Almost everyone wants to influence time-stressed doctors. As a result, the competition for their attention is intense.
Join Stewart Gandolf, CEO of Healthcare Success, as he shares some of his favorite secrets to successfully market to doctors and other HCPs.
This webinar is appropriate for senior executives and marketing professionals representing health systems, hospitals, multi-location specialty practices, addiction treatment facilities, skilled nursing facilities, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers, health plans, and other healthcare organizations.
Stewart Gandolf
CEO
* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.
Stewart Gandolf
Hello, everyone. Hi, I'm Stewart Gandolf and welcome to Digital Marketing to doctors and other HCPs. My associate and all star team player Natalia is on the line as well. I may interject with her for a couple of moments during this meeting, but I'll be leading most of it today. I am really excited about this topic that we're about to get into and it's really funny.
Stewart Gandolf
I the last time we did this topic was just at the beginning of COVID, and during that period the topic was similar, but essentially it was how do we reach doctors now that we can't reach doctors? And we had hundreds of people sign up within a week that we promoted that. I think we ended up with about 500 people.
Stewart Gandolf
And this was that was our number one most attended webinar. This one is a close second. So this is obviously a hot topic. And those of you that know US Healthcare Success, we cover a really strong, I think, webinar series on many of the relevant health care marketing topics, but this one just seems to get a whole bunch of interest for reasons that are pretty obvious to me, because this is a very, very important topic.
Stewart Gandolf
So welcome. And as I'm watching the counter go up and up with our participants today, this is a very well attended webinar and I will do my best to live up to the expectation of new our audience. So the we're going to talk today about, first of all, I guess fixed some housekeeping issues. This will be recorded and we will send that out to everybody who's registered.
Stewart Gandolf
So if you have a meeting or come into your office for me, don't drop out or you have colleagues you want to share, you will be getting the recording. So that's important. Also, we will be having a Q&A section at the end, so I will do my best to answer your questions. This is a huge topic, so I'm going to go pretty fast and I probably cannot answer every question that you've ever had about B2B marketing.
Stewart Gandolf
Today, but we can always talk afterwards and draw down if that's appropriate. The agenda today, where I talk about the challenge of this topic, which is a big one, we're talking about databases, content, SEO, paid search page, social programmatic, case examples and Q&A. So that's a lot. I will try to keep this moving fast pace and clear. And like I said, there a lot to cover today and this is a huge topic.
Stewart Gandolf
So but I'll do my best to put this into a easy to understand format a little about ourselves before we jump in, just in case you're new to us, we certainly have some loyal viewers here today and dispense and subscribers and clients, but there's also a lot of people that are new to us as an agency. So Healthcare Success specializes solely in health care.
Stewart Gandolf
We work with really every vertical, so tons and tons of providers, multi-location providers, hospitals, health systems, also pharma device, SAS companies, consulting companies. So really health plans every and it's a lot of the disruptors we have now, like telehealth, for example. So really everybody who has anybody in healthcare to work with. Sorry, but I can't. My dog is rooting for me in the background, but my wife's not here to soccer, so hopefully I'll stop in a moment.
Stewart Gandolf
Here we so the we work with one of the things that makes us unique is we're very Roy driven and we are truly integrated, meaning that it's more than just say for example, page search or email or whatever. We work on a strategic level on creative branding strategy, digital traditional marketing, sales, really, all of it. So we are top 100 health care agency and this just happens to be one of our favorite topics.
Stewart Gandolf
So the first challenge we have today, or the person I want to talk about is, you know, why do we have so many people signed up for this? But why are so many people interested in this topic? Well, the answer is because marketing the doctors and other health care professionals is really, really hard. Let's face it, it's hard.
Stewart Gandolf
And why is that? Well, first of all, everybody wants to reach them. Everybody ask a doctor, right? Everyone wants a piece of them. just give me 5 minutes of your time, Doctor. This 5 minutes. And that happens all day, every day. And so and it's just not, you know, by a farmer, by device grabs, by real estate salespeople, by, I don't know, people selling gold watches.
Stewart Gandolf
Everybody is trying to get a piece out of doctors. Everybody just wants a couple of minutes of their time. So they're crazy, crazy busy. As you know, there are often and study after study talking about how burnout they are. They really want to be spending time with patients. The business stuff is not something they want to spend time with.
Stewart Gandolf
They do feel a responsibility to be informed of what's going on out there. They also have tons and tons of time, you know, the EMR and clerical stuff they have to do. So it's really an impossible job. And so they're extraordinarily busy. And so the other thing is there's information overload. Think about this. If you're a doctor, as you know, you are responsible to know everything there is, to know about everything, especially if you're in primary care, for example.
Stewart Gandolf
So information overload. And by the way, things are changing so fast, it's crazy. And we work with an ecology. For example, the developments in ecology are just breathtaking, the kinds of things that are changing so fast. This, you know, health care used to be a stodgy, very slow moving space. And now, you know, everything's changing constantly. And what was true yesterday is no longer true today.
Stewart Gandolf
So there's a lot of information overload. The gatekeepers are state of the art of health care. No one's going to get a hold of my boss if I can help a baby. It's a badge of honor to keep you away from their doctor. Right. Reduced access after COVID, you know, back during COVID, and nobody could get in to see anybody a lot.
Stewart Gandolf
They that they like that and keep reps out of the office. So access was hard before. It's even harder now with the corporatization of health care. There's now more policies in place again and keeping acts are reducing access. I would say, I don't know few audiences in the world that are more sort of anti marketing and anti sales than health care.
Stewart Gandolf
And certainly often doctors are very conservative and not big fans are being sold to. And they but with the the ironic thing of all of this is that health care providers, health care professionals inadvertently reward face to face selling. I can't think of any other industry where, you know, people call drop by any other industry. People make an appointment before dropping by, not on health care, so they're actually rewarding cold face to face call calls.
Stewart Gandolf
And again, I can't think of anything anybody else gave up on that in the sixties and seventies. So it's a unique space in health care. The why digital marketing? Well, because digital marketing leverages wrap time and acts as the air war. And what I mean by that is and this is an interesting comment, nobody has a figure that anybody has any enough sales reps.
Stewart Gandolf
Let us know through the Q&A our chat. By the way, the if you could just sort of moderate that because I'm obviously reading and if there's any comments to respond to there and chat, please do so. But at any rate, the you know, recently we were talking with one of the leaders of AstraZeneca, and I asked so like, how's your build sales for us?
Stewart Gandolf
Do you have enough for us for oncology? And I said, my goodness, no, not even close. So they don't have enough reps. Chances are you don't have enough reps. So whether you're working in, know a detail reps or physician layers on securing provider space or business development, if you're in the addiction space or whatever, almost nobody has enough reps.
Stewart Gandolf
So one of the big addiction centers we work with, you know, has ten reps for the entire Midwest. And you think about all the different niches they have to reach their court system, school counselors, government officials in our hospitals. You know, it's an endless array of targets. And so what's great about digital that is it can support those on the ground troops.
Stewart Gandolf
And it also scales well, it's cost effective. You can track and attribute it or attribute it. One of the cool things I want to talk about it in a few minutes is it's omnipresent. You can look like they're everywhere online. If you do this right. And one of the great things that goes right around those very aggressive gatekeepers, I love them, but they are tough to get around.
Stewart Gandolf
So you're able to reach out to the peers and the executives directly with digital marketing and skipping right past that, those gatekeepers. I do want to give you a caveat. However, it is, it magic. So we get calls from lots of every day, every year or so, all search engine optimization do the things that we're talking about today, but we get lots of inquiries every day for our business.
Stewart Gandolf
And occasionally we get somebody that calls us and they're very interested in this topic. But you know, they're sort of in the startup phase and they don't have any salespeople at all. And that unfortunately, I wish I had great news for you, but I doubt this requires you really need to have a salesforce. That's step one. This is a very important part of growing sales, but you need the sales force first.
Stewart Gandolf
You need boots on the ground. And by the way, I'm not a military guy, but the concept of an air war is apropos here. It's like it's a layer to help maximize the effectiveness. But at the end of the day, you need salespeople who are actively calling and responding, reaching out to doctors. So it's just want to make sure you understand it's not magic.
Stewart Gandolf
This is it should be a combined coordinated effort. Marketing partner with the sales effort is really a vital. So we're going to start off talking about databases. And the key here is everything in B2B starts with a database. You just everything starts with a database. You can't do anything without a database. So we want to start thinking about your house list of prospects.
Stewart Gandolf
So fortunately, pretty much everybody who calls us not everybody, but most people have at least some form of house list may or may not be be good to me or not be up to date, but that's the place to start. Over time, you can integrate data provided by your salespeople. Ideally, this would happen in a really effective manner.
Stewart Gandolf
The challenges are not simply clerical. They're more focused on sales. And so it's it's difficult, but they should be integrating data as they find it into your CRM, which, by the way, you know, you need to house your data and a CRM customer relationship management program like Salesforce are but one of the many others. One of the key things I want to talk about in just a moment is you can enhance your data by licensing from reputable providers.
Stewart Gandolf
Very importantly, when you do that, you can target KPIs on an individual NPI basis and you can grow your list within inbound marketing. So, you know, we'll talk about some of the stuff we do here at Healthcare Success in a few minutes. But, you know, we're constantly we have our list of high priority contacts that we reach out to, but every day we get about 28 breaks or constantly growing.
Stewart Gandolf
All right. Or 20 subscribers, rather. We're constantly growing our list with inbound marketing. So these are all ways to build your database today. The exciting thing is that, particularly in health care, when you're targeting health care professionals, which I would refer to that as, you know, MDs and spies and other health care professionals as well as executives, biometrics oftentimes can be a target as well.
Stewart Gandolf
But when you buy these lists today or rent these lists, at least these lists, the amount of data is really, really incredible. So you can target HTTPS, I think most of all gas or sure, you can target them by or they not big surgeon or family practice. Yeah well that's you know you go a whole lot deeper than that.
Stewart Gandolf
So one of the great things that you know the more sophisticated marketers among you may be aware of, but others may not. You can target doctors by, you know, who's diagnosing the most, who's prescribing the most, who's doing the most procedures so you can work on their clinical behavior. That data is all available and largely accurate so you can target based upon the ones that are most accurate, to start thinking about the 8020 rule and targeting, Those are the ones that are most important to obviously a target by demographics.
Stewart Gandolf
So, you know, sex, age, whatever. So geography, you can target them whether they work at a practice setting or in a hospital setting, can target them by their profession. You can target by NPI, you can target by their online behavior. What they're reading online, what they're most interested in. You can target if they do telehealth. So this is a huge, huge category.
Stewart Gandolf
There's a handful, maybe about a half a dozen leading providers out there. One of the ones that we work with often is like when we're partnered with a growing relationship, there's others we've work with as well. You're interested in that topic, you know, let us know. We can talk afterwards, but the there are a variety of sources out there that are very, very powerful and center and extensive.
Stewart Gandolf
So that takes a lot to put these this data together. So that will require an investment to be able to reach these people. But it's worth that. These are the data is fantastic. So one of the things I like to talk about when I'm speaking live as well, okay, let's say you've got a really good job of your data and you're narrowed it down and find out, my gosh, I've only got 5000 prospect in the entire country or the entire world or wherever.
Stewart Gandolf
I've only got 5000 prospects search, I would argue. Great. That's fantastic news. You only have 5000 prospects. So you're not going to be Coca-Cola and Target 300 million Americans, right? You can target your 5000 TS. I have this cat in this category, this category or or orthopedic surgeons or pain or oncology or rheumatology or whatever, you can target very, very precisely.
Stewart Gandolf
You can target by, you know, anything you really want to. And so that is the key fundamental concept. It's not about typically in B2B, whether it's 5000 or even 100,000, it's still a finite audience. So the key to our discussion with digital marketing then is how do we stay in front of our prospects over time and build a positive reputation, add value to them.
Stewart Gandolf
One thing that I want to bring up at this stage too, that's really critical, that's fundamental to the rest of our presentation is that I mentioned earlier, doctors don't like being so. Doctors do typically like being educated. What I have found, having worked with thousands of doctors over the years, is that if you go in and you start talking to doctors about things they already know about, they dismissed you.
Stewart Gandolf
So, for example, a financial planner, if they're trying to reach a doctor and if they start adding no value beside something that somebody can easily see on the arm, the doctors say, get out of here. I know more about this than you do. So the key is instead to be absolutely expert to your target audience. That's the key.
Stewart Gandolf
And that's going to drive so much of what we're going to talk about today is how do we stay in front of our doctors, Those 5000 or 10,000 or 100,000 or whatever you're going after? But how do we stay in front of them in a positive way, build our reputation and show thought leadership and educate them? You know, most doctors are have an analytical personality and you kind of have to become a doctor.
Stewart Gandolf
And virtually all of them love learning. And so if you can do that, that's the secret to their heart. It's not typically in our fancy sales lines. So how do a lot of doctors like to be educated? Well, in a lot of ways, right. And by the way, live conferences are coming back as well as, you know, webinars.
Stewart Gandolf
There is, you know, all kinds of different ways to reach doctors. But it's interesting how think dimensions another less provider they they do the survey every year on this and almost always it's right around two thirds of doctors prefer e-mail as their number one channel. So you know it's like there's lots of things we're gonna talk about today.
Stewart Gandolf
But just remember not to overlook email. It's usually fundamental and it's one of the key strategies we want to think about because it still works. And I know you hear doctors tell you they hate email and frankly overloaded with email myself, I was just talking to Tom there prior to this. I'm so busy this time of year and I actually did a couple of charity events this week, last week, the last two weeks I was traveling.
Stewart Gandolf
I'm overwhelmed with emails personally, so I get it. But I can tell you that the doctors are also equally busy, but it's still the effective way to reach doctors and other health care professionals. So talking through that about email, I'm going to spend a moment here. First of all, if you are going back to the last comment as well, it's really vital.
Stewart Gandolf
I cannot stress enough to use opt in lists from reputable providers. You want to protect your brand, you want to avoid bounce rates, block out now emails, waves. This is your reputation. You're talking about nonsense directly as a company, but there's something called a center score. So a center score is a rating that you're getting. And maybe unbeknownst to you as you send out emails with your email service provider that is based on feedback, you know, are people opening, Are they clicking?
Stewart Gandolf
And then are most importantly, do you have email addresses don't exist? It turns out there's even things called honey thoughts out there where people put fake emails out there on the internet. So these cheaper you must get these calls. We get kind of daily half my team gets these down. If somebody says, Hey, do you want to buy every psychiatrist in America for 20 bucks on a you know, And it's like, well, okay, if you do that, you're running a wildly high risk of running your center score.
Stewart Gandolf
And they can actually you can actually get slammed shut down by your email service provider or Google. So that's a bad place to be. I've had people call me in a panic. We can't send emails anymore. That's kind of a problem. So you want to make sure you're using reputable vendors when you do email, but also make sure you stay compliant.
Stewart Gandolf
This is a much bigger topic than we have time for today. Can't Spam is the biggest. It's a national rule essentially. You can't have misleading information, your header or your subject line. You need to have a physical address. It needs to be somebody in the front line. Meaning who is it from a physical address? Opt-Out Option. Those are some of the things.
Stewart Gandolf
There are state laws now. It's an ass. It's getting more and more difficult. But again, if you're working with one of the leading vendors, they have expertise in those categories. You're not sort of walking through the valley blind. We use leading vendors because you don't want to violate laws. So you want to make sure that you're working with people, know what they're doing.
Stewart Gandolf
This is a sub area of expertise building these lists. There's a lot to it. And again, just make sure that they're updating their opt in, their ongoing way. Updated. The vendors that are in this space have all kinds of systems in double checks to make sure that it's effective. In terms of emailing itself, there's brand edge to now there's text only, there's frequency and timing.
Stewart Gandolf
You want to make sure you're always relevant. Shorter is almost always better. Remember where the doctors are busy things like the from line, who's it from, What is it say saying the front line, the subject line in the preview. These are all critical, critical things. Typically you want to have multiple links to whatever your call to action is.
Stewart Gandolf
You want to think about direct response principles, test everything so direct or are email best practices. This is a you know, again, I'm not trying to drill down on every one of these topics where I cover a lot today, but emails are super important. You know, again, we practice, we preach, we have a subscriber base of about 40,000 and maybe 10,000 of those are super active with our interaction with our content constantly.
Stewart Gandolf
And so, you know, we do do a mix of all of this first. Every time we send an email, we think about is it text, is this one brand? And so that we do both. By the way, if we're doing a sales email, will tend to do text. If we're doing a brand email, we'll do it tomorrow. But the frequency, the timing, the copy, all of these factors matter a lot.
Stewart Gandolf
So you want to think this through as you're beginning your email program. Me Market automation is sort of like email on steroids. So again, we recognize that in this meeting today we have some people who are super sophisticated, others that are not. So I'm going to try to make my comments relevant to both audiences. The if you're already sophisticated, you're probably doing this how even if you're sophisticated, In my experience, very few people take advantage of email mark or marketing automation to the extent that they should.
Stewart Gandolf
And can the boxes theoretically open up when you buy it? So, you know, a lot of people use you know, they always say like what attributes 5% of their brains? In this case, you know, people probably use at best 5% of the capabilities of their marketing automation or what is it anyway? Well, marketing automation allows you to do some things that are very special that's over and above what email could do.
Stewart Gandolf
So, for example, you can score your prospects based upon how they interact with their data, how high priority they are to you. You your sales reps can get alert when people engage with your content, so that's super important so they can prioritize their time. You can customize emails based upon how they interact with their content as they interact with their content.
Stewart Gandolf
You can ask the questions to improve your data over time. It can nurture prospects until they're ready to buy. And we like systems that integrate with your CRM. And so there are a variety of systems out there and marketing animation platforms. Some of the famous ones are like Pardot, HubSpot or Eloqua and others. We use HubSpot or a HubSpot partner.
Stewart Gandolf
We're doing B2B, by the way. You really shouldn't use it for consumer because it's not hyper compliant for me to be. It's okay. Again, this is these are all big topics we can talk about offline if you're interested, but for now, just keep in mind that Mark Lamination is a very powerful tool and it should be part of your email marketing program to maximize your effectiveness.
Stewart Gandolf
So, okay, we're talked about emails, we talked about databases. Well, what are you going to sell them exactly? So let's talk about content marketing. So content marketing is a word that's, you know, come of age over the last, I don't know, ten or 15 years. You know, I've been doing content marketing before the word was ever before I ever heard the word back in the day emails we used to do newsletters, we used to do conference calls actually.
Stewart Gandolf
So current content options include very commonly. Websites are big if you're trying to sell landing pages, blogs, webinars, websites, and even our site ebooks, podcast infographics, case studies, outcomes, data, there's all kinds of different content. And so the website, by the way, your existing website and landing page, that's really the epicenter of all your marketing program. But as you're thinking through these kinds of content, like for example, webinars are really designed for people that are actively engaged.
Stewart Gandolf
It takes a lot for someone to commit an hour to watch on a webinar, right? We have a whole bunch of people on this webinar. You're engaged. This is something that it's a big no no, your time horizon, it looks a little easier. That's maybe 10 minutes of your time or blog is maybe 5 minutes. So when you're thinking about your plot, your content mix, you know, typically things that are higher commitment are lower funnel things that are expert, really, really you're engaged.
Stewart Gandolf
Audience And so the purpose of, for example, blogs might be primarily SEO. Your ebooks may be for people, you know, we're going to closer in the buying decision. The webinar could be more educational. Sometimes we use podcasts, the sales reps can use case studies, infographics. All these things are part of your marketing mix, and there is some science and some strategy here to build a marketing mix for our company.
Stewart Gandolf
We currently use most of these. We have a website, we have specialized landing pages, videos, blogs, webinars, ebooks, podcasts and case studies and the advantage for graphics so and outcomes data within our case study. So as a company, word practice and we preach, we do all this again, it requires an address. All right. It's not easy to do all that stuff.
Stewart Gandolf
So that's one of the realities. You just have to recognize that as you look at these kinds of things, to do it well, it's going to require serious investment. It's just, you know, try as I might, I can't convince, you know, our writers, our designers, our tech people to work for free. So it already has to get paid.
Stewart Gandolf
So it means there's going to be some investment to do this well, but this is really at the heart of your B2B marketing program. So it's something that if you're serious about this, you're going to need to invest. And so how do you do great content? Well, it all starts with great strategy. So the first thing to do is to define your objectives in your KPIs.
Stewart Gandolf
Think about your goals. Are you trying to be a thought leader or are you trying to add sales support? Or is this all about SEO and website traffic? Are you looking for leads? Yeah, that's all those are all goals, right? So how are you going to prioritize those and which content is appropriate for which goal? What is your content strategy?
Stewart Gandolf
Do you have a content calendar? How are you going to gather data? Gather data. Sorry, I made a change on that last night. I didn't. That's not my fault. It happens. So I gather data and conduct research to better understand your target audience and personas. You want to work closely with your ASCO team because they're going to look for content gaps and content types so they can be should be must be part of this program.
Stewart Gandolf
Your content, your SCA team will also talk about how you are ranking vis a vis your competitors or keywords and all these kinds of things. You want to think about your personas. And again, at the end of the day, once you're done with all that, you need to have a strategy and a content plan. So again, this takes a village, right?
Stewart Gandolf
You have writers involved, designers, people to deploy the message, SEO content people. There's a whole bunch of people out here involved to do this well, but that's what gives you the winning edge. When you do this well, you will stand out from the crowd. Most want to do content very well. On that note, you really need to have experienced health care writers and subject matter experts.
Stewart Gandolf
The reason is because you're doing multiple objectives here. You want to typically keep in mind our brand voice a lot to build our brand awareness, and you want to be consistent with our brand voice. But we also have to do SEO and marketing best practices. So on hand we're looking for brand one hand we're looking for our CEO.
Stewart Gandolf
On the other hand, we're trying to convert people to inquire. That's three different things with one bit of content. So that's why so much content fails, because it's either focused on the accounts, focused only on sales, focused on one or the other. But it has to be really integrated and that sets us apart. Make sure you're writing for all of your stakeholders, including the experts, the executives.
Stewart Gandolf
If it's a website, you're all maybe also realizing that patients and families may be honest influencers, your own employees, Google. It's all about crafting the messaging that's ethical. It's on brand, and also it's throughout their journey because you have different kinds of content for different stages of journey. And again, great content is all about educating, informing and motivating them.
Stewart Gandolf
So once you've created this content, you want to start thinking about, well, in our role, our stakeholders have complex journeys, right? It's not like linear. They have lots of different buy information all over the place all the time. So you want to be everywhere that your audiences are going to publish in multiple formats. You want to make sure that you use multi-channel approach to your distribution.
Stewart Gandolf
So hey, as well as organic channels, you know, we often talk in marketing about own channels like that. You can actually control lectures and your personal social media pages, your website, page, search page, social and earned, which should include, you know, shares, media coverage, you know, those things. So all of this is part of your media strategy. So best practices for content marketing, right?
Stewart Gandolf
For people first, then Google. A lot of people get caught up and write for Google, write for people first. Keep in mind the Google helpful content guidelines, make sure you optimize and leverage the content you've already got to ensure that you have good content. Right? And some of the basics, good copy, active voice, proper reading level. By the way, emotional is often much stronger and overlooked in health care.
Stewart Gandolf
Make sure you're satisfying the user's needs. And again, when you think about content, the words are critical. But there's more. The images, the data, the graphic. It all comes together in a pack. And right this webinar we're doing here is not just I have information for you to use. It's not sloppy visually. It's hopeful. You agree, pretty compelling.
Stewart Gandolf
And so we want all of our content to be like that. So think about the visual side of it as well. Just a passing slide here. We've done tons of webinars on ASCO lately. I just want to point out one thing that may be may not be obvious when I talk to people about ASCO. So often they're saying I'm going to go to the Philippines and do some tech.
Stewart Gandolf
Last year I was like, Well, you can it's more complicated than that. But the even bigger point we're missing is the technical SC to get the website ready. So that Google fully understands what's on the site. That's what technical CIO's about. But eventually the technical SEO should be in place, right? So when we work with our clients, technical is often our first priority to get the website in fighting shape.
Stewart Gandolf
But at the end of the day, long term it's all about content. So you know, all the stuff we just discussed, it's content, content, content related to ACL and people list this all the time. And so these are some of the things that matter on content and creative SEO. We have four webinars in this discussion and you can learn more about that on another day.
Stewart Gandolf
It's interesting, you know, a lot of times with B2B, we have the same issues we do with B2C, which is sometimes your prospect are searching for solutions. And so that's what we call pull marketing. We're trying to pull in people that are already looking for an answer. And so SEO is poll marketing, paid search is poll marketing. You're looking for people are looking for a solution.
Stewart Gandolf
We want to be there when we're searching. Is it expensive? Well, I don't know. It's relative, right? If it's profitable, it isn't. But if you want do you want to be there when they're searching or not? Somebody for example, I want to use an example in a moment here. You know, EMR software, approximate software, somebody searching, you want to be there or not.
Stewart Gandolf
So SEO is vital, but also page search. And we've had our page search webinar. We talked a lot about how page search is really for low funnel KPIs for actively searching in this case page to be searching for a product or service. So as a reminder, for those of you that are Page search, as you know, Google ads, this is, by the way, with Google Fortune is May and it's not you know, Chromebooks or phones.
Stewart Gandolf
It's paid search. So page search is where all the action is for. And I really think of it as the Yellow Pages. Now, I know some of you don't ever go there, but I'm just showing you billions of people do. And so in this case, you know, this was an example here at a search last night, practice management software for oncology.
Stewart Gandolf
You can see here there's four people vying for that term at the very top of the page page search some of the benefits of doing cancer. It's a media. So what a lot of times of working with a B2B campaign, they want some something going a lot. Some of that stuff is going to take some time, right? Even with a big budget, you're still going to take time to roll this stuff out and searching.
Stewart Gandolf
You're growing very quickly so you can get on top of Google almost immediately. So ranking above all the competitors and the organic listings, getting to the marketplace for page search, you generate highly qualified leads You can target very precisely by geography time of day, your tests like crazy. You can you have data that will help you inform your content and SEO measurement.
Stewart Gandolf
You can measure this stuff to death and the budgets up to you and flexible. So again, we've covered a lot of these topics and other webinars along with in more detail on paid search today, except to say that it's a strong tool when you're going for low funnel people that are searching for a solution right now and it's usually part of the mix.
Stewart Gandolf
Typically it's as big a part as we can do. Now, if it's an obscure, it's a new product. Nobody's searching for it, right? If they don't know exists, they can't search for you or if it's a brand name never heard of, they can't search for you. But if it's more of a competitive category, page search may be a pretty integral, pretty important part of the marketing mix of social media.
Stewart Gandolf
The So again, we're going to be we just talked about paid social media in a recent webinar, but social media can include LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. There's also additional options like Reach. Everybody has a podcast sort of social option oximetry. But for the purposes of today, we're talking really primarily about LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. You can do, can and should have organic presence there, but head is where all the action is, as we discussed recently, because paid you can reach thousands and tens of thousands of people cost effectively and immediately versus building a organic presence over years.
Stewart Gandolf
And even then when the algorithm you know your audience not seeing your messaging. So we use a combination of both of which with our clients as well as with ourselves. You can also target with paid search, you can target or paid social right. You can target people that are visiting your website, people that have engaged in their profile lookalike audiences, sort of massive opportunities here.
Stewart Gandolf
When we're thinking about social, again, this is similar process or to define your goals, identify your target audiences, figure out what your channels are, develop outstanding creative. When it works, you want to amplify that, optimize, scale and repeat. So that's the basic idea. With social, you need to make sure that you have a very sort of process base.
Stewart Gandolf
I want to show some examples in just a moment. Fun fact. LinkedIn has really emerged as the strongest platform for business and even actually these are difficult because some are really after LinkedIn, some are absolutely absent from it. So it's a strategy. It's better for executives, but CPAs are on it as well, and it has really come a long way over the last couple of years, you know, that has had some of its own challenges.
Stewart Gandolf
But, you know, like it has done a good job. They're late to the party of really building engagement, building social activity. And so on the organic side, as well as on the page side, fun facts we have, I don't know. That's why I think you said around ten, 15% of our audience today came to us from length. And these are new people to us.
Stewart Gandolf
So we have our subscribers in the past four years. That is a sizable portion of our audience came to us from paid and organic links in today's news. So it all works together and that's how you do this very important climate. I've been stealing our saving this for mid presentation here you're a one. You have a list of prospects that's qualified.
Stewart Gandolf
You can target people on an individual basis. And so in other words, when you have an email list or a list of prospects, you can actually target on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, like that, or acts today. And even on programmatic. So you can target people on a one on one basis so that again, you can target your doctors on a one on one basis as they reach read their own personal Facebook profile, their own LinkedIn profile, their own Instagram profile.
Stewart Gandolf
Keep in mind there's a match rate here. So and some of the better list providers out there have multiple email addresses for each provider, their personal addresses, business address and old addresses so that you're able to get a higher match rate. Because like for me, for example, I sign into Facebook with a personal email for the Better Lives vendor is no my I have two or three business emails and two or three personal.
Stewart Gandolf
They know them all. That's, that's the databases that are out there so you can market people individually. This is an example of some page social our team recently did for AmerisourceBergen created static paid social ads working within their brand guidelines and and they're at their request and mending their bride brand guidelines. We do like video for both programmatic and social.
Stewart Gandolf
It's much more engaging. It tends to do much better. These are just examples of some real life ads we did with that campaign. So you do want to think through the creative on social and make sure that you have things that stand out and very, very busy trades like So programmatic advertising for is another opportunity. So programmatic essentially you're not familiar.
Stewart Gandolf
And by the way, we have a webinar coming up on this much deeper. And at the beginning of the year, programmatic is a way of beyond just reaching doctors on social media. You can reach doctors on, you know, essentially millions of websites. So there's a whole marketplace out there. In the old days, if you want to buy, you know, an ad in a local newspaper, you call the Wrap and what do you do?
Stewart Gandolf
And you have a million different websites all vying for trying to sell their space. So that could be news sites, sports sites, you know, blogs, all kinds of different sites are out there that allow advertising. And so with programmatic essentially is an automated bidding system where you can advertise on Fox Sports or CNN or, you know, Suzy's blog about puppies or whatever.
Stewart Gandolf
So as long as they accept advertising, they're a publisher, they're making money. And essentially what's happening with programmatic is you're making a bid for a given audience and along with other advertisers and an instant in the time it takes for the page to load, the winning advertiser shows up on their screen. So instead of trying to buy individual, you're buying from inventory of, you know, thousands, millions of publishers.
Stewart Gandolf
So the options here are big, right? So you can do audio, for example, Spotify and platforms like that. Connected TV we'll talk about in a moment video display, native advertising. So there's many different options here. One of the fun facts that we often do is geofencing or targeting around events. So, for example, if you're on a target, well, for example, I just did this my community college alliance where were targeting community oncologists and there are annual that you can target them through programmatic so that when they walk into that convention hall they will be served through apps and various ways ads about your business, and you can target them while they're at an event and
Stewart Gandolf
then for 30 days afterwards. So event targeting is just one topic out of probably dozens you should be thinking about. But with particularly with HTP is the idea of targeting, you know, HQ within a hospital or targeting HTP so that an event can be a very, very powerful tool and it's something that is often part of our next and we built into the marketing plan Another thing that people are interested a lot these days.
Stewart Gandolf
Is CTV showing up on connected television. So for example, I have Hulu at home and periodically I will get ads on Hulu so you can target again. There's a whole universe out here reaching out to people and essentially you can actually target doctors on a 1 to 1 basis with CTV. Now, the only challenge to this, because that's really compelling, right, showing up to a doctor as I'm watching the news on Hulu.
Stewart Gandolf
But childcare is it is pricey. So this is where you start getting into these things. This is a sort of big budget level because it's just not practical. It's not budgets. We're talking typically tens of thousands of dollars campaigns to do this. You're not going to be able to do this on the cheap in most cases. One thing here, even this is truly programmatic, but I wanted to remind you to think about is partnering with health care publishers.
Stewart Gandolf
So this is another tactic that you can look at when you're doing brand building or direct response. You can certainly, you know, on an organic basis or paid basis, you know, advertise on association websites, emails, addresses, you can lead, which I would do a lot. Webinars for associations. We're often asked to speak at annual events or for webinars.
Stewart Gandolf
You can also do pay to play options. There are lots of health care publishers out there, as you know. So modern medicine. Medscape MJ It's live. Science is a beast in this category includes pop like medical economics and resistance practice. One of the things we like a lot is plain English. And going after the past the hospital market, you know, there's a review journals.
Stewart Gandolf
So if you get the idea here that this is a whole marketing plan where you have the content, you have programmatic, social, you have paid advertising, but a lot of times we're using our content as offers. So for example, strategic health care marketing and health care strategy trends are targeted toward the hospital market. They do a lot of sponsored content, whether it's e-books, shared content, webinars.
Stewart Gandolf
So there are opportunities out there to target KPIs and, you know, health care executives, each of these depend on who's your target audience. And then from there you figure out which publishers are going after the some success examples, putting this all together. The case example Want to share today's biology? This is a program we worked with. For those of you don't know, biochemical hormones are some doctors think it's fantastic.
Stewart Gandolf
They love it. It's transformational to health care. You know, for every menopausal, women should have it. Others think it's voodoo, witchcraft. I think it should be outlawed. It's pretty broad spectrum there. So when I worked with biology, one of the things we came up with was we we decided to build a whole program that included a whitepaper, social media videos, programmatic.
Stewart Gandolf
A lot of them were discussing and we wanted to create offers and we thought through this and we thought through strategically. All right, Well, there are some people who know bioidentical hormones are all about or some people know nothing about it. So let's build marketing campaigns to target both sets of KPIs. This particular e-book we wrote was the culmination of the sort of climax of the entire campaign.
Stewart Gandolf
After months of setup, this was actually compiled the Doctor who behind BIOS. He had written a book for people he had sorted for. He had cited many different studies, but it was not written for professionals. So it was kind of we had to go back and reconstruct and source the actual names and the actual studies that were cited and rebuild this.
Stewart Gandolf
And so we built this particular white paper, you know, to make the argument why that not only is our bioidentical hormones ethical, by which you would argue it is unethical to not give about that odds. So it makes that argument in a very rational way, backed by science, but in a very compelling way. This is our our this is tough to do.
Stewart Gandolf
This require really skilled writers are a team to put this together, to go back and do the research, build the science, create the right pricing. But, man, it's really powerful when you do this. So this is the kind of cancer that works for you. And by the way, that the voice in this email that cites clinical studies is very readable.
Stewart Gandolf
We want to give doctors or people to read, don't want to have drive boring content. So typically, even though we're covering clinical material, we want to make sure that it's engaging, that it's readable. So this was a part of a long or an ongoing sales program when we did this. And this included things like Great Social. Again, we talked about static ads versus video.
Stewart Gandolf
By the way, typically as we sit here by their standards, but it's still part of the program here, programmatic and display ads we had programmatic was a big part of this campaign as well. Again, I'm not going to show the entire campaign here. Some credit was dedicated psychographics towards people who know about bioidentical. Others was just too pure, did not know much.
Stewart Gandolf
Typically, most of the programs drove them to landing pages where they can become a sort of learn more about becoming a certified biology provider again. Calls to action everything here. This gives you an example of how to build out a campaign here. So we had landing pages, we had direct mail to support events. Again, we had ongoing videos, programmatic Facebook ads like that, ads, again, very, very thorough marketing program.
Stewart Gandolf
But in fact, here this is the way of looking at this by building the social media, driving to the landing page, driving to the marketing automation, and immediately upon registering or getting into the system or sales systems and sales follow up, that's fitness is works well, that's the way it's designed. Another case study before we get to the Q&A in just a moment here, we practice what you preach.
Stewart Gandolf
I alluded to this a little bit ago and Healthcare Success. We built our business. We like to joke that we were doing content marketing before that word was even popularized. We've been doing this since 2006 and prior to that, my last endeavors I did lot of content marketing before that. You know, again, our audience includes especially health care executives these days, but health care professionals are as part of the mix.
Stewart Gandolf
They're always part of the decision making process. You know, it's fun fact. We started our first blog within days of founding. And by the way, that first blog was about how to market the doctors, the We Operate column for Dollar Economics. We published audio CDs in partnership with and on for medical economics. We spoke at venues nationwide, and our CEO worked according to plan.
Stewart Gandolf
You know, we ranked immediately really pretty much in the early days. It was really ranked number one for everything. So we have very, very strong SEO presence. And many of you who are watching as well. And I started off through these efforts today. Our website is around 60,000 visitors. We know we've done over $100 million of revenue off of that website over the years and the content is always designed to support our brand sales lead generation objectives.
Stewart Gandolf
Some of the content we have, we do, webinars we do, these are some of the recent blog posts. Those of you from Follow us. Notice we spend a lot of effort on making a brand in terms of how we distribute our blog post and our ebooks. So this is a this e-book, by the way, of some of the lessons of health care.
Stewart Gandolf
Marketing is something that's the name of a closing session I came up with a couple of decades ago. This webinar or this e-book has been rewritten multiple times over the years, has probably been $100,000 this e-book in its various versions. And of course you are on a webinar today about digital marketing, so just more content. So how everything works together.
Stewart Gandolf
And so we've covered a lot today. I promised you we would cover a lot and wow, it's on your problem. It's like, exactly. I are 50 minutes into this. I've got about 10 minutes for Q&A. If anybody has some questions, please feel free to add them into the chat. So the first question I got was, Is CTV expensive?
Stewart Gandolf
Generally speaking, to do CTV? There are options out there. There are some lower cost options out there. But to do it right and you cover the strategy, the creative and the execution, CTV, CTV can be super expensive. So there is lower cost options out there. That's a topic we can talk about off air. But my point that I'm trying to make here is that when we're doing a digital marketing for doctors, you know, all of this requires investment, right?
Stewart Gandolf
And so if you're on a startup, you're in have to do things more guerilla fashion, right? So if you're looking at, you know, if you have to make by one of the founders writing the content and distributing the content and, you know, going on social media, you have to. But where this really starts to scale is where you have a marketing budget and can address that.
Stewart Gandolf
The another question is about air and thank you. I should have brought that up. Air is really, really taking over the world and that's something that I'll just give you some examples of how air works on some of the things that we just discussed. So for example, with paid search, Google is all about AI. And so the ads that are being run right now of Google and the placement, Google essentially wants you to turn over your marketing campaign to its AI.
Stewart Gandolf
And there's a lot of value in the Google algorithm and the AI that's we've built within the Google platform. However, as we said in our Google search webinar, you can really, really over do that because the objective can be to feed Google's pockets versus to feed your business. So air is endemic and there are air is a really critical part of the programmatic.
Stewart Gandolf
I mean, it's programmatic is largely driven by air and increasingly so air as also can be used in the generation for content. So you have to be careful with this, but for example, I had fun with this. I did an AI query once on, okay, I want to promote this webinar with a seven series email, compelling email targeting doctors with increasing urgency on this topic.
Stewart Gandolf
And so what we find is and we ended up getting seven emails back from that, so chat can be good for that. The challenge with it is, is that it still requires humans. So in our experience, especially when you're writing for doctors, if you're looking at content, it can be a good starting point. It certainly is a good way to avoid writer's block.
Stewart Gandolf
But again, remember we were talking about your app. To write to Google, you have to write page KPIs. You have to write in a way that builds brand and brand guidelines. You have to write in a way that's compelling. So we haven't found a way to have humans circumvent humans, but it can be a good tool. So that's a.
Stewart Gandolf
Nora That's a quick answer too. That's a deep question. We could spend a lot of time on that, but that's just some of the ways that we use a today. How? Let's see. Yeah. So we had the question is, you know, databases to match businesses to personal emails to struggle with our social media because our business addresses the most social tends to get too personal.
Stewart Gandolf
So yeah so that question again, you know we mentioned Acuvue Acuvue is has consolidated a lot of the multiple providers out there. That's one that we're using most often. We have used others as well. So when we work with our clients, that's the kind of thing we, we, you know, sort through and share with them four or five different options and, you know, look at the cost and look at the subject.
Stewart Gandolf
Again, this licensing, these databases are not inexpensive. So, you know, there's an investment here, but you can do it. But you're right, it's like just doing a list of, well, here's a fun fact. If you're trying to target doctors ads, you know, Doctor Joe you know Davis ad you know Samsung Dermatology dot com they don't use that know dressed in their overalls doctors your Gmail y email well I still see a lot of arrivals you know so the yeah you definitely need a data source that has multiple email addresses for HTP and that's why it's expensive right So you can build your email address on your own or you can use one of these vendors.
Stewart Gandolf
Ideally, if you have the budget for you want to use one of these vendors that's on tick tock, that's a good question too. So tick tock and it's an evolving it's funny, my wife is big on tick tock, my kids are big on tick tock. I see a lot of TikTok videos. Tick tock, because I think if you're an innovator and you have a lot of the other boxes checked off would be a great idea because you can target the tick tock is much less mature, so the targeting ability is less mature.
Stewart Gandolf
And so as it relates to HCV, I haven't really spent much energy on that because most clients I'm going to talk to still aren't doing the basics. So you have to be careful what this is really easy to go off on these obscure things like, right, you guys have a really strong database. Why are you doing mark animation?
Stewart Gandolf
Why are you all like that? So if you had all those other bases covered, you know, if we had a client that really wanted to do that, we would say, okay, great job, all those bases covered. Let's look at that. The similar option is X. We have a client right now or ask us to bid on. They want LinkedIn and Twitter and one of the discussions we'll be talking about is why access compared to some other platforms.
Stewart Gandolf
So these are all part of the strategy and the thought process. You should have. Okay, Do you have a silver bullet? What content format is a great questions. By the way, I love this. Mara, you're the get the Gold Star today for being engaged. So the path to the doctors prefer I don't know if is the content between blogs or ebooks or webinars.
Stewart Gandolf
I think the big thing as doctors prefer content that's relevant to what they need that educates them. And it's easy to read. That's the silver bullet. You know, it's not so much about the format. It's really more about, you know, like I told you at the opening of this webinar, it's like keeping them engaged means you have to it.
Stewart Gandolf
First of all, you don't talk to them like a robot. Most people really make the mistake of talking to each of these like robots. That's not a factor. Instead, you want to talk to them like humans. Usually it's much more conversational than you would expect. It still has to be professional, but you want to be readable. But it's like education is almost always this.
Stewart Gandolf
And you know what's in it for me? Remember, they're consumers too. So I ask them what's in it for me? So if your conversation is all about we do this, we do that, we do this, we do that, you're probably going to lose them. It should be much more about you're going to get those. Your patients are going to get that.
Stewart Gandolf
We're going to help your patients have better lives because of this. There's other upside. Here's the downside, because those doctors are skeptical. That's what's going to work for you better. The other question was about consent. We are recommending in most cases, opt in lists. You can email people legally and many instances due to cancer. That does not say they have to be opt in, but the best practice is to be opt in.
Stewart Gandolf
So that's a, you know, a larger conversation. But generally speaking, we're recommending opt in less. I like final question that we have, as you know, about the content side of stop and I'll finish my Q&A at this stage. Actually, the consumer thing. So the last comment I'll make here before we wrap up is the the question was about numbers or stories.
Stewart Gandolf
So they both were I mentioned case studies earlier. Case studies have read to them, if you look at our own website, you know, particularly if you're interested in higher ed. So I would encourage you to look at some of our content so you can look at, for example, our case studies, you can peruse our content, you know, the case studies each of those things that we have have different purposes.
Stewart Gandolf
So e-books are designed for people at one stage of the buying journey. Webinars are designed for some, but other people, the blogs are designed with different purposes in mind. Case studies are designed with different purposes in mind. But our case studies tend to have facts and story. One of our featured blogs is about marketing is a world of health care specialist, and that blog starts with a true story of somebody calling me from her office and very, very commonly she was their first marketing person.
Stewart Gandolf
You know it a large entity, and they expect her to be a content expert or SEO expert, a graphic art person. They expect her to know social media and PR and digital advertising and paid sales or programmatic ad publicity. And by the way, in your spare time, drop off donors to doctors. So, you know, it's like that story resonates with our target audience.
Stewart Gandolf
And we hear from people all the time. my gosh, how did you know that? It's like because we see that all the time. So that's where a story can be super compelling to the target audience. And in that case, we're targeting an administrator. But that's when you get into the mind and you can use stories and numbers and data and content that's relevant to your target audience.
Stewart Gandolf
Well, that's where the magic happens. So if you're interested in how our agencies help, we would love to talk to you more about this. Our contact information is there or subscribe to my newsletter. If you're on this blog. So if you want to continue to receive information like that, our website websites out there, this is one of our favorite areas of expertise.
Stewart Gandolf
So zero pressure and our standpoint on this. This is something that is not an easy ask, like building a good B2B program. There's a lot to it. But if you're interested in this and you're looking for an agency, this is something we certainly know something about. And anyway, I hope you've enjoyed our time together. I know. So thanks for listening.
Stewart Gandolf
We appreciate it. Bye bye.