Digital Marketing Strategies That Reach Modern Patients, ft. Stephen Strong

Stephen Strong (00:00):
I think you need to create enough content that meets your strategic objectives. And I think that’s where having not just a strategic focus of what orthopedics, cardiovascular, what are the service lines, but more importantly from a marketing standpoint, what is your organization most importantly need to drive patient volume in and which places? So it’s not just drive everyone to one hospital. Most of us in larger health systems have multiple hospitals across multiple cities. And so understanding where that volume is needed and digital is a great way to geotarget and focus your content publishing.

Alan Tam (00:34):
Hello Healthcare. Healthcare consumer behavior and expectations have become increasingly fluid. From consumption and engagement to research and conversion, the number of mediums and channels have exploded in recent years and healthcare organizations have accelerated their own digital transformation and how they are racing towards meeting and connecting with healthcare consumers where they are. I’m excited to have Stephen Strong, director of digital marketing at Northwestern Medicine join me today as we explore and discuss how healthcare organizations are tackling the fluidity and the dynamics of today’s healthcare consumers. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen Strong (01:22):
Thank you.

Alan Tam (01:23):
So I’m really interested in what does a digital marketing director do within a healthcare organization today?

Stephen Strong (01:31):
Anything that plugs in. No. Digital is a fuzzy word, right? It’s very broad. So when I joined Northwestern Medicine over six years ago, it was a new role, didn’t exist, at least someone at that more leadership level, more senior level. And so kind of was brought in to run the website and then very quickly create a social media team and build a social media strategy. And then that started blurring because it’s marketing and the digital paid. But I think in healthcare more than any other category, quickly got into consumer experiences or patient experience. And so for digital in healthcare, especially a lot of health systems that have not had a strong digital experience perspective, the role in a lot of health systems has evolved outside of marketing into more patient and user experiences.

Alan Tam (02:19):
So if I’ve done my research correctly, I understand that you come from a CPG background, is that correct?

Stephen Strong (02:26):
I do, yeah. Prior to Northwestern Medicine, I had not worked in healthcare, so spent about 20 years on the creative advertising brand marketing side, both at advertising agencies and then also at large consumer companies like Unilever, for instance, for CPG. So really grew up in the marketing, consumer marketing space and then moved over to healthcare and realized that was very new territory for the industry, and the last six years, been really making my path through that as they say.

Alan Tam (02:55):
What’s been the biggest surprise for you coming from CPG to healthcare?

Stephen Strong (02:58):
Yeah, I think, and this is pretty general, not just my experience as I’ve brought in other people from outside healthcare into my digital team, it’s the pace of things. Healthcare is for a lot of reasons can be perceived as slower than other industries. It takes a lot more time to have more strategic decisions made and approved and a lot more time implementing because healthcare by general is just so much more complex than I’ve worked in cream cheese, I’ve worked in hairspray, I’ve worked in paint, and those products don’t necessarily have a point of view either on how they’re marketed and how they’re portrayed online. When you work in a service organization like healthcare with a lot of physicians, a lot of clinical teams, there’s a lot more voices to listen to and understand and also sometimes persuade.

Alan Tam (03:45):
Right. Is it changing? I mean, with the formation of digital teams like yours, is it changing and is it changing more rapidly now?

Stephen Strong (03:53):
Interesting, being at some of the healthcare conferences post Covid, Covid helped, it really digitally transformed a lot of the organizations, given the remoteness, and made them more open to digital and digital experiences, especially in the clinical side. And so I think it’s changing. I think the digital teams are becoming more robust and bringing in skillset like user experience that in the past really weren’t even known existed. But I think within a large health system, you’re still working within that bigger health system with a lot of other priorities, a lot of other teams participating in digital tools per se. So I think the skill sets coming in.

(04:30):
How digital teams fit within the bigger organization I know is a lot of discussion not just at Northwestern Medicine, but other large health systems. Where do they fit? Do they stay in marketing? Should they be in IS? Should they be in a patient experience group? Do you even have a patient experience group that’s tasked with improving patient experience? So it is kind of wild west. I think the core fundamentals are there and the skill sets. Now it’s like, oh, their teams are getting pretty big. Where are they going to be most beneficial in an org structure as well as a senior leadership standpoint?

Alan Tam (05:03):
What’s your opinion? Where should they say?

Stephen Strong (05:05):
I’ve worked in a lot of different organizations. No one’s, not even CPG have they figured it out. It was always marketing or IT? Marketing or IT? I think you’re going to see the patient experience emphasis, especially with more systems creating chief experience officer roles. That’s fairly new to healthcare, not in other categories. I think it’s got to take a senior leadership perspective of the importance of that, and I think the digital teams will be ready to plug into it. But it really, right now, talking to my other digital leader peers, it is probably one of the bigger topics right now. Where are we going to land?

Alan Tam (05:39):
Absolutely. So in the digital team, obviously you create a lot of content, a lot of strategy, and really driving forward the digital transformation of Northwestern and other health systems have their digital teams driving things forward. From an audience perspective, how do you compare and contrast that with say, the audience that you worked with in consumer product goods?

Stephen Strong (06:07):
Sure. Yeah, I think on the marketing side, you’re still marketing to consumers. Either people have never been a patient for a health system, so they need to be convinced to consider us at some point if they do have health issues, or patients who are lapsed and have not been back in a while, reminding them we’re still here. And so the consumer marketing emphasis and strategy is very similar. Healthcare from a content standpoint is a lot different than packaged goods. There’s a lot of topics we can talk about, a lot of service lines as we call it. There’s a lot of content formats. There’s so many content channels now. So from that standpoint, it’s really focusing on where do you feel you can reach the audience most efficiently and how much content do you need. Social media takes a lot of content, a lot of branded content. So part of it’s depending on how much content you can create and then where’s it most efficient to promote it and publish it.

Alan Tam (06:58):
So does healthcare, in your opinion, need to create more content?

Stephen Strong (07:03):
I think you need to create enough content that meets your strategic objectives. And I think that’s where having not just the strategic focus of what orthopedics, cardiovascular, what are the service lines, but more importantly from a marketing standpoint, what is your organization most importantly need to drive patient volume in and which places? So it’s not just drive everyone to one hospital. Most of us in larger health systems have multiple hospitals across multiple cities. And so understanding where that volume is needed and digital is a great way to geotarget and focus your content publishing. That a lot has to go into it and the digital team just wants that information. The marketing team wants that information. So as much that information is available to us, the more we can tailor the content and the audience. Otherwise, you’re just doing mass awareness, which is not very cost-efficient.

Alan Tam (07:52):
All right. So since the pandemic and as we exit the pandemic, how have healthcare consumer behaviors and expectations changed?

Stephen Strong (08:02):
Everyone loves telemedicine now. Everyone’s been on Zoom, right? That’s one thing the pandemic did. Everyone’s comfortable with talking to someone through your computer or your phone visually. So I think a lot of remote care, remote health, that’s a big topic, hospital at home. How do we move still providing quality care outside of our clinical spaces? That’s way beyond the realm of marketing, but it is a digital experience. And so I do think Covid and the pandemic made people more comfortable with technology in a patient health clinical conversation. At the same time, we were only doing a lot of marketing digitally when everyone was sheltering in place. So kind of seeing where the media landscape more broadly is netting out as far as media costs and what those opportunities are, it’s still coming together, I think. But it’s interesting to see the industry was almost on autopilot. I think the paid media industry, and it’s really the last two years we’ve been rethinking its value and increased value or lesser value.

Alan Tam (09:08):
All right. So let’s talk about healthcare consumer expectations versus where healthcare marketing is today.

Stephen Strong (09:17):
Yeah, I want my appointment to act like taking a plane, or booking a flight. I think that is the comparison of, sorry, I’m holding up my phone that doesn’t exist, my phone being my care tool and my first touch with my provider and being able to schedule and reschedule and follow up just like I would booking an air flight, just like I would booking a hotel stay. That’s the holy grail I would say. I think what’s different is travel industry is extremely complex when it comes to data, but it’s also extremely structured when it comes to data. Healthcare, just as complex and much less structured.

(09:56):
And so the tactics that, sorry, not tactics, the functionality that you expect through a travel app you would expect could be just as easy in a healthcare app or maybe even easier. Behind the scenes, unfortunately not that way. And so because being able to just even book an appointment, finding when a physician’s available, getting that appointment reserved, knowing you’re showing up with your phone to prompt you before you get there, that all seems pretty doable in a technology. I call it the laws of technology physics, that you can totally do it, but most health systems behind the scenes, it’s so complicated. Just trying to pull that together takes a lot of effort and a lot of health systems would love to have that seamless experience, and we’re just struggling to get the right tools in place to provide it.

Alan Tam (10:50):
Why? If everyone wants the same ultimate goal, everyone wants that holy grail.

Stephen Strong (10:55):
It’s, again, coming from outside healthcare into healthcare, I’ve never seen an industry, and this is not just Northwestern Medicine, this is across the board, an industry that organically grew such complex in-house data structure and databases, and where’s the data? Who has access to the data? We’ve got a data lake that’s probably the size of a small ocean and all the data’s in there somewhere, but who’s going to find it? How do you find it? How do you make it self-service? And there’s a lot of technology companies trying to solve that for us, which is great. They haven’t quite done it yet for the most part. But once that middle layer, we call it middleware, once that middle layer is in place to allow the very simple user tasks to interact with very complicated and complex data and databases, once that’s in place to let that happen, it’ll be light years progression. I can’t wait.

Alan Tam (11:54):
Yeah. So how does patient data today play a role in your strategy and programs? How much of it and are you using it today?

Stephen Strong (12:03):
I mean, there is a new trend and we’re part of that to really start owning our own data. And from marketing, CRM, automation, whatever you want to call it, owning that data in-house. You can go to a lot of external agencies and vendors and they’ll take third party data they buy, they’ll mash it up with your patient data, not at a one-to-one basis, but in general. And they’ll create targeting lists for you to use from a marketing standpoint. And that’s pretty general practice. Moving that in-house and owning your CRM in-house and that marketing automation, I do feel like that is the new trend that’s coming. It takes a lot of effort and money to do that. And it’s not just a marketing decision nor a marketing responsibility. That again, requires a lot of different departments coming together and agreeing that this is a priority for the organization.

(12:50):
Marketing may be one of the more faster near term benefits of that, beneficiaries of that, but there is a feeling now, I think that there’s a lot of other departments that would love to have access to that data for other needs beyond marketing, but it’s just not one place. So I do think marketing as a driver for the need for that seems to be something that’s a trend that’s really happening. And that’ll have, I think, benefits well beyond marketing for organizations. Once the data is in one place and you can access it and utilize it.

Alan Tam (13:21):
So CRM adoption and implementation as a trend in healthcare, is that the right move in your opinion?

Stephen Strong (13:30):
I think it is. I think it’s natural. Again, it’s just one area where healthcare for better or worse is behind most other categories. So it’s a common strategy. I think how do you do it correctly? And again, you’re dealing with so much more data than I think you do in other consumer marketing industries. So how do you identify what data is most important to developing a target list, for instance, or deciding who do you remarket to? Lapsed patients. And then more importantly, again, where do you have volume? So if I’m selling hairspray, I don’t have to worry about if the Walmart down the street has it in stock and CVS doesn’t, they all pretty much carry my hairspray.

(14:15):
 But in healthcare, we’ve got availability in one clinical facility or not the other, depending on what your clinical treatment is, there might be availability or not. And so that again, inherently makes it more complicated to decide how do you capture that data, leverage it and market to the right people and not drive people to try to make an appointment where then they can’t get in for six months. And that eliminates, really damages your brand reputation as well.

(14:41):
So again, it’s so much more complex than I’ve seen elsewhere, but I do think AI’s coming, we were just talking about that. So AI’s coming, hopefully it helps. I think a lot of those vendors and those types of systems are just hopefully going to just bake in AI into what they offer. And as a marketer, I don’t even probably have to even know that AI’s happening or what. It just makes things more efficient. And I think that for us is like, please hurry up.

(15:10):
AI has been… It’s almost like mobile. We were talking about mobile, the year of mobile’s coming. We were talking about that for 10 years until the iPhone. I feel like we’ve been talking about the year of AI has been coming. I think the recent, very recent evolutionary approach we’ve been seeing with open AI and some of those systems, that is, I think the iPhone coming from mobile. Finally, it’s like, oh, that’s tangible. I see how that actually is going to hopefully benefit and make all these systems and behind the scenes work much more efficient and much more appropriate.

Alan Tam (15:43):
Yeah, I think for sure, and I think it’s kind of the golden age or golden era for AI at the moment. And quite honestly, the year of AI or whatnot, I think ChatGPT and these generative AI technologies definitely help elevate it. But quite honestly, it’s been around forever, especially in retail, commerce, travel, they’re all using AI. In fact, in healthcare, on the clinical side, AI has been in use for almost, if not over a decade, helping with clinical diagnosis and so forth. So is there a place and what is the place for AI on the business side of healthcare?

Stephen Strong (16:23):
I think if we can just make processes more efficient, rather than hiring someone to sift through CRM data and build a targeting model and pull all the switches necessary, if you can automate that, it frees up a marketing person’s time to do other things. And so I do think if it makes more efficient and more effective speed to market for programs, I think the marketing team obviously will still own the strategy. They’ll own the channels, they’ll own the creative content. But I do think that that data, especially on the analytics side, trying to, how do you crunch behind the scenes data to get to an ROI for a campaign, which requires a lot of clinical data and patient data.

(17:09):
Again, within a firewall. So it’s all protected, but there’s a lot of activity that has to happen there to get an ROI for a direct mail campaign. And if AI can really automate that and everyone believes it’s telling the truth, skepticism is always part of it, then I do think it’s going to allow everyone, any health system that leverages it to be more effective and be more accurate with their campaigns, which is what we want. We want to make sure our patients or potential patients understand the care we can provide. We want to get that message in front of them. We just need to get in front of the right people. And that’s hopefully where AI can really add value.

Alan Tam (17:42):
Why is there skepticism in AI?

Stephen Strong (17:44):
I think everyone’s, I don’t know. You tried using Chatbot in the last five years? Chatbot’s not that smart. Chatbot was really, I think from a marketing standpoint, really the first foray until, hey, we can automate processes. Someone come to the website and instead of using the search bar, they can start talking to the bot and get where they want to go. Out of the box, they need information to be smart. And again, a lot of that information is limited. So they kind of weren’t that smart. You’d spend a lot of time building a knowledge management system to feed the chatbot, and that’s a lot of people power, and that’s a lot of effort. And so I think the idea of a chatbot automating search queries or automating a website experience was the holy grail. I think everyone quickly realized, oh, it’s just giving you links to pages. So maybe it’s a little bit better than a site search.

(18:32):
But again, now with generative AI and everything coming out, oh, it can actually become more of a conversation. But within healthcare, you got to make sure you’re giving the right answers. And so again, I do think from a clinical standpoint and from a brand standpoint, healthcare topic’s very complex. The questions that can be asked, not always the right questions and the answers we provide have to be accurate or at least directionally driving to the right answer. And so that again makes it very complicated. And again, there’s a lot riding on those answers. And so I think we as healthcare marketers are more comfortable with AI, and digital, we’re totally comfortable with AI. I just want it to be correct and accurate, otherwise it’s not helping.

(19:15):
And so I do feel now, transformationally, that’s coming. Like, oh, now I could see a chatbot actually seeming to be intelligent, starting to sound like a real person and adding value. Where in the past it was interesting, but not something we would’ve ever launched at scale.

Alan Tam (19:33):
So Siri and Alexa don’t cut it?

Stephen Strong (19:35):
Siri and Alexa, don’t cut it. I still can’t get Alexa to answer my questions. I wish that’d hurry up and get some generative AI. I still fight with her sometimes about what I’m trying to get an answer for.

Alan Tam (19:44):
So Siri wins.

Stephen Strong (19:46):
I’m not a Siri user. I can’t quote on Siri. I’m an Alexa loyalist, even though we don’t agree most of the time.

Alan Tam (19:53):
Fair enough, fair enough. So one of the things that you’ve recently talked about is leveraging TikTok in healthcare, which I find fascinating.

Stephen Strong (20:00):
Yeah, nothing controversial about TikTok.

Alan Tam (20:03):
Absolutely not. How did this idea come about and tell me more about it.

Stephen Strong (20:07):
Yeah, sure. So we launched our TikTok channel two years ago, actually two years ago, April. So it really is our two-year anniversary. And one of the things I had accelerated when I joined Northwestern Medicine is I built an in-house social team. We built between a couple departments, came together and we brought all our social media in-house, so the strategy, the content calendar, the publishing, the content creation, the community management analytics, everything to run social channels. And I’d done that at other companies. And so as we built up the resources and brought that together, we’ve got a really solid social team.

(20:41):
And we had pretty much, I would say, figured out Facebook, Instagram, Twitter’s always kind of hanging out. I think like everybody else, we spent about six months with Snapchat and decided it wasn’t really appropriate from a marketing standpoint. And so TikTok was coming through and it was for the kids two years ago, it was predominantly 20 somethings and younger. And I’ve got kids and they were all two to three were consumed by TikTok. So we knew it was a compelling social channel. We didn’t know is it going to be appropriate, not for healthcare ’cause I think health information is very appropriate for TikTok, but is the audience, right? So we’re predominantly like many health systems, our audience from marketing standpoint is older 35 plus. And so at that point, TikTok was younger.

(21:23):
But it seemed to me as Facebook was getting extremely mature and Instagram was getting there, that more and more people were probably going to be kind of dabbling in TikTok and maybe it becomes their second social platform of choice. So we chose two years ago to, I call it pilot, which is my words for not sure what’s going to happen, so don’t hold me to it. And we agreed not to spend a lot of effort, but you do have to create content.

(21:50):
And so we launched doing a couple of videos a month, got a lot of experience with just the TikTok style ’cause it is very unique compared to other social channels. Videos on TikTok look very different than videos elsewhere. And if you take a video from another platform and just publish on TikTok, it looks out of place. And so that creatively, from a content standpoint, it was a nice challenge, like okay, how do we create content, feels TikTok, but it’s still representing a national healthcare brand? And so that was year one and just getting learnings from it.

(22:18):
And fortunately in the last year as TikTok’s continued to grow, it’s continued to grow because it’s acquiring older users. And so some of the research I found recently that was published, I think it was 65% of users in the US are over age 30, which is pretty good. Before that, a year prior, it was about 38%. So TikTok’s been growing. I think they got all the teens, there’s no more teens to capture, and it’s growing because it’s skew and older and older audiences are getting engaged with it. And so that gave us a pretty good comfort level that, okay, year one was learning how to use it. Year two was, okay, let’s make it a formal part of our social media platform. It’s still, I would say, not as emphasized as Facebook and Instagram because very large audiences, very robust paid media capabilities there. But it’s coming. And as long as the country doesn’t ban it, I think we’ll be okay. We’re kind of waiting to see what happens there.

Alan Tam (23:12):
How do you measure success and effectiveness of the content that you create and deliver on TikTok?

Stephen Strong (23:18):
Yeah, we’ve got our benchmarks for the other platforms, which helps, and it’s your typical impressions or views along with engagement rates, shares, likes, that type of thing. And so with the same common analytics can apply to TikTok. I think what we’re looking at right now is the analytics from TikTok is much more basic, I would say, than the other platforms. As a newer platform and one that’s just exploded exponentially, your analytics is views, is pretty much it, right? You can get some engagement rates, but it is really views. So from that standpoint, it’s pretty basic.

(23:55):
We’ve started dabbling with paid media on it, and right now, and it’s really early days, but it just seems to be a much more efficient paid vehicle as far as we spend, let’s say a thousand dollars, how many views do we get for a thousand dollars? Way more views than we’re getting in Facebook. And so Facebook CPMs have been rising the last couple of years. That’s a pretty common known fact. And CPM just means it’s less efficient use of our dollars. I don’t think we’ll dump Facebook and move over to TikTok per se, but the fact that we can demographically target and geotarget on TikTok with paid spend, and we’re seeing really good efficient video views coming out of it, gives it promise.

Alan Tam (24:36):
Amazing. So definitely bleeding edge, I’ve heard of very few-

Stephen Strong (24:41):
Not a good healthcare term by the way.

Alan Tam (24:44):
Yes, yes. Play on words there. So what’s next?

Stephen Strong (24:47):
Oh, what’s next?

Alan Tam (24:48):
Yeah, what is next?

Stephen Strong (24:52):
The AI stuff’s coming, so that’s definitely what next. I think in social media marketing TikTok what’s next? Whether or not Twitter flames out, we’ll see, but I think that’s the new frontier for now.

(25:08):
I think there’s a lot… Well, the big topic right now, and there’s some sessions most recently at this conference is privacy and HIPAA, and now HIPAA and PHI being applied more broadly outside of patient, one-to-one patient. So you’re logged in MyChart portal, patient portal, that applies now to just public websites. And your IP address is now considered PHI. And the content you’re browsing with your IP address, even though it’s not you, it’s your device, is considered PHI. It seems to be, based on direction the government’s been giving lately, and how a health system in the past could share user data with our advertising partners, with our media platforms to more highly optimize our media dollars and are targeting, not on a one-to-one basis an aggregate, but it still uses IP address. And so that is something every health system is struggling with right now, which is, oh, we are losing, and most of us have lost the ability to leverage our site data outside of the system.

(26:11):
So that is the big challenge. And how do we move around that? Do people bring more of that third party in-house behind the firewall so we can leverage it? That’s a huge commitment, effort and money and technology. So I think if I look at the rest of this year, that is definitely probably one of the top two or three items on every health marketer’s list.

Alan Tam (26:33):
Okay. I got one for you.

Stephen Strong (26:35):
All right.

Alan Tam (26:36):
What about the metaverse?

Stephen Strong (26:37):
Oh, the metaverse.

Alan Tam (26:40):
You got to get ahead of the game before it exists so that when it does come out, you’re there. First to market.

Stephen Strong (26:47):
I started coding webpages in 1995. I saw the metaverse when it was second life back in the 2000s. The metaverse, it’s coming, it’s got 15 years. The technology, the devices just cannot keep up with what we envision the metaverse to be, visually, real life and that type of thing. The headset technology is just not there. It’s going to take at least 10 years.

(27:09):
I think what gets interesting is that is more so than any other digitally enabled technology, that’s going to have an age break. They’re going to people over a certain age who are not going to do it. There are going to people under a certain age who are going to grow up with it. There are going to people in the middle who’ve been doing gaming for a long time and kind of get it, so they’re okay with that type of experience.

(27:31):
But from a health system standpoint, what I tell people is like, “You don’t have to worry about it.” And part of what I feel in digital strategy is sometimes actually that’s very relieving for people to hear, “Don’t worry about that right now.” Let’s worry about AI, let’s worry about that tangible stuff. But the metaverse, it’s coming. It’s going to take a while and just don’t worry about it. You can play around it if you want, but on the training side, on the clinical medical education side, VR headsets, virtual, that has a purpose and it’s a very focused purpose. But from a consumer experience standpoint, it’s going to take a while. And you could argue it’s already here. It’s called Fortnite, it’s called Roblox. If you’ve ever been in Roblox or even Minecraft, and those are basic experiences. That’s the metaverse right now. So you can actually be engaged with it if you want, but unless you’re really into it, you won’t spend much time there.

Alan Tam (28:26):
Absolutely.

Stephen Strong (28:27):
Yeah. Don’t get me started on the metaverse.

Alan Tam (28:30):
Well, Stephen, it’s been a super enlightening conversation.
Stephen Strong (28:33):
Yeah, thank you.

Alan Tam (28:34):
I want to thank you so much for your time and dropping in. I’m sure many in the audience would love to continue the conversation and learn more and pick your brain and say, huh, we want to start a TikTok program. How do we get started? What’s the best way for folks to get ahold of you to learn more?

Stephen Strong (28:50):
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Stephen Strong, or by email at Stephen.strong@nm.org.

Alan Tam (29:01):
Thank you so much again, Stephen. So for those of you in the audience, this has been a super enlightening conversation on social marketing and quite honestly, all things healthcare marketing. So do give Stephen a ping and let’s pick his brain some more to learn more about what is next in healthcare marketing.

(29:21):
With that being said, thank you for joining in today, and until next time, Hello.

Outro (29:26):
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