Mapping the Patient Journey from Awareness to Retention | EP 9

We've talked about the psychographics. What does that person have or what do they want to have? What's the before and after? Good marketing, good marketing messages. They articulate what that shift is gonna be from that before state to that desired after state. And a lot of times as businesses we forget that someone is actually buying the outcome. You know, they're buying the end of that journey and the more you can articulate what that is gonna look like by meeting someone where they are now and bringing them along in that continuum of belief, the greater chance they're gonna choose your solution. (upbeat music) Welcome to Healthcare Marketing Edge where we share stories and strategies to grow your practice. I'm Tim Bouchard from Limitus and today we're diving deep into something that can transform your marketing results the complete perspective patient journey. Our guest is Jay Rice, a consultant and someone who's served in CMO roles for large regional medical groups who is going to share why understanding every stage from awareness to retention is a secret to outperforming your competition. If you've been focusing only on getting new patients through the door, this episode might change how you think about marketing. Jay, welcome to the show. Why don't you start by telling us a little about you and your past experiences in healthcare marketing. Thanks Tim, glad to be here. So yeah, I've been to CMO as Tim mentioned of a multi-location medspot here in the Northeast. So I know, you know, quite a bit of the ins and outs of what that is like, you know, working at a company that's growing, working with markets where there's a lot of restrictions and patients have a lot of concerns. So that was an interesting part of my experience. I can share where I learned today. And also I was a VP of digital marketing for a health, a home health business. So it was a pretty large company here again, mostly in the Northeast that grew from 40 million in one year to 400 million in about 12 months. It was quite a journey. And, you know, before that, I was a VP of digital marketing for a B2B company. And part of that, I have some of my own businesses, one of which I sold, you know, had grown that business through digital marketing. So I've kind of run the gamut from, you know, owner operator of business to working at a large company to working at some smaller companies. And as I said, I've touched on healthcare marketing and medical aesthetics marketing. - Sweet, well, this should be a very good conversation because we've had people on the podcast so far in the early episodes that talked about little pieces of this process in ways to kind of tackle each thing, but we never actually looked at the full patient journey as a whole. Why do you think there might be some healthcare practices, especially small and independent ones that might struggle with looking and understanding the full patient journey versus just focusing on that specific new patient acquisition step at the end of someone's decisions, someone's decision making. - Yeah, so what I've seen is that small businesses in particular, and not only in healthcare, but across all different types of industry verticals, their focus is on lead generation. And I know in health marketing healthcare, it's like sometimes they don't call them leads they call them referrals. So how many referrals am I getting, you know, into my business, into my practice. And the problem with that is that's just one stage of the journey. And if you just focus on that only that one stage, you're really missing out on the entire customer journey. In a life cycle of that customer, or patient with your business. And if you maximize the steps along that journey, not only will you have more patient referrals, but you'll have a greater value per patient as well. - Yeah, lifetime value is something that's important to think about because not only earning someone's trust but keeping them both healthy in their processes, in their programs, and making sure doing follow ups is a big benefit to them from an actual care perspective, but also a benefit to the practice in terms of building that clientele and patient census basically. - 100%, yeah. So I've seen at the very top of the funnel, if we wanted to kind of start there, every business has different stages of the funnel. There's, if you have read or you hear about different stages and how they're mapped out, I mean, you could go into detail on what the stages are labeled. A simple way to look at it is the very top of the funnel is the awareness stage. And then you have the engagement stage and then you have a conversion stage. If you want to simplify it. And then after a patient is converted, you have a whole retention stage of that customer life cycle and in journey. But the very top of that funnel is awareness. And we've kind of spent some time on that, but a lot of businesses overlook that. And if you're not putting marketing assets or activities into that awareness stage, by definition, you know, a patient can ever enter that funnel, they can't be part of that journey. So you really want to look at what you can do. What are the marketing levers that you can pull? What are the channels that you can use to actually bring someone into that funnel in the first place? And that's the awareness stage. You know, we actually, we have a patient pipeline blueprint workshop that we send people to. We actually break up our sort of anecdotal conversation based session on those types of steps to in looking how they're addressing each one, how the assets, attention they give, maybe systems that they have set up and kind of giving like strength and weakness values to it. But the one thing about awareness that everyone has to remember is that healthcare is all about trust. You can't even get to the conversion point until you have earned someone's trust both in your ability to do it and that they want you to be the one to do it. And awareness plays a huge role in that upfront. - 100%. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if they're not, you know, so you can kind of back up a few seconds and say, you know, are they problem aware, right? And so like a lot of marketing dollars are wasted because people aren't problem aware. And if you back up even further, you could say, okay, well, who is that ideal patient? Who is that ideal customer? And that goes down to something we talked about about the email and that's like, what's the ideal? What's the persona? And really the goal of marketing should be to identify who is that right audience for that solution that I have. And what's important to them? And most businesses only talk about themselves and they broadcast out to a very wide set of people who might not be interested at all. And so you really need to find out like, okay, who is that ideal patient? You know, simply what's, what are their demographics? So it's the what? You know, what age ranges are they? What genders are they? You know, where do they live? Like what's their income? And then you can look at the, at the why? Why would they be a candidate for what I offer? You know, what does happen to them? And that's kind of like the, like the when. Like when was the triggering point that brought them to this decision? So if it's medical aesthetics, for example, and someone wants to lose weight, it might be that someone made a comment to them or it might be that they have an upcoming vacation. And you know, they're going to be to bathing suit and you know, they have excess fat and they just don't want that on their body. You know, they feel self conscious about it or something like that. And you know, so there's that triggering event which leads them into your funnel. But you want to really dissect that and figure out not only like the demographics of that patient population, but also the psychographics and really what makes them tick. And if you can do that as a business, really in any industry, you'll have a much greater chance of success because you'll be actually getting into the psychology and the psychographics and that will tend to resonate with people a lot more than just, you know, selling on a prize, selling on, you know, I don't know, what everybody else is selling on. Certifications. Yeah, we had a whole patient centric voice episode is actually the first episode with my creative director here at Luminus. We're saying, if you look at your website and your brochures and it's more about you than the patient situation, you might have a need for more patient centric messaging. But to your point, how do you get to that? And that's where I understand the demographic trigger points and what resonates with that person even brings them into your world. Right, exactly. And you know, a quick, you know, a little, a little thumb or something for businesses who might be listening to think about is, what does the ideal patient, so we've talked about the psychographics. We also want to think about what does that person have or what do they want to have? So what's the thing, what's the before and after? And good marketing, good marketing messages, they articulate what that shift is going to be from that before state to that desired after state. And a lot of times as, you know, businesses, we forget that someone is actually buying the outcome, you know, they're buying the end of that journey. And the more you can articulate what that is going to look like by meeting someone where they are now and bringing them along on that continuum of belief, the greater chance they're going to choose your solution. So in other words, like what things about that person's body might bother them, for example, if you're in aesthetics. You know, maybe it's, you know, if you're in chiropractic, maybe this person has aches and pains or you know, there's a whole range of things you could think about, but what do they have now? And what do they maybe not want to have or want to have in the future, depending on what the circumstances is. So if they're overweight, they have excess pounds, they don't want those pounds, right? So that's a, you know, I have. So it's the, it's the who, what do they have? And you also want to think about their desire, that desired after state. So, you know, their before state might be that they feel, you know, psychologically frustrated, they might be embarrassed, they might be self-conscious. There's a whole range of emotions that they have. And you want to really figure out what those emotions are. And it's more than just fluff because if you can understand what those emotions are, then your marketing will have great impact because you're actually able to speak to those emotions. And you're able to understand, you know, really what matters to that customer. And then your value proposition and all the certifications and the, you know, the number of years in business and all that stuff comes through, when they get further down that customer journey to fun. - Yeah, there's actually a little bit of a side benefit to that approach too. That outcome-based approach is you can kind of get, I don't want to say get around compliance. But if you're talking about desired states like, being able to spend more time with your family is not a claim that you have to worry about compliance for. It's just, it's an outcome that people can see from a certain type of procedure or treatment or program or whatever it is. So, you're able to put them in the post procedure or post program scenario that they desire, speaking to their need and their trigger point, without making any guarantees or, you know, claims that like run up against compliance or something like that. - 100%, and that's a good point because any type of marketing these days that's medical related, you know, has all those issues. You know, good rule of thumb is just, it is not to focus too much on the negative and, you know, don't do any kind of, you know, shaming like body shaming. And if you can avoid doing that, then it can just help everything stay compliant. But, so, but back to the customer and, you know, that persona and, you know, the other thing you want to look at is, what's the, what's the average day like for that person? You know, is there something in their day that, you know, and if it's, maybe if it's a mobility thing or pain related thing because of some physical impairment, maybe it's like their, you know, their back has like a, like a, a disc is, like a spinal decompression is the solution and so, after, so the before is, I can't do the chores around the house like I used to, right? I can't take part in that class like I used to. I can't, you know, hang out with my kids of rank kids like I used to and that is a frustrating experience. My after is, I'm now able to do that without pain and fear and fear. And so, like, again, getting to that before and after and every business is different. So, whoever's listening and whatever that business is, you can just kind of fill in the blanks for how your, how your solution handles those things. - Yeah, let's say someone takes the initiative and goes after trying to understand that more. Now they have access to this information. They're starting to understand it better. Well, the next step is actually trying to attract them in and at that point earn that conversion, but based on more of a warm and, and confident type of lead action, where would you take someone to the next step once they have that piece? - Yeah, that's a good question. So, at the very top of the funnel, we have awareness and you get it, getting it to the degree of the persona again. If you have that persona, you know, outlined and you've done a good job of that, what's gonna happen is either if the business is doing its own marketing or maybe they have an agency, you cannot help direct the agency to better results. By actually, by plugging in all of those things, you know, maybe know the demographics, you know, the geography they live in, you know, whether they're homeowner, all of these things can actually be inputted into your advertising platforms. So you can target those people specifically, you know, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, whatever you're using. So that's important. You wanna plug in and utilize all of the before and after all the psychographic type stuff, all the emotional triggers, the identify when you go through that persona journey in your messaging, but once you get beyond that, you wanna actually have some type of attractive thing that allows that person to give their contact information. So we refer that as a lead magnet. And really, that's just something of value that you have usually on your website that allows somebody to get that value by giving up their contact information because these days, you know, someone giving their contact information, they know that if they give that contact information to a savvy marketing company, they're gonna be probably bombarded with messaging, right? So they don't give it up lightly. And so you wanna make sure that you actually have something of value. And the reason you wanna do that is I've seen far too often, like I did one of the last businesses I worked at. They had a lot of website traffic. When I say a lot, over 20,000 visits per month is a lot for any type of medical practice. And what you wanna think about if you have that level of website traffic on a related note is how can you convert more of that because when you convert more of that, you have more leads. So one of the ways to do that, even if you don't have that level of magnitude of traffic, is to have things on that site that compel people to give their contact information to you. And we'll kind of talk about that in a minute, but most websites, you go to the website and the options are very limited. You know, it's like book now. It's called, it's something like that. And you know, if you use like, I don't know, I guess I kinda use a dating now. I haven't dated for a long time 'cause I've married a long time. But you know, you could say that like, that's just like going right up to someone and you go right to marriage, right? Where a lot of people go to website, they're just visiting that website. They don't know yet if they wanna put their trust in that business, they don't know yet. If they wanna give up that contact information, they might be intimidated about speaking to someone. It could be like, you know, self-consciousness about talking about their solutions, a whole range of things. They're going through their head, preventing them from taking that leap. And you wanna be able to bridge that gap. Yeah, it could be as simple as a resource. It could be as complicated as an interactive tool or even as active as something like an actual console. But a console that you give people an idea of what outcome they'll get out of it, right? Not just like a schedule, a consultation, but you know, an actionable thing. Like 15 minutes for us to identify a blank and see if you have a next step kind of thing. But really that is that if you're doing awareness the right way, you aren't just getting people that are thinking about making a decision at the moment. You're exposing yourself to a patient population that may need you in the future. Correct. And you'll want reasons for them to come back to you or be re-exposed to you and then maybe learn more and then figure out down the road when it might make sense for them. And that lead magnet gives a little bit of a sticky point that you can lean into a little bit to keep them engaged after that. Exactly, yeah. And I mean, it sounds like your agency has got a lot of these bases covered and that's exactly right. I mean, that awareness stage, it's basically increasing that top of the funnel. And if you stop investing in that top of the funnel, what's going to happen is like a lot of the leads will start to dry up. And it's especially important if the business sort of practices new. If they open up a new office or in a new geography, like if you open a second, third office, whatever it is, my last business, I might imagine we had 10 different offices and I helped open three of them. And you know, in different geographies. And before that, we open up all kinds of offices in the home care business in different states. And you have to really establish that market presence. And you do that through awareness marketing. And the thing is that awareness level marketing, the important note is, and we won't have to get too much in the degree, but awareness level marketing has a different set of measurement than lead generation marketing. So, and a lot of professionals, a lot of doctors, business owners, it's really hard for them to wrap their head around it because you're spending money and you're not seeing leads right away. But a good marketing person and good marketing agency can help identify how that type of awareness effort is actually impacting the overall flow of everything that happens, so the new patients and business and lifetime value and all that kind of stuff. But you're really looking at things like impressions, you're looking at maybe website visits, you're looking at things that happen at that early, early stage of that journey. - Yeah, and the lead magnets are very good soft conversions because you may not get the sign up or the consultation and the appointment right away, but someone has taken an action that shows interest that they want to know more and that they're in consideration phase. Really good example of this is LASIK companies doing lunch and learns. People can go see a procedure. One of the biggest things for LASIK companies is people are scared to have lasers put in their eyes to correct their vision. So, it's the easiest way to get over that. Show them how, do a lunch and learn. You know, they get a little food. You might even throw them a promo at the end. There's a reason they all do that. And that's one way they can overcome their persona's fear, build trust, and then also become the preferred choice when those people are ready, but they also got their contact info. And now they know that they can follow up with them to see if they've gotten further in their decision-making phase, which is a perfect segue to, if you do get someone's information, you have started to earn their interest. How can you nurture that, let's say post lead magnet prior to something like an appointment, a commitment or something like that? - Yeah, so most businesses fail in the follow-up. You know, whether it's medical or B2B, B2C, it's like, usually the follow-up is not consistent. It's not enough. The thoughtlier companies out there, like Forrest Research, Gardening Group, bus and consulting group in Harvard Business School, they've all identified that over the past even five years for all types of industries. The number of touch points that are required before someone actually makes a decision have gone up tremendously. And if it's B2B, for example, the number of people in Walden's decision has also gone up. So, you know, we're talking about business to consumer here, patients, but still the more expensive that procedure is, the more touch points that business will need in order to convince that patient to buy something, right? Or to make that choice, or to trust that brand. So what you can do is create nurture sequences in a CRM, you know, a good CRM like a HubSpot, for example, has built-in all different ways to nurture, and nurturing is not blast emailing. And that's where, you know, a lot of folks also make that mistake of, oh, well, I email my list and I just send out like a blast from constant contact. But whenever there are much more sophisticated ways to do that, to segment that database and to send out messaging, based specifically on what somebody is interested in, not just blast them out, discounts, or, you know, things about the business that nobody really cares about, you really want to be talking to them about what matters to them. And so you really want to have content created that has different types of formats, too. You know, you look at short form content, like PDFs, one-pagers, infographics, you could look at longer form content, like case studies, you know, patient stuff, you know, before and afters. You want to look at that stuff. And on the before and afters and before and afters, obviously sell quite a bit and things like medical mechanics. You got to think about not just the picture of that person, in their after state, but what they felt like in the before and after state, getting back to that persona. But to your point, it's important to actually be able to nurture them and a good CRM system will help do that. And so we've talked about a lot of different things that can get people up to that decision point. And we've also talked about that a lot of people are overlooking many of the stages of this and really focusing in on just trying to get that appointment. For someone that does start to put all of these pieces into play, how does that give them a competitive advantage over others in the market? - Yeah, well, I think the first thing is that most businesses are doing it. So if you're doing these things, what's gonna happen is, so let's take the awareness stage, for example, you're opening up that aperture and see you're getting more potential patients into your business, unlike others who might be just too focused on converting someone who's already in the market. So you think about are they problem aware? Are they solution aware and are they brand aware? And all those that awareness starts at the very top of that funnel. So if a business is doing that, by definition, and if they're doing it right, by definition, getting more people into that whole flow, just doing that as an advantage. But think about all the steps along that chain. If they're doing lead magnets, for example, in other businesses don't have any type of lead magnets. And you can use more than one. There's a whole strategy and strategies around lead magnets. But let's say this practice has a lead magnet and its competition doesn't, you're gonna actually get more leads because you have that lead magnet. If you do the nurturing, you're actually gonna convert more of the people who come in ready yet to purchase. And so this is, again, still even at the top of the funnel. And we can go down further and say, well, what about someone who does become a customer? Fall up on them is also critical so that you can actually have them come back and you can increase that customer lifetime value at patient lifetime value. And that's how you build a practice. Yes. By keeping them, not because you need to have them forever. But if it's a program that has an extended follow-up process or there's a certain amount of check-ins where it's a personal care system that needs to be put in place. They think dental or primary care, something like that. Building the patient's senses is what builds the practice from the ground up. If you're just constantly churning in new patients and new clients, then you're giving yourself that plateau. So that nurture afterwards appropriately for those that need it helps give the next level to kind of complete the process of taking people from that funnel-based approach to get them in the door and making sure that those are new patients that are growing the senses from there. Exactly. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, a lot of businesses, they just cycle through their customers and once they become a customer, the communication might be just your appointments to or something like that. That's a reminder, but it's not really valuable. What might be valuable is to remind people of if it's the dentist, the importance of doing certain things for gum health or for preventing cavities or something like so that people don't have a need for root canal or some expensive procedure down the lines, have just a little bit of education along those lines. Maybe it's offering something like teeth whitening that they haven't thought about before in the benefits of that or some special type of at-home dental appliance or maybe it's sleep dentistry. There's a lot of cross cells, upsells, profit maximizers. You can roll in there that fit nicely into those nurture sequences that add value to that patient population and also allow you to stay top of mind because once they're in your ecosystem, you want the misdain your ecosystem and purchase and continue to purchase from you instead of going off to a competitor. Yeah, and we've already identified that some people are stuck in the idea that lead generation is what they should be focusing on solely just because that face value seems like the right move. It's going to take a bit of a mindset shift to step outside of that. Do you have any advice on how people can flip from thinking solely about trying to get the appointment versus looking at trying to earn larger recognition within the population and the trust of that population? Yeah, I mean, I think the business owner, whoever's calling the shots, hopefully they're paying a marketing agency. If you get to a certain level of growth, you really want to have either in-house marketers and agencies and if you get to 10 million and above, you really should have both. You should have more agencies in-house marketers because you get the best of both worlds. But it comes down to a mindset shift for the owner. Part of it is just giving the marketers some autonomy to do the things that we've talked about and that marketers come up with in terms of their ideas and not trying to be so focused on leads. And I've heard it so many times in so many industries, it's like, "Oh, we need easily, oh, we need easily." And usually there are places to get more value from patients, to generate more revenue, to generate more profit, than just opening up more leads. And you can do a lot of these things without spending more money, or not without spending much more money. So, you know, it's just, it's a mindset shift and I think that's really the start of it because without that mindset shift, it's hard to, you know, to get these initiatives over the finish line. That's a good way to put it. And it does, I've said it on past episodes. Practitioners are incredibly smart people. They're incredibly gifted. And they have great ways of taking care of patients, but it's hard for them to step outside themselves and understand how to do the promotion of their practice or themselves. And sometimes that outside perspective can be a good way to get some advocacy and guidance on that mindset shift. So, just something to throw out there. I guess that's a little bit of a nod to agencies and marketing consultants. But, you know, sometimes you need someone from the outside. You need a doctor to help you figure out what's wrong, you know, with your prognosis, what's going on with you. Sometimes you need some outside perspective to help you bring yourself out of, you know, the practitioner out mindset and go from the patient in perspective. A hundred percent. I mean, as a matter of fact, you know, as we talked about, I mean, if a business gets, it wants to grow. Marketing is one of the biggest value ads that the company can invest in. Because if you stop investing in marketing, you know, like when you get your MD or your doctorate of dentistry, or your chiropractic doctorate, they don't teach you typically how to bring in new patients, right? They teach you how to do the work that you're doing to take care of those patients. Marketers are in the business of helping you bring in new patients and investing in those marketers in the marketing initiatives is something that is one of the most important things that you'll do as a business. And a lot of times, you know, those medical professionals, they have this expertise by us where, you know, they're so into their world and maybe they're jargon and that they don't realize, you know, there's probably a lot of things that they're doing that add a lot of value, maybe over and about the competition. But they just figured out, this is just how I do it. Well, marketer will make a great story about that and differentiators and marketing campaigns so that those things can be highlighted. And, you know, it really, a lot of times it takes another person to draw those things out of the professional because they're just too close to it. And so that's why, you know, investing in marketing is critical. Yes. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to bring up as part of this conversation? I guess you probably won't have time to talk about it, but the retention side of the customer journey, and life cycle is really key as well. And that's again where a lot of businesses, you know, they don't maximize their existing patient population and there are a lot of opportunities there. A lot of businesses mostly start at the leads, but it's the referrals, it's the advocacy, it's, you know, creating referral engines from existing patients, making sure that they leave testimonials, making sure that you can maximize, you know, their value in their journey to health, whatever that is, for your business. And then getting them to say nice things about you and that advocacy is going to actually bring people to that awareness stage of the funnel because that's what a lot of the things reside on these days is what other people say about a business and not what you as a business say about yourself. So that completes that whole, I think, journey that we're talking about is working on, getting those existing patients to, you know, to giving them more value and getting value from them. And it's not always value monetarily. It's having, you know, having them comfortable discussing their journey is incredibly valuable, right? 'Cause that's like real people. Having them just leave a nice review, a testimonial, that actually helps you get up to the top of the local search in the map called the map pack and Google search and things like that. So these are all strategies that a lot of times are the best places to start with, instead of just, you know, that lead generation part of fun. Yeah, yeah, we'll let this episode breathe but maybe that can be a dedicated episode in the future. Cool, yeah, there's a lot to talk about, yeah. All right, Jay, this has been awesome and super valuable. Thanks for breaking down the, at least up until the nurturing, part of the full patient journey framework. Well, you let everyone know where they can find more about you and the work that you're doing. Sounds good, yeah. So I'll just give my personal email. So I just consult right now, usually pretty full in advance but my email is Jay, is [email protected]. So it's just [email protected] and in any of your listeners want to reach out to me and we can talk about how it might help them. Cool. Well, listeners, if you want to develop your full patient journey strategy and boost patient recruitment and take that to the next level, you could also take advantage of a patient pipeline blueprint, which I think I already mentioned once in this episode. It's a workshop to uncover each of the new, each of those steps along the journey and tracking new patients and covert more inquiries into appointments. You can learn more at luma.agc/blueprint. And lastly, if you like to hear more episodes like this, don't forget to subscribe to Healthcare Marketing Edge on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Jay, thanks a lot for being on this episode. This was awesome. You're welcome. I have fun. Thanks. All right. We'll see everyone on the next episode. [MUSIC PLAYING]