Inside the Brand Strategy Powering 1,000+ PDS Health Locations

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, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Ashley Petrochenko: Hey, everyone. Welcome back for another episode of the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am so excited for today’s guest. We’re going to hear from one of the most sophisticated and innovative healthcare groups in the country, spanning nationwide with more than 1,000 locations. I’m so excited to welcome Courtney Taylor, the Senior Director of Brand Marketing at PDS Health.

Courtney Taylor: Thank you so much for having me, Ashley. I’m so happy to be here.

Ashley: We’re so excited to hear back from PDS Health. We welcomed one of their marketing leaders to the Scaling Up stage a couple of years ago, so we’re really excited to touch back, hear about their brand journey, what’s evolved, what’s changed over the last few years. Before we dig into that, maybe you can tell listeners a little bit about your role and the work that you do at PDS Health.

Courtney: I head up brand marketing here at PDS Health. We have a number of brands, which is very interesting and unique to most companies. PDS Health is obviously our employer brand, but we also have Smile Generation and PDS Medical Group, another brand we just launched, and our local office brand, which is those sales and offices that you talked about across the nation.

Really looking at evolving the brand, making sure there’s understanding around it, getting some reach and awareness around PDS Health and Smile Generation, which I’ll talk a little bit about as well. Really, a team of people trying to get our brands out there so people understand what we’re doing.

PDS Health used to be Pacific Dental Services, and we’ve launched PDS Health because we’re talking about mouth-body connection now, so it is that your mouth is actually connected to your body. Patients tend to compartmentalize their health a little bit, separate the two, we’re bringing those two together. In some places, we’re actually even launching connected care offices, where dental and medical are working together.

From a brand perspective, we’re trying to educate patients and consumers around that and understand what we’re trying to do to lead the charge as PDS Health. I’m really overseeing all of that brand marketing, what our brands look like, feel like, and how we want them to be perceived by patients and consumers.

Ashley: I love that. There is so much to dig into. Dental is one of the most competitive healthcare industries out there. In many ways, like you said, consumers commoditize it. They think, “Oh, it’s just my dentist. I go a couple times a year, that’s all they can do for me.” They don’t really think about that relationship to their whole health. How have you approached that differentiation for the mouth-body connection, and how are you getting patients to make that connection?

Courtney: There’s a couple of levels of that, too, because there’s an operational level where we’re making sure that our clinicians are able to adopt that concept. If you think about it in the past, connected care was not a thing. Your mouth was completely separated from your body. People went to the dentist and the doctor separately. Dentists didn’t take saliva screenings and understand what your blood pressure meant and how that affected your whole body.

We are here to evolve that from a clinician standpoint, but also to educate patients in a human way. What’s interesting about healthcare is it can tend to be a bunch of sameness. If you’re looking at marketing for healthcare, a lot of those stock photos seem the same. People have the same look. You see a lot of clinicians, a lot of clipboards, a lot of that kind of thing.

What we’re trying to do is evolve that and understand what the patient wants to see and hear and be more human. Instead of saying, “We are your dentist or we are your doctor,” obviously, we talk about appointments and all of that, what we want to say is that we’re co-creating your health with you. Brand and marketing, we’re educating the patients and potential patients, our consumers, around the fact that we’re here to co-create your health. We’re not here to talk at you, we’re here to learn with you. Every patient is different. Every care that we have for every patient is different.

In a brand marketing perspective, we’re trying to be human. We’re trying to create a fifth-grade level. I know that sounds weird, but we need to understand what patients are trying to hear. We have to make it easy for them. It’s easy for clinicians to get a little bit lofty in their words. From a brand marketing perspective, we’re here to educate the patients at a fifth-grade level so they can understand that we’re here to co-create their health from head to toe, which is a complete differentiator from a normal DSO or dentist branding.

Because we have our stake in the ground on mouth-body connection and we’re starting to actually open up medical office as well, we need to make sure that differentiator is out there and known and create awareness around that. Brand is the tool to do that. I think people separate brand and performance marketing too aggressively because brand is the best tool you’re going to have because if people understand you and know you and are familiar with you, then performance marketing doesn’t have to work quite as hard.

Ashley: Much like performance marketing is healthcare historically has just focused on the bottom of the funnel, capturing that intent. You have to actually build that differentiation and preference way earlier. That is something that brand is the only one who can really do that really well.

I liked what you said about education. Educating not only the patient but also the clinicians too, because it does sound weird to say fifth-grade, being able to. I’m not a doctor, I don’t know. When you’re talking to someone in the waiting room, in the chair, when they’re lying, they’re not looking for super complex medical information and they want to feel like what is this hurt or how that might affect the rest of my health.

Can you speak about that education from that top-of-the-funnel approach? Where are you connecting with patients, and how are you educating them on the services and the way to think about this connection?

Courtney: Education is really important to build trust. In healthcare, trust is absolutely the most important thing. If a patient doesn’t trust you or your brand, you’re going to have to work a lot harder. Especially with dentistry, trust is so important. People really approach dentistry with mistrust because it’s money, it’s upselling, it’s all of those things that go through a patient’s head, so the education is incredibly important.

The channels are important, but the story that you’re telling is way more important. If you think about Smile Generation right now, which is our consumer-facing brand, that’s a brand that’s educating patients and consumers under the umbrella of PDS Health, we’re out there in a bunch of different spaces. If we’re doing podcast reads, for instance, we want to make sure that we know where patients are going to be and that we’re creating trust and authenticity around those podcast reads, but they might want a more emotional connection to that, so we reach them there in that kind of content.

If we’re getting them in search, they want way more detail. We’re going to be a little less emotional, a little bit more exact around what they’re looking for. The channels are important, but it’s content to context. We take our content, and we want to put it in context with the channels that we’re in.

It’s a little bit about reaching them where they are. That’s a buzz word or a bingo word when it comes to marketing and branding. I think the funnel is starting to fade a little bit, the talk about upper and lower funnel. It really is, what story do you want to tell on the channel that you’re on, and do they need emotional connection and a little bit longer tail, or do they need to know exactly where they want to go right now? It’s a little less about upper and lower funnel, a little bit about content and context.

Ashley: We’re seeing that with Meta, the Andromeda update. It’s the message. It’s like you don’t necessarily know where someone is, but that message is going to resonate with them. The algorithms can identify that if you give them the right messages and the right imagery, the right context, and it will still align with whoever that person is. I love that’s how you guys are approaching it.

I think the trust standpoint, I wanted to go back to that. The trust across healthcare, across so much of the spheres of the world right now is at all-time lows. “Why would they be recommending that from me?” They’re asking, “Are they just trying to get another buck from me? Why are you recommending me to do this thing that the dentist has never asked me to ever do?”

How do you introduce new services without triggering those feelings?

Courtney: It’s storytelling again. The idea is, especially with what we do, if we get a little bit into mouth-body connection, the idea isn’t just that your mouth is connected to your body, it’s that bacteria in your mouth gets into your bloodstream. I don’t think people think about that a lot. Our stories need to be really relevant and very deep emotionally, not sad, but deep emotionally.

Your oral bacteria is connected to your brain health, your cognitive health, your cardiovascular health, affects pregnancy issues. If that bacteria gets into your bloodstream, it will cause pregnancy loss. We have our own doctors that have lost their babies at 24, 25 weeks and have gone back to do oral DNA tests in their mouths, have realized that this bacteria level, this certain bacteria called FN, is so high in their body that it’s causing their pregnancy loss.

It’s stories like that we have to tell, but we have to tell them in a way that builds trust that isn’t, we’re going to tug at your heartstrings and we’re going to get you to come here. It’s more understanding and research. This is science now. This isn’t stuff we’re making up. We’re here for you from your head to your toe. Even if you come in for dental work, we’re going to talk to you about your overall health because we care about that. We’re here to make patients healthier and happier, but we also want them to trust us.

We try to get ahead of that from a branding and marketing perspective, to educate on these stories, let people know that this is real stuff, and that we’re leading the charge on that and they can trust us. All of those things together really is the heart of storytelling. We don’t want to tug at heartstrings. We don’t want to make people upset. We don’t want to fearmonger, but we want to have them understand what we’re here for and make sure that they know that we’re here for that total body health, which is a massive differentiator from anything else anyone’s doing in this marketplace.

Ashley: My own dentist and my hygienist, Amy, I love her. I know about her family, she knows about my family. That person is, like you said, they care about you and they care about your health and want to be that kind of person to help you on your next journey. If they can help you with another issue that you may be having, he will be happy. I like that a lot.

This has been a journey for you guys over the last few years. Is there a moment through that time where there was a specific activation or brand moment where it’s like you started to see momentum or it was, yes, this is exactly what we’re doing to capture this change?

Courtney: Yes, there’s a few. Coming out of COVID, getting budgets back and getting paid media out there, once you have the right story to tell, really important. Last year and the year before, but mostly last year, we had a Confidence Unleashed campaign, which is our pay campaign for Smile Generation. We tried different channels this time. We tried to figure out podcasts that we knew our patients or our consumers were listening to and creating that trust through those podcast reads or partnering with those podcasters to share real stories.

Also, audio, a lot of audio, so we could get that feeling and get that emotion out, but understand, real easily, what we’re trying to do here, and we had massive success with that. We did a long tail on that. Smile Generation is really a long tail, because our local offices, if you think about that, that’s book appointments, book appointments.

Smile Generation is a long tail. We want to get them interested. We want to get them thinking, and then we want those loyal patients that really trust us. We put that campaign out there in lots of different channels, sort of like what I said. some were more emotional, some a little bit more exact and more direct. We managed to raise our leads by 33%, 34%. We also won some really great creative awards, because we told the story so well. Being recognized for that and then creating this muscle memory for Smile Generation is really important. Super proud of telling that story and having that activation notice.

People took action. We can actually track foot traffic to our offices through some of our audio. That was exciting to see that someone listened to our audio, and we know they walked to our offices and actually stood in front of those doors.

Ashley: I think that is something that people struggle with brand. Especially, how do you measure brand health? How do you measure if you’re actually making improvements? Maybe you can actually just get into the way PDS health has a pretty robust measurement framework. You have a very integrated tech stack. How did that all play into how you measure impact for your work?

Courtney: Absolutely. We track everything. With this pay campaign, we tracked the foot traffic, which is an easier piece to tell, especially back to our stakeholders, but we also tracked our own email. What we did is, when we created those leads, and we got somewhere around 100,000 leads, which was really amazing for a long tail, but we don’t stop there.

A lot of paid media will just stop there and be like, “Oh, there we are.” We created an entire nurturing system with those leads where we are constantly educating. Now, we’re not hitting them with book appointment. We’re not hitting them with things like that, we’re educating them on mouth-body connection, understanding what they want to hear, and then leading them in their own way to their decision making.

We don’t put a time limit on when we convert these people, especially if we’re nurturing them, because that’s how you build trust. We have, obviously, our email analytics there. We have our web analytics there. We have the foot traffic that we’re working with some of our partners.

To go on top of that, we also are creating these really authentic partnerships, which I think are incredibly important too. It’s not just paid media, it’s not just the storytelling, it’s how we get a halo effect out there. With healthcare, we tend to think that people know us. Oh, they know PDS Health and they know Smile Generation, but we have to be real about that. We have a lot of competition out there and people that are lacking trust, especially in the world we’re living in now.

We have these relevant partnerships. For instance, one of our newest partnerships is with Neuro. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but they’re really amazing. They actually create a gum that is energy and focus, and it’s super healthy. It’s got some great things for your mouth in it, but also is really important to your brain energy, and it’s all natural. These guys went on Shark Tank and are just really amazing people.

We’ve created this authentic partnership with them to explain how important this mouth-body connection is, and then we created a halo effect, because their audience is very different and it’s much wider. It’s an authentic partnership that’s relevant to what we’re doing, because I think if you’re going to do a partnership, it’s got to be relevant to what you’re doing, and everybody in the game has to be excited and have skin in the game. Layering partnerships on top of that paid media was really powerful. We’re expanding halo effect. We’re tracking everything, including foot traffic, which is something new.

I’m also doing brand lift. What we do is brand lift studies as well. When we start our year or start our campaign, we put a study out to understand where people are with our brand. Then at the end of the year, we do that again, so I can create a baseline and then show brand lift, because brand is difficult. There’s performance marketing analytics, which we are really good at. We have our market stack, and it’s fantastic, but to layer on top of the fact that, how’s the brand doing now? The more that we create muscle memory, the less the performance marketing is going to have to work. We’re doing that all at the same time, layered on top of each other to tell that story. Then we can get back, did people recognize the brand more to make the performance marketing work a little less, and then we have all of our analytics that go with that.

Ashley: Yes. You don’t want to be fighting at the bottom of the funnel for all of those clicks. You want them to be like, “Oh, Smile Generation? I love them. I heard about them from my partner, and it’s just–” That’s going to just make your performance team happy, the brand happy. Everything’s good.

A lot of partnerships and influencer marketing is relatively new, I think, in some ways in healthcare. Maybe they think of partnerships more on the clinical side from other organizations or referrals. Is there any advice for someone who wants to explore building those partnerships authentically? How did you land on this relationship with this manufacturer?

That’s really cool. You wouldn’t think of it, but it does introduce you to a whole new audience that might not be even worried about their dentist, because maybe they’re younger and they don’t really care and they’re wanting to have fresh breaths. How did you come to that point, and any advice for people to think about partnerships in a new way?

Courtney: I wish I would have known earlier that taking risks is fine and failing fast is fine. I come from entertainment. I spent a lot of years in entertainment, spent many years at Hallmark Channel, spent years at Game Show Network. I understand entertainment, which is why a lot of our content looks like edutainment. The most important thing is take the risks, first of all.

Second of all, you have to start somewhere. Sometimes you have to pay for a little partnership here and there, but if it’s relevant enough, you lean in and get to know the people as humans, and then that’s where that really good relationship comes in, but I would say, take the risk. Figure out what you want to be perceived as. Find your gaps. Where are our gaps? Where can we grow? Where do we need to create a halo effect?

Find those brands and then initiate the conversation, because people don’t know how willing people are to talk about things they’re passionate about. If you find these brands that are passionate about what you’re doing, or even in the ballpark of what you do, lean in, contact them and create those relationships. If they don’t work, fail fast and iterate, because we don’t get better unless we fail fast. We really don’t. We don’t get better unless we take risks that scare us a little bit.

I would say, do that, but make sure it’s relevant. Not because, oh, someone’s famous, but do it because it’s relevant, and then it will grow and that can be complementary to everything that you do. It’s like the bubble wrap around all the great things that you’re doing. That’s what I would suggest. It’s something I wish I would have known earlier. Just take the risk. If you’re feeling it in your gut, take the risk. Make sure that you’re setting the right expectations. Yes, you’re not over promising or you’re under delivering, depending upon who your stakeholders are. Everyone is thinking about that as well, but take the risk.

Ashley: Like you said, you can always pull the plug and move on. If it is not working, you can do that. Healthcare is a little bit risk averse. People don’t want to take the risk. I think that’s fabulous. I also think in the sea of sameness of healthcare, like you said, all the stock photos, all of the creative looks are often very similar. Being able to expand to those partners, like you said, the gamification, allows you to stand out in a way that the other brands are doing. I think that’s great advice, because we’ve all seen enough stock photos of dentists and doctors standing over with like lights. We need to move up beyond that. It’s fabulous advice.

We talk about the sea of sameness, and it’s hard to differentiate in healthcare for a lot of brands because they are risk averse. If there’s advice you could leave for the listeners that they can talk about enough, or something that you want them to explore and just challenge themselves, is there any advice you could share there?

Courtney: I think it goes back to the fact that people think brand and marketing are one in the same, and don’t realize that if you separate your brand out for a bit, understand how you want to be perceived by other people and really get what that brand is, then everything else falls into place. I think from a healthcare perspective, and it could be because of my background, I came in with a fresh set of eyes, and I might have made things a little uncomfortable for a minute, but I think that’s how we grow and evolve.

We have an incredibly entrepreneurial CEO who’s really willing to take that extra step, but I think from a brand perspective in healthcare, you have to differentiate. You have to.

You have to do something that’s going to push the envelope just a little bit. We have compliance people, so we’re making sure that we’re not pushing the envelope too much, but push it as far as you can push it, because that’s where the differentiation comes in. That’s where the word of mouth starts, because you want people talking about you.

In healthcare, it’s all about, let’s not pretend that people aren’t talking to each other, and that’s how really people pick their doctors and pick their dentists. That’s why that brand tool is so incredibly important. Know who you are, but really know who you are, not how you think people want you to be, but how you perceive that.

Do a lot of market research. We really make sure that we understand our patients and our consumers enough, that we’re pushing the envelope just enough to give them what they want. They want easy. They want ease my way. They’re asking simple questions. Healthcare is taking very complicated things and using them. Patients just have simple questions, which is why the word comprehensive, that’s probably the buzzword I dislike the most; connected, that makes sense. Things are connected. We’re connected to you. We’re connecting your health. We’re connecting your dental and your medical, and you understand that because we’re here to take care of you from your head to your toe.

Brand is a really important tool. You need to separate it from performance marketing and really know who you are in order to push the envelope on that. That’s the one thing I think I want people to know the most, that it’s really important to understand what your brand is and what it wants to say, and then the performance marketing flows out of that. Make sure people understand you, realize you, trust you, and then everything will be a little easier.

Ashley: If you don’t know who you are, your patients won’t know who you are either. That’s the first step, knowing yourself and what you want to stand for. I think with the way that AI search is evolving too, that trust and that word of mouth and those reviews and all of those conversations are feeding the consideration set and what’s being shared about you online. If you’re not controlling that conversation and that brand perception, it’ll be bad. [chuckles]

Courtney: Yes. There’s a human at the end of that. I think even with AI, AI is amazing, and it should be complementary to that, but there’s always a human at the end of that. I talk about B2B and B2C. I don’t even know if B2B really exists anymore, because we’re all consumers. We’re all a C. There’s always a human at the end of that, and we always need to remember that, even operationally. There’s always a human there, even with AI, even with all of the evolution that we have, we cannot forget that.

Ashley: I love that. Just one last question. Looking ahead for the rest of the year, is there one goal or focus area that you’re really excited about that you guys are focused on this year that you can share?

Courtney: Yes. The other interesting thing about healthcare is that they compartmentalize marketing from operations from all of those things. From a brand perspective, like I said at the beginning, we have multiple brands that are happening. We need to bring them together and make sure that we’re talking the same language and understanding the same things in order to create that awareness and that halo effect.

This year, we’re bringing our brands together and creating a common thread so it feels like they’re in the same family, because brands together are strength. Brands apart are drifting, are diluting. This year, we’re bringing all these brands together, understanding how our team members perceive them internally, and then understanding how our consumers perceive them externally and bringing that together. I think that’s going to be really important, that one vision, one message around mouth-body connection that’s going to make our brand, our PDS Health brand, really strong in the marketplace, but also all those other brands that are educating our patients and touching them in different ways.

I think I’m much more excited about creating a connected system of meaning with all of these brands and seeing how that plays out. It’s very exciting.

Ashley: It’s exciting. It’s full circle. We talked about educating the patients, and it starts with educating the team members, the clinicians, the hygienists, everyone who touches a patient needs to be on the same page. I like that common thread that you’re weaving across the org. I think this has been a fabulous conversation. I’d love to take you back in a year, how is this going? That’s a big lift. That’s a big goal and a big initiative this year. Thank you so much, Courtney, for sharing this story. This has been great. If anyone wanted to connect with you, where can they find you? Can they connect with you on LinkedIn?

Courtney: Yes, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Absolutely.

Ashley: Okay. Well, thank you again for joining us and for another episode of the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Thanks so much.

Courtney: Thanks, Ashley.

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