Going Beyond PPC to Win Patients

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: What’s going on, everybody? One of my favorite friends and former client, and one of the smartest marketers in all of healthcare is joining us for the next 20 minutes. This is going to be a blast. I know how savvy, how sharp, and how innovative Jenn is. Jenn, welcome to Ignite.

Jenn McClain: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Alex: This is fun. I know some of our prompts are going to be slightly different than the ones we normally go with. We don’t get to talk about PPCs, so this is going to be fun, even though that’s my favorite thing. Jenn, tell them where you’ve been, where you’ve worked, your experience in the industry, and then we’re going to get right into it.

Jenn: I spent almost four years at Smile Doctors. I was the first CMO there. I left there late last year. I’ve been consulting and doing some other things in my spare time right now. I love the healthcare space and just want to see it grow, and the technology, and AI, and all the fun stuff that’s impacting us. It’s like we just have to get smarter day by day. It’s scary. It keeps me up at night, but it’s fun too. I just love seeing that whole full funnel patient journey.

Alex: Yes, full funnel patient journey. That’s what we’ve been nonstop blabbing about all year is, you can’t just do the PPC thing forever. Yes, we will talk about AI and all the fun stuff that robots are doing. I want to stay with like how marketers– Now that you’re consulting, that’s probably very fun going from in-house and you’re just seeing one OSO, the biggest OSO in the world, but one brand, if you will, and now you get to touch a bunch of different ones.

You’re seeing uniform complexities and issues across the board. What do you think it takes for healthcare marketers to stay competitive in 2025 with the macroeconomic situation we’re in and to help them grow through it? Where do you start? What are the basics? What are you looking at?

Jenn: Yes, I love that you say like going back to the basics. You have to have like a strong data foundation. That’s what I’m finding is some do and some don’t. The biggest piece too is, we know what’s going on at Google and Meta, the algorithms are black a little these days. Just making sure that we’re not only looking at our data, but then also making sure I’m having the local teams go out and just be a patient from a consumer standpoint. Doing searches, doing digital, doing lots of different things, and understanding how the brand is showing up from a practice standpoint in their local community.

I think just go back to the basics there, but then also making sure that digital is fantastic. That’s one piece of the business. I think digital, the online, offline marketing, definitely has to all come together. We say upper funnel, lower funnel, all those fun things from a data attribution, all that, but really and truly making the teams work together as well to understand truly what’s driving incremental.

I think we’re shifting. We’re in a time right now that we have all the data that we have connected. That’s the hard part, but being able to analyze it and make actions off of it. That’s the big piece that I think healthcare marketers are starting to get into is those key insights. I know you guys at the agency too have done some of that phenomenal work over the last couple of years of attribution modeling, and all that fun stuff. That’s something that we have to lean into to make sure that we’re using our dollars wisely.

Alex: Yes. I hear you there. You had the benefit of being at the largest OSO, which has a big budget. You were able to get ahead of it and start getting clean data and some of the more advanced technology, and stuff. Where do you advise a provider group? Not quite the largest of its kind, but 1,500 locations. You talk about clean data, where does it start and what do you need to tie together for good omni-channel reporting and understanding for insight? Where do they start?

Jenn: Especially in the DSO world, I’m not going to lie, OSO, DSO, it’s hard because you’re taking in the affiliate data coming in as they join the company. Making sure that the integration team is truly looking at the data and working with IT partners. I had a fantastic IT partner. We looked at, we made the business rules there to make sure their integration team was pulling in the data so that it was accurate. There was definitely some cleanup work, and so making sure that we had all the digital–

There’s different KPIs. As an OSO, DSO, you have to standardize what those business key metrics are. That’s what we were working on and making sure that we had all those key business indicators from a KPI standpoint, basically analyzed and decided on. Then, we have our local teams as they integrate it, making sure that data came through. What you can imagine is, if it’s a different practice and all the data is different, it’s going to be a hot mess. Making sure that those standard business rules are in place, integrating it, and then you can action on it, and working with your agency or working with the local internal team as well.

Alex: Standard business rules, I had not heard that vernacular before but that’s actually quite good. What is the common understanding we’re going with? You have your own KPIs and ways you’re tracking things. What are the things? Can you give us examples, Jenn, of standard business rules and the main KPIs you were looking at? We can use DSO so I don’t confuse people with OSO. What are the main things you think a healthcare marketer should be looking at? What are some of those business rules for them to get started?

Jenn: From a business rule standpoint, making sure that we are looking at the right common, like first-party data, third-party data, depending on how it’s coming in. Making sure that from a patient acquisition file, it’s a true conversion. A lot of data will come in based off of leads. We all love leads, but leads don’t drive conversion and start. We would make sure that start data optimized. Making sure that those are some of the business rules that the company’s going to be focusing on start. Not just the digital world, across the board.

It’s a different way of thinking to truly drive that patient acquisition. Then the standard from a digital side, the standard metrics, cost per acquisition, cost per lead. I think incremental is the piece that’s so hard because there’s so many different. Especially in the OSO, DSO world, you’ve got great local teams and they’re doing activities as well. Tying that activity into the funnel piece, like if they have an event or something like that, from a referral standpoint, making sure that’s coming through so that digital is not all taking the credit. Making sure it’s all across the board.

Alex: Yes, I love it. Starting with starts, guys, at the end of the day, leads are what they are. Jenn was tracking cost per lead, cost per acquisition, but also starts. Then she’s looking at an omni-channel thing. Then, guys, listeners, to our three listeners, it takes just some business ingenuity, marketing ingenuity experience to say, “Hey. I know we ran these field events and I know we had this linear TV thing happening in Texas that month. That’s probably why overall our starts are higher and stuff.” Trying to get, I guess, as close to an insight as you can. Generally digital was doing all of these things and we got to start and we’ll tie that back. This stuff is working. It’s impossible to get one-to-one or?

Jenn: There’s no way. If you’re 80%, make sure you’re there. Sometimes you know your business is lifting and your day is a little off, but you have to go with your gut as well. That’s where smart marketers can lean in and say, “Hey, it’s working and trending. How do you pivot?” I’m working with a company right now and we’re running OT, and we see a lift in the search, we see a lift in social. It’s the whole engagement, but it’s hard to track. There are tracking mechanisms out there, but we’re seeing a positive trend. We analyze that way too.

Alex: Yes. Guys, y’all have to be Jenn. I told y’all she was the best. I told y’all she was the best. Everybody was like, “Oh, he was right. Okay.” That is part of it, guys. The OTT and all that stuff is like, how do you measure that? It’s the lift and the other things. Brand search goes up. Your cost per lead goes down because they recognize your brand, yadi, yadi, yada. Sometimes you have to be okay with that. Jenn, you have a lot of gravitas and people will believe you when you say, “Listen, it’s generally working.” How does a younger market or less experienced sell in OT and keep it sold in? Are there metrics? Is it brand lift? Search lift? Cost per lead going down? Is that good enough?

Jenn: You just said it right there. It’s cost per lead going down. It’s brand search going up. It’s taking some of the old digital metrics that we always look at and tying that from a TV standpoint and some other metrics too. You don’t have to have a big agency. You can look at the data that you already have and you can make assumptions on, “Is it working or not.” I’m a big believer. I know most people are probably going to watch this. They’re all about test strategies. You’re not just going to roll stuff. You test in the market, you see a lift, and then you roll.

Alex: All right. Test. Giving us all tips. I love it. I love that you’re not there anymore, so you can tell us everything.

Jenn: I’m just telling you everything.

Alex: Almost. This is awesome. Yes. Testing the market, that’s your control or experiment, I guess, if you will. The rest is a control. That’s very cool. Quick, before we move on to marketing channels, I’ll get there. I promise, everybody, technology that you use. I believed you were onboarding Salesforce back when we were working together. Did you keep that for a while? Did you layer on CDB? Was there anything else that was important to all the attribution?

Jenn: Yes. We brought on Salesforce when I was there. It was a major integration, but it was the right thing to do. It allowed us to definitely do appointment reminders, see our immigration. I’m a big believer in having one version of the truth and making sure what programs are working. That is, I view too, especially with a lot of the DSOs, it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s making sure you have a great database, a great CRM system.

It doesn’t have to be Salesforce. There’s a lot of ones that was out there, HubSpot, a few others. Just making sure you have the team behind it to be able to analyze the data, put the campaigns together. It’s not just blasting every single day. It’s personalizing, making sure that we’re sending the right message at the right time. It sounds really easy. It’s not easy, but if you put the time and effort behind it, you’ll see the lift.

Alex: Yes. Probably dedicate someone in-house to doing it and building the journeys and everything. Very cool. Is that how you got the cost-first start? You saw Cindy came through or whatever, digital media start. This is critical.

Jenn: When I was leaving, we were integrating all of that from all digital channels to make sure it’s one version of the truth. It definitely took some time, but the team was working on that.

Alex: Yes. Big lift. Guys, better to do it when you’re 50 locations, not 400. That’s tougher. You have a hundred different brands and that gets more difficult.  Let’s talk digital channels for patient acquisition. What are your favorites digital channels for patient acquisition? You can’t use PPC.

Jenn: I can’t use PPC. I think you know what I’m going to say because I love it. I’ve seen some of your podcasts before, but I’m a huge believer in social media. It’s not just running sponsored ads. It’s taking the time to make sure you have the right content strategy for the right social media channels. I love influencers. It’s something we started. I continue to do influencers. Before I was in healthcare, I should have mentioned this earlier, I was in retail.

A lot of things that we’re working in retail are applying to the healthcare model. Making sure to do that but also just taking a lot of the data, like testimonials. Our patients are giving us great shout outs, so let’s use that, and then repurposing some of that content. What might work in Instagram, Facebook, won’t work in TikTok, just from a video standpoint, understanding what works and understanding your audience per channel as well. Then the other thing that is low-hanging fruit, it’s shocking but it helps SEO too, is Google business profiles.

That’s another social media channel, making sure that the content’s there, making sure responding to reviews, and it gets hard. Is it the local team? Is it the central team, the support center? Who’s going to do it? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who does it as long as it gets done, in my view, and just putting those guardrails around what can be answered, how to respond, but using technology today too. It doesn’t have to be a human. It doesn’t have to sound like a robot, but you can personalize using some of the tools out there and make sure that you’re responding to every single review.

Alex: Yes, I love it. A lot of those reviews will say keywords, like, “Best orthodontics practice. I love the braces,” and that helps. Just driving those SEO reviews as well, but it helps with all that stuff. Thank you for saying GBP, Google My Business, Google Places, whatever they want to call it this month.

Jenn: It changes like every–

Alex: Not sure why they do it like that. I don’t know, they must have like a rolling lawsuit where [chuckles] they keep changing. Sometimes the basics matter most. Guys, people are on mobile and they type in orthodontist near me, and what is the number one thing?

Jenn: In healthcare, we love acronyms. There you go.

Alex: Yes. Hey, keep giving us new ones. Let me go back to the social media thing. You said you were using influencers. I know you were at iFLY skydiving. Guys, this is fun. Retail now is coming into healthcare. We are getting to do some creator stuff to basic, corporatey brand videos that everyone’s running in healthcare. It’s not resonating, homies. I’m really curious, what were you doing with creators for Smile Doctors or otherwise in healthcare? What didn’t seem to work?

Jenn: We ran influencers. We had an influencer program. It was amazing. It was not expensive. It was scrappy. That’s where I tell everyone to start and then you can build from there. We had many, many brands within Smile Doctors, and the same thing at iFLY. The biggest challenge at iFLY was skydiving. Like what you just said, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to fall. I’m going to get hurt.” “No, you got to show the experience.” We had influencers there. It’s like really bringing it to life. They don’t want to really hear from us as marketers, they want to hear from patients. They want to hear from consumers. Repurposing that and making sure that you’re building your advertising campaigns around that.

Alex: Yes. Very cool. You’d give braces away, I guess. Dentists, braces, give them away, get people in there, and then use the content for ads. It’s not just like what they’re going to post on theirs. That’s whatever. Cool. I’m pumped. We’re building out that capability here, and it’s not so simple but it is fun.

Jenn: In the past, you really couldn’t track influencers, but now you can track just like any other channel. You don’t have to give them a code or things like that. It’s getting easier and easier.

Alex: Yes. There’s marketplaces built out and all you need for agents here in-house is a creative strategist that says, “Generally, this is like the theme I want. Show to this place and I will run the ad like this after,” or whatever. Very cool. It’s getting easier. Talking about privacy a little bit, everything has hit the fan over the last few years and even though Trump fired the HHS inspector, it’s still not going to have state regulations, and all that fun stuff. What do you think is really key to still doing personalized marketing at scale, but maintaining privacy regulations? How did you do that at such a big corp?

Jenn: I think obviously being HIPAA compliant through all your journeys and making sure you’re working with a legal team and IT, and all that, check the box there. From a personalization standpoint, leveraging first-party data is your easiest one. There’s so much data in healthcare. As long as it’s the legal team signs off on how to use it, you should absolutely use this. I’m a big consulting right now. It’s all new. They’re very concerned. They don’t know what to do.

Really just getting the team or getting the agency on the phone with the legal team or with the IT team, and walking through that, and what we can and can’t do. The last thing you want to do is just say, “Hey. If there’s a concern there,” walking through it and then assessing the business risks. We leveraged all of the data, we connected everything, and then we connected our campaigns with the data that we could connect when I was there to make sure that we were hitting the right patient at the right time or the right lead at the right time.

Alex: Yes. Right message, right lead, right time, all that fun stuff. Somehow do it in a private and compliant manner. This is why everyone’s getting out of healthcare. You aren’t getting it because it’s hard, that’s why we love it.

Jenn: It’s hard.

Alex: That’s why you love it is because it’s hard.

Jenn: Yes.

Alex: There’s really cool outcomes. People think, “Oh, braces. What’s the big– That’s not cardiology.” I remember how insecure I was as a teenager before the braces and how much more I came alive after the brace. It actually can change your life. If it can change your mental health, it can change your life.

Jenn: The confidence factor is huge. Same thing, I’ve seen kids be able to fly for the first time. That whole mission, it’s amazing to watch that. Even on a hard day, it was fun because you knew the outcome.

Alex: Yes. We get lost as the big time marketers and private equity backs. It’s always a number that has to go up. That number is actually a patient. The mama that feels better because her kid feels better. I don’t know. It’s cool.

Jenn: Lost tears, cried all that, the first reveal. Yes, it’s amazing.

Alex: Yes. Super dope. I love healthcare marketing. We know AI is becoming a more bigger thing. What are you looking at this year? What are you hearing now in the market with all the clients that you’re having to consult with now? What do you think is going to be important? How do we blend it? Where are people using it best? Not best, et cetera.

Jenn: I would say just putting anything in a ChatGPT, one of those, that’s not the best way to go, but a lot of people are doing it and you can see it. I think the biggest thing too, is just understanding how AI is going to be part of their suite of services. It’s here. It does keep me up at night. It keeps me up. I’m a mom. I’m like, what’s the future for my son? From a marketing standpoint, it’s here. How are we going to integrate it with humans as well?

I was working a few days ago on predictive modeling. Predictive modeling is hard. I wasn’t doing it. I was watching a guy work and do some coding. Normally that would take like two to three weeks. It literally took him like four hours, and he kept redefining the whole engine and it was working. We have to embrace it because it’s here, and being able to figure out content strategies. Honestly, AI is going to be from a personalization standpoint.

When we say full funnel from a marketing standpoint, I truly feel that AI is going to be from the very top to, all the way to the conversion, all the way to the thank you and the follow-up, and everything else. Where does it integrate? Then, from a business standpoint, we have to look at where it needs to integrate. Where do we need it? We might not have the budget for staff or something, and it’s going to be complementary and figuring out where that hole is too.

Alex: Yes. Look at like the menial stuff so far, AI good at that. It still can do creativity and strategy yet. Who knows if it’s two months or two years at the way it’s moving, but that’s where our value add is. Yes, I’m going to tell my sons to be plumbers because that’s the last thing it’s going to take.

Jenn: AI is building homes. It’s a plumbing route.

Alex: Yes. They are building homes. I didn’t know that, but I dream last.

Jenn: Yes. The homes are amazing.

Alex: They’re building them on-site or they’re like fabricating a warehouse that comes as a square.

Jenn: They were building fabricated, but now they’re building them on-site, and now they’re building luxury homes. They built their first luxury home. It’s pretty crazy.

Alex: Okay. Don’t go on home building. The plumbing may still be a thing. Yes. Dude, I drove by all these houses being built around here the other day. I see this guy who’s sweaty. It’s hot here in Atlanta, and I’m like, “there is no doubt a robot could do that job in 10 years. What are we all going to do?” I don’t know. That’s not today’s topic though. Jenn, one last thing. You said something very important to me in the pre-show, which is you want marketers to get away from fighting fires. Why is that? What do they do differently?

Jenn: Yes. I would say, going into 2023 and going into 2024, it wasn’t like coming into an election year. That’s just really, really tough. It’s always tough, no matter what industry you’re in. With the economy, inflation, you name it. We had to pivot across the board and all marketing teams did. It’s like, “How many tools are in your toolbox? What I think coming into this year is really focusing on being able to truly drive the right strategy, drive the right content, see the results, and not being able to have to respond to every single buyer, and doing our day jobs.

I feel like marketers, not just in healthcare across the board, they’re more business owners. More and more is coming on their plate from a strategic, from revenue, and all those different things. All the different Cs, and cheap growth, cheap revenue, all of the things. It all impacts marketing, really aligning on what that role is and making sure you have the right team to have a successful year.

Alex: The shared business rules and KPIs and say, “Great, great, great. Thank you for the input, input. That’s a fire, fire, fire. Don’t forget, this is what we’re trying to achieve. The numbers are good.”

Jenn: You have to agree on the guardrails. Stay focused. I’ve seen companies do it really, really, really well. I’ve seen companies respond to every blow of fire. You don’t make as much traction. I do think once we see some stabilization, hopefully here soon, fingers crossed, then we’ll start to see some great work by marketers. Getting conversation across the board. We’ve got South by Southwest coming out. We’ve got a DSL, right? We’ve got CMO Club. Everybody’s talking about the same thing. 2024 was a tough year for all. We just want to do the right thing and have a great year across the board.

Alex: The elections are miserable. I guess, as marketers, keep an eye on the prize. What are we trying to achieve?  Let’s do marketing stuff every day. Also, Jenn, you’re in a new position where you’re the Chief. You’re the Chief, Chief, Chief. It becomes like you’re running numbers in a business and answering to everybody instead of what we love, which is marketing. I forget that every day too, like, “Why did I get it? I’m dealing with this problem, this problem. I don’t know what to do with as much.” Careful wanting the chief roles, everybody out there like, “Aargh.” It comes with a lot of management and number of crunching stuff and less marketing, unfortunately. We could do a whole podcast on Chief first Director, Manager, and the fun of both. Jenn, this was awesome. I loved talking about technology, clean data, how do you attribute things? How do you look at omnichannel? We talked about AI, Google My Business, social media, how to do influencers in healthcare. I thought this was going to be one of my favorites of ’25 and it is, and that I’ll go through ’25 at the end, still thinking that. Jenn, thank you for joining me.

Jenn: Thank you for having me.

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