The Strategists’ Corner: Getting Leadership Buy In

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.

Rich Briddock: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ignite Marketing Podcast, and continuing segment, the Strategists’ Corner with fellow strategist, Ben Dutter. Hi, Ben, how are you doing?

Ben Dutter: Hey, Rich, I’m great. Although I had a moment of being an old man over the weekend. I bent over a chair and I popped my rib. I actually sprained my rib just on a chair, so that’s how I’m doing. I’m a little bit short of breath.

Rich: All right, well, we’re not going to make you do any stretching today. You can just sit and just– oh, we’re only going to be stretching your brain muscles. There you go. It’s 30 minutes.

Ben: Now I get the illustrious distinction of having been beat up by a chair. That’s another fun one on my resume.

Rich: Don’t want to put. That’s not your top five accolade, hopefully. Today we’re going to talk about somewhat of a perennial challenge, whether you are in healthcare or whether you are in other industries, which is how to get buy-in for complex change, complex ideas, doing something wholly new from what an organization has done before, both on marketing side, but also you could apply this more outside of the marketing use case as well.

I think often as agency, we’re coming in and we’re saying, “Hey, the way that you’ve always done this thing, the way that you’ve always measured, the way that you’ve always bought media, the way that you’ve always spoken to your prospective customers or patients is not optimized, or it might not be the best way. There’s actually a different way to do that. Then we certainly talk about this all the time in healthcare.

We see this often where we joke about this all-encompassing Google machine. Everybody’s addicted to Google. Everybody’s addicted to paid search and has been in healthcare, because forever, obviously, that’s where people go to start a lot of their healthcare journeys and demand capture is the easiest thing. It’s the most efficient thing. Everybody rushes there, and that’s where they want to be. Then when you start to talk about things that are further away from that conversion point, like paid social and even more in programmatic and CTV, digital audio, digital out-of-home, these are channels and tactics that people really don’t believe in.

They just don’t have that affinity for it. They’ve not seen it work for years. It’s really hard to get buy-in to drive organizations to adopt these other efforts, even if we know from everything that we’ve done in the past, that’s the right approach. Talk to us a little bit about when you get into that situation, when you start with a new client or even an existing client where you just realize that they need to change something to hit that next growth point or to meet that next goal, how do you come in and wean them off, “the tried and true things” that they’ve been doing and help them see that there’s a better way or a different way to test into?

Ben: I’m laughing. If you’re on the podcast and you can’t see the video recording of this, you’re missing all my non-verbals happening here as I’m trying to restrain a chuckle. A lot of my job is executive therapy and really trying to manage change within an organization. 10-plus years ago, I used to cringe at or poo-poo the concept of change management in organizations. It was like, “Oh, just be really clear. Of course, everybody wants the best outcome. They’ll do it.” I’ve got some gray in my beard now, and I’ve got a lot less hair, and I’ve learned in that time that that’s not the case.

A lot of it is understanding the real cause of the blocker. I think there’s a couple different categories of real causes of blockers. Why are they hesitant or resistant to change? The most common one is strictly just inertia. Everybody just has a status quo of business, and it’s everybody feels operationally underwater. I haven’t met a single brand or agency or vendor that’s like, “Oh, yes, I got a bunch of free time I’m just screwing around with day to day.” Everybody’s like, “I got 20 pounds of work in a five-pound bag. What can I do to try to win some efficiency?”

Coming in and saying, “Hey, by the way, everything you’re doing is wrong, and it’s going to be really painful and slow and challenging to fix it.” A lot of execs just plug their ears, and they don’t want to hear it. A lot of it is just inertia. That’s the most common. The next most common one, I would say, is actually just clarity of understanding. In this industry, in particular, and you mentioned Google, I would say Google is particularly guilty of this. Even outside of ad media, just agencies, measurement vendors, data partners, everybody, they have a tendency to overcomplicate things. They say a lot of jargon, and they say a lot of fancy technical terminology.

If you’re in data science, which is some of what we’re going to be talking about today, marketing science, scientists are notoriously jargon heavy and notoriously considerate with their language, where they don’t want to say things that are definitive. They don’t want to say things that are a fact, unless they feel like it’s a fact. It erodes understanding. If I’m a busy CFO, and I need multiple hours of explanation on how a marketing mix model works, that’s not a good use of my time. I’d probably come away from that meeting more frustrated and confused than invigorated or clarified.

That’s the second blocker, is clarity and being able to translate, admittedly, complex topics into simple language and business-friendly language that non-practitioners can understand. Then I think the third most common one is incentive misalignment. You and I talked about this on a previous episode, Rich, is you got to make sure that marketing, sales, finance, the board, all want the same thing. It’s shocking to me how often that is not the case. That’s why I was chuckling about executive therapy, because a lot of the time, they haven’t ever had the headspace to sit down for an hour with those different organizations internally and say, “This is what my priority is, what’s your priority?”

Sometimes, those priorities are directly opposed to each other or contradict each other. Those are the things that I have to try to identify when I’m coming into an organization. Not even getting into, and I’d love to hear from your point of view on the healthcare side, not even getting into regulations or data loss or just the actual tactical executional challenges, which are downstream of that, but just even getting political buy-in often requires one or multiple of those three things being removed.

You got to make space to make the inertia. You’ve got to get people to understand the opportunity cost of doing nothing and the upside of doing something. Then you got to make sure everybody’s incentives are aligned and that their goals are aligned and not contradictory to each other. That’s really where you start to make headway. On the healthcare side, I’d love to hear from you. Is there a challenge that’s unique because of all the regulatory pressure there?

Rich: On the general piece before I get healthcare-specific, I think one of the things that I also notice when we’re thinking about change management is the appetite for risk. I think people obviously have varying appetites for risk. Organizations have varying appetites for risk. A lot of the time, no one wants to put their neck out for something that an agency, even though they may like their agency, but ultimately, their agency, not even an internal employee, is recommending that they change.

Going back to the point about clarity, people find concepts that they don’t fully understand a lot riskier. To your point around, you’re going to come in and talk to me about synthetic controls and Bayesian models, and I’ve never heard any of these things. All of a sudden, I’m like, “I don’t get that.” Therefore, that feels really risky to me, because if I don’t even understand it, how am I going to defend that to my CEO or my CFO if I don’t even conceive what it is doing? Appetite for risk and helping to de-risk some of this change management is definitely something that I’ve noticed over the years, too. I’m sure we’ll get into strategies around that in a second.

On healthcare-specific piece, a lot of times what I see is, again, with HIPAA and with tracking and with regulation, oftentimes paid search, there are ways to get to HIPAA-compliant tracking with something– with a channel like paid search, which is much easier than with a channel like meta and much easier than with programmatic where you really need pixels. Paid search, you can live life without pixels. For risk-averse healthcare marketers who don’t have a budget for a CEP and can’t put sophisticated tracking solutions in place, paid search is almost an easy out.

Especially if those institutions are not bought into MMM and bought into incrementality and correlation and causation types approach to measurement, they don’t really see that they can trust those channels or that they can optimize those channels to get the most out of them because they can’t feed the information in for optimization purposes. That is definitely another blocker on the compliance and regulatory side. The other blocker on healthcare side is that healthcare is, we spoke about it on another episode, Ben, healthcare is behind some of these other industries.

Ben: Totally.

Rich: Oftentimes, they’re still trying to get their paid search, their demand capture efforts, working as well as they possibly can. Then throwing out, “Actually, you need to be focused more on demand generation and building a brand on digital,” that can be scary. They’re like, “Hang on a minute, I’ve still got this problem at the bottom of the funnel. Now you’re telling me I’ve got to set up this whole new initiative at the top and the middle of the funnel.” Oftentimes, they’re lean marketing teams. They don’t have a lot of folks internally to help execute against this. Maybe they don’t have the right creative, the right messaging, the right brand position strategy, all these things.

I think that’s the other thing, too, is oftentimes when we’re talking about change, we’re talking about taking something that is less complex and making it more complex. We’re talking about something where you’re over-invested in a single channel and we’re saying, “No, you’ve got to diversify. You’re too bottom of the funnel, you’ve got to go full funnel.” Oftentimes, change management is not, “We’re going to make this simpler for you.” It’s, “We are going to add some degrees of complexity.” I think that’s where, again, you get that inertia and that resistance that you were talking about, because to your point earlier, they’re looking to make life easier. They don’t want to hear, “Now it’s going to be harder.” That’s the most challenge.

Ben: I think that’s where the clarity piece comes into is, a lot of the time, additional layers or additional actions don’t necessarily need to be more complex. It’s just the level or the altitude of the complexity changes. I’ll give you an example. If I’m running an out-of-home campaign with billboards, there’s nothing to really build around an optimization layer. There’s not a lot of data pass back I’m going to get. There’s no conversion signal that passes back that I “optimize” or algorithmically optimize against. It’s not necessarily a ton of iterative testing that you can do at least over a short period of time.

You can get really complex with an out-of-home strategy around, where do I place these billboards or these locations? Do I go into grocery stores or do I stay on highways? How far out do I go? Do I look at commuter flows? Do I look at demographics? There’s a lot of other components to consider strategically from an allocation perspective, how long is the flight? It’s trading one complexity for another.

A lot of marketers, especially in the current generation, they’ve been raised on performance marketing. They’ve been raised in the Google meta stack for the last 15, 20 years, and they just assume that everything needs to be 700 campaigns with thousands of keywords and hourly optimizations. The reality is it doesn’t require that for a full funnel strategy. A lot of the time, it’s as simple as looking at a freeway off ramp and saying, “That looks like a good spot for my practice,” or whatever it is, and letting it run for six weeks.

It behooves marketers, whether it’s an agency or a vendor or an in-house team, to make that clear to the powers that be internally, “Hey, understood that this is a budget ask, or understood that this is a strategic complexity ask,” but it’s not necessarily a tactical complexity ask, and it’s not necessarily a super rigorous data pass back ask, especially with these more omnichannel or comprehensive programs.

I think that’s a hidden objection that often doesn’t get uncovered, where the executives at the brand side may be misattributed, sorry the pun, of the amount of work that’s required to execute some of these initiatives. It is more complex from a P&L perspective, but it’s actually maybe not as complex from a day-to-day management.

Rich: Let’s talk about, you brought it up, and I think it’s a great place to go, these performance-minded organizations. Power is a performance marketing agency, first and foremost, although we do a lot of other things.

Ben: Sure.

Rich: To your point, you’ve got more and more people who have grown up over the last 10 years in the school of performance marketing, and people who live and die by CAC, or live and die by ROAS, or you name it, whatever it is. We have become more and more obsessed with data and these numbers, which is a good thing, but there is the old school Don Draper approach to marketing, which is, great positioning, great emotional connection, great user centric messaging, and the need to be full funnel. It speaks to people at the category level, at the awareness level, at the consideration level, and at the conversion level.

When we’re talking to these performance-minded organizations that are so married to CAC, they’re so married to that performance metric, and we’re saying to them, “Actually, the problem is you’re never going to scale because you saturated the bottom of the funnel. By the way, you need to get up to the top. The issue is you’ve got to expand the universe, and that’s going to be more costly and less efficient.” How do we convince these internal marketing team that they’ve got to make that shift?

Ben: I think it comes down to scenario planning. I think the root of the evil in many cases is actually the short-term time that most organizations budget and allocate media and also make reactive optimization decisions. I’ll give you an example. Most of our clients, we got about 500 clients, they’re making decisions on a monthly P&L, and they have a daily expectation, they have a weekly expectation, they have a monthly expectation.

Going to the CAC example, they’re going to spend a million dollars in marketing this month and they expect $100 CAC. If the CAC comes in at 80 midway through the month, maybe they jack up their spend. They’re comfortable with spending up to 1.2 or 1.5 or whatever it is. If the reverse happens, which often happens, the CAC comes in at 120 and their target’s 100, they’re like, “Oh no, we’re not profitable on these customers that we’re acquiring in this month. Let’s draw down our spend.”

Now, I’m the first to say, “That’s prudent from a P&L perspective. You definitely need to pay the bills and have positive cash flow and understand your unit economics and your LTV to CAC and all those things.” For sure, but it misappropriates that the spend in this month is driving all of those customers, because that blended CAC that you’re seeing in your P&L is all the new customers that you’re capturing, but it’s all only measuring against the spend of that month.

In reality, many of those customers were influenced from marketing touchpoints months ago, sometimes years ago. There’s actually a scenario where you can forecast out, “Hey, we’re going to spend a bunch more of these top of funnel tactics, and it’s going to add zero new customers this month, or very small amount of new customers this month.” Then some will be added in month 2 and some more will be added in month 3, and so on and so forth, and we’ll get through the process maybe six months down the road.

Actually, your overall blended CAC gets better. Maybe you were trending at 100, but now it’s trending at 80 because you’re actually driving a more incremental program. Having that scenario, that forecast where a finance team and marketing team can understand, “Hey, we are misunderstanding or misattributing the spend this month or this week to the customers that we’re winning this month or this week.”

It’s really more of a cohort model. That gives them new vocabulary, coming back to my three blockers, new clarity around what it is. The way you can do that is through some marketing mix modeling. You can do that through some testing, incrementality testing where you can understand, our customer actually takes three months on average from first exposure to conversion, so we’re going to actually look at our CAC numbers on a trailing three-month window as opposed to just these last 30 days within the intra month. That’s going to be a more realistic representation of the customer acquisition costs of those customers.

There’s more sophisticated ways to do that, but just starting them out that way and showing them what that looks like, is a great first step. Obviously, if your hypothesis and scenario pays off, all the better. If you say, “Hey, I’m going to get your blend CAC down from 100 to 80 after six months,” and you’re able to do that, then that builds a lot of goodwill, but it’s usually just giving them the right vocabulary and the right framework to build off of so they can understand their decision making is actually leading to the short-termism.

That can be from a test, that can be from a model, that can even just be from a scenario on a spreadsheet, but in many cases, it’s a new way of thinking for the brand that they didn’t understand that they were causing a lot of their performance challenges internally, just based off budgeting alone.

Rich: Would you say that a way for internal marketing team to drive desired change inside of the organization at a larger scale is to position these tactics as tests rather than a, “Hey, we’re going to shift to more of a full funnel approach, and that’s just what we’re doing because we believe in it”? Is it more a, “We have this hypothesis,” to your point, “and this is the timeframe of the testing window that we’re going to need. We feel relatively confident based on X, Y and Z, but ultimately, this is a test. Even if we get nothing else out of it, we will understand that at least the way that we design this funnel is either effective or it is not effective at driving incremental new patients or new customers.”

Ben: That’s a fine and even a great way to do it. We spoke on a previous episode. I’m big into provocation. I think having a very critical or negative ‘what if’ is a great way to start change management. I’ll give you a very simple example. For this story that we’re talking about, brand has a hundred dollar CAC. That’s blended. They’re spending X and they’re getting Y total customers and it’s blended out into this $100.

I could go to the CFO and I say, “Hey, what if your CAC– actually, the incremental CAC, the cost to actually buy a new customer for marketing dollars is twice that. Because half of your customers are coming in through organic brand equity baseline workflow, and half of your customers are actually coming in from marketing because of the way that you’re running your marketing program. Your real CAC is actually $200, not $100.” They will go, “Oh my God, we’re not profitable at 200. We need to be at below 110 to be profitable.” It’s like, “Great, I want to prove how to better budget and how to get an actual incremental customer acquisition cost below 110. Here’s how I’m going to do it.”

Having that provocation or that what-if scenario is really important. That’s a negative way to do it. A positive way to do it would be in an organization that maybe that’s already growing. “My hypothesis, Mr. CFO or Mrs. CEO, is that if we had invested differently, i.e., we put more on top of funnel, here’s a scenario plan or whatever, what that would have looked like. Our total new customers would have been up 50%. Our CAC would be down. Total allocation is the same, but the lift of it is much better.”

If they have any trust at all or cloud at all, then that executive team will say, “Tell me more about how you’re going to prove out your hypothesis,” and then that opens the door for more testing. The more evidence you can bring to that initial provocation or initial scenario, the better, but in many cases, it’s a chicken and egg situation where you just frankly, you don’t have the proof until you run those tests, and so you have to start with that ‘what if’ that plants a seed in their mind that makes them afraid of the opportunity cost.

Rich: I totally agree with that, and I think iCAC is often the piece that is missed, and I think is often pushed back against and fought against by those who are resistant to change because they desperately want to believe that Google is driving $100 patient or $100 new customer. Yes, it might be blended, to your point, but that last dollar you spend, it might be 200, it might be 500. Again, it comes off like weaning yourself off these tactics that you have this certain perception of that you’ve just invested in for years without properly validating how they’re performing at all budget levels.

I think the other thing that I see on the health care side is this bifurcation. It’s really interesting. You’ll see performance marketing organization, and I’d be curious to see if you see the same thing outside of healthcare, that will bifurcate their expectations of channels depending on whether it’s a digital channel or a traditional channel. The expectation of radio and TV is that radio and TV really doesn’t have to drive performance, but we just have to do it because we have to have a certain TV spot coverage, we have to have a certain radio spot coverage.

We know, and for those of you who cannot see me, I’m doing air quotes, “we know”, that a certain amount of prospective customers are listening to the radio and that they’re watching television. When it comes to digital, because digital is more measurable, the expectation is that every dollar has to be measured and every dollar has to be shown to be driving performance. When you think about it, that is obviously, to us marketers, especially on the digital side, an unfair comparison and expectation of these channels.

Digital out-of-home is just out-of-home, but with better targeting and some better measurement. It’s still ultimately an ad that you see on a billboard. That’s something that I see and I often wonder about, which is, why are you siloed and looking at these tactics differently when I think we would agree that they are all part of the same marketing engine and they all have to work together, essentially? We should be looking for waste and we should be looking for places to drive efficiency or places to drive scale, irrespective of whether it’s traditional or digital.

Ben: I see it all the time in omnichannel brands. They’ll even have different teams. They’ll even have different agencies in some cases, where they’ll have a brand agency and a performance agency, where they’ll have a top of funnel and a bottom of funnel, whatever you want to call it. I’m a big believer in the funnel and I’ve been quoted on saying, “The funnel’s not dead, the funnel exists.”

I think people misunderstand the funnel. In my opinion, it’s actually more of like a layer cake of time. When you’re talking about more upper funnel tactics, it is building mental availability, it is building brand awareness and consideration, but it’s over a longer period of time. Because those people are earlier in the consumer journey, it’s going to take more time for that upper funnel spend to materialize into revenue. It doesn’t mean that it’s not performant. On the contrary, we often see on long-tail tests and long-form models that channels like TV and radio are very profitable.

They might have an IRO as the incremental return on ad spend better than a meta or a Google because they are actually reaching new, colder audiences that are less close to making a purchase decision, and therefore, more influenceable. Measuring it off of a two-week or a 30-day window, in many cases, undercuts the value of those tactics. I get why that separation has happened where people intuitively understand, “My brand media shouldn’t be held to performance,” but I do think it should. You have to measure it towards the right timeline.

What I see a lot of channels being mis-measured today, a lot of brands doing that mis-measurement, is they say, “We’re tapped out on Google meta, where next?” Right now, it’s very common to move into a TikTok or a CTV or a YouTube, and they start measuring that in the same way that they would measure a very bottom-of-funnel performance channel. They maybe even are smart and run an incrementality test, but that test maybe runs for three weeks. Then they get the iROAS result. It comes back and it’s like, “You’re losing money on your ad spend on this iROAS result.”

The test doesn’t even have a chance to even make an impact on those customers. It’s got to run for 60 days or more depending on your purchase cycle. In healthcare, I would imagine, it’s even longer. Six-plus months, I would guess, for people to make those very important bodily health decisions of what provider they’re going to go with. That’s the problem that a lot of these performance-oriented organizations are mis-measuring brand channels. They hear people say, “Oh, yes, brand channels drive ROI. It’s measurable. Use an MMM. Use an incrementality test.”

They say, “Great.” They run these tests, but for such a short period of time. It gives them no purview on the long-tail effect of those tactics. Then they kill it and they go back to, “we’re just going to stick with meta and Google and try to optimize as best as we can.” My advice is definitely view it as an omnichannel, full-funnel mix, but you have to allow for enough space, enough runway for those upper funnel tactics like out-of-home to actually mature and actually build mental availability and brand awareness in your customer because those customers likely are very, very early in their decision-making criteria. It’s going to take a long time for them to make that decision.

We see it in the data. There’s one test recently for a client we ran. It was a YouTube test. It was a 90-day test. The first 30 days, there was no discernible lift at all, zero. All the ad spend looked like it was not incremental in any way. The next 30 days, day 31 through 60, it was modest. It had a decent amount of lift, and it was statistically significant. We could have called the test concluded right there where maybe the iROAS, I think, was like a 1.5. Not great, but also, okay, statistically significant. We feel good, but we saw that it was compounding still. We saw that it was getting better every day.

We weighed it again, and it ended up getting to over a 4 iROAS. The same exact test, same exact creative, same spend per day, but simply because of the flighted length of media, the ROI kept getting better. If we had just assessed it up those first 30 days, stinker, killed it. If we had assessed it off that second month, okay, maybe to optimize it, but not great. Boy, after a quarter of it running, it was performing great. Now that brand is spending a decent chunk of their media mix on YouTube for that very reason. They’re measuring it over this 90-day period.

Rich: I think what you bring up, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, by the way, that the funnel is enormous. It looks more like a Gantt chart.

Ben: Exactly.

Rich: The further up you go, the further out you get.

Ben: Yes.

Rich: I think something certainly that I see on the healthcare side, which I’m sure you see on the retail side and CPG side as well, is that what we miss is we’re very short-termist about when organizations want to commit to change, in that, change is often driven by a crisis. That’s when people get on board. Things are not working. Everything is on fire. We’ve got to change something. Then that becomes this, “What can we change? We’ve got to change it right now. Performance is down this month. We’ve got to change something.”

The problem is your iCAC on Google is $1,500. By the way, to your point, if you think, “The right move is to invest in YouTube,” but if you think that’s going to impact this month’s performance numbers, forget it. Here’s a more of a philosophical question that I’m going to put out to you. I know you’re a bit of a philosopher, but when is the right time to change? Is it when your back is up against the wall and you are penned into a corner, or is it another moment in your journey? When do you think is the most optimal time to push for change?

Ben: I think it’s you reap what you sow. You’re at a period of time where performance is great. Growth is happening. The category maybe is expanding. You’re able to invest. You have some buffer. You have some risk mitigation. That’s where I would test the most and try to learn as much as possible. Here’s what works. Here’s what doesn’t work. We’re okay. We can survive running an expensive test that failed because we’re crushing it in these other areas of the business. That’s all seeds that you’re planting. That’s all things that you’re selling for the future.

When times are tough, when performance is poor, when there’s some macro category impact, like many of my clients went through tariffs this time last year and are still suffering the consequences from that, they know what to do because, “Hey, we have all this learning that we’ve been able to accumulate during the great period. When the sun was shining, saved it up for a rainy day.”

Now, that’s a luxury that not a lot of brands necessarily can afford. It is easy for me to say, “Oh, yes, just wait until you have a good performance period, and then you can learn and use that to change when times are rough.” In many cases, when you’re forced into a change, a lot of the time it’s understanding, is the change a strategic change that needs to happen, which means it’s probably going to be slower and more painful and take a longer period of time, or is it an execution change? Am I even just doing the right activities? Am I doing them well?

An example of that might be, in the immediate context, a strategic change might be, I need to expand into a new market because I’ve saturated my new customer growth. That is a net new expansion strategy. I probably need to do some research on this new market. I need to make sure that my product go-to-market strategy fits with this new audience. Maybe my channels have to change, whatever. Whether that’s a physical market or a category market, same principles apply.

Versus execution, tactical, it could be like, “Hey, we’ve had six months in a row of missing our numbers, and we are drowning in terms of where we can perform.” It’s just go back to first principles. Are you even executing well? Are you doing the basics and the fundamentals well? Are you able to ensure and guarantee that you’re doing the right activities? I think those are two different times of when change is important. If you’re performing well, let’s start depositing some learnings in the bank, so to speak, that we can pull out and use to iterate and avoid those dire moments.

If your backup is up against the wall and you’re in a dire situation, always, always try to look at, what can I control in the short-term? Usually, that comes down to execution. Immediate, it might be like, am I bidding on a bunch of non-incremental terms, or am I spending in a bunch of channels that I can’t prove drive lift, or am I doing all these CRO EB tests that aren’t driving any conversion rate improvements, or whatever it is? Let’s just cut all those. Let’s go back to a budget-zero approach of, what’s the minimum viable marketing strategy I can do? You’ll probably identify a lot of waste there, and that might give you some more buffer to test into things that are more strategic long-term.

Rich: I agree with that approach. The biggest thing that I’ve picked up is the old adage of, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Doesn’t actually apply here. If you are crushing it, I wholeheartedly agree that the time to test is when things are going well because of all the things that you mentioned. Because the world doesn’t stand still, the competitive landscape doesn’t stand still, just because Google and these things are working well for you today does not mean that they’re going to work well for you tomorrow when a competitor with a bigger budget who’s going to dominate the bottom of the funnel comes into that market.

We have to constantly be evolving and finding new ways to reach our audience and to engage with them and to own parts of the funnel. Just to round us out, because we’ve had a great chat about this, how do you work with an internal team to start instilling that mindset of, you can’t stand still? You’ve got to keep learning. You’ve got to keep testing. We’ve got to push. Insights in itself is somewhat of a currency. How do you instill that into these clients that you’re working with?

Ben: I think it comes back to, again, the what if. I think that’s probably the theme of my answers for this episode today is the what if scenario. What if we’re able to unlock twice the customers that we thought we could? What if we’re wasting half of our media? What if we’re able to spend a tenth of what we’re spending and still achieve the same outcome? I think bringing that example of the what if and building an intellectual curiosity within the executive team, within the marketing team, and even, I would argue, in some cases, encouraging them to KPI themselves and hold themselves accountable to a rigorous and formalized testing roadmap.

What we do for a lot of our clients is we supply a 12-month testing roadmap where we’re doing something between 12 and 50 tests per year. Each has a hypothesis, each has a test design, each has a specific KPI. We’re measuring against the so what– the executive summary so what, and all those things then become, we got to hold ourselves accountable to checking these boxes, because you’re right, if you don’t, you’re going to get caught by somebody who does, and that other person, that other brand is going to outperform and all of a sudden double down, and now your life just got a lot harder. You don’t have the budgets to figure it out at that point.

I think it’s putting a little bit of fear of the unknown and the what if into them, but also giving them a framework, like a testing roadmap that says, “Hey, here’s how a mature organization continues to evolve their marketing program. They’re doing these 50 tests a year, and here’s exactly what that Gantt chart looks like that we recommend for you,” and giving them that artifact so that they can hold their teams internally accountable against it.

Rich: Yes, I completely agree. You just cannot stand still. You just cannot stop. I think there’s always something else to unlock out there. There’s always another opportunity, and obviously, the velocity of how– even if you’re still on the same tactics and platforms, the velocity in which these platforms and tactics are changing, you really just cannot afford to be doing the same thing you were doing yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

That’s really the lesson that needs to be learned and the reason why everyone out there really needs to embrace change and change management as part of their organizational approach to their efforts. Ben, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks again for sharing your wisdom with us. We appreciate it. To all of our lovely audience out there, we hope you enjoyed another episode of Strategists’ Corner on the Ignite: Healthcare Podcast. Thank you so much.

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