’ll take you right back.

Alex: Is that where that was from?

Lauren: For sure. Yes.

Alex: I never had fun. I was just building the company. What are some of the tracks that we have?

Lauren: I think the number one thing that everybody’s talking about right now is AI. We’ve got a track, AI in motion, really looking at and examining how people are using AI. We’ve got a track specifically within that, which we just did a livestream on LinkedIn, if you all listened, led by Rob as a teaser. How is user behavior changing in AI-assisted chat?

How are users migrating entirely over to generative engines. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to track people?

Alex: What are you doing about it? What’s the actual work? We’ve asked our team, come with the actual– When you’re asking the expert panelists, make them say what they are doing differently now.

Lauren: Yes. Not just, I track it. What do I do once I track it?

Alex: It’s important. Mops in year one of scaling up, that was the big thing. Marketing with–

Lauren: By Teresa, yes.

Alex: Teresa Bordeau. That’s ATP.

Lauren: You know Teresa will be back. We’ll see her [crosstalk].

Alex: She’s giving an awesome session. She’s the expert at all things marketing. Ops can’t drive demand where it’s not needed. Is that going to be the General theme again this year?

Lauren: It’s just that integration continues to happen. I see groups internally building bigger teams, growth teams where it’s really both things working together. We just want to lean into that and understand how organizations at the leading edge of that are making progress.

Alex: Marketing readiness because what we do really well is we drive demand. Cardinal is pretty good. There’s a lot of agencies that are pretty good at that. Then the practices get hit with the next problem, which is all kinds of issues with capacity and call center sucks. Stanley didn’t pick up the phone and you don’t actually have that pay your partnership in that location, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I assume, Lauren, because we’re a performance agency, there’s going to be a performance track.

Lauren: Yes. You can’t take us out of paid media. We’re definitely going to lean into it, and not just paid, but everything that halos around making paid successful. We’re going to get really tactical on some of that stuff too. Channel mix opportunities, performance creative, SEO strategies, get in the weeds. How do you actually drive performance? That is still the name of the game and why we’re all here.

Alex: All of the best performance in the world doesn’t mean anything if you’re not tracking the right things, if you’re not measuring and you can’t forecast the right stuff. Are we going to have us track on measurements? What’s another track we’re going to have? What’s another track? Just tell them the other track.

Lauren: Okay. I think one of the most important tracks that we’re going to have this year is marketing measurement. We continue to push forward in this field. We’ve got to move away from the last touch, reliance on our bottom funnel channels. Organizations are really adopting media mix modeling, incrementality, modeled MTA, all these other concepts that I think other industries use that healthcare has been slow to adopt.

We’re going to really bring that to light this year.

Alex: Those are all tactical things, the four tracks we just mentioned. This year, finally, we have a big picture track. That’s cool. What does that mean?

Lauren: Yes, just keeping it high level. Where’s the industry going? What are the CMOs? What does the C-suite care about? Mostly CMO-led tracks, so really thinking about what’s happening at the highest level within organizations and marketing and growth. What are the trends? What are they seeing? Where are they focused on for next year?

That’ll play into everything else we talk about. How are they working with the ops team? How are they measuring? How are they thinking about AI?

Alex: I was scrolling through the panels that we have, and a third are CMOs. Very cool. We struggled to get three in the last few years just for the opening roundtable, so this is exciting.

Lauren: We’ve taken it up a level. We still want to give you really specific and actionable and tactical things to do with this information, but let’s give you the context and why you’re in that space.

Alex: We’re going to make the CMOs also give tactical, so they’re not going to escape. We’ve only invited the ones that actually know what they’re doing. Three final CTAs. I want you to register for scaling up. It’s free. It doesn’t hurt you. We’re not going to spam you too much. Then I want you to take the persona quiz and find out what kind of healthcare marketer you are, so you get your tracks lined up.

Then I want you to nominate yourself or a fellow healthcare marketer for a Flockie. One, two, three, you’ll be happy as can be.

Lauren: See you all there.

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.