Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #59: Healthcare Marketing Misses

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to episode number 59 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast and video podcast if you're on YouTube.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: My name's Chris and this is Michael.

Michael Utley: Hey everybody.

Chris Raines: How's it going, man?

Michael Utley: Good.

Chris Raines: Michael, we're going to talk today about healthcare marketing misses, healthcare marketing mistakes.

Michael Utley: This is my favorite subject.

Chris Raines: This is your favorite subject in the whole world?

Michael Utley: I love this, yeah.

Chris Raines: I like it too because healthcare is really important in people's lives and healthcare providers are really important, but they get a lot of things right when it comes to care and they get a lot of things wrong when it comes to communicating and doing their marketing to the public. So, we're going to talk about some common that healthcare providers, healthcare marketers, get wrong and ways to fix it.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. This episode's kind of for all the healthcare practitioners out there and the Chief Operating Officers and CMOs of healthcare operations. A lot of healthcare culture is sort of old school. And what happens, this is, I really love this topic. And shout out to Aaron Clifford and Jackie Martin. They're sort of people that we know who are just kind of in an industry, working in healthcare marketing stuff. And Jackie in particular is super, I know Jackie probably a little bit more than you do, but super insightful in terms of like what's broken about the world. And a lot of doctors would agree he or she doctor may be busy delivering care. They've gone through medical school and they're super bright people, but when it comes to run a business, it's a different kind of smart, it's a different kind of creativity.

Michael Utley: And they're so influential in their realms that they don't always make that transition. So, topic number one here is understanding online reputation management. This is one of the areas where a lot of docs and the other executive folks supporting them in healthcare operations, they really still see the internet as a big liability rather than an asset. And so, yeah, sure we're going to give you a real long story that we could talk for hours about real short. The Internet's not going away. As Bill Sever would say, "The deer have guns now." And so, Healthgrades, Google My Business, all these platforms, they are absolutely tools that customers have and patients have, and consumers have that are not going away. So, you have absolutely got to decide, we are going to participate in this world and we're going to get good at it. And the trick I like to use is to think of it like, "Hey, this is like passing all your final exams."

Michael Utley: This is the proof is in the pudding and the Healthgrades and the Google My Business reviews, all of these different profiles and platforms, they're really an assessment tool of your practice. And occasionally a fake review will get in there and there's a process for that. Those can be removed. But outside of that, outside of that handful of really fraudulent reviews, this is like the exam. And so, not only do you need to be sort of good at your craft, but if you're going to run a business, you got to be good at surrounding your people who can help manage operational excellence and deliver an overall excellent experience as you're delivering care. So yeah, online reputation management, number one, it's not going away. You need to decide, we're going to make this a part of how we do well, we're going to treat this like a test grade and we're going to create a feedback mechanism to let it make us better.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I love that. Number two, follow up.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Oh my gosh.

Michael Utley: Yeah. See patients as consumers who are busy, follow up.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So, putting yourself in the consumer's mindset where they are. Just because someone filled out a form on the website doesn't mean that you don't have to follow up with them continually in order to book the appointment. So, Michael, we've seen this a lot when running traffic for different healthcare providers, and where the miss happens is the follow-up every single time. So, you might think this because someone filled out the form that they're eagerly just ready to bang your door down. That's not the case. They might have felt a particular pain at that particular time, filled out the form, and their move on with their life. And maybe you called back once, didn't get an answer. And that's actually what happens to most health. They call back once, don't get an answer, and then they leave it. You have to use every modality available to you and you have to continually follow up until you book the appointment.

Chris Raines: That's just the way things are. So SMS, you need to have an SMS texting provider to do a welcome text or follow-up text, it's within five minutes. That should be an automatic, you should do automatic SMS and automatic email and they should get a phone call within 30 minutes, okay? And you can have your agency set up this for you, but there should be systems set up to where, as soon as someone fills out the form, someone knows about it at the office. They know exactly what to say, who to call back and name and there should be follows in place after that, until the appointment gets booked. So follow up, follow up, follow up. So much money and so much opportunity gets left on the table because follow up, people will think follow-up is like, "I called them back. They didn't answer. And if they're interested in appointment, they'll call back." No they won't.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I think a lot of docs think of marketing as a really good logo maybe. And if they stretch themselves philosophically, they might also include something like we have really good geography. We're really central. Like I had a dentist one time telling me, "Man, I don't need a website. I'm next to a school. You know what it's like being a dentist next to a school?" And that's true. That is kind of part of your marketing. But yeah, I think this hustle and this follow-up is a big part of how to think about marketing broadly as a category. Everything about you connecting with the market with your audience.

Chris Raines: Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow. I can't stress that enough and I've seen it happen. I've seen campaigns just go south time and time again, because the follow-up wasn't there.

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's not overkill to do this much.

Chris Raines: No. And you're not bothering them. People are busy.

Michael Utley: Yeah. They raised a hand. They're waiting for somebody to help them.

Chris Raines: Yeah, exactly. And so, you need to be that person to help them.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: Michael, next.

Michael Utley: Next up. So, this is building on a previous point, turn reputation management into operational excellence. So, here's how it works. You have the internet, life was good for doctors and healthcare providers for years. They would go deliver services, try not to get sued and it was pretty easy. And then the internet came along and suddenly there's this whole feedback mechanism. There's a big scoreboard for the whole world that tells you how somebody felt or tells everyone how somebody felt during their care delivery even if they wouldn't tell you.

Michael Utley: So, this is a real conundrum, this is real quandary for healthcare delivery folks at every step of the game. So, what do you do with it? Well, number one, you have to have someone engaged with those accounts who has identified all of them and is monitoring them and doing one of two things, either responding quickly and acknowledging the positive reviews or responding quickly and forwarding to someone who can do something about it, the negatives, the negative reviews. And then here's what, so that's externally. You need to get a marketing agency. Somebody who does reputation management, call DodgeballSEO called [inaudible 00:07:32]. This is the kind of stuff we do and we'll happily jump in and set up reputation management program with you. But then internally, what you need to do is have someone whose job it is, is to receive that and treat it like an operational excellence project.

Michael Utley: If something comes in, someone says, "I walked in, sat in an empty room in a lobby. For 15 minutes, nobody came or went." This is true that really happens. "Nobody said anything to me so I left and I'm going somewhere where they answer the door, and somebody's there when I walk in." It was like a lunch situation and kind of a low staffing day situation. And just kind of worst case scenario, a patient who had an appoint in the book, came in, sat in a lobby for 15 minutes was not greeted and exited. They've got all the emotions of their health issue on the table, right there, walking around with their heart in their hands and nobody talks to them. They're nervous walking in, nervous to go talk to the doctor and suddenly they feel the entire universe has rejected them.

Michael Utley: What are they going to do? They're going to Google. They're going to Facebook. They're going to tell their friends. They're going to tell everybody, well, guess what? You got a new project off the office manager. You can't ever let that happen even if it means preemptively calling everyone who has an appointment and letting them know there's a staffing problem and please come in. This all just comes down to initiative, communication, and excellence. And for some reason folks, the healthcare industry is lagging behind everybody else and we need you to catch up. We need you to do better and take excellence in your craft seriously and not live on the respect that you experience having gone through something as hard and truly difficult as medical school. Because all of the realities that follow in the path of poor office management are painful human stories where people feel hurt and rejected.

Michael Utley: And the only option they have is to go take it to the internet, tell their friends. And you know the old story, everybody will tell one good story twice, but one bad story, 12 times and you don't want that happening. So, the internal function of reputation management is to take the negative review, understand what really happened with a real person, understand it real terms and treat it as a project to make sure that that situation can't happen again. And if you're a practice with say two to three stars on Google, guess what? You've got 10 projects that you've been ignoring that you knew you needed to do. But now you've got a ticketing system to let you know exactly what priority order to take them in. And if you're a four to five star, guess what? You're ready to rock.

Michael Utley: You're ready to take what you think is pretty good and make it even better. And if you're in that four to five range, here's what's going to happen. You're going to have somewhere people are just unreasonable and that's okay. So, a good rule of thumb, if you've got at least, I don't know, 10 to 20 reviews in Google My Business, Google Maps, then you've got enough data there to probably work with unless they're all just fake. But if you're in that anywhere below sort of four stars, then you've really got kind of red alert where we're struggling operationally. And if you're in that four to five range, that's where I think it gets into not overreacting, but taking it seriously, taking the feedback, but maybe saying, "She seemed kind of unreasonable when she was in here. We're going to have to just acknowledge her experience and let this one go because we don't see an opportunity with this one."

Michael Utley: So, that's a good rule of thumb ranking system for where to put yourself. We've had folks call us Chris, who came to us and we're at three stars and we look through the reviews and before we make an agreement to work with them, we understand, are you committed to this going up not because of what we do, but because of what you do documented by what we do? And if we don't get a, yes, I can tell you, it's not somebody we're going to work with.

Chris Raines: Sure.

Michael Utley: Operational excellence can't be fixed with a bio marketing agency outside of shop, it has to come from inside. And what we've really found is that it comes down to just a lot of times, the dots are just not connected. It's that the signals, the doc maybe goes home, look themselves up on the internet, maybe a friend. Tells him or her, "Hey, I checked your thing and you got some reviews out there. You need to take a look at that." That's like a common experience as a friend telling someone, "Hey, you need to look at what the Internet's saying." But those dots are not being connected to put anybody in charge operationally in house to truly fix these problems. But yeah, healthcare's a big problem this country and there are a lot of sort of cultural things that go into that and we need it to be better.

Michael Utley: And marketing is one of the ways to shine a light on the path to make it better. And we're passionate about it because I think because we're parents, because we've had enough broken arms and broken ankles and accidents to go through to have lots of experiences, and broken appendix. Yeah. So, operational excellence can be yours if you use the input of reputation management.

Chris Raines: Yeah, awesome. Fourth, take a cue from elective services and modernize your ability to predict costs. There's a billboard in Nashville, it used to be up. And it was a plastic surgery practice that had, I think their special was like the $4,000 breast augmentation or something. It was right there on the billboard 4k breast augmentation, right? I don't remember if it was 4k or what it was. Point is for elective services are really good at communicating what things are going to cost and it's obvious why, because those elective services, people are paying out of pocket for those. But people still have questions even if they have insurance and insurance is paying for it. Maybe Michael, they are coming to the end of the year and they're trying to decide, maybe they have a yearly, maximum out of pocket. Maybe they're getting close to it are deciding what to do to push it this year, next year.

Chris Raines: And the cost is [inaudible 00:13:39] ensures actually matters. Figure out how to tell people how much stuff costs. And now here's the thing, people just want an answer, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: They're not going to get mad. Like I know it. You can't predict it because there's different insurance depends on what they have, I get it. Give them a range. Because it doesn't [crosstalk 00:13:57] matter if it's-

Michael Utley: Just like a range it's super helpful.

Chris Raines: Five to $12,000 is fine. I used to work in... My company used to do video and a common thing was how much it's going to cost. And of course you got to scope it out how long is the video? How many on screen actors, blah, blah, blah. But I learned pretty early on that people just want an answer. They're not going to get mad if you tell them 7,000 and it happens to be 8,500 or 10,000. But if you tell them, "Oh, this is around 7,500 to 12,000 depending on the scope, let's talk a little more." That's all they want to hear. So, figure out how to tell people how much your services cost. The plumber does it, your accountant does it, the grocery store does it, every other place that they go to does this. Figure it out.

Michael Utley: And more people are paying Self Pay. So, in my family, we do Self Pay. We're part of a healthcare co-op and it's not that we don't have the money it's that we find it to be a better experience in doing healthcare coverage and it's a lot more affordable. We're a family of six, it's a lot more affordable.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And I'm going to say it again, and I can't stress it up, people aren't looking for an exact number that they're going to hold you to and opinion their ground for. They just want to know a range and they have the right to know that before they engage in services, just like any other service that they partake in. This is no different. So, figure out how to tell them how much it's going to cost, even if it's a big range. You owe it to them as your patients and as your customers.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Awesome idea.

Chris Raines: We're running out every record time here. So, you want [inaudible 00:15:34].

Michael Utley: Yeah. We'll make this one quick. So, last item. Get help so you can focus on your craft. A lot of healthcare delivery folks who are either RNs or docs, they're really passionate about their craft. And then a lot of the healthcare software and all the of stuff, it's really just noise. It's really just a huge distraction from that one-on-one connection with the patient. And so, you got to get help. If it's somebody there helping with documentation, or if it's just doing a better job of empowering office staff to make decisions and fix problems, you need to treat yourself not like you've got to be in the middle of every decision. You've got to treat yourself like you're the talent on the field and that you've got a head coach, an owner, what would be like another one? Like, offensive line coach.

Chris Raines: If you're the owner, you can't also be the offensive line.

Michael Utley: Yeah. You need to feel empowered within yourself to delegate. And I'm a business owner. This is really hard, but you've got to do it. The more I have delegated over the years, the faster we've grown and the happier our clients have been. So yeah, making that pivot and empowering people to take over areas of responsibility and actually solve problems, it's really key. And so, this is all about doing a better job for patients, anyway. Healthcare marketing misses are really patient misses at the end of the day.

Chris Raines: I like that. I like that one.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah, it's true.

Michael Utley: The marketing, your marketing is part of your care delivery.

Chris Raines: That's right.

Michael Utley: So yeah. So, we need to take it seriously. Use it as a mechanism for excellence. And yeah, that's it. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you on the next one.