All right, everybody, thanks for joining us. We'll get into introductions here in just a second, but wanted to highlight the title of today's meeting, Top Healthcare Marketing Trends and Tools for 2025. So we have Tyler Calvi, the Director of Marketing and Communications with ProLiance here, and myself, Ryan Evans, our VP of Sales at Social Climb. Hi, everybody. Just a little bit about myself. I have built a career in healthcare and medical device marketing. I'm currently the Director of Marketing and Communications at ProLiance Surgeons. We are a physician-led multi-specialty group in the state of Washington. Our primary specialty is orthopedics. We currently have approximately 160-plus board-certified surgeons with an additional 450-plus provider support staff. We are currently sitting at 90-plus locations. My personal areas of expertise are digital marketing, public relations, communications, reputation management, marketing compliance, and more. Many hats over the years, and I enjoy learning new things. Thanks, Tyler. I'll add to Tyler's intro. We're super excited to work with Tyler here at Social Climb because he is a leader in the healthcare marketing space. He also drives a lot of forward thinking. As far as myself, I've been in software for 10-plus years, primarily in marketing. I've done non-healthcare social media marketing, non-healthcare and healthcare digital marketing, and then obviously you see the third bullet point, healthcare marketing for the last six years with Social Climb. I lead our business development team, our expansion teams, if you're a current customer of ours, and then obviously our net new account executive teams. I'll let Tyler jump into what we'll cover, but to set the stage, these are his focuses. Again, going back to Tyler being very forward thinking in the industry, these are his main focuses of what's going to be important for him in 2025. Thanks, Ryan. At Proline Surgeons, we're focused on some key areas that we'll cover today. Those are going to be search engine optimization, or SEO, targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, and reputation management, which is always something that's at the top of my to-do list when we log in every day is get a feel for where we're at online. We'll dive into those now. Perfect. Well, search engine optimization, so a couple definitions for you. I really thought that these really summed up what it is, how does it work, and why is it important. SEO is the process of improving websites visibility in search engine result pages or SERPs. The goal is to help search engines understand the website's content and make it easier for users to find the site. How does it work? Search engines like Google act as librarians reading and indexing content across the web. When someone searches for something, the search engine uses the index to return its most relevant results. SEO helps a website to demonstrate to search engines that its content is a relevant result. Why is SEO important? SEO is critical for businesses and website owners because it helps increase the amount of traffic and website receives from search engines in a cost effective manner. It's more than just keywords. SEO is tied to greatly to your patient experience, so ensuring that your site loads quickly, ensuring that you're providing relevant and personalized content that your patients are looking for, and leveraging links that are helpful, and of course not broken. All of those things contribute greatly to the success of your SEO. How do we improve our SEO? So there's a number of things that we can do to improve our search engine optimization. The biggest piece is to create and optimize relevant authoritative content. This involves a lot of keyword research, however, that's not the only thing that you should be focusing on. We want to ensure that content is up to date and unique to your website. Google likes to see unique content. Content needs to be up to date and current. Regularly posted content is also something that's very attractive to search engines. Links need to be prevalent on your site and helpful link to helpful resources, and they need to not be broken. There are many tools out there that can assist you with ensuring that you do not have broken links. And then you need to expect your readers search terms. Knowing what your readers and your users are going to be searching for is extremely important. For example, one of the ones that Google outlines in their guide is charcuterie board versus cheese board. Knowing which one of the two your consumers are going to be searching for is going to be key when it comes to building out content on your site. This leads me to the next piece, which is understanding the needs and wants of your target audience. This piece is key. Understanding what your patients need and ensuring that you're providing that information on your site and removing it when it's no longer relevant is extremely huge. I do this by constantly having conversations with providers and understanding what it is that their patients are asking for and what they're wanting to have published on the site. Lastly, follow the search essentials outlined by Google. Google has posted a document that is their starter guide for SEO. Following what they are looking for is extremely essential to your success in SEO. While I know Google is not the only search engine out there, it is the most prevalent. And so following their practices, it will be extremely beneficial to you. So solutions to SEO. For the longest time, really the only option that I've had at my disposal was to partner with an SEO vendor. SEO requires a lot of work, and so having a group of people assist you with it and constantly research keywords is extremely helpful. There is a few downsides to having an SEO vendor. The vendors don't always know you. They don't always speak the language of your organization. Content always needs to be tweaked. And then there's always the simple fact of having to manage an additional vendor. So when you're reworking a bunch of content, you end up spending a significant amount of time regardless of whether or not you have somebody assisting you. So it's not a perfect solution. However, over the last couple of years, new emerging technologies, especially in AI, have made managing SEO in-house a possibility. And that's something that we at ProLiance have started doing. This AI technology allows us to successfully manage our SEO more effectively and efficiently in-house for approximately three to five hours per week of our time, which is unheard of in the SEO world. So what can an SEO platform do for you? So the platform that we use does a number of things for us as far as an SEO strategy. One, it identifies relevant keywords. It does this by scanning your site and looking at your competitors and builds you out a keyword list that you can essentially select relevant keywords from and improve your SEO. So there's no more keyword research on your part. The tool does that for you. And AI allows you to build your SEO strategy around your competitors and ally sites. So one of the things that ProLiance that is extremely difficult for us is we have a number of care center websites. So it's not just my website that exists under the ProLiance search umbrella. We have a number of groups as well. And so how do we build out an SEO strategy that helps us but doesn't harm our ally sites? AI now allows you to list out who your competitors are and who your allies are. And so it builds you an SEO strategy that says, all right, we want to outperform our competitors while not harming or harming our care center sites as least as possible. Something that was thought to be impossible in the past is now made very easy with new platforms. Leverage advanced AI to generate content for your website in seconds. So one of the biggest reasons I hire an SEO vendor is to generate content. It is extremely time consuming to write the amount of articles needed to have a successful SEO strategy and new AI tools will write that content in seconds. Again, it analyzes your keywords, your competitors, your allies, and generates stories for you that are relevant to your site. Customizable analytics dashboard. Again, one of the big things that we always look for in marketing is can we prove what we're doing is effective? A lot of these platforms allow you to build out dashboards and prove that you are moving up in the rankings, which is fantastic. This is actually my favorite. One of the most beneficial things that a lot of these new SEO platforms do is they tell you what changes need to be made to your site in order to outrank your competitors. It will literally say go to this page and change this title. Go to this page and change a meta description to this or add content related to this on this particular page. And you can assign these website updates to members of your team through the tool. As they are completed, the tool will rescan the site, notice that the change is made, and it will drop off your list. So very exciting how this technology allows you to really manage your SEO. Advanced link management. This is another one that's extremely helpful. Our website has links at the bottom of it that we do not have to do anything as far as management goes. The links automatically update every single month with relevant content related to that specific page. I want to say it took about 30 minutes to load, to upload the code to the site. And from there on out, the tool just manages links internally for you. Last but not least, these platforms allow you to perform advanced competitor analysis. You can drop in URLs of your competitors and essentially lift back the veil and see where their successes are and where their opportunities are and how you can exploit that information in order to increase your own rankings. So very exciting tools at your disposal these days. As far as SEO goes, I encourage you to explore them. Thanks, Tyler. One of the things that you said there that I really liked about SEO, because a lot of practices don't think of it this way, is patient experience, right? Like a lot of people think patient experience begins when they see the front desk, or maybe some even think about it when that first nurse enters the room, right, to gather some information. A lot of groups don't think of it as like, what kind of experience are we giving a potential patient, right? Like, what are they finding? What kind of experience are they having with our brand or our providers? And that's where targeted marketing campaigns come in here. So this is one thing that Social Climb does do for those that are watching. But what is targeted marketing, right? Like, have you ever had that thought of, I really want that backpack, or you're talking to a friend, I really want that backpack, or you just keep searching backpacks. And then you're getting blown up on meta, or Facebook or Instagram, with ads for backpacks, right? And so it's just constantly being put in front of you. Well, the thing is, is like, all of the companies that are doing it are, I put a lot of big brands here that are non-healthcare specific. And then right in the middle, you look at large hospital and health systems, right? There's been this idea that only big businesses can do this kind of targeted campaigns with marketing. But outside of healthcare, there's a ton of mom-and-pop shops that do this and do it very well. Healthcare has kind of been the last one to start doing it. So we'll get into what does targeted marketing mean in healthcare when Tyler gives his example. But a good practice for you, whether you're a two-doc orthopedic practice, or as large as Tyler's or larger, what I would do is I'd sit down either with my providers or myself, or both separately, determine your ideal patient. A lot of practices sit and think, well, we're super full already. So we must have all the patients we need, right? But if you could determine your ideal patient, like, is it total bone and joint? Is it a knee procedure? What is it that you want to go after? Should you be able or could you be able to choose? Number two would be, how do we locate these ideal patients? There's a lot of solutions, social client being one of them, that you can leverage data to locate where these ideal patients exist. For example, let's say, you know, we've analyzed millions of patients who have had knee replacement, right? Well, how do we find more people out there in the United States who are likely or highly likely to need that type of procedure, right? These are possible things that you can do, given the right platform. And the third is, how do we send them marketing messages and the right marketing messages, right? Like, you could have the perfect data or the ideal patient, and you're just totally missing on the marketing message you're sending. And the opposite of that is true as well. I'll let Tyler jump into some of the challenges that he faces and that likely most of you face as well. Yeah, thanks, Ryan. So, challenges we all face. So, over the course of my marketing career, I've had the same conversations probably about 100 times. And the first is, can you do more for less? Or can you do more with what you have? And then the second is going to be, can you prove your ROI? And one of the things with marketing that can be extremely challenging is proving that what you're doing has a financial value associated with it. Can we track what we're doing? Can we prove down to the cent what we're getting for what we've invested? And that's always been the challenge, especially in marketing. When it comes to brand marketing, you can't really have associate value with certain campaigns. And this is something that we found extremely valuable with the social client postcard campaigns is it would allow us to do that. And so going into that, one of the things that we've implemented recently is the social find postcard campaigns. What our goal usually is with most of our campaigns is to increase patient appointments. We want to see patients coming in the door with all of our marketing campaigns. So one of the recent campaigns that we started doing is social climb postcards. Social climb allows us to send out postcards through the mail, as Ryan said, in a very targeted way. We have a number of specialties across Pro Alliance, and so we use a number of their specialty filters. When we run campaigns, we're generally promoting providers, new locations, any services or procedures that are important to the practice, pretty much anything you could think of. And we've even done some orthopedic urgent care campaigns that have been extremely successful. One of the things that is most exciting, again, is the ability to prove our return on investment. So as we're reaching new patients by specialty and subspecialty, we're able to go into the tool and determine down to the exact cent what we're getting for what we're spending. Right now, we're currently getting three times our money back, and one of the unique things with social climb is this enhanced filter to really ensure that we're targeting who we want to. And so when you, Ryan's pulled up the social climb dashboard here, and one of the cool features is if you go to the marketing reports tab, you can come in here and see exactly what you're getting for what you sent out. In addition, you'll see that you got the ability to change the date range, but right off the front, you can see here's your conversions, here's your appointments, and here's your new patients. Now, the really exciting thing is you can actually continue to keep drilling down, and the tool will tell you exactly who those new patients are, when they were seen, what's their chart ID, what provider they were seen with, how many postcards did you have to send them before they converted into a patient, data that we're not used to having. Extremely exciting, because then we can take that patient's name and chart ID and go back into our system and see exactly what we got from them as far as were they just a clinic visit or were they a full-on total joint replacement surgery? So whether or not a campaign is successful is irrelevant. It's more of just knowing whether or not you're getting what you're putting in. And another great thing about Social Climb is, as I mentioned before, we're getting on average three to four times our money back. So a great opportunity and a great way to prove it. And this is something that excites all of our surgeons is this data. We've told them for so long that, sorry, we can't provide you with this data. And so now that we're able to give it to them, it's very excitable to them. They love to see what they're getting for their dollars, good or bad, it's just not something we've always been able to offer them so very exciting. Right, and the thing that I'll add here, we had, Tyler had the bullets, one, two, and three of what we were going to cover today. ROI reporting, like you're seeing here, it's all encompassing. Like it tracks all of that. Like it could have been its own bullet point, but it falls under each of the categories, right? Like if you look at organic search towards the bottom in orange there, what are you doing from a reputation or Google listing standpoint? What are you doing from a website standpoint? How well are you converting people that are actively looking? You get the paid search, which is Google ads and different ads you're running there. And then you have the print. Those are, we're sending a postcard to somebody, right? How well is that getting in front of someone and converting them? They may get this postcard, they may go to Google. We track all of those conversions and the process that they have as a patient, because not everyone's going to get a postcard call and book an appointment. They may do something else there, which leads us to our last bullet point. Now I'll kind of set the stage here. If you have been going to AAOE for years or you're new, this has been a topic that you've seen a lot. One big thing that groups do if they've been doing this for years where they make a mistake is they think that reputation management is kind of a thing of the past, or I've done enough here, let me move away from this. Tyler has some examples that he'll jump into of it's still relevant today, if not more relevant, and it's almost like a table stake. You have to be doing it because all of the other, the big hospitals and the other specialties are starting to do it as well. Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, absolutely. Ryan is bright. Reputation is extremely important and something that we can't take our eyes off. It needs to be a focus every single year. And we have some statistics here that highlight the importance of online reputation. 84% of people consult reviews online when choosing a provider. That's an extremely high percentage and it leads one to think it should always be on the top of your radar. If that many people are looking online prior to coming through the front door, your Google listings not only need to have high scores, but they need to be built out with accurate information. 49% of people trust reviews as much as they would a direct recommendation from friends or family. Not as high as 84%, but still extremely insane to think that people trust online strangers as much as they would friends and family. So again, what people are saying about you online is incredibly relevant to your reputation. Lastly, but not least, products with five or more reviews are 270% more likely to sell than those with no reviews. This touches on something that we should definitely call out and that's quantity is just as important as quantity. I'm sorry, quantity is just as important as quality. So ensuring that you have that five star is just as important as ensuring you have numerous amounts of reviews. You can have a five star score, but if you only have one review, that doesn't really inspire as much confidence as a 4.8 star with 150 reviews. So it's important that we focus on both aspects of review, both count and star. Yeah, and I would add one thing to that too, Tyler, recency of reviews, right? Sometimes groups can say, well, let's have this big push for January, 2023, and then they lose the relevancy of those reviews over time. So consistency is a big part of that. Wouldn't you agree? Oh, absolutely. You know, I've had providers tell me, well, I don't need reputation management. I've got a five star review and you go look at their listing and they've got five stars, but the last review was from nine years ago. A lot can happen in nine years. Right. So yeah, recency is very important. So reputation strategy, again, is key and it should be something that you build into your marketing strategy every single year. Now, there's a lot that you can do to garner reviews on your own. It is possible, but challenging. And some of the things that, you know, we've done in the past are, you know, review stands for waiting rooms. Some of those are getting really fancy where now you can just tap your phone on them and it takes you right to the review site. You can create provider and location review cards. Off to the left here is an example of one of the ones that we've created for one of our providers. Some of our providers, even though they have reputation management system in place, still like to have these and hand them out. And then of course, you know, there's always staff engagement, training your staff to encourage patients to leave reviews online. All great opportunities. However, there's a lot of cons with that. You know, these types of strategies often will lead to review gating, which is essentially, you know, choosing which patients you want to solicit online reviews from. And who can blame them? You know, if you have an upset patient in your waiting room that's clearly unhappy, your first thought isn't going to be to hand them a review card and say, hey, would you like to let us know how we did online? So something to be mindful of is, you know, we want to make sure that we're not review gating. The other thing is, you know, managing one and two star reviews when they come in. You know, with online reviews, if you get a one star review and you don't have a lot of reviews coming in, those can be very damaging. However, if you get a one or two star review and you have a bunch of reviews coming in the door, not as damaging. And so this strategy really doesn't protect you as much as taking on a reputation management partner. The goals of having a reputation management platform like Social Client is to bury your one and two star reviews. By sending out text messages to every single patient and or emails if text messages fail, you garner reviews on a much larger scale. This way, when a one or two star review comes in, it's not nearly as damaging. One and two star patients will never go away, but their reviews can be mitigated by gathering a number of positive reviews, which is what a reputation management partner does for you. Other benefits that you see with reputation management partners is identifying holes in your network. I don't know about majority of groups, but when I have probably a good 500 to 1,000 listings under my domain and determining which ones are missing, you know, one of our providers could be seeing patients at a new location that I'm not even aware of. And so these online reputation management platforms that our partners put in place for us identify holes in the system. They'll say, you know, hey, look, we're noticing that patients are being seen by this provider at this location, but we don't have a Google listing set up for them. Or, you know, they might say, hey, there's listings that exist, but they don't have descriptions or appointment links, or they're not claimed. All these things that improve the quality of your listings that you might not know unless you're going to every single listing on a regular basis are now managed by these reputation management partners. And it's extremely important, especially when your organization is large, to have this help to ensure that you're doing a good job with your reputation across all of your listings. Yeah, and as we get into Ryan. Sorry, what was that? I was going to say, I'll hand that off to Ryan because as the reputation management specialist, I'm sure you've got a lot to add. Yeah, as we get into our last slide, I'll just say Tyler's exactly right with the barrier one and two star reviews. It's not meant in a negative way, like ignore them and hope they go away, right? It's, hey, if 98% of our patients, 99% of our patients are happy, we should have an online representation that matches that, right? So let's get more of the happy patients leaving feedback. But when we do get those bad ones, it's just, if not more important on how we handle them as an organization. How do we take care of them? This is, when we talk about this last slide, what to look for in a vendor, these are some of the things that we highlighted, right? So are they consistently innovating? Going back to the 2025 trends, are they adding things like Apple, which could be a huge, and we anticipate being a huge player in the reputation management space? Can I consolidate other products? Meaning what else can this solution do? Can they do surveys? Can they do caps? Can they do PROs? Can they do some of these other things? But not just can they do them, can they do them well? A lot of organizations in 2025 are having plans of consolidation, and that's great, but sometimes you don't wanna just consolidate to consolidate, right? That can cause problems in other areas. Like you have to sacrifice a lot of something that was good for you in the past. And then that third bullet is patient feedback driving patient experience. Patient experience is a big buzzword today, right? How are we gathering feedback both online as well as internally? And how does that drive better patient experience? From the moment a patient receives a postcard from us, that is a patient experience. They're gathering an impression of your organization. Then they go to your reviews and seeing what other people think about them. Then when they become a patient, you have to know what their experience was like with you, right? It's a full channel that a lot of organizations, like I said at the beginning, and Tyler has hit on, they forget about it. And then what does their reporting stack look like? Tyler has mentioned this in each section. How easily can I tell my story to our board, to my boss, to our docs, or to my partners that I work with, right? And is the data that I'm gathering actionable? Can I do anything with it? Well, that postcard didn't work. Let me try something new. We're not getting from these ads what we thought we would be getting. So let's try something new. The last one is no matter your size. So if you're a 10 doc or you're a 150 doc like Tyler, and you have a small team, it's can this vendor or does this vendor make us more or less efficient? That's probably the key thing here, Tyler, for you in closing before we end this is how does the vendor make me on a small team managing a big book of business more or less efficient? Would you agree with that? Absolutely. And the other thing that you mentioned that I think is an extremely important call-out is while consolidation is absolutely key, making sure that the vendor you're consolidating with understands reputation management is extremely important because I've landed myself in situations where we've consolidated to either cut costs or to try and be more efficient. And at the end of the day, if your vendor doesn't understand reputation management and that's not a primary part of their business, you're actually gonna cause yourself more work than not because you're going to end up managing the vendor more than you are them managing your reputation. And so definitely something to always be cognizant of is does your vendor know and understand reputation before you consolidate? Perfect. Thanks, Tyler. Thank you guys for listening. Like I mentioned, Tyler is an industry expert. I would connect with him on LinkedIn if you wanna learn more about all of his tips and tricks and strategies. If you wanna reach out to me, you can see my email address is right here. But if you're looking for more general information, sales at socialclimb.com is a great place to get set up with a demo. See if we can build, we talked about targeted marketing campaigns. If we can build some in your area to give you a look at what it looks like and how you could use it. Again, thank you guys for your time and we'll talk to you soon.

healthcare marketing

SEO

reputation management

targeted marketing

AI technologies

patient appointments

vendor consolidation