The Strategists’ Corner: What healthcare can learn from retail

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: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Ignite Marketing Podcast. A little change of pace today, got a very special guest, Ben Dutter from Power Digital, and we are going to start a new segment called The Strategist Corner. Ben, first and foremost, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Power and what you do here?

Ben Dutter: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. I’m Ben Dutter. I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at Power Digital. I oversee Power Digital’s overall company strategy, and I also advise our clients on their strategy, which is a buzz word, kind of a fluffy word, so we’ll get more into the details of what that is.

Rich: Yes. The idea around this segment, Ben works in a ton of different verticals outside of healthcare. Obviously, what Cardinal focuses on is almost purely healthcare, but the focus is how do we bring the strategy of other verticals and other digital marketing disciplines to healthcare to really accelerate this new patient acquisition and branding and awareness and consideration objectives that we struggle with every day in the healthcare marketing space? Ben is going to really show us some of the wisdom from retail and fashion and e-comm, and all these other verticals that may be slightly further down the digital marketing maturity curve and what we as healthcare marketers can learn from those verticals and how we can start bringing that into our marketing strategy. Ben, great to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Ben: Thanks for having me, for sure.

Rich: One of the most common issues that we see when we’re working with healthcare clients is there’s a lot of pressure, just like there are in other verticals that you work in, for performance. Obviously, Cardinal is a performance agency. Power is a performance agency. We live and die by the numbers, but what that typically leads to in the healthcare vertical is a race to the bottom. Everyone is focused on demand capture. There’s a lot less focus on demand generation because those channels are perceived as more expensive, further up the funnel, further away from the conversion. How have you overcome that struggle in some of the other verticals that you’ve worked in where you’re working with clients who are over-indexed at the bottom of the funnel, hitting those diminishing returns on search, but can’t seem to wean themselves off it and diversify the media because they either don’t trust those other channels, or every time they try and play in those other channels, their measurement tells them that the acquisition cost is too expensive? How do you help to educate and diversify media in some of the verticals that you’ve worked in?

Ben: Yes, it’s a great question. It’s a really common challenge, even for industries outside of healthcare, and it’s not just a unique demand capture industry. One thing that you said earlier I want to double down on a bit is I think healthcare is only behind other verticals because it’s so heavily regulated. A lot of what the other verticals have been able to achieve is largely because they’ve been pushing the limits of what’s actually regulatory allowed and sometimes crossing that line and learning things in a more accelerated way than what a healthcare brand could. The healthcare folks out there listening, I see you. I understand that it’s a challenging industry, for sure, from the data side.

To answer your question around demand capture versus demand generation, a lot of it comes down to the measurement, but also the maturity of the brand itself and what type of customer that they’re trying to capture. If you’re a smaller brand just getting started, even mature, 10-plus years old, but you’re in an industry that is very, I would argue, maybe commoditized where there’s a ton of competition, you’re really trying to win at the checkout aisle. You are the candy bars at the grocery store and everybody’s just trying to, what’s their favorite based on the packaging?

That’s okay. That’s a viable strategy. A lot in the fashion and apparel space do that. A lot in the SaaS, B2B SaaS space do that. They essentially sell the same product just with a slightly different color variation or product iteration. Demand capture channels actually probably are the right choice for a lot of those brands. Learning how to determine, well, when do I need to push up more media to capture more demand, versus when do I need to actually cut back on my surge budget or cut back? That’s one tranche.

As you get a little bit more mature or you get into a product category where branding and demand generation actually become super critical, think of something like a car or a more expensive purchase like a mattress or something like that, there’s a much longer consideration window. I would argue actually in healthcare, there’s a long consideration window, but then a very short conversion window. They think about it for a very long period of time before actually doing it. I myself have been exploring LASIK for 15 years or something and I still haven’t pulled the trigger, but all of the demand awareness generation that I’ve seen over the years will accumulate.

It comes back to measurement for sure. Are you actually measuring what’s incremental and are you past the point of diminishing returns in demand? More importantly than that, I think, is understanding where you are as a business in the maturity curve and are you trying to win at the checkout aisle or are you big enough now where you can tolerate a longer consideration cycle and actually investing in awareness and upper funnel media? How we help those brands do that, a lot of it’s education, a lot of it is testing, and a lot of it is measurement.

Rich: We talk about healthcare as a broad brushstroke umbrella term, but obviously inside of healthcare, there is very high acuity and very low acuity verticals that we work within. Urgent care, you might not have to do a lot of top-of-the-funnel demand generation. You want people to realize that you’re there, but maybe $99 out of $100 is spent in search because that consideration window is incredibly short, but LASIK or something much more high-acuity, that does require some kind of differentiation further up the funnel of why should I pick you versus going to competitor A or competitor B down the street.

I think what’s interesting about healthcare that’s somewhat of a unique dimension, and I’d love to pick your brains on this if you see this in other verticals, is historically in healthcare, the high-acuity decisions have largely been driven by provider referrals. If I am thinking about, oh, I need to get some major surgery, I’m often going to go and see my private primary care physician, or I’m going to go to a healthcare provider that I trust, and I’m going to say, who should I go and see about heart surgery? They’re going to give me a referral, and that’s going to be maybe 70% of influencing my decision. Is that something that you’ve combated in other verticals and anything similar that we see there in healthcare?

Ben Dutter: Yes, you said a couple of key phrases there that apply, I think, at all levels of order value. If you think about a very cheap impulse buy, something like a candy bar, I don’t need as much credibility or trust in order to do that. The higher of an AOV you go, the higher order value you go, you’re making a big life decision, buying a car, buying a house, buying a serious medical procedure, signing up for a business-to-business contract, as another example. That trust threshold increases significantly.

Whether the trust is coming from reviews, like second-party public reviews, whether that’s coming from your friends where you’re asking them about, hey, what’s your favorite mattress or whatever it is, or coming from a healthcare provider or some other trusted source, it’s all the same motion. The consumer wants to feel like they’re mitigating the risk as much as possible and that they’re getting the right chance.

The challenge then becomes, okay, where do you show up as a brand to generate and foster that credibility? For a consumer product, a lot of the time, it’s mass reach, it’s influencers, it’s celebrities. It’s review sites where people are doing the research. They want to come back and say, oh, wow, they won the JD Power Associates Award, or whatever, and that makes them more likely to buy.

If it’s a B2B contract, which I think is, in many cases, more similar to healthcare than D2C is or consumer product is, you have a shortlist already. You are understanding, hey, I’m going to go to my referral partner or I’m going to go to my subject matter expert I know about this topic and say, who are the three best agencies that do whatever? It’s how Cardinal makes a lot of their money. It’s how Power makes a lot of our money. The motion as a brand is identifying that source of credibility and actively having a motion against it.

Sometimes that’s advertising. Sometimes that’s partnership or collaboration. Sometimes that’s just showing up and doing really good work and being seen by those groups so that they can actually publish their own research and their own credibility boosting. Either way, the motion is the same. You’ve got to build that trust with a credible third party for your brand.

Rich: Yes. I think that’s a great lesson to healthcare marketers out there, which is, it’s not just the patient that you should be marketing to, it’s the HCP as well. Oftentimes, those disciplines are bifurcated, but digital can be an influencer for that HCP audience in addition to the patient audience.

I want to come back to something that you were talking about earlier when we were talking about media mix diversification, which is measurement. Another thing that you said earlier about healthcare friends having to deal with a lot of regulatory challenges no more so than in the measurement piece of the puzzle. It’s a fun challenge and a conundrum all in one, which is how do we measure, in a world that we’re leveraging marketing platforms that don’t sign BAAs, that are not HIPAA compliant, that have no intention of ever being HIPAA compliant, that are leveraging data that they’re getting from these websites to monetize their products, which is against the spirit of HIPAA.

We have these technical solutions, CDPs that now have closed-loop attribution and all of these fun tools, but there’s also MarSci, right, and something that is being leveraged and has been leveraged for a long time in other verticals that is now really table stakes in terms of measurement. Talk to us about some of these MarSci advanced analytics products that you’re using on a day-to-day basis and why it’s so good for healthcare because it doesn’t require pixels and it doesn’t require scraping information for websites that otherwise we wouldn’t want to be giving to these ad platforms.

Ben: Yes, totally. In MarSci, as we call it, marketing science, it’s the endeavor of trying to understand, through data science and through experiments, the actual cause and effect relationship between some kind of activity and an outcome, which in our case usually is some sort of marketing activity, whether that’s paid media or PR or email campaigns. How is that actually driving patient acquisition? How is that driving incremental net new revenue, however that monetization struggle occurs?

With measurement, if you go back to a time- before the internet, I know it seems like ancient history, but there were brands that did marketing campaigns in the ’60s and the ’70s, and they were held to an ROI. Measurement at that time was much more in this MarSci field of space, where you’re looking at marketing mixed models is a very common and hot topic right now as people are calling it. MMM is essentially looking at the relationship between those inputs and outputs in a data science way, a statistics way.

The second is experiments. The example I always give is if I had two store locations, a west side and an east side, and I ran a bunch of media, billboards, and radio ads on the west side and nothing on the east side, I would expect to see my west store location perform better. It’s intuitive. That same principle can be done. These AV experiments can be done at increasing levels of sophistication for different geographies, different product groups, different customer groups, et cetera, with all still maintaining HIPAA compliance because the only data that we’re passing back is very chunky, aggregated user data.

It’s not looking at deterministic data that’s a one-to-one PII or PHI kind of relationship like you would need with a CDP or a clean room or something like that. It’s just looking at, we’re in San Diego filming this right now, did we run ads in San Diego and did we see a spike in total applications in San Diego, for example. Those two, the combination of models, coupled with experiments, and using those to calibrate and measure each other also, is a very compelling way to prove out what’s actually incrementally driving the business.

This touches back to your question around media mix. What we see in many cases are channels that are highly incremental, meaning that they really do true lift to the business, true net new customers, net new revenue. They often struggle to be measured in these traditional attribution ways, pixels and clicks and UTMs and things like that. If you think about a billboard again, how am I going to get a UTM parameter on a billboard? I can’t, but we know that they’re effective. Attribution really just focuses on trackability, not necessarily causality or incrementality.

Rich: Obviously, we’re throwing out a lot of things, a lot of concepts that maybe some of our audience is familiar with because we’ve talked about them, but certainly hasn’t played around with. From a testing point of view, what are some of the most common tests that you run? What are some of the easiest to get started with or some of the ones that you’d recommend starting with?

Ben: The easiest, it’s not really a true scientific experiment per se, but it’s just the pulse test. We’re going to run media for a flight, and then we’re going to turn media off for a flight. We’re going to see the leading and lagging indicators, how it relates to us going up and down. Sometimes you hear that called the Super Bowl test. We’re going to 10X all of our spend or 100X all of our spend in one day or one week and see, is there a big curve of like a waterfall effect of net new leads or net new revenue? You can use that to measure.

There’s a clever way to do that called a causal inference analysis or causal impact analysis. If you go online and you Google that, you say open source causal inference, you’ll find a bunch of Python scripts that’ll run that for you. It’s pretty simple to set up. That’s the easiest, is to basically just turn stuff on or turn stuff off. Now, to make it a true experiment, you need some kind of control group.

The challenge with a pre-post-it test like that is that there might be some other factor that gets in the way. Seasonality or a competitor comes in or whatever. You just always want to compare a test group and a control group. It’s most simple, is you take your geographies of all the areas you service, cut it in half, run media in one half, don’t run media in the other half, and just compare those over time.

Rich: Okay. Going back to something you just said about the Super Bowl test or the pulse test, cutting the media off or even 10x-ing the media, how do you get buy-in for that? Because I imagine a lot of our marketing team, they might hear this podcast, and of course, it shapes all of their marketing visions. They run to their executives tomorrow and they say, we’re going to run this pulse test immediately. We’re going to cut all of our media. The executives are like, excuse me, what? We’re going to do what now? We’ve got volume goals to hit. We can’t pause our media. How do you get around that and that objection?

Ben: Yes, I guess to back up 100 steps, the point of measurement is to glean some new information so you can make a better decision. It’s not just measurement for the sake of itself. It needs to lead to some kind of action, which means that there needs to be some kind of hypothesis, such as we believe 100% of our leads come from paid media. That is a hypothesis. I would challenge that that’s true. It’s probably definitely not true.

Rich: 100% not true.

Ben: That could be an assumption that the CEO, the CFO, or the CMO hold. As a marketer, especially somebody who’s closer to the media, they might say, hey, look, the overall blended unit economics cost per lead look like this, but that’s assuming that 100% of the leads are coming from media. Realistically, it’s probably closer to 10% to 50% are coming in from media at best. The real cost per lead might be double what we think it is. You present that to a CFO or to a CEO, they start getting very interested. They go, oh, wow, the downside protection on this is actually that we could theoretically spend less.

If your organization is already performing well and you’re hitting your profitability metrics and you just want to figure out how to scale, that becomes an easier argument then to say, look, we think we can get this incremental lift. We’re going to do this pulse test. It depends on the circumstance that your business is in. If you’re already performing well and you want to scale faster, you can bring a gamble to the boardroom. You can say, here’s what it’s going to look like to gamble on this bet. If you’re not performing well or there’s concerns around profitability, that’s where it’s much easier to sell in a holdout test or a go-dark test where you’re reducing media spend significantly and seeing outcome there.

Rich: Because they’ve already got the appetite to pull back.

Ben: Correct. They’re probably looking to spend less money.

Rich: Yes, exactly. Speaking of spending money, great segue. One of the things, from a Cardinal point of view, we’re always trying to educate our clients on is, or let me step back and talk about a common problem statement. We’ll onboard a new client, they’re spending $200,000 a month, say, and they always spend $200,000 a month. It’s just flat. They’re not really controlling how it’s being spent. Maybe they’ve got 400 locations and every location has the same budget. Just let the algorithm figure it out and spend wherever the algorithm finds performance. That’s a common one. What we try and say to them is, where do you have capacity? Where’s their actual need?

Because what we’ve seen in the past is, we’ll spend 10% of the budget at a location that’s only open two days a week but converts like crazy on Google because there’s no competition. From a lead driving point of view, it’s a lead driving machine. The CPA’s through the floor. Google over-optimizes there, but the doctor actually can’t see any of those patients because they’re already booked out for months. How do you look at the business need and use that with your clients to shape investment strategy? Oftentimes, you’re not trying to fill capacity, but presumably you’re trying to hit sales goals or various revenue pieces. What’s the typical strategy look like for you guys on that side?

Ben: All businesses of all types, there’s only two ways that businesses make money. That’s it. It’s customer count and customer value. That’s it. For us, we want to try to understand, is there a limitation on how many customers that we can get in an area, in a TAM, total addressable market, in an ICP segment of who’s our ideal customer? This is very common in B2B, by the way, where you’re looking at lists of segments of audiences that you want to attack. Common in B2C too. That’s the starting point is just to understand, like your example of the clinic or what have you that’s only available two days a week, there’s a small TAM. There’s a small inventory supply. That’s one option.

The second is then, okay, how do I get the most value out of my customer? Which in B2C businesses or B2B businesses comes down to product. Which products are we selling? Some products are $500, some are $50. Not all orders are created equally. We want to find customers who are willing to buy the $500 thing multiple times over the next six months versus the customer that’s only going to buy the $50 thing one time. Much like capacity planning is very similar in healthcare, it sounds like, to inventory planning and value planning for D2C brands and consumer product brands.

You want to start to look at the analysis from the perspective of here’s my total universe of customers that I can capture, in theory, but then there’s a secondary component of that customer value. Really, to take it even to a 301 level is profitability because not all products have the same margin. There starts to be a matrix somewhere in there of where’s the sweet spot of what the company’s priority is. Is it contribution margin? Is it customer acquisition? Is it total revenue? What have you? There’s a right answer on how to manipulate a media plan to attack whatever that most important goal is, that top number one North Star metric.

Rich: Presumably with some of the verticals that you work in, because obviously healthcare has very specific entry points in the low acuity space, primary care being the most obvious one, but also the emergency room, urgent care, and we work with health systems that are then trying to graduate those patients, which are very low margin into the more high acuity specialist services as a follow on and keep them in the system and reduce leakage. Presumably you deal with similar things in the verticals that you work in as well.

Ben: 100%. Both in consumer product and in B2B, same story. If you come in on a low value promo product, the chances that you are a loyal repeat customer are very low compared to somebody who has made a serious considered purchase, paid full price. They’re much more psychologically committed and invested in their purchase, and they’re much more likely to retain and buy multiple times. Sounds very similar as with healthcare. If I have an emergency need, if I need toilet paper, I’m getting whatever I can get today. It’s an emergency.

Rich: Don’t go below three ply, man. Don’t go to one ply. Don’t ever do that. Unless it’s COVID.

Ben: That’s right. If I have time to think about what is this, again, I keep using the mattress example, what is the best for my sleep? What is the best for my living situation? My budget? All these things, I have a longer time to think about it. You as a brand have more time also to communicate with them before they make that decision. You have to sell them on it through marketing, through education materials, through this sort of mental availability model where they’re deciding, actually, I do want to buy the $2,000 mattress because it is going to make me feel better and last longer.

Then you have to pay it off. That’s the biggest thing I think most brands struggle with is they oversell and under-deliver. I’ve personally experienced that with healthcare providers myself too, where it’s been an almost traumatic experience to the point of how poorly managed it was and it makes me not want to engage with that provider in the future. It’s the same if I bought a car from a shady car dealer. You need to be able to deliver on what you’re doing. That creates loyalty and that creates retention.

Rich: Another great segue into, I think, probably what is going to be largely our final broad topic of this podcast, which is, we’ve talked about measurement, we’ve talked about media diversification. What are some of the other key lessons that healthcare marketers and healthcare organizations can take from other verticals that maybe are further down the maturity curve, are more competitive, are more advanced in terms of their methodology, that can really help set them apart and differentiate them from their competitive set, would you say?

Ben: Yes, I think there’s two things that immediately come to mind, and you’ll have to translate for me a little bit here. One is distribution. Very common truism or fact in consumer product is the more retailers I’m in, the more sales I have. If you think about it, I have a D2C, I have an Amazon, I have Walmart, I have Target, I have Best Buy, I have all these other retailers. Some amount of customers are going to go to those distributors and buy them. You’re going to get more effect out of your media, and you see that where the more omni-channel a brand is in consumer product, the less it has to invest in marketing. It’s just a fact because the distribution is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them. It’s called physical availability.

Rich: The baseline is increased.

Ben: 100%. In healthcare, the way I could translate that potentially would be inventory capacity, but also locations maybe, or the size of the geo that they could serve. That’s one category for sure is right now, if you just saw recently the Grüns sale to Unilever, over a billion dollar value in three years. The way they did that was they had a very clean unit economic on D2C. They took that to all of the major grocery store chains and all the major retailers and they said, “We can reproduce this at infinite scale.” They proved it out and they were able to maintain that. They went from 0 to 300 million in revenue in three years.

Rich: Yes. I think just to translate that in the spirit of what you were saying, that’s what we’re seeing with retail healthcare now. With Hims & Hers telehealth, all 50 states, you can sell it anywhere.

Ben: That’s right.

Rich: You made the friction or the barrier to entry so low that it makes it so easy for you to reach so many consumers versus a traditional healthcare model and operating system.

Ben: The watch out there, which tees me up into my second learning now that a lot of these consumer product brands are learning the hard way, is that their product is actually not really well positioned. The way that they showcase the brand and their positioning and their messaging around the brand and the product, the value props of the product isn’t great. It’s not clear. It’s not trustworthy. It’s not compelling. It doesn’t grab attention. This is the most fragmented attention economy ever in history. Everybody’s got a million different channels that they can engage with now.

Your creative in a paid media environment has to be on point. It has to make an impact and we see oftentimes two to three times more ROI on high quality creative versus low quality creative for the same brand measured through incrementality studies. That ends up becoming a really crucial component. I am a little biased. I’m not as close to healthcare as you are, but the creatives that I’ve seen, they’re fuddy-duddy. They’re not super compelling, probably because of regulation, but that would be the area I would think that healthcare, that’s like the next frontier, is how do they make a compelling creative messaging that actually gets patients to want to work with them.

Rich: If you think about it, healthcare as a vertical is primed for that because healthcare decisions are very emotional decisions. It’s a very emotive vertical. It’s not buying a toilet brush off Amazon. You are buying potentially life-changing procedures and you’re making serious health decisions, not just for you, but for your loved ones as well. We really have great stories to tell and we should be telling them in this high production modality that you’re describing that feel genuine and authentic, rather than stock photography of a man wearing a white coat with a stethoscope. Yes, I 100% agree. I cannot agree with you more.

Also, I think while in certain instances, leading with the provider is a benefit if they’re a known entity, I would encourage people to park the ego and lead with the patient’s story and the outcome and the motivation as well.

Ben: Yes, for sure. The creative aligns differently based on the media mix too. Because, like we were talking about earlier around where you are in the maturity curve of your media program and are you actually trying to generate brand awareness and create demand or just capture it? Those have a different creative vehicle too. If you’re trying to actually create demand, it’s more about building almost subconscious or subliminal positive affiliation. You just want to understand generally that this is a good brand that I feel good about and you’re probably not going to remember a lot of the details.

When you get down into the bottom of funnel brass tacks consideration research phase, that’s where the creative has to do a lot of heavy lifting and being more, I would say, feature-specific. It has to actually sell more on what it is. I think a lot of brands invert that. They lead with product, or in your case, maybe they lead with the benefits of whatever the medical procedure is. Yes, exactly. It’s like, why am I listening to you? It really should just be a brand introduction and those very upper funnel media channels.

Rich: Yes, I think that is a tendency. We tend to go straight to the middle of the bottom of the funnel in terms of our messaging without really explaining, to your point earlier, why LASIK? Why would you even want LASIK? What is the benefit of the category as a whole if I’m getting an elective surgery, which is scary, especially on my eyes.

Ben: Totally.

Rich: Then before that, we’re just like, “Oh, we accept insurance,” and it’s okay, but you haven’t really explained to me why I want this thing in the first place. I think that’s an area where perhaps there’s a missed opportunity because everybody’s expecting everybody else to do that legwork so that they can just swoop in the bottom of the funnel and grab that conversion before they’re ready to do the procedure.

Speaking of that, and just almost as a bonus question, because we get this a lot, I do want to touch on it because I think it’s interesting. We work with a lot of health systems where they might not be doing a lot of demand generation digital, but they are certainly doing demand generation traditional advertising. They are still running print ads. They are running the TV spot. They’re running the radio spots. They are maybe sponsoring the local baseball game in the community.

First question, does it make sense for them to shift their focus away from those traditional media buying efforts to replicate funnel strategy in digital? If it does make sense, how do you go about educating those executives and bringing about that shift away from traditional channels to more of a full funnel digital strategy in the verticals that you’ve worked in?

Ben: I’m only allowed two of these a day. This is my second one. It depends. For me, ultimately, it’s about what drives the best ROI over a time horizon that you’re comfortable with waiting. What we find with traditional media, especially as there’s a, I would say, an exodus, for lack of a better term, in a lot of big holding company advertisers, they’re shifting dollars away from traditional media because of the benefits about digital, which I’ll get to in a second, there’s actually lower rates. It’s cheaper now in many cases than it was even 5 or 10 years ago when you factor in media inflation.

In many cases, I actually think the ROI is better in traditional media, if, and this is important, you measure it correctly, which is back to what we were talking about earlier with experiments and models and some of these old school ways that are not attribution dependent. That being said, the benefit of digital is I get a lot more information. I have a lot more control over who I can target. Even with regulations, I have geo-targeting options. I have channel targeting options. I’ve got inventory targeting options. You have textual targeting options, a lot of these benefits that aren’t available in traditional, and it’s agile. I can make changes very quickly.

I can 10x my budget day over day in CTV. I probably can’t do that with a linear buy. It ends up being, hey, this is really working. This test proved very fruitful, let’s go all in. I can do that tomorrow in digital, but I can’t necessarily do that tomorrow in traditional. I actually recommend a blend and you want to have as much– It’s just like the sales distribution strategy I talked about earlier, the more stores that you’re available in, the more customers you’re likely to get. Same thing with media channels or media tactics. The more reach you have, the more likely you are to have incremental reach.

You hit a person who maybe they’re not on TikTok, but they watch a lot of Judge Judy. I’m going to be on Judge Judy and that’s going to hit that new audience and vice versa. Having a good blend omni-channel program, if you can afford it and hit the right reach and frequency and saturation curves and all that, is super critical.

Rich: I think a key piece of not trying to talk to your digitally savvy consumer differently than you’re talking to more of a traditional consumer in that going back to the LASIK example, somebody who watches Judge Judy to get their LASIK information, versus someone who goes online to get their LASIK information, they’re probably still looking to have the same questions answered-

Ben: For sure.

Rich: -irrespective of the media that they consume. Just having a very bottom-of-the-funnel strategy on digital and a very top-of-the-funnel strategy on traditional, because you’re talking to two separate audiences that oftentimes don’t overlap, doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense.

Ben: Yes. For sure. I think in general, the one tweak on that, I would say, or the 201, is you can still have the same value prop or the same brand positioning, but you can tweak it to be more endemic to the channel. Extending the TikTok versus TV analogy, you can have the same value props, you can have the same brand positioning, but the way that you show up in TikTok has to look like a TikTok, versus the way you show up on TV, has to look like a TV ad.

Rich: Correct.

Ben: I want to decompose the notion of the flavor or the context of the creative and the messaging or the value prop of the message. I think consistent through line on the message, unique delivery on the creative.

Rich: Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, Ben. If you’ve made it to the end of our podcast, you clearly ooze stamina.

Ben: That’s right.

Rich: We appreciate you being here still. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you and learning about all the things that we can bring to healthcare from these different verticals. We will be making this a regular segment if we get more than four listens, so that’s great. We’ve got a very low bar that we’ve got to hit.

Ben: I’m going to tell my mom to go listen five times.

Rich: We’re going to hit this thing. We’re going to hit this thing. Appreciate you guys for listening. I hope you found this useful, and tune in next time to the Ignite Podcast. Thank you very much.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.