For a few months every four years, the U.S. presidential election and Summer Olympics dominate the media landscape and create major challenges for advertisers trying to establish reach, maintain ad frequency, and meet cost per acquisition (CPA) goals. From roughly mid-July to early November, election campaigns and Olympic promotions overtake ad inventory, limiting supply and driving up costs for other advertisers.
Let’s explore how a thoughtful election- and Olympic-year paid media strategy can help you emerge victorious from this quagmire. After all, who doesn’t love a good underdog story?
Politics and pentathlons: The negative impacts on marketing
Before we discuss strategy, it’s important to understand what is at risk during these quadrennial events. Here are some of the ways your current paid media plan might feel the impact of the election/Olympic year:
Limited inventory
Channels like traditional broadcast, out-of-home (billboards, transit, airport advertising, etc.), and even CTV, have a finite amount of ad inventory. As politicians, advocacy groups, super PACs, the Olympic Games, and the likes buy up ad inventory, it becomes a challenge for other advertisers to secure inventory for themselves.
For election candidate advertising specifically, the FCC requires broadcast stations and cable systems to charge legally qualified candidates the lowest unit prices, making TV advertising more affordable, and increasing the likelihood of those candidates purchasing a lot of inventory. Additionally, because candidates are guaranteed the lowest unit price that other customers receive, this means that you likely won’t be able to secure any zero-cost added value spots during this time.
In an effort to treat competing candidates fairly, the FCC also requires broadcast stations to abide by the “equal time” rule. This means that if one candidate gets a spot in the 6p news, the other candidates must also be able to receive a similar spot. As such, many non-political advertisers get preempted (“bumped”) during this time and may not receive makegoods during the desired window. This rule makes it especially challenging for advertisers who are operating within very specific promotional windows.
With political and Olympic ads taking over the airwaves, it becomes difficult for other advertisers to secure any ad inventory at all, yet alone enough to maintain an effective reach and frequency that will grow brand awareness or compel action from potential customers.
Cluttered ad space
As politics and Olympic promotion overtake traditional advertising outlets, many non-political and Olympic advertisers will move into the digital realm to secure inventory and lock in flat rates. The political and Olympic advertisers will be here too by the way. As you can imagine (or have experienced first hand in years past), the digital marketplace becomes inundated with heated political messaging and inspirational (usually sports-themed) stories, on top of all the normal ad clutter.
It can be extremely challenging to break through all this noise. Consumers often get overwhelmed by excessive advertising, making it less likely that they will engage with or be influenced by ads.
Increased costs
While broadcast stations are required to keep costs low for advertisers, digital channels are not. Costs on Google, Meta, and other auction-based platforms will surge as competition increases. Cost per clicks (CPCs) and cost per conversions (CPAs) will increase as advertisers bid against each other to win ad space. Target CPAs are going to take more work to hit as each impression becomes significantly more expensive to secure. While you can still serve ads within a set budget, your paid media dollars won’t go nearly as far in auction-based platforms as they normally would outside the election and Olympic seasons.
Taking the podium: Overcome obstacles with a winning strategy
While the challenges that exist during an election and Olympic year may seem daunting, it’s not too late to implement a winning strategy. Strategically planning ahead can help mitigate these challenges:
Adapt your channel strategy
Perhaps the most obvious response to the challenges highlighted above would be to adjust your paid media channel strategy. The limited inventory on traditional broadcast channels will make it difficult to maintain an effective reach and frequency and auction-based digital platforms will experience increased costs. While you may not want to exclude these channels altogether, consider countering those challenges by:
Secure broadcast sponsorships and packages: These often guarantee a minimum number of impressions without the possibility of being preempted.
Extend your broadcast impressions with digital video and streaming audio: These channels have more inventory and often allow you to negotiate flat CPM rates.
Invest in podcasts: Podcasts break through the clutter by speaking to highly engaged listeners.
Incorporate flat-rate digital platforms: Plan ahead and collaborate with digital partners that will guarantee flat CPM/CPC pricing to avoid the increased bidding costs.
Understand your audience
As inventory shrinks and costs rise, efficiency is key. Don’t let your advertising dollars go to waste serving impressions to people outside your audience.
Many marketers use demographics to define their target audience, but demographics have little to do with why a person takes a particular action. Well ahead of the Opening Ceremonies and primary elections, consider investing in values-based persona research to more clearly define who your audience is and what motivates them so that you can tailor your messaging and creative accordingly. Effective ad messaging and creative that resonates with your audience will help break through the ad clutter and drive action during a time when consumers are faced with significant distractions.
Additionally, make sure you’re investing in your first-party data to understand consumer behavior. Today, marketers collect more data than ever before, but often struggle to harness the power of that data in a way that yields actionable insights. Effective data quality management enables you to analyze the right data points that help you understand your customer, enhance their experiences, and optimize campaigns for more efficient and effective results.
Invest in Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy is the insurance policy for any paid media plan. A strong paid media strategy can drive significant traffic to a landing page, but if users are met with a poor website experience, they might leave without converting, thus creating a leaky bucket situation. A strategic CRO program systematically tests various iterations of website design and functionality to weed out points of friction and increase conversion rates.
By investing in CRO strategy ahead of the election and Olympic year, you can help prevent valuable paid media traffic from trickling away pre-conversion during that time when paid media traffic is more expensive and harder to come by. During election and Olympic years, when digital costs increase and consumer attention is being directed elsewhere, decreases in conversion rates are almost guaranteed. An effective CRO strategy will help offset the anticipated decrease in conversion rates.
Conquering the digital landscape to boost online visibility and establish brand presence requires a strategic approach that mirrors mastering a chess game. It’s all about drawing up and executing a holistic search strategy that covers every angle of the digital marketing board.
With time and money on the clock, crafting a holistic search strategy looks like the meticulous planning and execution required in a high-stakes game. Achieving grandmaster marketing status isn’t merely about making moves; it’s about anticipating your opponent’s next steps. And by combining search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and other winning tactics with a holistic approach, you’ll be prepared for success at every turn.
The opening gambit: Unveiling the holistic search strategy
A holistic search strategy breaks down silos between paid search and organic search efforts. By analyzing data from both channels together, you can create a unified strategy that maximizes your visibility across search engine results pages. This approach ensures your website aligns with user needs at every stage of the customer journey, ultimately driving overall search performance.
It’s about weaving together the threads of customer behavior, market trends, and competitive intelligence to inform strategic decisions with optimism and purpose. By gathering and leveraging data from diverse sources, such as search engine analytics, valuegraphics, and market research, a holistic search strategy strives to optimize many facets of a brand’s online presence.
Much like a well-executed gambit, implementing a holistic search strategy can maximize ROI by aligning marketing efforts with the evolving audience needs and preferences, ensuring sustained success in the digital board.
The middle game: Key elements in play
SEM, SEO, and conversion rate optimization are a triple threat in the digital realm and serve as the key elements in a holistic search and integrated marketing strategy.
SEM: The Rook
Our agile rook, SEM, charges forth with paid campaigns, reaching engaged audiences, amplifying brand visibility in search engines, and driving traffic to websites. Unlike the organic approach of SEO, paid search utilizes paid advertising platforms to quickly reach engaged audiences and achieve faster visibility.
Like a rook on a chessboard, SEM is a very powerful piece in a marketing plan, but it requires strategic planning to effectively deploy:
Keyword strategy: Leverage organic keyword research to inform which keywords you will bid on and which keywords you want to exclude from campaigns. Include a healthy mix of brand and non-brand keywords, and test bid strategies on those keywords.
Aligned ad and landing page copy: It is important that the ad copy aligns with the copy on the landing page it drives traffic to. This helps ensure a cohesive user experience, which generally results in better performance.
Use your assets: Don’t settle for just headlines and descriptions— take advantage of site links, callouts, structured snippets, phone extensions, lead forms, locations, prices, and promotional features to capture user attention and drive immediate action.
SEO: The Queen
The queen of your strategy, SEO orchestrates content, keywords, and technical aspects, ensuring your website ranks high on the digital field of play. Imagine it as the most versatile force, attracting organic traffic through optimized content, targeted keywords, and a user-friendly website structure. Think of SEO as building a sturdy, well-defended castle, organically attracting visitors with relevant content and strategic placement with vast mobility.
Here, SEO serves as that central force:
Keyword research: Like a skilled scout, SEO identifies the most relevant search queries and key phrases your target audience is using.
Content creation: Drawing on these insights, SEO transforms into an informed storyteller, crafting engaging, informative content that resonates with your audience and answers their burning questions.
On-page optimization: Finally, SEO acts as the architect, meticulously optimizing website elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking, ensuring search engines can easily understand and index your content.
As the game nears its climax, we focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO). Much like a well-executed endgame, CRO ensures that every move, or every click, counts.
Here’s how:
A/B testing: A/B testing allows you to explore different variations of elements like landing page design, call-to-action placement, and content structure. This data-driven approach helps refine your tactics, uncover winning combinations, and constantly improve your conversion rate. Meticulously testing different strategies can help identify the most effective approach for your target audience.
Strategic landing page optimization: Landing pages guide visitors toward desired actions, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. By optimizing them for seamless user experience and clear calls to action, you convert interest into tangible results. Think of landing pages as kings capturing website visitors by providing a clear path to desired actions.
SERP dominance: Checkmate
Securing top positions on the SERPs and winning clicks is the endgame in a holistic search strategy. Success looks like seeing your brand in the top positions for relevant keywords, increasing your brand visibility, and driving significant organic traffic toward your website. From organic and paid search results to Google Shopping ads, answer boxes, featured snippets, videos, and images, provide search engines and users with a clear understanding of your content and increase the click-through rate for your organic listings. Think of SERP dominance as securing the king’s position and establishing your brand as a leader in the digital landscape.
The digital realm is dynamic, constantly shifting and evolving. Just as Garry Kasparov adapted in response to every single one of Deep Blue’s moves, brands too must be adaptable and responsive in their holistic search strategies.
Here are some key moves to keep your holistic search strategy at the top of its game:
Embrace new technologies: Stay informed about emerging technology and industry trends, such as voice search and SGE, and incorporate them into your strategy. Get started with our blog about SEO trends in 2024.
Monitor algorithm updates: Search engines regularly update their algorithms, which can impact your rankings. Stay informed about these updates and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Analyze your data: Regularly analyze your website traffic and user behavior data with GA4’s new metrics to identify areas for improvement and optimize your strategy for long-term success.
Keep learning, keep growing: The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving, so continuous learning is essential. Stay up-to-date with industry trends, attend workshops, and actively seek new knowledge.
Take the board with purpose (and Tallwave)
Just as in a friendly game of chess, adopting a holistic search strategy means thinking ahead, staying flexible, and making smart moves to outmaneuver the competition. In this dynamic arena, where algorithms are always changing and search trends are in flux from day to day, taking an integrated approach will help your brand stay sharp and ahead of the curve.
Many companies have shifted their focus to bottom-of-funnel tactics, like paid search and retargeting ads, as economic uncertainty drives budget constraints and increases the pressure to make sales. However, this imbalanced approach will almost certainly have a lagging negative impact on revenue and ROI.
Implementing a full-funnel marketing strategy can fix the imbalance and ensure long-term growth and sustainability. Let’s look at the full marketing funnel, why stage-specific engagement matters, and how to bring them to life.
What are the stages of full-funnel marketing?
Marketing strategy is often compared to a funnel because of the shape it takes as consumers move through the purchase journey.
Stage 1: Top-of-funnel
Awareness tactics (at the top of the funnel) are broad and cast a wide net to reach consumers. This might include things like radio ads, billboard ads, blogs, or public relations campaigns.
The purpose of top-of-funnel tactics is to get your brand in front of your audience and generate brand awareness. As such, success for these individual tactics should be measured by publisher metrics like impressions, reach, frequency, and video completion rates or through survey metrics like lift in brand awareness and ad recall. A common misstep we see marketers make is trying to measure the success of a top-of-funnel tactic by the number of conversions it drives. Billboards aren’t going to result in a click-through conversion, but they do influence consumers who may not even know they want to buy your product or service yet. Similarly, an attribution model that ignores the role top-of-funnel tactics play as part of the confluence of factors that ultimately drive conversion can work against you.
Stage 2: Mid-funnel
Consideration tactics (in the middle of the funnel) focus on consumers who are familiar with and evaluating the brand. Tactics deployed at this might include product-specific emails, FAQ pages, and organic search strategy.
This is the stage where we start to see consumers interacting with the brand so success metrics look different than those in the top of the funnel. Here, we are interested in engagement metrics like click-through rates, social media interactions, rich media interactions, average time on site, pages visited per website engagement, scroll depth, and non-conversion website events (e.g., PDF downloads, webinar registrations, video completions, etc.).
Stage 3: Bottom of the funnel
Conversion tactics (at the bottom of the funnel) get in front of consumers who are ready to make a purchase. Paid search is a major tactic at this stage of the funnel, but tactics might also include website content like comparison charts or savings calculators.
This is the stage at which we measure tactical success in terms of conversions. Consumers, influenced by the awareness and consideration driven higher up in the funnel from other tactics, are now ready to make a purchase or submit a lead form.
But it doesn’t end there! After consumers convert, they move into the loyalty part of the funnel. The tactics in this part of the funnel keep consumers coming back. It might include things like personalized content, rewards and loyalty programs, or incentive campaigns.
The success of your loyalty program can be measured by customer retention rate, customer lifetime value, and repeat purchases.
The lowest part of the funnel is advocacy, which is all about getting consumers to tell their friends about your brand. This often takes the form of customer reviews and referral programs and can be measured by metrics like customer satisfaction scores, online reviews and sentiment analysis, and social listening insights.
Why does a full-funnel marketing strategy matter?
Although marketers like to position their strategy into a nice, neat little funnel, the reality is that the consumer journey is not so nice and neat. It’s also not linear. On average, it takes 8-12 touchpoints with a brand to convert a customer!
The beauty of a full-funnel marketing strategy is that it helps you meet consumers where they are in their journeys. It is a holistic, integrated approach that drives repeat exposure and facilitates multiple touch points with customers at different stages of their journey, which is critical for ensuring your brand is top of mind when the moment of truth comes and a buying decision is made.
The negative impact of a bottom-of-funnel approach
Conversion-focused tactics often get the most attention because they produce the most conversions. But consumers can’t convert if they aren’t aware of your brand. Consumers won’t convert if they know about your brand, but haven’t taken the time to consider what it means to them. By neglecting the upper parts of the funnel, you choke the funnel and restrict your ability to drive conversions in the long term.
Unfortunately, many companies get overly focused on the bottom-of-funnel tactics due to the very real and understandable pressure that marketers get from leaders focused only on transactional KPIs. This is especially true in times of economic uncertainty (check out our white paper on how to optimize your customer experience for recession resilience) when driving revenue takes on a heightened priority.
A broken funnel can manifest in many ways:
Poor engagement rates
If you skipped over the awareness part of the funnel, consumers may not be familiar with your brand. Trust and credibility have yet to be established and so they are not prepared to engage with your content.
High engagement, but low conversion
Similarly, if consumers are clicking, but not converting, may not be meeting them at the right point in their journey.
Conversion stagnation
Often a symptom of low-funnel strategies, you may have tapped out your available audience by ignoring critical awareness tactics.
Unintentionally over-indexing on first-time customers
It is 5-7 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. If your customer base is over-indexed on new customers, you may need to double down on your retention efforts.
Decrease in branded searches
Customers can’t search for you if they don’t know about your brand. Investing in top-of-funnel tactics is crucial to driving brand awareness.
Increase in costs to convert
Persistent increases in cost per lead (CPL) or cost per acquisition (CPA) signal that you are competing for a finite, over-indexed audience and would benefit from upper-funnel tactics.
Bringing a full-funnel marketing strategy to life
If any of the scenarios above sound familiar, it’s probably time to evolve your marketing strategy to adopt a full-funnel approach.
Here are some key considerations when establishing a full-funnel marketing strategy:
Teamwork makes the dream work
A full-funnel marketing strategy requires collaboration across multiple teams (think strategy, brand, paid media, creative, content, design, PR, email, loyalty… the list goes on!) to ensure thoughtful, cohesive customer experiences. Make sure you are pulling in representatives from all the appropriate teams to drive alignment and ensure consistency.
Measurement matters
An appropriate measurement strategy is key to keeping a full-funnel strategy on the rails. As we described when defining the stages of the funnel, KPIs must reflect where tactics sit within the funnel to properly measure success and make informed marketing decisions.
Similarly, an attribution model can make or break your strategy. Last-click attribution models in particular can influence over-indexing on bottom-of-funnel tactics by assigning credit to the last touch before a conversion. This model puts a thumb on the scale for bottom-of-funnel tactics, limiting the ability to optimize for the distinct goals of tactics that play other roles in the funnel. Linear or data-driven models are generally more effective at assigning appropriate value to tactics throughout the funnel.
Be patient
The impact of a full-funnel strategy won’t be felt immediately. Upper-funnel efforts build future demand. Building loyalty and driving advocacy takes time. But this strategy sustains growth marketing investment in the long term by allowing you to reach more potential customers, extending the lifetime value of those customers, and generating more profit for less investment by driving efficiencies across the program.
The bottom line: full-funnel marketing strategies work
A recent Nielsen study of CPG brands showed that those with a full-funnel strategy had 45% higher ROI and a 7% increase in offline sales compared to marketing campaigns running in a single purchase stage.
We recently published a case study about how we helped a nonprofit client of ours drive efficiencies in their paid media program by enhancing their bottom-of-funnel paid media program to a full-funnel one. In the first year of running this full-funnel program, our client spent 9% more on paid media year over year, but produced 61% more donations.
Designing holistic customer experiences that drive growth is our strength. Because full-funnel marketing strategy is a team sport that requires participation from multiple teams, internal silos are the enemy of creating a holistic, integrated strategy. At Tallwave, we pride ourselves on two things: 1) relentlessly keeping the customer at the center of what we do at every stage of the journey and 2) driving integration and collaboration in the strategies that drive the customer experience so we can deliver successfully against your customers’ needs and your business goals.
Ready to learn more about how Tallwave can help enhance your marketing program? Give us a shout!
Picture this, you’re executing a holistic paid media strategy, driving traffic to your website through a broad range of tactics like digital video, streaming audio, display, paid social, and paid search. Paid media is living the good life, racking up impressions, driving ad engagement, and generating some conversions along the way. But something is missing…
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) marketing, a strategic method of testing, iterating, and optimizing on-site functionality to improve the user experience and increase the rate of conversion (or high-value action), is sitting on the other side of town, pulling petals off a daisy, waiting to find a partner who can produce the quality traffic and insights it needs to really thrive. A partner to complete him…
Both paid media and CRO are integral parts of an efficient and effective marketing plan, but oftentimes are treated as independent tactics with little regard for one another. Much opportunity is missed by only running one of these programs or by running them in silos.
Integrate your paid media and CRO strategies and watch the sparks fly.
Two Lovable Leads: Paid Media & CRO
Our love story begins with two independent marketing tactics, paid media and CRO, living worlds apart (or perhaps just a siloed marketing team away), not realizing just how incomplete they are without one another. Existing as stand-alone tactics, paid media and CRO will generally (hopefully) produce positive results for their campaigns, but are limited in their respective abilities.
Most comprehensive marketing plans include paid media. It’s a great way to get in front of your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website. In fact, marketers typically spend up to 25% of their marketing budget on paid media.
That’s a huge investment!
But what happens when those prospective customers get to the website?
If they encounter a poor landing page experience, they may get lost trying to navigate through on-site information, they may abandon cart before finalizing a purchase, or — worse yet — they may just … bounce. A poor user experience on-site greatly reduces the chance for conversion, causing something of a leaky bucket situation, in which site visitors fall through before converting. And then all that time, money, and effort you spent trying to drive traffic to your site through paid media was… kind of a waste.
Since paid media success is often evaluated based on its ability to convert traffic, a poor landing page experience can be detrimental to a paid media campaign. To further amplify the pain felt here, paid media marketers often don’t have the ability to control the landing page experience, which can fuel frustration and drive misalignment between paid media tactics and performance. If only there were something that could help plug that leaky bucket….
Meanwhile, still hanging out on the other side of town, CRO is becoming a more popular tactic with marketers. More companies are investing in CRO strategy to identify and address weak areas on the website that may be impacting the user experience and actively working against the company’s goals. CRO allows marketers to systematically test various iterations of website functionality to determine which iterations are most impactful in weeding out points of friction and producing conversions (or any high-value action, like a lead form submission, an “add to cart,” a search query, etc.).
But CRO only works if enough quality traffic is being driven to the website to run tests that yield statistically significant results.
The Meet Cute: Where Two Digital Marketing Strategies Come Together
So paid media and CRO might get along just fine on their own, but bring them together …
FIREWORKS!
By running these two tactics in tandem, always-on paid media ensures enough traffic is flowing to the website for the CRO team to run impactful and efficient tests. In addition to traffic volume, a strong paid media plan will also help ensure that quality traffic is being driven to the site, which is crucial for producing meaningful CRO test results. The more qualified traffic coming to site, the quicker CRO tests can produce data-driven insights, the quicker actions can be taken to make UX improvements on-site, and the quicker you’ll see a lift in conversions.
Likewise, an active CRO strategy helps ensure that users who come to the website through paid media efforts can seamlessly work their way through the conversion path. An investment in CRO helps protect your paid media investment by keeping visitors on-site and increasing their likelihood of converting, which in turn boosts important KPIs like conversion rate and return on ad spend.
Building Butterflies: 1 + 1 = 3
But here’s where the real magic happens.
By running these two tactics as part of one integrated strategy, you now have a constant flow of data between the two. And data, as we all know, is king. Paid media insights can help the CRO team better understand who the target audience is. Knowing who is engaging with ads can help establish tests for how best to connect to those audiences on site. Learnings from CRO tests may impact paid media channels, placements, targeting, and creative recommendations. The constant flow of learnings between teams will increase the ability for both teams to identify tests, optimize features, and effectively connect with the target audience. And, perhaps most importantly, when CRO and paid media come together, they create a more seamless brand experience that is felt by the user.
Through an effective paid media and CRO relationship, messaging, creative design, and paid media placement will feel cohesive when a prospective customer clicks through an ad to the website, rather than feeling like two separate experiences. Leveraging paid media and CRO together makes marketing plans more effective and marketing budgets more efficient.
No love story is complete without a montage!
The Lightbulb Moment: Recognizing the Need for a Paid Media & CRO Relationship
So how do you know when you might benefit from an integrated paid media and CRO strategy?
The following indicators suggest that your paid media traffic is being met with a poor user experience on-site and is in need of CRO:
Paid media traffic has a bounce rate over 80%
Paid media traffic is spending a lot of time on-site and/or visiting many pages on-site, but isn’t taking any high-value actions
Paid media users begin the conversion process (E.g., adding an item to cart), but ultimately do not convert (E.g., complete purchase)
The following indicators suggest that your CRO marketing program is in need of more qualified traffic via a new or improved paid media plan:
Not enough traffic to produce statistically significant test results in a reasonable amount of time
Poor quality of leads (suggesting that the wrong audience is engaging on-site)
Running paid media or CRO alone is beneficial for your marketing program. Running both paid media and CRO is even better. Running paid media and CRO as part of an integrated, seamless strategy with data as a driving force… that’s a love story for the ages.
You Complete Me
Tallwave is ready to play matchmaker when it comes to marrying paid media and CRO marketing. We’ve helped many clients find success.
Interested to know how Tallwave can help you implement an impactful paid media and CRO strategy? Let’s talk!
As soon as COVID-19 hit, healthcare systems and organizations across the world scrambled to craft new strategies to serve their communities whilst keeping employees and patients safe. But despite their efforts, there was often one barrier that often prevented patients from seeking care in times of need: Trust. Trust that they’d be protected from contracting COVID-19, should they visit a hospital in-person.
In the latest episode of Tallwave’s Innovator Series, our Vice President of Marketing Jessica Pumo talks to Patrick Knauer, the Director of Digital Marketing for Banner Health’s Ambulatory practices, about developing and implementing digital marketing strategies to give patients peace of mind, as well as what he believes is in store for the future of healthcare, the patient experience, and digital marketing as a whole.
Innovators Q&A With Patrick Knauer
Jessica Pumo: Hello everyone. I’m Jessica Pumo, Vice president of Marketing at Tallwave, a customer experience design company. Welcome to the latest installment of our Innovators Series. Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Patrick Knauer, Director of Digital Marketing for Banner Health Ambulatory Services. Welcome, Patrick.
PK: Hi Jessica. Thank you. It’s great to be here.
JP:Now, at a high level, Patrick, you work with Banner Health’s ambulatory service lines to align marketing strategies to business direction, and then you work with the broader marketing and media teams to execute marketing campaigns. So, I know you’ve got great perspective to share.
To kick things off today, I’d just like to start by hearing a bit about your professional journey. What initially attracted you, like so many of us, to digital marketing, and how did you get to where you are today?
PK: Yeah, I started off in digital marketing, working for a search engine optimization company, not knowing how much I would love it, but it really became my passion just because it changed it. It felt like every two weeks Google would reset the landscape and we would always [have to] adjust and have to rethink our approach.
That sense of excitement really stuck with me as I grew and it’s still that way. I’ve been in digital marketing for over 15 years now and it does feel like every two weeks there is a new tweak to keep you on your toes. So, that excitement hasn’t faded.
JP: So, let’s get a little more specific about how your role contributes to Banner’s larger mission. How is success defined for you and your team and how does that help Banner reach its established business goals?
PK: Yeah, so, Banner is working to meet consumers where they need healthcare, and that’s in an ambulatory setting. My role and the teams that I work with, are working to make sure that we’re easily accessible. That we’re easy to find through digital channels and that when our consumers need care, it’s not troublesome or burdensome to schedule to get into a healthcare clinic and to get out.
So, we have a lot of communication that we need to do, and we have a lot of marketing that we need to do to make sure that we’re omnipresent on various digital platforms that consumers use today.
There was a fear about being inside small spaces and healthcare locations. People were more hesitant to just walk in. They wanted to use their digital tools to limit their time, to limit their exposure, and [to] make that appointment on the computer.
JP: Wonderful. As, as we narrow our focus a little bit, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with something that I know has changed the landscape for all of us. And it must be an understatement to say that the pandemic has changed the healthcare landscape.
So, given that the pandemic has driven a lot of changes to how consumers find and engage with businesses of all kinds, what kinds of changes have you all seen in terms of how consumers search for and engage with ambulatory services?
PK: One of the best examples that I could give you would be just our online appointment rate for our Urgent Cares, which is of our ambulatory service lines. We see the most volume out of our Urgent Cares. We have over 50 locations in Northern Colorado, [and] Arizona, so a lot of different points of access.
And, what we noticed from the beginning of the pandemic to its peak, was that our online bookings rose by 37% [percent] all the way up to 50% [percent]. So, about half of the patients coming through the doors were scheduling online. And the reason we saw that increase was because there was a fear about being inside small spaces and healthcare locations. People were more hesitant to just walk in. They wanted to use their digital tools to limit their time, to limit their exposure, and [to] make that appointment on the computer.
JP: Since you’ve mentioned it, I would love to jump to that idea: How concerns around personal health and safety have changed with the pandemic.
I know that’s really put those concerns front and center and the need to build trust with consumers has never been more important than it has been just these last several months. This need must have been even more acute when it comes to ambulatory services.
So, I’m curious what data points have you used to help understand patient needs and patient pain points as they’ve evolved through the course of the pandemic?
PK: Our analytics demonstrated that, prior to COVID, the most popular action that we would see consumers takes were clicks over to our website where they could access more information on the location or the services that were there.
But during the pandemic clicks to the website went down and direct phone calls to our clinics went up… We extrapolated from that there was more information that they needed directly from a person: To hear what steps were being taken or specific situations – if you’re at high risk for COVID or you have an auto-immune disease, or you’re in a certain age bracket – you might need reassurance of talking to someone at the front desk, and asking questions [such as], “Can I be seen?”, “What special requirements or services do you have for me?”
That was one data point that we really noticed, and it helped to kind of informed the communication that we put out there to our consumers because we were able to take those data points out of the conversations and understand, what are the concerns? How do we address them [and make] them easy to find, and put them in front of our consumers so that they already know the answers to some of their questions?
There’s a myriad of different digital transformations that are happening, but most of them are revolving around improving the ease and the experience.
JP: It’s really fascinating to hear how you’re looking at those digital signals and interpreting them as indicators of how that experience needs to change, knowing that the experience inevitably – in an ambulatory setting – is going from online to in-person. How has Banner worked to build patient trust through marketing and messaging from what they experienced in local search to what they experienced when they arrive in-person at an ambulatory services center to inspire and build that confidence and trust and drive continuity in that experience?
PK: That was the main challenge with COVID. And the main objective was to really make sure people understood the efforts that, as an organization, Banner Health was taking to make care safe.
So, we created a safe place for care, a logo, and a brand campaign… [We put that logo] on communications, whether it be a top of the funnel advertisement or bottom of the funnel, actually inside the clinic. We had the steps we took to clean a clinic, that we ask our patients to [wear a] mask, and the other steps that we take for our own employees to make sure everyone [is] safe. And we put those pieces of communication on our website, on our blog, within our emails – all over the possible digital touchpoints, so that no matter where the consumer interacted with Banner, the logo was there and the information was there. And if they needed a deeper dive, we provided the URL where they could go and read exactly the steps that we were taking behind the Safe Place For Care campaign.
JP: When you look at any one of those individual touch points, the changes that you’re describing may seem really nuanced, but when you look at them in [the] aggregate, that really is some significant changes to the patient experience.
PK: It really was. And it was a lot of work to spread that kind of communication across 400 plus clinics, [through] email, blog, or website advertisement. But that was our mission. That was our objective. I was proud to be a part of the team, and the outcomes were great because we had a lot of people tell us that they felt safe, and they appreciated the efforts that we took.
JP: Which is so important. So important. Well, let’s move from innovation to transformation here for just a second. Something that’s top of mind for me and for the Tallwave team, based on our recent Tallwave research report, is telehealth as a prime example of the digital transformation underway in the healthcare space. What does digital transformation in healthcare look like for you and your team?
PK: It looks like a lot of things. That’s a difficult question to unpack because it could be an app on the phone that has a host of capabilities – from communicating with your provider to accessing lab reports, to making an appointment. And that’s just within an app. But there’s also other touch points out there, on the web on a mobile web, where you need to have other capabilities like online scheduling.
One of our most popular digital transformation features is our symptom checker, which is really easy to use. You can just pop onto BannerHealth.com, open up the symptom checker app, tell our computer exactly what you’re experiencing: What you’re feeling, [and] what your symptoms are. And after a series of questions and answers, you get a mini-diagnosis, and it’ll point you to the right level of care, which is important in healthcare, because you don’t want to go to the emergency room when an urgent care visit is perfectly appropriate.
There’s a myriad of different digital transformations that are happening, but most of them are revolving around improving the ease and the experience, overall, that you have interacting with healthcare.
JP: I know we’ve talked about some of the complexities of managing that experience within the pandemic, but I certainly don’t want to lose sight of how complex that is for you and your team, just on a day-to-day basis.
In general, outside of the pandemic, I know Banner has leveraged a really diverse constellation of digital touch points to address patient needs and pain points by meeting them where they are, when they’re there. And I know that really does cut across a lot of different teams at Banner. So, how do you set the stage for smooth handoff, from your team to the next, so that that patient experience feels really seamless as they move through multiple points of engagement from the Banner websites to social, to email, to Google My Business, and everything in between?
PK: Yeah, that’s one of the core responsibilities of my role. As the Director of Marketing for our ambulatory service lines, I need to understand the objectives of one of our business units, like Urgent Care or the medical group, and come forward with a marketing plan that meets the goals that they’re trying to accomplish.
Then, I put that together into what we call a marketing playbook, which lists out: What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What are we going to use as our call to action? What are our proof points, or what we like to call “reasons to believe” in Banner Health or Banner Urgent Care or Banner Medical Group. [I] put that into a centralized tool, which we use work from, and pull all of the various teams together and have kickoff calls, and installation meetings, and go over all of this planning [around] the direction, and everything that we are going to use so that everyone understands: “Let’s use these calls to action. Let’s use these reasons to believe. Here are blog resources. Here are website resources.”
And then, whenever it’s time to actually execute, the teams can go into [that] work, [and] know that they can pull the information [and] that will be the same information that the web team is pulling, or the email team is pulling, and the advertising team is pulling. So, everything is the same across the board, and you have that nice, beautiful experience that’s consistent.
We know that the level of trust that we encounter through Google My Business and organic search is higher just based upon the way our consumers convert and make those appointments – but paid search is a very high converting platform in itself.
JP: I think you you’ve touched on some things that really are very actionable for all of us. I think there are very few marketers out there who are not working hand-in-hand with other marketers who may be on different teams, different departments, different divisions, but the idea of starting with a really clear unifying strategy in enrolling everyone into that strategy together, so that you’re all on the same page, and then offering up the tools and resources that everyone needs to do the job. I know it sounds simple. It’s hard to execute and certainly worth bearing in mind. So, thanks for calling those things out.
As a marketer who manages a combination of paid search and organic search, which are needs supported by different teams in my world, it’s not lost on me how challenging it can be to marry those things. That really should be two parts of a whole. So, I’m curious, Patrick, how do you think about organic versus paid search as it relates to the patient experience, and how do you coordinate your efforts on the organic front with those of your partners managing the paid activity so that those things work together?
PK: I think they’re both extremely valuable and, in my mind, there’s not a difference between the two. There’s performance differences – we know that the level of trust that we encounter through Google My Business and organic search is higher just based upon the way our consumers convert and make those appointments – but paid search is a very high converting platform in itself.
The thing that we want to do is make sure, again, that our messaging is consistent, that we’re using the same reasons to believe, because we know from analysis of how long it takes some to convert, that there might be multiple touch points along the way. Paid search might be two of three touch points. So, we want to make sure that the messaging, the reasons to believe are consistent no matter where they interact with us. But from a strategic level, they’re both lower funnel for us. And they’re both of high importance,
JP: [It] all kind of goes back to recognizing that those things have to be seamless in the customer experience. Right? So, how do you see local search within the ambulatory services space changing and how is your team adapting?
PK: So, yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. Real estate in Google is shrinking, and Google is owning more of the first page for its own products, like Google My Business, for zero click information. I think that that’s going to continue. I think paid search is going to stay rather consistent with the results that you see on the page and the real estate that it’s given, but zero click information and Google My Business, in my mind, has more of a future because the big change in healthcare would be if you can make an appointment to get into your doctor or to an Urgent Care clinic directly from Google, [without ever] having to click over to Banner Health or any other health system, that would be a zero click conversion.
Google is working towards that in many industries, including healthcare. And it’s probably not going to be a 2021 solution that you see, but it’s not too far down the road. And being able to provide our consumers with as much information, and as much access as they can out of local search is an extremely strategic focal point for us at Banner Health, and one that we’re keeping a close eye on.
So, we’re very active within our local search tools, [and] with our listings. We want to make sure that we’re providing everything that we can, and the information in there is as up-to-date as possible. So, we solicit reviews. We post new information. We provide videos. We provide images. And that continual effort to work the local search has paid very good dividends for Banner Health.
Being able to provide our consumers with as much information, and as much access as they can out of local search is an extremely strategic focal point for us.
JP: I think that’s a well-informed look at what may lie ahead. When it comes to that local search space, what other changes are on the horizon for you and your team in a post-pandemic world?
PK: That is yet to be known. Right now, we’re kind of letting the data tell us what to do. Our research team is constantly bringing us new information on the consumer perspective [within a] COVID and a post-COVID world. And, right now, we’re continuing our messaging of safety and a Safe Place For Care, but we realize that that may not last forever, and that we need to plan for the future.
I think what we want to do is make sure that, no matter where you are on the spectrum of COVID-concern, whether you feel very comfortable without a mask and you’d like to go about your life like it’s 2019, great! Or if you are forever changed, and you need to know that there are certain safety protocols for you wherever you go, great, we also want to make that person feel very comfortable.
So, planning for those two different consumer types is something that is existing at Banner Health, as well as understanding the nature of the changing landscape of healthcare with the digital space, and how those two things can work together to be each other’s benefit.
JP: Such an interesting road ahead, no doubt, regardless of how that crystal ball changes over time. But you’ve been very generous with your time today, Patrick, thank you again for joining us, and for the great conversation.
PK: Oh, thank you so much, Jessica. I enjoyed it.
If you’d like to learn more about Banner Health, you can visit BannerHealth.com or follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, all at Banner Health.
If you’re interested in learning more about Tallwave and how we help companies design exceptional customer experiences, contact us today. You can also read and download our recent research report, “Data-Driven Insights Into the Evolving Customer Experience” here.
