(00:01:15) John Hallock: Why marketing plans should be simple, flexible, and adaptable to change.

(00:04:57) Mark Macias: Meaty earned media comes from compelling characters and authentic storytelling and solid data.

(00:08:15) Linda Smith: Driving brand awareness with strategic, and sustained, thought leadership.

(00:14:02) Todd O’Neill: How AI is rapidly changing the SEO landscape.

(00:19:27) Greg Gallant: Podcasts as a critical component of the modern media landscape.

(00:23:17) Femtech Panel: Building brand awareness on limited marketing budgets.

(00:26:32) Colin Hung: How even small booths can have a big impact at healthcare conferences.

(00:32:30) Carol Flagg: The rise of vodcasting to expand your podcast’s reach.

(00:35:49) Mitch Duckler: The Future-Ready Brand: how Fortune 500 brands are leveraging AI to enable micro-segmentation and hyper-personalization.

(00:41:37) Brian Tanquilut: A prominent financial analyst with prescient predictions about healthcare claim denials, revenue cycle challenges, and the future of pharmacy.

[00:00:08.800] – Kriste Goad

Hello curious marketers. Welcome back to the How It’s Done podcast. I’m your host Kriste Goad. We’re taking a page from Spotify and doing a year end wrap up. We’ve compiled some of our favorite clips from season four for a super special best of episode. We cover everything from AI to brand storytelling, healthcare conferences to healthcare trends and predictions. These are some of the highlights that made this year so awesome. In episode one, we talked with John Hallock, Chief Communications Officer at Quantum Health. John shared how storytelling can transform a brand’s presence in a super competitive landscape. He also talked about CEOs role in PR and the value of experimenting with different kinds of content. As we’re all heading into a new year and looking at our 2025 marketing and communications plans, here’s one of my favorite moments where we talked about making sure you have a plan that’s not too complex and that has built in flexibility to adapt to a rapidly changing market and media landscape.

[00:01:15.260] – John Hallock

It again isn’t necessarily rocket science. So you, you first have to have a plan. It can’t be too complex. I feel like I’ve told you it can’t be too complex.

[00:01:25.380] – Kriste Goad

I want to understand that a little bit, a little bit more in terms of

[00:01:28.420] – John Hallock

I think a lot of well meaning comms and marketing teams that make things so elaborate and things they want to do in a market that they end up spending the vast majority of their time creating the plan.

[00:01:43.960] – Kriste Goad

Yeah. Okay.

[00:01:44.750] – John Hallock

And by the time they go to, they go to implement the plan, whether it’s competitors or the market in general has already moved again. It’s constantly moving. Right.

[00:01:54.630] – Kriste Goad

So, so how much time should be spent on such a.

[00:01:57.480] – John Hallock

I think not long, maybe a month.

[00:02:02.530] – Kriste Goad

I mean really and truly, I guess that really should be plenty of time, right? Yeah. Like how much more? Like how much information is too much information, Right?

[00:02:10.190] – John Hallock

Correct. You gotta have internal buy in and all those things and those buzzwords. But you also need to have enough intentional gaps in that plan for flexibility. Right. Meaning it can’t be so fleshed out that you know, A equals B equals C. Well, what if B doesn’t equal C one day? Then you might have to switch. And, and so if you don’t also build that rigor and flexibility in your own teams, they may not be able to react to the market. So the other flip side to that is culturally, and I’ve had to deal with this a number of times in my career, you have to get buy in, not just in terms of the strategy and the tactics that fuel the Strategy. But the people in the company, they’re going to be critical in telling the story. I can’t just be one spokesperson. It has to be across the board. So you have to get them energized and excited and have their unique voice as part of that. And you use all those different folks as part of telling your story, then it makes your life easier and your team’s life easier as you’re trying to go faster.

[00:03:13.800] – John Hallock

People have a vested interest because they’re part of the journey.

[00:03:17.600] – Kriste Goad

Tell us how you do that, because the name of this podcast is how it’s done. And give us a little more insight into how you go about doing that from a chief communications officer perspective. Are you literally having a little, you know, road tour within the company and then you’re like, how do you go about it? What’s the best way?

[00:03:37.520] – John Hallock

I think you just nailed that. Yes.

[00:03:39.020] – John Hallock

It’s a little bit of doing your own team’s PR internally to educate individuals as to why we’re doing this, what it’s going to enable us to do, how it’s aligned with the key KPIs of a company, the growth of the company. Everything we do, Kriste, is aligned with driving the growth of the company. We know that if we do something in the market, it’s going to add to share a voice, power of voice. Right. Social implication. But all that content is also designed to fuel sales, marketing. Right. The different growth drivers in the company. So there is a natural overlap there. And once you can convey that and educate individual folks at a company, they clearly see why they want to be a part of this and spend time because they have to allocate time. As you know, there is that tactical element of doing interviews, doing messaging sessions, and when you’re asking people to give up time and put effort in, they have to understand fully why you’re asking them to do something. And so there is. But back to your earlier question, you need to parallel process, right? You actually need to do a lot of this.

[00:04:48.730] – John Hallock

You have to cross pollinate this. It can’t just be, we did this this week, then we do it this week, it kind of comes together. That’s a lot of work.

[00:04:57.640] – Kriste Goad

In episode two, we talked with fellow media relations expert Mark Macias about the power of storytelling in every campaign. Mark gives great tips on how compelling characters, authentic narratives and data driven insights can totally transform a story from good to great.

[00:05:16.020] – Kriste Goad

You know, as a fellow agency owner who spends large parts of every waking day instinctively assessing and mining for ele of a good story, your blog the other day caught my attention and I just had to get you on here to talk more. But for our listeners, your post was titled the value of characters with every media campaign. And it was inspired by a recent story in the Wall Street Journal about lab grown diamonds of all things. The headline of that story was the embarrassment of having to explain your monster diamond ring. So Mark, I am so curious, what was it about this story that got your attention?

[00:05:54.350] – Mark Macias

You know, it’s a client. You know, it seems like every time I read things in the news and it’s exactly what I told the client we needed, you know, in their case. And I won’t name names, but you know, we, they didn’t have a character for the story. It was, you know, essentially selling a tech product solution. But without having that character, you don’t really have a story. And that’s one of the things that is, was one of the biggest mistakes I saw publicists make when they used to pitch me in the media, which was they didn’t have a fleshed out story. This Wall Street Journal was a great article because, you know, it wasn’t really about the lab, you know, process or how the diamonds are made. No one really cares about that. That’s kind of like, you know, inside baseball. No one wants to read how the sausage is made. Instead, the article was really about everyday people like you and me who bought a ring, couples that got engaged, and, you know, how this ring brought them together. It was only the characters that made that story. And you know, when I read that, you know, I can only tell a client so many times, like, hey, we really need characters for this.

[00:07:06.990] – Mark Macias

And you know, that was kind of the total. When I read it, it just, you know, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell them. We need it. And not just from me even talking to reporters, you know, former colleagues that said the same thing. You need, you can’t sell this invisible story without having people.

[00:07:25.120] – Kriste Goad

Yeah. What’s that biggest disconnect between brands and journalists, do you think?

[00:07:30.350] – Mark Macias

I think that a lot of, if you’re talking about business owners, entrepreneurs, they tend to look at it from a marketing lens.

[00:07:39.120] – Kriste Goad

Totally.

[00:07:40.230] – Mark Macias

The media doesn’t care about marketing. They don’t care about your message. You know, it doesn’t matter.

[00:07:45.570] – Kriste Goad

Very turned off by it.

[00:07:47.240] – Mark Macias

Exactly. Yeah. And if you come in with, in fact, a lot of them will say, you know, editors will say, hey, we’ll, we’ll read an editorial or some thought leadership from your, your client on this, but we just don’t want a commercial and that’s what a marketing message is. It’s telling you firsthand, you know, a commercial.

[00:08:04.710] – Kriste Goad

That’s the difference between marketing and pr.

[00:08:06.970] – Mark Macias

Yeah, correct. And the smart, you know, experienced journalist can read a commercial or a marketing message a mile away.

[00:08:15.420] – Kriste Goad

Episode three finds us with Linda Smith, VP of marketing and communications with Progeny Health. Linda shared how she transformed Progeny from a brand with strong customer loyalty into one with widespread recognition. I’m so impressed with the very big things that Linda and her small team have done from a thought leadership perspective. They started with honing in on what makes their company unique, and from there, they figured out the story they wanted not just to tell, but to own.

[00:08:46.000] – Kriste Goad

Right. In fact, what you’re describing is what I find more often than not, a much smaller internal team and outside resources, because that’s easier to scale up and scale down, you know, and also it’s a lot easier to hire that diversity of talent. You would have to have a lot of headcount to do some of the specialized things that maybe you need, but you only need it from time to time. Is that that’s correct?

[00:09:09.800] – Linda Smith

That’s true, Kriste. Absolutely. In many ways, it allows you to scale and you wouldn’t be able to do that as a small organization. So we’re able to cover a lot of ground for, really, a very small team, thanks to our partners.

[00:09:27.900] – Kriste Goad

Right. So in that kind of environment, when you’re assessing, you know, partners you want to work with and when you’re assessing just even your own team, how small or midsize firm compete in a crowded field?

[00:09:41.010] – Linda Smith

Yeah, it’s a really great question. The first thing is you really have to go to your strategic roots. I’ve mentioned that a couple times now. It’s so important, those fundamentals. Who are you? What are you trying to say to your target audience? Why would people want to work with you? And what is unique about your organization that allows you to stand out from the competition? Right. You have to really start with the. With the basics, and then once you do that, you really want to think about, okay, I can’t boil the ocean, so what can I do? What are the few things that I’m going to focus on that I can do well? And that’s really what we tried to do. When I first came to Progeny Health in 2020, Dr. Ellie Stang and Progeny had an incredible reputation, and they were. But they were not well known. And I sat in on some client meetings in those early days as I was learning the business, and I’d hear Clients say, completely unsolicited. I wish all of our partners were like progeny. Their team is so dedicated and has such expertise. They’re producing results for us year after year.

[00:11:01.500] – Linda Smith

I mean, they really sung our praises without any prompting from us.

[00:11:05.210] – Kriste Goad

Were you like, oh my gosh, this is a gold mine?

[00:11:07.660] – Linda Smith

It is.

[00:11:08.580] – Linda Smith

It was just like that for me. I said to myself, well, one thing is clear, we have a lot of brand loyalty. We just don’t have a lot of brand awareness. And so that was the first order of business, was to raise the visibility of the organization. And our team decided that we were going to lean in on our 20 year history, especially in today’s here today, gone tomorrow startup world. We thought that was a strategic advantage to have that 20 year legacy. And so we said we’re going to concentrate on one thing and that is we’re going to educate and we’re going to advocate for better maternal and infant health. And we really doubled down on thought leadership. That was where we were going to focus our efforts. And it was important for us to make sure that everything we did after that took its cue. So we started with a health trends report that was a compilation of some of the thinking of our subject matter experts from within our organization and from our experiences. And we’ve now done that report every year. It’s now our signature thought leadership asset. It has more downloads than anything that we produce.

[00:12:23.590] – Kriste Goad

Really? I love that.

[00:12:24.790] – Linda Smith

Yeah. And that really for, I would say that was what set the tone for everything else we were working on, our public relations, our social media webinars that we chose to participate in. We wanted to get away from trying to sell ourselves in the traditional way and really let people decide for themselves that if they were going to have a partner in maternal and infant health, it was going to be us. And I think it’s worked really well because last year alone, our sales team told us that they were going to conferences and for the first time, and it took a couple of years, people were coming up to them and knew exactly who we were and what we did. And we had our best sales year in the history of the company last year.

[00:13:07.990] – Kriste Goad

Amazing.

[00:13:08.400] – Linda Smith

And while the lion’s share of that credit goes to our sales team, I’d like to think marketing played a small supporting role in that story. So that’s really, I think in our case, that’s how we competed. We found a niche for ourselves and we decided we were going to invest all of our money, our efforts, all of our talents into that particular area. And I think that’s how small and medium companies have to compete is you have to find your voice, and then you have to find the best way to tell that story.

[00:13:42.500] – Kriste Goad

Episode four was super fun. I got to talk to Todd O’Neill, professor of interactive media at MTSU, about the implications of AI and ChatGPT in marketing and PR. So much has changed since then, especially in terms of the impact we’re seeing on SEO. Let’s listen to that part of the podcast.

[00:14:02.650] – Todd O’Neill

Oh, it’s crazy. I was teaching SEO last spring. Yeah, ChatGPT hit hard. This was around. We were only about three or four weeks in, and I said, listen, guys, you all have been playing around with, you know, generative AI, and they’re like, yeah, a little bit. Not so much because the academic community at the time was freaking out.

[00:14:23.870] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:14:24.870] – Todd O’Neill

Oh, people are going to, like, write their article. You know, it’s like, stop. Just stop. Yeah. And then. And then the tool people. We have a tool in our learning management system that detects plagiarism by looking at a database of articles that have been written and doing text matching. Well, it came out in March and said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got this AI covered. We can totally detect it and pick it out. Like, no, you can’t. No one can.

[00:14:58.260] – Todd O’Neill

Just don’t. Don’t even say this, but in February, a few weeks into my SEO course, I just said, so we’re going to continue on with our curriculum this semester. Yeah, but we will chat about, you know, we’ll talk about AI. But just so you know, I have to rewrite this curriculum for next spring because AI is going to change. Search Engine optimization. It is. Google just integrated AI into. Gosh, I can’t remember the name of their tool into their search engine. You can use a ChatGPT to come up with something, and then it allows you to press a button to say, search for this information or verify it to bring this stuff in. But it’s ever.

[00:15:46.650] – Kriste Goad

I mean, so have you rewritten that curriculum yet?

[00:15:50.000] – Todd O’Neill

I’m working on it.

[00:15:51.070] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:15:51.370] – Todd O’Neill

No, I’m delivering it. Yeah. I. I’ve gone through and, you know, touched on things and. Yeah, but a lot of it, frankly, right now, the tools aren’t quite good enough yet to be a competitor for search engine optimization, because they’re just even as good as they are. They’re not quite that good yet. Remember that One month after ChatGPT was released, it had 100 million users.

[00:16:25.410] – Kriste Goad

Insane.

[00:16:26.090] – Todd O’Neill

It took Netflix five years to get 100 million users. Yeah.

[00:16:32.200] – Kriste Goad

And the model is learning. It’s operating fast as a result. Right. I’ve been reading about that.

[00:16:38.340] – Todd O’Neill

There’s this concept called Moore’s law, where every 18 to 24 months, it has to do with. With electronics, really. But every, you know, every 18, 24 months, the power of our phone will have doubled. Right, Right. The resolution our pictures are, you know, will be twice as much. AI is not on that track. It’s every month, it’s continually learning.

[00:17:06.670] – Kriste Goad

I’m getting more and more anxious the longer we talk here.

[00:17:09.500] – Todd O’Neill

Yeah, but see, that’s that. I mean, that’s the, that’s the cool thing that. Wow, this can really learn. This could really do something really cool. But we have to go back to. It’s all our data, and this country has no record of managing or regulating data in any way. We don’t do it. And it learns really fast. And these are commercial products based on what the companies say are experiments and they’re charging us for them. And they are. It’s like. And like, Microsoft does this all the time. They release like the beta version of their product.

[00:17:52.640] – Kriste Goad

Right.

[00:17:53.260] – Todd O’Neill

See if we could break it. And when we do, they fix it.

[00:17:59.050] – Kriste Goad

Right.

[00:18:00.650] – Todd O’Neill

They’re constantly fixing it. And the way it works, it basically is constantly accelerating.

[00:18:11.330] – Kriste Goad

Right.

[00:18:12.080] – Todd O’Neill

It’s not on a steady path. It’s just. It’s constantly, constantly.

[00:18:15.730] – Kriste Goad

Like a rocket ship.

[00:18:17.060] – Todd O’Neill

Yes. Yep. And there’s really, it’s, you know, it’s really scary. There’s really no stopping it. The only way to stop it is for the government to step in and tell OpenAI. Great. Now drag your large language model into that trash icon and get rid of it.

[00:18:37.050] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:18:37.940] – Todd O’Neill

Now you can start having a product and you’re going to have to rebuild it and spend the billions of dollars you spent already in development and rebuild that large language model in an ethical way where you give compensation to the people who are building it. And that’s not going to happen.

[00:18:56.760] – Kriste Goad

In episode five, we talked with Muckrack CEO Greg Gallant about the changing landscape of public relations. We clearly were ahead of our time talking about podcasts, being as much a member of the quote media as the New York Times. I mean, consider the ink and airwaves that the Joe Rogan experience and call Her Daddy have gotten since the election. Anywho, here’s our hot take on how the old school media landscape is going to keep getting smaller and smaller and what to do about it.

[00:19:27.630] – Kriste Goad

It’s interesting also this podcast angle, because I’ve had conversations with people and some people don’t consider podcasting and podcast pitching necessarily part of their media relations. And I’m like, well, why wouldn’t you? Of course, it is a medium that people go to to learn, to hear thought leadership, to talk about interesting things. It’s just as much a media outlet and, you know, in my opinion, as New York Times. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:20:00.860] – Greg Gallant

100%. And in fact, you know, a lot of the journalists at the New York Times are doing podcasts.

[00:20:06.270] – Kriste Goad

Doing podcasts. Yeah.

[00:20:07.820] – Greg Gallant

We’re going to appear in itunes just like you do. And just like, you know, anyone who starts a podcast and a lot of the top podcasters might have, you know, more listeners than the journalists of the New York Times. So I think it’s. I think it’s a big question for the PR industry because of the PR industry and media relations specifically defines itself as just, you know, pitching very traditional publications. It’s challenging because unfortunately, there are fewer journalists at these traditional publications now.

[00:20:40.870] – Kriste Goad

Yes.

[00:20:41.360] – Greg Gallant

And, you know, some of what they used to cover kind of, they don’t really need to cover anymore because it can just get release free on the Internet. So there’s a lot of stuff that they do where they’re adding a lot of value and investigating, you know, covering the niche that they know. But then it used to be sometimes a daily paper would just run a national news story, and now it’s like, well, why does a daily paper have to run the national news story if you can just go straight to the national news one click away? There’s a bunch of transformations happening in media, but I think if you’re in media relations and you’re just saying, how do I pitch people at newspapers and TV shows, your universe is going to keep getting smaller. But if you say, hey, my job is really. I mean, I hate to use marketing buzzwords, but earn media. You know, there’s probably this idea of, like, who should we talk to? Who’s going to talk about us who are not going to pay? So, you know, we’re not marketers. We’re not looking for paid endorsements here, but there are a bunch of people aside from, you know, newspapers and TV shows, who might want to talk about us for free.

[00:21:49.610] – Greg Gallant

I mean, you know, not that they do, because it’ll be interesting to the audience.

[00:21:53.780] – Kriste Goad

Yeah.

[00:21:55.210] – Greg Gallant

And, you know, it’ll be more credible in a big way because there, you know, it’s not the ad, it’s the actual content. And we’re even seeing it, you know, even now, like traditional things, like when, you know, actors release new movies Part of their media tour is now going on a bunch of podcasts. When even presidential candidates, you know, want to make a run, they go on a bunch of podcasts. Even sitting presidents, you know, go on podcasts now. So, yeah, it’s all that. It’s like kind of become a fabric of, you know, podcasting specifically. But I think more broadly, newsletter writers, which you also have in Muckrack and other totally kind of similar types of influencers, are a part of the media fabric. You know, they’re not the whole media fabric, but they’re an important part of it. So I think in PR media relations, you have to think very broadly, like, who are all the people we need to pitch and talk to to reach the ultimate audience that we want?

[00:22:52.970] – Kriste Goad

In our sixth episode, we hosted a femtech panel featuring Leigh Ann Ruggles, Shelly Lanning and Margaret Malone. They shared their perspectives on overcoming funding challenges, building impactful brands on limited budgets, and addressing societal gaps in women’s healthcare. Here’s a highlight from Shelly and Margaret talking about early stage marketing, its focus on the founder and the importance of data.

[00:23:17.980] – Shelly Lanning

When you’re launching, you sometimes need to have time on task before you can ask for references from customers, et cetera. So it’s my real belief is to. Get out and talk to as many people as you can be a social butterfly at every single conference and frankly, it’s really hard to know sometimes was that conference valuable? I don’t know. I was never there before and it’s too early to say what type of return I’m going to get. So I try to be really busy in the, just coming up to the. Selling season, the start of the selling season, travel a lot, go to as many conferences, get as many speaking positions as you can that I don’t pay for , and make sure that you have relevant content and information that the conference cares about. And it’s, it’s the old fashioned feet on the street method for an early stage company.

[00:24:17.970] – Kriste Goad

Right. So, Margaret, I would love for you to chime in. How do companies know, how do investors know when is the right time to invest in marketing, to bring internal marketing talent to the table? And then, you know, I find it’s interesting a lot of times you might be able to hire an internal person, but that person still needs support. You know, whether it’s additional team members internally or outside agencies that they can leverage to actually get things done. That’s where I see a lot of the friction and the challenges come in, in terms of, you know, these things take time and they Take money and they take expertise. As an investor, how do you guys think about that and how do you advise your portfolio companies?

[00:24:59.110] – Margaret Malone

It’s a great question. I think there’s probably a couple of different ways of thinking about it. I’d say at the earliest stages of a company, most of the marketing is. Kind of founder led to what Shelly just described because you’re trying to have the signals of product market fit. You’re trying to, you may have one customer that you’re driving if it’s a tech enabled service enrollment for. But you know, if you were to hire, you know, like a head of marketing or build out that department, like there just may not be enough work yet for them to really run and execute on. Because we’re, you know, you’re kind of. You know, you’re, you’re building the car as you’re driving it in a lot of ways. But there’s an inflection point where, you know, you start to see and recognize. That like you need to invest in marketing, you need to invest in growth and that may require a dedicated team member to really take it off. And I think that typically comes once you have, you know, a couple of customers.

[00:26:09.630] – Kriste Goad

In episode seven, we spoke with my friend Colin Hung, chief editor at Swaay Health. Colin hits pretty much every healthcare conference imaginable and we talked about everything from his ideas for impact at these conferences to nurturing meaningful media relationships. In this clip, Colin talks about the secret to booth success and how to get a big bang with a small booth.

[00:26:32.680] – Kriste Goad

When it comes to booth design, what do you think attracts attention and what is just a waste of time?

[00:26:39.070] – Colin Hung

Oh, see, that’s a loaded question because I think there are actually two very distinct things to answer that. So to attract people to your booth, I think actually has almost nothing to do with the physical design of your booth anymore.

[00:26:57.010] – Kriste Goad

Oh, tell me more.

[00:26:59.360] – Colin Hung

So and the reason why I say that is because when we talk to the CIOs that we talk to, when we interview the leaders of companies, when we talk to the people who are even VPs and directors at healthcare organizations, the very people that, you know, you’re trying to attract, very rarely do we hear them say, oh, I’m just going to tour through the exhibit hall and find something. They are all like, no, no, no, I’ve got five people I need to meet. We had set up meetings beforehand. I’m just going to go see those five and then maybe like if I see someone next to them, maybe I’ll stop by if it was interesting. But I’m Just in here for like these five vendors and I’m gone, I’m out. But I haven’t got time to wander the HIMSS exhibit hall. Right. So great. So what I mean by that is to attract people to your booth you have to do all the pre work, right. Which has nothing to do with the design of your booth. It has everything to do with, you know, getting to that right person and making sure that, you know, you have a good sales team and good sales follow up process and all those kinds of things.

[00:28:01.150] – Colin Hung

And has nothing to do with whether or not you have a backlit panel or whether you have a spinning thing on top of your booth. So to attract people to your booth, I think it requires all that legwork. And so when I, when I talk to people and people ask me what attracts people to your booth and I said, I will usually say the fact that they’re in your funnel and you’re following up with them is what will bring people to your booth the most.

[00:28:22.450] – Kriste Goad

That is a really great point.

[00:28:24.770] – Colin Hung

And that. And also things like what I call booth attractors. So a lot of booth styles now will have a small little theater area right where you can sit down and listen to a talk, maybe get a demonstration live. Those are the types of things that attract people to the booth. Now as much as the spinning wheel where you can win a prize or the DeLorean that’s sitting in your booth or the race car and those are still effective too. But I think more and more people are pre planning how they’re going to go through the exhibit hall and it’s less and less about just wandering and something catching your eye.

[00:29:00.400] – Kriste Goad

That is awesome. Really great tips and observations and what other kind of tips and strategies do you have for companies to, to really maximize the return on investment. At a conference, for example, you know, if you, if all you do have is a 10 by 10, which there’s a lot of companies that, you know, that’s a big investment for them and nothing says they can’t be just as successful on lead generation, you know, as the folks that are spending millions on their booth. So I’m kind of curious what else, you know, maybe you have to share.

[00:29:30.640] – Colin Hung

Yeah, that’s a great question. One that we get asked a lot as well. I think with a 10 by 10 you can be very, very successful. You don’t have to have a large booth in a 10 by 10. Obviously you can’t have a meeting space, you can’t have a theater and those kinds of booths. But you can do other really Interesting things. First of all, you can make your 10 by 10 booth very welcoming. A lot of people make the mistake of putting the table right at the front of their 10 by 10 and the backdrop at the back. And basically you have this 10 foot space where you’re standing in, only you can stand in and everyone has to walk up to your table. Walking up to a table is very intimidating. You know, most hotels have realized this, right. If you’ve checked in the hotel recently, they no longer have these giant registration desks, they have these little tiny kiosks and the person comes out from behind the desks and welcomes you and greets you to check in you into the hotel. Even car dealerships are doing this now. I would take a cue from them.

[00:30:21.630] – Kriste Goad

Banks.

[00:30:22.650] – Colin Hung

Banks, right, exactly. Retailers, yeah. Like do not put your table right at the front of your booth, right. Put it at the back or on the side and make it welcoming. And I think that will, that’s one very simple thing that you can do to be, to have a more effective exhibit presence. And then you know, the other thing, you know, physically that you can do for your booth is just make sure it’s very simple and very to the point. Because you only have a 10 by 10. It’s not a lot of real estate. You can’t waste it with a lot of words because I’m not reading them. All right, Maybe those words exactly. I may be glancing at, you know, I may be walking past. So you really want to make sure that like a billboard, it’s got max 10 words on it and it tells me what you do, what you are, what problem you’re solving and don’t waste any time on like the best or like you know, you know, number one in this. And like that doesn’t tell me anything, right? Like you know, we solve sort of.

[00:31:20.370] – Kriste Goad

Like world’s best coffee. You know, it’s like meaningless.

[00:31:24.340] – Colin Hung

Right. The most important about is coffee, right? So, so yeah, use less words. Get, get bold in terms of coloring and so forth. Those are all things that will attract people to that 10 by 10. But again I think it really boils down to the pre work like making sure that you’re setting up those meetings, making sure that, you know, if you can, you know, send out those, those social posts to say hey, we’re going to be here. Who else is going to be there? Look in your own funnel, right? And just say hey, we’re going to be at this show. Are you going to be there? If you are, we’d love to see you right we’re going to be here at booth number 4, 5, 6, and we’d love for you to stop by and win this prize or, you know, check out our new announcement or whatever it is that you’re doing there. But you have to do all that work to really get a good return on your investment at any conference, whether it’s large or small.

[00:32:12.740] – Kriste Goad

In episode eight, we spoke with Carol Flagg from Answers Media Network. Carol and I talked about the growing trend of a little thing called vodcasting. We also discuss leveraging platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn to maximize audience engagement. Here’s a clip I think you’ll love.

[00:32:30.170] – Carol Flagg

And so podcasts really became the in thing. Everybody started a podcast. You know, the most famous people in the world had podcasts. Every media person had podcasts. Yeah, it’s not incredibly expensive, but it’s a bandwidth issue and it’s also about a content issue and it’s a production issue, because at the end of the day, a podcast is a piece of entertainment, you know, and if you’re going to put a podcast out there, it has to sort of rise to the occasion. And as the whole world, you know, improved on their podcast creation efforts, a lot of podcasts fall by the wayside. But a lot of new, more interesting podcasts came up, came up the ranks. You know, the world does not need another podcast, but the world can always use really good content, right? And content marketers, many of them that you probably work with, I know some that we work with, began to think, well, how are you? What are we going to do to increase our exposure and increase our engagement? Understanding that podcasts are like videos, you know, you know, who you know on a YouTube video, you know, who the number of views you get, but you don’t know who’s viewing a podcast or the same way.

[00:33:41.040] – Carol Flagg

And so content marketers were like, well, what can we do to, you know, if we can’t get better analytics, what can we do to at least increase our footprint? And some content marketers began to take their recordings of their sessions and put them on YouTube just on their own. Everybody knows that Google is the number one search engine in the world and YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. So as these things began to happen and podcasters, and when we’re a network, we were putting all of our audio content on YouTube, we began to see sort of this SEO traction again. No surprise, you know, Google’s goal is to drive viewers to YouTube, and they’ve made it that easy for everybody in the podcast landscape to Create a, I’m going to call it a baby vodcast. Initial Vodcast, right? Because it is a, it is a video. It’s a podcast converted to a video, but there’s no images. It’s just your album cover and it’s playing. And so that experience on your phone is exactly the same on any other network. It’s like, oh, hit that. Play the next episode, play the next episode.

[00:34:56.450] – Carol Flagg

It’ll do exactly. It functions in the same way. And because of this move, YouTube is now challenging, has already challenged Spotify for podcast listen dominance, but is now challenging Apple, like, because it’s, it’s YouTube, right?

[00:35:15.390] – Kriste Goad

It’s Google.

[00:35:16.920] – Carol Flagg

Right.

[00:35:17.710] – Kriste Goad

I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

[00:35:20.550] – Kriste Goad

Up next. In episode nine, we continued our AI series with Mitch Duckler, author of the Future Ready brand. Mitch shared how AI is democratizing access for small teams, fueling micro segmentation and hyper personalization and creating strategic opportunities for B2B marketers. Here’s a quick clip.

[00:35:49.150] – Kriste Goad

In my experience, it’s kind of the only way to do it. And I think it’s interesting also because there’s all kinds of new tools that are leveraging AI and so you can do your work differently, better, more efficiently. And they don’t have to be these huge investments. They don’t have to be huge platforms. You know, I just think of, for example, some of the pretty rapid evolution of some of these even, you know, meeting recording and transcription services and platforms, you know, which can really scale back the time that your teams are spending on summary notes from a client call, for example, or you know, anything like that, there, there’s ways that are big, obviously you know, that this transformation is going to happen, but there’s also those small ways that maybe don’t get talked about as much.

[00:36:50.470] – Mitch Duckler

And I think you hit on an important point in that they all are very accessible. And even if you take a look at some of the gen AI, right, like the ChatGPT, I mean, I mean it’s free or $20 a month I guess, if you want kind of the custom. But I mean that’s all very affordable and I think it is just like the Internet did, right. A quarter century ago. It is democratizing the marketing landscape. You know, one of the other things I thought was interesting is when I talked to B2B marketers in particular, yes, they were quick. Yeah, they were quick to point out that they feel that AI in particular has the ability to really elevate the very nature and stature and profile of the marketing function. You know, in the C suite and across the organization to a much more strategic level. Right. I think, you know, I work across different industries but you know, and it’s very common in more consumer oriented or like cpg. Right. For marketing to, for those companies to be marketing driven and for marketing to definitely have a seat at the strategy table. But a lot of times in B2B that’s not the case and they’re relegated to more of a staff function, if you will, and more tacticians than strategists.

[00:38:11.680] – Mitch Duckler

And they’re saying that, you know, this has the ability to change that. And encouragingly, you don’t need to be become a data scientist in order to do that. Right. You just need to befriend your CIO or your IT folks, find out what’s out there, what kind of solutions and even data sets do you have access to. And all of a sudden you are much more, you know, especially when coupled with machine learning and predictive analytics, you’re much more in a driver role for a business than perhaps you’ve ever been.

[00:38:42.170] – Kriste Goad

Can you say more about that? I don’t know if where my head goes when you say those words is where it actually where, where you’re talking about, but what initially comes to my mind is, you know, I’ve certainly been inside companies as well as, you know, have clients who we’re trying to do, we’re trying to market them and we’re trying to, you know, differentiate the company and the brand. And we’re like, what data can you give us? What can you tell us about, you know, we’ve got all this data, let’s just call it, we’ve got all this data around smoking cessation. What can you tell us? And then historically the answer has been, oh, we can’t really get that information out across, you know, we can’t, it’s too hard to get that information out. We can’t, there’s all kinds of reasons why we can’t give you that information. We’re like, okay, that’s going to make it a little more difficult, but okay, we’ll work around it. Are you talking about that kind of data or that kind of, you know, strategy or what are you talking about specifically?

[00:39:45.580] – Mitch Duckler

Well, I think if you, if you, if you think about what marketing is really charged with, it’s, it’s understanding the, understanding the marketplace, understanding the competitive set, understanding customer needs and wants and purchase drivers and so forth. And I think what AI has the ability to do is to understand those things at, at a much Finer, more granular level than ever before. There’s a couple of concepts that I talk about in the book too. Micro segmentation and hyper personalization. So what do I mean by those? Like, micro segmentation is, you know, as the name would suggest, you can segment the market at a much more granular, much finer, more granular level than ever before. With AI, it’s not just, hey, what is your five or six segment schema? Right. Based on high level attitudes or behaviors. I talked to a lot of CMOs that they’re saying, you know, what we’re getting, we’re developing thousands of micro segments because of what AI is able to do to understand the combinations of different variables and what they mean, for example, what to offer or the message to deliver consumers. So micro segmentation, again, is not just, you know, segmentation went a long way towards, you know, years ago, towards not doing the same thing for everyone.

[00:41:15.440] – Mitch Duckler

Right. Let’s kind of talk about five or six or seven different segments and then we have different offers or experiences or communication for each episode.

[00:41:24.390] – Kriste Goad

10 rounds us out with healthcare trends and headlines from Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquillet. Check out this super timely snippet where we talk about rising healthcare claim denials and struggling pharmacies.

[00:41:37.010] – Kriste Goad

Can I ask you a question about that? Because there’s, I’ve been having some conversations lately and there’s a theory and, you know, maybe it’s not just theory, maybe it’s reality, but, you know, revenue cycle that function within hospitals has always historically been, you know, like, okay, yeah, that’s revenue cycle. They’re over there in a, you know, like a closet somewhere, you know, not necessarily seen as hugely strategic, I guess, but I’m hearing conversation that maybe that’s shifting, you know, that maybe it’s becoming a lot more on the radar of CFOs.

[00:42:13.760] – Brian Tanquilet

I think it is. I think it is.

[00:42:16.350] – Kriste Goad

Why do you think that? What are you hearing?

[00:42:18.640] – Brian Tanquilet

It’s sad because I think the level of denials has gone up. We’re hearing that especially from hospitals, there’s this dynamic called the two midnight rule. There was a rule change that happened late last year that basically, you know, if you, you can, you cannot keep a patient for more than two midnights in an er. So once they’re with you for two midnights, you got to push them into a, an inpatient admission, which obviously is more expensive. As a result of that, the payers have become more stringent in paying the bills. Right. They’re screening these bills out and filtering and they’re Denying a lot of bills because, you know, kind of like you need to show medical justification to keep that patient for more than two midnights. So that’s the two midnight rule. And that I think has been the key driver of, you know, I mean, granted always, you know, the manager companies are always looking for ways to delay and deny claims. But this was a real inflection point for them where they’re like, we need to figure out, you know, if we’re going to pay more just because of a new rule, we need to figure out what’s appropriate, what’s not.

[00:43:19.400] – Brian Tanquilet

So for the provider, they’ve seen a spike in denial. So and as a result, right, if you’re a CFO of a hospital and you’re not getting paid for a certain patient, I mean, it becomes a big red flag and it has impacted cash flows for some hospitals and that’s what’s forcing the hospitals to reconsider whether it’s investments or outsourcing of revenue cycle.

[00:43:43.890] – Kriste Goad

Right.

[00:43:44.080] – Brian Tanquilet

I mean, if the payers are going to do something, we need to fight it back.

[00:43:48.030] – Kriste Goad

Yeah. And the change healthcare data breach, which brought everything kind of a squeeze halt, I would imagine, you know, really elevated that conversation as well in the C suite.

[00:43:59.070] – Brian Tanquilet

It did. And part of it is that, you know, some hospitals got squeezed really hard because they were not getting paid for weeks. Right. So they had to tap bank facilities or whatever cash sources that they had just to keep the lights on. Right. And you know, I think we’re just now starting to get that resolution, really showing up in P&L’s and cash flow statements for a lot of these providers.

[00:44:22.430] – Kriste Goad

Yeah. Interesting. What should us marketers and communicators in healthcare be? You know, for us as an agency, you know, we start looking at, okay, what are some of the year end and then 2025 trend stories that are going to start coming out, you know, and where we can plug in our folks as thought leaders. And I’m curious what you see on the horizon where you think those trends and headlines are going to be focused.

[00:44:49.430] – Brian Tanquilet

One of the things that we’re watching really closely, for example, in the pharmacy space, CVS is shifting their revenue model in the pharmacy world to where they call it a cost plus model essentially, or a transparent model. And their view is that the clinician relationship with the patient, meaning the pharmacist patient relationship, is important and we need to get paid for that clinician’s time. And we’re going to split that away from what they pay, from what your payer insurance company pays. For the drug. I think that’s a really interesting topic because there is, at least from the pharmacy’s perspective, they’re saying that the pharmacist is actually more of a trusted clinician and partner in healthcare for a patient than a primary care doctor. Yeah, which, which is actually interesting. Right. I mean, if you think about that. But if you think about whenever you get your drugs, you have an effective consult with your pharmacist, like they ask you do you know how to use this? Do you know side effects? I mean, they walk you through your drugs. And a lot of seniors especially love that interaction with a pharmacist, probably more so than the doctor, maybe because it’s easier to get into get a conversation with a pharmacist than getting to your doctor’s office.

[00:45:59.150] – Brian Tanquilet

Right. Then they’re trying to shuttle you out every five minutes. But I think that’s one area that could be interesting, just strengthening that relationship and the value of the pharmacy going forward. Especially as we’ve seen some of these pharmacies struggle, whether that’s Walgreens or Rite Aid. Right. I think making that push to establish the pharmacist as a clinician and as a key relation healthcare relationship partner for a patient, I think there’s something there. And then there’s a lot of focus on price transparency, whether it is especially in drugs right now, I mean you have the Mark Cuban cost plus strategy. Obviously CVS is rolling this out. So I think trying to figure out how does price transparency factor into patients or employers decisions to pick a specific pharmacy copays obviously matter. You know, value based care is one that’s kind of fading a little bit right now, especially in primary care. A lot of value based companies are struggling. So again, that was one area where years ago, I mean, not that long ago, like marketing was focused a lot on value based care because you’re trying to bring patients into these value based care practices.

[00:47:12.730] – Brian Tanquilet

Whether you’re Village MD1 Medical, Oak Street, I think that a lot of them are having a difficult time right now. They burn through a lot of cash. And so I would say you’re probably going to see a little bit of a fading in terms of marketing dollars out of value based care companies.

[00:47:29.350] – Kriste Goad

Interesting.

[00:47:30.110] – Brian Tanquilet

Value based specialty is an emerging area where there’s probably some investment that’s happening.

[00:47:40.870] – Kriste Goad

That wraps up our best of season four episode. We hope you enjoyed revisiting these standout moments as much as we did. We’ve linked all of our episodes in the show notes so you can dive deeper into any one of them. That’s it for now. Thanks so much for listening. We’re looking forward to keeping great conversations coming your way as we grow this podcast. There’s even more great content from our conversations on our blog. Be sure to check it out at growwithfuoco.com that’s growwithfuoco.com. Stay tuned until next time. And no matter what, stay curious.

• Recommended Reading
  • Season 4, Episode 1: The Quantum Health Effect: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Brand Storytelling
  • Season 4, Episode 2: A Diamond in the Rough: How Digging Deep Uncovered a Wall-Street-Journal-Worthy Story about Lab-Grown Diamonds
  • Season 4, Episode 3: How Progeny Health Leveraged Customer Brand Loyalty, Thought Leadership, and Patient Advocacy to Build Brand Awareness and Drive Sales
  • Season 4, Episode 4: The Ethical Use of AI in PR and Marketing: Expert Counsel from a Professor with His Finger on the Pulse
  • Season 4, Episode 5: Future Proofing PR: Insights from Muck Rack’s CEO
  • Season 4, Episode 6: Empowering Her Health: Unveiling the Secrets of the FemTech Movement
  • Season 4, Episode 7: Swag, Socks, and Sweet Success: Colin Hung’s Conference Formula
  • Season 4, Episode 8: The Future of Digital Media: How Vodcasting is Changing the Game
  • Season 4, Episode 9: The Future-Ready Brand: How to Leverage AI and Emerging Technologies
  • Season 4, Episode 10: Follow The Money: 2025 Healthcare Trends & Headlines