Trust, Truth & Treatment: A Marketing Maven's Take on Healthcare Marketing's Future

[00:00:00] Lisa: Urgent care is becoming the new primary care physician. It's your neighborhood doctor.

[00:00:05] Lisa: They're popping up everywhere. I hear this everywhere I travel today from my friends, from my family, from people that I just randomly run into who know that I work for a chain of urgent cares. Urgent cares are becoming primaries and I don't mean that they can treat or do treat all of the same things.

[00:00:21] Lisa: I will say we do treat most everything a primary will treat, but The convenience factor is huge, and I think it's driven by a lot of different things. We live in a very convenience based society, and part of that comes from Amazon, right? Part of that comes from the digitalization of commerce. E commerce just becoming the forefront of our lives over the last 10 to 15 years.

[00:00:48] Lisa: It has created a mindset of instant gratification. And that's one thing that in health care ceases to exist.

[00:01:23] Kelly: Hey, everyone. Kelly McGuire. Excited to talk to today's guest.

[00:01:28] Todd: Everybody, this is Todd, you know, Kelly's partner. And today a really exciting person to talk to Lisa Overman, who has been in charge of marketing most recently for a retail multi unit healthcare brand, but also. Was in marketing and running marketing for a very well known retail franchise brand in the food space.

[00:01:50] Todd: Previously, I won't name the name, but they make really good sandwiches. And Lisa helped launch and build that brand. And now she's doing the same in retail, urgent and healthcare. And there's a lot of myths, a lot of chatter, a lot of conjecture, a lot of, I don't know, facts or not facts in the, in the healthcare industry that we're going to talk about today which are.

[00:02:11] Todd: Maybe somewhat contrary to popular opinion. So Lisa, thanks for joining. Why don't you tell the audience just a quick little story about yourself.

[00:02:21] Lisa: Sure. Oh, my gosh. Little story. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me talking. Kelly. It's been a pleasure working with you guys and excited to talk about some of these myths and dispel some of them. Hopefully a little story about me. I did started sandwiches. I've done a little bit of marketing and a lot of bit of things.

[00:02:40] Lisa: From retail sandwiches to , residential real estate, commercial real estate, health care finance, you name it. I have done marketing in a lot of different spaces and oftentimes in spaces where people think that marketing is either not necessary or predatory or a lot of different things.

[00:02:57] Lisa: So, I spent a lot of my career. Being an advocate for education in a lot of the marketing spaces that I've worked in. So I'm pretty excited to actually talk about some of the myths that we talk about pretty regularly in the healthcare space and advertising and marketing specifically. Little story about me.

[00:03:18] Lisa: I have worked in, I believe I've worked in 42 different states. So while I am a traditional marketing practitioner, I'm a non traditional marketing practitioner in that I used to work kind of on location. So I would work in a city within a market for about a week at a time. And then I would move on and go to a new state, a new city, a new, not a new book of business.

[00:03:43] Lisa: I covered the entire country in a lot of different. Facets and capacities, but I was very boots on the ground. So in today's day and age, when we're so used to everything being digital, I feel like I have gotten to experience so much in person marketing functionality, marketing operations that my foundation for digital is.

[00:04:05] Lisa: Is a little bit different than somebody who has just traditionally been online advertising, pay per click in the digital space for most of their career. So I feel like , my multi state, multi retail background has really led itself to my current role as director of marketing for Exxon.

[00:04:23] Todd: Awesome. Ah, boy, I bet you have a good miles account built up from all that travel.

[00:04:29] Lisa: Yeah, I do. I'm like taking through it. It's, it's really interesting to be on the road for so long and then to suddenly be thrust off the road. During COVID, it was the first time in my career, actually, that I was stationary for my career life, my business life. I was not stationary for my personal life, but it was definitely a shift.

[00:04:50] Lisa: And so I'm still now two, three, three plus years later, getting used to being stationary and working completely from a desk. So it's an interesting transition.

[00:05:01] Todd: Yeah, I think we're all facing a little, a little piece of that as well. All right. So I want to talk about your role now and, and a lot of what you have to say, you can either equate it through the lens of your current role with the current company that you work for. Or just in general, if you want to just sort of generalize in the industry.

[00:05:18] Todd: And so we're talking about health care, retail health care in particular, always a lot to say about the healthcare industry. There's a lot of change going on, whether it's driven by political factors or, or other socioeconomic factors. So I think we can just start out either through the lens of, again, what you're doing now with the current company or in general what are the evolutions, the shifts, the trends that you see happening with health, care, I guess, more along the lines of the consumer behavior.

[00:05:46] Todd: Relative to healthcare, it seems to just get more and more complicated for us consumers on where do I go? When do I go? What do I go for? How do I know? How much is it going to cost? Is my insurance cover it? There's so many things to talk about. But what are there major things that you're seeing now in this role that you've been in for a few years that are changing?

[00:06:04] Lisa: Yeah, there are definitely major things that are changing and are really interesting in this role and in health care in general. I will say as a person, this does kind of go back to my background as a person who has traveled for living most of their adult life primary care physicians. I'm not saying they're going away, but that's a huge evolution.

[00:06:22] Lisa: And I feel like I was on the forefront of making that evolution come to life as a person who travels. I have never had time to have my own primary care physician because I've never been in one place for more than a week at a time. And so. Urgent care is becoming the new primary care physician. It's your neighborhood doctor.

[00:06:41] Lisa: They're popping up everywhere. I hear this everywhere I travel today from my friends, from my family, from people that I just randomly run into who know that I work for a chain of urgent cares. Urgent cares are becoming primaries and I don't mean that they can treat or do treat all of the same things.

[00:06:57] Lisa: I will say we do treat most everything a primary will treat, but The convenience factor is huge, and I think it's driven by a lot of different things. We live in a very convenience based society, and part of that comes from Amazon, right? Part of that comes from the digitalization of commerce. E commerce just becoming the forefront of our lives over the last 10 to 15 years.

[00:07:23] Lisa: It has created a mindset of instant gratification. And that's one thing that in health care ceases to exist. Right. So I think everybody will probably agree right now where it doesn't matter what part of the country you're in. If you're trying to get in to see a primary care physician, you're going to be waiting.

[00:07:41] Lisa: Weeks if not months and the flip side of that is is there an instant gratification in health care? And the answer is yes, and that's the emergency room And so part of the evolution of what we're trying to achieve in in my role anyways, my current role is closing the education gap between Thinking that you either need to go to your primary or you need to go to an urgent care or an emergency room And those are your two options There are other options.

[00:08:09] Lisa: There are other options in between. And part of that is urgent care. Another part of that is virtual care. And I think that virtual care is going to be a huge future of the United States in general, in accessing immediate care. I mentioned Amazon as like an instant gratification solution to the society we live in today.

[00:08:28] Lisa: They've created the monster that they are. They've created the monsters that we are in expecting instant gratification. You can order prescription medication through Amazon. You can order prescription medication through a lot of different subscription services now, which require that you still require doctor authorization.

[00:08:44] Lisa: But 10 years ago, you couldn't get that doctor's authorization through a virtual care appointment or through an urgent care. And if you could, oftentimes your insurance wasn't covered. Your, your insurance didn't cover it. So you're paying a lot more out of pocket. So I think to sum that up, the evolution, there were tons of evolutions happening.

[00:09:02] Lisa: In health care in marketing, advertising and health care, of course, but the main ones are we are moving to a digital world and health care is a little slower than the rest of the world, but it's getting there. It's coming and urgent cares are filling the void between primary and emergent care, whether we like it or not.

[00:09:24] Lisa: A lot of urgent cares are also offering virtual care. So I think as a society, we're starting to figure out that some of the little things that we would have historically gone to our primary care physician for, we shouldn't be going to the emergency room for. And we can go to one of these solutions in between, whether that's virtual care or urgent care.

[00:09:44] Todd: So do you think that the primary care health network systems and the emergency rooms see a brand like eggs are as friend or foe, given that you're talking about,

[00:09:58] Lisa: friends, no question. You know, no individual workers in in those settings might not immediately identify an urgent care as a friend, but globally, the health care system, we are absolutely urgent care is absolutely a friend of primary and emergency care, emergency care, specifically because.

[00:10:18] Lisa: Emergency rooms are overburdened if anybody has ever visited one in the last 25 years, right? You are sitting next to a gunshot wound victim and somebody vomiting and you have upper respiratory symptoms. You're in the wrong place. You're terrified. It's been waiting. You've been waiting for hours and hours and hours.

[00:10:39] Lisa: You have no idea what the bill is going to be like. There is just this like imminent fear that the bad things are happening and you're just in a bad situation and you're not. feeling well on top of it. So the emergency rooms want the lower acuity cases to go to urgent cares or to virtual care or to their primary care.

[00:10:59] Lisa: The emergency room wants to send you anywhere other than the emergency room so that they can treat the patients that absolutely need emergency care. And those are the really high acuity cases, the gunshot wounds, the heart attacks, the strokes, the compound fracture or compound breaks and something if it's life threatening or limb threatening is what we say you should go to the emergency room.

[00:11:19] Lisa: Everything else, let the emergency room exist where it does and find the care you need in a quicker, less expensive environment. So I'd say we're absolutely a friend.

[00:11:28] Todd: I would, I would agree with that assessment. All right. So another question, I'll turn over to Kelly for some marketing talk, but this is more on just the, the evolution and the trends. So the idea Of virtual care, what has been your observation since exer had made offerings in this space? people really they buy into that?

[00:11:49] Todd: Do they think I on zoom like we are right now? I can actually be assessed and potentially Given a prescription or a treatment that I can trust like what's the? What's the trust level? What's the consumer sentiment around virtual care? Is it a, just a, is it a fad or is it a new technology that's going to grow and take more of a foothold?

[00:12:10] Lisa: Oh, there's no question it's here to stay. There's, it's not going anywhere. Virtual care is not going anywhere with the volume of patients that need to be treated and seen. We cannot get rid of virtual care. It's not a fad. It's not going to die. It's not a trend. The trust level I'd say is, is growing.

[00:12:27] Lisa: I will give you a personal example because I just had one. I just two weeks ago, I have had, you know, ongoing relatively low level health issues that I've wanted to address. I can't get in to see a primary to save my life. And when something comes up and I'm like, Oh, I have the symptom. , I .

[00:12:43] Lisa: I don't want to wait four months to have it treated. Right? So I was able to order an online lab, an online blood test that covered 86 different blood markers. Go to an independent lab and have that blood test completed. And then I called up a virtual care doctor. I called, I dialed up a virtual care doctor through my health insurance platform, connected with them same day, sent them my lab results and had them interpret my lab results.

[00:13:09] Lisa: The whole process took days because I had to go get the blood test, wait for the results to come back in. And then I was able to get the virtual care appointment the same day as the last result came in and have them read the results and interpret the results for me. That was all in covered all covered start to finish by my health insurance.

[00:13:26] Lisa: I only had to leave my house to go get my blood drawn. So to ask if the general public trust virtual care that was the virtual care doctor able to tell me anything any other doctor would have been able to tell me about my test results. They told me everything any normal doctor would tell me about my test results.

[00:13:43] Lisa: Were they able to look at me and say that I might have a sprained ankle in addition to my blood test results? No, but I could have described my symptoms to them. And just like a primary care, if you think about it, last time you saw your primary care doctor, he probably walked in, he took your heart rate, took your blood oxygen, he took your blood pressure, and then asked you what your symptoms were.

[00:14:02] Lisa: Maybe you felt your tonsils, right? Maybe you felt your tonsils. If you had a sore throat or something upper respiratory, might have felt your tonsils, might have taken your temperature, seen if you had a fever, and sent you on your way, right? Maybe you got a prescription to some antibiotic, if it's a bacterial infection, if they think it's a bacterial.

[00:14:18] Lisa: But likely, you're either getting some sort of lab test that's going to be sent out or done in house, if necessary. Or the doctor's going to Okay, your tonsils feel swollen, you have a slight, you can get a rapid strep test. If it's strep, we'll get you some amoxicillin out the next day or that day. But much more than that, your primary care isn't, isn't doing a ton more that can't be done through a television screen.

[00:14:44] Lisa: I mean, you know, if your tonsils are swollen, right? Like if you have a sore throat. Now, when it comes to small children, maybe a small child doesn't know, maybe mom needs to look in the small child's throat and I'm not giving healthcare advice, but. I think most things that can be diagnosed in a primary care physician's office can be diagnosed by a virtual care.

[00:15:03] Lisa: And if they can't, Sometimes they cannot. They know when to send you for in person care. So your primary care physician, that person might be online from now on. If that becomes the new norm, they will send you when you need an in person doctor to further examine your symptoms. So building the trust is going to take time.

[00:15:23] Lisa: Time. But I think that covert really helped with that. I think that living in a pandemic world in a post pandemic world and doing what we do every day on zoom has made people a lot more comfortable with the idea of convenience and quickness. Over in person care, I

[00:15:42] Todd: Yeah. Well, it definitely does seem to be a trend. And I, I mean, I'm, I'm of that mindset. If I can, if I can get a diagnosis for a sore throat or a sinus infection and just, you know, zip in a prescription and go pick it up and take care of it. I'd way rather do that than try and go sit in a, in a waiting room somewhere.

[00:16:00] Todd: But the idea of. Not having to go to my primary care that I get an appointment scheduled five days from now. And I can just go to a a center like yours and just walk in and be seen by a doctor same day. That's a no brainer. So hopefully people are picking up on this trend and starting to take their, their care under their own sort of control that way.

[00:16:18] Todd: So that's interesting. There's a lot of crazy movements in the healthcare space and I'm sure we didn't even scratch the surface, but just very specific around this. So you're in marketing of. Retail healthcare. So, Kelly, I know you probably have a lot of questions about that. What is your, what is your first big burning question about how in the world do we do marketing in this space?

[00:16:37] Kelly: Yeah, I love the setup here, right? Because one of the reasons I'm excited to have this conversation at least is, you know, we've been in the trenches for a while now on, on the marketing and you have such an interesting perspective on the actual healthcare side, but then the, the marketing realities of what that means.

[00:16:51] Kelly: And so one of the first things that I thought was worth sort of diving in and exploring is something that I think we probably talk about on a very regular basis ever since engaging on the marketing side. And that is. You know, what is marketing capable of of really moving the needle with in this space and Really juxtapose around the biggest challenge that we've always talked about which is this isn't selling sandwiches, right?

[00:17:14] Kelly: You're not promoting something that's going to get someone to be like, oh that sounds really good Let me go out and act on this advertising that i've been exposed to because it got me right this is a You, you know, I'm going to hone in on the word urgent in urgent care, right? This is a, something has happened to me and I'm not at that point likely to go do all of my research and figure out where to go and what to do.

[00:17:37] Kelly: I have broken my toe or I am sick and I need an answer right away. And so really talking about how the setup and the challenge of needing to be proactive in conveying information, educating the market, letting people know. What they should go to urgent care for versus emergency room versus primary care.

[00:17:55] Kelly: What insurance is accepted? What the hours are? Is it well rated? We're really talking about this biggest challenge that we're always tackling, which is we have to do all of our work in advance to a group of people that we don't really know who exactly is going to go break their toe or who's going to need us.

[00:18:12] Kelly: We need everyone that's capable of using the convenience of our location and our services To have a certain level of education and knowledge so that we can be considered at that point in need. And so i'd really like you to dive in a little bit about How that has been thinking of in that perspective and what challenges that that poses

[00:18:31] Lisa: think, you know, as well as I do, it poses a lot of challenges educating the public and so I'll give a little comment. I guess that kind of speaks to some of my background as well about marketing in this space. So, historically, I have marketed for. For retail brands that I would consider, I was educated to consider option brands, which means you want to be the best option out of all of the options in an area of synergy in an area of retail synergy.

[00:18:59] Lisa: So as for example, with sandwiches, you, you can't be on an island with sandwiches, right? Because you have to be where people are going to get. Lunch. You have to be where people are going to get a meal. And then you have to be the best option. Urgent care is by nature a destination brand. And so you're constantly battling to educate people, not only about you, your services, what you stand for, your, your values, but where you are, when you are, how you are, what you do.

[00:19:33] Lisa: You have to constantly educate about everything that you do in urgent care, not just where you are and you're the best and then people will find you. So some of the challenges are, I mean, I hear all the time for one, what do you go to urgent care for? I mean, had this conversation probably a dozen times in the last three years.

[00:19:56] Lisa: What do you go to urgent care for now? And now you know, Kelly, you're a little more familiar now having a small child. You know exactly why people go to urgent care. Once you've experienced it, you're like, Oh my gosh, it's like an epiphany, right? It's a light bulb goes off and you're like, wow, this is incredibly convenient for my lifestyle.

[00:20:11] Lisa: I've got a little one who always gets sick at 7, 15, 7, 15 PM. On a Saturday night when there are no primary care. It doesn't matter if you could get ahold of your primary. You're not going to see them on a Saturday night at 7. 15, right? So a big challenge in March.

[00:20:26] Kelly: nowhere i'd rather not be than an emergency room with that young child in the middle of the night

[00:20:32] Lisa: Absolutely. Just breeding more disease and more fear and terror into your small child's life. Yeah, so a big part of the challenge is is that education gap and continuously being in the forefront of people's minds. And that that might seem and I said this all the time. It might seem predatory, right?

[00:20:51] Lisa: Retail health care can seem predatory. Here's the difference. If we're not educating, if we're not using marketing to educate patients, we are really doing them a disservice. The marketing is going to tell them, not that they should go to urgent care when they don't need it. It's to go to urgent care when you think you need the emergency room, because you probably really don't.

[00:21:14] Lisa: We are committing to saving you time and money. Comfort. It is much more comfortable. I don't care how dingy and dirty the urgent care is, which are obviously are pristinely beautiful. But, you know, urgent cares can have the stigma that they're dingy and dirty and dark and the quality is low or the care is not as encompassing as that of the emergency room.

[00:21:36] Lisa: And it's not 100 percent but it's about 85. So and don't call me on that number, but it's a high level of comparison between energy care and emergency room. Like I said, if it's not life or limb threatening, you can probably go to an urgent care for it. So the perception that they're lower quality or not as convenient or more expensive is what we're battling against on a daily basis.

[00:21:57] Lisa: And that means being there. All the time, digitally, physically, and then executing on our brand promise. I talked about this a little bit at the urgent care conference a couple of weeks ago that we were at. Brand awareness is huge. Brand awareness is education. It is patient education. And to your exact point, Kelly, I We don't know when somebody is going to fall off their skateboard and break their ankle.

[00:22:19] Lisa: We're not out there throwing sticks in front of people's bicycles, hoping that they fall down and scrape their knee, and then they need an urgent care visit. We are just constantly reminding people that we're here when they need us, and hopefully, we're We are able to become essentially the, and no brand infringement here, Kleenex of healthcare.

[00:22:39] Lisa: Like, we want to be the, oh, you fell down, you should go to urgent care. Right? Like, you broke an arm, you fractured your arm, you sprained your ankle, you have an respiratory infection, you have cough, cold, flu, fever, sickness, illness, whatever it is, oh, go to urgent care. We don't want the thought to be, Oh my gosh, you have to go to the emergency room or I'm never going to get in to be my primary.

[00:23:02] Lisa: We want to be that brand recognized and quality care recognized service so that people are able to get the health care that they need. It is known. That if you defer maintenance on your own body, like our body, we get one body, right? Our whole life. We get to have, we get to have one. As far as we know, you'd have one body and one set of health conditions that we can manage ourselves.

[00:23:27] Lisa: And it is a fact. If you defer maintenance. On your health. You will incur additional health care complications further down the line. So a lot of times what people are doing is avoiding urgent cares because they're not educated on how urgent cares operate exactly and they're deferring that maintenance until it gets bad enough.

[00:23:48] Lisa: That they do end up in the emergency room and they actually need the emergency room. So in brand awareness and marketing and advertising and healthcare, we're trying to help educate patients, not only on how to save time and money, but how to help their own future selves. We're trying to help them understand that if they, if they want, if they, if they need, they can take care of their health now in those tiny deferred maintenance things that they think can wait until next week or next month or two years from now, get them taken care of now.

[00:24:16] Lisa: And. Part of marketing in health care, in addition to alleviating the pain points of it's not that scary. , you know, educating the public that we do take most of these policies, but we are open 8 a. m. to 8 p. m. seven days a week. I sound like a walking advertisement, but people need to understand it's not scary.

[00:24:34] Lisa: , it's not more expensive. It's not any more fearful than visiting your primary care physician or the emergency room less. So I would say it's just the education gap. So advertising is our means. Mainly our primary means of educating the public on the services that they can utilize.

[00:24:52] Kelly: Yeah, I mean that's definitely been my experience with it and you know, essentially you mentioned that that misconception around that It might be more expensive right and that's kind of again having a young child Although even with myself having experienced it That's the benefit i've seen out of it where if there's something in doubt, right?

[00:25:08] Kelly: if there's if if my child is is sick or even like when I cut my foot and I was on the borderline and Not sure if I needed stitches or not I had the experience with urgent care where I was like, well, it's 20 bucks in like 20 minutes to have that peace of mind and no versus what if I do need stitches and I don't go and then I make it worse in three days like having that option of just That on the fence not certainty.

[00:25:30] Kelly: I would have never gone to an emergency room If i'm like if i'm on the fence and in the emergency room is the option It's definitely not happening like my foot's got to be falling off to get me into that stage But the urgent care i'm like why I don't have that much to lose It's 20 bucks in about 20 minutes and then i'll know and I can move on with my life.

[00:25:46] Kelly: And so yeah educating that ,

[00:25:48] Lisa: you know, growing up, not growing up, in my adult life, my adult growing up, my 20s on, I was, I was personally terrified of urgent care because I thought, kind of the opposite of you, you've now had the experience where you get 20 bucks 20 minutes and you're in and out. I had the fear that it was going to be 2, 000 and two and a half hours and I wasn't gonna know that and I was gonna walk out and six months later I was gonna get hit with this crazy bill and or they weren't gonna fix me and I was gonna have to go somewhere else It wasn't until Six, seven, eight years into my traveling career that I had to go to an urgent care for something and you know My parents gave me this weird stigma that urgent cares were expensive and crazy and scary And six seven eight years into my traveling career and I needed it for something and that was the urgent care was the only option It was in seattle, washington And I had to go to an urgent care to get an antibiotic because I had Blood poisoning.

[00:26:42] Lisa: And like everyone was like, you're gonna die. People were telling me I was going to die and I was like, but I don't want to go to the emergency room. I have to work tomorrow. You know, I was a workaholic. And so went to an urgent care and they were like, Oh, you definitely need IV antibiotics. They hooked me right up right then.

[00:26:57] Lisa: I think I walked out with a flu. 300 bill and I lived, I didn't die. I'm obviously here telling another story. I probably wasn't going to die in the first place, but people freaked me out. And I was already freaked out about urgent care. So that was like my kind of coming of age, overcoming my fear of urgent care.

[00:27:11] Lisa: And then obviously slowly learning through the years, how less scary they are now working here. But yeah, it's, it's just getting, having that experience, having the initial experience, like you've had very positive experiences with your toddler. And yeah. Everybody doesn't have that necessity right away, and we just hope that when you do have it, that you are willing to give it a shot at an urgent care and avoid the craziness of the ER.

[00:27:39] Kelly: One of the things that I really, think is interesting that is applicable to bigger marketing challenges but is unique to urgent care marketing that I'd like to explore is, again, because we are not going to create new customers, right? We're not going to create people who just feel like walking to an urgent care because it sounded so wonderful, right?

[00:27:58] Kelly: You still need that point of need. And it's, and oftentimes you cannot predict the When that need arises and that's further exacerbated by external factors like blue season, or in our case, COVID and other things where it creates these surging experiences in the market or these pullbacks, and then there's point of need and demand.

[00:28:21] Kelly: And there's all these things that can drive the business up and down. It's not, you're not going to create new customers. So you're trying to capture a finite market that exists. And I bring that up in the sense of. How do we navigate knowing whether or not our marketing is being effective at moving the needle or not when it is one small part of why people will go into an urgent care or not.

[00:28:43] Kelly: And again, exacerbated by the example of during COVID, there was a lot of people that needed it. And so it didn't matter how much marketing you had in and out. And I know that created a big baseline problem when COVID was no longer driving it. When we're trying to compare, well, why are, why is our patient counts down and how is the business doing?

[00:29:01] Kelly: Well, was it an anomaly we're comparing it to? Do we have a realistic baseline? So, knowing all of that noise and external factor, how do you look at managing the expectations of, I'm spending marketing dollars, I need to know if my marketing agency is doing a good job and if these dollars are making a difference or not.

[00:29:19] Kelly: Okay.

[00:29:21] Lisa: Well, as you know, it's tough. That is, that is a metric that we struggle to manage. Not for lack of time, but we've done some creative things. As you know, we partnered with a company called Keynes who ran a Bayesian regression model that overlays our marketing strategy. Ben versus our census data. And for those of you not in health care people, census data is just our daily volume of patients.

[00:29:43] Lisa: And we try to normalize. Right. So you tried to look for nuance in the marketing spend that matches up with nuance in patient data. But All the while trying to extract anomalies in the data, which could be COVID or flu season or any sort of seasonality. So we do a lot of different things. Obviously average daily volume increasing as marketing expenditures increase is a good, not definitely not ever a one to one we've spent 5.

[00:30:11] Lisa: We got one extra patient. But the ebbs and flows do seem to To follow pretty well. And you can see the curve starts to normalize as we spend more, we create more efficiencies in marketing. I think obviously you guys know we're like absolute optimal efficiency. I like to think about like optimal efficiency in spending on advertising.

[00:30:30] Kelly: Not for lack of trying that that did not magically happen.

[00:30:35] Lisa: where there's a lot of work that goes behind this. It was, it was not a magic wand that can be waived and all of a sudden, poof, your marketing dollars being spent super effectively. But I think brand recognition, you know, doing brand lift studies and really understanding what patients are recognizing about your brand and also having boots on the ground in the community.

[00:30:52] Lisa: I live in the communities that we serve, and I am forever in communities wearing my company jacket, and people are stopping me like, Oh, my gosh, you work there. They're popping up everywhere. Oh, my gosh, I just was at one. I just had a fracture. I had a sprain. I had to take my kid and so. A lot of it is still human nature and human feedback mechanisms, you know, curing patients come in, watching the feedback channels online, monitoring our reputation online and really, truly seeing what patients are talking about and being there for them while they're talking about those things as well.

[00:31:24] Lisa: So, The metrics that come through from digital advertising are amazing and our, you know, agency as a whole is incredible and delivering those metrics and we read them every week and we go through them one by one and talk about where we can speak and where we can refine, but a lot of the metrics on the average daily patient volume side also still heavily depend on the brand experience.

[00:31:47] Lisa: I'm gonna give one quote from a long time ago. You guys will probably remember we had a patient review that was patient was so mad at us. They had to wait for something. I don't know, maybe 2 hours to get their finger stitched up and they called us band aid baristas. They were like, these band aid baristas just know how to get you.

[00:32:02] Lisa: You know, they know how to get you in and out quickly and stitch you up. But it's like, you know, everything is the same. There's no more doctor than the family. You know, it's not like my primary care doctor that I knew his last name and I knew his kids and I knew his family and he lived on the street for me.

[00:32:17] Lisa: This is just the Starbucks of urgent cares. And I was like, yes, we've done it. You know, we've done it. We've made it. We are now here. We are the Kleenex of urgent cares. And this guy knows us as the Vandaver says, we want that. We want our, our patients to be talking about. That recognition. They're like, instead of saying, Hey, go to urgent care.

[00:32:39] Lisa: We want to say, Hey, go to excerpt. We want to have the brand recognition that comes from the massive advertising efforts that we have in place. And we want them to identify our brand experience as consistent. What they see on the Internet when we're advertising is. Did you have a fall? We're here for you.

[00:32:59] Lisa: Up late on a Saturday with the flu. We're here for you. Open late on weekends, studying too hard this weekend, you know, like, are you, did you have a rough St. Patrick's day? Like we're here for you. So the message that we're driving on the internet and our advertising for brand awareness, while we're not able to meet people exactly at their point of need, where you could with a sandwich, somebody's hungry, they order a sandwich.

[00:33:19] Lisa: To our earlier point, we don't know that you just fell and broke your ankle and you probably aren't looking at the internet. If you just fell and broke your ankle, you're probably enjoying time with your friends skateboarding or whatever you're doing. We want you to think, okay, I broke my ankle. Now. I know I saw that ad.

[00:33:33] Lisa: I saw 175 ads. I'm going to go to exit. And so. Aside from daily volume, we measure on basically patient reputation on the internet and patient reputation and patient feedback through 150 different channels that we monitor constantly. Every single day, we read every single internet review that comes through about our company, good, bad, and otherwise.

[00:33:53] Lisa: And we attempt to respond to all of them. And we address those issues internally so that the brand experience is always reflective of what we're advertising on the internet.

[00:34:03] Kelly: I like that so much, right? Because I think it's so analogous to other marketing challenges that aren't necessarily in this point of need because there is a lot of times there's this instant gratification need of I want to see my marketing lead to a sale or a new customer or new thing. And there's a lot of loss in this idea that you need to do the legwork.

[00:34:21] Kelly: You need to do the upfront the pre Marketing and the education and the experience so that at some point you have a chance to get that customer You don't want the first time you're talking to them to be When they need a new pair of shoes or in our case when they break their ankle, right? You want them to have already been aware and educated and know what they need to know so that when they're ready to act And you hopefully have a good advertising program in place and you put an ad in front of you're ready to act That's not the very first time they're like what's eggs or do they accept my insurance?

[00:34:51] Kelly: How far away from my house are they? Are they any well rated? But that applies to shoes, right? You don't want the first time you're like, hey, i'm ready to buy shoes to be like, no Hey, this shoe brand that I've never heard of is trying to convince me that I should, you know, put my credit card and buy them like you want to be aware of what those values are.

[00:35:05] Kelly: And so that's where I think it's very analogous. And you're, we're forced to do that upfront work that a lot of companies try and discount and don't see the value in and don't want to. They just want that. Sell and get that ROI right out of the gate in that area. So what I'm going to wrap up in my last question in this, I think is going to be a little bit of a two part and it's based on your position and what I just said, which is trying to make the case and the value of marketing and what it brings to the table.

[00:35:30] Kelly: And obviously you have to justify your budgets and the effectiveness up the ladder and everyone that's in place. But on the other side of it, you're also boots on the ground, and you understand that you don't just manage an individual location with its own nuance, you have an entire system, and it's a growing system of a lot of different locations that experience very different variables in the mix.

[00:35:53] Kelly: There's different hours, there's different staffing challenges, there's you know, there's distance locations, there's demographic of the locations, there's mature locations that historically perform well and ones that are kind of up and coming and need a lot more support. So I guess where I'd like to kind of hear the last part of it is, is how do you look at being able to continually justify the necessity of marketing to promote future growth without clear visibility in the one to one ROI of that?

[00:36:22] Kelly: And then also managing the variables of it's not always just going to be a Facebook ad that's going to convince someone, right? There's a lot of other factors that insurance issues, you know, competition, other variables on an entire system of locations that's going to weigh whether or not Quote unquote, things are effective and going in the right direction or not.

[00:36:42] Lisa: Yeah, I think it's a very, very complex question to answer in a short period of time. But constantly optimizing. I mean, we, you know, we're constantly, constantly optimizing. We are looking at how well our social advertising is performing against our pay per click ads or our display ads, banner ads, CTV ads, you name it.

[00:37:08] Lisa: And Optimizing for essentially meeting people where they are, where the need exists is how we're continuously justifying additional budget, right? And we've been able to identify different types of demographics and different needs. Really? We advertise to need more than anything. Finding those needs.

[00:37:27] Lisa: And alleviating pain points at the same time is is I believe why our marketing is becoming so much more effective every single day and how we're able to justify continuously increasing budget for these initiatives as an example at this urgent care conference. We talked at It talks about alleviating pain points, right?

[00:37:47] Lisa: And you just talked a little bit about it. Like, what does this, does this urgent care take my insurance? Do they, do they stay open late? Do they, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera in urgent care specifically, you have a couple of very specific pain points that you need to alleviate. Do they take my insurance?

[00:38:02] Lisa: What hours are they open? Are they close to me? Do they take cash if I don't have insurance? And are these essentially properly qualified medical professionals that will take care of me like a primary care would? And so the only way we're able to educate our patients About those pain points before having to meet them for the very first time to your point kelly If they broke their ankle, they've never been to an ex or they're not going to think of us Is through advertising and increasingly advertising to more broad audience a broader audience?

[00:38:38] Lisa: Because at the end of the day Everyone needs health care. There isn't really a demographic that we can isolate and say They don't need health care and urgent care really is just broadly health care. So it's just faster and a little more convenient than the emergency room. And so I think to look at the metrics that we see coming in and just say, like, oh, Here's a, here's a mistake that everybody in healthcare makes.

[00:39:04] Lisa: We're just going to run PPC ads and then the cheaper they get, the better we're doing, right? We are successful because they're really inexpensive and we're only paying if somebody clicks on our ad. That's not enough because people are clicking by accident. Sometimes people are clicking because you're first, people are clicking because they just feel like clicking.

[00:39:23] Lisa: They know you're an advertiser and they're like, I'm going to spend this person's money and not go to their urgent care and not go to their healthcare organization. If you're not supporting the entire ecosystem. Of advertising and marketing. Marketing is not just advertising. If you're not supporting the entire brand experience and meeting people where they are on social media in person digitally in print, you're not going to fulfill or alleviate the fulfill the needs or alleviate the pain points of your customers because customers take so many touch points to really understand the message that you're sending to them.

[00:39:56] Lisa: And so that's what we're Even though I can come back and say, Hey at least senior leadership, our PPC metrics are off the charts. Like this is incredible. They're going to say to me, yeah, but what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything to me at digital advertising is great, but how do you know that that's a patient through the door?

[00:40:12] Lisa: But then when I go back and I say, well, we had the best digital advertising month, we have the best PPC month. We had the best display display month. Plus we handed out, you know, all of these. Physical flyers that have QR codes on them that are trackable. Plus, look at our social media metrics. We've gained 15%.

[00:40:30] Lisa: We've increased 15 percent follower account and follower count in the last two months. All of these things are working together to deliver on the brand promise that we advertise to. And then in the clinics, the final end all be all to help justify is these people are writing about us on the internet.

[00:40:46] Lisa: And so we're seeing our reputation. Increase month by month in the brand value that we're paying for on the internet. And we're delivering in our clinics and our staff is huge. They're delivering on our brand promise every single day. They're one of our single most important sources of marketing. , you know, equal to digital advertising, the rest of the marketing ecosystem, but it's the all encompassing. Network of marketing and advertising that we do what I always call the ecosystem of marketing in urgent care that allows us to continue to increase budget allows, you know, leadership to really understand and see the whole picture of what we're doing and how we're educating people to really help become advocates for increased budget and increased marketing in our work.

[00:41:36] Kelly: Yeah, I really see it as a double edged sword. And, and it's one of the things that I love about the challenge that it represents, because it really shines a spotlight on, again, what I think a lot of other brands inherently forget about because they're not forced into it. Like we are in this marketing where.

[00:41:52] Kelly: Again, when you're marketing sandwiches, you, you can put it out there and some people might just not want to sandwich. It doesn't matter what you're going to do. You're not going to get them to do that. They're going to eat something else. Bye. In urgent care, that is a point of need. Someone is going to solve that problem, or they're going to ignore the problem, and you're going to miss out.

[00:42:09] Kelly: But It's an everything that we measure a lot of it is measured in opportunity cost and it's both short term and long term Right the getting someone into our urgent care that lives in that area Once they have that experience you now become part of their consideration set and every time for potentially the next 20 plus years You've got a patient that's going to be come back there and have that loyalty and be in there because that point of need is right by where you live, and there's an element of convenience.

[00:42:35] Kelly: And so it again, it highlights this area of our success often comes in the form of opportunity cost of, yeah, maybe you're not driving that extra patient, but what if you're not driving that patient? What if they go to a different urgent care, get a good experience? And now it's gonna be a lot harder to commit some never go anywhere else or.

[00:42:51] Kelly: You know, what if they do miss out on going and now they have to go to the emergency room because they waited too long And you can't get them at that point And so it is that idea of being forced to do what I would call good marketing, which is that full funnel that advanced Nurturing of your potential customer because we don't have any other choice Whereas a lot of other brands, they, they can get addicted to that.

[00:43:11] Kelly: I can just do the pay per click at the end of the funnel and I can see one to one ROI and they can not want to make that investment. And again, I love the fact that we're forced. We don't have a choice, but to, to make what is the right investment that everyone should be considering.

[00:43:27] Lisa: Yeah, that's so true. And as we all know it is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy to advertise in the urgent care space. It does grow as your brand becomes more recognizable. And you. Digitally expand into new platforms. You open a different audience's eyes on one last example we had never historically advertised on x nor did we really I don't think ever intend to advertise on x but as

[00:43:53] Kelly: I love that you would call it X and not Twitter. Like you've managed to evolve. I still call it Twitter.

[00:43:58] Lisa: I've made the leap.

[00:43:59] Lisa: I've made the leap. I don't participate in that platform personally, but I do know that that's what people are calling it nowadays. And, you know, when Google started allowing X to give inventory on their platform, on the Google platform and the Google, Google ecosystem, and some advertisements leaked into, you know, the, the X platform, not unintentionally, not necessarily intentionally.

[00:44:19] Lisa: It's just, that's where the people wanted them. That's For the ads were being demanded. An entire community of people inside our territory started talking so much about our advertisements that the CEO and COO of our company both sent me text messages, like, what did you do? Like, why are you, why all of our, all of our friends are suddenly asking us about eggs are, and this has never happened before.

[00:44:44] Lisa: And I'm like, well, you know, you didn't think that there was an audience in this particular market because of the demographic, but you're wrong because the demographic for urgent care is literally everyone. And so as more people are participating and engaging in our advertisements, they're helping us grow the education sphere because then.

[00:45:03] Lisa: audiences that look like them and people who behave like them are in the same echo chambers at times, or they end up in the same circles or you know, digital domains, and they're getting fed these same advertisements that they've never seen before. Even though there are urgent carers in their community, they've probably been to them 10 times.

[00:45:22] Lisa: They don't remember the name until they randomly see an advertisement and they're like, Oh my gosh, Oh, my gosh, there's one. There's right. That's right around the corner from me. I can't believe that I've never seen an ad for them before. So, It's interesting watching the evolution of our advertising infiltrate communities that hadn't, hadn't infiltrated before and hearing the feedback from those people and hearing the conjecture that like, Oh, they, why would we advertise to them?

[00:45:47] Lisa: Why would we not advertise to you? You're now talking about our advertisements. It worked. It clearly worked. They're clearly effective. Whether you're talking about it because you just went to an urgent care or you just saw an ad. What we want is the conversation to be happening and we want people to be talking about it.

[00:46:02] Lisa: We want to be recognized and people to be aware of our services and that they can utilize them at any place in their health care journey from basically birth to the other end.

[00:46:16] Todd: Well, we've said a lot about healthcare marketing today. Good stuff. I guess we could probably talk for another two hours, but we probably shouldn't to be the longest podcast out there. Hopefully there's some healthcare people that are listening or will listen and we'll pick up some things you are probably listening to.

[00:46:32] Todd: A firecracker in this space. I hope you stay in this position for a long time, cause you're so good at it. And it's fun to work with you. Thank you. So I guess today we suggested that advertising works. So I'm going to ask the question that I ask everybody at the end of every show, which is if we assume advertising works and it's supposed to create awareness and recall and so on and so forth.

[00:46:55] Todd: Can you remember the last ad that you saw?

[00:47:00] Lisa: Okay. I remember the last ad that I saw personally

[00:47:03] Todd: Can you remember the last ad that you saw?

[00:47:07] Lisa: Oh, my gosh, I can, and it's embarrassing, but I do

[00:47:13] Todd: Maybe the other last ad that you saw. Yeah,

[00:47:19] Lisa: And the person who there is a person out there who will probably know exactly why it's embarrassing, but I saw a dominoes ad and some of the people who work for dominoes used to run in similar circles as me in past years.

[00:47:31] Lisa: I'm a little cringe, cringe a little bit because I'm like, first of all, I don't want to like your pizza dominoes. Second of all, your advertising is everywhere. I will literally be driving home from the beach. I spend almost all of my weekends on the beach playing sand volleyball. Driving home from the beach and I will think to myself, if I don't order food right this moment, by the time I get home, I will die of starvation.

[00:47:57] Lisa: I will literally die of starvation. And I will get a pop up on my phone that says hungry for pizza from Dominos. And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, if we could only do this in urgent care, Kelly and I've talked about this a hundred times, like if you drop your phone and it shatters or something, you know, it should have a pop up.

[00:48:15] Lisa: Like, are you okay? Do you need to visit extra urgent care? We don't do that yet. We might do that someday in the future, but that also

[00:48:20] Kelly: Get us those domino budgets.

[00:48:23] Lisa: Those domino budgets man, let me tell you every time I get a dominoes ad i'm like, you know what? I want to click it just to I just want to click it

[00:48:29] Kelly: Not to go down the rabbit hole, cause we don't have time, but the Domino's turnaround story, if anyone's listening is an incredible story. I read a statistic, so everyone thought that NVIDIA was the darling stock, but they went back and said at the same time, it was a couple of years that if you bought Domino's stock and NVIDIA stock, Domino's outperformed it, like the brand turnaround of that thing is astonishing to, if you dive into it,

[00:48:52] Lisa: i'm a little bitter. I'm a little bitter about it. I'm not i'm not bitter. I'm not bitter I support dominoes and their efforts and they their turnaround story is incredible And some of I know some of the people that work over there are incredible at what they do. So, props to them Not This is my nice endorsement for the brand and your advertising does exactly their advertising does exactly what it should is got my attention.

[00:49:15] Lisa: And now I'm talking about it. So

[00:49:16] Kelly: there you go,

[00:49:17] Todd: there we go. Pizza and retail urgent care. Love it, Lisa. Thank you. You are, like I said, you're a firecracker. You have so much energy and marketing firepower. It's awesome to hear you talk about it whether it's healthcare or dominoes or sandwiches or whatever it is. Your brain is on fire. I love it.

[00:49:35] Lisa: You guys are the best. You're the best to work with. I appreciate all of your work and efforts and being partners. You are phenomenal partners to myself and the brand, and you're always willing to listen to me go off on tangents about random things that somehow maybe tie back into marketing and urgent care.

[00:49:51] Lisa: Sometimes they don't, but I appreciate you letting me have all of the moments of. Light bulbs and epiphany is about things that you guys have probably known for decades and i'm just like just they're just clicking with Me since I remember how effectively running the digital advertising So I appreciate you guys more than you know,

[00:50:10] Todd: Well, thank you. And I'll, I'll just say this to the listeners. If you don't have this kind of relationship between marketing client and agency you should work hard to have one because they're very fruitful when they are good like this, of course, we'll have to write you that check for saying all those nice things about us later on.

[00:50:26] Todd: Cause.

[00:50:26] Lisa: you know where I live

[00:50:27] Todd: Yeah, we didn't pay you to say that. But anyway, thank you very much for giving us 45 minutes of your time. I appreciate it. On a Monday after Thanksgiving, when we're all sort of in food fog and food coma holiday after effect thank you very much for sharing.

[00:50:41] Lisa: Thank you. I appreciate it