Stewart Gandolf

Hi, everyone Stuart Gandolf here, I’m here with a new guest and a new friend, Michelle for Shackleford.

She is senior vice president of marketing for Let’s Get Checked. And I reached out to her because I saw her topic.

We oftentimes look at some of the major conferences and see look for interesting topics. And I thought yours, Melissa was really great.

So welcome. And I guess if you could start, Melissa, by telling our guest a little about your background and what you’ve been doing more recently with Let’s Get Checked.

That’ll just the way I have a place to start.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Stuart. looking forward to our conversation today.

So little bit about myself. So I’m based. It’s Minneapolis where it is just starting to snow and it’s five degrees.

So you should feel sorry for me.

Stewart Gandolf

It’s cloudy here, but it’s not that.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

No, no, no, five degrees is a little chilly. I have been a health care marketing leader for nearly 20 years.

I’ve been on all sides of health care. The payer side, the provider side, the PVM and pharma. I’ve worked in behavioral health care and senior care, kind of seen and done it all.

I truly grew up as a B2B marketer. And then become more B2C and B2B2C focused along the way as I’ve worked with different provider companies.

And most recently, I’ve added health tech to my kind of level of experience, working with Let’s Get Checked, which is home health and diagnostics.

And we do a lot focused on B2B2C with that end user patient.

Stewart Gandolf

All right, great. health tech is exploding in popularity. just talking offline moment ago about mental health, which is a huge category and finally coming of age after decades. health tech is flying as well. So that’s an exciting space. you guys are kind of reinventing healthcare while you’re at it, right?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

And that’s what’s happening. It’s really a lot of the health tech players are truly reinventing how healthcare is going to look in the future.

I mean, think about behavioral health, as you just mentioned, a few years ago, we started to see, wow, doing something like this, doing your mental health visits with your with your provider on Zoom became normalized.

And in the future, more health tech is bringing more and more disruption like that to the to the marketplace.

Stewart Gandolf

So I’m curious about just for our audience and as well as me. So what’s sort of the unique selling proposition for

Let’s Get Checked and we’ll jump into the rest of the program here. But what what makes you guys great?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Well, with Let’s Get Checked. We make it as easy as possible to meet people where they’re at. So you can do a lot of the bulk of your testing and diagnostics that you need for your healthcare remotely from your home. You can do anything from colorectal testing, HPV testing, you can do testing for diabetes, all kinds of different testing you can do from home.

And when I think about someone who is in a rural healthcare community where they may see their provider like this over a Telehealth, they still need to be able to test their blood or test other samples and makes it really easy.

Also, if I’m not just in a rural community, if I’m an elderly person who may not drive, lots of different reasons that people just want to have more convenience to make sure that they’re getting their, particularly their preventative care from home.

Stewart Gandolf

That’s great. And it’s funny, because my wife just went through Zoe, I don’t know you’re familiar with that, but for the different kinds of testing for a diet, it was amazing.

So love this category for sure. Okay, so let’s talk about inclusive marketing, because the session, was it SHSMD?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

can’t remember whether it was SHSMD.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, but SHSMD, last of all. So, I saw this and I couldn’t make it this year because I was speaking one of the same mental health conferences because just talked about health lines.

this is the first government shipment in the years. So, I didn’t get to see it, but I love the description of it.

And so, it was about inclusive marketing. so, for the uninitiated, what does inclusive marketing mean and why are you so passionate about this topic?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Well, I think all of us in health care marketing should really be passionate about inclusive marketing because everyone is a healthcare consumer.

Whether for yourself or for your loved one. And when you really think about inclusive marketing, it’s really making sure that your messages resonate with the broadest audience, whether that be gender, age, race, sexual orientation.

It could be just about anything, someone would live in with a disability. All the different things, we need to make sure our messages resonate with everyone.

And not just talking about marketing from a real superficial standpoint, we need to make sure that everyone feels seen and heard, so that they feel like they are welcome to get care from that particular provider or that health system.

Stewart Gandolf

All right, that totally makes sense. it’s been a long time coming. It’s a topic that we’ve talked about for a long time and talk about inclusivity in terms of, for example, photo selection.

our team, we actually have a step in to make sure we don’t have just all white people or all men and how could we reach the broader audience.

so that’s at a very surface level. I’m assuming there’s a lot more to this. when you think about inclusive marketing, are there any other ways to define this maybe more specifically or why you’re passionate?

What are the things that let’s start there? I’ve got other questions to ask you, but help us understand maybe little bit deeper level what that means or some of these people have.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Yeah, and I think for me, I get really passionate about inclusive marketing in healthcare, just like I said, because

Everyone is a healthcare consumer, and I have a lot of diversity in my family, as well as in my friends, and people, different types of messages resonate with different people.

So, for example, years ago, I was leading marketing at a behavioral health provider, and we did an inclusive marketing audit, and I thought we’d get A++ grades on it, because I thought, okay, we’re doing all the basics.

Our imagery, like you mentioned, we had lots of diversity in our imagery. I thought we were relatively accessible from a website perspective, we did close captioning on all our videos.

I thought, okay, we’re going to really pass this with flying colors, and what they came back, and they said there was two things that we sort of failed on.

One was size. We used so much stock photography that everyone was a beautiful model.

Stewart Gandolf

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Absolutely true. I had not considered that as another kind of element of inclusivity, that it if everyone is a beautiful, skinny model, somebody who’s not a skinny model, size or shape, might not feel that they’re welcome at your health system or for your provider.

The other one is we got dinged on not having enough people living with disabilities. And when I had previously thought about accessibility, I thought about closed captioning my videos.

But I needed to show imagery of people living with disabilities and I needed to focus on truly having accessible communications.

Because everyone, even of course people living with disabilities too, is they’re all health care consumers. And so it helped me to think about a lot of different angles when I’m talking about inclusivity.

And it has to go beyond the imagery, but the imagery is kind of the table stakes.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, that totally makes sense. So it’s funny, I think about, I was just in Target with my wife this week.

I forget what we’re buying, but we’re in target for some reason. And they’ve done a much better job, right? So you go in, and they still have the pretty models, but they have people different sizes, different faces.

And I don’t know if have to build these on the wall, but they definitely have changed their marketing. it’s interesting. it’s mixed.

I feel like at one point, I don’t know if over did the right word, but it’s kind of a good balance now.

Just really people that people can relate to. I’m assuming it’s working for them.

They’re doing it in all their stores.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Exactly. mean, Target isn’t health care, but they’re also, I mean, everybody could be a health care target consumer too.

And I actually have a girlfriend who uses a wheelchair, and she’s a model, and she’s done modeling for a target.

And I love the fact that in her modeling sessions, they don’t focus on the wheelchair. They focused on her.

And you’d have to look really closely to notice that she’s in a wheelchair. That’s the kind of thing I think makes people feel seen and heard, that they’re not just a token in a wheelchair.

That’s absolutely what we don’t want. We want somebody who’s there in there being able to be seen and heard for who they are.

Stewart Gandolf

I love that, by the way. I really do, because the worst it be to get somebody who’s not disabled put them in a wheelchair for a photo, right?

That’s just super unauthentic, I’m sure that happens a lot, right? But then they didn’t make the wheelchair the star, I think it’s great.

So you have to be, it’s more subtle, it’s more inclusive, but it’s not patronizing, I guess, would be the word I was using, know?

It’s something like it’s patronizing, so that’s awesome. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, comes to mind is like, you know, brands have a lot to worry about these things, right?

We have a very uncertain, you know, political landscape, economy, global economy, global issues, all lots of stuff is going on at present.

So, you know, how does this, of the healthcare marketer, you know, in the brand or at the healthcare brand, like, why is this matter today?

And why is it matter, you know, more than ever? And why is it more than just lip service, which I can see, you know, focusing, okay, we threw in a couple of photos, what else do you want?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Exactly. Well, in healthcare, I think there’s two sides to that. One is we know that we can impact healthcare outcomes.

And by getting people to get the care that they need, we’re improving outcomes. And the second half of that is there is an economic benefit to inclusive marketing and to serving a broader audience.

Because just think about it, if everyone is a healthcare consumer, but you’re only speaking to this segment of the population, those are the people who are going to be your healthcare patients.

If you’re speaking to the widest possible audience, whether you’re going to have more people come and be your healthcare patients.

So there is an economic play beyond just, it’s the right thing to do.

Stewart Gandolf

You know, it’s funny though, on the brand side, what I’ve noticed is some institutions look at themselves as more leaders, like they just feel like it’s part of who they are.

So Mayo and Cleveland Clinic in particular, as I’ve met, worked with, you know, leaders of both of institutions. it’s kind of like, it’s just what we do, you know, like, I just had Lee Aase back on my podcast, who was the head of social media, he kind of invented social media for hospitals, like he was at the leading front.

And they did that because they just do. And Cleveland Clinic, you know, I’ve had multiple people on talking about patient experience.

And so I think for them, it’s probably little easier because it’s more on their DNA. And it’s, it just kind of makes you look around at your, your waiting rooms and I’m sorry, reception area.

And you’re not everybody who looks blonde and, you know, 5 foot 8, you know, whatever. So I think it’s more in the DNA as well.

But from a marketing standpoint, beyond being more authentic, which is, you know, word it’s used a lot more in the last 10 years than ever before, right?

I just think it matters a lot to who we are. And if you’re not the sort of leading organizations, these are little things you can do that, you know, and a lot of times, depending if it’s a provider not, in the provider world, a lot of times the market department doesn’t have the sort of, authority they would like.

These are subtle changes they can make about anybody complaining and it’s the right thing to do anyway, so.

Melissa Fors Shackelford
Exactly it as absolutely the right thing to do and I think if people come at it with authenticity Like you said and empathy That’s really if you have those at the core in all of your marketing and health care I think you just really can’t go wrong

Stewart Gandolf
You know actually a quick question on that. Let’s say There’s an organization that’s listening to this and whether it’s a provider or device or whatever software We have a lot of different categories But all right, let’s say they haven’t really paid attention this before they’re inspired Like is there hope that eventually  this will just become habit like let’s say you go through an audit and eventually becomes more your culture So you don’t have to stop and think about this every time like if you’ve never looked at this It’s probably a good time to actually go back to look at it But is it becoming easier for people to actually implement over time?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Yeah, I think so I’ve been at a number of different organizations large and small where we’ve been It’s always our objective to speak to the broadest audience we can because in healthcare, like we said, everyone is a healthcare consumer. And even for example, I worked for many years in substance use disorder, and not everyone is going to need substance use disorder care.

But odds are you know someone who might need care. So we have to continue to speak to the broad audience possible.

One of the things we discovered after that audit, and we sort of got dinged on not showing people living with disabilities, is we discovered that we had a very unique value proposition that we could take patients in inpatient care who used wheelchairs, and a lot of the competitors could not.

And so by us not focusing on that audience, we were missing out. I mean, it was a revenue play.

Obviously for that patient population who used wheelchairs, it was about their healthcare outcomes because we wanted to make sure they could receive care that they needed.

But when you think about it, if that’s a value proposition for you, if it’s a differentiator for you from your competition, well, you should lean into it and lean into making sure that population knows that not only can you accept them as patients, but you want them as patients.

Stewart Gandolf

So, you know, I’m in California, which is little different where you are. We were very, very diverse here in Orange County, although obviously I travel everywhere.

I just got back from Scottsdale a couple of days ago, well yesterday. But, you know, here it’s funny thinking about like the sort of diversity and the inclusiveness.

And you mentioned this earlier, so I want to talk about this for a moment. Like thinking through a little deeper than just like sort of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, whatever.

So, a great example is me and my wife. My wife is from Columbia. She was born in Columbia. She came here and she was 11.

She has no accent at all. We have so much from Mexican restaurants or whatever, because when she speaks Spanish, they’re like What. One time they were teasing her, they were like, Oh your Spanish is pretty good, you should keep learning. She got so mad. I’m like, honey, there just screwing in with you, but, It’s like, so if you look at that dynamic right there, like if you think, okay, well, is she White or is she Hispanic, she’s both, you know, She has her mom who, you know, believe, has speaks broken English. So that’s a whole different thing. And so she’s involved with her mom and anything major, right?

So there’s that. But then if you feel like you sort of understand that, recognize that Columbia and Spanish is different than Mexican Spanish, which is different than and Spanish.

These are all different sub-nitches. So it’s kind of overwhelming. I don’t know if you have any comments on that or insights on how do you figure this stuff out?

Because there’s a lot there. Just the American population, you know, we have here in Orange County, Japanese descent, Filipino descent, Vietnamese, Chinese, like there’s a lot.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

No, no, there is. And I think it’s a lot of it’s making sure people feel seen and heard. And that’s where in healthcare marketing, I think we have to be high focused on making sure people have the appropriate language.

And so that’s really important for us. us in healthcare marketing, we have to make sure that things are accessible, because sometimes if English is your second language, making sure that you have closed captioning, whether it’s, you know, it can even be in English on all of your videos to make sure that people who may not understand the verbal English, they can see the closed captioning and be able to read it, making sure that you have things available in different styles, because some people learn things easier on a video versus an email versus a voicemail versus, you know, a paper letter, because different ages, oftentimes like older populations might want something on a hard copy.

So really thinking about all those different modalities, including the language, it helps you to reach the broadest audience possible.

Stewart Gandolf

That’s great. So what’s funny I’ve noticed over the years that everybody likes to talk about the mistakes. The mistakes are always the things that we seem to learn from.

Like we recently, I had a thought leader on the influencer space. We talked about the sort of Bud Light debacle recently.

So like on the inclusive side, you know, give us some examples of some mistakes or some things that are pretty common when you’re thinking about being inclusive in your marketing.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

So I’ve got one, but first I want to say that I think if you’re starting off and you’re working with authenticity and empathy in mind, it’s hard to really make a mistake because you’re at least you’re trying.

And I think a lot of people will give you credit for that. But I had one that I found really, really just embarrassing.

So I was leading marketing for an organization that did consulting in the healthcare space and they had an offering for organizations that serviced the prison population.

So there was a catalog of services and somebody, it wasn’t on my team, but somebody in our organization put together.

catalog for this services for people in prison, and on the page was a very stereotypical man in kind of a blue shirt, could have been a prison shirt, but he was a black man and it was the only picture on the page.

So I got a call as the head of marketing from an industry association just slamming me for that using that stereotypical picture of a black man on the page about servicing people in prison.

And even though I hadn’t done it and my team hadn’t done it, I had to own it and I had to take it kind of take it on the chin as the leader of marketing, so I had to go to this industry associations meeting, I had to let them yell at me and say how we were perpetuating the stereotypes of black men, and luckily I think for me the chairperson of the committee that was mad at me or mad at my organization, I knew her personally and she knew that my husband is a black man and so

I think she knew in my heart that I would never do something knowingly that would perpetuate a negative stereotype about particular race, particularly a black man.

And so I think she believed me more than the rest of them when I really said, listen, this is not right.

There’s lots, all races are in prison and we should have probably either not used an image or used an image multiple different races.

so what I did is I modified the online version of it. I right away, I owned it. I apologized.

I said, yes, I agree with you. It’s a problem. But I luckily had this woman who was the chair who kind of knew I was being kind of authentic in my apology.

So that I was kind of lucky. It wasn’t in that I talked to the woman who selected that photo and she said, listen, I was trying to show a lot of racial diversity in this catalog.

So she did, when you look through the whole catalog, it was lots of different races and genders and ages.

But she did pick that particular picture on that particular page. So I can see it. Yes, it was a mistake as it could be seen as definitely perpetuating a negative stereotype, but we said, OK, I said we learn from it.

We’re going to do better. We’re going to just try harder in the future. And I think they really accepted that.

And but I also appreciated that the industry association tried to hold us accountable.

Stewart Gandolf

That’s great. Yeah. And that’s the marketing nightmare.

There’s so much to worry about when you’re doing marketing.

And there’s so many things that can go wrong. And it’s always very public and embarrassing. And so I can totally relate to that discussion.

That’s tough and that’s kind of the nature of marketing. it’s like even it’s like it’s not the planes you see it’s the planes you don’t see that are the scary ones.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Exactly. That’s why I think with inclusivity. I think as long as we’re trying and our hardest in the right place and we’re following kind of an objective of authenticity and empathy.

Most people will give us a break.

Stewart Gandolf

That’s makes sense. So OK. So we’ve inspired a few people I hope today like where did where to brand start?

What’s the best place to do it?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

If they want to start I think I think the best way to start like you said at the very beginning of our conversation table stakes is Imagery and to be able to just take a look at your imagery But beyond that I think it’s very helpful to think about the makeup of your team whether you’re using an agency Or your own in-house team to think about if you can lean into diversity there whether through your freelancers through your agencies your own team That’s really helpful.

everyone has the luxury or they’re in the location where they can have that kind of diversity And if you’re not part of it is also bringing in Outside experts to at least check your work.

For example one time We were launching services to that were in Spanish language So understanding my team didn’t have that expertise.

I actually hired an agency that could help who were experts in Spanish language because, like you said, for your wife’s situation, she certainly wouldn’t want me with four years of high school Spanish trying to communicate.

But I think imagery, I think thinking about your team and I think really, really leaning into authenticity and empathy is so important, not just around inclusivity, but all of health care marketing because everyone is a health care consumer.

Stewart Gandolf

So more subtly and more broadly, let’s talk about the messaging part because, yeah, everybody looks at the images and we can see that.

But I’m really understanding these different target audiences, particularly if, know, from an SEO standpoint, if you have something special for disabled, that would be something that would be SEO, for example, word, but, you know, you can focus on, you know, keywords and bringing that into SEO.

Any specific, so, I mean, this is a long conversation, but any quick advice on, you know, really understanding the brand.

Or the audiences that you’re writing for or you know again within this context because like if they’re different audiences, right?

Like I said, so for example, if you’re going to talk to my wife, wife’s like Kind of a little left out of both worlds, right?

Because she’s truly Hispanic. was born in Columbia but she lives in a very sort of, you know, white county and it’s like where am I or do I fit?

So that kind of understanding is different when you’re messaging to the adult child Which probably this is really

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Oh, no, it’s very very common but part of it is gets to kind of modern marketing and modern marketing can start to really personalize and As we in healthcare start to get a little bit more advanced at the way we do marketing the more Personalization we can do so that we can understand that this person We’re not just gonna do one broad brush and one broad brush of that message for every single person We’re gonna start to say by age, by gender, by ethnicity, by language. We can start to cut it further and further because people will start to hear their messages in different ways. So when you think about a lot of different industries, they can get hyper hyper personalized, I think that’s kind of where we’re heading with healthcare marketing I wouldn’t say we’re there today, I think we’ve got pockets of it but I think that’s really where we’re heading and that’s where we need to for individuals like your wife.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah and I feel like like for our agency, we have an interview process and so we would be interviewing our client and sometimes when you look at when we have the benefit of research we use that, and sometimes we actually interview stakeholders to help make that more authentic. It’s those little things that make it real, right, those little choices of words or getting the message or the tone right, or the emotion right is really important.

So another thing we had talked about earlier was sort of healthcare stigma.

What do you mean by healthcare stigma and how can brands address that?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

I think stigma is in the way I look at it as kind of a subset of the broad umbrella of inclusive marketing because healthcare stigma really prevents people from getting care.

And it’s a lot about these negative perceptions that people have of certain healthcare conditions. Whether it’s most of them are just imagined and they’re just happened long ago when people have just perpetuated them over time.

So things like mental health, like we’ve mentioned, substance use disorder, obesity, HIV, AIDS, even diabetes, all these different things can have some perceived negative connotations and sometimes a lot of shame along with them.

so these are people who are not getting the care that they should. They’re not talking about it with people to learn about what’s the best path.

And so I think that’s one of the things we in healthcare can do is to break down these stigmas to make it easier for people.

to get the care that they need. And we can do that through a number of relatively, I think, relatively simple tactics.

Stewart Gandolf

Great. And it’s funny too, because stigma is such a broad topic, I think we actually covered in our blog about how to market like sensitive topics.

you know, some of that another classic one, this is a pretty broad topic. One is hearing aids, like nobody wants to say need a hearing aid.

For my wife, of that article I just mentioned was inspired by my wife. She went to her trainer, and the trainer said, what can I help with?

She’s like menopause. And I laugh because like nobody would have said that when I was growing up. that was just so taboo.

And like, so Halle Perry came out talking about menopause recently. So there’s stigma everywhere. I don’t know.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Exactly. Exactly. then I mean, Simone Biles started talking about mental health and she took kind of a leave of absence essentially, from her career.

And she’s made it okay for other people to take a leave of absence for mental health. People like Halle Berry talking about

menopause. You’re right, menopause is everywhere these days because you have people like Halle Berry out there talking about it and just saying it’s no longer taboo, it’s not shameful, it’s a topic, it’s a health care condition that we should be talking about.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, for sure. And then finally, how does accessibility fit with inclusive marketing?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

I tell you accessibility is so important to health care. Not just because of the fact that there is a revenue component.

mean, they say the CDC says 25% of the population is living with some sort of a disability. That’s a big audience.

But it’s also just the right thing to do. So I mentioned before, back in the day, I thought accessibility was just doing close captions on your website.

But it’s so much more than that. It’s also making sure you have the right all tags. If you have a screen reader, because if you have vision loss, it’s making sure that obviously you’re showing the appropriate visuals with people who might be in a wheelchair.

or who might have hearing aids, things like that, it’s all the different very basic things you can do to make sure that people living with disabilities can still interact with you and your organization.

Stewart Gandolf

Really good point and going to the most basic fundamental concept here is making sure your website is ADA compliant and if it’s not plugins we recommend user-wide but there’s other plugins you can do to make it compliant.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Yes and that’s so important and I think there’s still an awful lot of healthcare that have don’t have ADA compliant websites and that’s a risk on so many levels and it seems like such a simple thing to do.

Stewart Gandolf

It is, I mean the cost to get a plugin because like sometimes making the changes is huge it’s really expensive especially on a big site so for you know $100 or a couple hundred dollars a month to make this problem go away.

A, because A, it’s the right thing to do. And B, O, by the way, to be employed, sued by, you know, maybe it makes a living doing that.

I read a little swap meet in India of all places, California, which is a little desert town that was just shut down by, you know, in this case, somebody who’s met, filed dozens of lawsuits.

So it’s like, you know, from a, I’m not sure if that’s really what they had in mind with this, the whole ADA, certainly you can do what you can to do the right thing and avoid, you know, unnecessary risk, to your health care organization.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you think about the population that you’re reaching by having a more accessible website. And it’s not just, you know, somebody who has, who’s blind, it’s, it’s somebody who has just some vision loss who needs to be able to see things.

It’s, there’s such a broad spectrum in the disability space. And having that ADA compliance on your website should be something that it’s the right thing to do.

And you’re actually the regulators are actually telling you to do it as well.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, on our own website, by the way, we have a plugin and you’ll note that at the bottom of this podcast when it’s published, we’ll have the raw transcript.

We don’t edit it because almost nobody reads it, but we do have it there. So where is that way?

We’ll listen to it. So, well, Melissa, this was fun. Uh, any final comments or anything else?

Melissa Fors Shackelford

No, this was, this was great. I appreciate it. I just applaud you for bringing this topic in. It’s not necessarily the sexiest side of, of healthcare marketing, but it’s so important.

And I feel like we’ve, we’ve got a lot of momentum in the last few years.

Stewart Gandolf

No, I appreciate it. Like for our podcast, we cover a really broad category and all the digital marketing and branding.

There’s other topics that are relevant to it.

So I appreciate your time.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Thank you so much. Stewart.

Stewart Gandolf

Great. Good job. Okay.

Melissa Fors Shackelford

Thank you!