beer on the shelf you're listening to the
pt pinecat where smart people in health
care come to make noise here's your host
jimmy mckay
All right.
Hello, I'm Jimmy.
That's Andrea.
And we are here to explain why healthcare
marketing doesn't work, dot, dot, dot,
unless you listen to us or you do
it better.
And we've got examples of other people
doing it better.
This week,
a health system that can actually prove
with numbers on a dashboard,
we love dashboards,
that marketing can drive real revenue in
healthcare.
Who knew?
We knew.
We knew that.
why a strategy almost everyone uses is
quietly breaking oh that's some tension
and a tease and what the smartest
organizations are doing differently first
let's start off on a positive note
franciscan health i actually i forgot to
look at where they're from where are they
from where's franciscan from you know oh i
don't know off the top of my head
here jimmy
All right.
So you nodded like you were like,
that was very good.
You convinced me you knew them.
You were like, yes, Frances.
I know them.
I don't know where they are.
Well, let's just do this.
In most healthcare organizations,
marketing and revenue live in two
different worlds.
They're in two different departments and
they're treated as such.
But they sort of need to go hand
in hand or at least hand to foot
or something.
Marketing, the problem is marketing
can't prove it's driving revenue or hasn't
been able to do that or people just
haven't bothered to ask if it does that
so leadership then sees that marketing as
a cost and not a revenue driver and
you and i both said on this show
and off this show if you can't prove
that what you're doing drives revenue or
attention that eventually drives revenue
you shouldn't be doing it
right clear and you know useful beats
clever clever is great but if it doesn't
drive revenue what are we doing here okay
uh so franciscan health decided to connect
the dots that's really what it was here's
what they did wow this is going to
be remarkable outside of healthcare people
are like of course you would do that
they integrated crm and emr data
We've said this before.
How come EMRs just aren't like slowly
becoming CRMs?
They are.
They're fancified CRMs, right?
So they could track a patient from first
click or first eyeball to scheduled visit
to completed plan of care to lifetime
interactions.
Understand you have so much of this data
available.
We talk about data, data, data, and AI,
AI, AI.
What are you doing with it?
And we'll get to some of the things,
the failures in just a little bit.
Here's what else they did.
Standardized campaign tracking.
Every campaign had clear attribution tied
to service lines.
Service lines are different.
Healthcare is different at different entry
points.
So we have to understand what that is.
Advertising for cancer care to everybody
might be a miss.
Why?
Everybody doesn't have cancer, right?
That sounds very, very obvious.
But when you disconnect these things,
it's not as obvious.
They built a shared dashboard,
not a marketing dashboard that only
marketing people look at, care about,
and can understand.
A marketing and operations looking at the
same data, not separate reports.
This is fantastic.
Again, some of this stuff sounds basic.
Spoiler, because it is.
Can't believe why it hasn't been done
before.
But hey,
good for these people for doing it.
And the last thing.
They focused on service line growth,
not marketing performance,
but things like,
how are we growing our orthopedic
footprint?
How are we letting more people in our
communities know that they can get these
different things?
This was a big win.
This is what we did at Mount Sinai.
I'm not saying we did it perfectly.
But when I was there,
my short two years there,
it was controlled.
The good thing was it was controlled by
vertical or by service line.
The bad thing was we were on our
own.
Right.
Here's almost no budget and minimal
resources.
Go grow this.
And then how come you haven't every
quarter, every six months in meetings?
I was like, you gave me nothing.
So what did I give you?
Almost nothing.
I gave you nothing plus a little bit.
So here's the thing.
Instead of the ad performed well,
it really became in a meeting,
this ortho campaign drove X number
surgeries and X revenue.
Because if you can't tie one of those
things together,
you're never going to get any more
resources either.
So the outcome specifically for
Franciscan, are you ready for this?
Their campaign drove,
once they were able to track all these
things, they were like, oh,
we did this stuff and we found,
look in the couch cushion.
I love finding quarters in the couch
cushions.
Sixteen point seven million dollars in
revenue.
They were just able to attribute it now
by saying we did X,
Y happened because of Z.
About twenty seven hundred patients were
now attributed to all this stuff that
marketing was doing can now lead to
revenue.
And I know it sounds icky talking about
revenue, but if no revenue,
we can't pay the doctors,
we can't pay environmental services,
we can't pay the finance people,
we can't pay the people in the parking
lot, we can't pay anybody.
So in your experience, Andrea,
small organizations, large organizations,
what is the hardest part of connecting
these systems?
I just mentioned CRM and EHR.
That sounds pretty obvious.
What's the hardest part of doing that?
I've banged my head against the wall in
multiple areas of healthcare trying to do
this.
The hardest thing with small organizations
is
I think so, you know,
if you're like a large system and you're
on Epic or something like, you know,
maybe there are more integrations,
probably not actually.
But when you're looking at a specialty
provider,
so I think about PT as specialty.
I was in urgent care.
There are others you're using more often
than not.
You're using an EMR that's designed
specifically for your smaller portion of
the health care industry.
So.
trying to get that vendor to do the
things that are necessary to be able to
integrate is sort of hard, right?
Like you need to be on their roadmap
to say,
can we integrate or are you building XYZ
in?
And the hard thing in healthcare across
the board is we have to be really
careful with anything that we're plugging
into our EMR because there's very,
very sensitive data in there.
And I think, you know,
I was up against that
with multiple organizations that I worked
with.
But if you can find a way to
do this where you're not sharing PHI,
then you're in pretty good shape because
otherwise what happens is you have these
two disconnected systems,
which we've talked about.
So part of it, I think,
is there are technical
There are technical roadblocks because the
systems just can't do it right it's like
well we don't want to open an API
or we can't do it because of this
I mean and I've spent so many times
spinning my wheels trying to get this
done,
or it's just internally like we don't want
to open our systems to talk to other
systems.
Understandably.
And so I think you really just need
to have some oversight and some guidelines
in place when you're doing this to make
sure that you're not sharing sensitive
information.
Right.
Like I just am always in the camp
like there is a way to get this
done.
You know,
like we know we need an end to
end view.
There is a way to get this integrated.
And if we can't figure it out,
we need to bring someone in who can.
Right, right, right, right.
So who actually needs to own this?
Here's a toss-up question.
And the answer can't be both.
Is it marketing or operations?
You're already saying both.
Yeah, no,
I like to own it as a marketer.
I know what information I need and I
know what it should look like.
That being said,
I don't think you should hand this off
to a junior marketer and go,
here you go,
own the integration of our two really
important systems.
I think it needs to be a marketing
operations person specifically if you have
that on your team,
but otherwise it needs to be someone in
marketing,
but operations needs to be a really close
partner in that process.
yeah i mean this is direction so it
should be a director or above right i
mean this is the sum of all the
things that you're doing in terms of
marketing and finally what's the first
step if someone doesn't have this yet i
mean i guess it depends on the size
of the organization because if if you're
below a certain level and i don't have
that mason dixon line but this this is
simple but not easy so what's the first
step if someone doesn't have this yet at
their organization if they don't have the
integration if they don't yeah if
Or let's go even more basic.
If they're not even trying to connect
these two things,
because some people are just like,
marketing happens.
What do we need?
More marketing.
Why do we need it?
Because other people are doing it.
Wrong answer, in my opinion.
Other people are doing it is not the
reason you should be doing it.
That is usually the wrong answer.
So where I start is I usually start
with the EMR vendor.
And usually for like some of these
specialty organizations, again,
I know PT is a huge industry,
but when we think about larger healthcare
systems, right,
there are just different sizes.
I start with the vendor and I talk
about what I'm trying to accomplish.
And I ask them if this is something
I can do with their system currently,
is this on their roadmap?
What would it take to get on their
roadmap?
And then I bother them like every two
weeks to a month until I figure out
if it's on their roadmap.
Right.
Yeah.
You need marketing to show up on the
P&L.
Otherwise, it doesn't get taken seriously.
You've talked before how marketing
positions have the shortest lifespan in
the C-suite.
Isn't that right?
They do.
Shortest tenure.
Marketing leaders have the shortest tenure
in the C-suite.
Yeah.
And maybe because if it doesn't show up
on the P&L,
this person doesn't feel like they're
doing a good job.
Vibes are off.
I don't know how to judge this person.
But if there's a metric now,
if it's showing up on the P&L,
which again,
a lot of this stuff sounds really icky
because it's like,
you're talking about money,
not patient care.
It's like, no,
we're trying to show off your patient care
to give more patient care.
And that's a good thing.
Right.
That's one of the things when I talk
to founders, I, you know, my secret,
one of my like sort of helpful,
I think things that convince people,
I guess,
to go with a more senior level marketer
than just bringing in a bunch of interns
or freelancers is you really want to work
with someone who speaks the language of
the CFO.
you know, the entire C-suite.
So they're not just coming in going,
we need to do marketing.
We need to do some marketing things and
show you vanity metrics and tell you,
you know, we got four hundred likes.
We need to be able to show you
how it's growing the business.
OK, second story,
the channel that became the strategy.
And I am not anti this.
I'd like to go on record before saying
it, not anti.
I'm anti only this.
paid search became pretty much the default
because it's measurable and immediate.
Those two things are pretty powerful.
We just talked about being able to be
measurable.
So look at all these dashboards.
You have your meta dashboard.
You're able to say,
I put a hundred dollars in.
I got seventy two clicks from those
seventy two clicks.
This is how many appointments were booked.
Therefore, this is my dollar per.
This is my customer acquisition cost or my
patient acquisition cost.
Here's the problem.
Healthcare turned that channel into an
entire strategy.
When I do presentations for organizations,
paid search or paid advertising is one of
my fingers.
I use my hand where I bring everything
back to the organization.
But they turned it into an entire
strategy.
I mean,
there are large enough organizations where
they have a paid ad department when they
get that big.
So everything gets optimized for short
term conversions.
I need to convert because I'm being judged
on a hundred dollars.
Where does my hundred dollars go in the
next thirty days?
Last click attribution,
which could be one of the worst as
you close your eyes and not one of
the worst things ever.
You know,
we'll talk about that in a second.
Make sure I don't skip over it.
And then are people already ready to act?
That's how it gets optimized for that.
So I think here's what they did wrong.
Budget gets concentrated just in Google
Ads because it proves ROI because you can
measure it, except what happens there.
If that's your only strategy when costs go
up, uh-oh, your costs,
like costs in a Google Ad or a
particular keyword go up, uh-oh,
what are we supposed to do?
You don't own that channel,
you are renting it.
There's no investment in awareness.
It's just,
you're just trying to get in front of
people who are ready and looking for the
thing right this moment.
Again, make sure I don't skip over.
Are people ready to act?
Messaging becomes clearly transactional.
Book now, call today.
That feels creepy, not healthcare.
That feels transactional.
That's exactly why I said that.
And it does not do that thing that
healthcare is supposed to do that we talk
about when you're a clinician,
building relationships.
When I feel like I'm being sold and
I need that thing,
I guess I'll buy it.
Right.
Long term,
these are decisions that we like to say
it builds trust.
And then instead of stepping back and
saying,
are we growing demand or are we just
optimizing for conversions?
So St.
Elizabeth's saw this.
They spent more than they had higher cost
per click.
same or worse growth.
So spending more and getting the same or
worse results, that's not good.
And if you're not doing anything else,
you didn't diversify,
you're stuck with it.
So that channel became the only strategy.
And now you're up the creek without a
paddle because they were only competing
for people who were already searching.
So you need upstream demand and creation.
So here's really my question.
Why is it so hard for organizations to
pull budget out of paid search?
If you're that organization that's saying,
but, but, but,
why is it so hard to pull budget
from that to put it somewhere else?
Because you've got to take from one to
put in another.
I just bit a hole in my tongue,
Jimmy, trying to not say anything.
So I have worked with so many
organizations that have done this and it's
so hard.
So remember what I just said five minutes
ago about speaking the language of the
CFO.
It's really hard for organizations to pull
budget because of exactly what you said
when you started talking about this.
This is the channel that you can prove
ROI.
So I can say I spent a thousand
dollars and got this many things.
If you're set up right,
you can see how many people clicked.
And then if you take the next step
to say how many people actually converted
this talk,
this is where you're talking about
integrating systems.
That's why it's so hard.
I mean,
I have so many stories around this.
I've worked with a founder who
literally made me cut my entire marketing
budget because we couldn't prove direct
ROI for a lot of in healthcare for
a lot of those channels to only focus
on.
Well,
what if we give you ten thousand dollars
more to put towards towards that?
Because we know we spent X and we
got Y. And I'm like,
that's not how the math works for for
PPC.
Right.
Like if I spent fifty K and got
you know, a thousand conversions,
I'm not going to spend a hundred K
and get two thousand conversions.
Like it just doesn't work that way.
But it feels like it should work that
way because you're talking to people who
live in spreadsheets.
Right.
And so not in a that's not a
negative way.
You have to live in spreadsheets to run
your business.
You need to sort of look at the
financial health and patients per week and
all that.
But that's why it's really,
really hard to sort of get people to
shift their thinking on this.
But what happens is
like you said,
all of your money's in this bucket.
You do not own it.
you rent it, and so Google decides.
And I've talked with a recent client about
this.
Google decides how much you're spending.
They determine if you're even showing up,
where you show up,
and that AI is factoring into this now.
If your website isn't great or you have
a bad online reputation,
even though you're spending a bunch of
money on PPC,
you still may not be showing up in
a favorable position.
And when you do, like you said,
it's very transactional.
That being said,
There are some organizations where it
makes sense to be heavy on paid search,
but that's just one tool in the toolbox.
You need to still do a bunch of
things.
And I'll give you one example.
When I worked in urgent care,
I had a really large paid search budget
because I had it down to a science
to the extent that you can.
And there were parents that were
looking for immediate care and in some of
our very competitive markets, you know,
we had a,
so this was one of many,
many things that we did.
We were, we had brand awareness.
We, I mean,
we had so much going on.
This was just one thing.
So at two o'clock in the morning,
if your kid has a fever, right.
You're like, what urgent care near me.
shows up,
book an appointment for the following
morning.
And it makes sense to do that because
it's intent-based,
but if it's someone that's not at that
stage of the journey,
it might not make sense for them.
Understand the tool for who you're
optimizing it for.
Yes.
Yeah, in that instance,
three o'clock in the morning,
your kid's got a hundred and four fever,
you could optimize for last click
attribution.
Exactly.
This is where I come back to,
I grew up in New York.
If you're watching a Yankee game in right
field, there's an ad for Jaguar.
They are not looking for last view
attribution for their billboard ad in
right field to buy a Jaguar.
They know that they're advertising to a
bunch of nine and ten-year-olds because in
thirty years, if they earn enough,
Jaguar is now a status.
That is different than healthcare.
But in competitive markets,
understanding who gets what,
especially for the different service lines
like oncology,
that is not something you're buying at
three o'clock in the morning, correct?
Correct.
Right.
Oncology care.
But that's going to be a long,
deep journey.
And if I'm deciding between A and B,
that decision or the basis for that
decision,
the grounds for that were laid long before
that.
Right.
It just is.
And I think another thing I talk with
clients about is around exactly as you're
saying, intent-based last touch.
That's where you're going to see the
conversions and see the ROI unpaid.
That being said,
you can certainly run a campaign for
someone who's earlier in the process.
So for PT, for example,
my knee, like my knee hurts.
What do I do?
I don't know if that's the right search,
right?
Like someone who is not specific yet.
They're not going best PT.
They don't even know that they need PT.
You can have a campaign that optimizes for
that.
Just don't expect people to click through
because at that point you are just a
digital billboard.
So when they are ready down the line,
they go, wait a minute.
I think I saw that somewhere.
Is this a reporting problem or is this
a leadership problem?
Um, in what way?
Um,
I was sort of setting you up for
this one.
It's sort of both,
which is if you don't convince the
leadership that what you're doing is
valuable, we won't measure it.
And if we don't measure it,
we can never prove it again.
Exactly.
Exactly that.
I think that's it.
I think there's leadership needs to
understand why we're doing what we're
doing and why we're not doing what we're
not doing.
And if you're not reporting on it and
being very transparent,
then
you're not going to get more budget to
do other things or to continue doing this.
Correct.
Okay.
Third story for today.
I wanted to end on like something that
someone's like doing well and maybe
something that people can steal.
And this is building demand before it
exists.
We just, oh wait, I want, oh no,
I said, I talked about that.
Talk about Jaguar,
which is like last click attribution.
That was the thing.
If that's the only thing you're optimizing
for, that's transactions.
I wrote an article on LinkedIn last week
where I essentially talked about sales
life cycle.
in technology sales.
And I went from prostitution to marriage,
different types of relationships in
different stages.
This is also like you're,
I was taught like public relations,
you're building a relationship with the
public.
You're either doing that well,
or you're doing it poorly.
You're never not doing it.
If you're not doing it,
you're doing it poorly.
That is news.
All right.
So here's what St.
Elizabeth's did.
Here's what I think's next and could be
a trend and wanted to get your input.
Building demand before it exists.
Which is the best time to plant a
tree if you want shade?
Twenty years ago.
What's the next best time?
Now.
Right.
Not tomorrow, right?
So most healthcare marketing shows up day
late and a dollar short when the patient
is already making the decision.
Again, there are some examples.
Kid has fever, three in the morning.
That's a good place to be.
But I think the problem is everybody's
competing at the same moment.
I've given an example before about when my
boss asked me what my budget was going
to be for the St.
Patrick's Day parade when I was in radio.
And I said,
I want fifteen thousand dollars,
but I'm not going to spend it at
the dumb parade that everybody else in my
market is going to be.
I'm going to spend it in April,
May and June when they already blew their
budget for the quarter.
And it looked crazy at first.
And then I look like a genius.
So the problem is differentiation
disappears.
Everybody's yelling at the same time.
Why yell when everyone else is screaming?
Then it just becomes location,
availability,
Whoever shows up first is,
and that's not how you want to
differentiate yourself.
That's a real estate game,
which if you're big,
you want to play that.
And if you're small or you're not,
it's binary.
You are either the biggest and the most
available or you're not, right?
So St.
Elizabeth flipped the model.
They built a coordinated full funnel
system, right?
Not just in one spot.
So they connected TV and YouTube content,
introducing services before the need was
urgent.
I don't hire the best lawn care service.
I hire the best one amongst the ones
I know about.
No last click attribution yet.
Not there.
That's top of funnel, as we'd call it,
kids.
They created social and educational
content.
i'm here for you hard to hard to
put an roi on that directly but that
is how we make decisions for better or
for worse um they did do some paid
search again not anti i'm anti and sounds
like you are too anti only or or
over reliance if the channel becomes the
strategy and then finally consistent
messaging across all stages
They were saying something not the same.
I looked at some of their ads,
not the same thing repeated over and over
again, but consistent.
It felt the same four different stages.
You speak differently to a person who's in
the market for a car than you do
when someone is ready to make a buying
decision.
What's the difference between these two
things?
What will put you over the edge, right?
So when somebody finally searched,
they weren't choosing between options.
They were confirming the decision they
already made.
I talk all about this.
We're big, dumb animals.
We make emotional decisions and we back
them up with logic.
But a lot of times in healthcare,
we love the statistics and the rankings.
Actually, rankings, I think,
are more emotional than logical.
In New York City,
it was whatever you were ranked by
whatever service was ranking number one in
orthopedics.
That to me is actually,
it's more emotional.
I want to be with number one.
Well,
what if you can't get in with number
one?
Is number three better than four?
I don't really care about that.
I want to go with number one.
I would argue is more of an emotional
decision than a logical decision.
So their outcomes,
That was a long one.
What is the hardest part of aligning all
those channels I just mentioned?
TV and YouTube,
social and educational content,
paid search.
What's the hardest part of aligning all
those different channels at one time?
The hardest part isn't aligning them so
much as it is proving what worked.
That's what it is.
So, you know, you
Any marketer who knows what they're doing
can put together an integrated campaign.
And within that integrated campaign,
you know,
these are the channels we're using.
This is the creative.
This is our message.
Here's when it's happening and all of
that.
Where it becomes challenging,
and this is the attribution piece,
and I've used a lot of attribution models.
I've used first, I've used last,
I've used multi.
It's so hard and it's harder now than
ever to the point of it's impossible now.
And any vendor that tells you they can
give you
you know,
perfect attribution is lying to you
because it is impossible to truly know at
this stage, we're on different devices,
we're on different browsers.
We have, we just have different habits.
Like there's no way to track one person.
And this is where some self-reported,
like,
how did you hear about us can sometimes
help with that direction,
different conversation for a different
day.
So I think the hard thing is not
necessarily aligning,
but it really is trying to figure out
what,
What drove what?
And is there any piece of is there
any channel that we know for sure,
like did not assist at all and we
can get rid of it?
I but I do talk a lot about
the brand awareness piece sort of
assisting the paid pieces and the paid
sort of assisting the brand awareness.
Like you can't just drop a whole demand
gen or brand awareness piece because you
can't necessarily track it.
M&Ms runs TV commercials with talking
M&Ms.
Do you think they're monitoring the
markets where the TV commercials run and
the week that they run?
I don't buy M&Ms.
That's just my M&M buying habit.
I don't buy M&Ms because I was like,
you know, talking M&Ms talk me into it.
But when I'm deciding between thirty nine
hundred different types of candy and
Again,
I don't even know if the talking M&M
did it,
but it makes me think of M&Ms when
I'm standing at the aisle.
Well,
then if you were only doing last click
attribution,
you would do all the advertising budget
would be spent at the aisle.
But it's not done that way.
And M&Ms knows this.
So the Mars company knows this.
And Jaguar knows this.
And Rolex knows this.
I think you brought up something
important, too.
You can show up everywhere.
You can,
but you can't because of budget and
creative constraints.
So understanding where not to show up is
probably just as important as knowing
where to show up.
I'll give you an example.
Somebody pointed out that Rolex has never
run a Super Bowl ad,
which doesn't make any sense because the
Super Bowl is going to be the most
eyes open.
In the world.
Right.
Rolex makes that decision from what I've
heard and what I've read.
And I think it's fascinating because they
advertise a,
do you know where Rolex advertises any
sport and sporting events?
Like where do they show up?
Tennis.
Wimbledon.
Yep.
Big ones.
Wimbledon and F one.
Oh, and they say,
this is who we are.
We're not here.
We are up here.
Right.
They could get better.
You know,
they could get good ROI in terms of
dollar for eyeballs.
Right.
Dollar for eyeball.
That's fantastic.
But Wimbledon says we're not going to be
there because that would erode our brand.
We know where our real people live.
Buyers.
People are actually going to make that
decision.
Now,
those people probably also watch the Super
Bowl, though.
Probably both.
But a lot of other people watch the
Super Bowl.
right and so the juice isn't worth the
squeeze but also it says about wimbledon
is we're here so when they go to
charge you i don't even know what a
rolex costs thirty thousand dollars
something mind-blowing i'm not in i'm not
in the altitude of rolex not yet anyway
um they understand where to be and where
not to be like i sort of wanted
to and i know i use extreme examples
but i think you sort of have to
to point out why you shouldn't shouldn't
be places
And that's just it.
And that's the,
we may not be able to tell the
ROI on all of the things,
but we know we shouldn't be where our
buyers are not.
So we know if we're trying, like, again,
I'm going to go back to urgent care
because it was such a great example of
knowing it was a mom.
She was the target.
Like that was the target.
And we know what radio she listens to.
We know what social media she's on.
And so we put money there.
I mean,
another organization I worked with in the
PT space was entering a new market and
it was super commuter friendly.
And I'm like,
let's do a takeover of the train station.
Like, let's let's do it.
Can't measure the ROI.
Absolutely.
We have a QR code or something on
it.
Right.
You want to know what's funny?
Do you want to know the quickest way
that ROI goes out the window?
Here's a quick one.
If you had pitched,
let's take over this train station.
And the first question is,
what's that going to cost?
Which is a valid question.
What are we going to get?
Can't track it.
The quickest way to throw that out is
that idea of taking over the train station
gets denied.
And three months later,
your competitor does it.
And everyone goes, why didn't we do that?
And you go, we pitched to do that.
Suddenly it doesn't matter because they
own it and we want it.
Scarcity.
Yep.
That is the fastest way to do it.
Why didn't we think of this?
Whenever a competitor would do something
creative,
I dreaded walking in the office the next
day and would say,
because everybody would go,
look what they did.
It's so revolutionary.
Why didn't we do that?
Which would lead me to my next question.
Well, my answer was usually, hey,
I think what they did was fantastic.
Let's deconstruct how they did it and why
they did it.
And then I try to play devil's advocate,
although the devil doesn't really need an
advocate most of the time.
If I would have pitched that idea to
you six months ago,
would you have said yes?
Because the question is,
do most organizations even you have to ask
yourself, do we have the structure?
To do this, do we have the,
this is where I bring my P's and
T's, people, product, process, tools,
training, time.
We just got smoked.
Here's an example.
One of the radio stations that I worked
at, one of our competitors also owned,
they owned,
they were a radio station company,
they owned several radio stations,
a newspaper,
and an outdoor advertising company.
That was helpful.
We would get beat up on outdoor
advertising.
My boss is like, what's going on?
I go,
maybe we should put a billboard on top
of our building bill as my GM going.
I can't do what you have not.
I cannot use a tool that you have
not put in my hand.
So I don't optimize for it.
I never thought that was an option.
Well,
you should always be thinking outside the
box, Jimmy.
Okay.
Except when I think outside the box,
I get told can't do that cost too
much.
So we go round and round.
And I understand it.
But the funny part was if you would
have walked in six months from now and
your competition had done the train
station takeover,
it would have been looked at,
why didn't we do that?
Of course,
our person that we're aiming for is going
to be here.
And the answer was not all organizations
have the structure to do everything.
Money is not the only thing that you
need.
You need other things to do it and
to do it well.
Yep.
That's right.
And I think a lot of PT organizations,
there are some that are so massive that
there are very strategic marketing leaders
in place.
I think a lot of organizations are still
the founders sort of making decision based
on what they like or think or whatever
it may be.
And and I think the structure isn't in
place.
And so that makes it really,
really hard because a lot goes into doing
these things to put together an integrated
campaign, to take over a station,
to put some kind of average like a
lot goes into it.
And I think if you're not marketing,
you truly don't understand what goes into
getting this stuff done.
And so I think the structure is really
important and that's where we fail.
And in a small PT organization,
the marketer is one marketer or two
marketers are being pulled in five
thousand directions.
And so they're not even in the position
a lot of times to do this and
do it well.
Also,
they're doing other daily activities.
Like large campaigns are not the only
thing.
You're not always throwing a gala or an
event.
That is one thing.
But usually when you do that,
people are like, well, I get it.
Like, hey man,
this gala that's four hours long did not
take four hours to put together.
There's a thousand moving parts.
Because the first thing a lot of people
do is they walk in and they start
to tear things.
Well, why is that?
That looks different than our brand color.
It's like,
that's the only color the cake company had
for icing.
And you're like, yes.
Right.
How do you spot – how do you
pay attention to or put your finger on
the pulse of your ideal person over –
how do you keep it there?
I've got an example I can give you,
but that's the question I'll ask.
So I'll give my example first to sort
of give you some context so I don't
just throw a question under – throw you
under the bus.
Culture changes.
What people like changes.
Our ideal person ages,
and those things change.
If I asked my staff,
and not just my staff,
because I'm going back to my radio days,
if I asked them directly, hey,
what's Keith, who is our avatar?
What's he into these days?
They're trying to justify what they want
to do by saying Keith likes it.
So I would always ask indirect questions.
What was cool ten years ago that isn't
anymore?
But if I ask them what music we
should drop, they get real territorial.
because they're emotionally attached.
This is where I'm trying to detach the
emotion from it.
So I would say,
what was cool ten years ago that you
think is less cool now,
and what's cool now that didn't exist ten
years ago?
Essentially, what I'm asking is,
what are we doing that we should drop,
and what are we not doing that we
should pick up?
But if I ask them,
what are we doing that we should drop
in the reverse,
I would get whatever they wanted or they
thought.
I needed them to think for the user,
the listener,
not for themselves and what they wanted to
do.
That's really simple, but not easy.
So how do you do that?
Any ideas or suggestions?
I don't think there's a magic bullet,
but...
There's not a magic bullet,
but the avatar, you said it.
So you need to have documented personas
and you need to update them regularly.
And they need to be based on what
real clients or patients are telling you,
what feedback.
It's based on research.
There's a lot of ways to do this
now.
You can put your personas together and
And test it.
Ask Claude.
This is who I'm trying to target.
This is her age.
This is whatever.
Is this correct?
But there's a human element to it.
You do need to be updating these personas.
I would say yearly at a minimum.
But you need to always sort of go
back to it.
And it feels like...
of silly exercise when you tell a founder
you need to have a persona or you
need to have an ICP.
But you do because otherwise we're just
going,
I'm going to do the thing that I
like.
Like, no,
I don't think that's going to work because
I don't like that.
Okay, well, are you our target person?
I would always ask, can you show me?
And they were like, what do you mean?
I'm like, show me a moment in culture.
Show me other people avoiding or doing
this.
I love the day when I get hired
and we're like,
I ask, start with the end in mind.
What are we optimizing for?
What game are we playing?
And they're like,
we want people to do this.
And I say,
show me how you're doing that now.
Oh, we're doing that all over the place.
And I go, bring up your Instagram,
your website, this.
Even internal communications.
Bring up your internal ways of showing me.
People know that there's paths to grow
within the company.
Awesome.
Show me.
I get to pretend like I'm a dumb
five-year-old that day.
really petulant why why where if i got
a click and read between the lines it
doesn't exist it exists in your own mind
is where it exists so you should be
constantly testing for that icp which
sounds you know again all these terms make
it sound like there's not a peop they're
people but it is right uh anything you
what what are you what are you looking
at more
now and what are you looking at less
i'll give an example um i'm seeing i
saw a statistic i'll find it was like
ninety three percent of ai applications in
healthcare never leave the pilot phase so
i'm not saying ai isn't powerful i'm
saying it is not a plug and play
genie gets out of a bottle
Yeah, this situation was at MIT.
I'm really forgetting last year or within
the past year,
there was the study exactly that across
the board,
ninety five percent of pilots do not get
out of out of pilot or don't succeed.
And I think or I know I've read
the study, but it's sort of common sense.
It comes down to
They don't have the structure in place to
support it,
and they're not using it for the right
things, among other things.
And I think marketing specifically,
it was found,
was the least successful of all of the
applications.
So people who were solely using AI for
marketing found the least value,
I guess you could say.
But I think it's how people were using
it for marketing.
Because what happens is, you know,
you and I have both worked with people
that are like, oh,
just have AI do it.
And you're like, yeah,
it doesn't work that way.
Right?
Like this is AI is coming for all
of our marketing jobs, but it's not.
You're right.
That's exactly what it was.
MIT study,
ninety five percent of enterprise AI
pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI.
Isn't this funny?
We started talking about we started today
talking about how marketing has to prove
ROI or you just yank the budget.
You see a lot of people talking, oh,
I've got twice the quota and half the
budget and a quarter of the staff this
year.
But MIT saying enterprise AI pilots,
ninety five percent.
How, Andrea?
All of them come on their slide decks
that say
It's going to reduce this by eight,
you know,
six hours a day and free people up
and people will be running in fields of
sunflowers and be,
burnout's going to be gone tomorrow.
What are you waiting for?
And yet we're seeing, yep,
ninety-five percent of enterprise AI
pilots fail to deliver.
Because leaders are going,
we have to use AI.
Why?
Because everyone else is.
For what?
Because everyone else is.
And so they throw some AI things into
their organization
There's no guidance as to what, how,
there's no consistency,
there's no oversight.
They're not setting expectations or trying
to figure out how this is actually going
to help,
how this is going to integrate different
teams or using different AI.
And your outcomes are only as good as
the strategy behind the technology.
It's the same thing I remember the early
HubSpot days.
What was that?
See, I wasn't around in early HubSpot.
I mean, I was,
but we weren't using that.
That wasn't our bag.
So early HubSpot date.
So HubSpot, for those who don't know,
it's a CRM and marketing automation.
It is, you know, best in class.
Like I was and still am a strong
proponent of HubSpot.
It helps you.
It really helps.
Like I've plugged HubSpot into EMRs and it
sort of gives you that end to end.
And everyone was like, oh my goodness,
you need HubSpot.
And great, you do.
But if you don't have the people to
use it well or implement it or put
it into place and you don't have the
process in place to use it well,
it's it's not going to solve anything for
you.
Have you ever used Notion?
I have used Notion.
I came up with the phrase that Notion
is an ocean.
I remember working in an organization
where everything was in Notion.
And I was like, hey,
how do we do this?
Like, it's in Notion.
And I'm like,
you might as well just say,
figure it out yourself, dumbass.
It's tech.
It's like a tech.
I dislike Notion.
It's a junk drawer.
With companies that are like, oh,
make a Notion.
And I'm like,
I don't need to put it in Notion.
I think we're good.
Yeah.
It looked really cute.
And for people who have,
if someone were in charge of Notion,
that's the problem, I also think.
When everybody's in charge,
no one's in charge.
So if someone says,
this is how we put things in there.
Listen, it's in the library.
Where, I don't know,
because there's no librarian,
nothing gets shelved properly and make fun
of it all you want.
The Dewey Decimal System actually helps us
figure out where to find crap.
Just having the information is not
valuable.
We have to be able to find it
when we need it.
I learned that the hard way when I
was renovating my house for the first
time.
Bought a house,
owned a hammer and a screwdriver,
but then I started acquiring tools.
And I had a room for my tools
and I had no way of putting things
in the room.
So I would be like, I own this.
I paid money for this.
Can't find it.
Doesn't matter.
Right.
It's like the so the high tech
organizations use Notion.
I think other organizations use OneNote.
You know, do you have you have?
Oh, yeah.
No, it's in OneNote.
The front desk staff has access to
OneNote.
Well, are they are they looking at it?
Do they know where to find it?
Correct.
Yeah.
So you have the right tool,
but doesn't do anything.
All right, you've got a hard stop,
so we'll get you out of here early
because I don't want to go right from
one meeting to another,
which should be also something you do for
your people.
You should have a ten to fifteen minute
buffer.
So parting shots,
what's something you're paying attention
to in the next seven to thirty days?
Oh, boy, a lot of things.
I'm still paying attention to AI because I
want to know how to use it and
how how not to use it.
So I know sort of general and maybe
I've said that one before,
but that's that's sort of where I'm where
I'm at.
Yeah, I do a lot of,
I had great advice a long time ago
and I forget who coined this phrase was,
don't listen to what people say,
watch what they do.
So a lot of these AI companies are
still hiring humans.
What a weird idea.
It's because the answer is not all or
nothing.
The answer is going to be both.
And maybe don't fall for that scarcity
just yet.
I think even some of the best AI
companies would rather take on the right
clients and
than the wrong ones.
Because if they take on the wrong ones
and they have a bad experience,
that person's going to shout it from the
rooftops.
So I think the smart ones are trying
to weed potential clients out if they're
not the right fit.
You can find Andrea on LinkedIn.
We'll put the link to her in your
show notes.
Are you still writing regularly?
You were throwing some bombs around for a
while.
I was, and then I stopped.
We had a school vacation and a snowstorm,
and then I was kind of like,
I just don't have the energy to be
here.
There's been so much noise on LinkedIn,
but I have started writing semi-regularly
again, so I'm getting some traction.
Excellent.
Andrea, appreciate the time.
Thanks for doing this.
We'll be back next week.
Thanks, Jimmy.
That's it for this one,
but we're just getting warmed up.
Smash follow, send it to a friend,
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Want to go deeper?
Hit us at pgpinecast.com.
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And legally, none of this was advice.
It's for entertainment purposes only.
Bullshit!
See, Keith?
We read the script.
Happy now?