Running a marketing agency means wearing a lot of hats. Marketers must keep up with not only advancements in the industry but also client expectations, best practices, and technological advancements.
To provide a glimpse into the mind of an agency decision-maker, we recently sat down with Andrew Miller, Co-Founder of Workshop Digital – an agency located in Richmond, Virginia. Workshop Digital has a diverse client base, including many healthcare organizations. In this Q&A, we dive into what trends are shaping up in 2024 in the marketing industry and take a magnifying glass to the healthcare space in particular.
Q: To kick off, please introduce yourself, tell us about your role at Workshop Digital, and about your background.
A: I'm Andrew Miller, one of the two co-founders at Workshop Digital the VP of client services. I oversee our paid media and SEO teams and our analytics division to ensure that all the solutions we are developing for our clients meet their needs and that we're evolving and keeping everybody on time and on budget. Workshop Digital has about 30 employees currently – all over the US. We’re focused on getting great results for our clients and building strong relationships. The technologies, tools, and tactics will all change, so we focus on the fundamentals.
Q: What industries do you focus on?
A: We’re industry agnostic, but do a lot in healthcare, financial services, and B2B – primarily manufacturing and industrial manufacturing.
Q: What services does Workshop Digital focus on?
A: We primarily focus on SEO and paid media across all channels and analytics. We don't do website design, development, organic social, or email. We like to stay in our lane.
Q: What trends are you seeing right now overall – and in the healthcare industry in particular?
A: The biggest [trend] we're seeing is a new focus on HIPAA compliance — so protecting and guarding patient information is essential and clients fall somewhere on a spectrum of their awareness and productivity. Our smaller individual practice clients, in many cases, are not even aware of some of the changes that have happened in the HIPAA space, like the new guidance coming out from the government and some of the lawsuits that are underway and how they challenge us as marketers.
From a marketing perspective, there's a trend towards greater data privacy, which makes it harder for us to do our jobs. We can't target as efficiently as we used to be able to. But, regulations are a good thing. We don't want to put ourselves in a tough spot regarding compliance and pushing the envelope.
Q: How are you staying current with the latest happenings in the healthcare space and how are you keeping your clients updated?
A: Some of our larger clients have dedicated compliance and legal teams that are out ahead of these matters and they make us aware when they come to us with requests. We do our own research as well and share our POV with all of our clients individually. We put together informational, short-form videos, blog posts, and email updates that we work into our regular cadence of communication with our clients. So we're trying to hit them on all fronts to inform them of what they need to be aware of.
Another factor here was the rollout of GA4 earlier this year which seemed to be a catalyst for many of our clients reevaluating what data they're collecting.
The last piece I'll mention is where we can get information on official government guidance from regulators around HIPAA compliance. What they're getting into is what kind of tags and tracking tools are compliant or what the intent is so that breeds a whole new round of lawsuits. Law firms can be a great source of information when they're trying to bring claims against marketers who are doing this stuff too aggressively or platforms that aren't safeguarding information.
As marketers, we must figure out how to work with all this information and constraints. We have to be smart and stay a step ahead for our clients’ sake.
Q: How does AI function in your work, and with your healthcare clients specifically?
A: We're bullish on AI, ChatGPT, and whatever comes next in terms of workflow improvements and automation, but not necessarily content creation and public-facing material. We're not spamming the web with blog posts written by ChatGPT, but rather automating and streamlining day-to-day work. We’re investing time and money, and learning and experimenting, and then figuring out if there's anything that we need to build independently.
Marketers will sometimes upload analytics data or Google Search Console data or otherwise and have ChatGPT create visualizations or reports – we're not doing that with healthcare-related data, even if it's anonymized. It's too risky because we don't know what the AI tools are doing with that data. We’re trying to be as conservative as we can with what we upload.
Q: How is healthcare marketing different from working with clients in other industries?
A: In healthcare, we don't always get a closed-loop view of clicks that turn into prospective patients, that then turn into consults, that in turn, translate into revenue. Much of that data is locked into an EHR or electronic health records platform or some other closed-off version of a CRM that we don't have access to for privacy reasons.
So, with a lot of our healthcare clients, we're approximating the value of a lead, consult, or new appointment request based on what the practice tells us an average patient is worth — but we can't go into their systems and say this click led to X revenue or ROI. That is a challenge where in most other Industries, we can tap into sales data and lead data conversion data to get a truer picture of ROI.
Healthcare marketers, however, are excited when we can show lead or click-to-conversion paths, even if it's an appointment scheduled online. Call Tracking is important if it's phone calls generated for a practice. In that case, we like to distinguish between ‘existing patients’ and ‘Other’ and figure out what the quality of those clicks and visitors are across all their channels — not just paid search and SEO. I think there's an opportunity there because the lifetime value of a patient can be extremely high versus a one-time transaction on a retail site where you may never see that person again.
As far as Call Tracking, we don’t necessarily listen to calls but do analyze call tracking data to identify which calls turn into confirmed patients either through spot checking or automation with Conversation Intelligence™. Some clients don't want us touching that information for privacy reasons, but it comes down to having the right protections in place with a business associate agreement (BAA) as CallRail does with its Healthcare Plan.
We need to have an expectation-setting conversation with clients in this case. Some are open to it and others don't even want us to see patients’ names. It’s all about setting expectations and letting them know that, since we can't track ROI truly and look at the revenue generated by these clicks, the question becomes: ‘What can we do?’
If it's just phone call volume and making some assumptions about how many of those are new versus existing patients – and what the approximate value of the new patient is – then that just becomes a simple proxy for ROI. We know we got a hundred new patients last month and each one is worth 500 bucks.
That at least gives us some data we can benchmark against and compare traffic channels to each other to compare year-over-year seasonality and start testing to figure out what's working better and driving better results. So, often in healthcare, it's more of an approximation than actual, hard data.
Q: What new trends and tactics are you seeing in the healthcare marketing space? Where are things headed for the industry and is there anything your team is actively testing right now?
A: One thing that’s always been true is when practices or healthcare providers try to develop a relationship with the patient and their providers even before they pick up the phone. Providers share content either through social channels, blog posts, doctor profiles, or bios that humanize them. It's easy to say we want phone calls, but patients are interested in finding a provider they can connect with.
Many times we see that the practices that invest more in showcasing their providers and personalities are more successful – not necessarily life outside of work but content that humanizes them because that's the person I want to go visit for my next appointment. Patients don't want to feel like a number. It’s not necessarily a new trend, but I think it will become more important as healthcare marketers try to differentiate themselves.
It's a pretty level playing field and marketers can talk about symptoms, treatments, and conditions all day long – but making it easy to contact you and making it feel like ‘I'm going to be welcome in that practice’ – that's the stuff, I think, that'll differentiate and get somebody to pick up the phone and actually call.
Q: What are your current clients looking to achieve in 2024?
A: Closing the loop on ROI is still always the number one goal. Getting that right makes every other decision easier because you can evaluate what's working and what's not and be a little bit more precise in your decision-making or from a tactical perspective. I think people are growing wary of the rising costs of search, for example, Google Ads are getting more expensive every year. More automation creates new opportunities, but also brings more marketers into those auctions and makes them more competitive and expensive.
Clients are always looking for us to guide them toward how tactics are working today, how they will work next year, and where else they should look to diversify. The diversification piece is the second biggest question we get besides ‘how are our results – how are we doing?’
Q: What are your predictions about the changes that are taking place with cookies and how are you navigating these changes with clients?
A: I think the next conversation we're all going to have is how do you manage your first-party data, and how to stop relying as much on third-party cookies, tracking cookies, and pixels. First-party data that we own as marketers or brands will be more valuable in the long run than even the anonymized cookies that the current tools are built on. When cookie tracking goes away – whenever that is, Google keeps pushing it off year after year – but when the inevitable death of the cookie occurs, one of the only things we'll have left is the first-party data that we own, control, and keep secure.
We'll lose some capabilities on the audience targeting side, but I think we'll gain the ability to engage existing visitors or customers. We’ll have to be smarter about how we capture and use that information now. That's one of the things that we're exploring: What happens when browsers don't accept tracking cookies anymore?
Not to oversimplify, but if you follow the money, Google's got a huge advertising business. They're not just going to let it slip and let cookies go away until they have an equally profitable solution. That's my view: they're not just going to give up on tracking people – they'll just find a different way to do it.
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