The stigma surrounding behavioral health is finally fading, consumers are seeking help, and all types of behavioral health businesses are booming.
Our Senior Account Director Paul Knipe, Josh Weum, and I were among the presenters at this year’s INVEST Conference, where we shared pivotal strategies to reshape your marketing approach—emphasizing the critical role of authentic branding, effective SEO, and targeted advertising in building meaningful patient relationships.
Since the recordings from our session are available, I thought they’d make a great podcast. Join Paul and me as we share:
Key Takeaways
- Effective Digital Marketing Begins with Your Brand
Establishing trust with potential patients begins with authentic branding. Create a supportive environment by ensuring consistent messaging across all physical and digital platforms—websites, social media, and physical locations. - Leveraging SEO to Boost Visibility
Improving your online presence hinges on effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Craft authoritative content and optimize local SEO using tools like Google Business Profile to boost search engine rankings.
- Adapting to Industry Trends
Stay ahead of the curve by monitoring industry trends and evolving patient needs. Understanding these changes allows your organization to pivot and effectively address emerging challenges. - Fostering a Patient-Centric Culture
Emphasize a patient-centered approach in every aspect of your organization to improve satisfaction and retention, ultimately driving growth.
Listen to the Panel Discussion:
I highly recommend listening to this recording in its entirety for deeper insights and actionable strategies.
We invite you to subscribe to our blog and connect with us on LinkedIn: Stewart Gandolf, Paul Knipe, and Healthcare Success.
Note: The following raw, AI-generated transcript is provided as an additional resource for those who prefer not to listen to the podcast recording. It has not been edited or reviewed for accuracy.
Read the Full Transcript
Stewart Gandolf
Welcome. Welcome to our session, our very cozy, very intimate session. So hopefully we can all get to know each other and be giving each other hugs by the time we’re done. So, we’ll be very, very comfortable together. I’m Stuart Gandalf, I am CEO of Health Care Success, and our session today is called Expert Marketing Insights to grow your Behavioral Health Business.
Stewart Gandolf
And as you guys know, the industry we have today is evolving. It’s incredibly competitive. And what do you think will be more next year a little more competitive or less. Right. It’s more competitive every single year. If there’s anything constant at all in our world about behavioral health, marketing is it’s competitive and it gets more complicated every year.
Stewart Gandolf
So, we’re gonna try to keep things very relevant to you. And the concept behind this when we are talking, to the team here with invest was I wanted to share insights. One of the things that I talk about a lot with our team that we’ve been fortunate enough to create over the last 18 years, I’ve always just trying to find specialist people that specialize in what they do, just like, you know, health care.
Stewart Gandolf
You have nephrologist orthopedic surgeons and origins in our world. And, as you guys know, you have SEO or local SEO or a paid search or paid social or writers or of rounders. So, I brought along a couple of my colleagues that I work with all the time for absolutely expert of what they do. And so, the goal today was to talk about some of the relevance that we think are most relevant to your category.
Stewart Gandolf
And by the way, when I say category, it could include addiction, autism, getting disorders, mental health, teens. We work with all those different kinds of clients. By the way, this is mental health category is our largest category overall. So again, this I’m not the star today. I usually get to do most of the talking. But today I’m the moderator.
Stewart Gandolf
And I brought, like I said, some really strong, strong people to this panel, will be available during this pandemic and talk later. So, we’re going to talk today about, Paul as our head of account services client services. So, he leads our client services team. So, he works not just as the, strategic head of that team, but he’s one of the rare individuals I know, who is a brander and, strategic digital marketer.
Stewart Gandolf
Those are usually completely different things. So, Paul, Grazer and that’s Paul. And Josh is a long term player in this industry. He was fortunate enough to be he’s been working in addiction for years. Some of you guys may recognize him. He had the great fun and ATP to describe, the shutdown and logit script and all that.
Stewart Gandolf
So welcome guys. So, I would like to start off by adding a comment that I want to jump straight in. The first thing I want to bring up though is I feel like we’re all here and that’s great.
Stewart Gandolf
And that’s what I thank you for coming on the second day, which is always a little challenging, but I would argue that the marketing has such opportunity, like in other specialties, like for example, dermatology or dentistry, they get marketing addiction that we find that it is a lifeblood of many of their businesses. And I would argue, even if it is already the lifeblood of your business, it can do even more.
Stewart Gandolf
It’s just can be that powerful to growing the value of an institution or to growing, patients, obviously. And so, we have financial people in here today. We have people here on the provider side. So, it’s a lever that’s commonly underutilized. So, I can’t talk about everything we know today. So, we’re going to talk about instead today about two really critical things.
Stewart Gandolf
Number one we’re going to talk about branding. From the perspective of how does that support everything else. So, Paul this is like Paul is really passionate on this. Or you guys want to talk to Paul for hours. Just go for it. Paul.
Paul Knipe
Yeah. Well, when you think about branding, specifically in the behavioral mental health space, it’s important to reset on what a brand is. Sometimes they’re big notions of what a brand is or should be. Is it a logo? Is it your message? No, it’s a set of ideas. You know, there’s a quote from Michael Eisner that a brand is a thousand little gestures that you can enrich or undermine cumulatively over time.
Paul Knipe
So, what does that mean? I mean, a brand ultimately has to be every touchpoint with a prospective patient. Their families, and what does it feel like to them? It’s not an expensive process. You know, we know that big, highly accountable public brands, notable brands have to think about their presence, their strategy. But ultimately, a brand can be a collection of your core ideas, your stake in the ground.
Paul Knipe
And I just wanted to start with that because that’s important. Because if you can differentiate yourself, if you can determine what your organization is based on in terms of its principles, and if you can properly identify your audiences, then you’re in a much better position to think about digital channels, period.
Stewart Gandolf
So, Paul, a lot of times people get confused, and we say branding and thinking logos and colors and logo type like I have a brand. We did that like years ago. Tell us what you see and why you feel that, how that continuum becomes real.
Paul Knipe
You can’t really define those aspects of a brand. The tangible, concrete elements of a brand. Until you’ve actually done that thinking on where you’re different, how do you stand out from the rest of the landscape? If you can do that, then you’re one step forward in thinking about how a digital strategy of attaining patients, reaching out to people, building a meaningful connection actually happens.
Paul Knipe
A brand is ultimately about creating trust, credibility, authenticity. And when you do that well, you got a little bit of a framework for how you develop a creative strategy. You can think about the color palette, you can think about the messages that stand out. But all of those tangible things that people think a brand really is about are not really possible until you establish the framework of what the brand represents, what does it stand for?
Paul Knipe
What does it stand against, and how does it make people feel?
Stewart Gandolf
So Josh, talk about from the, your world, the branding side of your world because you’re in paid search. Like, who cares about branding and paid search, right? That’s not true.
Josh Weum
Well, brand consistency is very important. You know, wherever you’ve got messaging, if it’s your paid media, your ads, your video content, your website, it’s all got to be consistent. And that means everyone on your team needs to be aware of what that brand message is really attuned to that in every piece of your marketing, it needs to be reflected.
Josh Weum
And not just that, but for a lot of companies, there’s a bit of siloing when it comes to that. Not every piece of the company is really in tune with what the brand messaging is currently. Alignment key there. And another aspect of branding in the paid media world is refreshing. You know, if you’ve got a brand identity today that’s very resonant and it’s working very well.
Josh Weum
It’s something that has to be reevaluated often. And, you know, there’s key aspects to that when it comes to the paid media world. You’re, you know, for this industry, paid search is critical. We’re looking to get people in the door. And, you know, that brand messaging has to be consistent from the paid media side all the way to the SEO.
Josh Weum
And then of course, the website and everything else you’ve got going.
Stewart Gandolf
So, support one of the things we talk about a lot internally and when we’re working with clients and speaking is the idea of a living brand. And so, talk about, I guess, you know, what is the living brand clearly. And some of the benefits of having a living brand.
Paul Knipe
So, I think a lot of people think of a brand as being the static thing. You set your brand guidelines, you set your messaging guidelines. You have sort of an idea of who your audience is. But there’s a rigid, somewhat static approach to how you express it. Whether you’re doing social ads, whether you have a website, maybe you have a booth at a conference.
Paul Knipe
There’s consistency. But the truth is, is that there’s no one audience you have. If you’re reaching out to prospective patients or their family members, you have to think about how your brand needs to adjust and adapt to them their values, their different mindsets. It’s not the same thing. So you have to personalize the brand. A living brand as a concept adapts and responds to the needs of its audiences.
Paul Knipe
And what that really comes down to is having an understanding of social channels, marketing channels, and the messages that are appropriate for those channels to deliver it. We do a lot of work with YouTube, with video, and honestly, sometimes we need to be able to adapt our marketing strategies across a range of different audiences. A living brand gives us the flexibility to do that.
Stewart Gandolf
So yeah, I would like to add to that. The idea here is if you have a brand and for example, your colors are blue and white or whatever, if you’re advertising on TikTok or you’re advertising on Facebook or Instagram, the way that’s expressed has to be very different. If you want to actually have people stop and look at your ad.
Stewart Gandolf
So the living brand in today’s digital world is really vital to be appropriate to the audience that you’re trying to reach and where you’re actually able to, respond appropriately. And then, of course, demographically, all those different things. So, Paul, on a, we’re going to move away from branding in a moment here, but like, let’s talk about just from an SEO perspective, how does a consistent branding help or hinder the SEO in your experience?
Paul Knipe
Yeah, there’s a direct through line, between brand strategy and the clarity of your brand and search engine optimization. You know, in a way, it’s important to say branding is not just this theoretical framework. If your brand is strong and your strategy is really well put together, that’s one step closer to building relationship with patients. And here’s why.
Paul Knipe
If you have a good brand that has recognition and credibility, when someone sees organic search results and they click something, well, those clicks add to a click through rate that will improve your SEO rankings. If the branding experience of your website from the visuals to the messaging to the clarity of the user experience are really well done, there will be a lower bounce rate or better bounce rate, I should say, and you’re going to have people converting.
Paul Knipe
So, their experience on the site from a branding standpoint has direct results on the SEO data. The rankings that you see in a deeper sense, we all do brand searches ourselves, right? We search for specific brand terms, people in a specific market, they may not think they are really there for behavioral or mental health services, but when they are, the recognition influences their search behavior.
Paul Knipe
So branded searches and that trend actually influences SEO rankings as well. When you think about back linking, the linking that goes on between websites, credible organizations, government organizations, big businesses, they want to link to other highly credible and trustworthy brands. So, these are ways that brand authority, brand credibility and trust really do influence SEO performance.
Stewart Gandolf
And you may not be or some of you may not know, but there is a big link with Google and their algorithm this year. And the Google algorithm link showed that they are favoring brands and we’re seeing that as well, that brands are getting showing up better in search. So, if you’re a little guy with no brand it’s just tougher.
Stewart Gandolf
It’s a tougher road. So, let’s talk about SEO. We’re going to push away from the brand stuff because we are all really geeks at heart. That’s up here. We like the technical stuff even more so. But that branding part is foundational, which is why we covered that. So, let’s talk a little bit about, what’s working today for SEO and behavioral health organizations, both on a natural basis and on a local SEO basis.
Paul Knipe
You know, I am I think content marketing and local are sort of the pillars of SEO and behavioral mental health. So, content marketing, are you creating content for the site that’s highly relevant to users intent? Blog posts? Are you creating podcasts? Are you creating reference pages? Areas resources of your site that are highly relevant to your users needs?
Paul Knipe
Content is king with SEO, and you have to have a regular cycle of producing highly relevant content on the local SEO side because it’s location based. You have to think carefully about your Google business profile. You have to have a consistent use of your name, address, phone number across the board. And you have to do, I think, what you can to leverage the tools that Google Business Profile gives you.
Paul Knipe
You can almost treat your Google Business profile or your organization’s locations profiles as social channels in and of themselves. There are ways you can actually post content, whether they’re blog articles or recent updates to your website, directly to your Google Business profile. If you’ve got a smart web developer, they can probably even create a script. And so, any time you publish something to your site, it goes directly to your GP.
Paul Knipe
So, it’s really important because a strong Google business profile really does improve your overall SEO rankings. And because it’s connected to your brand. If it’s done well, if it’s done consistently, your brand and your SEO will overall work together to boost rankings.
Stewart Gandolf
So, Josh, well, you know, we have we’re at a mini conference right now, a lot of private equity, a lot of investment bankers, people on the money side of things. And we, certainly I would say what 80% of our clients do. They have private equity backing, something like that. So, they’re really, really interested in this idea of, okay, we’re doing paid search.
Stewart Gandolf
We’re doing our SEO. Why do they work together? Does it make economic sense? I’d love to share from your side how do these things integrate and why would you even invest in bonds? Why don’t we just do it, you know, one or the other?
Josh Weum
Yeah. I mean, ideally we wouldn’t pay for any ads ever. But it’s the way Google makes their money and ultimately, you’re going to always have to fight with the people that are paying Google to rank at the top spots. So, you know, when it comes to those ads, the SEO is critical. You’re looking to get to your SEO built up to the point where you’re not needing to rely on Google Ads starting out.
Josh Weum
You’re going to need to do that. The ad platform has its purpose. You know, you’re looking to get leads really quickly. What you do with that, though, when you’re running ads with Google, you’re getting data that you can’t get from SEO. You’re getting data that you’re not normally privy to when your people are opting in, when they click on an ad, what we found is that you can utilize that data to inform your SEO, to inform your content.
Josh Weum
And a couple examples I’ll give you, the scourge of fentanyl. A couple of years ago, it really wasn’t that prevalent, and we were still seeing and procuring a lot of content around things like heroin detox as as people’s habits shifted and fentanyl became a lot more prevalent than heroin. Websites. SEO was not coming along. And so, you know, we were seeing that for those that were doing paid media, you’re developing data.
Josh Weum
You’re seeing data that you wouldn’t see on the organic side. And one of those things that we noticed was the advent, you know, the rise of fentanyl as a core term, if you’re using paid media in an effective way, you borrow from that, you’re paying for that data, utilize it to inform your SEO. Fentanyl content was then for anyone that we had using paid media words like fentanyl, disordered eating is a different way to say, eating disorders, and it’s become very popular.
Josh Weum
If you’re not adjusting your content to those learnings that you’re getting from paid media, you’re spending money for ads, and that’s great, but you’re not getting the ancillary benefit of informing your SEO with those things. You know, as soon as you have the advantage over everyone else of, hey, I got this great data from paid media, I’m going to leverage that.
Josh Weum
We’re going to infuse our website and all of our other messaging with content around fentanyl, because it’s new and it’s novel. You just benefit from using the paid media. And that way it’s not just a channel that gives you direct response. It does that, but you’re also privy to data that you’re not getting through SEO. The best marketers use that data to inform the SEO side and build up those pieces before it becomes a national trend.
Josh Weum
Then everyone else is putting fentanyl content on their sites. You know, you could be ahead of that curve.
Paul Knipe
I would add to that, that that cross-pollination that Josh is talking about is really key. And it comes back to the insights gathering that I was talking about. In terms of brand strategy, organizations often spend a lot of time, a lot of energy on defining brand strategy, audience insights. What Josh described is actually a great way to determine those insights.
Paul Knipe
You can look at the data, you can look at the keyword behavior. You can look at what works for paid. And it informs not just your SEO strategy, but it gives you a window into what your audiences think about what you do. In many ways, we can always say we define it because we know it. It’s really what they think and what the data shows.
Paul Knipe
That should drive the messaging, the language, the nomenclature, nature. And to me, that’s sort of the underlying principle behind messaging, but it’s what you get when you have paid search and SEO side by side in a marketing mix.
Stewart Gandolf
So, one of the things we hear a lot about is social media, and the idea of organic social media is great, but the idea of paid social media instantly instead of a few people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands that scale very quickly. So, as we try to diversify our portfolio away from just Google and we want to like go more mid and top funnel, let’s talk about your experience with paid social and how where does that fit into the mix?
Stewart Gandolf
Josh.
Josh Weum
Yeah, well, and there’s a stigma for paid social in the industry here. We know that it’s not going to be the go to like it is for a lot of other industries. But you know, the people that we are targeting are frequenting these platforms. They might not be looking for what we’re offering at that moment, but there’s benefit to showing up for them.
Josh Weum
I think more importantly for this industry, when it comes to social media, it’s a little bit different. YouTube is a hybrid. It’s a social media platform, but it’s also the second largest search engine in the world. So, you know, having that content, looking at it in a different sense, paid social is a very good thing to be doing in general for the behavioral health space.
Josh Weum
I would just say that you know, paid social should be considered sort of a hybrid. It’s not the same kind of interaction that you get when you’re socializing on Facebook, but it’s still the exposure that you want to have. You know, for your brand, YouTube is going to be the place where you’re going to find the most impact on social media for the behavioral health industry.
Josh Weum
As far as patient development.
Paul Knipe
I would add, to quickly paid social is a perfect way to experiment with that concept of a living brand. But I was talking about it. In the past year. I’ve worked with Stuart and with Josh on, dental, client of ours that ran a very large national test market in paid social, and they basically had three different audience segments, and we had to adapt their core message, their core brand, across three very different set of sensibilities and expectations.
Paul Knipe
And so, the creative, the messaging, the photography, the video, all of the things we deployed on Meta and Instagram and face to Facebook, it really, was quite a spectrum and it didn’t reflect one rigid, static thing. And yet we got great results from each of those audience segments because we had the flexibility to adapt that brand accordingly.
Paul Knipe
So the brand, the data, I do feel like, paid social gives a lot of flexibility with brand strategy.
Stewart Gandolf
By the way, there are questions through the app here that so far we don’t have any. But if you guys have questions, feel free to share. I hope to have a few minutes for those, when we get to the end here. So, Josh, you mentioned a moment ago, I just want to clarify that because the whole idea of we certainly the meta platform and TikTok, those are all things that we’re working with a lot these days.
Stewart Gandolf
But what makes YouTube so special? You mentioned that it’s a search engine as well, but why do you think it works so well in addiction compared to or mental health kinds of cases versus other verticals? We work with?
Josh Weum
Well, you get a real sense for what a brand this is, where you can really accentuate the brand that you have. You can do a lot to promote the facility, the location they have, the staff that you have. Most importantly with YouTube, though, not everyone realizes that Google bought YouTube and it’s a piece of their ecosystem. It we find that most people are underutilized in that platform terribly.
Josh Weum
Within your YouTube video content, you’ve got description fields that you can use, 1500 characters, you’ve got, playlists and things that you can organize. You’ve got community aspects of the channel. YouTube is free. That’s the key. You can develop a channel, you can develop a brand, and you can really bolster that brand by using that platform. Another thing is when I, as Google is incorporating AI into their entire search process, YouTube is going to be a big part of that.
Josh Weum
And if your presence everywhere else is very robust and developed, but your YouTube presence is not, it’s going to become a factor. As I cobble together your impression of what your brand is to people. If you’ve got a piece of that that’s lagging. YouTube, Google Business Profile, it’s going to be a problem for you. So, there’s a lot of benefit to using the platform for just, you know, creating video content and kind of putting that out there.
Josh Weum
But it also has a lot of value as an ad platform. If you have, let’s say, a playlist of different videos that talk about your programing, your staff and the way you do things, but you’ve got one ad that is pointing traffic to your channel and kind of allowing the other videos to get organic viewership. There’s a lot of value to that as well.
Stewart Gandolf
So. So we’ve promised not to talk about AI today. Yeah. Just kidding. I how many times you guys heard about AI today? This, wasn’t even here. So, one of our things that we love AI, by the way, or at least I do personally, but it’s not for everything. And Josh is, you know, again, like, we have advocates on our team, Josh is the advocate against overreliance on AI, particular when it comes to Google Platform.
Stewart Gandolf
And so, Josh would love to talk about, you know, how you know where the humans meet the AI, where does that matter, and why is it so important on the Google platform to avoid Overutilization?
Josh Weum
There’s a lot of fervor around AI, obviously, and I’m not a contrarian per se, but I think it’s important to recognize that with this big wave of attention and excitement, there’s going to be a contraction. And Google is very keen on genuine content. And they’re also very good at identifying plagiarized or, you know, AI content. It’s going to be scrutinized very heavily in the next few years.
Josh Weum
And any company that’s utilized, we should be using AI to inform, to inspire, but not to create content and put it out there. There are a lot of limitations and issues with the validity of AI today, and even as it gets better, we really want to be focused on utilizing it as a tool to inform what we’re doing, the genuine content that the, you know, the experience and leadership that’s where you want your content to come from.
Josh Weum
Google is really going to prioritize that kind of stuff. As the dearth of AI starts to hit, we’re going to really notice that, you know, genuine content rises to the top. So, we should be using AI. You know, I don’t want to completely go against it, but it’s important to to use it as a tool. But to have genuine, meaningful, useful content around it, and not just use it.
Stewart Gandolf
But just one of the things that we’ve talked about before, I’m just curious, you know, first of all, disclaimer, we’re the premier partner with Google. We do have millions of dollars a year on Google. But we’re not saying just turn over the keys to Google. Right. Well, you know, you’ve talked about that before. What are the disadvantages that are saying, okay, I like my platform.
Stewart Gandolf
Right.
Josh Weum
Well, Google has great features that say, hey, we’ll create your ads for you and we’ll target your your campaigns for you. The problem is that’s Google’s number one source of revenue, Google Ads. It has been for many years, and they’re not going to side they’re not going to do anything that takes money away from them. So yes, they are helping you, but oftentimes they’re helping you spend money and not necessarily get results.
Josh Weum
I love taking apart Google’s automation and helping clients understand that manual management of those campaigns is critical because yes, it’s surreptitious. They’ve been doing it for a while, but they’re trying to take control. And as they do that, you just get less value out of the platform. You spend more and you’re kind of tricked into using AI, and it actually handcuffs you in some ways.
Stewart Gandolf
So we’ve got some questions coming up. But before we get there, we have two topics I’d like to cover. One is about tracking and then one is about help us out, make sure we don’t forget. So, Josh, you that you’re in the in the weeds. As one of our analysts and lead analyst, let’s talk about tracking where it is, where it’s going.
Stewart Gandolf
You know, give us some insights on why that’s so important.
Josh Weum
It should be the first thing that you’re thinking about. If you’re launching a campaign or looking to promote paid media, you know, the best results that we get are when clients can share internal data with us on outcomes, verification of benefits. Ultimately, we’re looking for admissions and tying those pieces, those outcomes to the actual keyword or campaign or day of the week that we ran an ad and then building off of that.
Josh Weum
Okay, well, we’re getting a lot of good at the policies in the state of Illinois. Great. How can we build our campaigns to do more of that? Or, you know, Cigna is no good in Florida for my company, for what we’re doing. Sorry. So, we’re going to, you know, pivot away from that. Yeah. I think that it’s important to recognize that when it comes to outcomes, you’re not doing very well with your paid media.
Josh Weum
If you don’t know exactly how much your admissions are costing or how much a good lead is costing, and that that functionality is there, you have to be thinking about tracking first and foremost, not secondarily. Hey, let’s get a campaign going. And then later on we’ll figure out how much it’s working or how much we’re getting for ROI.
Josh Weum
It’s something that should be built initially.
Stewart Gandolf
And I would say that whether you’re doing this internally or whether you’re working with an agency, that partnership is really important in between the people that are actually have their hands on the machine versus the people that are doing admits versus the people on the account team is absolutely vital. So, our joke is, or my joke, I’ll take ownership of that is, look, I’m going to throw you the ball, throw it back.
Stewart Gandolf
You throw his ball, throw it back. If you just keep the ball and I can’t reach you, that’s not helping us, right? Like we’re the team behind the team. Josh and Paul are working, you know, in the bowels of the machine daily. And they want to know those insights like what’s working what’s happening. You know I had a conversation all day yesterday about why am I demographics different at different locations.
Stewart Gandolf
We should look into that. Right. We want that feedback. That’s a partnership versus just sort of relying on the tech guys to figure it out. So, if something feels like it’s not working, do you have a question or comment?
Audience
Sure. What tools or how do you measure? Are you talking about branding this? You what what tools you thought are most effective to measure meaning? I spent a lot of money over the years on marketing, branding, Google, Facebook. Right? You know, we’re not we’re successful. We’ve been, for 11 years, but I never get a sense that there’s some, you know, measuring stick of success with marketing.
Audience
Right? And we invested for about three years, you know, whatever. You’re looking for a direct ROI, right? But, you know, how do you guys look at that? Sort of a life cycle. We start here a year and a year later where we ended up what, you know, what were your measuring sticks be for success.
Paul Knipe
I’ll lead with that. I you know, I feel like it is important to establish your brand strategy. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It shouldn’t be lengthy. It should be. It should be making decisions around, you know, your core audiences and competition. That should be step one. But it shouldn’t be a lengthy process that should inform your messaging.
Paul Knipe
If you run paid social, for example, you would extend those brand strategies into your messaging, your creative, as well as your SEO strategy, looking at your competitors. And you would run that through your paid search program. But your question is really about attribution. How do you measure ROI? And to me, I really feel like there needs to be an investment in an infrastructure that allows you to actually determine which admits which appointments, which new, patients, stakeholders you can link back to your Google Ads program.
Paul Knipe
And to me, that means identifying through a CRM program or through conversion tracking a rock solid ability to track new appointments back to your ad programs because you’ll know which keywords are working, which campaigns and ad groups are working. To me, that’s the through line between brand strategy and your media. And without that, you’re guessing you’re just in a gray area.
Josh Weum
What I think regular assessment of that, we meet with our clients on on those metrics weekly, monthly. If you’re constantly keeping an eye on where that ROI is trending a year from now, we’ll have a goal that we’ll have monitored all the way through, and we’ll have made pivots to get to that point. But constant reflection and monitoring on the campaigns isn’t.
Stewart Gandolf
For the sake of time. I want to just grab this real quick. So, though I’m going to talk about that more later. But like for example, that’s the holy grail working with Salesforce or different CRM. And that’s a deep, deep topic. The last topic I want to do, we want to cover in one minute. So at least a couple questions, or I’ll make a statement for the sake of time.
Stewart Gandolf
So, if you haven’t been following what’s been happening with digital tracking technologies and HIPAA, you really need to do so. So, the just so you guys know, back in 2022, there is a gotcha piece where they found a bunch of hospitals, had the pixel the Facebook pixel inside the patient portal. The world went upside down and crazy.
Stewart Gandolf
We have blog post on this. We have articles on this. We have webinars on this. We work with a vendor called Fresh Paint. There’s other ways around it. It’s a huge topic. I don’t have time for it now. But if this is an issue, you’re going, oh, wait, what? Talk to us at the end of this call or at the end of the meeting, and we’ll give you some links to some good resources, including from some law firms.
Stewart Gandolf
Either law firms have opined on this, whether it’s risky or not, that’s really an important issue. It’s something you must pay attention to. By the way. We go very conservative on this. I feel like it’s a cataclysmic event. If you end up going through this, you may argue, well, I’m not getting hit by the asteroid. And my argument is it’ll hurt a lot if you do.
Stewart Gandolf
So, you can make your own choices. It’s I’m giving you informed consent here. You can make your own decisions, but we generally recommend the conservative safe route. So quickly. We’ve got, a bunch of questions here. I’m gonna answer one, but after the meeting is over, we can, join at the end if you have additional questions. Sorry.
Stewart Gandolf
We just had a lot to cover today. Actually, the question was about asking the most effective approach for B2B. I would love to just, And 30 seconds allow Paul B2B strategy in addiction. Why is that so important?
Paul Knipe
You know, you have to think again about, the pain points of your audience. If you’re talking with doctors, if you’re talking with providers, you have to think about the media they consume. You have to think about the profile of what is important to them. B2B ultimately comes down to two columns. You know, you think about the consumer or the patient proposition.
Paul Knipe
That’s one thing, but that’s not your concern. You have to think about what is it going to take to get my staff trained? What is it going to mean for my bottom line? It’s an entirely different set of calculations. So you have to go through an insights gathering process for B2B to understand what’s important for providers, because your messaging you’re creative has to solve something for them.
Paul Knipe
The tools, the media channels, whether you’re using LinkedIn or using programmatic or your geofencing conferences, rather than taking traditional consumer a patient measures, those are all part of it. But you have to think about how the impact of your message impacts what is happening in an office, a practice among that team. It’s a different calculation.
Stewart Gandolf
So, I’ll finish with this. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of topics related to marketing. If you guys have questions, our website has a whole set treasure trove of free stuff that you guys can tap into webinars, eBooks, blog post, podcast. So, it’s on health care success.com. But we’re also happy to, if you’re here in the audience today to ask us so we can send you specifics like the MPA stuff, we’ll send you articles.
Stewart Gandolf
We have lots of stuff again, to help inform these things. So, we recognize that we can’t teach everything we know in 30 minutes. So anyway, I appreciate your time today. Thank you guys very much. And from this perspective to the next session here. Thank you. Thank you. Be around for a few minutes.
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