What Actually Drives Healthcare Growth Now—and What No Longer Works

Catch the key takeaways

Healthcare marketing leaders are facing increased pressure to drive strategic growth with limited resources. As patient behavior evolves and margin pressures rise, the traditional ways of reaching patients are shifting. During our recent Amsive Health webinar, industry experts discussed how healthcare organizations must align their strategies to meet patients where they are.

Here are four key takeaways from their conversation regarding the biggest shifts in healthcare marketing.

1. Unite brand and performance to supercharge growth

Brand and performance marketing can no longer operate in separate silos. Growth is now a boardroom conversation requiring accountability and measurable outcomes. However, performance marketing campaigns will struggle without a strong foundation of brand trust. Marketers must build a unified ecosystem where brand awareness and performance metrics work together to create a cohesive experience for the patient.

2. Alter your strategy to match the new patient discovery journey

The patient journey is no longer a straight line. It is a complex web of touchpoints that includes search, referrals, social media, and emerging AI answer engines. Patients are increasingly getting their answers in a zero click environment. Marketers need to recognize this nonlinear discovery process and build a surround sound presence that ensures their organization is visible at every possible point of interaction.

3. Leverage creative as a performance lever

Creative execution does much more than grab attention. In healthcare, it manages patient anxiety and helps build emotional confidence. Testing different messaging, imagery, and tone can often drive campaign efficiency faster than tweaking audience targeting alone. AI tools can help scale these dynamic creative tests, provided all efforts remain strictly within organizational compliance frameworks.

4. Take an evolutionary approach to your growth tactics

There’s no point in trying to boil the ocean. Implementing these tactics requires taking scalable and manageable steps. Start by auditing your current metrics and identifying specific friction points in patient discovery. Pick one profitable service line, map out the patient journey for that specific area, and set realistic milestones.

FAQs: What Actually Drives Healthcare Growth Now

Why does healthcare marketing need to change now?

Healthcare marketing has shifted from a departmental function to a boardroom priority. Health systems are under growing pressure to prove value, drive measurable growth, and operate with tighter resources. At the same time, consumer behavior has changed. Patients now discover and evaluate providers through a wider mix of channels, including search, social, referrals, content, and AI-driven answer engines. That means older marketing models no longer reflect how people actually choose care.

How has the patient journey changed?

The patient journey is increasingly nonlinear. Patients move between search, referrals, provider recommendations, online content, social platforms, patient portals, and now AI-generated results. They may interact with a brand multiple times before booking care, and they may continue evaluating options even after an initial visit. That makes it critical for marketers to think beyond isolated campaigns and instead map the full journey, identify friction points, and improve continuity across every touchpoint.

Why can’t brand and performance marketing operate separately?

Because patients don’t experience them separately. A health system’s brand shapes trust long before a patient converts, while performance marketing depends on that trust to succeed. If messaging is fragmented across service lines, channels, and touchpoints, it can weaken confidence and create friction. A unified approach helps health systems deliver a more consistent experience and connect brand-building efforts to measurable growth outcomes.

Why does lifecycle marketing matter in healthcare?

Growth doesn’t stop at confirming a patient’s first appointment. In healthcare, high-value growth often comes from what happens next, including referrals, follow-up care, repeat visits, and long-term loyalty. Services like urgent care or primary care may be entry points, but their real value often comes from downstream care within the system. A lifecycle approach helps marketers reduce patient leakage, strengthen retention, and support both profitability and continuity of care.

How is creative becoming a performance lever?

Creative now plays a direct role in campaign performance. Strong creative doesn’t just build awareness. It helps marketers understand what messages, visuals, and emotional cues actually drive response. In healthcare especially, decisions are often emotional, so resonant messaging can improve engagement faster than targeting changes alone. As platforms increasingly optimize based on creative performance, marketers need to treat messaging and creative testing as core growth tools, not just brand assets.

Dive into the transcript

Welcome

Sarah Gray (00:06):

Thank you all for joining today. Our webinar will start in just one minute.

Craig Blake (00:46):

Alright. Well, good afternoon everybody, and thank you so much for joining us today for an Amsive Health webinar. Excited for today as we bring together a couple of the best minds in healthcare marketing today. We’re going to talk about what actually is driving healthcare growth now and what no longer works. There’s been a lot of shifts, a lot of changes in the healthcare marketing landscape, but I am so excited to have Chris Boyer, principal at Chris Boyer LLC and co-host of the TouchPoint podcast. If you haven’t checked it out, make sure you do. As well as Gary Stubblefield, SVP of Healthcare here at Amsive Health. And my name is Craig Blake, Amsive Growth Lead and your host for today. Gentlemen, welcome.

Gary Stubblefield (01:27):

Thank you.

Chris Boyer (01:28):

Thanks for having us.

Craig Blake (01:30):

Yeah, excited for this. So what we’re going to be diving into today is the reality is healthcare marketing leaders are under immense pressure to drive growth with smaller teams. We’re seeing layoffs everywhere and having to do more with less. We’re seeing this lever of brand and growth no longer being separate channels or separate lanes, swim lanes, but they’re having to merge together. And the reality is patient discovery is changing so fast and we’re seeing a wave of consumerism coming to healthcare marketing.

When we started to plan for this, Gary, Chris, myself, and the Amsive Health marketing team, we were on the phone for about two hours and we covered a lot of ground. We’re not going to go into two hours of conversation. We’re going to narrow this down to about 45 minutes. So to do that, we’ve kind of focused in on four of the biggest shifts we have observed that Chris and Gary have seen, as well as myself.

And those four key shifts are this. You can see them on your screen. First is that unified growth strategy, shifting from siloed brand and performance marketing. And then how does that need to come together and really drive strategic growth for an organization? Second, we’re going to go from channel thinking into journey oriented discovery, a very important topic in making sure we’re really wrapping our arms around these patients and members. And third is from acquisition only to more of a lifecycle continuity. And then we’re going to wrap it up with some creative as creatives really changing and become a performance lever in our world today. So that’s what we’re going to cover.

Chris and Gary, excited to have you both here. Let’s jump into it. But before we dive into these four shifts, I want to kind of just lob a question out to you two to get things going.Why are we at this point? And Gary, for you, why does healthcare marketing need to change now?

Setting the Stage: Why Healthcare Marketing Must Change

Gary Stubblefield (03:26):

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think as the fundamental business model in healthcare has shifted really over my career and probably started that shift, has been a long, slow shift over my lifetime from this idea of how many beds do we have and how many bodies are in those beds to how effectively can we move folks through our healthcare system and through how many different services? Growth has really become a boardroom level conversation.

And for the folks around that table, you showed it on one of these slides earlier, but margin pressure is sort of that bolder that healthcare leaders will always be perpetually pushing up the hill. But now it’s coupled with this demand for accountability for the dollars that we’re spending on growth efforts and on marketing in particular. And so I think that we’ve seen an instinct in that case to sort of lean toward these performance marketing tactics that are really very easily measurable and reportable and maybe away from brand.

And I think some of the conversations that we have been having with folks over the last year or so have really been more about how do we find that balance between the two? How do we stop writing the pendulum from one back to the other and find that happy medium in the middle because really brand cannot exist separately from measurable outcomes. And conversely, performance marketing doesn’t work without an effective brand. So you can’t silo brand when you’re being asked to prove value, I think.

Craig Blake (05:15):

Yeah, that’s great insight, Gary. And I really love what you said around it’s now in the boardroom. We’re not talking about this hanging out in a little cubicle area in the marketing department. It’s now in the CEO suite really driving what’s going to be that next evolutional change for these health systems. Chris, you’ve been dealing with healthcare, you’ve worked on the healthcare system side, you’ve run a very successful consultancy. You have a podcast where you talk healthcare all day long. So where do you see it? Bring us up to speed on your thoughts.

Chris Boyer (05:44):

Well, I think first of all, echo everything Gary said because it’s true internally within the organization, marketing is taking a higher seat at that boardroom table. That’s been dramatic. But the other thing that’s also important to understand is from the consumerism aspect that you talked about, Craig, is that over the years we’ve seen patient behavior interacting with health system change and being impacted by all of the different changes that are going out there.

So think about the digital front door investments from three years ago that were built on patient journeys now that are no longer the same. They don’t exist anymore, but a lot of organizations are responsible for maintaining an infrastructure that’s built around this older model. And what we have to now, as healthcare marketers, also take into mind that the landscape has changed for our users, for our customers. Discovery doesn’t look like what it did three years ago.

I mean, I never would’ve thought that people would be using AI to search the web, but it is more effective and it makes sense now. And who knows what the next three years have. So I think really- Two years ago,

Craig Blake (06:51):

AI, that was like 12 months ago. Yeah.

Chris Boyer (06:55):

But I think the risk today isn’t really that we … It isn’t an activity, but it’s more for us if we’re misaligned. And that shows up in how we spend our dollars, that shows up in how we can run well-targeted campaigns. For service lines, for patients that are trying, that they want that activity to go able to easily find, book, or choose their provider, we need to make sure that the business operations and marketing meet the moment. And that’s why we have to change today.

Craig Blake (07:33):

Totally agree. No, that’s great. That’s great. And just a reminder before we diving into the meat of the conversation, we are taking questions at the end. There is a little Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. So go ahead and click on that. You have a question. Go ahead and type it in that. We’ll get to as many as we can once we get through the content we’re talking about today. So gentlemen, let’s jump into shift number one. Let’s tee it off with from siloed brand and performance to unified growth, what does this mean to today’s strategies? Why now after so many years of doing your own thing? Why’s the band got to get together? Chris, why don’t you start us off?

Shift 1: From Siloed Brand & Performance to Unified Growth

Chris Boyer (08:08):

Well, sure. I mean, so first of all, again, you could see I’m clearly taking a consumer-centric perspective on this thing, but our consumers, our patients, our existing patients, or even potential patients, they don’t experience us in very singular ways. They experience this as a holistic experience. So that includes having a perception of your brand and experience with your brand before they even potentially show up as a patient. I’m a patient, but I’ve never met a patient that says, “Well, I am on an orthopedic journey or knee replacement journey.” That’s not how they think about themselves.

They get communicated by not only the health system, but also the ancillary services, maybe their ambulatory airfits, maybe the clinics, et cetera. They’re getting communicated all the time by us. Our patient portals are now pushing messages to us, but we have a disconnect and messaging problem. And when you talk to them in different ways, that can in a way impede upon the overall trust they have.

And trust to me is equate to their brand experience. So think about some of those gaps where brand trust gaps undermine how they actually perceive you, and then ultimately they vote with their feet. They may choose to go with another organization, it’s a little bit more coordinated. If we have brand trust and performance kind of aligned together, then what we’re doing is we’re allowing for a seamless experience or as seamless as we can make it experience. And they don’t feel like they’re bouncing around from this specialist to this primary care doctor to this urgent care center. What we’re doing now is we’re giving them a unified way to experience us. No,

Gary Stubblefield (09:59):

I completely agree, Chris. And really from the inside perspective, when I had my first experience owning marketing at a health system, it was separate budgets and reporting lines. We had someone who owned brand, and then we had folks who owned the different service lines, and they didn’t really interact with each other very much, and it doesn’t work anymore to think about it that way.

We have our brand measurements, and those are important, and we have our performance measurements, and those are important. But I think more and more, like I said before, what we’re understanding is that a performance campaign cannot succeed if that brand isn’t strong to begin with. And we think about the types of services that folks are looking for. And in healthcare, some of them are urgent and some of them have very long lead times when it comes to conversion. From my first interest in a particular service to the time that I actually need that could be years in some cases.

And so without that brand trust, without that brand confidence, then a performance-driven campaign to try to grow a particular service line really struggles. And so I think the idea to answer Craig’s question is really, if we start viewing these things as a unified ecosystem, we’re creating a surround sound for the patient, like you mentioned, Chris, because they’re interacting with us at all different points. So we have to look at it as a holistic approach instead of separate like that.

Craig Blake (11:29):

So riddle me this, gentlemen, we’re throwing out the hypothesis that this is all now got to come together. And as a marketer, that could be frightful because I haven’t done that before or that’s new to my organization. Where should I as a marketer focus my efforts? Of course, I’m going to get directives from the board or service line owners. They’re kind of pulling some of those marionette strings. But from your experiences, where should someone begin as they tackle this challenge or this new opportunity?

Gary Stubblefield (11:58):

Yeah. My first thought is we have to make sure that we’re investing in the channels that both influence and drive growth. And I guess what I mean by that is cardiology may be the thing that we have led with at our organization for decades, and it may be the thing that we’re known for, but if we’ve got 70% market share in cardiology in our service area, that’s probably not going to offer a lot of growth opportunity for us.

And so taking a look at where we are and where we stand against the market and against where we want to be, and then putting our efforts into those areas where the opportunity really exists, where there’s a sort of land grab opportunity for us. If we say, “Hey, across the board, we’d like to be at 60 plus percent market share for all of our core service lines.

And there are a couple that aren’t there yet, that’s where we should probably lean in more while obviously not losing sight of what I would call a defense position that we’d want to take with something like a very established service line.”

Craig Blake (13:04):

Yeah. So if you’re Coca-Cola, you’re not going to abandon Coke, you’re going to keep supporting Coke, but you might put a little extra money towards Sprite, and boost that up. So Chris, thoughts on that?

Chris Boyer (13:14):

Yeah, I think that actually makes sense. That point about the different ways people experience their care too is that Gary made, that’s a natural handoff to actually understanding where our priorities are. But then also, again, I don’t want to beat the drum, but as the consumer, their discovery journey varies by service line. I’ve done a lot of work around consumer insights about how people choose orthopedics versus cardiology versus primary care, and each and every one of those journeys is unique.

And so if we’re going to focus on efforts, obviously focus on those key priority service lines that are good for your organization, but also those ones that can be influenced by patient behavior because we as marketers can reach forward and try to influence that behavior. Those are areas, by the way, where you can actually start to map out without even having deep expertise, mapping out those journeys.

You don’t need detailed service line journey mapping. Even a rough level will help you there. Journey alignment probably … We really have to have an honest conversation about where your organization really wants to grow and can you as a marketer influence that or is that a referral problem or is that coming from another avenue, another way to influence the growth?

Craig Blake (14:36):

So Chris, what you’re kind of saying is you almost got to look yourself in the mirror a little bit and saying, “Hey, what’s reality like? ” Because your directives may not align with what the reality is of the situation or referral patterns or how you can service these patients.

Chris Boyer (14:48):

That’s right. The hardest thing to do though is look in the mirror because sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. But what will help though is again, having a true north around where we really feel we can influence consumer patterns as well as aligned to business value. Gary, do you have anything to add to that?

Gary Stubblefield (15:08):

No, I agree. I think the more frequently we are taking the time to self-reflect, then the more insight we have and the more direction we can gain from that. I absolutely agree. Yeah.

Craig Blake (15:20):

And I love what you just said, Chris, about having that true north, because as a marketing team, you have to have a true north, but then that needs to get to the next level to the executive team to make sure they’re aligning with your true north, because if they’re not connected, the train goes off the track real quick. So I love you pointed that out. I just wanted to put a pin in that because I think that’s very valuable for our audience to hear today. Good.

Well, Chris, you kind of naturally took us there. You kind of mentioned the patient journey, and that happens to be our second shift. I’m glad you paid attention to the slide we had up. Thank you. So let’s jump into that journey, that patient journey and that oriented discovery. You had mentioned in your opening comments about how things have changed over the past three years.

I challenge you. It’s changed in the past 12 months. Heck, it’s probably changed in the past week and we don’t know about it yet. So let’s talk a little bit about that. How has that patient discovery changed and what have you seen over your decades of doing this?

Shift 2: From Channel Thinking to Journey-Oriented Discovery

Chris Boyer (16:14):

Well, I’ve seen it change so significantly. I focus on digital and technology and the more we introduce technology and digital to the consumer, the more they start to use those tools to navigate the complexity of our care. And some of them are incumbent upon themselves. They’re very active. Others are more passive. But either way, you have to think about the patient journey in a different model. I remember when we first entered this space for me, it was almost 20 years ago, when patient journeys at that time was much more linear, right?

They discover you, they select you, they opt, you can map it out in like six stages. Well, it doesn’t work that way anymore. There’s so many different ways that people can interact with you, know about you without you yourself even knowing it. It spans now search referrals, searches or referrals from other patients or their providers, content, social.

And now we have this other thing, answer engines, AIs, right? AIs that are out there. And AIs are unique. Answer engine optimization is a unique trust problem for us because those engines have already determined what your brand is and they’re presenting it. And we are now just suddenly playing catch up. If someone like I have found myself doing asking an AI tool, what are the best doctors in this? I was actually looking for a pediatric dentist. What is the best pediatric dentist in my city? And if that organization wasn’t exposed to that or understood that or the AI tool couldn’t crawl that, it doesn’t exist in my mindset anymore. And so what we’re talking about now is there’s a whole enterprise or a whole activity around this around structured data, schema, et cetera. We won’t get into the details of that, but we have to do that in order to reinforce our brand and to make sure that our brand’s performing on these channels.

Gary Stubblefield (18:17):

Well, yeah, it’s the same. It’s the idea of the surround sound approach. It is no longer linear. And so we have to be aware of all of the different potential ways that a patient is going to interact with us throughout this journey. I don’t know if anybody’s watched The Good Place, but it’s the Jeremy Veramy journey. It’s not a straight line. It’s all over the place. And journey thinking, I think forces our teams to identify those frictions and not just think about impressions. I talked at a conference a few weeks ago, I had a conversation about looking at the journey and identifying these blind spots in the middle that we have. And it’s not exactly blind, it’s in the post-privacy world in healthcare, it’s sort of legally blind because now we are being restricted on what we can and can’t see and what we can and can’t track.

And so finding a way to create visibility throughout the entire journey so that we can know where folks are dropping off throughout the journey and then take action and do something about that so that we’re not just looking at the beginning and the end, we can see the entire process. I think it’s really important.

To your point about the AI, this zero click environment is a real thing. I was just at my parents’ house a few days ago and talking to them about it, and they didn’t even understand that they have been using this environment. And the average person really doesn’t know what we do about how all of this functions in the background, but they’ve stopped clicking on the website because they’re getting their answers straight from search. And so how do we optimize for that and are we being aware of that? And I think that’s really, really important to consider in this day and age, for sure. Well,

Chris Boyer (20:07):

There’s other … Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I was going to say, there’s another component of this too, that some areas where we don’t normally get more involved traditionally as marketers, but referral ecosystems, we have to talk about those because I think those are also a power player here. There’s a whole network of outreach to a whole different audience that we as marketers could become more involved in and helping the influence and sway. And I know that traditionally some organizations, they have that as part of their marketing suite, but I just want to state that that could do tremendous … Those referral patterns do tremendous work. Large organizations are leveraging that to drive national, international growth to their organizations.

Craig Blake (20:52):

Yeah. Just a reminder, this isn’t specific to healthcare. This nonlinear journey is pervasive across every industry. It’s just healthcare, I think, is now addressing it for the first time where other industries maybe have been looking at this a couple years ago. I remember being at a Google event a couple years back where they showed the non-linear journey. Candidly, it looked like a plate of spaghetti because there were so many touchpoints. But because there’s so much volume of an opportunity to engage with our patients, hey, Chris, what happens after that first appointment? That’s equally as important, right? Because it’s not just getting them to the appointment, it’s what’s next.

Chris Boyer (21:29):

Yeah. I remember once talking to a chief marketing officer, said, “My only job is to get them in the door.” And then after that, that’s operations. And we know that that’s not how marketers and other industries look at it.

I understand why there was kind of a separation of roles and responsibilities, but we’re also responsible for ensuring that after they leave discharge, that that’s a good experience, that loyalty is critical to us. And so we see now organizations and also, frankly, EMR companies are starting to realize that’s a lost opportunity for marketers, that we have to provide them access to the ability to reengage people even after that first appointment.

Gary Stubblefield (22:17):

Yeah. I remember when I was doing service line growth and development, we would sit around it and talk about what is the “fly paper” for our system? And it is those sort of easy entry services, urgent care, primary care, those types of things. But an example is for urgent care, that visit itself might generate $150 for this health system, but the downstream revenue that the urgent care visit happens and then that patient gets referred in to treat a larger problem generates four or $5,000 on average in downstream revenue towards the system.

And so it’s being able to take a bigger picture view of what’s happening and think about growth and lifecycle of a patient in a broader way that’s really, I think, an important factor in today’s world. Lifecycle, really, it supports both the profitability and the continuity of care, and that’s important. We always like to sit down and talk about lifetime value and really understand what the revenue impact is of whatever goal we’re trying to accomplish so that we can understand the real impact that we’re driving down the road.

And that helps to inform what kind of investment we should be making and it helps to drive what our KPIs should be and all of those types of things. And so using data and intelligence to really inform all of those things is pretty critical.

Craig Blake (23:50):

Yeah. Those of you keeping Square home, we moved directly into Shift three, by the way, lifecycle. So that was a smooth transition. It’s kind of like yacht rock, we’re just cruising along here, having good time. But Chris, go ahead.

Shift 3: From Acquisition-Only to Lifecycle Continuity

Chris Boyer (24:01):

Yeah, I was going to say, it used to be too that when we talked about patient linkage, that was a clinical thing. But I really think of patient linkage as a marketing problem, right? Or at least in some ways we can influence that because oftentimes we don’t have access to the tools to help us understand where patient leakage can occur. It’s often invisible to us. It doesn’t show up in our dashboards. It doesn’t show up in our campaign data performances.

We understand how we can convert to potentially to new patients, and we can map that. When we see a patient who came in once they left the network, when we see a patient that maybe had a urgent care encounter somewhere in between that patient journey that we’re mapping, that’s key insights for us to understand exactly what’s happening and we can use that back onto our own patient lifecycle management to understand that.

But we rarely have the ability to close that loop right now. That data exists. It’s just we’re not making those connections. Closing that loop requires getting access to data that may live in ops, it may live in finance, it may live in the EMR. This is the world we’re living in, right, Gary?

Gary Stubblefield (25:19):

Yeah, it is. I actually just went through an exercise of trying to help define what opportunities really exist based on patient leakage, based on out migration. And it was a really interesting exercise because for this particular system, it’s not the skillset that’s missing. They’ve got all of the right qualities, they’ve got all the right capacity, they have the surgical capabilities, they’ve got the providers, they’ve got everything that they need, but the outmigration is happening because it’s really a brand problem.

Folks in the area think, “I’m going to get better care in this particular service if I leave town and go to the next major city down the road.” And that really is a brand and a creative messaging challenge that they need to accomplish. It’s not a functional one, it’s not an operational one. And so that was a really interesting thing that it required us to dig pretty deep into the data to understand.

Craig Blake (26:16):

Yeah. So you guys are almost, it’s kind of bringing those worlds together that once you define your North Star as a marketing team, making sure that the boardroom is aligned to that North Star because they can bring those worlds together, operations and marketing to help really focus on where the growth needs are and tackle those problems because the rules of the game have changed. And Gary, your example is spot on.

If you’re in not a major metro area, you’re challenged with leakage because they may go to that big city because the perception is, oh, they’ve got the best X or Y or Z, but you could have even better, but people just don’t get it or don’t understand it or don’t know it. So that becomes a brand and messaging problem. Chris, you’re about to say something. Well,

Chris Boyer (26:59):

I was going to add to that because Craig, one of the things when you’re talking about this expanded universe of data and bringing marketing to that post-patient, the post-net new patient, the existing patient reactivation, I think a lot of the organizations, the clinical, the operations and even the IT people would be welcomed to have us participate in those. They don’t know what they’re … At times, they’re kind of left with not really knowing exactly how to message appropriately.

Marketing should be owning the voice of the customer. We understand not only growth, but we should be understanding the other aspects of it. How do they perceive us? What is the next best action for them, et cetera? This is an area where I think while we may not be comfortable sitting at that table, we certainly are more welcomed because they’re looking for that direction. Gary, I would assume you see this too when you work with clients.

Gary Stubblefield (27:59):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, audience intelligence, and maybe I’m going to move us into this next section here, but audience talent really is foundational, but the targeting alone doesn’t really create the action. And so this is kind of what we’re talking about is taking this step back and being able to really understand what’s happening in the market and sit down and collaborate with the other folks in your system who really have access to a lot of these resources.

We talk about brand and performance needing to be unified, but there’s also a level of collaborating across the system at large, across the organization to make sure we’re pulling in the right stakeholders who understand the service line owner, the folks who have access to the data. All of these things need to be part of the equation so that we can really develop a strategy that gets us to where we want to be.

And I think that’s really important to … I talked earlier about, in this particular case, we used all of this audience intelligence to understand where the opportunity is, but it’s not a targeting problem that we’re dealing with. It’s really a brand and messaging problem. And so how do we take that understanding in all of this data that we have access to and translate that into resonant, personalized messaging that really helps folks who are in need and raising their hand and saying, “I need to find a solution for this that helps them find us.”

Craig Blake (29:29):

Yeah, and you guys have both mentioned brand and creative, so let’s jump to that. And that’s really shift number four that we presented early on. It’s a better understanding how creative really now is becoming a performance lever. But before you jump into that, I just want to do a quick reminder. If you have a question, I see them popping up, go to the Q&A icon down below, go ahead and we’ll get to as many of those after we’re done with our conversation here. But Chris, performance creative, it’s a word we hear. You’ve probably had it on your podcast a bunch of times already, but let’s talk about it here for the audience today.

Shift 4: Creative as a Performance Lever

Chris Boyer (30:00):

Yeah. It’s interesting how creative and content and visual creative expressions of what we can do a number of things all at the same time. They not only reinforce our brand and how we want to be perceived, but we’re now in a world where audiences are starting to want to have, I’m going to say the P word, personalization. They want to have more personalized communications. They want us to reach them in a way where we meet them, not only where they are in the moment of the physical journey, but also emotionally where they are and making those decisions.

So creative variations allow us to expose what resonates emotionally and contextually for them. And if we do it right, what we can do is we can actually measure different types of responses based on ad creative, based on ad copy, what have you, and use that to actually as a signal on how certain people may be reacting to this.

It tells you a lot more about their mindset than demographic targeting at times, if done right. Creative is doing more than just grabbing attention. It’s sometimes managing anxiety and helping people make decisions and things like that. And in my experience in the work that I’ve done, I found that those high performing creative themes are, first of all, they’re extensible. They can inform a broader strategy. They can reach multiple different segments of your audience. And it can do so much more than just optimizing your ads, frankly.

Craig Blake (31:39):

Yeah. But Gary, before you jump in that, I just want to add to that. And the reality is the platforms you’re using to promote this are leaning in on that more than ever. Meta, they changed the rules in early 2005. They’re now paying attention to the ad and what’s in the ad more than the subtext of the ad. So they’re really bringing the word performance into performance creative the way Meta optimizes things. But Gary, go ahead.

Gary Stubblefield (32:06):

Yeah, no, I was just going to say this is sort of the bigger picture of what we’re talking about today. This is where brand and performance really come together is in, and I mentioned it before, and I believe this wholeheartedly that using data to help understand who our audience is has to be the first step in any of these processes. But then once we’ve determined who our audience is, it’s not the targeting that necessarily resonates. It’s figuring out then how to speak to them with the right message at the right place, at the right time, when they need it in their journey. And so I also think that creative can be maybe the biggest variable in performance success sometimes today.

And it’s not just whether or not we had the right segments, it’s how we spoke to them and did that message resonate. So I think testing things like messaging and imagery and tone can really drive efficiency of these campaigns maybe even faster than just tweaking the segments.

Adding a new segment isn’t necessarily always the best or right solution. Because I mentioned this before, we’ve got in the healthcare world, people are coming to us for real life needs. And so there is such an emotional undercurrent to every interaction that happens here, whether it’s something urgent or whether it’s something long-term, whether it’s completely elective or something that I just know that I’m going to need. At some point, there is an emotional element to everything here. And building a strong brand is where you build that emotional confidence in the healthcare decisions that these folks are making and in making them with you more importantly.

Chris Boyer (33:47):

And this is such a great use case for AI. It used to be, when we mentioned AB testing five years ago, people were grown because they know that’s a lot of work. When we’re talking about dynamic ad insertions, dynamic ad placements and things like that, this is really a great use case of doing this. As you said, Craig, right? The ad platforms are leaning into it, but we as creative teams, we should have the responsibility of also understanding and managing those all within the compliance framework and not getting too creepy. Yeah.

Craig Blake (34:20):

But you know what’s Chris, if you talk about compliance, I’m starting to see in MSAs and BAAs that you can’t use AI without explicit written consent from the system or the organization. So while we’re talking about performance creative AI and all this, we got to make sure that everybody’s aligned because depend on where your stance is really could change how you view performance creative because you can’t do this kind of personalization without AI. The reality is, is if you’re going to create a bunch of images.

And a variety of things, you’re talking several versions. You don’t have budget to do that the old way. You have to use tools to automate that. So all those listening in, talk to compliance, find out what you can do first.

Gary Stubblefield (35:05):

Yeah, really, it does need to be a sort of baseline conversation that everybody’s having because it is a tool and it can help and it can make things so much more efficient. And we’re not changing the scientific approach to the process. We’re just sort of making it more efficient to be able to iterate faster.

Craig Blake (35:23):

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Well, good. So we hit all the four shifts. Let’s kind of wrap it up. What I always like to do when we have these conversations is we talk about a lot of theoretical stuff and we talk about a bunch of ideas, but I’d love to really focus on what can the listeners take back to their offices.

Today’s Wednesday, let’s say it’s Monday morning, because they’re going to get a recording, we’ll get some notes from this. What can they take to their team meeting next week and say, “Hey, here’s two or three ideas that we can really bring home and share with the team to really move the needle and address the things we’ve talked about. Gary, from your standpoint, what’s one individual item or a couple items that you really think people need to bring home with them?

Key Takeaways: What to Bring Back to Your Team

Gary Stubblefield (36:07):

Yeah, look, here we go. I’ve been talking about the scientific approach here and we believe it in taking a scientific approach to everything. So audit first, you got to understand exactly what’s happening before you can make any moves. So audit, brand and performance metrics and make sure that those two things are aligned with each other. That’s the first step into unifying that approach. If we’re chasing different goals, then we’re never going to be unified. Launch a testing initiative.

We have to test to be able to learn and then to be able to iterate. So let’s do those things and then identify a discovery friction point. And this is part of what I was talking about earlier. Let’s look at what’s happening. Let’s be self-reflective. Let’s look at what’s going on under the hood and let’s find a point of friction and then ideate on ways to improve it.

Chris Boyer (37:09):

And then adding onto that, I would say that with that insight, start to map out. If you already have a mapped out, maybe reframe your patient journey. If not, map out a new patient journey end to end and use that as sort of like your true north or your guidelines of how it’s going to work and realizing it will change. But if you can map that all the way through, that will help you to get a better A discipline, better understanding where those friction points are and allow you to find ways that we can be creative.

In addition, you’ll probably find one or two lifecycle communication touchpoints that maybe are misaligned. I think a lot of this of patient portal messages comparing to what we communicate from a marketing suite, and that’s something that’s kind of low hanging fruit, but do audit that. Look to see if you can improve that touchpoint, make it more part of your brand, make it more related to what we think that journey is.

And then that one profitable service line, the one that we have some influence over is prioritize that. Maybe make that first. You can’t boil the ocean. So I always try to look at as if you’re approaching this revolutionary, but you have to act evolutionary one step at a time. So do it one service line at a time as we get there.

Craig Blake (38:26):

Yeah. I love that you’ve brought that up, Chris. It’s something we talked about when we prepared for today is really you can’t boil the ocean. Everything we’re talking about here is take it in small, manageable chunks, set goals and milestones along the way so you feel like you’re moving the needle. Because if you’re looking at the full field and you’re like, “How am I going to get to the end?”

You’re going to get burnt out. Look for the little wins along the way and rally your teams around those little wins because that’s the way you’ll see success. Anything else to add to this, Gary or Chris? I know these are some of the ones. By the way, it’s A- L-I-M-I-I, so everybody can write that down and remember this, right?

Gary Stubblefield (39:04):

It’s a great acronym. No, I think to your point, this is probably a good starting point. And then you iterate from there. You learn and you grow and you improve and it’s a continuous cycle.

Chris Boyer (39:19):

Yeah, I 100% agree. And always have, as you, Gary, you mentioned earlier, that the creative and flexibility mindset so that you can actually change and pivot. Unfortunately, our consumers change much quickly than we as Stoic institutions change. So we have to try to put the more Plex in as we can, the most flex we can in today’s day and age.

Craig Blake (39:43):

Yeah, love it. Love it. Well, guys, if you’re open to it, we got a few questions that came through the Q&A channel, so if we can just jump to … I think Sarah’s going to join back to the call and then share a few of the questions that came up on the Q&A.

Q&A: Resources, North Stars, and Auditing Metrics

Sarah Gray (39:57):

Yeah, thanks everybody for your questions. Jennifer had a good question. What are some good resources you can recommend to better understand that patient journey we talked about today across various service lines?

Chris Boyer (40:10):

Gary, you want to start or should I?

Gary Stubblefield (40:12):

Go ahead.

Chris Boyer (40:13):

Well, so first of all, if you’re thinking about doing it, inevitably someone else has done it before. And we as a healthcare organization, we tend to share some of our best success studies and stories. So what I do is I actually spend a lot of time actually understanding how others have done this before. It’s the questions that usually has been asked or answered before, but again, realize that some of these case studies or some of these patient journeys have been done years ago, so they need to be updated. The other thing I would say is you have an ample set of tools that can act as signals.

If you don’t have a CRM, that might be an area of opportunity. Maybe you can actually leverage some third party data to help you provide some insights. Maybe you can leverage a company like Amsive to help you start to understand exactly what your marketplace looks like.

You’ve probably been serving your patients anyway through various different means, NRC or Press Ganey or what have you. You probably have that data available to you. And then of course, your strategy department has a lot of information about the marketplace. But when you’re really getting into journey mapping itself, there’s a lot of information about how to get started on that if you haven’t done it before. But I think it’s like a combination of learning the language and then applying it internally. But Gary, I’d love to get your thoughts on-

Gary Stubblefield (41:39):

No, yeah. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a plug and play solution that just solves the problem for you here. So it is a little bit of a collaboration across all the different sources that you’re going to need to look at. And then working with somebody who can help pull all of that together and pull out the insights and then move on from there. Yeah.

Craig Blake (41:58):

Yeah. Chris, the thing that you mentioned that really hits home to me, and it’s something we forget because we just get immersed in our own daily tasks, is lift your head out of what you’re doing and leverage the industry you’re in. If you’re regional health systems, there are hundreds of regional health systems that might’ve solved your problem. When you’re at conferences, just don’t listen to the content being shared, meet and build your professional network, because those are the individuals, they’re your phone of friends.

They’re the ones that you’re going to call saying, “Hey, have you seen this before?” And whether or not they have, they may know someone else, and it’s just building that referral network. And I know we’ve got springtime conferences coming up from the healthcare industry, so make sure you check those out if you haven’t had a chance to, but that’s great.

Sarah, do we got time for one more question?

Sarah Gray (42:44):

Probably one or two more. Excellent. Sonya had a good question. She said, “Can you talk a little bit more about determining your marketing North Star? Is this how marketing engages with hospital leadership around business goals? Is it something else?” Tell us more.

Craig Blake (43:01):

Yeah, that’s a great question. Gary, do you want to lean in there, have a thought?

Gary Stubblefield (43:04):

Yeah, I think that that is an interesting conversation and that maybe depending on the dynamic in your individual system, it’s something that you need to look at. But the idea in my mind, the way to get there is if this is a boardroom level conversation, then having a conversation with your senior most leaders about what our goals are and what we really want to accomplish, and then backing down from there into looking at data to understand where opportunities are.

And so I do think, and it was mentioned a couple of times here, that the first thing that needs to happen is to make sure that marketing isn’t going rogue and determining their goals without talking to the senior leadership about what’s really important to the system overall. That’s the first step in the process. And then I am a huge fan of collaborating and bringing folks together.

And so I think it is maybe sitting down with service line leaders and understanding what their particular challenges are. Sometimes we might think we really want to grow in a particular service or another, but there are real capacity challenges. Maybe we’re having trouble recruiting physicians, maybe everyone’s at capacity.

There are all kinds of different challenges that we face, and it’s really important for marketing to be able to understand those before we can determine exactly what that North Star should be. And maybe it’s important to also say that North Star doesn’t have to be fixed, that North Star can move and can evolve as the systems needs do.

Chris Boyer (44:38):

Yeah, I would only add to that is that sometimes when you meet with those service line leaders, they probably have a perception of what marketing does and that may not align to what you’re trying to accomplish. So be sure that you arm yourself strategically and come in asking the strategic questions. Inevitably, they’re going to be like, “Well, we hired five new doctors. We need to fill up their panels,” or, “We just need some advertising around that. ” I’ve heard that time and time again, but that can speak to something more systemic. So I use a variety of tools to try to just actually understand the business goals, the business reasons, the rationale around what you’re trying to accomplish, and then that can feed into aligning your true north, so to speak. But to Gary’s point, for sure, make sure you’re not doing it in a bubble.

Make sure that it aligns to some sort of strategic plan.

Craig Blake (45:27):

Yeah, we call it stakeholder interviews that we conduct, and we almost become the peacemaker. As an agency, we come in and we’re going to talk to person A, person B, person C, D, E, and F, and then we’re going to synthesize the data. And it’s so fascinating how perceptions are vastly different. And our job is to get them all on the same page. So stakeholder interviews, internal looking in the mirror are so critical to aligning. So hopefully some of this commentary will help you, Sonya, as you’re defining that in your organization. Sarah, what else do we got?

Sarah Gray (45:59):

Another good one. Can we get a concrete example of auditing the brand and performance metrics for alignment? That’s from DeAnn.

Gary Stubblefield (46:10):

You’re looking for hard results then, Sarah, that might be something that we could package up a little case study.

Sarah Gray (46:17):

Yeah, or I think even just talking about what metrics to look at might be helpful here for brand and performance metrics, what things might indicate a holistic story together?

Gary Stubblefield (46:31):

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. On the spot, let me think about specifically what those might be. But thinking about, obviously with brand, you’re measuring awareness, you’re measuring overall NPS. A lot of times what we like to do is in our reporting process is to report on incrementality. When we know that some of our channels are really brand heavy and drive that brand, but they’re not going to drive a ton of conversion.

What we like to do is build a mechanism upfront in a campaign so that on the backend we can show, hey, these are the people who were touched by some of these brand awareness channels and also by some of these lower funnel conversion channels. And then here’s some of the folks who’ve only got one or the other and look at that and say, here’s the incremental lift that we were able to provide when we showed someone a CTV ad plus a piece of direct mail plus a display ad and so on.

And so I think looking at things that way helps us to create this more holistic view. It’s not necessarily that there’s a list of particular KPIs for brand and for performance. It’s really more about how we look at them in combination with each other. And sometimes that mechanism does have to be built into a campaign upfront so that we make sure that we’re collecting the right data along the way to be able to report on it on the backend. Yeah.

Chris Boyer (48:02):

And I would add, a tool that I use sometimes is I create four quadrants where I’m looking at specific metrics. The first I kind of bucket around awareness and reach. You traditionally think of that in funnel performance marketing. It’s like the top of the funnel work, but that’s also really kind of a treasure trove, I think, for understanding brand and awareness. And you can actually tap into that. You also have your reputational and trust factors that you’re collecting through typical brand performance. And those signals can actually help you get some insights into how you want to do your performance.

Then you want to go more towards the traditional route of your content and your consideration metrics. And lastly, market share and growth metrics. I think if you can group your metrics in those four buckets and start to align what you have from a branding perspective to your performance perspective, that gives you more of a sense of what the universal dashboard could look like.

But just because you can measure, it doesn’t mean you have to. So you want to make sure you’re actually focusing on those things that matter. Well,

Craig Blake (48:59):

That’s great. Well, this has been great questions. Thanks so much for that, Sarah. So as we’re going to wrap it up here, Chris, if people want to reach out to you, how would they find you? Where are you going to be? Are you going to be in any events coming up in the near future? I think we’re both going to be in Utah in spring, but how do people find Chris?

Chris Boyer (49:15):

Well, easy way to find me. Usually Google my name, you probably can find me. I say that knowing that there are other Chris Boyers out there. I have a website, Christopher Boyer, because the real Chris Boyer is a B actor, so he has his own website, but I’m Christopher Boyer. You can also find me on my weekly podcast called Touchpoint. Touchpoint.health is our website if you want to subscribe or we’re available on all the podcasting platforms. And I’m going to be at HMPS and I’m going to be at some other of the big national conferences in the future. So always look me up. And by the way, find me on LinkedIn. That’s a great way too to reach out to me. Love to connect with you there.

Craig Blake (49:53):

Yeah, that’s great. And likewise, Gary and I can be found at LinkedIn. We’ll both be at HMPS, we’ll be at Swaay and all the fun upcoming healthcare conferences. But also if you want to get in touch with us here at Amsive Health, there’s a QR code breakout that phone, scan that and then that will take you to a contact us form. But we appreciate everybody’s time today and great questions. Thanks for the engagement. And Chris, thank you for your time. And Gary, always a pleasure to chat with you gentlemen. So thanks everybody for joining us on another Amsive Health webinar.

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