There were also a number of fantastic speakers and panels, addressing the biggest challenges facing dental practices today and offering some smart suggestions for where you might find opportunities to make gains. The current landscape is definitely challenging. 

Dental Industry Trends and Challenges

Everyone at Dykema agreed that there are a few big challenges facing DSOs today:

New Patients Are Down

Thanks to inflation, more Americans are having to tighten their budgets and rein in spending on anything they don’t classify as an absolute necessity. And while dental care may be important, it’s often likely to be deferred when budgets get tight.

Exacerbating this is the fact that Medicaid coverage has been disappearing for many Americans. Tracking from KFF shows that since March 2023, over 23.8 million people have been disenrolled from Medicaid—including 45% of former Medicaid recipients here in Georgia, and over 2 million disenrolled in Texas alone. That’s roughly 25% of all people who had Medicaid coverage, now disenrolled in the past 14 months.

In short, that’s a whole lot of people who no longer have their dental bills covered, and are likely to put off that dental procedure for a year or three. And younger populations show lower demand for care in the first place. Gen Z and Millennials are less likely to be able to afford dental care, not only having a lower median income than other age groups but also being less likely than most age groups to have dental insurance coverage. Even those who can afford dental care often prioritize convenience and accessibility, which many practices don’t offer.

Costs Are Up

Supply costs shot up when COVID-19 hit the scene in 2020, and while some prices have come down since then, costs for supplies and materials still remain higher than pre-pandemic. Due to staffing shortages, offering higher wages is essential for practices that want to ensure they can maintain the capacity they need. This has put a squeeze on dental groups from both ends, as they face rising costs for staffing and supplies, but aren’t seeing any increase in Medicare reimbursement rates and can’t raise prices without losing patients who have limited discretionary income. Margins are thin, and DSOs more than ever need to look for ways to improve their marketing. 

Interest Rates Are High

Money isn’t cheap anymore, which means it’s not so easy to decide to grow your business now and turn a profit later. The gold rush may be over, and we’ve seen a major slowdown in growth through mergers and acquisitions. Note that doesn’t mean that all growth has slowed, just that the industry has shifted towards more measured sustainable growth rather than an M&A blitz. For the past two years, the focus has been on same-store growth and growing organically through de novos, and we expect that will continue to be the trend for 2025.

What Industry Leaders Are Saying

The biggest takeaway here is that times may be tough, but DSOs still have plenty of ways to grow and should figure out how best to leverage those opportunities. No one knows that better than Pat Bauer, the CEO of Heartland Dental. During the “State of the Industry” session, he offered a simple reminder:

“You can’t use the economy as an excuse why you can’t grow. You have to figure out ways to grow.”

So, what’s the best advice for DSOs looking to grow today? Some of the leaders in the dental world shared their perspectives during the “CEO Panel: Challenges & Opportunities in Patient Acquisition & Retention,” and here’s what they had to say.

Meet Consumers Where They Are

Reveal Dental’s CEO, Houmam Ali, explained that to connect with the modern patient, you need a deep understanding of the modern patient journey, because old content and messages no longer work. You need to be present and relatable to today’s educated population where 90% of them have smartphones and can easily do online research. Video is a great way to differentiate yourself by nurturing the consumer along their decision-making journey. Just keep in mind that you need a strong USP and compelling creative if you want to use video to engage prospective patients and build trust.

Maximize Production at Every Practice.

Now that money isn’t cheap and it’s no longer easy to grow through acquisitions, you’ve got to make the most of the practices you already have. That means hiring more hygienists to support your dentists, so you can make use of your dentists more efficiently. ClariFi Health CEO Elliot Zibel suggested turning every available space into an operatory—you’re not getting new locations, so figure out what spaces you can convert into operatories and stick a specialist in there.

On the marketing side, you need to make sure your digital advertising is directing new patients to where you have the capacity. Otherwise, some practices will be starved for business, while others will be overbooked with an increasingly frustrated clientele. The key is aligning your marketing strategy with demand and capacity.

That’s certainly a topic I’ve written a lot about, and I’m about to write even more about it and give you some great tips on how to accomplish that at your DSO.

How To Maximize Your Marketing Impact

Margins are tight, costs are up, and leads are down. You need to make good use of every dollar in your marketing budget. But as you grow, advertising becomes more complex and nuanced because you can’t use a blanket approach across your whole platform.

What’s a DSO to do? Here are some of the top actionable suggestions for ensuring you get the most out of your investment and start super-charging your marketing.

1) Build an Integrated Measurement Platform

This is the #1 thing you need to do because if you want to put together marketing strategies that will work for your business, you need to know your numbers for show rates, cost per booking, LTV, etc. A good tech stack is the foundation of data-enabled marketing and gives you the right data signals to improve performance in an increasingly complex media buying landscape with sophisticated consumers. 

Last-click attribution is last-decade tracking that leaves you marketing blind, without insight into what’s happening along the patient journey. A modern martech stack will help you build a multi-touch attribution framework that gives you a fuller picture of the patient journey so that you can nurture patients along the way. You need a CRM that can be integrated with an online booking platform like NexHealth and call tracking like Patient Prism. That’s what’s going to give you better data on the conversion actions and signals you can feed into your ad platforms.

With increasing demand for healthcare privacy and evolving HIPAA regulations, it’s a perfect time to update your martech stack. A well-integrated data platform will be compliant, provide you with better signals, and offer more transparency in reporting so you can see exactly the impact that marketing is having—essential in a high-competition environment where growth is the goal, but budgets are tight.

2) Align Capacity Goals with Media Strategy

Capacity is one of the most critical inputs for any advertising strategy, because you need to know which practices are struggling with production and which are already overbooked for three months. That’s vital info to have BEFORE you start allocating ad spend, not only for driving same-store growth but for making sure you’re maximizing your marketing ROI.

Never base marketing on “a general sense” of capacity.

Capacity is nuanced and you need specific data to get results. Talk with operations to get a deeper understanding of your capacity on every level: capacity by location, by doctor, hygienist, and by service line. Marketing and operations need to work together to develop a process that ensures the current capacity—which will fluctuate—is being integrated into the current ad strategy and budgeting.

3) Focus on the Types of Patients You Need to Grow

Marketing needs to be in conversation with the C-suite to understand exactly what is needed for growth – and to make sure the focus is in the right place.

Not all leads are the same. Stop treating all search intent and service-line conversions the same.

I’ve been beating this drum for a while because I’m still seeing some DSOs who are tracking “Cost Per Lead” as a single metric across everything as if a $100 cleaning lead had the same value as a $3000 orthodontics lead. Which one do you want more of?

You need a good martech stack so you know which clicks turned into cleaning and which turned into an implant procedure. Feeding that data back into the advertising algorithms enables them to find more users like that one. 

Don’t be afraid to prioritize the leads you need with value-based bidding. If you want to get more valuable leads, you should take that value into account in your targeting and bidding and be willing to bid higher for qualified leads that will have a higher payoff on conversion.

A Reason To Smile

It may seem like a rough time to be a DSO, given the tight money situation on all ends. But what differentiates strong organizations from the rest is precisely their ability to continue growing through tough times.

I hope some of the strategies I’ve outlined above can help your dental group weather the storm and continue to bring in new patients, by using an integrated martech stack to align your marketing strategy with your capacity goals and the types of patients you need. We’ve helped many clients to do just that, by putting together a comprehensive patient acquisition strategy that leverages all of the above tactics and many more—and most importantly, always tailored to their specific situation. No two practices are exactly alike, so it’s essential to understand the relevant factors for YOUR practice so those inputs can help you drive new patient acquisition and get the most out of your marketing investment.

The post Dykema DSO Takeaways & Dental Marketing Strategy for 2025 appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

In this article, we’ll be diving into the debate of a branded house vs. house of brands approach for DSOs by talking about the pros and cons of both:

• Branded House Structure
• House of Brands Structure

About Branded House Structuring

Working under one branded house is also known as market centralization, which happens during the post-merger integration (PMI) phase of your business dealings. Basically, this process involves incorporating all your new brands under your brand name by centralizing marketing activities in a seamless way.

This has worked successfully for many brands, including Aspen Dental, Heartland Dental, and Dental Care Alliance, which are able to provide care to patients across the United States under one parent company’s name. 

Related: How Marketing Centralization Helps DSOs Accelerate Growth

Branded House Pros

There are countless advantages to centralizing your marketing strategies and unifying your acquired brands underneath one brand name. It helps maximize efficiency and profitability all while taking a lot of hard work off your shoulders so that you can focus on other aspects of your DSO. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the main upsides of a branded house structure.

Convenient and Efficient Brand Management

With a branded house, you will only have a single, brand to focus on, which means you only have to focus on a single website, logo, brand message, and tech stack. Within a tech stack, you’ll be able to have a singular CRM system, call center, call tracking software, online scheduling systems, chatbots, and more. 

This centralization of all these different systems will make life easier for you and the businesses working with you. 

Easier to Build Brand Awareness

With a holistic marketing strategy at work, you can create a sense of cohesion and unity amongst all these brands you’ve acquired, making you much more noticeable and trustworthy to potential patients. 

Since your brand will be well-known and accessible to many people, you will have more opportunities to present new offers and products to your clientele. This is because customers will be much more willing to accept change from a brand they know and trust.

Better Scalability

Having one brand also makes scaling easier since you won’t have to start from scratch every time you acquire a new dental practice or open a new location. Instead, you’ll have repeatable patient acquisition processes in place that you can quickly implement. This will allow you to maximize profitability by ensuring new locations are ready to accept patients as soon as possible.

With everything being so streamlined, it will also be much easier to identify issues with scaling, so you can quickly adjust your strategies and get every brand back on track. Ultimately, you will save yourself a lot of time and energy by only having to do this once rather than over and over again.

Branded House Cons

Despite all the advantages of using a branded house marketing strategy, there are a handful of downsides as well. With everything under one umbrella, you may find yourself having issues with maintaining a positive reputation, building trust with consumers, acquiring new dental brands, and more. 

Here are some more concepts for you to consider before you make a decision.

Reputation Relies on the Parent Brand

Arguably, the biggest pitfall of a branded house is how much it relies on the reputation of just one brand. All locations are tied directly to your DSO, which means if your image takes a hit, every entity underneath you does, too.

These days, consumers are already distrusting of brands, especially large corporations. This leads to many developing an “all or nothing” approach when it comes to reacting to malpractices. One bad hit to your reputation can potentially lose a large portion of your client base, and it won’t be a simple task to win them back.

Lack of Trust from Potential Customers of These Dental Brands

Like we stated above, consumers don’t naturally trust businesses. Plus, people don’t love the idea of large “corporate” entities either. While having all your brands underneath one name improves brand awareness, it can also lead to a lack of trust. 

This isn’t because you’re doing something wrong; it more has to do with having fewer opportunities to form a real relationship with your customers. In many cases, patients will feel like this is more transactional and are searching for some form of an established relationship. 

This mentality is what drives so many people to family-owned and operated businesses rather than corporations, and it is something you will have to navigate around with a branded house if you want to gain loyal customers.

Related: Shining a Light on Your Dentists: DSO Marketing That Patients Love

Challenges with Acquisition and Integrating New Dental Brands 

With a branded house, it’s not only hard to gain loyal customers; it’s hard to acquire existing dental practices and brands, too. Established dental group owners often feel a strong connection to their brand and don’t want to feel like they are “selling out” to a larger entity that will undo their hard work and essentially erase their legacy.

This is definitely a tough one to work around because you will be making changes to their organization. When navigating this issue, it’s important not to lie about your intentions but still compromise with them to ensure they know they still have a say in their business. 

Once you do land a new practice, the hard part will not be over. With a strong sense of brand loyalty in place, it can often be difficult to get their team on board with your new branding guidelines. So, you will have to work harder to keep them happy as you’re incorporating them into your branded house.

About House of Brands Structuring

Instead of housing all your acquired brands under one name, house of brands structuring allows each business to keep its own name, logo, identity, and more, giving them a greater sense of identity while still getting to enjoy the benefits of being a part of a DSO.

House of Brands Pros

There are many benefits to having a house of brands rather than a branded house. For starters, this type of structuring allows for more diversification in terms of consumer bases and usually makes the dental companies themselves feel more comfortable. Here are some of the top advantages to having a house of brands.

More Options for Personalization and Customer Retention

While a unified front holds many benefits, individualization does, too. By having unique brands, you have many more opportunities for personalizing each one and creating a customized experience for new and returning patients. 

With healthcare being a personal and sensitive industry, being able to form a relationship with their provider is helpful for customer retention in the long run. Overall, it is much easier to build trust and form a relationship with clients as a unique brand rather than as a large corporation.

More Diverse Target Audiences

Moreover, having unique brands will make it easier to reach a larger target audience as well. Instead of operating underneath one branding strategy, each practice can have its own messaging and overall aesthetic, which can be incredibly helpful when it comes to attracting diverse customer segments.

Some examples of these different market niches include:

• Boutique Cosmetic Dentistry
• Family Dentistry
• Sedation Dentistry
• Budget Dentistry
• Orthodontics

…and more!

Client Acquisitions are Much Easier

By allowing dental groups to retain their individual brand identities, you’ll find that it is typically much easier to sign on new practices with a house of brands. 

Dentists will feel better knowing they still have their own identity while enjoying the other advantages of joining your DSO. With this structure in place, you will get to acquire many unique businesses and leverage their individuality.

House of Brands Cons

On the downside, having a house of brands structure will definitely leave you with more work as you’ll be handling individual brands as individuals. Furthermore, you won’t have as much power since your brands will be broken into separate spaces instead of being one entity. 

Whether this extra work is worth it is up to you and how you wish to run your DSO, but we’ll dive a bit deeper into the more negative aspects of this type of marketing strategy, so you can get the full picture.

Overall Operations will be Less Efficient

One of the biggest pitfalls of a house of brands structure is it puts much more work on your shoulders as the DSO. Since you’ll be working with individual brands, that means you’ll be monitoring and managing separate websites, ad campaigns, marketing strategies, tech stacks, and everything in between.

To offset this extra work, it can be helpful to have a larger team working within your DSO, but this also comes at a cost. This is something to consider as you begin structuring and acquiring new dental groups.

Harder to Analyze Success

Since you’ll be managing all these separate systems for each dental practice, it can also be much more challenging to measure success and extrapolate useful metrics and data to drive your marketing strategies forward. There are plenty of helpful software programs out there to help with data analysis, but the bottom line is it will be more work for you. 

It’s also challenging to tie disparate systems together. Tech integrations aren’t always easy, and you may not be able to gain insights across different brands or regions. 

Challenging to Build Brand Awareness

Without a single branding strategy, it can be harder to build brand awareness on a larger scale. That sense of cohesion that a branded house offers won’t be there, which will hurt you in terms of being noticed by a large target audience. 

To the average person who doesn’t really know how DSOs operate, each business underneath you will seem like a completely separate entity that has nothing to do with one another. While this is beneficial in terms of trust and loyalty, it takes a toll on overall brand awareness and equity.

Where Does Your DSO Fit Into the Picture?

When it comes to choosing the right structure for your dental support organization, it’s important to remember that everything is about balance. As you’ve learned from this article, both approaches have their advantages and setbacks, which means using just one approach might not be the right option for you.

In some markets, it might be beneficial for you to retain an existing brand instead of incorporating it under a branded house. On the other hand, if an acquired dental group has a poor reputation, it might be better to incorporate it into the main brand and start afresh.

At the end of the day, the decision is yours to make, so be flexible in your decisions. While you may be tempted to make a decision and stick to it, it’s okay to compromise. If you want to learn more about DSO new patient acquisition strategies, reach out to our team at Cardinal Digital Marketing.

The post DSO Marketing: Branded House vs. House of Brands appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

With inflation continuing to, well, inflate, it’s really putting the squeeze on anyone whose income doesn’t vastly outpace their expenses. People are prioritizing the things like food and utilities that they need to live, while the “might be nice” and “maybe one day I should” categories (which include elective treatments like clear aligners) are being indefinitely delayed.

This in turn is really putting the bite on the dental industry, which is already a very competitive landscape where it’s hard to stand out and differentiate yourself. So how do you overcome those difficulties and put together an effective digital strategy to reach the right consumers and start getting back some of that sweet orthodontic patient acquisition?

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Build a Data-enabled Advertising Ecosystem

Before ramping up your advertising budgets, you need to invest time and resources in building a solid foundation of actionable data that will drive your campaigns.

You can even think of the data as an aligner for your marketing because it will continuously nudge your advertising where it needs to go and ensure that it grows in the right direction.

The first step is putting together an integrated call tracking and online booking platform. Those are your two biggest sources for valuable patient data, which will not only help you identify the higher-value leads (like clear aligner leads) but also give you the data you need to make the algorithms work for you.

Algorithms can only run off what you feed them. If you don’t tell them which leads converted into patients and how much that patient is worth, then the ad algorithms won’t be able to find more of the leads you want. 

On the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast, Amol Nirgudkar from Patient Prism digs into how call tracking informs advertising.

“We launched AdWords and Analytics integrations on top of the AI we built. We wanted to make sure that what we were sending to Google, whether it’s analytics or AdWords, was very accurate in terms of conversions. The AI knows that this patient called, they booked an appointment, they wanted an appointment for Invisalign, for example. That specific conversion can now be written back specifically into the conversion bucket called “Invisalign – website calls for mobile collector calls,” within ads or within your goals that are specifically for Invisalign.” 

Keep in mind that it’s not good enough to just use any random call tracking and queryable reporting, because if you’re handling any PHI (Personally identifiable Health Information), then you’ve got to be HIPAA-compliant and sign a BAA with any company that will be handling the data for you.

There’s a lot to learn about how to put together a HIPAA-compliant marketing technology stack, but your easiest option is to use tools created specifically to capture quality signals with healthcare in mind: 

• Patient Prism (call tracker)
• Liine (call tracker)
• Nexhealth (online booking platform)

2. Map The Patient’s Journey

To advertise to your patient, you have to know your patient. Understanding the motivations and behaviors of your ideal patient is the key to orthodontic patient acquisition (or really, any patient acquisition). That has to come first, so it can inform your keyword strategy, ad messaging, creative strategy, etc.

A lot of that knowledge is going to come from those call trackers, which is why they’re so important, but there are other ways to understand your patients, from surveys to online research. You’ve got to ask the big questions about the patients who might make the big purchases. Questions like:

• Who wants aligners?
• Why do they want them?
• Where are they going for info?
• What questions are they asking? 
• What barriers are in their way?

Once you can answer all of these, you’ll have a much better idea of what keywords you should be using and what kind of messaging is most likely to be effective.

3. Capture Existing Demand with Revenue-based Bidding

One of the big mistakes I see a lot of practices make is to focus purely on maximizing the number of leads.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Not all dental leads are equal. 

If a routine cleaning lead that pans out is going to bring you $100, and a clear aligner lead that pans out is going to bring you $3,000, you don’t have to be a finance whiz to figure out which of those leads is likely to be more valuable.

Your marketing should take that higher revenue potential into account when you’re trying to divvy up a limited advertising budget. And with a good call tracking solution like Patient Prism, you can even identify the callers who are interested in braces or aligners and then automagically send that data back to the ad platform so it can find similar users and use that data to guide your bidding strategy.

So how does all this relate to revenue-based bidding? And for that matter, what even is revenue-based bidding? Basically, it means not treating all leads as equal, but focusing on the revenue that you’ll bring in from a successful conversion. So if clear aligner leads that convert bring in 30x the revenue of routine cleaning leads, you should be willing to pay more for that category of leads.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should run out and immediately start spending 30x as much on those leads. You’ve got to be smart about where you use revenue-based bidding, and the best place to start is with leads that have a high chance of conversion. That means aiming specifically for high-intent leads who are ready to book, so with revenue-based bidding you want to:

• Target your campaign at the bottom of the funnel
• Focus on patients who have a high intent to book an appointment now
• Focus on bottom-funnel, conversion-ready keywords like “orthodontist near me”

4. Use Geographical Data to Target Campaigns

Have I mentioned all leads aren’t equal? Well, all neighborhoods also aren’t equal, which you probably know if you’ve ever looked for a place to live. And these differences have a direct effect on relevance to your business:

• Affluent neighborhoods are more likely to have income for elective healthcare expenditures
• Family-centric neighborhoods are more likely to have children who might need orthodontic work
• Neighborhoods of younger struggling singles won’t drive as much ortho traffic

You have existing patient data, so crunch that data to figure out which zip codes and services are generating the most revenue, and target accordingly. If you’re getting the bulk of your clear aligner leads from two zip codes, you probably want to allocate a larger portion of your budget there, while allocating a more moderate budget to maintain a presence in lower-performing areas.

And don’t hesitate to create separate campaigns for high-performing zip codes or zip codes that have generated a lot of revenue for a particular service. 

5. Build Demand for Clear Aligners & Expand Pipeline of Potential Patients

Currently, there is a low demand for braces, and the search volume for clear aligners is even lower. 

Once you’ve optimized your performance at the bottom of the funnel, if you still want to generate more clear aligner leads, you’ll need to expand up the funnel to catch people earlier along their patient journey.

This is where full-funnel marketing really shines, educating people and influencing them early on to generate awareness and demand. You want to reach these new audiences and tap into their motivations, developing compelling content to get them to consider orthodontic treatments, especially because many of them don’t even know what aligners are.

Put together some strong messaging to show them why they should be interested in clear aligners:

• No one can see them
• Affordable compared to traditional braces
• Get the smile you’ve always wanted

You need to break through the noise and motivate them to learn more—and this holds true for everything from dental implants to surgical procedures that help with TMJ. Upper funnel education is how you widen the pipeline, and it takes time, but it will pay off with more orthodontic patient acquisition.

In Conclusion

This may seem complicated, but it’s really all about using the data you have to focus on high-quality leads that are most likely to drive big revenue.

If you’re hyperfocused on cost per lead (CPL), you’ll miss out on leads that are more likely to convert into actual patients and net new patients with a higher lifetime value. 

And of course, if you need any help in putting together effective full-funnel marketing, you can always drop us a line.

The post DSO Guide To Increasing Clear Aligner Leads appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Putting patients first means more loyal patients and steady growth in a highly competitive market – every brand’s dream.

How do you make sure patients are at the forefront of your strategy? 

We sat down with Melanie Basile, Chief Growth Officer at The Smilist (60+ location DSO) to pick her brain about how marketing can:

• Improve patient care
• Simplify the patient journey
• Create a cohesive brand experience across channels

Each of these can result in growth for your DSO. With her extensive background in digital marketing across various industries, including beauty and consumer electronics, Melanie brings a unique perspective to DSO marketing. Let’s dig in.

Digital Front Door

As a starting point, we asked Melanie about the foundation of digital media. Where do you start, and how do you expand out from there? 

“One of the first things I did was set up PPC campaigns and worked on optimizing the website and thinking about user experience,” Melanie told us. “That was the foundation. A great website is locally optimized and optimized for keywords. I was thinking about UI, which is big in e-commerce. And then, how do you attract, convert, and retain? That was the foundation.”

One key ingredient many miss out on? Online appointments. While there is some resistance in the industry, as Melanie sees it, leveraging online appointments is essential for any DSO looking to create a great digital front door.

“Not every office, not every doctor and team wants to go on that,” Melanie shared, “but it’s really, really, a must have from my perspective. If we’re spending money online, we need to have online booking set up. That’s how people want to schedule appointments. They don’t wanna call. Some do, and that’s really important too, but we need both.”

Patient Journey & Content Alignment

Having established the right foundation, where do you go next? Melanie emphasizes the importance of delivering the right content at the right stage of the patient’s journey. High quality, educational content is a must, but you have to make sure it reaches your patients at the right time. “What we are really focusing on right now is ensuring that we have the right content at the right stage in the patient’s journey,” she told us.

AI Tech for Patient Insights & Social Listening

How can you determine what is the right content at the right stage? At the Smilist, they turned to AI, undertaking a social listening project to try and gain insights into what is motivating patients and also what may be holding them back. During this monthslong project, conversational AI analyzed 1,500,000 conversations in which people talked about their dental experiences and what they were looking for in care.

This approach proved fruitful, delivering key insights into patient drivers and allowing Melanie and her team to understand where and how they should adapt. “We engaged with this whole social listening project last year, which is really cool, really insightful to understand… What is motivating patients in the dental category? What are the decision drivers? What are the fears? What are the concerns? And then how do we adapt our voice and our brand and our content to be, you know, authentic and be an authority, across every single channel.”

Importance of the Dental Team/Hiring the Right People

Along the way, the Smilist team happened upon one surprising insight. While it’s common to assume that “the dentist is the MVP,” as Melanie phrased it, the dental team was actually front and center for many patients. 

“The entire dental team is significant in creating a positive patient experience, not just the dentist,” Melanie asserted. “It’s about the whole team. That full team in the dental office from the person answering the phone to smiling when the patient walks in the door to the dental assistant, to the hygienist.”

DSOs looking to convert first-time patients into long-term and loyal patients need to focus on finding the right team— one that focuses on patient experience and care, and works together to keep patients engaged and happy with their care. 

Learning from Other Industries

As we wrapped our conversation up, we asked: How do you stay on trend and get ahead of things for your industry? In response, Melanie emphasized the importance of networking with professionals in your region and industry. I think it’s just really important to find the industry leaders and groups out there…Attend those events. Stay connected through your peers and your colleagues.”

Don’t limit yourself to the DSO space, however. Melanie also stressed the importance of looking beyond healthcare for marketing insights, strategy, and processes. 

“I like applying my past life to Dental because it is retail-facing. Yes, this is a patient experience. But why does that have to be different than a customer experience in some ways? You just have to find for yourself what is out there and stay in touch with it.” 

Conclusion

All in, this wide-ranging conversation with Melanie Basile delivered a lot of detail into how DSOs can improve their digital marketing and keep those patients coming in the door. Thanks again to Melanie, and head over to her LinkedIn to learn more about her and her efforts at The Smilist.  

If you want to see how Cardinal is continuing to help The Smilist grow and reach even more patients, check out our case study here.

The post DSO Marketing: How to Turn First-Time Visitors into Lifelong Patients with Insights From Melanie Basile appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

How Healthcare Marketers Are Using AI

The first thing to know about AI is that it’s not actually intelligent. It’s not a doctor, a marketing expert, or an insightful strategist. It’s more like an eager-to-please student who is going to hastily research to tell you whatever it thinks you want to hear based on your instructions — with no guarantees that any of it is factual. If you’ve been following the news lately, you know that Google’s newly added AI Search has been mocked for telling users to eat rocks, glue, and undercooked chicken.

This is why all AI tools need to be deployed strategically by experts who understand how to use them properly. An AI given bad instructions or pulling data from untrustworthy sources is not going to produce good results. But when used properly, especially for data analysis, AI tools can offer a way for marketers to improve efficiency, predict performance, and supercharge their data analysis.

“AI is not a pocket-sized Don Draper. The supercomputer is not gonna be this brilliant creative mind that is gonna come in and revolutionize your positioning. It is gonna allow you to do some things that were previously laborious that will help you to create a testing engine to understand what messaging works, and to create a copy generation engine that is much faster than manually coming up with all these copy concepts yourself.”

—Rich Briddock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cardinal Digital Marketing

Using AI For Copywriting and Content Ideation

Generative AI is the primary use case for AI that most marketers are familiar with. There are multiple options available for users looking to have AI do their copywriting, such as:

• Copy.ai
• Chat GPT
• Writesonic
• Jasper.ai
• Describely.ai

Although AI-generated copy still requires a lot of iterating and editing the output to produce something worth using, some users still find value in generating copy through AI.

“I have a custom GPT I trained for external new patient communications that I’ve gotten to have a fairly consistent tone and one for internal communications that uses a slightly different tone. Typically, with a good prompt and several iterations, followed by manual editing, I can get to a final document in less time than it would take manually.” 

—Paul Gruensfelder, VP of Marketing at Select Dental Management 

Even for healthcare marketers who would rather not use AI to generate their copy, there is value to be had in harnessing AI’s powerful data analysis for content ideation. Marketers can use AI to crunch the data and determine which issues are most frequently being talked about by patients. AI can even suggest topics for posts and emails that are more relevant to patients.

AI Tools For User Research

The best way to reach patients is to know what they want. AI can automatically organize survey results to help visualize important trends. It can also provide an in-depth analysis of all available data on how patients feel about various services, as well as identifying patient patterns in website usage. These insights not only allow a redesign keyed to optimizing the patient experience, but also allow for easier segmentation to improve and personalize marketing efforts.

Once patient profiles have been identified, some AI tools can even create virtual patients that mimic real patient behaviors to provide additional data points on site usage. While the “average user” may never exist, multiple differentiated profiles can be created. Whether you’re creating virtual users or just analyzing your current user data, you can consider using AI marketing tools like: 

• Maze
• Synthetic Users
• QoQo
• Notably.ai
• Dovetail

These tools can offer additional insight into user behavior, optimize your current surveys, and potentially allow for new market research and feedback before a site update is launched without needing human users.

“Synthetic Users actually creates AI users based on target ICP (ideal customer profile) information you put in. You tell the platform about your target persona and it will AI generate those personas, those users, and then you can ask them questions like a focus group. We’ve done this for a couple clients and we’ve felt like the results we’ve got from this have been pretty on point with the knowns that we have from actual focus groups that we’ve done ourselves. The outputs have been very similar.” 

—Rich Briddock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cardinal Digital Marketing

AI Video Analysis & Podcast Transcription

AI is great at automating well-defined tasks that would be time-consuming to do by hand, and creating transcripts of podcasts and videos falls squarely into that category. AI video tools can not only generate complete transcripts of videos but also analyze and summarize key themes for each section, giving you a head start on putting together clips and writeups for social media.

There are plenty of good options for automated transcripts and more: 

• Speak AI
• Fathom
• Trint
• Otter.ai
• Notta.ai

If you’ve ever had to repeatedly re-watch an interview you’ve done to try to find appropriate clips to share online, you know how valuable an automated searchable transcript with topic highlights can be.

“AI has really multiplied our efficiency on so many things. It’s really fun. I’ve enjoyed it. Even just prompting is interesting and fun to me. Since then, I’ve been working on an AI chatbot, which I want to integrate into our website. That’s the project I’m working on this year that I’m really excited about.”

—Maite Uribe-Echevarria, VP of Marketing at Sanova Dermatology

AI Forecasting & Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis drives a lot of modern healthcare marketing because most companies like to have an idea of what campaigns will perform well before launching them. AI forecasting is a powerful tool that gives marketers the ability to predict future trends based on historical data—which means data-driven campaign strategies with more efficient resource allocation.

By analyzing data to see what patients are searching for, predictive AI tools can identify patient patterns and calculate how likely they are to seek out certain healthcare services. This lets healthcare marketers stay ahead of their competition by understanding what types of campaigns will perform well with certain patient groups and allows the option of proactively reaching out to target groups with a campaign specifically tailored to resonate with them while offering the services they need.

AI forecasting tools include: 

• Vertex
• SEOmonitor 
• SAP Predictive Analytics
• SAS Analytics
• H2o.ai

Data Analysis With AI

I’ve been championing data integration for years because your data is only as good as the actionable insights you can get out of it. AI is perfect for crunching a bunch of data and spitting out useful insights and visualizations to help you improve your marketing strategies as well as your patient care. Here are some of the top AI data analysis options:

• Peerlogic
• Tableau
• Polymer
• Akkio
• Monkeylearn

You’re probably sitting on a lot of data that could be valuable to your healthcare organization, but there are obstacles preventing you from accessing it. Maybe it’s siloed, maybe it’s trapped in legacy systems, or maybe you just don’t have the time/money/resources to get at it. However, by using AI to analyze patient data, reviews, and surveys, you can spot the larger trends in the data. Gaining insights into the patient experience and satisfaction levels will let you identify key needs in the patient population—and adjust your marketing and healthcare services accordingly.

What’s more, you can even use this data proactively to generate new marketing. That’s what e-commerce has been doing for years, and now healthcare marketers are seeing what AI can do for other industries and figuring out how to adopt similar strategies.

“The concept is that CarMax sells cars. People write reviews on cars. What they did was build a large language model based on the reviews that people wrote about cars. Now, when you go look up Audi R8 or something, it will generate what people like about the cars from blogs and reviews based on actual internal AI data. It’s a brilliant use case because they’re pushing SEO to a new level.” 

—Ibrahim Albaba, Analytics Manager at CLS Health

Enhancing SEO with AI

Using AI in SEO isn’t exactly new, as anyone who has used Google’s Keyword Planner knows. However, analyzing search trends can give you insights that can help you find the best keywords and optimize content. And good tools can also help you track competitors and boost your website rankings on Google.

“We use some AI tools for forecasting, like SEO Monitor, and we use Writesonic for AI content support. We then, of course, use the standing AI support tools like ChatGPT for general market analysis, framework, and competitive intelligence. Lastly – many of the standard SEO tools like Semrush, Screaming Frog, etc, are also implementing AI for support, which is a little less ‘interesting’ but still part of the machine.” 

—Rob Sauter, SVP of Earned & Owned Media, Cardinal Digital Marketing

Elevating Performance: Advanced AI Applications in Healthcare Marketing

Beyond the basics of how healthcare marketers are already using AI, there are a few opportunities for using more advanced AI applications in healthcare marketing looking forward:

Patient-Centric Messaging & Copy

Anyword is an AI copy creation platform that generates copy using a 3-pronged approach, incorporating:

1. A detailed patient persona
2. Competitor ad copy
3. Customer sentiment analysis

It combines these three inputs to create detailed prompts and generate copy aimed squarely at a particular group of potential patients.

“Anyword is also iterating off stuff that already works with similar brands. So, for example, if you are Talkspace and you use this and maybe BetterHelp is using it too… it knows what is working for BetterHelp and it can tell you that something is likely to perform, because we’ve seen this perform well with similar brands. When you look at a specific asset, it will tell you how well it resonates with each of your personas, whether it’s a gender neutral tone of voice, whether it’s more a female neutral tone of voice, male neutral, and what age groups it thinks it will appeal to in terms of language that’s being used. So maybe, if you’re talking to 65+, you’re using more arcane language. The better you set it up and the more time you spend with it, the better the output is gonna be.” 

—Rich Briddock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cardinal Digital Marketing

Ad Performance Forecasting

Google continues to dominate the ad market, and its Vertex AI (built on its Gemini AI) provides forecasting models for deep machine learning. Its TiDE model architecture greatly sped up performance, allowing speedier data forecasting—and few people have more data on ads than Google itself. 

This allows forecasting that not only analyzes various scenarios and predicts future performance but provides actionable insights that can drive budget recommendations and other campaign optimizations.

“AI definitely helps to unlock some of those forecasting capabilities. We went from using performance planner and doing manual logarithmic regressions for our clients, to leveraging Google Vertex AI, which has a pretty cool forecasting solution and model, which uses machine learning.” 

—Rich Briddock, Chief Strategy Officer, Cardinal Digital Marketing

AI-er Beware: Caveats and Considerations

While it’s easy to be excited about the many possibilities for healthcare marketing and AI, there are three things you should keep in mind before rushing off and immediately signing up for all the powerful AI tools mentioned above:

1) AI Can Lie

From Google’s AI suggesting that people should eat rocks and glue to lawyers finding that AI research cites non-existent cases, anyone using AI needs to understand that you can’t blindly trust what it tells you. Any content or recommendations generated by AI must be QAed by a human expert with enough knowledge to know the trash from the treasure—because AI will offer you both with the same amount of confidence.

2) HIPAA Compliance is Required

AI doesn’t know enough to follow HIPAA regulations, which means you have to be responsible with all PHI. This means not feeding PHI into any AI without a Business Associate Agreement in place — which includes training AI on patient data.

It’s easy to forget this when tempted by the efficiencies of ChatGPT, whether you’re setting up a chatbot that could quickly answer patient queries about their specific information or using AI to generate a transcript of a patient-physician conversation and produce medical notes. But feeding that data to ChatGPT means feeding it to another company – OpenAI – with which you probably don’t have a BAA. And that’s a HIPAA violation.

However, if you contract with a data analytics firm with a BAA in place, then you can make use of their proprietary AI without risk of HIPAA violation. 

3) AI is Not Always More Efficient

AI is a technology with a lot of potential, but blindly adopting without evaluating how it fits into your system is a recipe for disaster. ChatGPT keyword suggestions can be useful, but aren’t a replacement for Semrush. Generative AI may offer ideas, but will need a lot of QA to filter out the bad ideas. 

In short, using AI just to use AI will often end up creating more work than it saves, so it’s important to ensure that the technology is deployed with specific goals in mind.

The key, as always, is to figure out how to leverage AI to do what AI does best—and make sure that smart and experienced humans oversee the process.

For a more depth look at how you can integrate these tools into your marketing strategy, watch our livestream recording and view our presentation deck on the topic. 

The post Harnessing the Power of AI Marketing for Healthcare appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

What’s the big deal?

Brought to you by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists, HMPS is where the brightest minds in healthcare marketing come together to share new ideas and strategies that will help shape the future of the industry. 

This isn’t just another conference; it’s a chance to tackle the challenges we all face in healthcare marketing and find smart solutions together. Think less jargon, more real talk.

And we’ll be right there with you at Booth #14!

Our Mission at HMPS: Connect, Learn, and Lead in Healthcare Marketing

At Cardinal, we’re passionate about helping healthcare organizations connect patients with the care they need by crafting data-driven, HIPAA-compliant marketing solutions.

We never settle and continually seek opportunities to improve our work and impact, which means learning and sharing insights on current marketing trends, technologies, and strategies with other industry leaders. That’s exactly why we’re headed to HMPS this year—to mix, mingle, and share ideas to help us all become better marketers, so we can connect more patients to care. Medical marketing is marketing that matters. 

Marketing Solutions for a HIPAA-Regulated World

Over the past year, OCR’s administration and enforcement of HIPAA rules have forced marketers to forget everything they know about capturing data and building ad audiences. HIPAA has fundamentally changed how you market to patients. Familiar tools and data sources are now off-limits, and you must adapt or risk a serious lawsuit. 

But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Our unique approach to HIPAA-compliant patient acquisition isn’t just about playing it safe. 

We help you bring in new patients, fuel revenue growth, and collect data-driven insights while safeguarding patient privacy–no compromises are needed. From building a fully compliant martech stack to developing a full-funnel media strategy, we ensure you engage patients effectively at every step of their journey to find care. Here’s how!

How We Build Compliant Martech Ecosystems to Fuel Data-Enabled Advertising

When it comes to navigating this new HIPAA-regulated marketing world, it’s all about striking the right balance. At Cardinal, our process is designed to guide you through evaluating the risks and crafting a digital strategy that engages patients and complies with HIPAA regulations. Let’s walk you through:

Tech Health Check: First, we ensure your current marketing tools and tech are HIPAA compliant. No stone is left unturned. We’re talking about everything from tracking pixels to your entire marketing stack.

Switching to Safe Tech & Smart Data Capture: If you’re using tech isn’t up to HIPAA snuff, we’ll find you privacy-first alternatives. We also focus on capturing the important stuff, like patient data from EHRs and appointment scheduling, all within HIPAA guidelines.

Unified Tracking & Smarter Ads: We’ll get you set up with HIPAA-compliant tech solutions like Freshpaint, Liine, Patient Prism, or Mixpanel (just to name a few) for clear, unified tracking to ensure that quality data captured is safely sent back to ad platforms  Then, we use that data to make your ads more effective!

Flexible Reporting: Our custom dashboards are designed to be flexible and fast, allowing us to iterate quickly for different stakeholders. Reports are adaptable and insightful, helping you track from the first website visit to revenue. 

Full-Funnel Strategy to Connect at Every Stage: We use a full-funnel approach, engaging potential patients from initial awareness to final conversion. We invest in creating targeted content for each stage of the patient journey, ensuring it’s not only informative but also encourages action.

We’ve cracked the code on merging HIPAA compliance with powerful marketing strategies that connect providers with patients. Our approach will give your healthcare marketing the edge it needs in today’s competitive landscape, which is exactly why we’re bringing our know-how to HMPS.

The post We’re Attending HMPS 2024: Revolutionize Healthcare Marketing with HIPAA Compliance and Innovation appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Sometimes, that means taking a couple of days in Miami at the beginning of March and kicking back on South Beach with a Corona and 2000 other registered attendees to hear from leading investors, execs, and founders about the latest trends in healthcare private equity for 2024.

Yeah, my job’s not all bad.

But just because you missed out on the party doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the key takeaways for healthcare investing, so let me share some big insights from the event:

The Path to Growth has Changed

The biggest thing we heard from the get-go is that things are very different than they were two years ago—and not just because of inflation. The shrinking labor pool is a very real problem. During the opening session, 43% of attendees said that their #1 challenge was the labor shortage.

And that’s not just on the front lines but in every layer of the organization, including management and even the C-suite.

The other big topic that came up for a lot of attendees was the difficulty with integrations. And it turns out both of those issues have the same solution:

Hire Good People

This isn’t a new observation, but for two days, it seemed that everything kept returning to this key point.

How do you handle a labor shortage? Hire good people.
How do you grow an organization organically? Hire good people.
How do you build a strong company culture? Hire good people.
How do you make integrations go more smoothly? Hire good people.

Again, this goes for the whole organization, including the C-suite. Good people running mission-driven businesses who invest in talent recruitment will build the strongest companies. You can’t say it too many times: Hire good people.

Follow Your Mission

Of course, once you have good people, you still need them united in a common mission. So good leadership means staying true to your mission. This, in turn, means your mission has to matter, it can’t just be boilerplate corporate jargon, you actually need a strong mission you care about that can inspire others.

That way, when you invest in your employer brand and stay true to your mission, your company will actually stand for something—which will help you attract talent as well as, eventually, potential buyers.

Those were the two biggest high-level takeaways from the event in terms of building a great business, but we also heard a lot of other great advice about building value that I’d divide into three general categories:

1) SCALABILITY & SUSTAINABILITY

They had a poll asking what was the most attractive trait to potential buyers (besides EBITDA, of course).

The top answer, from 37% of responses, was “Scalability.” Close behind at 30% was “Maintainable growth”.

But Matt Podowitz from CFGI noted that “Sustainability” was missing from the poll. He pointed out that growth doesn’t always lead to a successful exit. If you want to grow sustainably, you can’t just focus on rapid expansion; you must find a way to hold onto what made you a great company at 50 as you scale up to 200.

Buying a business is easy.

Building a sustainable business that can scale is a lot harder and requires private equity investors to communicate and collaborate with management teams.

Management Alignment

I know I’ve been hammering marketing-operations alignment, but Rebecca Levy from Summit Health laid out how important alignment is for the management team. She talked a lot about how getting a magical management team where everyone is rowing together is vital to growing an organization—and if you want to grow sustainably, you can’t throw out the people who got the company to where it is.

She said, “Don’t build a company just to sell it; build a company to last.”

Good advice, especially because it’s obvious if you’re just looking to sell, people will recognize that and not be committed. Adding to your staffing and retention issues

So, if you want to grow a great healthcare organization that will last, you need a strong management team that knows how to build a business, and also…

2) MISSION & CULTURE

A strong mission and company culture is something that was mentioned repeatedly.

It’s easy for those of us in marketing to look at a mission and company culture and see a Unique Selling Proposition, something that your company can offer to customers. It absolutely is, but it’s also so much more than that. It affects…

Recruiting & Retention

You have to consider company culture when recruiting. You’re rarely going to find the perfect candidate, but if you have to choose between someone with a little less experience and someone who doesn’t fit the culture, take the perfect culture fit. That’ll further the company’s mission every time.

If someone is a good fit and embodies your core values, they will work well with the rest of your team and make a smooth transition. What they may lack in experience or skills, you can coach or train them. But if someone’s a bad fit for your team to work with, it’s hard to train them out of that.

M&A Integration

Every single speaker agreed that culture is key for pain-free integrations.

Angela Nalwa from Grant Thornton talked about how a smooth integration—and thus a successful acquisition—hinges on a good culture fit.

Stephen Bochner from Korn Ferry discussed how culture integration is the key to growing organizations. A good culture not only allows you to attract new talent but also enables you to retain it. Constant turnover hinders integrations and may result in a loss of critical institutional knowledge.

Lawrence Kraska from Aqua Dermatology meets with every provider during an acquisition. When an acquisition is announced, he and the founder go to each office for 1:1 meetings with all of the physicians. He is adamant that growth “is all about the culture.”

Mission Alignment

One of the great tricks I’ve learned from my work on marketing and ops (MOPS) alignment is that sometimes, the easiest way to get two teams to align is to get them both to align with an overarching mission and goal.

So, it was great to hear Joe Miu from Sheridan Capital Partners discuss using that same strategy to align the whole organization. First, they bring the leadership team together to focus on the mission and values. Then, they have a two-day offsite to bring all the doctors together. They build the mission into the compensation package and even the bonuses so that people are rewarded for living the mission.

That’s a smart way to build an aligned company culture. So once you’ve hired good people, achieved cultural alignment, and have a business primed for sustainable growth, the last step is…

3) OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES

You need to look for opportunities across your organization to improve efficiency.

Investors and management teams are usually looking for quick, big wins, but 2024 is not looking to be a year for rapidly multiplying growth. You can still notch some wins; it just involves looking at the smaller stuff. For instance, investors are seeing a lot more revenue cycle management projects this year—not as glamorous as explosive growth, but still going to give you a very real bump in profits.

Don’t Neglect the Back Office

Historically, the back office is one of the last places healthcare companies have invested. And I can personally vouch for that being true, because we’ve had new clients come to us using patient booking systems from before Google was a thing. The back office got stuck with antiquated tech, and nobody cared about fixing it.

But that’s changing in 2024.

Granted, a big reason it’s changing is the HIPAA regulatory enforcement in marketing, which is forcing companies to update their tech and processes. But this is an opportunity for companies to kill two birds with one stone and find some efficiencies in the process.

Embrace Marketing Technology

There’s a great opportunity for multi-site providers to improve operational efficiency by implementing new marketing tech and processes.

I’ve actually written a lot about this topic. If you want more info, read leveraging martech to improve operational efficiency. Let me give you a quick 3-step plan.

1. Improve the Patient Experience.

Doing that at scale means you need:

• Patient Portals
• Online Scheduling

Patients love being able to schedule and view upcoming appointments and results online—and them doing so instead of calling, frees up time for your admin staff.

2. Streamline Productivity

Anything you can automate saves you time and money. Consider:

• Marketing Automation with CRM/PMS
• Chatbots + Live Chat

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Practice Management Software (PMS) with integrated marketing automation lets you automate reminders and post-appointment care instructions. Chatbots and Live Chat let you serve patients without picking up the phone.

3. Implement Call Tracking

Call analytics centralize your call data so you can use it to market effectively, as well as improve operations. Instead of complaints and requests getting lost in the void, AI-powered call analytics can glean insights from calls and deliver insights to improve the patient experience, identify trianing needs, or even new service opportunities.

The insights from HPE Miami 2024 underscore the critical factors driving success in healthcare investing, including talent acquisition, mission alignment, and operational efficiency. As the industry evolves, embracing these pillars will be crucial for sustained growth and value creation. If you’re seeking assistance in driving growth at your portfolio company, don’t hesitate to reach out to Cardinal. Our experienced team is ready to share proven patient acquisition strategies tailored to high-growth, multi-site provider groups. Contact us today to learn more and propel your portcos forward.

The post Key Takeaways from HPE Miami 2024 + 3 Essential Pillars for Building Value appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

That means you need an effective marketing strategy for patient acquisition before your new office opens. The good news is that there are some simple and effective ways to tell the digital world your new office exists. In following the four steps we recommend in this post, you’ll gain the critical awareness you need to bring in high-quality traffic from search engines and other digital channels.

In our experience, this is the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of ramping up patient acquisition.

1. Lay the Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Groundwork

First of all, let’s be clear: SEO strategies take months to translate into organic rankings, high-intent traffic, and leads. However, you can’t get out the gates without at least laying the groundwork for an SEO strategy you can later scale. To get the most bang for buck, focus on local SEO first.

Build Location Pages for the New Office

As we’ve emphasized elsewhere, dental consumerism is very much local in nature. People mostly patronize the dentists and other oral health professionals near home. However, that doesn’t mean the local market for your de novo office isn’t crowded and competitive.

That said, start by building location pages so you can get your new location information onto your website ASAP. Why? Because Google Local Pack needs your location, hours, and other information to create local, high-intent search experiences such as this one:

You can see from this screenshot that Google is inferring from the keyword phrase that I’m interested in finding an orthodontist nearby. As such, Google Local Pack displays a map and various business listings, including—you guessed it—links to their websites.

The sooner you can build out office-specific location pages, the sooner those de novo offices can begin appearing in these local search experiences. Only, you don’t just want traffic—you want new patient leads, right? So to that end, complete the post-click journey by adding a mobile-optimized contact form.

Lastly, we recommend that yet-to-open de novo offices add an “Opening Soon” banner to their sites. These banners can provide the date of the opening, as well as a link to schedule advance appointments using an online scheduler. Of course, you’ll want to set up a call center point of contact as soon as possible to field these queries appropriately.

Build Citations (and Get Your “NAP” Out There)

Now that you’ve got your name, address, and phone (NAP) onto your website (even if it’s still under construction), as well as your expected open date, it’s time to create a Google My Business listing. Immediately.

Your Google My Business is another key web entity to publish NAP, insurance info, and other relevant content to. As with any Google My Business listing, we recommend that you optimize every aspect you can. No hours yet? No problem—just omit them for now. But do include links or scheduling options that point back to your website.

Here’s what a typical Google My Business dashboard looks like to give you an idea of the rich detail you can give your listing:

Once you’ve established your Google My Business listing, apply the same principles to other citation networks, such as Yelp and Healthgrades. Consider some dentistry-specific networks, such as 1-800 Dentist and Smile Guide.

2. Start Generating Reviews As Soon As Possible

The very day your new office starts accepting patients, make review generation a priority. Reviews are digital currency in more ways than one. For one thing, Google considers positive reviews (both quality and volume) when deciding to raise map visibility.

Reviews are a great way to persuade people to try a new office. Why? Because people check Google Reviews, Yelp, and other review sources as they search for providers. Google Reviews in particular are often embedded directly into search experiences, so prospective patients can’t help but encounter them.

There are two steps you can take right away to begin generating reviews:

• Train front-office and other staff to ask for reviews as patients are wrapping up their appointments
• Add the new office to any review generation tools you have to automate part of the process

Remember, the idea is to generate a consistent flow of positive reviews over time, not necessarily a high volume all at once. Still, you need to attain a handful of reviews to build the digital reputation for the new de novo office.

3. Advertise Smart

Forget about Facebook; focus on paid search. It’s the best way to capture existing demand and generate new patients. It won’t be cheap to build a strong patient acquisition pipeline for a denovo office, especially for specialty high-cost services. However, this is the best way to ensure new patients are booking while you wait for your organic efforts to gain traction.

Don’t target top-of-the-funnel keywords; stay focused on the people looking for care now. We recommend building a local keyword set to capture high-intent audiences in the new office’s locale.

From there, use PPC specifically for driving new appointments. A simple but effective PPC ad to run might be a new location announcement or to promote a grand opening promotion. Again, that ad should make scheduling an appointment as easy as possible, whether that happens on the ad landing page or from the ad itself (that is, click to call).

CASE STUDY

How We Used PPC to Help Smile Doctors Acquire Patients for New Locations

To increase brand awareness and remain competitive in local markets, Smile Doctors needed to put pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in the hands of experts with direct industry knowledge. Our collaborative efforts generated an 82 percent increase in PPC leads, a 28 percent increase in PPC conversion rate, and a 28 percent decrease in CPA.

See how we helped Smile Doctors do it.

4. Focus on Your Audience, Their Location, and Actual Needs

Know the local market in which your de novo office will operate. This is critical to not only executing the first three strategies in this blog post, but building a reputation as a valuable addition to the community.

Let’s say you’re opening a new orthodontist’s office in Atlanta. Long before opening your doors, you’ll want to know the total addressable market for orthodontics in the area. What are the demographics of this market? As you dig into this data, look to extract insights into how this demographic behaves online. What do they search for and how?

Though it might require a little more legwork, you can learn an awful lot about your local market by reading the reviews of competitors. You can also listen in on social media channels.

Which leads us to competitor research. Build a list of the options for orthodontics that your local customers have. How will you position your new office among this field of competitor providers? And what will be the office’s unique selling proposition (USP)?

All of this information ought to inform at least the initial 30- or 60-day marketing sprint you deploy to kickstart new patient acquisition.

Notice What We Didn’t Mention

You won’t find organic social media on this list, nor blogging. Here are some of the digital marketing strategies that, though important, don’t make sense for a shorter-term de novo marketing strategy:

• Organic and paid social media
• Video marketing (YouTube, TikTok)
• Blog posts and content marketing
• Lead nurturing
• Over-investment into all kinds of marketing tools and tech

Lastly, Be Ready for Patients On Day One

The time to launch this marketing framework is before the new office is open. This is the only way to ramp up demand generation on time and in lockstep with your other business objectives. That said, you need to be ready when those new patients show up at your door.

Marketing is one thing. But the quality of your in-office experience, patient nurturing, and post-visit communications will go a long way to turning those new patients into loyal ones. How many people do you know that have been going to the same dentist for years? More than a few, most likely.

Usually, the chance to create repeat patients only comes around once.

The post The 4-Step De Novo Marketing Strategy for DSOs appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

So, what are the important healthcare and hospital marketing trends for 2024? Here’s what you need to consider:

HIPAA’s Impact on Digital Marketing

The past three years have seen a flurry of activity with regard to HIPAA guideline updates. Here’s a super-brief timeline to catch you up:

September 2021 – FTC issues a policy statement that all health apps and connected devices must comply with the Health Breach Notification Rule. 

December 2022 – HHS Office for Civil Rights issues new Bulletin with new guidance on Personal Health Information and how it is shared with online tracking technologies:

“Regulated entities are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of PHI to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of the HIPAA Rules.”

February, March 2023 – FTC fines GoodRx, BetterHelp for HBNR violations. 

July 2023 – HHS and FTC issue a joint letter to 130 hospitals and health systems, emphasizing the risks to Personal Health Information from tracking technologies like Google Analytics. 

November 2023 – American Hospital Association files lawsuit challenging HHS guidance and the new regulations. 

2024 (You Are Here) – ???

It’s not clear exactly what will happen next. But we’ve seen the FTC go after healthcare groups of all shapes and sizes—not just the big players in the industry—which suggests that they are serious about enforcing these new stricter HIPAA regulations. While the AHA’s lawsuit may buy them a little time, the writing is very much on the wall with states also tightening privacy laws: HIPAA is here to stay, which means hospitals, digital marketers, and everyone else will all have to adapt – no matter how reluctant they are to update their technology.

With fines of up to $50,000 per violation in 2024, it’s clear that whether you’re a healthcare marketer or a hospital, you cannot ignore HIPAA guidelines. 

Develop a Strategy to Ensure HIPAA Compliance

After you’ve made your organization aware of the issue and assessed your risk of tracking technology violations, it’s time to strip all those non-compliant Meta and Google tracking pixels and build a roadmap towards a HIPAA-compliant future with appropriate martech: 

5 Components of a Data-Enabled Advertising Platform That Protects Patient Privacy

Quality Signals

Capture quality signals with AI-powered call trackers like Patient Prism and Liine that can report on booked appointments, or use platforms like Mixpanel to capture onsite activity and Nexhealth to capture booked appointment data.

Informed Algorithms

Customer Data Platforms transmit data back to your advertising platforms in a fully HIPAA-compliant way. CDP options include Tealium, Rudderstack, and Freshpaint, a healthcare privacy platform designed exclusively for healthcare needs.

Holistic 

Holistic reporting tracks all patient activity across locations, channels, and brands. ETL tools like Funnel.io automate the Extraction, Transformation, and Loading from various sources into a central data warehouse.

Queryable Reporting

Your gathered data needs to be fast and easy to query for flexible report creation based on stakeholder needs. ETL tools can direct data to platforms like Google BigQuery for data warehousing and Looker Studio for data visualization.

End-to-end

End-to-end measurement captures the complete patient journey, from initial engagement to healthcare outcomes and ROI. A good CDP can help facilitate that via integration with your current systems, but a comprehensive end-to-end solution is a little more complex and involves multiple pieces of martech. 

If you want a better sense of how to do that, here’s a more in-depth guide to How to Build a Full HIPAA-Compliant Martech Stack.

Omnichannel Full-funnel Advertising Strategy is a Must in HIPAA-regulated World

There are safe ways to leverage data and engage patients through advertising. Since you can no longer use the Meta or Google pixel to build advertising audiences, you must use a full-funnel strategy instead.

Rich Briddock, SVP of Strategy & Analytics at Cardinal, shares that,

 If you want to engage effectively with prospective patients and you can’t use first-party patient lists anymore, one way you can do that is through what we call a full-funnel strategy. Essentially, what that means is you would utilize broad targeted video campaigns at the top of the funnel. Just to let them know about your business and drive some awareness. You might use 15-second to 30-second video clips to just explain the business to those consumers.”  

From there, ad engagers move through the funnel toward conversion. 

Research from Google shows that taking a full-funnel approach is the best way to improve conversion rates:

A comprehensive strategy for digital advertising aims to reduce the overall expense of generating leads at the bottom of the sales funnel. Based on our experience, presenting direct-response advertisements to individuals who have not previously engaged with your brand can inflate the cost per acquisition (CPA) by over 400 percent.

Healthcare consumers typically fall into one of three categories:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision (ready to convert)

Implementing a full-funnel strategy allows you to maintain a broad reach with low ad-serving costs and selectively guide only qualified audiences toward your call-to-action (CTA) ads. This is achieved through the use of precise ad group structures that help you pinpoint the stage of the funnel a prospect is in. As a result, you can deliver a message that aligns with their current decision-making process stage. If a prospect engages with a specific ad, it serves as a signal regarding their position in the journey. Armed with this information, you can then present them with ads that are most likely to resonate with them.

Reaching Disengaged Healthcare Consumers

Disengaged population segments necessitate that marketers have a better understanding of consumers to improve marketing performance and impact. That’s especially important in healthcare, where there is growing disengagement amongst consumers. A recent report showed that consumer engagement in healthcare was down in most regions across the U.S. between 2022 and 2023, with numbers decreasing by as much as 19 percent in some areas.

One of the significant drivers in this disengagement comes from a growing lack of trust in providers. All of it adds up to make a big impact on retention, resulting in patient leakage.

No-shows and patient attrition are, in turn, adding up to significant losses in revenue. 

In 2024, healthcare providers must invest in retention and reactivation. To do that, you need to deepen your understanding of patient needs and motivations – and specifically, what is preventing them from getting care. These answers aren’t always easy to hear, but it’s important to stay objective and:

• Recognize how patient populations may be shifting, and how your brand may need to adapt
• Conduct research to measure patient perceptions of their care and treatment experience
• Consider what kind of services patients want to receive, and what you’re offering
• Identify any potential issues with your brand or patient experience that could drive disengagement

Once you understand what’s preventing them from getting care, you can adapt your marketing strategy with a two-pronged approach: 

1.) Patient Reactivation

Reclaim those disengaged patients by developing workflow automation to help them overcome those barriers and return to the doctor’s office. One great way to do that is by investing in a HIPAA-compliant patient engagement and reactivation solution like Brevium.

2.) New Advertising Campaigns

Reach out to patients with a full-funnel campaign that connects with users and breaks through their barriers. This involves catching them at multiple points along their journey. And remember that radical and unique creative is crucial for grabbing their attention.

Healthcare Consumers Demand Authenticity

As mentioned above, patients aren’t trusting providers these days. The growing use of AI is feeding fears that search results are unreliable. Patients are asking themselves:

• How do I know this comes from a doctor?
• Can I believe what I read online?

In this climate, authenticity and originality are key. Healthcare groups must prioritize their brand and their experts. Content can’t be generic or appear to be AI-generated. You must prioritize a unique POV that’s backed by research. Show the people behind your brand as the authors of content and as advocates of your brand. 

Here are some tips for getting that done:

Be Original

Being “original” in your content can mean exploring unique angles. Consider adding your unique take on content rather than regurgitating what already exists online. Of course, in healthcare, that doesn’t mean that you can just go with any notion. Any content you generate in the healthcare space needs to be vetted, accurate, and held to the highest standards. Never sacrifice quality in pursuit of originality.

Your healthcare practice or organization has its own unique approach, however. Use this opportunity to highlight the one-of-a-kind approach and patient experience that your healthcare institute brings to the table. What do your providers wish more patients knew? How can you address questions that often get ignored? Dig deep here to find out what patients want to know, what information gaps exist, and introduce your authoritative and original voice and answer into the mix.

Focus on Your Community & Patients

Like it or not, many prospective patients will view your hospital or healthcare organization with suspicion. Whether you are a multi-site organization with 100 locations or a single hospital, the default way that you will be viewed is usually as some sort of faceless corporate “Big Healthcare.” The best way to dispel that distrust is to connect on a human level; people demand authenticity and want to hear from people like them. 

Tell your patients’ stories

Go beyond the boilerplate testimonials and think about what makes a good story that will resonate with your audience. A good story has multiple characters, a plot, conflict, and resolution. A great story also has something unique to your patient experience. And ideally, you want to accomplish all of that concisely, because attention spans are limited.

Practice empathy

Try to think of everything from a patient’s perspective and imagine what concerns they might have. “Meet the Physician” videos will put a face and human story to the care patients will be receiving. Educational content can help answer lingering questions patients might have. Video facility tours can calm patients nervous about having a procedure or giving birth in a strange place.

Embrace video

Video isn’t just a great way to show authenticity and build trust; it’s also the bedrock of an effective full-funnel strategy. Videos can add a touch of personalization to any point in the funnel, from ads on Facebook, to personalizing pre-procedure emails. Imagine a patient nervous about a colonoscopy, who then gets an email with a video where the patient’s actual gastroenterologist gives an overview of the procedure, preparation, and answers frequently asked questions.

Best of all, the video you’ve created can often be repurposed and reused. General videos can build brand awareness on Facebook, Meet the Physician videos can bring life to an “About Me” page, Procedure overview and FAQ videos can go on Top of Funnel service and treatment webpages, etc.

Consumerization of Healthcare

In 2024 more than ever before, patients are consumers. Gone are the days when everyone who needed any sort of medical attention dutifully went to the big hospital in the nearest major city. Patients today have a wide variety of options, and they are increasingly very choosy in exercising those options, thus making marketing a crucial part of any hospital or practice’s operations.

How Did We Get Here

The short answer is: Technology.

The longer answer is: Patients have increasingly been looking for other healthcare options, and technology finally caught up to make that desire a reality. It’s not as if consumers were previously thrilled always to have to go to the big hospital in an inconvenient location. That’s just where the hospital was. But nobody likes adding a lengthy commute to an emergency room visit or a procedure they’re already not looking forward to. Patient frustration was always present and only grew as patients could not connect with their physicians to answer questions or concerns. However, they were pushed to call and make an appointment, which might involve waiting another month. But what could they do? The hospital was the only game in town.

Until it wasn’t. In 2024, everyone has a complete searchable healthcare directory in their pocket, courtesy of Internet-enabled smartphones and Google search to find locations near them. Sometimes, that location is mainly online, thanks to the rise of telehealth options that have become more prevalent since the start of the ongoing Covid pandemic. And now, that location may even be a local retailer.

Retailers Enter the Fray

When it comes to raw commercial real estate, no hospital can match the ubiquity of big national retailers like Walmart, Costco, and Best Buy. And some of these retailers are leaning into primary care services to capture customers who are already in their stores. Perhaps it was the next logical step after Walmart’s in-store pharmacies. For retailers like Walmart, it’s an easy way for their brand to provide convenience and drive further customer engagement.

There’s no question that retail healthcare will further disrupt the healthcare industry as consumers find themselves offered another choice – and one that’s as convenient as their local shopping center. 

How Consumerization Has Changed Healthcare In 2024

Patients Google Everything

They’re Googling your hospital, every practice in a 10-mile radius, online reviews of physicians, and any other information they can find. They’re also googling their symptoms, common complaints about procedures, and anything else you can imagine. Today’s patients do not calmly accept you as the all-knowing authority; they have done the research, and you need to earn their trust.

Healthcare is a Consumer Good

Healthcare is now like any other product or service that consumers can buy online – they want to do research, compare reviews, see locations near them, etc.  And just as mom-and-pop stores learned when Amazon became popular, this means loyalty is dead. If you can’t give consumers what they want when they want it, they will find a provider who can.

Patients are More Financially Cautious

Most patients today will search for which practices accept their insurance before choosing a provider. And many patients delayed elective treatments during economic downturns, such as the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Care has Moved Online

If there’s one truth about 2024, it’s that everyone is online. And many consumers prefer the convenience of doing as many things as possible online. That includes things like getting updates from their healthcare provider, messaging their physician, receiving virtual care, etc. Some consumers are finding an increased appreciation for telehealth options, but even those who don’t will still appreciate a patient portal or some other way to communicate with your office without having to schedule an appointment and show up

How Hospitals and Health Systems Can Respond To Consumerization

The obvious way to respond to increased consumer choice is generally twofold: Improving the quality of your product or service, and increasing your marketing efforts to ensure consumers are aware of the quality of your offerings.

But when it comes to healthcare, it’s no longer enough to provide good care in person. As mentioned above, consumers want everything online. Creating a better “digital front door” will both improve the value and perceived value of your offering by giving consumers what they want the most: a convenient way to do everything online.

Digital Transformation: The Digital Front Door and Beyond

It seems like ‘digital transformation’ has been the main topic of conversation for a while now in multiple industries—except for healthcare, that is. Let’s be honest; healthcare is an industry that has lagged behind in terms of digital advancements. Whether this stems from concerns around patient privacy or entrenched analog workflows, technological adoption in healthcare has historically been low compared to other sectors.

That’s changing now. 

Having a “digital front door” has become an absolute necessity for any hospital or health system. Consumers are used to paying their bills online, scheduling appointments online, ordering food online, and using apps to manage everything from their finances to their health. They have come to expect this level of convenience, and since they are now also comparing healthcare providers online, if you cannot provide that level of convenience, they will find a provider who can.

Patient-Centric Features of a Digital Front Door

Online Appointment Booking

Online booking via a website is one of the biggest ways to streamline operations. Patients love it, and your administrative staff will be free from the phones for the first time, allowing them to focus on more critical goals and tasks. According to the 2022 Kyrus patient access journey report, consumers continue to prefer online booking, with over 40% in favor of online booking options and one-third of patients citing it as a factor when considering which practitioner to choose.

Digital Appointment Reminders

Easily integrated with online appointment booking, this is helpful for patients and helps you to reduce no-shows

SMS

Patients not only appreciate the ability to reach out to their provider but are more likely to respond to a text message than to pick up a phone call as well. Healthcare consumers expect a smooth digital experience, which will continue in 2024. They are looking for transparent, proactive communication that helps them do what they need to do and do it quickly. 

Digital Check-in and Forms

Reduces waiting room time and creates a better experience for everyone involved.

Online Payments

Not only highly desired by patients but also less likely to get lost than a mailed bill.

Telehealth Options

Consumers who can’t easily drive to appointments especially appreciate the convenience, but hospitals may also appreciate telehealth as a method for triage of emergency patients.

Marketing Technology Behind the Digital Front Door

While the digital front door is the most visible part of a hospital’s digital transformation, another key component of the digital transformation is the technology that backs it up. Technology investments are being prioritized due to HIPAA concerns, giving marketers more tools with which to work. Technology adoption can also improve operational efficiency and the patient experience.  Here’s where we see the most investment:

• Centralized CRMs: The more of the patient experience is moved online, the easier it is to get a holistic view of the customer journey with a centralized database.
• Call tracking and Analytics: Gathering data from phone calls and integrating it with the rest of the CRM.
• Patient Engagement and Automation: Using data and educational content to drive patient activation. (e.g. sending information on screenings to patients who reach relevant age milestones)
• Review Generation Technology: As patients become consumers, reviews become more critical.

Why Hospitals and Health Systems Must Invest in Digital Transformation

Digital transformation isn’t just a hospital marketing trend; it’s a world trend. Consumers live their lives digitally now, whether they’re booking a flight or ordering take-out. And just as a consumer choosing between two restaurants might choose the one with online ordering, a consumer choosing between two healthcare providers will often prefer the one with a patient-centric digital front door. But that’s just one reason you should be investing in digital transformation. Other reasons include:

Communicating your value

Again, it’s not enough that your patient experience is better; patients need to see that it’s better. When they’re searching online to choose between providers, a good digital front door (including patient portals, apps, good UX, etc.) serves double duty by also providing you with a marketing advantage.

Streamlining new patient onboarding

Patient information and scheduling must all be entered into your system at some point. Why not let the patients enter that information for you while also gaining their appreciation?

Improving patient communication

The easiest and most reliable way to communicate with your patients is automatically. Having automated messages tied to various demographics or milestones along the patient journey assures that patients are receiving the relevant and useful information they need, from appointment reminders to post-procedure advice.

Educating patients

In addition to building trust in your brand, educating patients and making it easy for them to find the answers they need means that they won’t be calling your office with questions that could have easily been answered online.

Healthcare Marketers Embrace AI

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of digital transformation for hospitals and how HIPAA-compliant AI tools can help healthcare systems organize their patient data. But one of the newest hospital marketing trends in 2024 is that healthcare marketers are starting to use AI not just for gathering marketing data but in ad platforms for testing and even generating the ad content itself. Here are some of the key marketing AI innovations:

Automation Uses AI-Analytics to Optimize Ad Campaigns and Boost Open Rates

AI-powered data analysis has been a mainstay of healthcare marketing for years now, and the abilities of AI data analysis are only growing. AI is now capable of not only analyzing things like Return On Ad Spend for various campaigns, but can be used to automatically reallocate ad budgets on the fly to ensure that your ad budget is being spent where it will get the most return. Given enough data, some AI analytics can even use statistical modeling to offer predictions for various ad campaigns before you launch them.

And AI analytics can also predict customer behavior – and adjust to compensate accordingly. Marketers with a good set of data on customer demographics and email campaign open rates can feed those into AI-powered reporting tools, draw conclusions about what is effective for certain demographics, and automate the next round of emails to be more optimized with specifically targeted campaigns.

Facebook Offers AI-enhanced Features for Ad Creatives

While Facebook has used machine learning to analyze user behavior for many years, in late 2023 they finally released their first generative AI-powered features for ad creatives in Ads Manager. These features include:

• Background Generation: Creates multiple backgrounds that complement your product images (Available only for Advantage+ catalog ads)
• Image Expansion: Automatically adjusts your assets to fit different aspect ratios (Available in Advantage +creative)
• Text Variations: Generates multiple new versions of your original ad copy (Available in Meta Ads Manager)

For any marketer who knows what it’s like to finally put together a great ad, only to then need hours more to source proper backgrounds, tweak text for various outlets, and resize everything 50 times to fit in various aspect ratios, these tools can save a lot of time and mental energy.

Personalized Ads Can Now Be Automated

Facebook is far from the only place using AI to tweak advertisements. New AI-powered creative tools can automate the production of multiple versions of an ad based on the guidelines you feed it. So whether you need to resize an ad or present your call to action with a less somber tone, GPT-driven technology can automatically adjust your ads for you. 

With AI analyzing user preferences, data can be gathered to automate recommendations for which ads will perform best with a certain demographic or even generate email subject lines tailored specifically to a certain audience. AI tools can leverage your data to automate targeted recommendations, freeing marketers to focus their work on the creative portion of the process rather than the endless minuscule adjustments.

Fully AI-Generated Ads Are Possible… But Not Recommended

Here in 2024, it seems like the powers of AI are boundless. With AI being able to generate text with ChatGPT, visuals with Midjourney, and now video with Sora, it’s easy to imagine creating advertisements entirely with AI and skipping the human element entirely.

That would be a mistake.

AI is absolutely a great time-saver for marketers, allowing them to automate A/B testing, resizing, background generation, etc. AI can even be used to generate ideas in a pinch. But for all its powers, AI cannot yet match human capabilities for ad production. Consumers have come to associate obvious AI-generated images with low quality, and text from ChatGPT often reads as awkward.

This is a perfect time for marketers to return to the fundamentals of effective advertising: Developing great ad creative and messaging. AI can certainly help improve efficiency, but good copywriting, graphic design, and video production are not as easily replaced.

The post 2024 Hospital & Health System Marketing Trends appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Times have changed. We’re not in the middle ages anymore, and marketing has gone from magic to science—the type of science that’s based on a lot of data and research.  Healthcare marketers generally recognize that good patient data and information are often the cornerstone of a successful campaign. But when it comes to having conversations to share information within the organization and get internal data, some marketing departments still feel more like they’re working in a distant tower. And these days, that’s just not good enough.

“The days of working in silos, with intake over here, marketing here, sales here, operations here, is over. 2024, for me, is all about integration. How does the marketing team support each of these entities in a way that drives our goals? That’s what I’m looking at, and the tools will follow.”  —Christine Perkins, CMO at Amen Clinics, Inc. 

Collaboration and alignment between marketing and operations departments are crucial for ensuring that marketing is achieving the correct goals. It’s no longer enough to wave your hands and say, “I’m bringing in customers, so everything’s great.” Because everything’s not great if you’re bringing in the wrong customers. Or bringing in customers in a way that makes things more difficult for the practice. Marketing may be essential, but it exists to serve the business, which means it should always be done with the business needs in mind.

And yes, patients are obviously a key business need for most healthcare organizations, but it’s far from the only need. Healthcare marketing will be much more successful if it is aligned with operations in four key respects:

• Capacity Alignment
• Service Line Alignment
• Messaging Alignment
• Technology Alignment

If you can get your marketing and operations to have conversations and align on all of these areas, it will not only improve your marketing, but be a great help to your daily operations as well.

Practice Capacity Alignment

One of the most basic—and thus sometimes overlooked—questions for multi-site healthcare providers is: “Which locations need more patients right now, and which already have a waitlist?”

This is barely even a question for the operations team, who tend to be well aware of any location that is starved for patients or any location with waitlists so long that patients are getting restless. But that information isn’t always conveyed to marketing, and if the capacity data isn’t being shared, marketing will go ahead and follow their primary function of bringing in more patients… to a location that already has too many patients.

What Happens Without Capacity Alignment

Ad Budget Gets Wasted

Marketing isn’t free, so any time you run ads for an overbooked location, you’re throwing away money. Good communication between marketing and operations can help you reclaim that money so you can either market that location six months later during a lull or market a different location now that may be struggling to find patients. But without that alignment, you’re wasting your ad budget to point patients to a sign that says, “Sorry, try again next month.”

Patients Will Leave For Competitors

Let’s not fool ourselves—they may be called “patients,” but they’re not infinitely patient. If you manage to drive patients to your practice to book an appointment, they probably want an appointment sometime in the near future. If they have to wait multiple weeks, they may start looking for another provider. If they have to wait months for an appointment, you can guarantee that they’ll be Googling your competitors to try to find something sooner. Now, you’ve spent your marketing budget to drive customers to your competitors.

Patients Who Wait Become Disgruntled

The good news is not every patient will leave for a competitor when faced with a long wait. Some will stick with your practice even if it’s another two months before they can have an appointment. The bad news is those patients will not likely be happy about it. And the result is unhappy patients who now associate your brand with an unsatisfying experience. Again, not a great way to spend your marketing budget.

You Have The Capacity For Alignment

All of these problems can be avoided by aligning your advertising budget with the capacity of practices across your system. And that alignment is not a one-and-done sort of deal. Marketing needs a strong alignment with operations that is built on consistent communication about which locations have the capacity for more patients in the near future—and which locations don’t. Good communication means that capacity information is fed back to marketing with regular updates, which in turn allows marketing to adjust advertising budgets accordingly.

“If we were to go big and launch a big campaign to drive more of the awareness than we’ve done… We need to work together. [We] provided operations with many tools to say you think that you want to grow, but your providers are not actually accepting new patients, they’re not bringing in those new patients.

…Once we gave that transparency, our operational leaders really partnered with us to say, ‘Okay, we’ll open up [appointment] access if you’ll do the marketing.’ So, we set thresholds of when we would see patients and when we would need to have new patient availability in key service lines as well as primary care. Before we would go live in a community and we scaled it, we had that alignment” —Kristina Dover, CMO at Mercy. 

It’s a bit of a shift for many organizations that aren’t used to looping in marketing on individual location capacity. But the benefits are clear: Capacity alignment lets you meet capacity goals across your system while avoiding the pitfalls of mismanaged ad budgets. It’s the kind of efficiency that no healthcare marketer can afford to ignore. But of course, it’s not the only one. There’s also…

Service Line Alignment

Just as every location may have different needs based on capacity and other factors, different service lines have different needs as well. And yes, some of those will be based on capacity in terms of which service lines need more patients currently.

But there are also a lot of other important questions to ask about your various service lines, including:

• Which services are most profitable overall?
• Which services have the highest patient lifetime value?
• Which services are most likely to lead to upsells? 

Note that while all of these questions sound like they’re asking similar things (“Where’s the money?”), the answers to all of them might be quite different. Your most profitable service may be based on high volume and have a low patient LTV. Your service line with the highest patient LTV may be based on a standard high-ticket service with limited potential for upsells. Your service with the greatest potential for upsells may be one that offers a permanent (or quasi-permanent) solution that eliminates the likelihood of continuing revenue.

Why You Need Deep Understanding of Business Goals

In order to understand how best to market a business, you have to understand that business. This means that it’s not enough for healthcare marketers to know what services they’re marketing. An effective marketing strategy will also rely on a deeper understanding of the needs and numbers behind the services, everything from service line revenue goals to average patient LTV. Roadmaps for marketing campaigns should then be drawn up accordingly to align with revenue and business goals.

For example, an MSO expanding into a new market likely has a revenue goal much higher than their $0 revenue in that market in the previous year, so a lot of effort needs to be put into developing campaigns to raise brand awareness and drive demand. Conversely, you don’t want to spend most of your ad budget prioritizing a patient acquisition campaign for your service line with the lowest LTV.

This is not to say that you should ignore everything that isn’t your newest expansion or your biggest moneymaker. Healthcare marketers are generally asked to do an infinite number of things with a finite amount of money. So when it comes time to figure out where your priorities should be (after you get past “everything is our top priority!”), alignment with operations is crucial for making those decisions. When marketing is aligned with operations and the C-suite and has a deep understanding of each service line, you can make stronger roadmaps for your team. And that means more efficient campaigns that will let you spend your marketing budget to forward the business’s desired outcomes. 

And keep in mind that not all of a business’s desired outcomes are purely about ad budgets and maximizing patient acquisition. You also need…

Messaging Alignment

I may risk having my healthcare marketing card revoked for saying this, but some of the most important alignment that marketing should consider is not just marketing ROI.

Take a deep breath, and hear me out.

A lot of the latest wisdom in healthcare marketing has to do with centering patients. We acknowledge the fact that patients are individual people, and you have to understand the different types of patients and market to your ideal patients accordingly. But once you’ve gone through the effort of positioning your brand and forwarding that message to reach your ideal patients, it’s important to avoid anything that will unravel all of that work.

What Happens Without Messaging Alignment

When marketers have no communication with operations, they may put out a slick campaign that drives a few more people to the funnel at the expense of damaging the brand. Off-message marketing can be disruptive to the practice and seriously damage trust—not only the trust that patients have for the brand, but the trust that operations has for marketing!

Imagine that the marketing team has no communication with operations and decides to run an advertising campaign promoting a discount for new patients. On a pure CAC level, it gets patients into the funnel, so it might seem like a success. But what if the practice owners feel that the campaign devalues their work and years of expertise? What if it attracts the wrong types of patients who are looking for a cheap fix and not an expert caring solution? What if the campaign ends up bringing in patients who don’t want to continue care, who just have one visit with very low-profit margins?

Messaging matters. Every marketer knows this, but it’s important to realize that messaging doesn’t just matter to the patients but to operations and the medical team as well. You need to have that communication to make sure marketing is in alignment with operations so that the messaging that goes out isn’t just effective from a marketing standpoint but is in alignment with your brand and the goals of operations as well.

“We’re really focused on building the next phase of marketing in terms of patient communication and automation and finding alignment between marketing and operations. We call it MOPs at PRM. We make sure that our patients have the right communication at the right time so that the entire patient journey is totally automated and seamless. They’re getting the right education, the right access.” —Theresa Porcaro, Director of Marketing, Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine

I know that 90% of healthcare marketing is about getting patients in the door, but again, it’s no longer enough to just get patients in the door. You have to have alignment with operations, or you run the risk of eroding the message, the brand, and the trust of the rest of the business in your marketing. You want operations to respect you so you can collaborate with them effectively, which means you need to respect operations, respect the medical team, and respect that they have goals and needs which may go beyond just getting any random patients in the door no matter how you do so.

The good news is, once you’ve built that mutual respect, you’ll foster a collaborative culture, which is the key to buy-in for…

Technology Alignment

If messaging alignment is about how marketing can help operations achieve its goals, technology alignment is about how operations can help marketing achieve its goals. Because while everyone is technically working for the same goal of “having the business succeed,” on a day-to-day level, different teams have different focuses and priorities.

As marketing scientists (no longer just wizards), healthcare marketers want one thing, and it’s data. 

The more data, the better. However, increasing HIPAA enforcement has removed some of the previous ways that data was gathered outside of the practice, so new marketing technologies are evolving for capturing that data, often integrating with electronic health records and practice management systems. 

Adopting new technology and integrating it with historical systems isn’t easy and can require a significant lift for operations, IT, and compliance teams to implement. Don’t make light of this effort, and seek to make implementation as painless as possible.

Lastly, what happens after it’s implemented? All of this great new technology that gives you data generally involves some extra workflow—or, at the very least, a significant change in workflow—that can create challenges for doctors and healthcare administrators. Having conversations with affected parties *before* adopting new technologies will help make sure everyone is on the same page and that operations don’t just feel like you’re callously dumping new hoops for them to jump through.

Marketing Technology Adoption Requires Preparation

What types of conversations should you be having to foment alignment with your operations and compliance teams? You want to use best change management practices, which means you should:

• Explain why the technology is important, appealing to both logic and emotion
• Seek to understand their workflows and how those will change with the new technology
• Ask what information they need and what resources are needed for implementation
• Find out what risks they fear, and share a vision for a brighter post-adoption future
• Enlist volunteers to increase buy-in and work with them on the implementation plan

So, how does that look in practice? 

Imagine that you’re a marketing leader who wants to use call-tracking technologies like Liine and Patient Prism to gather quality signals. (This should not take much imagination.) As a marketer, the benefits for you are obvious: The gathered information helps marketers evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. The data collected by call tracking tools can be used to inform ad platform algorithms so they can maximize performance.

But for operations, it’s a different story. Implementing call tracking technology can fundamentally change how contact centers process incoming patient calls and scheduling and add a lot of hassle. So, how do you get them to accept this change? You need to show them that the hassle is worth it. That means explaining both what’s in it for them at an operations level and how it helps achieve the organization’s overall goals. 

In the case of AI-powered call tracking, that might mean explaining how the new technology can help you analyze calls to detect trends like:

• Poor customer service by agents 
• Great customer service by agents
• Patient experience satisfaction (cleanliness, parking, check-in procedures, etc.)
• Service requests (are patients seeking something you don’t offer?)
• Confusion about positioning (patients think you provide a different service)
• Any common issues that prevent patients from returning 

Aiming For Acceptance

Once you’ve explained the benefits and the business need, you’re less likely to encounter as much resistance. This is not to say every member of operations will be thrilled to adopt the new technology. But they will understand why it’s important, which will increase the odds that they will adopt it more readily and start gathering that delicious data that you desire.

Realistically, a front service line is rarely going to be excited about adopting a new technology that adds extra steps to their workflow. Collaborating is more likely to gain their buy-in and result in a better outcome for both marketing and operations, which is why technology alignment is so important.

There are some good general principles for achieving marketing operations alignment across all of the aforementioned areas, but I’m sure by now you’re asking…

How Do I Achieve Alignment?

I’ve gone into some targeted strategies in various sections above, but here are a few general principles for achieving alignment within your organization:

Identify Aligned Goals

The first step to alignment is for all parties to recognize that you are working towards common goals. These include both financial business goals, like increased revenue, and more mission-driven goals, such as helping patients get care.

Consider Their Perspective

Of course, common goals alone aren’t enough to achieve alignment. You need to understand the perspective of your operations team. What matters most to them? How can your plans benefit them? How can you address their needs while still achieving the overall business goals? 

Prioritize Good Communication

A key to marketing operations alignment is communicating in a way that your audience will find easy to understand. Avoid using too much jargon—operations doesn’t need to hear that the CAC for your PPC campaign has a good ROI given LTV. You want to explain things clearly in a way that gets your message across without becoming bogged down in details or inside baseball.

Meet Frequently

Alignment is not something you finish. It is a constant process to ensure that communication is always taking place, that marketing is always aware of the operational needs, that operations always understands marketing’s reasons for things, and that everyone is collaborating to achieve their shared goals. Constant communication will allow you to identify any issues surrounding new patient acquisition.

Be Receptive to Feedback

Of course, frequent meetings are only valuable if the people in those meetings are actually listening. You need to keep the door open to address any emerging issues, which means listening to what’s working and what isn’t — and adjusting accordingly.

Practice Empathy

Lastly, but as far least as possible, remember that you work with other human beings. These are people who, like you, are trying to do their best and help patients get care, which is why they work in healthcare. And healthcare, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, is not easy. Working with patients can take a heavy emotional toll, exacerbated by everything from staffing shortages to payer disputes. But if you can remember that every person on your team is a fellow human being and treat them as such, you’ll be one step closer to finding true MOPs alignment.

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