Transcription:
Why Mobile Strategy Matters for Marketing in Healthcare

Intro: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of DoctorPodcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (host): On this edition of the SHSMD Podcast, so do you have a mobile marketing strategy? Probably many of you don't and I think sometimes mobile gets overlooked. So, we're going to talk about why a mobile strategy matters for marketing in healthcare with Leah Chatham of Gozio Health. If you're wondering about mobile marketing, listen to this interview. So, well, what are we waiting for? Let's get to the interview right now.

This is the SHSMD Podcast, rapid insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. And in this episode, we're going to talk with Leah Chatham, Vice President of Marketing at Gozio Health and why mobile strategy matters from marketing in healthcare.

Leah, welcome to the SHSMD Podcast. As you know, we start every episode of SHSMD Podcast with rapid insights, one quick tip someone can use to make their marketing communications better today. Leah, give us your rapid insight.

Lea Chatham: Yeah. I think one of the things that we often miss are those easy, free things. When we're in marketing, we're often thinking about, you know, what is my advertising, changes to my website, right? But there are some really cool, free things you can do when you're trying to promote something like a new mobile app. One of the ones we've seen that works the best is putting something on your Wi-Fi login page for when people show up at your health system. Pop onto the Wi-Fi and it says, "Hey, for help kind of navigating your experience here, download our app." It's free. It's super easy and it can really generate a lot of interest. So, that would be my one tip for when you're doing projects like that.

Bill Klaproth (host): I love that. That is a great rapid insight. Thank you, Leah. Don't forget about the free things, right? Because we overlook the easy things sometimes, don't we? Because we're so worried about the big things.

Lea Chatham: Totally, totally. Low-hanging fruit. I mean, we always throw out that term, but I think sometimes actually that's the stuff we sort of forget about.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah. And I'm wondering if we kind of forget about mobile marketing. So, we're going to talk about why mobile strategy matters for marketing in healthcare. So, let's talk about this, Leah. Why is now the time for mobile engagement?

Lea Chatham: Well, it's funny. I feel like we shouldn't still be having to kind of say, "Hey, mobile is where it's at," because look around you and everybody is on their phone all the time. Why are we still saying, "Look, why should we do mobile?" But it just keeps coming back, right? And often when I talk to people, they say, "Oh, we've really doubled down on maybe our website or something like that. And it's mobile-responsive, so it's okay." But the reality is that a mobile-responsive website isn't the same as a mobile native experience. And so, we need to kind of think about what does that experience look like when somebody is on their mobile device and they're interacting with us?

So, we know from all this data and research that the majority of people start their interactions with healthcare in some kind of search, some kind of online search. Mobile search now outpaces desktop and other forms, so we know that most people are starting their healthcare journey on their phone. We also know some things like there's a problem with revenue leakage, we have problems with no-shows or people showing up late and mobile engagement can kind of help us with that. But it does require thinking about the experience. So, the mobile native experience means you can use things like location awareness, voice triggers, you know, these other features that people are sort of used to in other parts of their life. And the most recent data I know of on kind of this expectation piece about "Hey, the rest of my life is on mobile. What do I think about healthcare?" is that about 60% of people say they want pretty much the exact same experience in healthcare on mobile, that they have in all the other aspects of their life. And that really does mean a mobile native experience. So, that's kind of why we need to be thinking about it.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah. You've made some great points there, Leah. And I especially wrote down here, "Mobile search outpaces desktop search." And I wonder if sometimes we kind of forget about that because we're in our offices all the time, we're on our desktops. But you were talking about the user experience, they're on their phones and they're searching, so you better make sure that experience matches what you said. Other brands, they have certain expectations now. We in healthcare have to meet those expectations. So, let me ask you this then. Why does it fall on the marketing department to take the lead in mobile engagement?

Lea Chatham: So, it's interesting. We recently did a little survey and focus group of healthcare CIOs saying, "Hey, how are you looking at mobile engagement and your digital strategy and all these things." And most of them said, "Hey, we'd be happy to lead from the technology side and help make that happen." But we feel like we're not the ones to pick the technology or pick the experience or those kinds of things. We'd rather see someone from marketing or patient experience or innovation step in and kind of pick what they want, decide what the patient experience looks like, map out their patient journey, right? Do all these other things. And we'll just kind of back them up. Because I think they feel like the people in those roles have a much better feel for what patients are looking for, right? They are spending time thinking about the patient journey. They are thinking about what services do we provide that help people get what they need and all those other things.

The other piece is that often marketing is seen more as a cost center, right? We're just giving money to marketing and they're marketing us, but we don't know if there's a payback there, right? Which is always so frustrating, I think, for any of us in marketing in any industry. It is this piece where you feel like you're constantly trying to justify your importance and your existence. And when you take charge of something like this, and you think about the features that line up with business goals, like scheduling or preventing revenue leakage or appealing to new young patients, you can turn yourself around and make marketing more into a revenue center, right? So, you can say, "Hey, we're driving some revenue. We're driving things that are helping support bigger business goals. We are not just a cost center."

Bill Klaproth (host): Oh, my gosh, you are so right about a couple of things, especially marketing people always trying to justify their jobs and people looking at us just as a cost center. But like you said, you can turn yourself around and make marketing more into a revenue center, which really is a very good thing. So, I know that you work with a lot of people, a lot of great clients, and you certainly know the ins and outs of mobile marketing. Maybe you can share with us what are some things to watch out for or what are some mistakes we should try to avoid.

Lea Chatham: Yeah. So, we definitely know that there are things that don't work when you're trying to get people to download mobile apps. And we know that because a lot of mobile apps don't get downloaded. They just don't have the value for users and they maybe don't have a great experience or they don't provide enough features and functionality. So, we've kind of summed that up into it's hard to find or it's hard to use. It doesn't have a great experience. You know, it just doesn't have enough stuff to make it useful. And flipping that around, essentially, what we're saying is you do want to have that mobile native experience that's super intuitive for people. You want to be able to try to put as many things into your one app as possible and have everything in one location. And you want it to have a really great kind of usability, user experience, intuitiveness, all those kinds of things, so that people will keep coming back and using it over and over again.

So, really the mistake to avoid is like a one-off, right? Or something that's kind of cobbled together, right? You're like, "Oh, we have a bill pay app." Well, sure, some people will use your bill pay app, but that's not going to get everybody. Or we have a way to log in to a mobile patient portal. Well, that's great as a critical part of your overall digital strategy, but not everybody uses the patient portal. You're trying to bring all those people and all those features into one place with minimum barriers, right? Like don't make it hard to get to, don't make it hard to log in. You know, eliminate logins as much as you can. I'll just say that right off the bat. Like the fewer logins, the better.

Bill Klaproth (host): Right.

Lea Chatham: You know, just think about those kinds of things, right? You just want that great native experience. You want it super intuitive. You want as many features as possible. It's like a tipping point, right? The more features you have, you're going to kind of hit this tipping point where you get lots of people coming for different things.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah, that makes sense. So, try to put as many things into your app as possible with minimum barriers, as you said. Try to eliminate logins, because "Yeah. Oh, what is it? Oh, do I need a password? Oh, forget it. Forget it. Too hard, too hard." So, just try to make it as easy as possible. So then on the flip side, I imagine there are tips for success to make sure people are using it and not forgetting about it, right? I'm sure there's a couple of other things.

Lea Chatham: Yeah. So, I think one thing is, and this is sort of how I think about the same way I think about marketing, which is like 80% of it is all the planning and the scheduling and the logistics, 20% of it is like the fun, kind of creative stuff, right? People always think marketing is all like fun and creative or whatever, but actually that's like the small part. The big part is all the planning and the execution. and mobile apps are really a very similar thing. You want to do a lot of planning ahead of time. You want to really understand your patient journey and what your patients are looking for. You want to go out and do focus groups and patient advisory councils, and talk to people. You want to talk to your staff. You really want to put in the planning on the backend before you ever get started. And you want to scope out exactly what that journey looks like and what you need in that app to provide a true kind of digital companion or handholding experience for people that helps connect them to you on their mobile device across their whole experience.

And then, on the other side of it, once you've launched that app, you want to have done a really thorough plan for how are we going to launch that app? What are all the things we can do? And all the places that we can promote this and all the ways we can get our staff on board and get the word out to the community and to the patients. And I think someone who's a good partner, hopefully, will have a lot of that for you, or be able to help guide you in the process of those things. But those two pieces on the frontend and the backend are really the super important part. The part where you put the app together is like just the cool part where you're saying, "Make it look like our brand. And let's like do these buttons and have a cool banner here or whatever," that's this little middle like 20%. The rest of it is really like all the planning and all of the information that's going to make it the best it can be and attract the maximum amount of people.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah. There's a lot of work there that's involved that people don't see.

Lea Chatham: Yes.

Bill Klaproth (host): So, you're so right. In marketing, "Oh, you're in marketing. How fun?" "Yeah. But you don't really see a lot that goes into it to." But you make some really great points. So, putting that really hard work in the backend, understanding what people are going to need and use and put as many things as you can in this app as you said earlier and then know about the frontend, how are we going to promote this, all the different ways we're going to build awareness for this app, so that makes sense. So, thank you for that.

So then, people are going to be asked, how do I measure the success of this? What KPI should be tracked? How do you measure the ROI on mobile? So, how do you do those types of things?

Lea Chatham: We kind of have a staged sort of approach when we're talking to clients where we say, "Hey, this first chunk of time, you just want to focus all your efforts and resources on getting as many people onto this app as possible," right? You're going to do all these various marketing things and the one KPI you're really going to want to pay attention to is "How am I going to get as many people as possible onto this app?" And then, at some point, you're going to sort of hit that tipping point, where you're able to say like, "Man, we've gotten 100,000 people or 200,000 people and we are really like chucking along here with getting people on our app." And now, we can focus on where do we line up this mobile app and the features we have with going back to that thing about business goals, right? Saying, "Okay. If a key goal of ours is X amount of growth over the next five years," looking at maybe a five-year plan, what portion of that could we drive on mobile by continuing to promote this app out into the community? If a key thing is revenue leakage, to say every time you're talking to a patient and you're talking about referrals or you're talking about services they need, you want to make sure you say, "Hey, do you have our mobile app? It makes it so easy to find a provider for XYZ," right? Because it may look like they're just searching and things are showing up on the mobile app, but of course, all those things are in network to you, right? So, you're doing that same with, you know, appointments. Or the other day I was talking to somebody about call center volume, right? Some places are just feeling the pain of call center volume that is unsustainable. If those are your priorities, then that's where you want to start lining up the features of that mobile app and how you're promoting it and saying, "Okay, where can we line this up to keep business goals? Do we need to make any changes? You know, look at the interactions you're getting on those features and you can start moving things around." You know, you'd mentioned we have some really great clients who've seen some huge engagement on their mobile apps. And one of them is amazing at monitoring every month the usage of every feature. And she has said many times, "Boy, we thought this was the thing, right? And then, it turned out no, it was this other thing. So, we just kind of moved things around and reprioritized." And that's what you kind of need to do. And then, you just keep lining it up, keep lining it up with those business goals, because you will find it can really help you and there really is sort of an ROI story there behind appointment scheduling and being able to, you know, help with that revenue leakage piece or help with engagement or improve your HCAHPS surveys, whatever it is for you.

Bill Klaproth (host): Well, that's a great tip about constantly monitoring and then adjusting to make sure you are really meeting the needs of the consumer, so you make it more effective and more useful. And I love how you said we should look at this as our goal, is X amount of growth over the next period of time. How much can mobile help achieve that goal? How much of this can we drive on mobile? So, that's a really good tip. So as we wrap up, and thank you so much for your time, we appreciate it. As we talk about the importance of a mobile marketing strategy, any final thoughts on this? Anything else we should know about this?

Lea Chatham: I think my one last sort of thought or one last suggestion would be that the other piece that is always really important and I think that we're seeing more and more is this idea of really human-centered kind of the healthcare. And what that requires is to always be sort of thinking from the outside in, instead of thinking from the inside out. And I'm certainly guilty of having done the inside out kind when I worked doing patient engagement and marketing for a health system. It was always like, "Well, we want to talk about our orthopedics" or "We want to talk about our new birthing center or whatever." But that may not be what your patients are asking in their minds when they come looking for information. And so, when you're thinking about whether it's your mobile strategy, an app, or it's your website, or any other marketing piece, to really invest the time in those things, like the patient advisory councils or the focus groups or the surveys, and trying to gather that information because you really might find that the kinds of questions or the needs of your community are really different from what you think of when you're thinking kind of inside out. And so, trying to change your perspective to one that is what are they asking, what do they need, what are they looking for versus what is it we want to tell them.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah. That makes sense. So, what is the best way you found to go about getting that information? Do you do surveys, focus groups, walk around the community? What's your thoughts on that?

Lea Chatham: I think it kind of depends a little bit on your community, on your catchment area. I have talked to people who've done lots of different things to try to get that. And, for example, there was an organization actually at SHSMD when we were doing our executive dialogue conversation. They have a huge sort of senior Medicare population and they do a newsletter. And in that newsletter, they sometimes do surveys and things and they get people really engaged. This older population engages really well that way. I've worked with some children's hospitals who have family advisory councils and those parents really engaged. And that is an effective way for them to get great input and feedback. And on the flip side, I've talked to some people who say, "Hey, we get really high engagement on our surveys or HCAHPS surveys and the other surveys we send out. And we use those for everything." I think you really have to sit down kind of with your internal group and say, "What is our best shot at getting that information?" And if you're not sure, you may have to try a few different ways until you find the one that's right for you.

Bill Klaproth (host): Leah, this has been very informative and entertaining and useful. I want to thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Thanks again.

Lea Chatham: Oh, thanks so much, Bill. It was great to be here.

Bill Klaproth (host): And once again, that's Leah Chatham. And this podcast is sponsored by Gozio Health. Gozio offers an end-to-end customizable mobile engagement platform, exclusively for healthcare systems with over 325 million mobile interactions facilitated. Gozio knows how to attract healthcare consumers with mobile. That's why a 2021 KLAS Research Emerging Technology Spotlight report found that Gozio clients surveyed had 100% satisfaction and improved experience for patients and staff. Learn more about Gozio at goziohealth.com. And if you found this podcast helpful, of course, how could you not? Please, people, please share it on all of your social channels. And please hit the subscribe or follow button to make sure you get every episode because they're all useful to you. This has been a production of DoctorPodcasting.com. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya!