Real Stories, Real Impact: Embracing Authenticity in Healthcare Marketing with Lantern

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: All right, everybody, what’s up? This is going to be a slightly different and very special episode. I’m excited. We’re always talking patient acquisition. We’re going to get to pivot a little bit and talk about a little bit about B2B and B2B2C with Nancy Ryerson. What’s up? Welcome to IGNITE.

Nancy Ryerson: Thanks so much, Alex.

Alex: Where do you hail from?

Nancy: I am originally from Long Island. I also lived in Savannah, Georgia, and then I came back up to New York City and I live in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Alex: You didn’t tell me that part. We are taking the whole flight. We’re taking 80 people, flying everybody from around the world that works at Cardinal to Savannah.

Nancy: Oh, really?

Alex: Yes, in December.

Nancy: Make sure you get some macaroni and cheese and sweet tea, grits, all the good stuff.

Alex: Oh, God. I’ll look for the mac and cheese. That I did not know was a Savannah special. I’ve only been there once before, even though we live in Georgia. That’s weird. That’ll be really exciting for everybody to see what the South is really like. That’s awesome. Nancy, where do you work?

Nancy: I work at a company formerly known as Employer Direct Healthcare, but we have just rebranded to Lantern.

Alex: Lantern, the guiding light. We’re going, “Don’t go too close to the light.”

Alex: Talk to us about what Lantern does.

Nancy: You did just touch on it. The idea is that we are lighting a path forward for our members. We are a specialty care platform. Part of what we do is– the usual term is center of excellence for surgery, but we’ve really found that term can be misleading and it’s a little limiting. We like to think of ourselves as a network of excellence. We vet all of our surgeons in our network individually. Making sure that they drive the lowest possible complication rates and that they have a ton of procedure volumes in the procedures that our members need.

A little story that we usually like to tell, and actually I just had this experience recently. I needed a procedure done with a specialist and my primary care doctor just sent me a list of two private practicing doctors and a center for something in Downtown Manhattan. I looked them up just on cigna.com, make sure they were covered, did a little Googling and that was it. I just didn’t have a way of really knowing, are they experts in this particular area? What is their success rate with the procedure that I need? Just as consumers, we really don’t have a way of getting that information.

That is where Lantern comes in. We partner with self-insured employers to help them guide their employees to these excellent specialists for surgery. Then we also have a cancer navigation program as well. It’s also really cancer– Getting that diagnosis is really such a stressful moment for people and you don’t know where to turn, you’re meeting all these different doctors, hearing all these different opinions. You don’t know if you should try and get a second opinion or if you need to just start treatment right away. Our oncology nurse navigators help people really understand their options and their treatment plan and then they guide them to specialists, to the second opinions, to the right care for them.

Alex: I love that. All things oncology is important and special to us at Cardinal. That’s very cool. This is a field I’m not that familiar with. Your client is a self-insured employer?

Nancy: That’s right.

Alex: This is a dumb question. They probably won’t even air it because it’ll make me look so dumb. What is that? That’s a huge company that doesn’t go to the Cigna’s, that they just will run their own plan. What is that?

Nancy: Yes. It is just us as regular people kind of a lesser known phenomenon. Let’s say you work at a large company. Let’s say you work at Walmart. They have so many employees that they feel like by managing the claims and the network themselves, they’re better able to control their spending than by only working with an insurance company. They do still work with the main insurance companies for claims administration, and actually for the most part, for building those networks. That’s why they bring on all of these add-on benefits.

Like Lantern, which is a separate network on the surgery side from insurance, it’s a specialty network that’s curated. A large company can say, “Okay, employees, you have to go or you can go to this separate network of excellent surgeons, you’re going to get better results.” We ultimately save those large companies money because we negotiate lower rates with our providers. Also really importantly, we drive better results. We reduce costs related to complications. Our surgeons are also– they’re not in it for the money. If they don’t think you need surgery, they’ll tell you that.

That’s something we look forward to is how often are they saying like, “You need to actually do physical therapy,” or “This isn’t really the right procedure for you at this time.” That, of course, is great for members because nobody wants to get spine surgery. Then it also saves our customers money at the same time.

Alex: Awesome. I’m learning from you. That’s cool. You have the B2B component. You’re trying to get the attention of these large employers. Then you also have a B2B2C-side, right?

Nancy: Correct. Yes. I’ll take someone like Hyatt or Hilton, those are two of our customers, as examples. We’ll work with them to send materials and emails, and we’re working on doing more targeted pieces as well. Let’s say we know, through claims data, that someone is in physical therapy, maybe they are going toward that path of surgery. Just making them aware, “You have this benefit. You can get excellent care, you can get second opinions through Lantern.” Yes, we do have a B2B2C aspect as well, which has it’s own challenges.

I think any of us who have worked anywhere know that most people don’t really pay attention to their benefits when you get it, and it’s really only until you need it. Then something like Lantern, where there’s not a lot of awareness in the market that this kind of thing exists in the first place. Yes, there are a lot of challenges in reaching people. We do find that word of mouth is one of our best channels. Maybe you hear someone complaining, they’re like, “Oh, my daughter is sending me knee replacement.” Really, if someone in the break room or on a call can say, “Oh, I actually had that done through Lantern,” that really builds trust and really helps with that awareness.

Of course, we can’t just rely on that. We are looking into trying to maybe incentivize some of that word of mouth.

Alex: I assume you sign up a Hyatt or a Hilton and/or first order of business start. I wonder if you guys run ads to all of their members. Are you sending out emails? “Hey, we’re part of the mix now. FYI.”

Nancy: Yes, exactly. Open enrollment is a big time when more eyes are on their benefits programs. We definitely have a suite of materials for that. We send out emails and mailers throughout the year. One fun thing that we do is we talk to members who have been through the program for testimonial pieces. It’ll be a little picture, you could have, “Oh, Nancy, that’s my coworker,” to catch people’s eye and bring that level of trust to pieces too. That’s one fun thing that we do with our mailers.

Alex: That’s good. Nancy loves content. She used to have her own podcast. She’s the most prepared person I’ve ever had on here. She has a headset and a special microphone that is better than this Apple junk that I use and I host the thing. I know she loves content and then she shares a similar philosophy. Over the last year, Nancy, what is something you’re really proud of having done? I know what you’re going to say and I love it because I’m tired of AI. Tell the peoples anyways.

Nancy: Like I just mentioned, I do talk to our members and capture those testimonials, those personal stories and incorporate that into our materials. That’s really something I try to do across all of my work, on the B2B side as well. I did, like many content marketers, study journalism back in college, went to NYU. My beat was Chinatown and I would interview people at restaurants and really all over the place. I do have that background in interviewing and storytelling. I really try to weave that in into everything.

One great thing at this role was really, I think it was just in my first month, I had the opportunity to go to a client event and meet some of our clients and capture video testimonials, ask them why they signed up with the product, what problems they were trying to solve. Then I’ve been able to use those interviews and really weave them into a ton of blog content and ebooks and guides and really just make the most of it in addition to creating those videos so that every piece we create does have that human element. So far, ChatGPT cannot call someone and interview them. As far as I know, we’ll see if it goes down that route, but that’s what I like about it.

You can really only get those insights from a person. At the end of the day, AI is just scraping what’s already been written and rephrasing it. Anytime you can bring in those actual experiences, that’s just going to create something that’s much more interesting and engaging and actually helpful.

Alex: Yes, I love it. From what I hear, I have to have a safe word now with my bookkeeper because these video things can call and demand change of bank routing information.

Nancy: Oh no, yes.

Alex: It’s not long before they can call an interview, but I love it.

Nancy: Absolutely.

Alex: The point taken is that the best way to stand out media testimonials, personal testimonials, all of the unique stuff that these AI bots can’t create is so important now with content marketing, not just for helping convert, but also for rankings like Google’s getting smarter, weaving through all that because they can tell if you’ve just launched tons of words onto your website all of a sudden. I love it. You’re going the personal route. Client summit sounds awesome and a very smart thing to do as well. You get them all in one place. What’s a piece of technology? I’m curious because for our brand team, we do all the B2B stuff like this to try to get clients in the door. It’s different from what Cardinal does for his clients. What do you use to keep it all straight and to nurture clients, if you will?

Nancy: I have used HubSpot and a few different roles. I wish I were a HubSpot influencer getting paid right now, but I just love them. I’m always happy to talk about them.

Alex: Do they pay?

Nancy: I don’t know. They should, right? [laughs]

Alex: I went to Inbound one year, not too far from you, and your rival city in baseball, and it was cool. I didn’t know they paid people, but maybe we’re going to hit them up.

Nancy: Yes. If you’re listening.

Alex: Do you hold contacts into there or are you nurturing only existing clients or are you using it to warm up cold potential clients as well?

Nancy: We do use it for warming up cold potential clients. We follow the law. We make sure that they are opted in so they’ve shared their information with us in some way. Sometimes it’s through an event that we sponsored and then we get that list. They’re somewhat known to us, but they’re not active clients. We do have, an outbound SDR function that is emailing those completely cold leads.

What I really like about HubSpot is that it’s just really all in one place. You can do email, social, content, website, and then you just have a much view of where people are going on your website, what they’re engaging with. Then as a content marketer, it also just makes it easier to tie that revenue back so you can see, “Oh, this, big opportunity closed,” and you can look back at all of the content pieces they interacted with on the way to that closed deals. Then sales isn’t able to take 100% of their credit, even though, of course, that it’s [unintelligible 00:11:33]

Alex: [unintelligible 00:11:32] away. It’s good. That’s interesting. I see the value in that. It lets you post and post social and it helps with smaller marketing teams. We’re small, so we just use disparate products to track and post and monitor and CRM, but I can see HubSpot’s value has always been there. You talked about data. When you get a good deal– I think what you and I love is B2B marketers and B2C. I got to say I’m also B2C because it’s what Cardinal does, but I love the B2B part, is when the deal finally happens is looking at all the touch points so that we can say, “Oh, that event, that guy that we promoted, the thing that stuck my neck out to do it, help contribute.” That’s cool. On the flip side, not everything can be trackable. I know you believe in that as well. You don’t need a data point for everything, right?

Nancy: Yes, absolutely. I think podcasts really are a great example what all tracking you use, but it’s pretty limited. You get the number of plays for the most part, you might get what part of the country they’re in, but I know when I ran a podcast, I would hear anecdotally from the sales team and from customers, so, “Oh, I loved that episode. I learned so much.” I think that that’s really valuable too. I also like to think as long as someone is receiving your message, I don’t necessarily care if they came on the website at that moment and went on every single page. If there’s, let’s say a graphic on LinkedIn, those little carousels that you’ve clicked through are at the moment still doing pretty well.

I think those are a great way to keep people on the platform, which is what LinkedIn wants while disseminating that information and the same with clips of a podcast. I’ve seen people do calculations, maybe on iTunes, they got 200 listens or something like that, but then the clips on LinkedIn or on YouTube, they could get hundreds and hundreds more and really amplifying that message. I totally agree if you’re too focused just on one little metric, like, “Oh, well, the podcast, we didn’t really lead to a sale. I can’t track it.” I think if you limit yourself too much like that, then you’re just really going to limit what you do and how you get your information out there.

Alex: It’s impossible. Y’all are going after bigger clients as we are now too. You can’t track everything. You can tell now we have a lead form that leaves it open. How’d you hear about us? It’s not like choose Google, blah, blah, blah. Then you get the interesting things that are clear. All of these little things like podcasts and stuff influence it because people will put a brand awareness in the space. That’s how they heard it. I don’t know what that means, but you can tell in a podcast, like you said, the number one value I think it has is the LinkedIn podcast clips, the video clips, and everybody will go to listens and all that stuff. I make sure the listens are going up just to make sure it’s still relevant, people don’t hate hearing me, but it’s LinkedIn.

It’s the promotion where your target client, you get them on the podcast, they promote it, and then everybody– all the other Hiltoners that are now at IHD or whatever, also see that because they formerly worked with that person. I love it. Not everything has to be measured. What trends are you watching? Speaking of social media, et cetera, what trends, what are you excited about going into new year other than the election being over with?

Nancy: Yes, that’s always exciting. I actually– I am excited about LinkedIn. I think ever since Twitter, now X, got to be a stranger place to spend time, I think more B2B type people and professionals have been spending time on LinkedIn and creating more useful content and thought leadership and just getting more creative. I’ve seen little video clips that made me laugh. I think if you had told me two years ago like, “You will go on LinkedIn and you will laugh at content someone created.” I don’t know if I even would’ve believed them, because I do think it’s changed a lot. There’s really a lot of green space. I think that there’s a lot that’s still pretty untapped on LinkedIn. I think that’s exciting.

Alex: I think so too. They have the video thing you can tell on mobile, it’s like home and then video, they’re really trying to do the clips. The clips are cringy. When none of us know, like. “It works on TikTok,” and this, because a lot of that is funny on LinkedIn. It’s like informational, so you have to switch your brain to like, “All right, I want to learn from these video things.” I don’t know. It’s tricky, but LinkedIn it’s taking off and all the content creators get a ton of visibility. If you’re a B2B, I think it’s number one. If you’re trying to attract referring providers, that’s tricky. They are not on LinkedIn as much. I think it works much better for Nancy and for myself and stuff like that.

Popular marketing tactic, Nancy, that you think is a complete waste of time.

Nancy: Yes, this is related to LinkedIn too. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, Alex, but if someone comes to you and says like, “I want to do thought leadership,” it’s always like, “Do thought leadership.” What does that really mean? I definitely believe in thought leadership, but you have to start with thoughts, [chuckles] they have to be differentiated, be interesting, even be a little controversial, otherwise it’s just not going to stand out and people will be able to see through it. I would say that’s my pet peeve, like, “Okay, I want it to be all about the company, but also let’s get that op-ed published, Wall Street Journal, but I don’t want it to really have any opinions or stand out in any way.

Alex: I couldn’t agree more. Real thought leadership is taking a stand, having an opinion. Controversial or not, but having an opinion. I’m with you there. In healthcare, I have found people are more vanilla than other industries. Everybody’s scared to be themselves. I’m not. That’s why I got fired last month from a client that said, “Just took over this as POC. I see Alex posts and swears on LinkedIn and stuff. It’s not our bag. That’s weird that he does that.” Fired us. The other 80% you’ll attract because you’re different and you’re willing to be yourself.

What’s interesting, Nancy, is you get all of our healthcare friends, thought leaders or whatever that are bland, but you get them on a podcast or one-to-one quiet in a room or an event and they’re really cool and unique and special people. It’s like, “Guys, just say what you’re thinking quietly out loud.” I love it. What would you say– I’m going to leave you with this because it’s for my own knowledge. What is the number one best– I know there’s lots of touch points to acquire a client. What is the number one tactic you think you could not go without?

Nancy: I think this year and probably in my prior roles to webinars, I think that’s something that sounds a little old-fashioned. You might assume it’s going to be a little boring, but I think that they’re not, and they definitely don’t have to be. We’ve had a lot of clients on our webinars and they really do have engaging conversations. Going back to that comment on clips and just being able to create so much out of them, I think you get a lot of bang for your buck. You get people who– if they’re taking time out of their day to hear about you, you know that they must be pretty interested in the topic and looking forward to next year.

I’d love to continue to find ways to make them more engaging. I think there are a lot of opportunities there as well. I think a little cold here and there. I haven’t seen that too much, too crazy out there, but I think that, again, anytime you can bring those real voices and people sharing their real thoughts, I think that helps make it much more engaging than just going through a slide presentation. Of course, slides are beautiful too. There’s a place for slides, but just making sure that that real conversation is part of the webinar as well.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. My friend Centauri taught me everybody in your company needs to be able to sell without a PowerPoint. Anyways, you know what we did to make webinars cooler is we started calling them live streams. [laughs]

Nancy: Yes, that’s a good idea.

Alex: Anyways, it made it feel less boring to me. Then, yes, we get on there. We make sure they’re only 30 minutes. We act kind of crazy. We keep the energy up. We do giveaways. Yes, we do polls. You got to get people engaged. You got to be short. You got to be to the point. You got to be loud, and they’re awesome. It’s a give. You’re giving information. People like that. You get the LinkedIn shorts. You get something to email people about. I agree. Nancy, no one other than you would have said webinars, but it’s the truth. It’s the best thing for us. In fact, I love it so much. Not just blowing smoke in late October. We have our virtual summit, which is basically 30, 40 webinars. [laughs]

Nancy: That’s another alias for our friends’ webinar. Yes, that’s great.

Alex: It’s a virtual conference. It’s a bunch of webinars. I’m pumped about it because it democratizes digital, allows people around the country. Guys, if you’re in patient acquisition, a provider group, it is a great way to nurture patients as well. If you have a high acuity thing like fertility, like ortho, where people are just like, “It’s a six-month process to learn. Do I actually need a spine surgery? Do I want to go through with IVF?” It’s a great way without having to ask people to come into the clinic to nurture patients along their journey. They can stay without video and they can learn. I love webinars for so many reasons.

Nancy, I learned a lot from you. There’s so much we can do on the B2B side. Thank you for joining IGNITE.

Nancy: Thank you so much for having me.

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