Multi-Location Healthcare Needs a De Novo Playbook

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Lauren: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Today we are here with our VP of Paid Media, Evan Ilgenfritz. He usually says, “Don’t even bother saying the last name,” but I’ve known him long enough, I got it, to talk about De Novo media strategies. Thanks for joining us, Evan.

Evan Ilgenfritz: Thanks for having me, Lauren.

Lauren: I know this is something we talk about a lot. When you’re working in multi-location healthcare, almost every one of our clients has some sort of De Novo strategy, an acquisition and rebranding strategy, an acquisition strategy. This concept of having the right playbook that is tested and repeatable so that you can scale your business is really important to our clients. It’s interesting how often groups don’t have this in place. It’s something we’re often working on with them. Yes, Evan, I would love to set the stage for this episode. Tell me what you’re seeing amongst the clients, what they do wrong, first of all, with De Novo, and then we can get into what we see as the right playbook.

Evan: Sure. It’s very common that in multi-location that you have not been supporting certain locations with digital paid media and you want to start to, or you’re launching a brand new location and you want to start getting leads and traction there. I would say the thing that often happens that is maybe wrong is that people are not thinking about or treating this as a different strategy when they’re preparing to launch ahead of it or when it, in fact, actually goes live, the location or clinic. They roll it into the traditional strategy they may have been doing before, which is fundamentally different than something that is a net new location.

I think the argument is that when you’re trying to launch a new location, you’re trying to drum up awareness and interest in a service in that location so that you can actually hit the ground running when the actual location starts running.

Lauren: I’ve seen probably the need for two types of playbooks. “I’m opening a De Novo location in an existing market where there’s some brand awareness and an existing client base,” but perhaps just not in this segment of this neighborhood or we want to have wider saturation. Then there’s the De Novo strategy of, “I’m going to take my brand concept and I’m going to go put it in a net new market, a net new state where nobody knows me.” Then I think those can also have different playbooks attached to them.

Either way, taking your paid search campaign, adding a campaign for that location, and turning on the same keywords, likely it’s not going to get you ramped very quickly in terms of keeping your providers busy. Let’s go through the phases. I know we like to think about it in three phases usually. Phase one is really that pre-launch brand awareness, clinic awareness. How much of that you need depending on if you’re opening where you have existing locations or not. Talk us through what you would typically do there, what channels you would consider, what’s the right messaging, what’s the right budget.

Evan: Sure. With healthcare, the need is to typically drive new patients. That’s the goal. When a new location is launching, before it launches, you’re not really doing that. Most of these locations are not prepared with scheduling or even have everything in order to be able to do so. Really, your approach ahead of when a new location launches it’s going to be fundamentally different in that it is specifically geared around awareness and engagement.

We’re not really looking to convert. What that means is, in terms of timeline, it can depend on maybe the length of the cycle of acquiring a patient. Typically, we recommend somewhere around two to three months in advance of your new location really going live and starting to accept patients is when you’re looking at deploying this awareness and engagement phase. You don’t really want to go a whole lot longer because then you’re drumming up awareness for people that are often looking for services now and they’re not going to wait around for six months. You want to keep your investment accurate and not overinvest way too early.

About two to three months out is usually where we start because, as we mentioned, you’re not really converting people to new patients. You’re not trying to drive calls or form submits necessarily. You’re looking at awareness and engagement channels. That would be video. That covers the spectrum from Meta and social to programmatic with CTV and OTT and even YouTube on Google. These are all great channels. It offers wide reach and gets eyeballs on the brand and–

Lauren: They’re relatively low cost.

Evan: Correct. The CPMs are rather low. You’re not really going after leads even with video clicks that much. You’re really looking to get eyeballs on it. Then additionally, I think engagement is important. The consideration mid funnel. You’d layer on additionally traffic to your website. A key thing that I want to call out here is that having an experience for users that makes sense if you’re driving them to the website is essential. Sometimes clients, companies want to drive traffic to the website, but they’re dumping them on the wrong homepage or there’s not anything really at all.

For this to really work, being prepared is important, to have something that conveys, “Hey, here’s all the great stuff we offer. By the way, we’ve got a new location opening by you soon.” That’s going to be really important because just dumping them on the homepage or other locations is probably confusing to people. You want to make sure that experience is right.

The last thing I would say is that something that you could consider, particularly we talk with brands that don’t have scheduling available yet because the business, the location hasn’t really kicked off. You can have something like an email signup. There is some form of contact engagement.

Lauren: A press builder.

Evan: Correct. You can drive people there. You can have maybe a separate campaign if you’d like to optimize towards getting more of those. That can help your outreach team and really prime the funnel so when you’re live, you’re ready to come back after them.

Lauren: I think especially when you talk about specialty or some of the higher consideration healthcare decisions, that’s where you may start a little earlier out and work to build a wait list of patients you can call back as soon as the clinic is available. You think about industries with long wait lists, even primary care, women’s health specialty. Those are the areas where you may want to do that. Then you look at an industry like dental. If I’m thinking about booking my dental appointment for the right clinic, I might wait a month or so. You’ve got to think too about the industry you’re in and how long a patient’s conversion cycle is.

Evan: That’s right. If you’re doing say dental, typical visits and hygiene, you’re not going to probably want to invest even three months out. That’s the kind of demand people are like, “Oh, I need it now. Great that you’re opening soon, but I’m just going to go elsewhere.”

Lauren: I just want to get this cleaning over with.

Evan: That certainly also informs the pre-launch timeline.

Lauren: Heavy video because the reach and cost is very effective. Then pushing those engaged audiences into a mid funnel where you can drive some traffic to your site. You’re getting them brand familiar. They’re getting familiar with your USPs. Make sure you’ve got a landing page that makes sense. It may say, “Scheduling will open on this date,” or give them some information about what they can do as a next step. It’ll give them an address. They can know where the clinic will be located. Maybe some renderings of your clinic or a similar clinic. They know what they’re getting themselves into, the insurance, the things that you do know, even though we know scheduling is not available yet.

Make sure that they’re just well-informed and can pre-select you as their choice, even if they can’t convert yet.

Evan: Yes, correct.

Lauren: We get closer to launch or at launch, what is the right time to go live with conversion campaigns in phase two?

Evan: Typically when we’re talking healthcare, if a business is prepared to start scheduling potential patients, that’s really the sign, right?

Lauren: It doesn’t mean physical office opening. Launch is when schedule’s open.

Evan: That’s right. In theory, scheduling functionality is live and working a month before the clinic opens the doors. You may even consider turning on, you’re really graduating to the full funnel. Now we’ve been talking about top of funnel awareness, mid funnel consideration. Then when scheduling and that actual lead intake is viable, that’s when you’d layer it. You’d complete the funnel with bottom of the funnel conversion efforts.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. Tactics there, the pretty obvious ones, what are you layering on?

Evan: Sure. Fairly boilerplate. Paid search is going to be an anchor position. Starting there, making sure that you’re capturing. Paid Search is the primary one that offers actual intent capture or demand capture. People are asking for it. Let’s make sure we really establish the right foundation in paid search. Also within Google being Performance Max is a channel we often recommend to supplement. Paid Search is also really geared towards conversion. Those are major ones. Additionally–

Lauren: LSA’s.

Evan: LSA’s too, that’s right. We’re available. Certainly, LSA’s Local Service Ads for Google have been live a long time, but the healthcare support is only in the past couple of years and they’re still adding new specialties, verticals within it. If it works for you, that would be also another thing to consider standing up as another channel within the Google ecosystem to drive leads.

When we look elsewhere, that would, of course, be Meta is a typical one we reach for right away, going in to set up actual leads. Gen campaigns within Meta. Then finally, if you’re running programmatic, then you could do some conversion-based campaigns. We, Cardinal, always work with healthcare HIPAA-compliant ESP programmatic vendors. Typically, they can sign BAAs. We’re very comfortable with their handling of data and user information. That really helps also unlock traditional stuff, which is retargeting. We’d be more confident using that. That would be really appropriate here for programmatic as well.

Lauren: A few other things I would sprinkle in there. I know we’re talking media, but nowadays, organic is such an important channel. Make sure your listings state hours and give a link to schedule, a really well-rounded launch effort so that users know everywhere that they may find your brand that you can, in fact, start booking an appointment.

Evan: One thing to add at this point as well is that obviously we talked first about the pre-launch timeframe, creative messaging, both in the landing page and in your actual ads and assets. That early, that pre-launch period is, of course, going to use pre-launch language, like, “Coming soon, in your neighborhood,” all this stuff. When you switch over to actual launch support, you’d, of course, across the board with both your conversion campaign, search, Performance Max, Meta, retargeting on programmatic. Everything needs to transition at that point to, “Now we’re open” language.

Lauren: Yes, “Now scheduling, call today, get your appointment scheduled, clinic launching X date,” all that good stuff.

Evan: That’s exactly right.

Lauren: I think everybody fundamentally understands I’ve got to launch some media before, some media when schedule’s open, but how and when to consider a De Novo location open, launched, part of your evergreen strategy, how to fold it in a phase three, what would you typically see? I’m sure it’s such a wide range, again, depending on industry and vertical, but what does it look like to really move from launch into evergreen?

Evan: Yes, it’s a good question, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it. Obviously, as we talked about, the messaging of, “We’re going to be there,” and then when you launch, “Now we’re open.” Transitioning, folding this new location into the boilerplate setup that you have with other maybe already established location depends on the industry. It depends on how it seems on the ground with the visibility of the brand.

Lauren: All the providers schedule for that, yes.

Evan: Correct. In terms of when you might transition that investment approach, but also the language. I think that’s going to be different for different companies, but how long do you want to have, “Now we’re open” language versus really transitioning to really front and center with your value propositions and how expert you are in the field. That may be somewhere in the range of three to six months you’d consider post-launch. You’re probably wanting some form of, “Now we’re open for three to six months,” at which point you’re graduating past that, and now you’re just going after what you do best, and you graduate beyond the launch language.

Lauren: That’s definitely true from a language perspective. When you think about the demand generation components of your funnel, I just wrapped up an episode with Richie where we’re talking about demand generation really being considered as a wider part of every mix in an evergreen capacity.

What you can certainly focus on is pushing some more of your budget down funnel, seeing what your saturation points are, making sure you’re capturing the significant impression share, seeing if you can fill your provider’s schedules off of a heavier search strategy with less demand gen. You can start to tinker with the mix and determine if that channel is needed anymore or the demand in the market is strong enough to meet the needs.

Evan: Yes, that’s 100% right. I think especially when you’re new in a market, having this visibility is super beneficial. Then you’re right, once you’re post-launch, now you’re looking at what is the right mix. To your point, a lot of businesses, companies, healthcare providers, the preference would be just demand capture, just driving leads. When you’re post-launch, you’re reassessing what is the need, as you said, with how much availability is there just to continue to drive leads with our conversion campaigns and assessing the performance impact of these awareness efforts.

The thing beyond just drumming up awareness is needing to look at these efforts at the top and mid funnel, evaluating, ideally, if you can see view through conversion behavior, conversion lift behavior, and how you estimate its impact on the overall marketing program you have for that location is going to inform your ongoing plan for investment.

In fact, if you have a good conversion flow at the bottom of your funnel, considering testing, typically the plan is not to not ever do awareness or consideration again, but you can certainly test and on, off to see if you’re getting a sense of, “Okay, now let’s understand, let’s assess the impact, analyze the initial results, and if we want to lower our investment or turn it off,” that also really tells you what your permanent strategy may be by what happens when you do that.

Lauren: You think, “Okay, I have this connected TV and some video strategy at the top, and it was really just to tell people where I am, and they know now, so I can shut that off.” Then all of a sudden, you see your organic start to slip a little bit, you see your conversion rates drop, you get fewer branded impressions, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe the messaging in those channels needs to change, or maybe I don’t need quite as large of an investment in that level, I can start to peel back my De Novo budget,” but that channel might still have a purpose here for an extended period of time, not to just cut it off for the sake of cutting it off.

Evan: Correct.

Lauren: Then I think, Evan, the one last thing I’ll ask you, because we’re talking about playbooks here. I think playbooks are the only way for groups with hundreds of locations to operate without running around with your head cut off, but we want to evolve, and not every De Novo is exactly the same. What do you learn from each one? What do you carry forward? We have clients who are launching dozens of locations a quarter, and so the velocity is quite high, and you want to carry forward learnings every single time.

Evan: Yes, that’s a good point. Before any efforts of a De Novo launch occur, you probably want to document what your planned playbook is to begin with. To your point, if you have more De Novo launches to come after that initial plan, that initial launch, you really do need to put in the effort to analyze how these channels interacted, what was the net output, how did we perceive performance, are there things we want to tweak with timing or messaging, and update your playbook as you go.

I think you have to have a baseline document to start with to outline your plan, and then as you do more De Novo launches, you assess and analyze and update your playbook. Additionally, some of these are going to be different than others. They’re not all necessarily going to be the same, so you probably want to add, as you update your playbook, you’re also integrating that with the perceived differences between these locations, and that’s your updated plan for each location.

Lauren: Yes, you anticipate, “Okay, we launched a De Novo in an urban market, high competitive saturation,” and that may be the playbook for that type of clinic, so you can anticipate when you go to open a new clinic in a similar environment. Let’s use that playbook, and that may be a spider off of a master playbook that looks a little different for clinics under different circumstances.

Evan: Exactly.

Lauren: Awesome. Well, I know we have a lot of documents around De Novo. This is something we talk a lot about with our clients. Our new clients coming in always want to know what are the baseline playbooks. Appreciate you walking us through it. If anyone listening to this podcast does not have a standard playbook, we have some that we could share, so please reach out, let us know if this is something you’re struggling with, and Evan, thanks for joining us today.

Evan: Thanks for having me, Lauren.

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