Executive Outlook on Healthcare Marketing in 2025

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: Welcome to Ignite. This is your lowly host, Alex Membrillo, back for another round of your weekly tune-ins. We had such an incredible two-day virtual summit. Scaling up was amazing, and we got to hear from 40 of the leading healthcare marketers around the country. These men and women are running the biggest provider groups, doing the biggest and most innovative stuff. Most importantly, we got a good outlook on what 2025 is looking like. I personally am very excited about this year because it’s a return to profit, deficiency, and not growth at all costs. If you want to hear from the best and brightest minds, that’s what this podcast episode is going to be all about.

It’s a rehashing of what you may not have heard that’s scaling up because the tickets were not free. You’re going to hear from Matt Fitzgerald, the chief marketing officer at Tend Dental, one of the most innovative DSOs out there. They don’t even call themselves a DSO, they are. They do some of the coolest stuff with technology and attribution that you’ve ever seen. Chris Pace, head of digital marketing at Banner Health. We have Ryan Torresan, the CMO of Peak Dental, one of the biggest, best DSOs out there in the country. Mari Considine from Acenda Integrated Health, one of the greatest behavioral platforms there are out there.

You’re going to hear from all of them over the next 45 minutes. Unfortunately, you’re also going to hear my voice. You also get to hear from our chief growth officer, Lauren Leone, who helped me host this. You’re going to get to learn what they’re looking at and what they also did in 2024 that they felt like maximized impact because that stuff matters. A lot of what they did, y’all haven’t quite done probably yet. That is cool stuff to learn from. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson. Guys, we’ve got Mari Considine from Acenda. Mari, you there?

Mari Considine: I’m here. Good morning.

Alex: What’s up, in [inaudible 00:01:59]

Mari: Morning.

Alex: Hello. Morning. What’s up? We got Matt Fitzgerald from Tend, one of the coolest– I don’t even know if I’m allowed to call you a DSO because I call them studios, not clinics. All right. Let me get my words right. Ryan Torresan from Peak Dental, phenomenally smart, knows the operations really well. Chris Pace, our senior director of digital from Banner Health. I’m going to let y’all do your intros. Mari, tell them who you are, where you come from, real quick. Give them the Acenda background.

Mari: Certainly. I’m Mari Consendine. I am the chief marketing and development Officer at Acenda. We are largely behavioral health in the state of New Jersey with about 100 different programs and across 56 different locations. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me this morning.

Alex: Thanks, Mari. We got to hang out in Nashville. Now, we get to hang out again. Mari’s getting tired this evening. That’s okay. All right. Mr. Fitzgerald, what’s up? What is up?

Matt Fitzgerald: Hey, how you doing?

Alex: Where you at?

Matt: My name is Matt Fitzgerald. I’m the chief marketing officer at Tend. I was part of the founding executive team of the business. We build de novo dental studios. Went from 0 to about 28 today up and down the East Coast starting back in 2019. What Lauren said earlier rings true. I was at HelloFresh before this. I made the leap into healthcare, and it seems to have gotten its claws in me pretty good.

Alex: That’s the delivery.

Lauren Leone: Yes. I just have to say Tend is my favorite consumer healthcare brand. I have been following them for years. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I posted about my experience the first time I went to one of their studios about two and a half years ago. Anyway, it’s just an amazing brand to look at from their digital experience.

Alex: We built them just for you in Atlanta.

Lauren: Thank you, Matt. Just open another one right by my house. I’ll do your location spotting for you.

Alex: Goes to the bucket one just because you guys allow rescheduling by texting.

Lauren: It’s amazing.

Alex: [inaudible 00:03:45] use that all the time. The least favorite patient. Chris, what’s up in Arizona? What time is it? Where are we at?

Chris Pace: What’s up?

Alex: [inaudible 00:03:56] two hours closer–

Lauren: Hot Sunday.

Chris: It’s 7:20 AM here. You pulled me out of bed, working from home. I had to put on a fancy shirt for the first time in a while, but I’m so honored and humbled to be here today. A little bit about Banner Health. We’re a pretty large health system based here in Phoenix. We’re, in six states. We have 30-plus acute care facilities and about 55,000 happy employees that are here to serve the healthcare needs for the Mountain West. Just honored to be here with these panelists. A little bit of imposter syndrome, I’m going to say, so I’m going to do my best to keep up with these guys.

Alex: Oh, you’re good. Six states. That’s a lot. You’re having to think about patients and what they care about across different States and ideology. Wow. We’ll catch up on all of that. I get imposter syndrome every day. I wake up and work with her. I’m very used to being the imposter. Ryan, you also put on a fancy shirt. Thanks buddy. How’s things in Jacksonville?

Ryan Torresan: Morning. Yes. This is the fancy shirt. Jacksonville is good. I’m Ryan Torresan with Peak Dental Services, 60 offices or so in Colorado and Texas. Then I’ve been in the dental game probably pushing about 12, 13 years now.

Alex: I see. We have another Jacksonville fan. How are the Jaguars doing this year? We just haven’t done well. Things that make us feel sad, right?

Ryan: yes, they’re not, they’re not good, but I’m from Michigan originally. I’m really a Lions fan. It’s a good year for me.

Alex: Oh, all right. There we go. All right. We’re all happy. All right, guys, we have a poll up there. This is always fun. Do Do if our attendees have access to the poll right now, Austin? Yes, you do. Yes. I want you all to go to the poll. We’re going to take a quiet second. This is important because it’ll help craft some of the conversation we want to know. Yes. We went ahead and craft through a lot of this agenda based on what our panelists have going on and what we’ve seen on our podcast at night and live streams and all the conferences we’ve been to, but it is always much fun to see right now in point of time, what is keeping you guys up at night? Oh, patient– All right. Let’s see. Where are we going? 20, 30. Oh, this is fun. Reaching the right audience.

Lauren: [unintelligible 00:06:01]

Alex: Report ROI. Oh, I bet it’s our data team. Okay. Let’s see. Click it on ROI. All right. Okay. HIPAA compliance. No one cares anymore.

Lauren: Hopefully, they’ve solved it this year. Let’s just say that.

Alex: I think we might not. It’s cool. Some of the regulations have gotten rolled back, and I think people are feeling a lot less scared than they were and figured out a number of different things. All right. We’ll end the poll. Reporting on marketing impact in ROI, number one. The patient volume, number two. Reaching the right audience, two and three. What do you make of that one?

Lauren: Yes. it’s like what we said in our opening session. There’s the need to reach the right patient. You’re diversifying your mix, which is making it harder to measure. You’ve got to make the case for why you’re playing the long game, not the short game. Alex is taking a picture of the poll as if we don’t have the ability to screenshot it later. [unintelligible 00:06:51]. Then just still the volume. It’s just competitive out there. You’ve got so many more players in the digital space. You’ve got to be a little bit more crafty on how you increase your volumes. Right now, a lot of businesses are looking for year over year, same store growth. It’s not all about increasing efficiency. It’s about growing.

Alex: Yes, and proving it. Look at at the end of the day, ROI, proving ROI. We’re going to talk a lot about that. We can stop the share if you don’t mind, Austin, and we’ll get right into the conversation. That’s incredible. I’m sure our responses are all to our tech vendors that help with reporting and reactivation. We’re going to love seeing that. That ROI is the biggest challenge that we have. I think partially probably brought on by the macroeconomic factors, there’s a lot more pressure being put on marketers to prove every dollar. That makes things doubly tricky when you have to expand into channels that don’t provide the direct attribution.

Lauren: We’re going to do a session on it later. We’ll dive in if you guys are around later today. Join our session on media mix modeling. Maybe that’s actually tomorrow where we’re going to talk about alternative ways besides just last click or multi-touch attribution.

Alex: Yes, I love it. We’ve run experiments with our clients that really worked. All of the stuff you guys are doing for brain building, Tend’s really big on that. That’s really cool. All right [inaudible 00:08:01] go ahead, kick us off.

Lauren: Yes, I think opening question we wanted to put to everyone on the panel, and we’ll go around is the role of the marketing leader at the organization has changed. We talked a lot about operational alignment. You guys are experts in IT, HIPAA law. I’ll start with you, Matt, just in general, how do the role of the marketing leader at Tend? I know you’re one of the founding members of the executive team as well. You wear many hats. Talk to us about your advice for other marketing leaders listening in.

Matt: I’m actually trying to make the pitch internally that the word marketing is actually a little antiquated in today’s operating environment. I was actually speaking to a general partner at a consumer agency and also VC firm. I just listed off all the things that a marketing leader does these days. He’s like, “Wow, you’re not just distributing ads anymore,” when you start to look at the digital product on the site CRM systems, a lot of the backend analysis, maybe around patient satisfaction and constant improvement. I think you just have to have a far greater skill set and toolkit to be able to operate both digitally offline throughout the patient journey.

You’re not just handing off to ops. You really aren’t. You’re trying to create a successful one-to-one interaction with the clinical staff at least at our physical locations. I think it’s a little limiting to box yourself in as just a marketer when you’re really in a modern brand that’s growing, you have to deliver that exceptional experience across from first touch to hopefully a retained patient long-term.

Lauren: Matt, have you come up with a fancy new word for it yet? Can we point it? No, the ones that could. It’s going to be.

Matt: I wish. I wish. Some of them I disdain, but people throw out chief revenue officer, chief commercial officer, chief growth officer, which certainly could be inclusive of a geographic strategy of expansion. There are some, I think, that are more reflective of a modern marketer’s plight.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. I love it. Ryan, in the dental space as well, we’d love to hear what as the marketing role at Peak?

Ryan: It’s a good one. I think Matt touched on a lot of it, but marketing is no longer just, “Hey, do the digital buy or the television ad buy,” from back in the day. You really have to own top of funnel to bottom of funnel. That is schedule the patient, and then validate the ROI that they actually showed up and got the procedure done. With that in mind, you need to know system flows. Like Matt said, you got to work with the operations partner big time now. I do think people are still looking to marketing to be relatively a thought leader still in their organization or in their space.

As marketers, we do need to be probing things like, “Hey, what’s the AI technology? How am I going to bring that in. Maybe it’s can help my call center because it can translate the language right on the call automatically. I don’t need foreign agents, they can still be US-based, but they can speak Spanish automatically,” down to just other areas in the business and, “How can you use it?” AI to create videos, things like that. Marketing’s morphed into that realm there. It’s patient flows, understanding the operations. Then what I would call as still do the day job, make sure you still create the ads and everything.

?Alex: Yes. Yes. Crazy about the day job. [inaudible 00:11:10]

Lauren: Day job is just the thing you do in your sleep, right?

Alex: Oh, Mari, do you have a COO that you’re partnering with that you have to meet all the time? Y’all are so big that you’ve got to be driving demand to the right locations with the right capacity for the right service line. How do you balance all that? Do you have a business partner there?

Mari: Yes, absolutely. Several. I think I definitely agree with what they just said. I think it would be wonderful if there was a different word and a different name. I think that would help with my interactions, particularly with operations. There’s these antiquated views of marketing. When we’re working with other C-suite members and other people on our teams, we’re not always speaking the same language. When we’re using marketing to refer to essentially what we do, they may be looking at marketing as ads and their perception of marketing. I am with you on the new word. Let’s find it and get it rolling. I think in terms of working with operations, there has to be strong alignment because I think the goal for all of us is scaling sustainably.

We need to have clear communication about capacity limits, resource availability, and where we could see any potential bottlenecks. It’s really setting realistic targets and not overextending, but working with our ops and programming [unintelligible 00:12:24] and able to do that at a team level. We’re looking at our plans against operational data, so we know where we’re pushing for growth and where we may need to pace ourselves a little bit. I think overall, it’s just really having a lot of that communication, utilizing the data and having that shared goal that sustainable growth is going to maintain the quality of our programming and help us maintain the experience that our consumers expect. It’s definitely working in that partnership. So vital and so important for us.

Alex: You’ve experienced officer also–

Lauren: Pull out by the end of day two. We’re going to get everybody’s opinion on what it should be called. Then we’re going to decide at the end of [crosstalk]

Alex: [crosstalk] new word-

Lauren: I love it.

Alex: -chief growth officer, that’s why we call it because you do everything. Chris, by the end of this session, we need a new title for all you guys.

Chris: Yes, for sure. [chuckles]

Alex: You didn’t know that [unintelligible 00:13:15] was going to be on 7:30 AM, stat. Chris, that’s such a big organization. How do you measure all of these things? How do you make sure ops is getting what they need? You don’t just have one CEO. You’re probably dealing with lots of capacity constraints at different location. How do you get this? How do where to place emphasis?

Chris: We have a unique challenge because in Arizona, being one of the fastest growing states in the United States and Phoenix, in that still rocket ship mode, we don’t have a demand problem. There’s more than enough demand for everybody to capitalize on. The challenge we have is as a nonprofit healthcare provider who, oh, by the way, is like Mayo in our backyard and all these other big health systems, it’s really boils down to no margin, no mission in nonprofit healthcare. It’s really about attracting the patients that drive the most opportunistic contribution margin while we still serve the needs of the folks that we need to as a nonprofit health system.

It’s about finding the right growth and attracting those customers to the points of access. That’s really, from an operations perspective, it’s having conversations with our ops team, our access team to really identify where access exists. Because we have a lot of providers that are 9 months booked out, 12 months booked out. You can’t solve that problem with marketing that actually makes it worse. It’s really trying to find– in a precision marketing mindset, identifying those right target customers and bringing them into the doors that are actually open.

It’s a bit of a unique challenge. Data solves the problem. I think that’s where this legacy of marketers being known as promotions, people and in health, you have dinosaur legacy healthcare. It’s really like PR teams that have been foisted into the modern marketing machine and trying to keep up with trends and keep up with demands that I think at the end of the day, data helps you get out of the guessing game.

Alex: I like that. I like that. My favorite part about no margin, no mission. At the end of the day, that’s the point where there’s nonprofit, for-profit, private, equity-backed or more mission-driven, at the end of the day, no margin, no mission. We have to be driving patients where there is care that can be provided. Yes, that’s awesome. You have to apply that and look at the whole swath. While we’re on this topic, because it’s all about talking and making sure that we’re aligned with Ops, do any of you all have a quick tip with how do you break down silos?

What has been your magic mission? Because Ops generally gives a lot of pushback. I’m going to roll IT into that as well. They don’t want to go with online scheduling because the providers don’t want their schedule, all of that. Do you have any quick tips, guys, on how you break down the silos with ops, IT, et cetera?

Ryan: Yes, I can jump in on that one. It’s old fashioned. Talk to them. Reality is they’re facing business challenges, too, within their scale-up. Those are eventually going to roll up into the company goals and what we got to accomplish. I’ve always found– particularly ops, if we can make their life easier, they are willing to have that conversation. That’s the way that I approach it with them. IT is a little bit different because they function a little bit differently. Sometimes with that IT conversation, same thing, I probably can’t make your life easier.

Let’s talk about, again, system flows, how is this going to work, and then what’s best for the business. Then if you get the IT pushback a little bit, I think you do have to be firm and hold your ground and say, “Hey, that’s great from a tech standpoint, but legitimately, this is how I need this to flow, so we can move this forward.” I think it’s just good old-fashioned conversation and making your point solid.

Lauren: Right. It’s the why. It’s how you negotiate or have conversations with anyone in your life. Like, “Here’s what I need, but here’s why I need it.” We’re looking to accomplish a shared goal, and that is to make the patient’s experience better. Matt, I know this is big on your plate because you own the product side, which is obviously very heavy IT in Tend’s online scheduling product. I think I would also love to hear your thoughts on alignment with de novo growth because I know that’s a way that you guys are continuing to meet patient demand.

Matt: Yes, there’s a lot here, and I agree with the frequency of communications, clarity, purpose, really important. One thing I try to stress with my team specifically is just almost a mentality shift. There are going to be times where the marketing organization, which is inclusive of our call center as well, is going to take the lead. They’re going to be the lead stakeholder in a project and rolling something out. Maybe it’s launching a new studio. Maybe it’s in influencing site selection and name because if you miss by a block, it can be crickets. Sometimes we’re the leader. Then you have to govern a process a certain way.

Sometimes we’re in support of the organization. Often with operations, that service leader mentality can be really constructive. We give them lots of opportunity to provide feedback, how your studio is doing. Are there any slow ones? We’ve even built programs called support our studios where we expand channel mix to maybe help a slower studio and make sure that regional director or the studio manager feels the support. We come at it with a very low ego, high collaboration mentality. Because too often I’ve seen ego get in the way and someone just wants to win or be right as opposed to, “What’s the larger context of the organization and what are we trying to achieve?” That part’s really, really critical.

Where we also help is on the de novo, which is we’re working on something called propensity modeling right now, where basically we’re looking at all the patients we’ve ever had, the good, the bad. This is a consumer business at the end of the day, so you’ve got a wide range. We’re really trying to figure out of the 28 we’ve built now, we have enough. Because it’s basically 28 versions of product market fit. Where are those studios placed that are just thriving and maybe where did we just miss or could have been better. That’s just part of the challenge of building de novo. You have to have a bunch in the pipeline before you’ve even opened your first door.

Now, we’re really trying to sharpen the pencil on how we’re allowing our own five years of data coupled with third party to see if we can’t evolve how we are doing site selection. How do we launch them and how do we scale them within the market to try to de-risk those future openings. Because when you build them new, they don’t come with staff and they don’t come with patients. It’s actually a very risky proposition.

Lauren: Matt, sticking on that theme, and then I’ll go around to the rest of the group, you mentioned propensity modeling. We’re going to be doing a whole BI session just later this morning where I know that this topic is going to come up. You’ve got that to help you inform some of your de novo site selection. What about the digital product experience, that online scheduling experience, the different touch points that someone needs to go through, not overcomplicating it, but getting what the business needs.

Matt: Yes, we have been relentless from day one, though. That’s my own background, though. I was at HelloFresh before this, and conversion rate optimization was a religion there, and they drove a very hard program. I tried to bring the best of hardcore direct-to-consumer logic into more of a healthcare setting and so partnered with our technology team to build the site and the booking experience and so that it is as seamless as it needs to be. Sometimes we actually want to introduce some friction. We’ve done a lot, too. We have a third-party patient management system. We work with Dentrix Ascend. We’ve had to do a lot with their API endpoints.

Sometimes Henry Schein is friendly and will open up their endpoints. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes if you do get a hiccup or two in booking, it actually comes down to what are they permitting that week. It’s been really important to us that we’re blending the digital and the physical experience. People, when they select a dentist, both at the category level and at the Tend level, it’s because we’re in network with their insurance. Normally at the category level, then it comes down to the credentials of the staff and clinical outcomes. If you assume that is present, people then come to Tend because of ease of booking, the convenience, we’re open six days a week, long hours each day, and then the friendly, trustworthy staff.

That digital-first modern booking scheduling experience coupled with a strong CRM support to move you from booking to chair is something that’s very valued by our members. We work at it every day. We have live funnel tests going on now about the calendar step, site selection, just the visualization of it. It will never stop, as long as I’m here at least. It’s fun to see how you can optimize that to make it even more efficient.

Lauren: It’s interesting to get non-healthcare perspectives. I like when someone comes in to a healthcare role, sometimes we’ll get new clients that join from a consumer background. It is a breath of fresh air. Then you’ve got the lifers. You marry those together, and you get the best of both worlds, which I think is great.

Alex: She used fresh air as a pun. [inaudible 00:22:02]

Lauren: I did not.

Alex: [inaudible 00:22:03] that’s going to be delivering dentistry in a box to our homes.

Lauren: That’d be great. I don’t have to leave my house.

Alex: Mari at Acenda, what are you guys doing? Everything’s shifting digital? Every patient wants digital-first interaction? What have you guys done to meet the patients on their journey where they– at the right point in time?

Mari: Yes. I think we just do it all. we have so many different avenues to entry. I would love to say that with lots of things, we’re digital first, but we’re still working with a largely traditional making a phone call and setting up an appointment as well. It’s integrating all avenues into one seamless experience. It’s funny because my daughter lives in New York, and she needed to make a dentist appointment. Tend was there, and it was so easy to make the appointment. It was seamless. It was digital.

?Matt: [inaudible 00:22:51]

Mari: Through our behavioral health lens, our consumers are looking at it very differently where there are some that do want that very quick and ease to make the appointment. Then there are others that want that long phone call, want to know the history of the clinician and all kinds of, “What color is the waiting room,” all kinds of stuff. I do think it’s having that mix and being aware of that mix and not trying to push too much into all digital because we know we definitely have that consumer that doesn’t want to go that route.

Alex: Yes. Digital can’t be the only thing. Chris, you guys have a high acuity service lines. That, for me, is not probably– is it online scheduling default? How do you know where to prioritize? Do you all have online schedule in Banner? How do you weigh your different conversion touch points? What do you guys do there?

Chris: The trickiest thing isn’t so much presenting calls to action, it’s the templates to which you schedule with the provider. At Banner, I believe there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 180 different scheduling templates that need to be applied in different use cases. Scheduling with the primary care might be an easier workflow because you’ve got considerations on new versus existing, sick versus well, but that’s the gist of it. Whereas you get into a highly specialized neurosurgeon, you shouldn’t be self with them first of all. That’s usually a referral pathway, but even a shoulder specialist, you want to make sure that your leads are qualified.

As you send somebody through a online booking journey, you don’t want someone with ankle pain to go to a shoulder specialist because that’s going to require rework or potentially a frustrated experience. I think where we draw the balance is things that are easy are best served in a self-service capacity. Things that require high touch and a dose of empathy, humans are the best pathway forward. We do balance the mix, and we’re pretty heavily skewed on a phone as scheduling first. I think we feel something like 10 million phone calls a year, somewhere in that neighborhood.

The coolest thing about where we are in call center data is you have this goldmine of unstructured data that if you can convert it using LLM or whatever technology you have in your stack, you can glean a ton of insights on what might you do in the next at that to serve that customer in a more delighted way. One of the things that we’re working on is really taking the terabytes of unstructured data that come through in the voice channel and turning that into a structured capacity that we can then use to service and grow in a more thoughtful way.

Alex: Nice to hear that humans are still needed.

Lauren: I don’t think that’ll ever go away.

Alex: My question, if my wife is ChatGPT-ing the answer to everything, “Should I stay with my husband?” I just hope it gives the right answer every night. That’s cool. The call center is paramount, the training, the operation. Ryan, when you first came to Peak, we started working together. That was one of the first places you dove in. It wasn’t the digital ad buying thing [unintelligible 00:26:04], Ryan. It was actually diving in to make sure leads were actually flowing through becoming booked appointments. What made you clue in there? What did you do to optimize all of the conversion points?

Ryan: Initially, the good news is Cardinal, you guys have great tracking top of funnel when it comes in. We internally have to make sure we can track it from there all the way down. The way we work, this existing patient goes to the office, new patient goes to the call center. It really just has everything to do with once you understand the flow, like what the panel’s all been talking about, the flow and the touch points, so when they all come in, you’re just looking for, “Where am I dropping the ball? Where are we not as efficient?” That’s going to be schedule, show rate, when they did show, what that treatment plan looked like, average revenue per procedure, et cetera.

Once you start looking in there, circling back to that ops conversation, you get into, “Great.” If the handoff is to the call center here, marketing did their job in theory. Great job. Kudos. Cost per leads’ good. Everyone likes that. I don’t so much look at things like impressions. Nobody ever believes the 3 billion impression number. Then really just from there, it’s just, like I said, just tracking it through the system. “Hey, great,” like Chris was saying, “How effective was my call center?” We have a great relationship with Patient Prism. They’re analyzing those calls with AI and everything.

It can serve up– like Chris was saying, “Hey, this was a missed opportunity. It was actually a new patient opportunity, but we dropped the ball.” At the end of the day, the business impact metrics, that’s what everyone’s going to care about. The answer to the why do I look there, at the end of the day, as much as I got to drive leads, I got to make sure they use the old-fashioned term where you’re getting butts in seats or whatever is what people say. We just want to make sure, “Hey, it’s working.” Then, from there, that what’s led us into what some of the panels already talked about. “What does capacity look like at each office?”

In our world, oral surgery generally will be a referral versus a direct patient booking, things like that. Alex, like what we do at the Cardinal funds. Then we start shifting things around, “Hey, this office is booked out for the next 120 days.” Take those dollars, put them over here to an office that can get them in within the next 10 days or something like that. It’s just a better stewardship of the marketing budget is what it comes down.

Alex: Is looking at the end business metric. By the way, shout out to Patient Prism. We have phenomenal sponsors. Yes. These are the leaders in all technology. You’ll have to go check out the booths. I’m also going to be speaking with Yvonne from Varsity, which is awesome. They’re going to be presenting a case study. Very cool. We’ve got [unintelligible 00:28:32] Interactive. Guys, these that I’m shooting. When we saw on the poll, ROI is the hardest thing to prove, guys. A lot of these technology partners of ours helped make that happen so that we all stay employed and get more budget the following year. Lauren, what else did you want to touch on? We got so much [crosstalk]

Lauren: [crosstalk] from Mari, we’re talking about all these different technologies and leveraging patient data and going in and finding those breaking points. Behavioral health is a very sensitive category, and you have to make sure you’re using that information in a way that builds trust and doesn’t degrade it. How do you think about identifying those points and potentially working with clinical staff as well just to really make sure that you’re building trust?

Mari: Yes, absolutely. I think for us, our blog, we call it the mental health resource center, is our most successful top of funnel tactics. For us, it’s having lots of alignment and lots of collaboration with our clinicians so they’re able to inform us on what we should be talking about it and how we should be talking about it. We have this clinician as translator type of mentality where we’re not assuming that we know what to talk about. We’re really digging in deep and really trying to get their insights. Then we are turning it into plain knowledge that it’s easily digestible to really anyone.

We’ve done a lot of different things to do that. We’ve come up with a whole strategy to involve clinicians a little bit more into our work in marketing. Some of those things, the easiest things have been most successful. Portal on the intranet where clinicians can just feed us ideas. They don’t have to do anything else. There’s no writing, no nothing. You just have to feed us ideas. That’s all. That’s what we need. That’s been very successful for us. Just developing that communication and understanding because they’re on the ground. They know what people are looking for.

We know the digital space. We know the keywords. We can do all of that. I do think we have to work together. I think it does bring it back to that human touch mentality, not just talking in terms of digital and data, but also in terms of the real human experience and what that feels like. I think it’s morphing all of those together to have a more successful marketing strategy overall.

Lauren: Mari, that’s it. I love the idea of the portal. I see the thumbs up popping up on the screen here. People are like, “Wow, that’s a really cool idea.” Does any of that come into play with recruitment? Does the marketing function support recruitment there? How much are you guys helping to plug those gaps in the organization as well?

Mari: Yes, at Acenda, we have taken a larger role in recruitment than we thought we would ever. It really has been. I think all of us, when we talked on our panel call, workforce challenges are just huge, I think, for all of us in healthcare. Having marketing be a key piece and a partner with your recruitment team has really been vital and has really moved the needle. More investments in employer brand, more investments in advertising, recruitment, all of that. On the marketing side is certainly something that we’ve been much more involved in that than we thought we would ever be a couple of years ago. I do think it’s been very successful. I know the other panelists have similar challenges as well.

Alex: Chris, are you getting tapped to support recruitment or acquisition at all?

Chris: I would say yes. I think really where we align best is on brand attributes. Really everything centered on Banner’s mission, making healthcare easier so life can be better. Initially, when that mission statement was launched, it was around the customer. That’s a pretty bold shift from where, I guess, 8, 10 years ago, where healthcare systems were. It was all about outcomes and like, “We’re number one,” chest-pounding messaging. Banner took a different approach. I think where we’re at today in our cycle is we’ve recognized after the pandemic that teams are burned out, it’s hard to recruit people, and it’s also difficult to make a sticky experience for healthcare consumers.

Our mission statement, in my mind, has really transformed into a statement around, “What are we doing to make healthcare easier for everybody that is engaged with Banner?” Whether it’s an employee on the inside, a clinical member, or a consumer. I think that’s really where Banner is going as an organization. This is where I think marketing is going to become a crucial partner in all of these conversations is how do we translate our brand and our value proposition so that we’re making the recruitment experience easier, we’re making the employee experience easier, we’re making the clinical experience easier, so that we can make it easier for consumers.

I think it all is symbiotic in the end. I think that’s where marketing is a great business partner. We think about things in a pragmatic way that are not tactical. We can really have these dialogues to help support all angles of the business.

Alex: Yes, making Banner easier to access for whether you’re looking for a job or looking for care. I love that. We’re getting questions. JC Johnson, thanks for the questions. This is live. Let’s dive into a few. I couldn’t read the end of some of those questions. Matt, I think you were looking at some of them. Help me if I screw this up. I saw questions on martech. Then I also want to ask where you’re going to invest more in ’25, my fellow panelists. Let’s go around and answer. Matt, favorite piece of marketing technology and where are you investing more in ’25?

Matt: It’s actually the call center. I took over the leadership of that earlier in the year. We’ve really transformed that function. We’re using a vendor called Level AI, which is able to score all our calls, assign them a disposition, real-time sentiment analysis, screen mirroring. We actually can go really, really deep into the calls to help train our agents and then get them sharper in terms of scheduling and patient need and just the quality on the phone. It assigns the satisfaction score at the end. That’s actually been a huge development, given just the sheer call volume that we’re able to drive, and we wouldn’t be able to do that.

I think we’re going to be doing two newish things. I would say we’re going to be really increasing our investment in SEO and content creation, dialing up our clinical capability and credibility a bit more and looking at some options in syndication, actually. How can we attempt to use earned media and organic coverage for broader distribution in our local market? Those are two areas that are actively being scoped as we speak.

Alex: I love that. SEO is not dead. [crosstalk]

Lauren: Alex, it’s still [crosstalk].

Alex: I started this as an SEO company almost 16 years ago. Thank you. Still alive and well. Still drives patients. You guys looking at it as awareness or a patient acquisition tactic, it sounded like, and you really go for a brand. Is it?

Matt: Yes, I was going to say, I think what we want to do is to just increase awareness and traffic to site, as you would know, Alex, SEO is a million things. It’s not one article, a blog. It’s site speed and how you’re building the back end and how many links can you drive. There’s just a totality. We’ve done this a few times. It’s just that we have a board that does not want to give money to Meta and Alphabet, if that surprises anybody. They have challenged us to find alternative pathways here. That’s certainly one of them.

Alex: Tell the board there’s no avoiding it. I tried. I tried. “I’m going to get your money.” [laughs] Ryan, favorite piece of technology and thing you’re investing more in next year?

Ryan: Favorite technology is probably two right now. We have piloted it. It is your Patient Prism, what they call it. I call it web we connect. I’m not sure what they totally call it, but it’s the form field comes into your website, but now it connects to an agent 60 seconds or less. We’re definitely intrigued with that. We think that’ll help us book more appointments going forward.

Then a person on my marketing team, we have started to play with creating videos through AI. Instead of sending the shoot there and trying to line up a doctor for a day or so, which we still do, some of those other requests, can we knock it out with AI, create it all from headquarters, and it’d be very lifelike, things like that. Those are probably the two technologies that we’re playing with the most right now.

Alex: Practical application of AI. Yes. Where are you investing more in AI or something else next year?

Ryan: We have a couple of different challenges for next year. I do believe that we need to invest into digital to the point of diminishing returns. We’re not there yet. That is one area that if we can get the company moving that direction I would like for it to go. We do need to update our website. Those templates are 10 years old and things are breaking all the time on them. That’s another one that we got to put into the old 2025 plan. Then selfishly, I might just look at advancing down the road. Like Matt was saying, it’s like I know content is going to be the key here, so already tipped the hand on the AI video.

The other one, and I haven’t done it yet, when we talk about doctors and explaining procedures and stuff like that, there is augmented reality or virtual reality that I think comes into play. I think that there’s a way to build that in. I don’t know if that happens in 2025 or if that’s a 2026 type thing. That is definitely piquing my interest of an area that I would like to probe.

Alex: Yes. Very cool. We’ve heard that one. All right. Very good. Mari, we said we got two minutes and Chris [unintelligible 00:37:55]. Mari, favorite piece of technology where you’re investing more next year?

Mari: Technology wise, we have invested a lot in our internal. We have a new ticketing system. We act as an in-house agency. We’ve put a lot of investment, both brain investment and monetary investment into building a product where the ticketing system and requests go right into our project manager. Everything is assigned, and we’re able to like seamlessly work as a in-house agency. It’s been really great. It’s been well worth the investment of time on that. Favorite technology, other than that, next year, we’re definitely investing more into brand building. That’s going to be a key investment that we’ll be making.

Just some exciting things. I know virtual reality was just mentioned. That’s one of the things that our training team is working on and really utilizing virtual reality to train a lot of our clinicians in a new and different way than ever before. I think that’s some exciting technology as well. A great way to [inaudible 00:38:57]

Alex: Yes, that’s awesome. The in-house agency, the ticketing system is good for a house of brands, a ton of affiliated providers that all think their thing is the biggest thing that day. That would be really cool to have. Guys, y’all looking for a new agency hit up, Mari. Chris, favorite piece of technology, what are you looking forward to investing more next year?

Chris: Yes. Right now, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, we finally have web analytics after an absence for reasons we won’t talk about today. The one that I’m looking most forward to is– feels dated to say this, but customer data platform, CDP. It’s a must. We’ll have it in 2025. Building it out in a federated way across a big organization is not easy, but we want to do it right because I think it has the biggest impact we could possibly have going forward.

Alex: Why?

Chris: I think it’s because they can serve the needs of just about every patient touch point across the care continuum from call center to frontline, to feeding back to our analytics and insights team so that we can precisely find the next prospects on the next-

Alex: Love it.

Chris: -[crosstalk]–

Alex: In a HIPAA-compliant way. That’s a big thing. [crosstalk]

Chris: Always.

Alex: We have several recommendations there. We love them. Probably don’t want to say who you’re going to use. That’s cool. We made it through 46 minutes, only mentioned HIPAA compliance once.

Lauren: I’m glad it’s behind us.

Alex: Not for these guys maybe, but it’s not the main talking point anymore. That shows how far the healthcare marketing community’s come in a couple of years. Thankfully, some of those recollections have been rolled back. We got to roll into our next one, panelists. I can’t clap, it’ll screw up the sound. Thank you so much. This was a great [crosstalk[

Lauren: So good to see you guys.

Alex: It was very cool to hear all of your wizardry tricks on how to align with marketing, and I started with ops. We need to find a new title [crosstalk]

Lauren: These are the themes for the rest of the two days. Everything you guys said is so relevant to the material that’s to come. If you guys are listening, stick around, check out the Zoom schedules, find the sessions that you are most interested in based on this discussion, and we’ll dive deeper.

Alex: Because right now, we’re doing first-party, third-party audiences ourselves, presentation [unintelligible 00:40:59]. It’s awesome. Panelists, thank you so much. We owe you one. Cardinal’s AV team, panelists are coming on later. Thank you all so much. Scaling up two days. We just kicked it off. Let’s keep going. Thank you.

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