S2
Episode 6
The Right Prescription for Healthcare Marketing
About This Episode
We discuss how the pandemic has driven innovation in healthcare marketing, from unique strategies to healthcare compliance.
Alexander Romero-Wilson | Manager, Communications and Brand Marketing, Eko Health
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
Digitally, I’m investing more. Again, looking back, I’m more in endemic partnerships, right direct buys, or partnerships with industry outlets, influential blogs, websites and organizations, which were things that kind of not really died away. But people were moving so much more into this programmatic social space. And with the competition, we kind of forgot that these influential places where people are still consuming and the trust is much more there. Like the trust, especially for us in health care. When you say partner with an organization that mirrors a segment of your audience, is going after they’re more likely to trust if your brand is associated with that, and then, like a Facebook ad.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:48)
Curious to know what industry-leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever-evolving digital landscape that how agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward-thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.
Matt (00:01:16)
Hey, everyone, welcome to today’s episode. My name is Matt Evered. I’m the host of the How Agencies Thrive podcast. And I’m also the Education Development Manager at StackAdapt. Today, I’m joined by Alexander Romero-Wilson, who is the marketing manager at Eko Health. Alex, great to have you on the episode today. Before we get started with the bulk of the content. I was hoping you could give us an introduction by telling us about Eko Health, your role as the marketing manager, and what you consider to be your strongest area of expertise.
Alex (00:01:46)
Thanks, Matt. Happy to be here and excited that you guys invited me on your podcast. Thank you very much. As Matt said, my name is Alexander Romero-Wilson. I’m a marketing manager at Eko. I’ve been with Eko for almost two years now I was a second full-time marketing hire, and is working in a startup. I wear many, many hats. I run our advertising, social media and community, a lot of our brand building, PR and comms and for fun. I love mine and everything to do with it. So I run our team wine tastings, and it’s definitely a fun place to be, you know, very, very fast pace. Before Eko I was the West Coast paid media lead for FleishmanHillard. And I’ve been working in marketing for about a decade now in many different roles, everything from media analytics to what I’m doing now, which is just being a Swiss army knife for everything that needs to be that a startup requires. Just a shameless shameless plug for StackAdapt. I know I love what your platform has been doing by disrupting the programmatic advertising space, you know, from native despite audio. We’ve been a StackAdapt customer for four years, maybe even more than that. So just, you know, much kudos, congratulations on your continued growth. It’s really, really awesome to see. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, and so a bit about Eko. So we are a Series C healthcare technology company. We’re focused on cardiopulmonary, so that’s heart and lung, primarily health. We elevate the way healthcare professionals detect and monitor cardiac and respiratory disease by bringing together advanced sensors, patient and provider software, and automated disease detection with a suite of FDA-cleared, AI-powered machine learning algorithms. So that’s like our boilerplate. So putting in more layman’s terms. Eko is a stethoscope technology company. Our technology powers the best stethoscopes in the world. Our two main products are the core and the duo, and our machine learning algorithms act similarly to Shazam, sometimes we like to car call ourselves, the Shazam of heart sounds. As our algorithms are trained with hundreds of 1000s of cardiopulmonary recordings. Again, that’s heart and lung recordings, and which then with our app, and we have a platform with a 15 second recording of a patient’s heart sounds, we can identify specific disease states such as afib, and murmurs, with an accuracy is close to or as better as you know, a trained professional such as a cardiologist. So in a nutshell, we’re really working to democratize the detection of heart and lung disease at the point of care. By detecting these disease earlier, patients can be treated earlier. And then costs are typically lower outcomes are better, and they are more likely to retain a better quality of life. We know that appropriate patients can be referred to specialists for care when they need it. Were we really using technology to provide greater health equity by improving upstream care for patients from the doctor’s office to a patient’s own home, from in person to anywhere. So from a business perspective, we kind of our two, two main lines of business so we sell our stethoscopes and platform directly to healthcare professionals. So that’s anyone that uses a stethoscope from nurses to physician assistants to medical students to cardiologists, and we operate very much like a traditional direct-to-consumer e-commerce driven company. We sell directly to healthcare systems, large and small, even private practices and EMS departments, and also to healthcare service and technology integration partners in this fashion, you know, we operate very much like a traditional medical device and software B2B company, you know, powered by our amazing sales team.
Matt (00:05:16)
Absolutely. And it’s, it’s great to have you on the episode. For our listeners, we’ve actually done a case study with Eko Health, and we worked with you on this last year. So I’m interested to see sort of how things have changed since we last spoke about some of the campaign tactics. And really the theme of this episode is to focus on healthcare and how advertisers have thrived through the pandemic. So as an overview, we’re going to cover key areas like how the pandemic has driven innovation in healthcare marketing, looking at unique strategies to navigate healthcare compliance. And, overall, Alex getting your insights on what the future of this vertical looks like? Absolutely. So to start things off, we’ve got a couple of questions that we wanted to ask you. But as always, we’ll see where the conversation goes. And we’ll definitely uncover some unique insights. So if we look at all the verticals across the board, I would say that healthcare was impacted a ton during the pandemic, and it was definitely disrupted a lot. And before the episode, we pulled the stat from a center that said that 97% of private healthcare practices were financially impacted in some way due to the pandemic. So Alex, I’m interested to know, back in March 2020, when everything sort of started to unravel with the pandemic, what was the number one thing that was on your mind as a marketing manager for a healthcare brand, many, many things.
Alex (00:06:51)
I’ll try to stick to one. But so that goes and customer is the health care professional, our entire community was, and continues to be impacted due to COVID. The number one thing not only on my mind, but on Eko’s mind was how we can be a partner to our community of healthcare professionals who are on the front lines. And I, you know, I really continue to ask myself this question every day. COVID is far from over. Around the world, frontline providers are selflessly putting their lives on the lines to save others. And we really needed to act on this. And we and we knew we had a place to really make an impact. So at the time, we knew that our stethoscopes and our platform and app enabled Bluetooth wireless functionality, but we initially thought it would be a less important feature. But with the onset of the pandemic, we noticed a high volume of new customers coming to our website and purchasing our devices, really mainly from the initial COVID hotspots around around the US and into Canada. And so, you know, we have an amazing customer support team who reached out to these customers to learn more. And lo and behold, these customers were buying our stethoscopes, mainly the core for this Bluetooth wireless functionality that could really stream heart and lung sounds in real time from their stethoscopes to wireless headphones VR app. So while they’re under PPE, to keep themselves protecting their patients safer, they could stream the sounds in real time, it was really a an interesting use case that we were able to discover kind of in the beginning. So from a marketing perspective, understanding what our customers are actually using our products for. During COVID. We really went all in as a company from staffing up or warehouse to support the huge influx of orders to putting 100% of our marketing resources, both from the b2c and b2b side, to address the provider pain points as COVID. We from infection control to telehealth, which I know we’ll talk about later, we made explainer videos clinical guides from our clinical team, our chief medical officer if we really did it all. And you know, beyond our paid marketing channels, since our customer base is all her health care professionals, we’re able to use our large organic reach using our email lists our newsletters, you know, we basically have a database of our 100,000 healthcare professionals, our blogs or social media, to be transparent and to tell the firsthand stories of our frontline providers to give them a voice that they might not have on their own channels or where they’re working.
Matt (00:09:25)
What I’m getting from that is pretty much at the beginning of the pandemic, it was more of a play to throw absolutely everything you had at healthcare providers and provide them with the education and the resources. And one thing you said that I really liked was to act as a partner for these healthcare providers. Because this was a time when everything was thrown into a spin. Everyone was scrambling the healthcare systems we’re trying to adjust in the best way possible to accommodate patients. So I think it’s really interesting that you bring that up that educating providers and we’re really honing in on what the use case was for your product was a really important thing to adjust your messaging and make sure everybody knew the best direction to go.
Alex (00:10:10)
It was a really crazy time for everybody. And really the partnering was that really nails on the head listening to our customers listening to what their needs are giving them a voice. And then being able to provide both education materials, our customer support team, like on the phones with people who are like, how do I use this? Like, how does this actually work? Like this looks like an amazing piece of technology that can really help me. And like we did. You know, we spent so much time again, just being that partner and being a resource to this community of professionals who are just in it, saving lives selflessly.
Matt (00:10:47)
And as a, as a marketing manager at the beginning of the pandemic, was there a bit of panic? Or what did you guys adjust pretty well, pretty quickly, with some of the marketing efforts that you had.
Alex (00:11:59)
No one really knew how long this was going to go on for, right? At least, unless you, I mean, even work in the industry? I don’t I don’t think people really knew, you know, is this going to be, as the media would put it, will this be week or, you know, a month. It’s funny, at the Monday, when I lived in San Francisco, the Monday that we went into lockdown, was the Monday we were supposed to open our brand new Eko headquarters in Oakland, like that opening never happened. And we’re like, oh, maybe it’ll be in two weeks, maybe it’ll be in a month. And then none of that happens. So for marketing, we were like, lists, it’s spending so much time listening to our customers at the time, because we were like, Okay, well, we were pushing this other narrative, we just launched some new products. So it kind of keep that going. And then as soon as we, as time went on, and we were learning from our customers that this is how they’re actually using it and the needs that our technology is addressing, we went 100% And I think we were 100%, in what after like week three, because we knew this definitely wasn’t going to end, you know, tomorrow. But we’re a really small marketing team. And so with that, we’re able to adjust very, very, very, very quickly. We can change basically our entire marketing mix. And our kind of creatives and messaging we put out, you know, in less than a week, so we can be very nimble, which is which was kind of to our benefit, at the time, and even now.
Matt (00:12:26)
Yeah, and I think within every industry and especially within healthcare, making those adjustments, sort of on a dime, and being really quick about it and listening to what was going on. Because as you said, we didn’t know how long this would last and it’s it’s still technically going on. And for I was definitely in the same boat, as you were, you know, at the beginning, it’s okay, well, will it be two weeks? Will it be a month will you know Will this be over by the beginning of 2021. And it wasn’t, and it was important to just listen to listen to the news, listen to healthcare experts about how we should all be managing the pandemic and staying safe. So I think that that would have had a really big impact on some of the messaging for campaigns. And, and making sure to always adjust and not just stick to one thing that might have worked previously, but but didn’t work in this in the current global state. Alex, I’m interested to know, and you kind of touched upon this a little bit earlier about reaching healthcare providers and some of the audiences that you use, and I’m interested to know what direction you’ve taken with your team to sort of best optimize your advertising efforts and drive the greatest impact to your audience. So you did mention, you know, educating that audience and having the right messaging. But one big thing would be healthcare compliance, how has Eko Health navigated the compliance regulations and stayed strategic in reaching its its audience throughout the pandemic.
Alex (00:14:06)
Starting from a compliancy angle, all of our technology on both the hardware and the software side is all FDA cleared, and saw HIPAA and compliant and cryptid SOC 2 compliant, you know, we have that box checked from day one. So, from kind of that angle, it wasn’t an issue during the summer, especially working with professionals and providers, right, who want to make sure their customer, their customers, the patient, data is secure. So we’ve always had that box checked, and we always do. But at that time, you know, in even today, it’s just making that message very prominent. So on our website in messaging, just as kind of like making them feel that sense of security. And even so backing up, kind of like to the beginning of how we’ve often miser campaigns and different things that we might have done. So like our business, we grew tremendously during the pandemic on both our b2c and b2b side, you know, we even closed our Series C in November of 2020. Like I was higher 40 ish, and now we’re close to 150. So growth happened. And it is difficult to say, I mean, it’s a weird thing for me, just because hundreds of 1000s of businesses around the world really took a hit due to COVID. And, you know, it was just an interesting blessing in disguise that we were able to act and be that partner and then kind of provide our technology to benefit professionals around the world. And so as I mentioned, before, you know, 100% of our marketing was focused on helping this professional on the frontlines. All of our advertising emphasize our wireless stethoscope technology, the ability to screen patients safely while wearing PPE and protective equipment. And yes, as we talked about, for like, we missed his chest, like every other day, like we were throwing out tons of different messages to see what resonated, being super helpful and transparent. But something that we really unlocked net new during COVID was content marketing, we were fortunate to have a handful of customers on the front lines that were willing to be interviewed for marketing collateral about their experience working during COVID, and how our technology has helped them. Our blog went from being kind of this passive place where some people kind of hang out, but really not really, too, with content marketing being one of our top five revenue drivers and traffic drivers for e-commerce business. And so we were able to use new platforms and placements, you know, speaking to StackAdapt, I mean, the native display ads to really drive performance of our content marketing efforts to our provider audience, and also paid social does well, specifically when it comes to content marketing. And then also beyond that, you know, partnering with some organizations or doing more endemic things can blogging, co-thought leadership, using influencers and ambassadors to our to be able to kind of help educate and show these messages of safety and how our technology helps them screen patients.
Matt (00:17:13)
This idea of thought leadership, and doing that through blogs and telling customer stories, was that something that was, you know, always a big focus for your team, or was that something that you’ve really honed in on now, and you’ve seen a lot of impact driven from that.
Alex (00:17:30)
We’ve been fortunate at Eko to have a really strong clinical bench, from our chief medical officer to the clinical team in the medical affairs team. And they have and continue to be an amazing marketing asset to us. Like we have weekly meetings with our clinical team, because we’re always trying to be, again, that partner, that educational resource to providers who have to use a stethoscope and who have to Oskol taping is what it’s, you know, the buzz is where the medical term that’s called to, you know, listen to the art of listening to patients body sounds. So it always was kind of an ongoing practice. But with the big increase of our business around COVID, and moving forward, thought leadership and educational content and kind of owning this category of auscultation is something that we’re putting a lot of resources behind, you know, everything from improving our SEO rankings in Google and on our website, to using these resources outside of our own properties and being able to partner with industry entities, not to do in the weeds again, too much. But auscultation is kind of, you know, they don’t really touch on that for a little bit in medical school, but not as much as needs to be and kind of, were championing the art of the physical exam and how important it is, and continues to be for being able to properly evaluate, diagnose patients.
Matt (00:19:05)
That’s actually a perfect transition into the next question mentioning, you know, the value of in-person exams and obviously, throughout the pandemic, that was something that a lot of healthcare providers had to adjust, and a lot of healthcare providers went online and started adopting telemedicine solutions because people didn’t have the luxury of going to see their doctor all the time. As you know, a lot of those appointments were reserved for people that were in a more dire situation with their health given the pandemic. So I’m interested to know from you on the topic of of telemedicine and the fact that it’s had such an upward trend over the last year and continues to grow. How do you think telemedicine changes healthcare and healthcare marketing going forwards? And do you think that telemedicine has established a sort of norm for post-pandemic? Or do you expect that things will go back to normal? In the future?
Alex (00:20:11)
I love this question. And there’s a few different angles I’m going to try to approach this with, and I’m probably gonna go a bit human behaviour and philosophical with this answer, but bear with me, it’ll be fun. So, yeah, telehealth, you know, kind of the larger sphere of technologies and everything from the actual telemedicine visit to using telehealth and education. Yes, I mean, telemedicine has become an established norm, Norm post pandemic. And I’ll get to that more. So, and yes to the other part of your question, that pandemic has changed healthcare marketing, well, all of marketing for that case moving forward. So why COVID changed human behaviour around the world in an instant, people are staying home more people aren’t going out and doing things, they’re not commuting to work, seeing friends, in person, etc. You know, there’s a bunch of things people are, are doing and what happens when people stay home more. I mean, well, beyond parents going insane balancing work from home and childcare, you know, people spend more time with themselves with their family, more time reflecting on what’s important, people discovering new talents and hobbies, you know, yes, I can cook now I don’t need to go to the gym, I can workout from home. And there’s many examples like these. And so with the individual consumers, you know, spending more time at home advertisers, you know, we must reach our audiences at home, we have to now. I mean, look at the growth of Amazon and HBO and Disney+ and Hulu, and even like this last Black Friday, and Cyber Monday was the biggest ever, and the vast percentage of that shopping was done online. Also, with, you know, the financial implications of COVID, the average consumer has and does have more money to spend in their pockets than ever before. And so how did this impact advertising again, not only from health care, but larger marketing, you saw things like out-of-home inventory prices dropped in most metropolitan areas, you know, no one’s really walking in the streets, no one’s taking buses, that inventory kind of was sparse. Where’s all that money going? I mean, it’s going to Ott, connected TV, audio, social media, and even back into just digital display and programmatic display, which kind of was I think losing interest and now is gaining interest. So, back to telemedicine. Yes, it is an established norm. And there will be much continued innovations. You know, humans don’t like doing anything that requires more effort than necessary to complete a task. Going into the doctor’s office is one of those things. I mean, it’s come on, it’s a pain, you have to drive somewhere, but a bunch of paperwork, sit in a waiting room with other sick people, you meet with a nurse, you wait for the doctor, I mean, it’s like truly an awful experience. Most of the time, it’s kind of like going to the DMV or something. It also usually takes additional money outside of what your insurance covers. But you know, we had to do this, it was required, it was the only way we could get health care, especially in the States. But now we don’t, you know, now we can meet with a doctor right from an app and less than a minute. But the experience of that visit currently is far from ideal. And this is where I think we will see continued innovation. I mean, back to this physical exam, you know, your routine checkup. It’s difficult to do this remotely right now. Sure, you can have a skill to wear way yourself, you can measure your height, you can get a blood pressure cuff. You can give all the information to the doctor on the other end, you can have a q&a with the clinician for them to you know, do their deductive reasoning about all these things, your symptoms, what’s wrong, patients honestly expect to be listened to, during their visit with their healthcare professional and their doctor, not only with words, but their body with their heart and lung sounds. You know, this may be my shameless last plug for Eko, but with Eko you can with telehealth and telemedicine are stethoscopes can send body sounds from a patient to a provider, and a real time from anywhere.
Matt (00:24:13)
Pretty much one in three people are looking for or are using at-home diagnostics. So there’s all kinds of technology that’s coming out that has sort of that feedback and connection to telemedicine. But as you said, there are still certain things that can’t be done remotely. But there’s a lot of innovation that’s happening in healthcare, and we’re getting a little bit closer as the years go by. With that said, I think what we can do is take a quick break. And then, when we come back, we’ll talk a little bit more about what the future of healthcare marketing looks like, as well as some key strategies for what marketers can use going forwards. We’ll take a quick break, and then we’ll be right back.
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Matt (00:25:32)
Welcome back, everybody. As mentioned, we’re joined by Alex Romero-Wilson from Eko Health to discuss how healthcare marketers can thrive in the months and years to come. So Alex, looking at the healthcare industry, there has obviously been a huge uptick in digital ad spend compared to what the previous years have looked like. What do you think the contributing factors have been to this? And what are some areas that you think healthcare marketers across the board can focus their efforts on to maximize the impact of their digital ad spend?
Alex (00:26:08)
Yeah, thanks, Matt. Not just healthcare again, but across all industries, digital ad spend has increased in growth year over year, I mean, looking even back at a marketer 2019 was the first year when digital ad spend surpassed 50% of a marketing mix. And everyone was kind of freaking out, like, oh my gosh, and by 2024, you know, digital is expected to be almost 70% of an average marketing mix. And really, I mean, as a marketer, and as a healthcare marketer, I’m not as all surprised. attribution model has gotten better. ad platforms are more sophisticated ad formats are much more engaging, really to match native environments. And, not only that, consumers are spending more and more of their time online from Pandora to TikTok. And as advertisers, we want to reach our consumers where they’re spending the most time you know, at the most fundamental level, we’re all competing for mindshare. And as marketers, we’re constantly evaluating our mix and looking for channels to reach our target audiences that are cost-effective and reach and driving performance. And now, with digital channels being in such demand, we’re seeing a much more competition these days. And, as a result, cost increases. Search and paid social are really main culprits. CPCs and CPMs are at record highs. When I look at Google, I’m like, Oh my gosh, what happened, but everyone’s competing for this. So fortunately, you know, there’s also constantly newer digital channels like video, audio and connected TV that are really appealing to marketers, you know, they kind of are much more cost-effective now, especially as kind of our out of market, prospecting audiences, even like direct on marketplaces, like Amazon, especially if you’re a consumer-driven business are really fantastic and driving direct sales. And even looking back on older channels, such as native and display are really becoming very appealing again. And as a healthcare marketer, and performance direct-to-consumer marketer, I’m really looking forwards by looking backwards to old playbooks I’m looking into out of home, like I said, inventory prices down with COVID. And it’s still down, it’s still at record lows, I mean, you can buy a billboard for not that expensive these days, or bus wraps. Also keeping in mind that people are driving and moving again. So not only are these inventories kind of more cost-effective, there people are seeing them again, now it’s kind of the time to act. Also, beyond that, I’m looking at creating in person experiences, of course with COVID-controlled environments with safety in mind, you know, to bring our products to the market, think small pop ups, demo stations and such. I was reading the week, which is one of the weekly magazines that we get in our household and there was a little feature about Amazon, you know how they tested their kind of brick-and-mortar stores. Like within malls, they have kind of like small little pop ups in some malls around the country. And there’s kind of like the Amazon Go store and Amazon’s actually putting a lot more investment into building these brick and mortars. Because from you know, everything from like return policies, it’s kind of the reason they’re doing it, they save money, someone comes to the store or try something in person. They know they want it and they know they’re spending that money on it versus like online. They’re like, maybe if I don’t like it, I can return it and return costs for a brand are insane. So it’s a little a little in the weeds there but If there and then digitally I’m in, I’m investing more. Again, looking back, I’m more in endemic partnerships, right direct buys, or partnerships with industry outlets, influential blogs, websites and organizations, which were things kind of not only died away, but people were are moving so much more into this programmatic social space. And with the competition, we kind of forgot that these influential places where people are still consuming and the trust is much more there. Like the trust, especially for us in health care. When you say partner with an organization who mirrors a segment of your audience is going after, they’re more likely to trust, if your brand is associated with that, then, like a Facebook ad. So it is pretty interesting of kind of how we’re moving and investing much more into this space.
Matt (00:30:48)
One additional question on that, because you brought up the point that certain channels are either getting a lot more expensive, or a lot more accessible to spend on, were there any channels that really surprised you over the last year and a half that now Eko is utilizing and finding a lot of success with podcasts and programmatic audio?
Alex (00:31:08)
I’ve been wanting to test podcast and programmatic audio forever, then it was kind of, you know, in the, in the beginning, it was expensive, and it’s kind of when it came to be and you’d have to kind of pervert you know, partner directly with a Spotify or Pandora and you had to be a big brand with a lot of money. You know, it wasn’t really accessible. And so and especially with Eko when our products and our technology, and we have an interesting sound demo on our website, sound is our everything, the sounds that matter. So with audio, we’re able to create a really engaging audio experience for people to really hear and this early feel what the differences of using our stethoscope technology, like we basically play a real recording of someone using a stethoscope with ambulance noise listening to heart sounds, and you hear like, oh, the ambulance sounds there, I can’t really hear anything. And then with the flip of a switch in the shows, like you can hear active noise cancellation Come on, and all of that background noise is gone. So using audio has been really awesome. And it’s really not that expensive from a CPM perspective. And what’s been surprising is, especially with StackAdapt, we’re able to kind of tracked everything from people are visiting our site from hearing the with a look back window to conversions, and it’s performed really well. And even beyond that, that direct sale line, our organic search traffic has gone up hugely. And when that happened when we started doing audio, so it’s been definitely a really exciting net new channel for us that we were able to unlock.
Matt (00:33:01)
Yeah, and especially with with what Eko is offering, you’re almost getting into that experiential territory with programmatic audio, because you’re, you know, you’re catching listeners, right when they’re engaged, but you’re also demoing the capabilities of the product, which is, which is pretty cool, if I caught that correctly. And that’s what you’ve been doing. That’s, that’s a really interesting strategy. And would you recommend for other healthcare marketers to really hone in on things like connected TV and programmatic audio? Would you recommend that as a strategy for somebody in this vertical as well.
Alex (00:33:39)
I would say it would depend on who the healthcare brand and marketer is trying to reach. We’re an interesting business that we have a direct e-commerce side of our company and we sell a physical product directly to physicians and physicians by them. So in healthcare in general and in health technology, that’s it’s a pretty interesting and rare there’s not a lot of companies out there who sell both directly to providers of technology that the provider themselves actually buy, they always buy their own stethoscope and then also has a software SaaS b2b side. So you know, if you’re a health technology company and you’re selling more enterprise audio, you know, may not be the way to go, maybe it will I mean, even today, a customer as a customer, because really, if you want to maximize your impact and your channels that key is to really understand your customers their wants needs pain points as much as possible. Looking at like, who’s buying now? What community segments do you understand most and where are these segments? Where are they consuming media? Where do they look for to trust? Where do they are they getting their information from? And then you you cast your line and you fish where the dashed line where the fish are biting and go deep? Um, it’s pretty interesting. And you really kind of need those go-to-market light strategies for all of your segments, because there’ll be different for us audio is great, because we have, like, you know, there’s so many nurses and providers out there. And we know that audio and podcasts are a place where they really can actively consume content, which, you know, for us, it makes a lot of sense.
Matt (00:35:18)
One thing that you mentioned a little bit earlier was, especially when informing your marketing strategies, sort of looking back to look forward and look back at what channels worked in the past, look at what ones are gonna work in the future? What would you say, with all this in mind are the biggest takeaways from the last year and a half that healthcare marketers can learn? And further to tha, how significant of an impact do you think the pandemic had on how healthcare marketing can thrive in the future?
Alex (00:35:53)
Yeah, I mean, the pandemic has changed everything, and will continue to change everything, as we kind of talked about before, consumer behaviour has changed. And we’re seeing that even in places that are opening up more, you know, my wife and I, we live in Texas, which is very different from California and San Francisco. And even here, those consumer tendencies has changed, people are spending much more time at home and on their devices. And I think we’ll continue to see much more of that as technology continues to be much more of an integrated piece of our life. And people are spending more of their time online, from their phones to their computers to consuming content. So I have some buckets. So my biggest marketing takeaways from the last year and a half, the first bucket is really regarding customers and community. Actively listen to understand, from the beginning, we were able to quickly pivot our marketing, because we listened. And we understood the immediate pains and the needs that frontline providers needed. And with that, be a partner as the brand, you’re not just selling something, you need to really partner with your communities. And as that give a voice to your customers and your community, as marketers, we, especially internally, but we are our customers greatest voice or their loudspeaker, their advocate, customer-centric marketing has never been more important than it is now. If you are a brand and you come across in a Deaf tone, then it’s not a good book, and it will not go well for you. So kind of regarding marketing strategy, it’s really about for us, you know, go where the fish are biting and cast or line deep, go to your customers, communities that you understand most. And focus your efforts there to really drive performance and drive a better brand affiliation with your brand to those customers. And then also beyond going deep, go broad more to understand, to be able to test to be able to gather data, and then apply those learnings, again, to your kind of go deep segments and then you continue to expand those go deep segments don’t go into a segment you don’t know just because it’s there, you know, focus where you need to focus regarding advertising, diversify, diversify, diversify, diversify your mix. Sure you’ve had some great channels, but continuing to look and explore. And what’s next from a marketer doesn’t always mean what’s new. Right? There’s always new things like tick tock and clubhouse and this and that, which are exciting. And there are brands specifically like large consumer brands that can use those channels successfully. But for people who work in healthcare, and for me who work with providers, I mean, to be honest, the targeting is terrible, or it doesn’t exist really at all. And so, again, why I say those are new and shiny. But for me, that’s not so what’s next. I mean, for me, what’s next is, again, looking back to old things like out of home creating experiences. Because by going deep, we know that when someone when a provider professional tries our technology in person, that they really don’t hesitate to buy it. So we do experiences, we look at things like out of home, we look back at buying endemically and through partnerships. And then the last biggest takeaway, I mean, even looking more at myself and behavior, it’s, you know, take nothing for granted. We in the beginning, we didn’t think this would last long and it’s kind of changing reality. We’ve lived in San Francisco for a decade, and we relocated to Texas because we can work remote and be closer to our families. And we know that really evaluate and things that are important. And also, you’re spending more time with yourself and your family and more with you, and know that you are your greatest ally. And then the last kind of takeaway, you know, again, not marketing, but regarding life, as, you know, be present, it’s so difficult, especially many of us, many of us listening to this podcast, probably work remote. And it’s very easy to with Zoom fatigue, or Google or whatever anybody uses and to, you know, be on a meeting and multitask on another monitor, and you’re going from thing to thing, and everything just seems much more transactional these days. But it doesn’t have to be, you know, be present be like you’re in the office. It’s a mindset, just because your environments changed. And the behaviour of working has changed, doesn’t mean that the relationships you create, even virtually have to really be that different from how they would be in person and just be present.
Matt (00:40:54)
This pretty much puts us at our time for episodes, I think that was a great note to end on. And on behalf of myself and our listeners. Thank you for joining us on today’s episode. And to any marketers who are working in the healthcare space or looking to test out this vertical, we hope that you took away some key insights that will help you succeed in your upcoming campaigns. Until then, thanks for listening.
Outro (00:41:18)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcast on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find us at www.stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
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