Maximizing Healthcare M&A Success With Strategic Marketing

Stewart Gandolf

Hi everyone. Welcome again to our podcast today.

I have a really fun topic and a really Yes So I’m introducing you to Victoria Shepherd who’s a member of our digital team.

She is a mover and shaker of force of nature Um, we’re joking offline. She reminds me of me when I was at the same stage of career.

She just gets We’ll say it nicely gets stuff done. She’s a ball of energy and motion and very very smart digitally savvy Uh, and we go back and we share the secret digital handshakes from you know a decade and a half ago.

So we’ve been at the same conferences So, um, thanks for joining our team, Victoria and thanks Yeah, it’s gonna be fun So yeah, I am too.

So it’s really exciting today’s meeting will be, I might kind of feel like a fireside chat of two people who live in this world a lot.

So those of you that follow our podcast or blog or our content know this but for the sake of those of you that are new to us, our agency works in the world of healthcare and especially privately or private equity owned businesses in healthcare.

So most of our clients today are private equity owned. Some of our clients come to us directly from the private equity owner.

Sometimes they don’t meet them as much but we’re more focused to the client but they’re a private equity. So that’s most of our clients.

I’m not sure with exact percentages but it’s over half these days. And a lot of those we work in all the various specialties within multi-location providers who work in addiction and medical, dental, physical therapy, all the different specialties and professions.

And we also do work with SaaS, telehealth and pharma and device and other things but still the sort of private-equity-based world and investor-based world is really an intersection of what we’re doing. so, some of you may have Paula Scott Becker.

I was on his podcast about, here we’re going, was just sharing with Victoria. And the topic I spoke about, very briefly on that podcast, is still one of their most listened to podcast, and I’ll give you the premise of that for the second Rightfully Speaking, they do spend their time on things like revenue cycle management, billing collections, growing providers, building new locations, bringing in systems, cutting costs.

But the one thing that I notice is, they often really underestimate the value of the marketing and what marketing can do.

So, not bitter, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. My job is to educate people, and I can just tell you from my experience,

that marketing is an incredible revenue driving tool that can create predictable, profitable, and passive income and profits to a business.

And it can also, poor marketing can actually put you in a negative place, making it less competitive, become a weakness for the business and decrease its value.

So that’s in a nutshell, I talked to on the Scott Becker podcast about. And Victoria has her own experience that she’s gonna share with us in a few minutes.

But one of the things I thought was really fun is you shot an article by McKinsey about integrating marketing and brand in M&A, the way to superior growth.

it’s like, Stewart, don’t you talk about that all the time? yeah, I do. So Victoria, let’s just talk about this a little bit.

So you’ve got your own experience. I’ve done a lot of the talking so far. But tell us about your experience with, broadly why this topic intrigued you and why this caught your eye, besides the fact that this is kind of a common thing we talk about all the time.

Victoria

Yeah, I think it was, I think it was, conference that you were speaking at invest and there are the people that were going to be there were private equity.

And since you and I are, you know, obsessed with the digital space and marketing, I was just doing some research and like I said, I this McKinsey article.

And then I in my previous life have worked with companies to help grow for an M&A. And one thing that’s kind of severely undervalued or really not focused on was the digital footprint and making sure your marketing was all started.

And it was funny because I found it statistic and I thought it’d be interesting to share is that the failure due to poor brand communications, approximately 85% of mergers fail due to lack of brand communications, which is part and integration, which is part of marketing.

This underscores the critical role of effective brand communication in preventing M&A failures. And then another quote, A quote I found in another article could have been the McKinsey one or could have been another one was nothing is more important to the success of a merger than brand yet.

It’s the thing most overlooked. So brand comes that all kind of falls under, you know, marketing because communications where we communicate to the ideal customer profile with communicate to the client, you know, so I’m Just kind of something that really kind of appeal to me.

I just kind of wanted to hear your experiences a kind of chat about like, if someone’s going to use, do, do an M&A, what would, what would it look like from a digital perspective?

You know, what would they do like before, and after kind of like the due diligence and things like that.

So just thought it would be neat to, you know, chat with you about that story.

Stewart Gandolf

Oh, for sure. I want your experience to like that’s why we’re colleagues and arms over here. So I was set this up most.

wanted to have you do most of the talk in the day because I think you’ve got a lot of news.

people heard me speak before. So I definitely want to get your input. You know, like I’m looking through the article that you shared with me and it is really crazy how much that fits some of the stuff we’ve been talking about for a while.

And I thought that the idea of, you know, how do we scale this? I think the first thing is the McKinsey article was arguing for was creating a thorough sort of digital foot assessment.

And here in the middle, there was a lot with us. So let’s talk about that process. know, from websites to social media to all the different things that are involved with that.

Since you’re on the ground doing that with the team, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Yeah

Victoria

I think it’s so important to do that.

Making sure your copies up today, making sure, you know, you’ve got high quality relevant content. Your blog is on a set and forget it mode and neither is your social media.

I know so many brands who are who will set up like a Google local business. profile or a social media like a Facebook page or even a little company LinkedIn profile and just set it and it just doesn’t look optics aren’t really attractive.

So I just am amazed that people still do a kind of a set it and forget an approach. So if I was to guide someone, I would be like, you know, set it up for success, you know, making sure your website and content is has like the high quality relevant content that’s up to date, you know, making sure your profiles are look active, you know, engaging your engaging with the clients.

And then most importantly, or I think one of the most is online reputation management. There’s so many, you know, skeletons under, I guess, you know, page two Google.

So I think it’s, you know, it’s just something that people need to do their due diligence. it’s not just for like the M&A, but it’s for the user experience and making sure

like your card customer post-murder is going to be still happy with the process. So I know it of goes all over the place, but I think it’s just making sure you have that, you assess your footprint, then you develop a strategy of, and what does that look like?

Stewart Gandolf

So I’m curious about any anecdote you’d like to share. Either somebody you’ve worked with here more recently or somebody in the past where that was such an important issue that you wanted to focus in on.

And you can talk about your experience as well.

Victoria

Sure, yeah, so I used to work with Medicare agencies, well, just agencies in general, and it was probably the SCP, the ideal customer profile was the agent.

And I would always talk to them, but I still talk to them about, hey, what are you going to do when you’re retired?

have you thought about that? And what does that look like? And it’s fascinating how, because I mean, if you’re a bigger agency, it might look different than like the individual, but I still think that it’s really important to have your brand and your reviews and everything be set.

From my experience, when I was working with agents, I was asking them, what’s your, what’s your kind of retirement plan?

And I said, does I, do you ever even consider your website being making sure it’s up to snuff? And they would completely just not really think about that because they were so focused on like their Rolodex or their books of business.

And I said, well, eventually that’s going to be handed on to someone else that you need to trust. But you need to make sure like the, you know, the communications and the marketing still stays there.

And it doesn’t get lost. So it was just interesting talking to agents and agencies. They just didn’t think about that.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, for sure. So The things that the, it gets just so funny, it feels like we’re reading each other’s stuff with a McKinsey list here, but it talked about developing a robust digital marketing strategy, which is kind of like what we do every day.

So, you know, you’re involved with like our clients at so many different levels, but you know, when we think about digital strategy, you know, it just talks about sort of very briefly sort of a McKinsey way about setting goals and utilizing multiple channels and optimizing, you know, what some of your thoughts there, know, and I know you’ve combined this also some other resources, but the, you know, let’s talk about digital strategy and how that’s so important to have in place.

Victoria

I mean, I think it is so important and having not just the 30, 60, 90 day plan, but having the year over year plan is so important, especially in the healthcare space.

We, I think it’s similar to e-commerce, but not really like we when you’re in healthcare, there are are trends like for example urgent care we know cold and flu season is going to be you know really a part of the initiative so when you’re setting up a strategy like any other strategy it’s maybe you’re thinking maybe you’re going to you know load your page search maybe it’s going to be towards those seasonal times where people people get set like that’s just kind of one of those you know in the lead type of things I think you know people often forget that content calendars are so important and aligning with your paid I’ve been in so many organizations where paid and and sales and even social SEO are so siloed but I think that organizations if they really kind of smurge those together and let let the marketing team the digital be over and and hear the sales even what are they doing and they’ll do that into the marketing strategy I think is really

important. And then another thing that I think we talk about is, you know, obviously when you’re going to do an M&A is making sure that Legion, that pipe is staying full up and making sure that you’re even down to your CRMs.

CRMs, you know, when you’re scoring an MQL to an SQL, like that changes often. That also should be a part of your strategy.

Because a lot of people don’t necessarily adjust their scoring based on like trends and what’s going on and how their business is evolving or changing.

And then a final thing, I think that we really need to be focusing on especially because word health care is compliance and security.

We’ve got regulations, FTC comes out all the time, we have to deal with HIPAA compliance, we’ve got to be doing being a good steward for our clients and making sure that they are doing their due.

diligence. I mean, across the board, but like, especially if you’re talking about like a M&A, making sure that when it migrates over to the next organization, that they are going to maintain that integrity.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, that’s true. I think you’ve hit on a lot there. So I’ll just add some comments and highlight some additional points.

So, when we work with clients, and Victoria is very familiar with this already, but we often talk about six ways to grow a healthcare business.

one of the ways, I just simple contacts, I wrote this article years ago, and it’s still one of our most read.

And so I’ll cover them for you now. So what is the first strategy that’s sort of at the core of everything is building the right brand, right?

So that’s a long discussion we can get into another day, but building a really strong brand is a foundation.

Digital marketing, well, of course, you’re going to talk about that story. That’s what you guys do. But in this case, I’m really talking about digital marketing, especially as it relates to

You know, getting patients or customers or healthcare consumers or residents that your clients are trying to reach. The third category is traditional advertising and I was talking to our traditional advertising buyer Charlie a few minutes ago And he was shared with me the amount of money being spent in Chicago land market by the top advertisers and it’s jaw-dropping I mean There’s a lot of younger Marketers who think the digital marketing it or I’m sorry traditional marketing is dead and I almost you know start to believe it Sometimes because we’re so digital here, but believe me traditional advertising is alive and well, and that’s still

Victoria

Yeah, and I mean I worked for a for 10 years for Blue Cross Blue shield and my experience was dealing with the offline to online because we would do e-mails we would have member kits for new members for under 65 for Medicare and then I had experience working with multilocation urgent care and I would be amazed at a magnet on a door—the success that campaign would do versus a postcard was interesting so it’s something that and like yeah a magnet is something that’s more expensive, but the calls that I would see in CallRail from this magnet that we did was just really neat because and I think that’s another thing because the offline talking to the online, making sure that you’ve got those tracking phone numbers. I know I’m talking in circles, I tend to do that anyways, but I need to do that to help people understand. Even having URLs on your postcards, some companies put an arbitrary URL on their postcards and they could never track the success of their traditional marketing, and I think that is something that is really important, especially considering that print is very expensive. Yeah and I almost feel that we’re in a, I mean, I could go on a tangent right now, but I would, I would even say that we, during, we’re seeing all, all the, because the election coming up, seeing only direct mail pieces from, from different people coming out. I don’t want to speak to giving the healthcare people a tip.

Maybe you should pause it until like, after it’s done. I don’t want your postcard to like, get in, you know, get out of the weeds and all that stuff.

But yeah, I think it’s so important and it needs to be considered. And if you have budget, I think definitely testing direct mail is integral.

Stewart Gandolf

Sure. so, we covered branding digital and then traditional. the other three areas of opportunity are PR broadly, is a topic for another day.

HCP marketing or doctor referral building or how do you build, you know, B2B would be another way of looking at that’s a huge category.

And that, again, is a really big issue. then finally, what’s the patient experience and that includes. but it certainly isn’t limited to how do you take those inquiries?

How do you convert them from an inquiry to a patient? So those six categories are all sort of strategic levers as a business.

From a marketing standpoint, you can pull and it depends on the type of business we’re working with. So, you know, like Victoria brought up insurance or like Medicare or Medicare Advantage especially.

Like that’s definitely, they’re targeting seniors, always TV, live events, know, insurance agent support. Those are all parts of it. Dermatology, you know, a lot of times they have just the greatest world from a marketing standpoint because they have doctor referrals, they have patient referrals, and they have all the other things that we can do for them.

So marketing is important to them, but they don’t perceive it as important to like, for example, addiction or most of them are like half of their business comes from marketing.

Like it’s really vital.

suffering, they feel it right away. So the point again, going back to our theme a minute ago is any business we work with in health.

all care. Marketing can help a lot. Sometimes it’s absolutely vital and weaknesses can hurt. So as you’re thinking about the value of your business, you want to make sure that the marketing is in place.

So one thing I’d like to talk about, you know, Victoria, you’ve been part of this process, we certainly do this a lot.

You know, a lot of our clients will come to us. Sometimes they just say just do our paid search and our SEO and all those things.

But ideally, a lot of times they ask us to start, if I always refer to this as a patient history exam diagnosis and treatment plan.

In other words, we do a marketing plan for them. It’s a four to six week process. And we do a whole lot of due diligence.

And so I’d like you to talk through about some of the due diligence that can help either guide the marketing. If you’re looking to buy a property, you want to kind of get a sense of record, we get this sometimes from P&E.

They want us to do the marketing plan where they are, before they even buy it.

Or it may be that they want to build it to sell. later, or it could be, you know, you’re toward the end and you want to do it.

Either way, all these times come back to doing the digital due diligence.

So like you to talk about that a little more because you’re heavily involved with that with our team.

Victoria

Yeah, I think, and I want to give a shout out to Alex Connect who is one of my SEO buddies and he’s been giving me a lot of insight into, into a Google Analytics 4.

And what I think what people need to do is, is making sure their data is telling the truth and it’s, and it’s tidy.

And you’d be surprised how with, with the emergence of G4, G4 is that people aren’t setting it up properly because they’re so focused on how it used to be and they’re trying to squeeze into how it used to be, into how it is now and that’s not case.

So I think for us guiding the guiding them, any client is doing their data and doing a data audit and making sure their things are set up and things are firing and tags and Google tags are appropriate and parameters are set up because you can have data all day long and it can tell a story but if it’s not set up properly then you’re just wasting money.

So I think that would be my first thing is making sure your data is sorted and it’s ready for action and it’s telling an accurate story and that’s kind of where I immediately would talk about that.

Stewart Gandolf

For sure. As we look at, we get new clients and this is part of our either at the front end when we’re doing a marketing plan or even if they don’t do the marketing plan eventually we usually do do an SEO audit, paid search audit, social audit, a website audit, we’re looking at all the technical things as well as the things

these things are in the machine that nobody else would know about, some of these things are very obvious like does this website work, are we able to generate leads, are we able to generate patients, what’s our return on ad spend, are we building, looking at the local listings, all of these things are part of that digital footprint, and that’s really important.

I’m curious what you think about this, usually when we do more often than not, it’s kind of a mess across the board, like you just mentioned like are the analytics set up well if they’re not then that’s a whole mess because that’s guiding the buys on the ads and it’s also guiding the team optimizing because we’re using making big decisions on bad data, but like or the SEO is you know we just had somebody call us that had asked us to do a wondered why the website was doing so poorly with SEO and we so checked and a bunch of their webpages were do not follow.

Well, there is that. So, any fun anecdotes or not so fun anecdotes about or just any additional insights on this topic about, because this is a big, again, we could talk about any of these topics for hours, but on the analysis side, what other kinds of insights would you like to share?

Victoria

I think this, and I wish I could find the story, but one of the anecdotes is, do you remember, and this was like a million years ago, when Toys R Us bought Toys.com.

Stewart

Vaguely, yeah.

Victoria

And they did a 302, not a 301.

Stewart Gandolf

So, explain what that means. Not, everybody’s in SEO.

Victoria

So, basically, I don’t know if this is old wives tale, but it’s a really great story, and you never want to get the truth in the middle of a story, and I would love to find it, but from anecdotally, what I remember, and this was like early mid-2000s, Toys R Us, for millions and millions of dollars, bought the domain being

is dot com and a 302 basically tells Google hey this is the apartment that we’re renting we’re not going to be here temporary redirect a 301 redirect is like hey I move from here to here and I’m staying here like I bought this house and I’m staying we’ve got it you know I’ve furnished it everything and then what happens is if you do a 302 all like your link juice and all the goods that came just kind of go out the gate so it was just so funny to me so I think and even if that story is totally old wives tale I think doing your due diligence and making sure you’re doing 301 and and and you know are you making sure like your links are you know you’re just crawling your your website you’re finding out what’s wrong with it you know you’re doing

keyword research or even just semantic research. I think now we talk about more about intent. You know, we could talk about, we had a conversation about addiction.

You know, like, there’s so many queries that are not being, you’re not being optimized for addictions and we know people are out there that are struggling with their mental health and the traffic’s there but sometimes those actions aren’t like really optimizing like their FAQ section for queries like that.

So, I don’t know if you could go on a million different ways.

Stewart Gandolf

Exactly. It’s really funny because, as I mentioned earlier, Victoria and I were at the same conference and nobody will get this but any one tech geek on this list and it is a podcast but Matt Katz used to be the head sort of public base of Google to SEO and we were both at CobbCon when he announced the disavowable and both of us know I know what that was but got excited.

So, that side of our past and I do remember or when at Bruce Clay, when I did my Bruce Clay training, one of the things I still remember is 301 is the one.

301 is the one. 301 is the one.

Never, 302.

ALWAYSdo a 301. So, but it’s funny, those little things, irrespective of the story, origins, really matter. And we see that all the time by, you know, kind of like bringing your car into a repair.

like, I don’t know why it’s not moving. Oh, you know what? It will.

That might be part of the problem.

And it’s the lack of wheels or heart for people to see or understand on a website.

Victoria

Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the day, was working for a big brand and their blog looked completely different than the rest of their site.

So, it liked when you like clicked on the blog, you’re like, wait, did I go, you know? And so, that just, you need to, from a design perspective.

can press, bring bread on that discussion. But like, you know, from a visual place, there means to be consistency throughout the site too.

And making sure, like, your customers stay engaged, they feel like they just went to a different, you know, location on a website.

know, so I think we don’t even talk about, you know, UX, but that could even be a conversation.

Stewart Gandolf

I would love to hear like, you also had some thoughts for me as we were preparing here about, you know, post mergers.

So we talked about, you know, preparing for the merger. We talked about making sure your ducks in a row.

Yeah, share some thoughts about sort of post merger from your perspective.

Victoria

So I think you want to post merger.

I think you need to have a seamless strategy with, you know, the people that you’re buying from, make sure that everything stays succinct.

And if there’s an opportunity for a customer experience to be stronger than make sure like that strategy is built out.

Whatever you do, you don’t want to dilute or like I said earlier, have the customer experience or anything be an issue.

So I think you want to ensure that there’s consistency, like I was mentioning earlier blog and website, you know, merge your websites and your social media accounts.

And then I think a big one is apart from your data is really about the communications if that is a part of that needs to be spoken about.

But really telling your customers from an internal communication like, hey, this is what happened, but please, you’re going to get the best experience like even though you’ve gotten where we’ve merged or we’ve been acquired, know, I feel like telling that message is I think so important to not lose

the trust of your current database, essentially. Great.

Stewart Gandolf

Last question before we wrap up today, discussion point slash question is branding. So we talked about brand, we referenced it a little bit.

And both of us are, I love all of it, right? But the SEO part is kind of like my first love, at least within recent years.

But branding is really, really critical. And so it’s like, and all as the head of our account team would tell you in strategy and brand, the stuff that he does, all these digital markers just jump straight, all this fun, digital stuff.

brand is at the essence of it. So I just love any digital that you have about. And this is all consistent hallway discussion with virtual hallway discussion here at our company.

But give you a sense of like any thoughts you have at all about the brand and in terms of, again, this topic of preparing for or following merger.

adding value to the business? comments there?

Victoria

Yeah, like I think just from a basic creative asset, like having your asset library, making sure like that’s being accounted for, because you don’t what you don’t want to do is you buy a company and all of sudden all that marketing collateral is just gone.

I think you need to kind of take take notes and make a checklist of all those things from what is the brand messaging?

What’s the tone? What is our is our voice going to change or is it going to remain the same?

Is the is our messaging going to be unified? Because it has to be unified. Yes, you Facebook and maybe LinkedIn are obviously different spaces, but for the most part, your tone and your messaging and your visuals and you know the brand should be consistent across the whole board.

And I guess that’s kind of what I would be making sure that I would be doing my due diligence about that.

I don’t know what you think about it.

Stewart Gandolf

It totally is. We’re wrapping up here. I just want to say there’s a lot to this topic.

just to go back to our theme at the very beginning was, you know, so often people in the investment world, but then also people that are buying or selling a business really just aren’t giving marketing much energy.

I get there’s many other things that are important, right? The personnel issues, recruiting doctors, you know, payment, finance, all those things.

But that marketing is a huge either asset or, you know, albatross, depending on where you are. And it’s something that we thought through very deeply in the consideration all the way from the branding to the online reputation and the presence through the sales systems and the conversions and all these things.

Anyway, Victoria, like, it is such a joy leading a company with such smart people and like, love having you on our team.

was really fun to share your thoughts for such a pro. all the stuff you touch and just I this stuff to us here at our agency as a playground.

Stewart Gandolf

No. We love talking about this stuff.

Victoria

Yeah, because I mean, I’ve dealt in the care space. I’ve dealt in, you know, the agency space for like, for, you know, insurance agents.

I’ve dealt with like the, like, like I said, M&A space, um, products have worked with health products and then personally, I’m a caregiver. So we were talking about the other day and I was like, oh, don’t get me started.

So I’m a contact library when it comes to caregiving. So which is interesting that, you know, another conversation, but a lot of private equity companies aren’t bringing up, you know, a living facilities too.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, for sure. So I appreciate your time, everybody, today, for lots more resources. you’re not there already, healthcaresuccess.com.

Thanks, Victoria.

This was just as fun as I expected it would be.

Victoria

Thank you. I really appreciate it.