Jacob Zemon, WSI-Certified Business Strategy Consultant in AI and Modern Digital Marketing
Jacob Zemon, a WSI-Certified business strategy consultant with expertise in AI & modern digital marketing, and the author of "Is Your Healthcare Practice Stuck?"
Jacob draws on 20 years as a consultant at Accenture Strategy & in executive marketing roles at Publicis Groupe and Merck to equip his health & wellness clients to grow.
In "Is Your Healthcare Practice Stuck?", Jacob explains the common marketing mistakes that hinder growth and introduces a practical strategic framework for success.
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0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implied shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin helen n believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena.
0:52 Thanks everybody for joining in today. I am Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio. We're on W four cy dot com. We're streaming live on Talk four the number four TV dot com, and we're streaming live on Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio. And of course we're available after the broadcast in podcast form wherever you get your podcast content. That's YouTube iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple again, anywhere you like to view. The mission of Winning Business Radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices, the how tos, the what tos, the what not tos, to be challenged and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. Who are those others. They are consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners, entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, as I say every week, virtually every successful person I've ever had a chance to talk to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So I again say it every week. While we all have to get our knees skinned once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies all the way up to the fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win, and I've seen some of them fail.
2:16 I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around and with some who probably should have found other jobs. And my own businesses, I've had lots of success, but of course some failures too, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So you'll hear from me, but mostly you're going to hear from our guests. And today my guest is Jacob Zemon, a WSI certified Business Strategy consultant with expertise in AI and modern digital marketing, as well as a published author. Here's his bio. Jacob Zemmon, as I said, as a WSI Certified Business Strategy consultant and author of the recently published book Is Your Healthcare Practice Stuck? Drawing an experience as a consultant at Accenture Strategy and in executive marketing roles Publicist Group and MRK, he now helps health and wellness practices grow through strategic planning, AI and modern digital marketing. His agency specializes in rehabilitation and movement focused healthcare, including physical therapy, chiropractic, sports medicine, and orthopedic practices.
3:17 And Is Your Healthcare Practice Stuck? He explains the common business and marketing mistakes that keep practices from growing, introduces a practical strategic framework, and shows owners how to apply today's marketing and AI tools to generate more patients than bill a stronger business. He earned his BS in mathematics and statistics from the State University of New York at Albany and his master's degree in statistics from the University of Virginia. Jacob lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Miriam, and their four children. Tomorrow, I think right also happens to be their tenth wedding anniversary. He grew up in West Niac, New York. Jacob. Welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Thank you, Kevin, thanks for the nice bio. Good to be here.
3:58 And is it tomorrow at the end, it is tomorrow. Yeah. My my wonderful wife Miriam has agreed for me to do a networking event tomorrow as well. That's my that's my little that's support. Yeah, that is support. My little anniversary gift to her is uh gonna be talking about the book and sponsoring a table a local networking events. And I did. I did clear with the boss first and she was okay with that. But tomorrow is a special day for us for the book as as well as our adversary. Well that's a wise man. Uh, So let me ask about Miriam. How did you guys meet, and then tell us a little bit about her.
4:40 Yeah, we met in simmer Spring, Marlin, when I lived there. We just got introduced by a mutual friend. We had a friend who thought that we would like each other. And Miriam likes to say that when she first first Army she was like, what are you talking about? I don't think I'm gonna like him. But this kind of like set me up because Miriam knew like that she was setting us up, but I didn't. So she like had like a brunch and invited us all over and a bunch of people, and I did kind of get drawn to her, and then she realized that she liked talking to me, and yeah, it kind of happened pretty quickly. So we met January, around right before Valentine's Day. So we met January of twenty fifteen. Yeah, and then we had like a first date around Valentine's Day, and about nine months later we got engaged, and about nine months after that we got married. Well, it was like a year and a half from meeting to realizing like hey, and then just finally getting married on Jolly twenty.
5:51 First love it, I love it. Tell us your kids ages and first names if you don't mind. Yeah, So our oldest kid is Anne, seven years old. So we have four kids, ye seven and under. So yeah, we're not busy at all. No, not a bit, not a bit. So in the seven she's our oldest, she's like almost become like a little mommy's helper now she's Yeah, she's very, very sharp and very sweet. And then we have a dear our son who is six. They're almost two years apart. And then our other kids are just about two years apart as well. So Aaron, our other son, is four. And then our baby, Zahava, we call her z Eazy because he's cute. Zahava is two.
6:39 Now that's great. Yeah, our kids are all about two years apart, not by It just seemed right. It wasn't planned, but it just seemed to work out right. So I understand you grew up in Western Nayac, New York. Tell the audience what it's like to grow up there. It was like to grew up in West Nyak. Yeah, so West NYC is one of those suburbs right outside of New York City. So if people are familiar with like Rockland County, New York, west Chester, New York, right so WESTNX in Rockland County near Nayak, near near the river. There, big big mall there. It's so, you know, very nice place, about a half hour drive to the city.
7:19 People in the city would always ask if I was from upstate New York, and I don't do not like to call Rockland County or Westchester. Upstate New York is a very very big state. But no, it was. It was nice. You know. Grew up there in like a ranch style house my whole life with parents and older sister and brother and yep, my I'm I'm the youngest one. My sister is six years older. She was also kind of like, you know, the the leader of the kids and taking care of us, and I was appreciated that. And then I had a brother who was in between our ages, who he was he needed like a lot of you know help at home.
8:02 He had very subable palsy. Oh people people home. Yeah, he couldn't like move by himself. So my my mom said that, you know, although I was the youngest I'm kind of like the emotional middle child, Kevin. I think we've talked about that. Yeah, middle child behavior and youngest child behavior. I kind of am a little bit more like a middle child in some ways, even though I'm the youngest, because you know, my my brother, who is the middle child, got kind of the attention of the youngest child. Yeah. So I'm curious what your early interests were, say high school, because you chose math and statistics as a major, so you had to be into something like that. I don't know. That always seems.
8:46 Yeah, that seems more like who likes math? Yeah I do. I do. Yeah. So I guess I was a little bit of a of a nerd when I was a kid. Right, So, when I was in kindergarten, my mom found it funny that when we did like career day, when the little five year olds would dress up like what they want to be when they grew up the top. I need to say, you knew what people like to be? Yes like to you know, those are fun I dressed up like a lawyer, you know. I went like a little tie and little briefcase, and I was like, I want to be a lawyer. When I grew up those those feelings kind of evolved and changed a little bit, but I was always kind of like more drawn to that.
9:29 You know, I did enjoy math, and you know, there was a part of me that liked how when I was an undergrad I focused on was like pure maths, so it didn't have any any applications to it. It was like logic. So I liked logic when I was a kid, and math was like very logical. You had proofs, objective. There's gratification when you solve a problem, when you figure it, you know, figure out, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was a gratification. It seemed challenging and maybe something that is a little bit ironic, I guess is when I was in high school and then picking a major as a freshman in college, I actually didn't love writing essays. So I just recently wrote a book and I do enjoy writing in the academic sense. Though in school I loved knowing that you know that there are subjects where there's like a right or wrong answer that I could be. You know, I could do something and get created on that and get judged on that. It's like, oh, subjectively right or wrong. So it's kind of drawn to subjects more like that rather than something where someone is going to grade my essays. You know, people of all people change over time. That was over twenty years ago at that point, at this point.
10:53 But then you got drawn to statistics because you get your master's right away, which I think makes a lot of sense. Why statistics? Did you know what you wanted to do at that point? Were you closer to knowing what you want to do? Yeah, I'd say I was a little bit closer. So undergrad pure math. I graduated in twenty ten. So I don't know if people recall, but around that time, twenty eight nine ten, it was not the best job market. So I was graduating with little experience outside of some summer internships. So I graduated with like a pure math degree with no application in a job market where people weren't hiring. So I was like, oh, well, I'm not going to go into that. Let me stay in school because you know, if you're in school, you're not unemployed, right.
11:38 That's that's right. But I also want to do something that was more practical, so you know, as we evolve over our time, Like I enjoyed the pure math, I enjoyed doing that, but I had to start thinking like, Okay, what am I actually going to do with this, Like what's the what's the point of this? So I felt like statistics was a natural extension of that where I could use the math, but statistics was highly valuable. You know, use statistics for a lot of applications. And I feel like there's this whole process of like not knowing what you want to do and starting broad and then kind of getting more and more focused, where pure math was kind of like that probably going to college not even knowing it was pure math, and then going into math and then going into statistics after that, like okay, this is like one step closer to something that like could be useful.
12:31 Because you landed at first position looked like was Merkel a big data research marketing research company? Right? Tell us about the company and your role there. Yeah, so Merkele was was a marketing agency. I'm still as a marketing agency. I was there a while ago, but you know, that was my first full time job and I was there for four years, which you know, in this day and age, starting out after your master's, you know, this is a pretty decent stint at a place when people job hop a lot. So there's a lot of different clients. I didn't have a specialty. I started off as a marketing analyst, you know, building statistical models and doing presentations, but also getting kind of exposed to the business side, which I realized I started to like the business side a little bit. So that was my first taste on the business side and the marketing side really, so using analytics and statistics on the business end.
13:30 So lots of different clients across retail and finance and every industry that you can imagine over those four years, and built up a lot of good, good relationship, right, So I had a lot of close peers and an age looking to like develop those in office sort of skills that I think might be hard for people to develop, and you know if we're not in person these days. So I did appreciate that, and you know, learning a lot on the business side and building personal relationships and you know, meeting a lot of great people. What would you say is your key lesson learned from that position.
14:14 I think the key lesson I may have hinted at it a little bit is just how important relationships are in business, and you know, learning a lot about the soft skills in life So in college math statistics you learn a lot of heart skills, you learn a lot of objective things and technical things and logic, but in business, relationships are very important and understanding people and treating people the right way. So, you know, developing that and learning that was probably the biggest evolution for me as as a first job. Yeah, and still being young at the time. That's good.
14:56 All right. Then you became a research statistician at Virginia Tech. That's kind of the enemy right of GA Applied Research Virginia Tech Applied Research Corps. Tell us about the organization and then your role. Yeah, so that was it's like a nonprofit spin off of the university. So the university gives seed money to these these nonprofits. So we called it vt ARC for short. So VTRC dealt with government contracts and my role was more of a on the statisticians side as well. So after after mercle, I was, you know, looking for for an opportunity to grow potentially, and I was at vtr for a short period of time. And when I realized when I was there it was on the nonprofit side and much more company side, was that wasn't the probably the best mover the best fit for me. Right, So you mentioned scraping knees and making Look, you make mistakes sometimes and sometimes even I don't want to say career moves our mistakes. There's things you learn there as well.
16:09 But it was a very much more technical, statistical role. And then I started to realize for myself, but that's something I want to to grow to grow out of. That's that's a good lesson. Yeah, right, Yeah, I. Think I learned a little bit about myself and the choices there. And realizing, you know, I wanted the business side excited me. I wanted to get back into something that was actually pushing further into the business side rather than pushing further into the technical side. All right, let's take our first commercial break right here. We'll be back in about sixty seconds with Jacob Zemmon.
16:52 You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four C. Why don't go away? More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Best in Wealth Management is family owned for two generations. They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management with a family feel for your closely held family business Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning, integrating your business planning with personal They will help put your money to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for more information. Advisory service is offered through Commonwealth Financial Network, a registered investment advisor. Join the Best and Family and let our family advise your family. That's Bestinwealthmanagement dot com for your complementary initial consultation.
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18:41 We are back with Jacob Zemmon. He is a WSI certified business strategy consultant with expertise in AI and modern digital Marketing. He's also the author of Is Your Healthcare Practice Stuck? And we will get back to that. You then went after vt RC Accenture. Great experience there, no doubt as a digital strategy consultant. Tell us about that. Yeah, so that kind of grew out of my desire to get you know, higher level on the business side. So it was more of a strategic role. And that's at the point where there was a big shift in my career path in industries. So we talked about how it you know, Merkle, there's all these different industries, all these different sort of clients. That wasn't really like a like a focus. I was hired at Eccentria to focus on life sciences. So that's where I really started to get that that experience and was I really enjoyed it.
19:40 So I picked Accenture because of the strategic role, more of a consulting role. This was in the before times, before COVID, so we were traveling to the client sites. For those sort of roles. It was typically like a Monday through Thursday every week, staying at hotels and traveling to the client and be kind of their their advisor and consultant, which was I think a really great experience both on the hey, developing those more higher level strategic, you know, consulting skills as well as diving deeper into the life sciences and healthcare industry.
20:24 Key takeaway would you say, so. There there's a there's a lot of takeaways from that. One is just how valuable clients are and how valuable their time is, especially when you know you're you're traveling to be there on site and you you know how how much you're you know they value your time for being there and making the most out of every single hour you're there. I think that was that was a big party for me to to make sure that you know, when I'm there and when I'm present, that the client's needs were coming first. So when I was at at Merkel for my first job, there were some client presentations and client facing sides of that role, but nothing like when you're when you're a consultant at a place at center.
21:17 So there you're you're sitting with them every day, you get to know them, but you want to really show that value and you know, keep bringing additional business to your to your firm and and your business right by developing those relationships and giving everything that you got and giving the highest quality, the highest quality work for them. And the clients were life science clients. Mostly, Yeah, so pharmaceutical clients. So those were my first pharmaceutical clients, you know, some big farmer names. We we don't typically say on the consulting side who we work for, like I for work later, But when you're on the consulting side, let's say I. I had some clients that were on a similar, similar size, similar competitors to that, and that was my first first step into those And you know, besides the skills that we mentioned of developing and really appreciating the client's time, I started to realize that healthcare and life sciences were were truly important to me.
22:26 In other industries that I worked in, sometimes I would have this complex of like, like whym why am I doing this? And different people have different feelings towards different industries. For me, you know, when I can see the results and the impact of bringing therapies or medicines to patients that can really change their lives and make them healthier, that made me feel a lot, you know, a lot more proud and made me feel better about myself than the other industries where there's nothing wrong with them. But at the end of the day, if you get someone to buy one company's car over another, or get them to get an additional credit card, there's nothing wrong with that.
23:11 I just didn't feel the connection that the personal satisfaction that I did when I started to see, you know, what we can do on the the like sciences and healthcare side and make people healthier and live longer. And I do realize that ye pharmaceutical companies in particular don't have the best reputations among certain industries, so not everyone will feel that way. Well to that point, you wanted to market associate director and it's this wasn't on your Bridge business card Digital marketing, channel, engagement, analytics, strategy and execution. That's a mouthful. Now I guess as to what that is, but I need you to explain it.
23:55 That is a mouthful, and I think the only reason for that title is so it's easier to be found on my job postings. That was not that was what we used. I'm pretty sure on my first call the recruiter said the exact same thing that you said. It's a mouthful, So to make it simpler. What we actually called the role, it was called architect, right, so it makes sense. So we were the architect essentially at MERC. Every major brand has someone who's an architect of the marketing plan. So we use the word architect because we would create blueprints, create the strategy, so there would be one marketing person who would own the actual strategy and execution of the marketing. So we would deal with the the how we target different whether it's either on the physician side or healthcare provider side, or on the patient side.
24:58 So so we did both, so we'd target on the physicians side, we target on the patient side. We would decide who would get which sort of marketing materials and when they would get them, and what we'd want to test for those. So a big thing on the marketing side for those is the testing and seeing what works. So you know, if you have different emails to talk about let's say, you know, efficacy or dosing, does it matter for different individuals if they see efficacy VERSU and then dosing or the other way around, right, So that's something that that we would test and different maybe different physicians, different types of physicians, whether they were more experienced or less experienced or in one state or another, it might actually be more effective to do one versus the other, or send them Some people would be better with email or some social media or it's or banner ads, you know.
26:01 So there's there's different things I would work for different individuals. So it was like kind of a constant test and learn process, and you know that, I feel like is probably the most important part of the job of the architect that I had at at Mark was testing, learning, readjusting, because you know, you can put together any blueprint, right, any plan for when you want to roll out different marketing materials, but you never really know until you. Can test it and you're measuring that carefully, Yes. Measuring that very carefully. I can give one example of this is something that I'm actually pretty proud of. There's Mark had an insomnia medication, has an issumni medication called Balsamra, And.
26:55 This is one where. The year that I came in, let's just say the marketing budget was lower than the year before that, right, so we had to had to figure out with a lower budget, how do we how do we still drive results from it? And the way that I did that was constantly testing and learning, and I kept kept like a PowerPoint deck of all the tests that we did and see like what worked and what didn't work. Even when something was like we tested two different subject lines and they weren't significant, I would keep that and say, okay, we can learn from this and this didn't matter. Twelve months after I did that, we were able to show that we actually grew the the art, like the scripts, right, the total scripts for that medication by thirty five percent year over year. So I was proud that I was able to take a marketing budget for a brand that we know is very marketing sensitive. So like we can tell from our our modeling, like when you market it, you know, it does better. When you don't market it, it doesn't do as well. So we kind of expected if you have a you know, X less percent marketing budget and that was a significant x less percent, that the total scripts would go down and our team was able to drive it higher. And I can't take full credit for for that, but I do think that the
28:28 the regular testing and adjusting that we did to kind of optimize every little thing that we can do was it was a big factor in that. All. Right, then you may be missing a company what was a Digitous Health next. Yeah, so digit Us Health. Yeah, it's an agency under Poles Group. So pobless is like a key Okay, yep. Goobless is like owns a bunch of agencies and digit Us Health is one of them. Yeah. And this was an executive role vp uh director data analytics more measuring, more using math, more, reading data and making decisions. Yeah. So it was really like a like a reporting team again that was still on the pharma side, uh, similar to Accenture, similar sorts of former companies as as marked that that level scale, but it was still kind of like a like an advisory role. That that position I took because I wanted to to start to lead my own teams.
29:30 And I don't know, that's a big New York agency, right, Yes, yeah, yep. So digit Us is a big agency in New York. There is the regular Digitas and then there's Digitas Health, which does specifically the life sciences. So that's the one that I was in. But yeah, they share the same building in New York, and we had an office in Philadelphia as well, people throughout the country. But yeah, they're they're they're big in in New York and I think they are also in Boston as well. They are because we talked about that. When did you decide you wanted to run an agency? And tell us what was behind the decision of joining WSI.
30:10 Yeah, Actually, probably the biggest factor in my mind set shift was thinking about how AI was impacting marketing, impacting what we were doing, and trying to get ahead of ahead of the curve. So if you think about how fast it has changed things, it's actually pretty crazy, right. So I it was just about a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago where I stepped aside from Digitus Health and you know, started my own agency under the WSI brand name. And around that time, I believe there was maybe one or two undergraduate programs in the country that had like a bachelor's in a related right. So just tout in perspective how new it is.
31:05 There was virtually no one in the workforce who had an education that would qualify them to do AI. But at the same time it was rapidly developing. Everyone was using chat, GPT. At that point you hear about all these uh these tools that are popping up and air generated websites and receptionists and how AA agents are going to take over for everything. So it was a very very rapidly developing thing that there there wasn't so much education on There wasn't so much, you know, a formal job experience that people had, but you kind of needed to have it right. So so working under the w s I brand name was a decision I made very heavily leaning into Okay, I think that AI is going to change marketing. I think is going to change businesses.
32:02 So I would like to get as many resources as possible that don't really exist anywhere else. Who are your target clients? Actually? You know what, let me pause that question. Let's take our second commercial so we don't get interrupted again. We'll be back in about one more minute with Jacob Zemmon. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helenet on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio.
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34:16 We're back with Jacob Zemon. He runs a digital marketing agency with a focus on effectiveness, results driven in AI. Who are your target clients? Yeah, so let's start with the healthcare industry. Right. So, as I mentioned before this this you know, this evolution of getting you know, sharper and sharper about understanding what you want. I realized that the healthcare industry is kind of where or my passion is, and I'm kind of on a mission to help these healthcare practices grow. So that that's the main area. And we're talking about the small businesses, right, your health and wellness practices clinics usually in the the one to twenty million dollar yearly revenue sort of range. So people who are not my targets are people who like work in hospital networks. Right, So that is a very much different beast. Uh, that's not what we do. But those the brick in mortar, your local practices, you know, some of them are being you know, be included in larger hospital networks, and some of them are kind of staying independent. So those more independent ones, more specifically, especially in the like the rehabilitation or movements sort of medicine groups, your PTO, ts chiropractors, sports medicine.
35:47 You know, things in those areas are the best sort of you know, fit for for our experience and. What we do, and what are some of the problems that you're solving for them. So there's quite a few. One common thing that I see happens with these these local practices is they start off in one way, right with on a small scale, with getting referrals and word of mouth and maybe getting some referrals, meaning from both from other doctors or from past patients. And they kind of grow a little bit and you know, they add a system here, they build a website there, but things really aren't aren't connected in a certain way. And then as the practice owners get a little bit older and their business grows a little bit, a lot of them feel like they might stall out or they don't know how to remove themselves from the daily practice. So the disconnected systems that in consistant leads for new patients, and then the owners feeling like they have to be the one providing a lot of the service as they're twenty thirty years into the practice, rather than being able to step away a little bit and more manage the business as they hire new healthcare. Yeah,
37:22 practice practitioners. So which gets into the book is your healthcare practice stuck? And I love the subtitle the care Blueprint that health and wellness owners used used to grow their practices by twenty five to fifty without becoming a full time marketer. A little bit about the structure interstate it's launching now, Yep, why do you decide to write the book? So I decided to write the book, I said, to kind of help these specific businesses get some clarity and grow. So a lot of the time they might feel that there's something missing, but they don't know the right steps to take. There's common problems that a lot of these healthcare practices kind of face, but a lot of them are also can be a little bit lonely there. They don't know what other people are experiencing, so it's a it's a very difficult space in that way. So from everything that I've seen from from working with them, I kind of start to hear a lot of the same issues come up again and again, but they, you know, they're not realizing that other people are having these issues.
38:46 So that that first main step is bringing bringing the clarity and understanding to what could be possible, and then On the other side of that is, as we just discussed, marketing and AI is also developing rapidly, so trying to keep it it modern and bring a modern perspective on you know, all these new terminologies and and these new strategies, and like what do they need to focus on and what do they not need to focus on? So you talk about the health and wellness and marketing trap, what have you observed. Mm hmm the health and wellness marketing traps? So that is that has a lot to do with these these disconnected systems and relying on referrals, so and not knowing quite the best way to target and focus their their marketing strategy.
39:42 Again realizing where their patients are coming from. Probably yeah, not not really where they're realizing where their patients are coming from, but also not even really realizing who should best own which part of the process. So with marketing, there is you know, you know, attracting leads, there's you know, educating them, there's converting them, there's follow up. And one thing I've seen with these health and wellness practices is that a lot of times these these systems are kind of disconnected. So they might have built a website with you know, one website developer a few years ago, and that person still kind of sits and owns it.
40:24 When they hire an agency to do their search engine optimization, their CEO and then maybe they have uh an in turn or office staff do some posts on social media, and then they get a CRM system, which is the relationship system where you do like emails and texts to patients and collect their data. They have that with with someone else completely, so they end up and this is more of like an organic way that they grow from like small business, from referrals to adding things to realizing that all these different aspects that should be connected should be giving the same brand and messaging are in like four or five different places. And I see a lot of websites where they have a blog section, but their blogs are not posted regularly, or living with their Facebook profiles, or they do some TikTok videos three years ago they try to do and then the TikTok videos just kind of stop. And you know, with one thing that we talk about is a big thing in healthcare. It's big in all industries, but especially in healthcare is trust and building building that trust. So it's not just about generating attention or capturing that attention. It's also about the right attention and building trust. So some of these things I see that they do actually don't really benefit or help trust either. So when they're they're looking at social media,
41:55 and you know, when you're using social media content, there's a way to be interesting without being too overly humorous, right, So I think finding that balance for healthcare practice is really important, really to say that, you know, for marketing, one of the big roles is don't be boring. So you don't want to be boring, but don't be boring doesn't mean that you have to be you know, you have to be overly humous humorous either, right. Yeah, So something that's that's not boring I talked about is showing behind the scenes videos of actual work in your in your office, in your practice, seeing showing people like what it actually looks like, doing short informational videos or educational things and like, oh I didn't realize that, you know.
42:44 So there's there are ways to elevate your professional brand and your practice brand while being interesting and collecting the right the right attention. Whereas that level of you know, social media content might be difficult if it's you know on your your office manager or your junior physician to kind of do it in their offers, but I'll just post something on Facebook, right, So there's there's a big disconnect from what I see between what a lot of practices are doing and what we see is what are considered best practices. What's the care strategy blueprint? Clarify, Attract, realize, and expand Can you explain that?
43:26 Yep? So those are the four steps in the process that I like to take when I'm working with a healthcare business. So Clarify means lead with strategy, Attract means attracting your patients. Realizing means you're realizing patients converting them to be your your actual patients. And then expanding is expanding your business. And you know, using the tools you need to finally grow. So these are in order for a reason. So we always lead with strategy first. So with clarity, we want to have clarity on what your business goals are, who your target clients are, what are you know, what tech do you have, what teams do you have, what's your brand voice and positioning right, and what's your twelve month plan? What's your twelve month goals?
44:16 A lot of that stuff is really difficult to prioritize when you're trying to manage marketing on your own, so leading with strategy is super important. A tract is the next stage where we're we're generating the leads, generating the new prospects for patients for them. So there's lots of ways that you can do it and organize the book this way, but the way we organize the tactics in these strategies are maybe a little bit different than what other people do. So under a track we talk about SEO and GEO and things like that. We talk about social media and building trust. All these things are ways where you can kind of get people's attention and build trust and get them to know about your brand before they become patients. So on the realized part of the patient journey, that's where we talk about your website and your communication systems like email and texts and things like that.
45:14 So getting the attention first and then moving to your website, because typically people will hear about your brand. You get attention, you generate those leads, and then they come to your website, and then we want to converting websites, and then when they convert we want to make sure that you're communicating with them and you know, saying the right messages, automating messages on texts and emails, and even really bringing back old patients and re engaging old patients. So that's another thing that we do with the realize and then expand is the next step where there's a couple of components of that. One is with the AI that we talked about, So using AI tools and A systems to really make things more efficient, grow your practice, and using those those tests and learn strategies that I mentioned earlier that I learned earlier in my career can be really effective. So regularly testing and learning to to really optimize things. So make things efficient with AI, optimize things, grow the practice, revalue your reevaluate your strategy. That's where you start to expand.
46:22 All right, one of my last questions is why should healthcare professionals not be afraid of AI? Hm hmmm. That's a good question, and I know the topic of AI can be controversial. What I will say is there's two extremes on the AI debate, which I don't think either are are fully accurate. There's ones that think that AI is a is a magic bull, it's a to everything, it's the great thing that's ever happened. And then some people are scared of it, like you mentioned, are afraid of it. Where that's going to impact them? I think responsible understanding AI tools and responsible AI use is going to be where you see the most successful businesses in the next three to five years. So what does that mean. That means understanding how AI tools can can help them and where not to. So, like we talked about making things more efficient and finding a fit for your practice, you can use AI in a way where it saves your team time on emails and communications and phone calls. You can use it to make your marketing better. There are ways to not use AI. So there are ways where people create AI generated content AI slop that can be hurtful. There are ways that people can ask for advice for AI that's not backed by the science and where it hallucinates that can be hurtful.
47:54 There are ways where people where the AI can can take jobs. Those are things that people are are afraid of. Or compliance related, you know, hippah. Compliance related, hip or related. So those are all like legitimate concerns, but at the same time, having a strong strategy for AI and knowing how to use it correctly and you know, adopting it in a responsible, compliant and an efficient way that's good for your brand and good for your your you know, patients and and and everything like that. You know, we hear some some stories where the patients actually start to appreciate some of the AI you said that they sort of see because it makes their experience better as well.
48:41 All right, last question, who in the viewing and listening audiences should reach out to you and why? Yeah, So, if you run a healthcare practice, a local healthcare practice, and you feel like you want to get some direction on your strategy. If you are I'm sure about what your marketing is doing, or you realize that your marketing and operations are in many different places and you want to kind of take a step back from managing everything yourself, that's a good place to start for Hey, let's have initial discussion. I'm always happy to meet people, have a call with them, you know, learn about their business, and then we mutually decide, hey, does this kind of make sense to keep the conversation going or not?
49:30 And your email addresses Jacob dot semon correct at WSI World dot com and the r L is. So it's just my last name group so Z E M O N group dot WSI world dot com. Perfect, Jacob. Thank you for being here. I know you're busy. I really appreciate the time. Thank you, Kevin, this was lovely. Thank you You're quite. Welcome, and thanks everybody for watching and listening. Listening, excuse me. This is a show about business, both successes and challenges. And if you get can sales, if you've got concerns wow about the sales effectiveness of your company. If you've got a team, whether it's even you or larger than you, and you're in Massachusetts, or you were referred by one of our clients and you'd want to learn more about implementing Sandler in your business, contact me. My website is go dot Sandler dot com, slash KJH or email me at Kevin dot heleanan at Sandler dot com. Otherwise, visit a Sandler dot com, visit Sandler dot com and find a training center that serves your area. We developed sales teams and individuals into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Listen. We're not right for everybody, but hey, maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you to producer and engineer one for another job well done.
50:41 Thank you one. Be sure to join us next Monday, July twenty seventh, at four pm Eastern and we'll have another great conversation. Until then, this is Kevin Hallanan. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host Kevin Helenan. If you missed any part of this episode, The podcast is available on Talk for Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio W four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Halenan and Winning Business Radio