Performance vs. Brand: Why Healthcare Marketers Need Both to Win

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.

Lauren Leone: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am here with one of our new account directors, Katie Gray. Katie might be new to Cardinal, but we’ve got her on this episode because she is not new to healthcare performance marketing and has a lot of really great insights from some of the prior work she’s done, as well as the work that she’s done in her short but very valuable time here at Cardinal. Katie, welcome to Ignite.

Katie Gray: Thank you. That was so nice.

Lauren: I’m excited to dig in. I’ve not even probably talked with you one-on-one about some of these topics. You bring a really great breadth of experience to Cardinal, coming from an agency that offered both performance marketing, but the brand layer as well. That’s something we don’t, ourselves, do here at Cardinal, but we work with a lot of partners to do it, and a lot of our clients need it.

I think as performance marketing continues to get squeezed at the cost bottom funnel layer and things get really crowded, this juxtaposition of I need to have brand and I need to have performance, you’ve got a lot of great insights on it. That’s where we’re going to go with our conversation today. I want to open up. I think it’s always good to discuss why this matters.

I know you’re a firm believer that performance and brand don’t exist in silos. That’s your background and your level of expertise. Why do you think groups, clients, marketers tend to over-rely on performance? Why does that seem to always be the thing we’re talking about even though it’s not the only thing that matters?

Katie: Sure. Performance feels safer. You can see the clicks, the conversions, the ROI. That makes it easy to justify to your CFO, who loves those numbers. To add to that, you’ve got your quarterly patient volume goals that are knocking on the door, and these short-term tactics become almost irresistible. Brand is a bit trickier. The payoff often appears beyond the quarter’s end, so it feels expensive when the budget is tight. The reality is that performance drives today, but brand secures the future.

Lauren: I think that’s a great point. It’s a little bit addictive, this dollars-in, dollars-out-of-the-machine, and it is really hard to break from that. As a marketer yourself, how fundamentally do you understand the way that those two things work together? Even though you may understand it very well, explaining that to CFOs and people who are non-marketers is a bit more challenging.

It is not linear, and it doesn’t make sense in their spreadsheet-minded brains. For the groups that you’ve seen under-invest in brand or where maybe they’re 100% performance, I’m going all-in with my dollars there. What are some of the gotchas of doing that?

Katie: A few big ones I see are organic and direct traffic start to suffer, which means you’re leaning more heavily and actually spending more on paid media to try to fill that gap. You also become more vulnerable to competitors conquesting your brand terms. Over time, you may even see a lower lifetime patient value or even erosion in referrals or partner trust.

Lauren: I think having something specific to say, so at the bottom of the funnel, it’s really hard to differentiate. You get 30-character headline and a little description, and only if they click to your site, you get this expanded opportunity to say something bigger to them. For them to understand why you’re different than the guy right down the road, also offering service in X location, it’s really hard to do.

You’ve got to have some layer or ability to share the brand voice. Speaking of that lower patient lifetime value, rising costs to acquire because you’re so over-invested in the bottom of the funnel, can you give us an example where you’ve either seen that happen, the over-investment in performance, or where maybe even performance-first didn’t go the way that people thought it would?

Katie: I love when a client can come to me with very specific goals, but if every conversation we’re having is about leave and bookings and nothing about vacation experience or the perception, that’s a red flag to me. I want to talk about recent patient surveys or roundtables that are being done. Case studies should be updated, and we should be thinking about the value prop to ensure that it’s not the same as all competitors.

Some things that you may see are inconsistent reviews or declining referrals. One thing that I see all the time is websites that emphasize affordability without providing transparent pricing, or the physical therapy office that talks about personalized care providers. Isn’t that all physical therapy? Isn’t that common knowledge we know that you’re going to hospital? It’s personalized care.

I assume that when I come into you with my shoulder pain from sitting at my desk all day, you’re going to treat me a little bit differently than the 14-year-old who just had ACL surgery. Let’s think about the value prop and ensure that we’re setting ourselves up to be different than our competitors, and that’s going to have a positive return on our paid media for other digital investments that we’re making.

Lauren: I think just to take a half-step back and really define this for the people listening, when we talk about performance and brand, can you just speak to what brand means to you? It’s not just, oh, I moved up the funnel and I served up a video on meta. What do you think of or how do you define investment in the brand?

Katie: That’s a great question because everybody sees brand marketing a little bit differently. When I think about brand marketing in comparison to performance marketing, I’m talking about customer journey, customer satisfaction. Are we understanding and creating a story that resonates with our audience and makes them trust us more? That’s all through understanding them with surveys, roundtables, with creating experiences that improve their time with us. If that’s on the website, we’re making sure that the search that you have is easily understood.

Lauren: The brand experience is obviously a curse at the point of care, but how do we understand that and carry it through the pre and post?

Katie: I look at brand marketing as really the future of the investment. How do we ensure that the new patients coming in are having good experiences with us? Understanding the current process and how we can improve it to make it more streamlined and informative so that we’re building trust and accreditation from these new prospective patients, as well as continuing down the journey with our existing patients to make sure that we’re consistently meeting the needs of our existing patients.

We’re looking at things like lifetime value and satisfaction through surveys and roundtables to really identify what opportunities we have to improve, but also what value propositions are things we can talk about for new patient acquisition because we’ve found that our existing clients really care about those things.

Lauren: Yes, before you start doing the intersection of brand and performance marketing is amplifying the brand message through performance channels. I think the key of what you’re really trying to say is, do you have the brand message? Do you really understand where you play, where your strong suits are, why someone might pick you? Is it access to care? Is it the experience?

I think nowadays, a lot of the like, we take insurance, we’re down the road from you, we have online scheduling, those are fairly common and those were the things that everybody relied on for so long. What about the outcomes? How is a patient of yours going to tell me that they had a great experience so I can feel it and not just hear it that you think you do a great job? Let’s hear that other people think you do a great job, too.

Katie: Exactly.

Alex: Healthcare marketers, what’s up? It’s Alex from the future. Guess what? Scaling Up, the healthcare performance marketing summit, is back. Scaling Up is focused entirely, entirely on driving patient acquisition to your group. You’re talking the largest provider group, health system leaders, everything it takes to drive a patient to your practice or health system from media, BI, analytics, performance creative, SEO, AI, because we’ve got to have that acronym in there.

October 28th and 29th, thousands of healthcare marketers are going to be showing up to this. It’s virtual and it is free. That’s the best part. Last two years, we were charging for it. This year, I want every healthcare marketer to come. We need to connect more patients with care. We all do. We all need to do it together. I’ll see you there. Scaling Up.

[music]

Lauren: Back to our performance marketing conversation now that we’ve really defined brand, if you’re looking at the data, you’re working with a client, you’re seeing their paid media, a lot of their bottom funnel stuff, what are the signs, the data signs that they’re underinvesting in brand?

Katie: One of the signs I see is every conversation is about leads or bookings, nothing about the patient experience or perception. Other red flags might be no recent patient surveys or roundtables are being done, case studies are outdated, the value prop is the same as all the competitors. Maybe you’re getting inconsistent reviews or there’s declining referral. These are all signs that you need to put more emphasis into your brand marketing.

Lauren: I think other things, if you’re looking in a Google search campaign or a meta campaign, you’re seeing maybe declining branded search volumes, so you’re having to rely more on non-brand paid. You’re getting fewer click-through rates. People are just scrolling right past you, or they’re clicking, which is, of course, where you incur the cost. Then those conversion rates are declining as well.

I think some of those data points, if you’re experiencing those, the problem might be not be just, we need to do a better job of setting up our campaigns. It might be something much more macro than that.

Katie: Yes, definitely for paid marketing, that journey that we take a consumer on to website is so critical. You and Jean actually talked about it recently in another Ignite podcast, and I thought she said it so beautifully. It is a storytelling journey, and we need to have the landing page match what we’re saying in the ad, which the ad needs to match what the keyword that someone’s searching for is all about. It’s a journey, and it all needs to be cohesive. If it’s not, you’re under-investing in brand marketing.

Lauren: Yes, most of the marketers will fundamentally get what we’re talking about. They will be the ones that see the declining brand surge. They’ll see brand traffic and search console organically going down. They’ll see paid media performance just ticking down and not having the right levers to do anything about it. They know that those are some of the signs.

They’ve got to then bring that to a CFO and say, maybe I don’t want to pull back on my performance investment, but I need to bolt something on to make this a more meaningful investment. What would your advice be, if any, on how they could take that type of request to a C-suite and make the ask?

Katie: I think you started to say it, show the cracks, pull Google Search Console data to highlight the declining brand traffic, or point to the stagnant paid media performance. Bring in review trends to show the risks that are involved if we don’t invest, and then commit to measurement.

If you frame brand as a lever, you’ll track in organic traffic, add recall and conversion rate, leadership is much more likely to listen. That measurement piece is just imperative when you’ve got a CFO who maybe doesn’t want to invest in something that they can’t see the return on.

Lauren: I would say that to me is always the biggest flaw and the biggest challenge is this moving goalpost of measurement. When we talk about, I’m going to go make this ask, I think the companion to that is, and here’s how I plan to measure those dollars, and I’m going to stick to that measurement, not get 30 days in and be like, “I’s not driving leads the same way search does.” Then the whole thing breaks down. I know you’ve done quite a bit with measurement framework. Can you just talk a little bit about what you think that needs to look like?

Katie: First, align on your KPI because your KPI that might make sense in your head, maybe it’s organic brand traffic lift, might not make sense for your CFO. We can talk about conversion metrics when thinking about brand marketing. That can be something like looking at your brand clicks on organic, or that can even be conversion metrics. You can look at conversion rates.

You can do a survey to better understand your value proposition and update your messaging on your website. Start it out as a 50-50 AV test, measure that conversion rate lift, and that’s going to give you a sense of how you’ve been able to increase conversion rate through your brand marketing efforts to really quantify the lift there.

Lauren: Yes, I think that’s a perfect point. It’s not we have all brand or no brand, it’s let’s find a use case for it, let’s pick a market, maybe it’s a geo holdout, maybe it’s a ghost fitting situation, something where we’re withholding.

Does this truly influence the buyer, the consumer, the patient to choose us, have brand preference, find us in ways, and convert at higher rates that ultimately still, at the end of the day, are going to drive more patients at a more efficient cost for new patient, or allow us to scale while staving off diminishing returns? I think that’s the kind of message CFO’s going to love to hear.

Katie: Exactly. They want the numbers.

Lauren: All right, time for two more questions. You alluded to some conversations with Gene in the past, and I think that’s a great point. I just want to get your quick point of view on it. You’ve mentioned a lot about surveys and really understanding what your consumer cares about. That is brand. Brand isn’t just running a brand campaign. The creative and storytelling itself, can you just talk a little bit about what you think works in creative as you move through a brand to consideration, to bottom funnel performance initiative?

Katie: Storytelling is so critical because it builds that mental model for your patients, who you help, how you help, and why you’re credible. That clarity reduces friction and speeds decision-making. The performance upside is higher conversion rates, lower CPCs, and stronger brand search demand. You’ll see that just happening naturally with things like search where a stronger value prop increases click rate, which improves quality score and lower CPCs.

There’s such a massive importance placed on the storytelling to make sure that you’re bridging the gap of, okay, I need to help the prospective patient understand who I am and how I can help them, but I also want to get them to convert. There can’t be one or the other. It needs to be a cohesive story across the board.

Lauren: I think you and I have seen this in a client that we’ve been working on together. The tendency to say, let’s launch a brand campaign, get me into the channels that feel like branded channels, but say the same thing as we’ve been saying everywhere else. That isn’t going to work. It’s not going to work to marry me on the first date, book now when you’re running a display video or OTT campaign, and that’s the first time they’ve ever seen you.

All right. Thanks for all the insights there, Katie. Looking ahead to next year, I know it’s budgeting season, I’m assuming as we launch this, hopefully, Ashley and our team are launching this in budget season, that the split, everybody wants to know how much should I be spending where? We know that that’s an art, not a science, but if you had to give someone who’s way over-relying in performance right now some guidelines, where could they start in trying to think of their budget and how to fund brand?

Katie: You’re right. There’s no magic ratio. It really depends on your brand health. If your awareness is strong, you might only reallocate maybe 10% of your test budget towards brand, but if you’re a brand and traffic is falling or negative reviews are rising, you may need to spend 50% or more fixing that foundation because if your message is weak, your reviews are poor, your site is frustrating, no amount of play media performance will offset that. You’re just driving up their long-term cost location.

Lauren: Absolutely. There’s a tendency to start with 10%, but let’s see how that performs and be willing to move more over or try to do an and, not an or statement. Obviously, that’s easier said than done when you’re asking for more budget, but I think now’s a good time to at least have some baseline data on what did the 10% investment in brand do for me? If you don’t start there, how are you going to go ask for more budget going into next year?

Katie: Exactly.

Lauren: If you had one piece of advice for the marketers listening, again, as they’re thinking into next year, brand plus performance, how they work together in one sentence, what would you share?

Katie: I would say that performance pays the mortgage, but brand appreciates the home. You need both to stay secure and build your equity.

Lauren: I love it. I’ve always said something similar about the dynamic between paid and organic. I always say paid is renting and SEO is paying the mortgage. It’s okay to have somewhere to live now, but we want to have an asset down the road. I love it. I think brand definitely falls in that category. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. It was great to have you on there. I’m sure we’ll see you again soon.

Katie: It’s fun. I feel like official podcaster now.

Lauren: You’re a podcaster, you’re fully embedded in the flock. It’s been great to have you. If you’re listening, please like, share, subscribe. Hit your other marketing friends with a link to the latest episodes so that we can share our knowledge with them, too. We’ll see you all next time.

Katie: Listen to June’s podcast because it was really good.

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