Debunking the Biggest Myths in Healthcare Marketing

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.

Lauren Leone: Hey everyone. My name’s Lauren Leone, the Chief Growth Officer here at Cardinal Digital Marketing. Today we’re going to do something a little bit different than our typical Ignite Healthcare Marketing podcast episode. Really excited about this one because I am here with a number of Cardinals to bust some marketing myths. We have heard these over decades of working with various healthcare organizations. What we want to do today is bring to you the things that we hear that are not necessarily true, that are not being used in the right way, so that you guys don’t make the same mistakes. These types of misconceptions tend to spread like wildfire and they can lead to missed opportunities for your business.

Without further ado, let’s dive in with some of my favorite Cardinal colleagues. Now I’m going to hop on over to a conversation with Alex Kemp, who is our director of Applied Analytics, to see what he has been coming across in his day-to-day. Alex, I love having you. I love our episodes on things like PMax and the marketing strategies. I want to talk to you today about the things that we hear that are not quite accurate. Let’s dive into the things that you hear most commonly in your conversations with our clients.

Alex Kemp: Thanks, Lauren. I think one of the biggest ones I’ve heard of is that Performance Max cannot be affected for lead generation. I’d say about three years ago, this wasn’t a myth, this was the actual reality that performance max just wasn’t good at driving leads. That was just because it was marketed as this one-stop shop for all your Google inventory. It worked really well for e-commerce but it really did not pan out well for lead generation just due to the poor qualities of the leads that were being driven.

That was three years ago. Now it’s gotten to a point where actually if you give it the right signals and the right inputs, it can actually be very effective, sometimes even more effective and more efficient than non-grant search. What made it a myth now is that when you give it actually qualified signals, that is to say qualified phone calls or qualified form submissions, the system is much better at weeding out the low-quality potential leads versus the higher-quality ones. I think with Performance Max, it’s just about giving it the right directions and the right volume of signals.

Lauren: You guys have heard a bunch of myths from some of our leaders of our teams. I want to bring in our group media director, Ruchi Patel, who is a wizard in platform and in driving multi-location strategy. I am sure that Ruchi hears these misconceptions on a daily basis. Hey, Ruchi, it’s so good to have you. Tell me what you’ve been hearing.

Ruchi Patel: That’s a really good question. Thanks for asking, Lauren. Being in a position running different channels for our clients, be it Meta, be it TikTok, be it Google Ads, the one thing that we’ve realized is clients come in with a mindset that Meta can be used only to drive awareness. Now, that is not wrong technically, if you think about it, the reach is really good. You can touch a lot of users through Meta. There’s absolutely an awareness component that comes with it. Technically, it is right. Meta can be used to reach out to a very broad audience.

If you think about it, everybody is on Meta, be it Instagram or Facebook, is a very good platform to get your brand the visibility to touch a lot of users. However, with the right strategy, Meta can absolutely be used to try bottom-up conversion actions, be it plan submissions, the phone calls we track to your website. There are a bunch of ways that we can leverage the AI that Meta brings in. Again, while that awareness component is high, it just becomes another channel that you invest in when you have limited dollar. I think it’s a mindset shift for our clients to understand that when we talk about the bottom-up channel, we don’t just mean performance mark-up source, we actually mean Meta and TikTok as another lever to drive leads as well.

Lauren: Awesome. Thanks for the insights, Ruchi. I’m going to go ahead and jump over to a conversation with Evan Ilgenfritz. Evan is our VP of Paid media. He basically makes our entire media function operate. Evan, tell me about the one common misconception that you just can’t get over.

Evan Ilgenfritz: Awesome. Thanks, Lauren. I’d love to dive into one of these marketing myths. That is that people often think that you can set campaigns and platforms to autopilot and expect really strong results. There’s a number of layers with that. I think we all know that most of these platforms, whether it’s Google or Facebook or other programmatic vendors that are leveraging a lot more AI, machine learning, smart bidding, all these ingredients, and that this is all fantastic. We’ve also found that this doesn’t really eliminate the need for strong marketing strategy and engaged managers running these campaigns.

I’ll give you a quick example, starting with Google. They’ve made a large shift that continuing towards smart bidding to set your campaigns to let the algorithm, let the system, using the signals you provide for conversion signals to optimize towards the right people in driving those conversions for you. We, here at Cardinal absolutely leveraged this tool but there’s other aspects to it, which is broad match keywords, for example, in paid search. This is a more recent thing.

If we go back a decade, broad match was largely never used because it was too unwieldy. Now Google has added some more systems in place to help it provide better traffic. We’ve seen here at Cardinal that if you just let the campaign run, the system really does need more control and support, and curation than you might be led to believe. This means that you have to have a very strong strategy about which keywords, which type of people you’re trying to drive, and to which experience.

Then even when you’re using smart bidding or any of these tools that you need to stay very present all the time, making sure that, one, are we capturing the right keywords and the right people. Are they going to the right location? Are we saying the right thing to them? Ultimately we’ve found that just letting these campaigns run, setting them up using smart campaign designs, or entirely broad match keyword approaches, if left unchecked, you’ll come back to find that you’re capturing a lot of irrelevant traffic and the system isn’t really able to solve all your problems for you without your continuous feedback.

That’s Google. That applies I think to a lot of the products they offer, which is obviously paid search but the GDN, Performance Max, all of these campaigns really require a steady hand on the wheel to make sure that we’re allowing the algorithm to do the right things for us. I think this also definitely applies to other channels, Programmatic for example, and display or video inventory.

It’s going to be a bit different than Google, of course, but the things that you’re going to want to make sure the system is providing is, again, are these people relevant? Are we showing inventory correctly on the right locations, or the right contents at the right time? Are we optimizing correctly towards the right behaviors that we want to encourage? All of these things, of course, these different vendors and providers have tools to help the system support you, but just continue to find that you need a steady hand-driving strategy and curating the results.

Then finally, when we talk about social, the first thing that pops into anyone’s mind is Meta, Facebook, and all of this remains true as well, with landing the right people, the right geographic targeting, and sending the right signals of the campaign. Otherwise for you know it, you’re going to start collecting a lot of clicks, a lot of traffic that ultimately isn’t landing on your ideal performance or the right audience that you had originally intended.

All this to say that if we look back in total while all of these tools provided to us now as we head into the future with smart bidding and AI integration and machine learning are absolutely important in Cardinal, we use it, we leverage it every day, but it’s a different type of management. It does not mean that you don’t have to manage it as much. You just have to approach it a bit differently, and make sure the inputs you’re providing to these platforms, be it the type of people, the type of keywords, the landing page experience, all of these things are really dialed in so you can provide the right bumpers to the algorithm to keep them in check.

Ultimately this is how we found great success. We’re continuing to refine this approach every week, every month as we go forward. Again, we’re excited about these tools coming out but are keeping a bit of an old-school mentality that we make sure that we’re designing this correctly and checking in on the results.

Lauren: More great insights. Thank you for joining us, Evan. Let’s keep this train rolling with the media misconceptions by talking to Brandon Wilhelm, one of our other group media directors. Brandon is newer to the Cardinal organization. What’s really fun is Brandon has probably heard a lot of really interesting myths and misconceptions in his first couple of months here with us. I’m sure he has some that he can speak to from his prior experience as well. Brandon, when you think about your couple months here at Cardinal and your experience leading up to Cardinal, what are some of the myths that seem to be persistent across those experiences?

Brandon Wilhelm: Thanks, Lauren. One of the things that I hear most frequently is that more traffic equals more sales. I think a lot of people believe that simply increasing website traffic will automatically lead to more sales. It’s really just not that simple. As traffic increases, or when we take steps to reach an audience more broadly, it’s pretty common that you’re going to see the quality of that traffic decrease naturally as you go to a broader and broader audience. That affects things like conversion rates pretty naturally anytime we see these things grow over time.

It’s not as simple as being a one-to-one thing with traffic and sales. The more you understand about your audience and who is the core of that audience is, the much more likely you are to be able to drive increases in traffic incrementally while maintaining some level of quality. It’s super important to understand. We see it so much with clients in the past I’ve worked with where it’s just understood that more traffic does help sales but there’s a lot more to that whole process in order to get what we  want out of it. Another misconception that I’ve seen over and over again is this understanding that you need to be on every social media platform. Honestly, there are some benefits to, of course, being everywhere and appearing to be ubiquitous to your potential customer base. Honestly, it’s often better to do one or two really well. The reason I say that is because you can really go deep instead of just wide, at least until you’re fully maximizing the opportunity on a successful channel.

I think you should certainly be considering the opportunity on new channels, and shouldn’t be overlooking those things. You really have to understand what’s right for your brand, business and customers. Often that’s much more strongly represented in one or even two channels in particular. We’ve seen a lot of value from going deep into something like one particular social media platform, growing the audience in there over some time.

Once there’s real consistent traction there, then it can be an opportunity to take a step into another and repeating that process over and over again. That’s where we’ve often seen a lot of success. That can be true both organically and from a paid advertising standpoint.

Lauren: Awesome. Thanks, Brandon for joining me. I have saved the best for last, the place where I probably hear the most misconceptions in marketing. That is going to be SEO. Things as broad as SEO is black magic. I don’t know what you guys do over there. It’s all black box. We’re never going to figure out the algorithms. That is why I’m bringing in the best of the best, our VP of owned and earned media, Rob Sauter, to help us understand the myths in the SEO landscape. Rob, it’s so great to have you back on the podcast. I want to hear in your expert opinion, decades of doing this for clients, what do you want to set straight about the SEO world?

Rob Sauter: Thanks, Lauren. One of the interesting things we hear from our clients all the time and comes up on a lot of our pitches and conversations is the impact of AI on the current SEO environment and questioning if it will destroy SEO as we know it. To dispel that myth, the short answer is no, it certainly won’t destroy SEO as we know it yet. Now, over the next ten years, it’ll be fascinating to see how AI changes the face of SEO.

However, at today’s rate, SEO continues to grow, search volume continues to grow. Google is making tens of billions of dollars on the space and has no interest in losing the stranglehold it has over the search marketplace. For the foreseeable future in healthcare marketing, SEO is going to remain an extremely valuable place. There will be a lot of traditional searches and we will keep a close eye on how AI continues to impact the market.

Another misconception we hear a lot is asking about how quickly SEO can impact a business. Often, we work with clients who also experience and manage paid media alongside their SEO. Often we see the misconception of SEO being held to similar speed to impact as paid. At the end of the day, SEO can and will, if done right, have some quick wins. Generally speaking, to see true bottom-line impact from SEO, you’re looking at somewhere between depending on the investment, five, six, seven months of rolling out a strategy. That is in part to the audits, the research, and building strategy.

It also accounts for the time it takes to make the changes to a site, have Google crawl and recognize those changes, and then finally to have Google or the other engine apply value to those changes. That takes a period of time and requires crawling, requires data gathering, and data growth. Again, at the end of the day, you’re looking at around a six-month and really throughout that next six months or six months to a year to really start to really see that bottom line impact from a single investment.

Lauren: That about wraps up our special myth-busting episode of Ignite. You’ve heard from six of the best cardinals you could possibly have on a single episode, debunking common misconceptions across paid media, analytics, and SEO. The marketing landscape is always changing. These aren’t the only myths we’re going to bust. If you like this episode and this format, give us a like, share, a comment, ping us on LinkedIn, and tell us that you loved it.We’ll bring you more content like this in the future.

A big thanks to the Cardinal team for taking the time to share their expertise with us. I hope this helps you navigate your marketing challenges and avoid the pitfalls that we have all learned the hard way. Remember, effective marketing strategy is not about assumptions, it is about pushing the boundaries and staying curious. Thanks, everybody.

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.