Strategic Storytelling: Video’s Role in a Full-Funnel Healthcare Marketing Strategy

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, welcome to Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Lauren Leone. I’m our chief growth officer and today we have an awesome guest with us, Heather Richardson, who is our creative director. This is Heather’s first time joining us and we’re really excited. We’ve been dying to dive into some of the topics around creative messaging and brand. Today we’re going to talk about full-funnel marketing and the importance of video.

Heather and I have been working with a number of our clients and prospective clients over the past 90 days to talk about how to introduce video, how to move up the funnel and out of just demand generation strategies. The critical piece here, if you want to move into these channels, is to have something to say, something authentic, something meaningful, and something engaging. That’s where Heather comes in.

Heather Richardson: Hi, I’m excited to be here. Thank you.

Lauren: Okay. Heather, you’ve got a media team that you’re working with here and they’re saying, “Heather, we want to adapt our strategy from paid search. We want to get onto social, we want to engage people on video, on display.” What are the right points in the funnel where you think video plays a role and how do you think it plays a role?

Heather: Oh, I love this question. I love to nerd out about video. I love to nerd out about creative strategy. Obviously, you have user interests and the marketing funnel. I assume everyone’s familiar with the marketing funnel, but at the top, we want to just raise broad awareness. Video is the best place for that. One of the things that I always say to clients is that you have to treat your audience like they are the hero of their own story. If you’re watching a superhero movie, no one watches a movie and is like, “Oh, who I want to be in this scenario? I want to be the person on the street being rescued.”

We all want to be the hero, right? We want to be the ones swinging through the street, saving people. When somebody is engaging with your brand online, the first touch point you have to reach them with is that video at the top of the funnel to raise awareness and to tell them, “You are the hero of your story. We’re here to help amplify your superpowers. That’s what we do with video. We paint this aspirational video, this aspirational picture of who these people can be if they engage with your brands. The goal is to create desire, interest, intrigue.

Then especially in a HIPAA-compliant way, we can use viewers to retarget them based off of how much they view from that video. It’s really exciting to use it in that capacity. I could nerd out a little bit more, but we’ll stop there.

Lauren: We might get to that point. I want to know. I think it’s interesting. To be super clear for everybody listening, the first touch point isn’t, “Here’s who I am, and here’s what I do,” right? Oftentimes people think, “Okay, I’m going to go create a video and it’s going to be me and my team and my doctors walking through our office talking about what services we offer, why we’re different.” That is not typically what brings someone in the first time. Maybe they have a problem, a fear, an issue, a barrier. They want to see themselves reflected in some sort of outcome that they can relate to.

Heather: to. All right. Now people want to see themselves represented and they are interested in what you have to offer them, but you have to bring them in first. You do that by showing them what their life could look like. In the nerdy realm of video, there’s someone named Jacques Spritzer, he actually runs a video agency. He pointed out that the human brain has something called the reticular activating system.

Lauren: We’re going to define that on the screen [crosstalk]

Heather: Exactly. It’s the RAB. Basically, it’s your brain’s capacity to filter out information that’s not necessary. We would literally go crazy if we had to take in every bit of information every day. Think about it this way. When you are driving to work every day, if your brain was taking in every detail of every vehicle around you, you would go crazy. What it does instead is it tunes it out and it all just becomes part of your normal drive. You don’t think about it. You don’t think about it until you see that orange Ferrari, right? All of a sudden your brain goes, “Wow, that’s unique.

I didn’t expect that. That’s not something I see every day on my drive,” and it registers in your brain. That’s what you have to do with creative online, especially in social, everyone’s seeing the same things and we’re getting really, really good at tuning it out. Especially in the healthcare marketing sphere, we actually have done an example for another client where we removed their branding and we removed logos and we removed colors. We showed them just a grayscale example of their ad against all of their competitors. They couldn’t pick which one was theirs.

Lauren: I love that tip, Heather, when you did that, if anyone here is wondering, “Do I have a unique creative point of view in my channels?” grab five competitors, grayscale all of those ads, and take the logos out and ask your team members– maybe you created them, but ask the rest of the people at your company, “Do which one is ours?” If they can’t answer it, then you have a creative task at hand.

Heather: Exactly. If you can’t recognize it, your audience that you want to interact and engage with your content, most certainly can’t. It’s that whole reticular activating system that causes the white noise that causes people to tune it out. That’s why it’s super important that you create something that’s unique, not only in appearance but in message. It’s important that you speak to your audience in a way that they’re going to relate to desire and be intrigued by. That’s what we have to do by making your audience the hero, and essentially building orange Ferrari creative.

Lauren: I love it. Heather, if I’m either maybe a media buying component of an agency, or I’m an in-house team, and I come to you, and I say, “I want to create video,” right? This is what we hear a lot, “I want to have video ads,” for what, for who, for what purpose? What do they mean? Tell me about the information that is important to understand before you just go create a video.

Heather: Sure. We do something called the patient journey mapping exercise. It not only tells us where your audience is on their buying journey, but it tells us what their key motivators are. I think a big important thing is to know and understand your audience and where they’re at. Now, here’s the difference. Everyone always says, “My audience is this demographic to this demographic,” we just paint them into very simple, they’re this age, they make this much money, they live in this state, which is helpful. I’m not knocking it, you absolutely have to know where to start.

I think the important thing, especially with creative, is to try to dig a little bit deeper into what their key motivators are. Sometimes those are things that you might not come to the table with, and we help walk you through that process. Some important questions to ask are, what are their fears? What baggage do they bring? Not just with your brand, but with competitors, what things do they have already weighing them down when it comes to their shopping for your service, those kinds of things.

Lauren: We see a lot of examples, like let’s take PT, we’ve been doing a lot of work in physical therapy lately, their motivator isn’t to get physical therapy services. Their motivator might be to go back to a job that they’ve had to take time out of. Their motivator might be to pick up my kids, because I haven’t been able to do that with my back pain, like there, it’s to go a little bit deeper into, when they call, they want to know what insurance and when the next appointment is. That’s not why they sought you out.

Heather: Correct. I think when it comes to creatives, we already touched on this, but it can be so easy just to be like, “Here’s our services, here’s what we do,” and show the office and someone working with a PT patient or something like that, which again, your audience needs to see, but they have to be bought in first. What we start with is instead that mom picking up her son without any pain, and we show them, you can get back to your job faster, those kinds of things. Then we tell them in the middle funnel, how we do that.

We educate them on our services, we educate them on how we solve problems for them. Then the bottom of funnel is all action. It’s static ads, no video on the bottom of funnel. I can explain why in a minute, but we all do static ads that incite action and drive someone to be interested in converting. Here’s my little tidbit. Do not do video in the bottom of funnel. Here’s why. When you place any ad, someone could convert at any point, we’re never going to stop someone from purchasing on a top-of-funnel video, if that is where they are at.

If they’re ready to buy or ready to sign up or ready to take action right away, we always empower them to do that by giving them conversion options. When you run ads in the bottom of the funnel that are video, you’re actually reducing the likelihood that that person will convert. Here’s why. A video already makes a request of somebody. That request is, “Watch this.” You’re asking for their time, you’re asking for their attention, you’re asking for their interest. When you’re at the bottom of the funnel, you want to be very clear with what your ask is.

You want them to take immediate action with you and your brand and your business and your offering. By putting a video at the bottom, you’re actually stalling their ability to take that action. You always want to have simple conversion pieces at the bottom, static ads.

Lauren: Just carousel, [crosstalk]

Heather: [crosstalk] carousel, those kinds of things that also are driving that same message of urgency and act now.

Lauren: It’s like when we bring people to a landing page, and we say, remove all the other buttons, all the other click fields, don’t distract them with other things, stay focused on the one thing you want them to do.

Heather: Right. It’d be like sitting down at a restaurant, and you’re ready to order what you want and they go, “Actually, let me tell you about all of the specials.” You’re like, “Oh,–”

Lauren: “I just know what I want.”

Heather: All right, and maybe you’ll be interested in that, but now you’ve derailed the decision-making process.

Lauren: Heather, we’re talking about video and I know we’re weaving in our background and experience in healthcare specifically, but let’s talk very specifically to healthcare. What about healthcare consumers do we need to know and how do we need to think about creating video for them versus your average consumer of any product or service?

Heather: Sure, I think a lot of the same rules apply, which is the make your audience the hero always, but there are a lot of specifics that lie just in healthcare alone. I found that with healthcare, a lot of people or a lot of companies want to live in that bottom-of-funnel, act-now kind of place. I get it, the conversion is easy to see, that somebody clicked your ad and now they’re a patient and that’s great but by doing that, you’re incredibly limiting what your audience could potentially be, what your patient reach could potentially be.

Brand awareness, top-of-funnel video is essential for any healthcare organization. Here’s why. Most healthcare companies are not offering impulse services. Nobody is late-night shopping and gets an ad for a healthcare organization and goes, “I’m going to go to the doctor right now,” right? You want to be in that consideration phase, you want to be top of mind when they get sick or when they need PT or when they needed to go to the dentist, or when they need whatever your offering is.

You really are competing against not the impulsive, “Hey, we take your insurance act now,” because every medical provider takes your insurance. You have nothing unique in that space to offer. What you do have to offer that’s unique is your beliefs as an organization, the potential that you offer your patients if they come to you with regularity. You get to paint that aspirational picture for your potential patients. That is huge because when I am sick and I need a place to go, you’ll be top of mind. Some essential ways to do that, especially I’ve been in the healthcare space for almost seven years now.

I think one of the things that you may not think about when you’re thinking about, let’s say just a primary care provider, you go, “What do we have that’s unique? We have a nice office, sure. We’ve got great doctors, sure.” Everyone can say, “Oh, we’ve got great doctors, trust us.” What makes you unique? Start to paint that aspirational picture. How do you paint an aspirational picture about going to the doctor? It’s about unlocking your health. Really that’s where it starts to paint more of that story is showing patients of when you’re on top of your preventive care, when you’re on your health, as soon as you get sick, you’ve got somebody there to take care of you.

It really starts to paint that picture of, wow, if I go to this place, it’s part of my health journey in the same way that working out could be or eating right could be. It starts to bake in that way. Then you really do become front of mind whenever the consideration of my child is sick or I’m sick comes up and you want to be there. I think that’s where video especially can play a huge factor. If you’re just in the bottom saying, “We take your insurance,” so is everybody else.

The one that I hear all the time is, we’ll be writing, let’s say paid search ad copy. This is a perfectly fine thing to say is, quality care, personalized one-on-one treatment, whatever these things are that we want to say. At the surface level, everyone else is going to say them too. Those videos that you have a moment to engage and show what does quality care mean? If I give quality care to a mom who hasn’t been able to pick up her kid because of her back pain, what happens to that mom, right? The outcome is then what she wanted and why she cares about quality care.

If anywhere in your messaging strategy you want to say quality of care, that immediately translates into, I do belong in the top of the funnel. I need to show, not tell that I provide quality care.

Heather: Correct. I say all the time that quality and trust are Bruno. We don’t talk about Bruno, we show that, right? We want to show what we can offer. We really do want to paint that picture. The other thing too, that really, you can do this at any stage of the funnel with any creative, but really at the top of funnel with video, you have more of an opportunity to elicit emotion. Whether that’s emotion that is sentimentality, humor, laughter, joy, excitement, inspiration, you just have a lot more opportunity to add to that.

When somebody emotionally engages with your content, you’re going to live in that front-of-mind space. It really is essential to add that in, especially in the healthcare space.

Lauren: I know video is a very daunting subject for a lot of marketers, you’re thinking, “Okay, I don’t have a million dollars, I can’t go create a commercial on Mount Sinai or have all this massive budget. Maybe I don’t have access to one-on-one patient stories or the things that I think I need.” There’s a lot of different ways you can get this done. Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress. Want to get some real helpful tips from you on where to start. What are some options to start getting video into your mix if you’re overwhelmed?

Heather: Oh, sure. There’s many. I really think it comes down to good ideas and telling a story well. You can do that with just simple graphics on a screen. You can do that with a million-dollar budget in the set. You can do that at any level. It’s really just about boiling down that aspirational inspirational picture and painting it for your audience. One of the things that we do a lot is what I call the stock special. Everybody has access. Not everybody. There’s a lot of access to stock photography imagery. When used improperly, everyone knows it’s stock photography imagery.

We do a lot of this storytelling where we paint this picture using content that already exists that’s easily accessible but when we do it in the right way, it feels fresh, it feels innovative and audiences get that opportunity to emotionally engage with the content. I think that is one of the ways that– We’ve personally tried to help clients reduce the cost of production because it’s easy to just take ideas and edit them into existence. It doesn’t take a lot of effort–

Lauren: To have actors and always-

Heather: Correct.

Lauren: -have to be in a beautiful studio.

Heather: Correct.

Lauren: If you can build that into your plan for 2025 and have foresight to say, “I want to do some first-party work.”

Heather: Of course.

Lauren: Don’t devalue those things but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until that 2025 budget gets approved to start creating video, because we know that’s a huge barrier to-

Heather: Of course.

Lauren: -expanding your channel mix.

Heather: Of course. Something is usually better than nothing [chuckles] when you’re out there.

Lauren: Usually.

Heather: Usually, I have to say that with a caveat. I also think the other thing that’s important too is finding the right person, company, freelancer, whoever, to create this content for you because it is hard to glamor up or make stock look not like stock. Sometimes it still will feel that way but I really do think it comes with needing a good idea, good concept, good story, good writing, just the ideation that goes behind it. Finding the right partner to help with that will also help you go far.

Lauren: Heather, what do you think about AI? What do you think about some of the AI video tools, if anybody out there is thinking of using them?

Heather: I think use what tools you can. Empower yourself to take advantage of what exists out there. I feel like now that we’re recording this and it’s going to live forever, when the robots come to get me for saying I don’t trust them as much as I trust a human, it’s going to be a problem. I’ve seen some AI-generated stuff, it’s a helpful tool. It’s obviously not going to be the same or 100% of what you could get when you work personally with an expert in the field. That said, I also use currently ChatGPT [chuckles] from time to time but I also put that human touch back into it.

I know how to ask the right questions. It’s the same thing with video content.

Lauren: The inputs are still going to matter.

Heather: It’s huge. You have to have the right context to understand that stuff. That said, again, I think that if you are a company looking for a way to save money or a way to do it within your means, it’s an opportunity. I think it’s that reticular activating system. People are going to start to get used to also seeing that type of content. You do need an edge to help you stand out. Again, use what tools are available [crosstalk]

Lauren: Maybe it’s your short-term strategy but not your long-term.

Heather: Exactly. It’s a band-aid fix for sure. Then who knows with the way technology is going, maybe I’ll be eating my words [chuckles] a little bit but I do think it is a short-term strategy. If you need it, use it.

Lauren: I learned something really interesting from working with you and Rich, our chief strategy officer talking media plus creative. A good way to get a lot out of your assets is to create vignettes so that you can save– Just like we would in an RSA, a responsive search ad for paid search, I’m going to enter 15 headlines and I’m going to dynamically rotate them to figure out, “Okay, I maybe know the five things that my audience cares about but in what order do they need to hear them? Does that change for different audience segments?” Can you talk a little bit about that?

Heather: Yes. One of the things that I love about working here that I’ve never done before working at Cardinal is we create testable iterable content. It’s super fun because we’re able to use the analytics arm of what Cardinal has to offer to test what is artsy creative, right? It’s this science and art marriage. It’s actually really fun as someone who’s-

Lauren: A creative at heart.

Heather: -wholly in the creative world, I really like this, because what it ends up doing is it allows me to say I have a theory that this is the best message that your audience can hear. Now I actually have a way to prove or disprove that. I’ve eaten some of my own words but it’s nice, because at the end of the day, we’re actually serving our clients in the best possible way, because they’re getting what I think is the strongest idea and potentially other really strong idea, and then audiences will determine what’s best.

Enough about Cardinal, but I say all that because it is super important whenever you’re creating is to not create in a silo, to also give yourself that flexibility of creating A and B iterations of something where you can clearly see, okay, we have the same message on both of these ads, but one is got more red, and one has more blue, what’s going to do what?

Lauren: [crosstalk] one’s animation, one’s first party, one’s third party.

Heather: Exactly. To give it time to sit and marinate and see what your audience or your patients really resonate with is important because then it also gives you clarity on not just your creative strategy or your media strategy, but also how you operate your business. If you find that by saying a certain phrase or a certain ideology your patients are resonating with that, maybe you bring that into the office too. Maybe you bring that into the services you provide of going, “Wow, our patients really need to hear that they matter.

We’re going to make sure that every interaction with our patients, they walk away knowing that they matter.” It’s really cool when not only are we just creating these ideas, but we actually can build things that trickle down into potential patient interactions and engagement. I think that’s just super important in what we create.

Lauren: All right, Heather. We’ve talked a lot about creative theories, how to get it done. At the end of the day, we are creating these assets, because there is a need to acquire new patients. We have to get them in front of an audience, we get into channel selection, how to create the right assets for the right channel. If you have the wrong asset on the right channel or vice versa, it can really negatively impact the performance of both your media buying and your creative. Talk a little bit about how you think about maybe taking a video concept, but how it needs to look, feel and act differently on different channels.

Heather: Sure. I’ll use a creative analogy. If you’re building a house, or if you have a toolkit, you’re not going to use a screwdriver the same way you use a hammer. I think a major problem that can happen when creating creative content is taking one piece and applying it across multiple platforms, not every platform is the same. We have to think of them each as a unique tool that helps us get a job done. You have to be very specific about matching content to what that tool is for. For instance, you would never put a static ad on TikTok.

Lauren: Yes, that doesn’t [crosstalk]

Heather: That seems obvious but sometimes we can think that video content created for TikTok would work somewhere else or vice versa. It’s not always true. You really do have to understand what each of those channels are intended for, the tone, the audience of it, and build content for that. A great example, whenever we create any video content, we always do it in multiple sizes, dimensions, lengths, all of those things to make sure that it’s highly flexible in its placement. Every video comes with a horizontal, vertical, and square deliverable.

Same video, but just visually different so that we can place that video on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, those kinds of things. It just gives us that versatility. Even within some of the same platforms, YouTube has historically always been horizontal. Now they’ve got the YouTube shorts that are vertical. Just understanding those needs is important. I also think really understanding who you’re talking to on each of those platforms is also important. We found that sometimes highly produced ads can play well on a TikTok platform.

That tends to be an audience that’s going to scroll past because the whole purpose of TikTok is that organic, raw, real supposed content. We’d rather do something that feels more user-generated or authentic, instead of highly producing something. Just understanding those platforms is essential.

Lauren” I see that a lot, I’ll hear, “Hey, we really want to expand our channel mix. What do you guys think about TikTok. We produced in a video for our YouTube channel last year, and we’re ready to go.” That unit is like pre-roll for long-form video, it’s like two minutes, and it’s very informational. You go stick that on TikTok, and you can have an adverse effect on how people feel about your brand, block, do not follow whatever it is, because this is absolutely not what I expected to see when I got on TikTok this afternoon.

Heather: Absolutely. You have to think about I’ve made this joke before, and you’re viewing this. Now you’re one of them. I’ve talked about the greedy consumer. We’re here to get our own interests. I don’t sit and watch things that aren’t relevant to me. Why would I do that? I have limited time. That is how every viewer engages with any social platform or really just any online content, I think serving each audience as the greedy consumer as, “What do you want?” and knowing how they want to be spoken to on that platform is essential.

I could talk about TikTok for a second. We have a couple of clients that are expanding and building their portfolio and building organic content there. The content on those platforms is highly specific. We really are addressing that greedy consumer, we don’t start by going, “Hi, I’m so and so. Today I’m going to talk about this.” There’s no time for that. User interest is going to wane. We just get right to it like, “Do you want to know the top tips on how to save your life?” These are the things that are going to do better on that platform.

Then eventually, maybe you introduce yourself. Start with the hook of what should that viewer be interested in? What is this content about? How does it serve them? How will it help them? I even joked about there’s two ways to do TikTok now. There’s a million ways to do TikTok, but we talked about the Gen Z shake. A lot of millennial users, when they record content, they put their tripod up, they have their content ready, they put their lighting on, they’re ready [crosstalk] Like us, we’re being very millennial right now.

Even though it’s organic or raw, it still has some of that poised mess where I guess Gen Z took this thing of just carrying their phone with them. One of the things that they do is the Gen Z shake, which is they start the video by going, “Oh my gosh, you guys,” and then they set the phone down, and then they start talking. The level of interest that that can garner because somebody is like, “What is–” You feel thrown into excitement, energy, visual movements, and then you’re like, “Okay, now I’m here, what do you have to say?”

You might be saying exactly the same thing that you said on your tripod video, but the engagement will be different because somebody is either going to be turned off by that or be very interested because you did something visually different. Whatever you can do to break through the noise, which is its

Lauren: It’s hard.

Heather: -it’s own skill.

Lauren: I think on TikTok, what we’ve seen to or what we’ve talked a lot about with clients is, it is one of those areas, you probably do want to have a authentic voice or face or group of voices and faces on the brand. You’re probably not going to put, your same animated Facebook ad there, you want a doctor, a provider, a patient, someone who can just speak openly, transparently to the camera, or about your services, or how it impacted them, or, I follow a dermatologist, and she’s constantly talking about, “I’m not going to gatekeep, these awesome ideas, here’s the drugstore products that my clients are using,” or whatever.

It feels very authentic. If she were in my area, I would go to her tomorrow. She didn’t once try to tell me to book an appointment with her, was not about that, or tell me her name or anything else.

Heather: You want to talk brand affinity, that is a great place for it. I’ve said to so many clients, it’s not the golden goose, it’s not the horse to bet on that it’s going to change your whole platform. It is a very important piece to building that portfolio, that online presence, and that brand affinity and familiarity. I do think it’s really important for that. One of the things that we’ve also found is as an agency, we would love to help you make your TikTok content, we would love to but what we found is that when we get involved, it removes some of that authenticness.

What we do is a lot of strategy, a lot of advice, we talk about scripting, like you need to entertain, you need to amaze, you need to engage. These are the purposes of these platforms and here’s how you do it. It is best for you yourself to go out and do it, even though you’re like, “I’m the awkward doctor.” Great, go be the awkward doctor [crosstalk] I think that’s an essential piece to understand. Again, we could talk about how Facebook shows up, how Instagram shows up, how YouTube shows, there’s so many different ways that you can present on that.

I know TikTok is the hot one now. You have to use each of these tools as they are intended. They are tools to be used specifically.

Lauren: Awesome. Heather, that was some great information. I learned a lot. Thank you for spending the time. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Wherever you’re listening, please like, share, comment, and join us again next week for more great content

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