Clinic Marketing That Actually Works

We talk with Jennifer Church Kilkenny about what actually drives growth for cash-pay services in healthcare, from local search intent to email lists you control. We also get real about social media tactics, staff involvement, paid ads strategy, and the compliance lines clinics cannot cross. 
• her core client mix across aesthetic medical practices and the rise of med spas across specialties 
• using goals and local search trends to pick services, messaging, and differentiators 
• why the website is the most important marketing asset and why an email list compounds trust 
• building marketing permission into intake forms so you can ethically educate existing patients 
• when TikTok Live can outperform Instagram Live for reaching new people 
• avoiding forced humor and keeping marketing aligned with real practice culture 
• involving staff while using approvals, policies, and clear limits on personal posting 
• choosing Meta ads for low risk offers and Google ads for high intent procedures 
• HIPAA compliant marketing limits including why retargeting pixels can be risky 
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Transcript

Welcome And Show Purpose

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Greetings and welcome to iCare Leadership Live. This is the podcast for iCare leaders who want to level up their leadership, create better cultures, and improve the financial results of their clinics. Now, let's join the show. Okay. We're recording and we're live out there. So, yeah, my guest here today, everyone. Welcome to iCare Leadership Live. I'm Mike. You know me. I'm always here. But sometimes I have a guest, and today's guest is Jennifer Church Kilkenny. Jennifer, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Well, thanks for having me here.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

I love talking with marketing people because if you don't get the word out about your clinic, no one will ever know that it exists. And um so it's really important to get the word out. And I find um I just always enjoy talking to marketing people. They've got great ideas. And um you've been doing this for a little while. You work in the healthcare space, um, but maybe that's a good place to start. Is can you just tell tell me and the for the folks listening, you know, what types of clients you work with and what you do for them?

Who Jennifer Helps And Why

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Primarily I work with uh aesthetic medical practices, so plastic surgery, oculoplastics, um medical spas, dermatology. Um, but I do have the occasional vascular surgeon, gynecologic surgeon, cosmetic dentist, and uh even more so now uh those uh other specialties because they're all opening up medical spas. So that's that's kind of where I uh what my sweet spot is.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Okay. Yeah, you know, it's sound like you said, so many med spas opening up, which is interesting because um it just seems as though the the consumer-driven side of healthcare has grown a lot. And that's where marketing really can, I would think that's where it can come in, you know, that you're trying to speak to the the discretionary spending. Am I right?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, especially when it comes to practices that have largely been focused on purely medical and insurance-based care. A lot of the time they will contact us and uh say, you know, insurance isn't paying out like it used to. We're opening this cosmetic cash side practice, or we've already had this cosmetic cash side and it's just not doing as well as it needs to. Yeah. And so we kind of we help them grow so that their uh their profitability goes up.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

That's good. We that's what we want. We want that profitability to go up. And you know, we're um we're streaming the show live here, and people can comment. We did have a comment from Amy Ford saying, hi Amy, she's out there. Amy works in the clinical research world, uh, which interestingly it makes me think that clinical research, you know, if you have a clinical business and you add clinical research, in a way you're trying to market yourself.

Clinical Research As A Marketing Boost

SPEAKER_01 3:15

You're trying to get people to pay attention to your studies and maybe join in. Have you ever gotten involved with that type of uh effort to try to promote clinical research at all?

SPEAKER_00 3:24

A lot of the time when it comes to clinical research, whatever our company is working with the practice to conduct the clinical research are the ones who are investing in the marketing and advertising.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

But we always want to try to take advantage of that whenever we can. That really does increase the need potential for practices. And I worked with dermatology clinics specifically that are very heavily involved in clinical research, and it is definitely a big boost in marketing opportunities. It's a little more difficult though. There are a lot more restrictions.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

50% off clinical research. Can't really do that.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Can you not so much, not so much, but um yeah, so it can be a little difficult in that regard. And uh, we typically don't uh spend a lot of time in there, but we don't really have to either. It's um okay, sure. It's pretty, it's a really good way to get people through the door to okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

So I know that you do a lot of work in the social media realm when it comes to promoting clinics. What you know, if a clinic comes to you, maybe they are a dermatology business or ophthalmology, they and they want to grow their oculoplastics, for example, or some area that's more cosmetic or discretionary, but they haven't really done much in the world of marketing. What would be like your first couple things that you would want to find out and start looking at growing for them?

Start With Goals And Search Trends

SPEAKER_00 5:00

I wouldn't just look at social media. Okay. Yeah. I would um I first have like a discussion with them about what their goals are, what their their immediate needs are, what their long-term goals are. See what's working, what isn't, what specifically they're looking to promote and get more people through the door for. Since we're talking about RP requests, why don't we just focus on the left-request and channel? You're trying to get more left-requested patients. The first thing I would do is I would actually go and look at search trends on the internet for their local area and kind of see what people are looking for specifically and what need isn't necessarily being met in the community and starting there. And then that would inform a lot of the uh marketing efforts and both for the website and for social media. And uh, you know, I'd also look at um the need for new leads versus the uh, you know, if if it's a established ophthalmology practice like you brought up, uh we would have discussions about how can we market ethically uh to the medical patients? Can we market to the medical patients? And if we can't, can we establish uh a uh a routine in the practice where we're getting authorization from medical patients to market to them? Because it's a lot easier uh to convert people who already know, like, and trust you, and and send out email newsletters to them and educate them about the procedures that you offer and getting them through the door for something cosmetic than it is to convince someone brand's thinking you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a plastic surgery procedure. And in that case, we might try to get them through the door with something less costly, low risk.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

So they can experience the practice, get to know them, and and then eventually scale up to something more invasive, more involved, any more uh expensive.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Okay, yeah, sure. Uh maybe like a neurotoxin injection or something like that. This is more affordable. Um, you know, you talked about looking into what people are searching for, and this is not something I know a lot about. And so it's not it's kind of like a voodoo thing for me. I'm like, okay, tell me more. So, like, give me an example. So let's say that I'm occuloplastics and I want to find out what people are searching for. What type of what kind of insights could I get? I'm assuming people are out there saying, How can I fix my eyelids or I don't know, tighten up my cheeks or something. What what are things that you might see that might give you clues about what to do next?

SPEAKER_00 7:49

It's uh it's a very involved and time-consuming thing. But um, you know, that there are a lot of tools out there that tell us exactly what people are searching for.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And it's it's about, you know, narrowing it, like zoning in on the local area and just knowing how people search for things on uh in search engines, knowing what questions they're asking, uh not just with search engines, but you know, those large language models. The AI chat can continue to quite all of them. Um what questions they're asking uh from there. And um, and then narrowing it down to specific key phrases um that people are searching for. So if the people, some people might be searching for blood photoplasty near me, but a lot of them are searching for things like how do I get rid of my under eye facts? You know, oh my eyelids are drooping. Oh, the crow's feet are so bad. Yeah. And um, and so we zero in on those kinds of trends, but then we also look at other things. So it's like, you know, they offer other surgery procedures, you know, maybe they also do rhino plasti. You know, we'll look at the trends for there too and try to determine again, like what need isn't being well met in the community, or if it is being met in the community, how can you differentiate? Uh and and then we go from there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, this is something I I need to learn more about. This like figuring out what people are searching on to kind of get into using their words, like figuring out what words are they using and trying to meet that need uh that they might be having. We had another, we had a question pop in uh from Amy, my friend Amy

Website First Then Build Email

SPEAKER_01 9:39

here. Do you think a good website and social media presence are a must-have for clinics these days? Is one more important than the other? What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yes, and yes. Uh, your website is always your most important asset. It's the one that you own. You don't own your social media. Uh your social media account could disappear tomorrow. Social platform could disappear tomorrow. Your website should be your number one priority, and also your email list on that too.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Uh, yeah, the power of the of the email list is really big because you talked about yeah, communicating to your existent patients, right? And trying to see if you can reel them in. And I know there are certain requirements, right? You you have to get them to okay that, right? How do you how do you get them to do how do you know if they've done it yet or not? And then how do you get them to to agree to marketing?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

That was interesting. We lost my camera. We lost the camera view. Oh, and it's gone again. Okay, you can hear me though. So I can't do it.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

I can hear you, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Yeah, I don't know. So your question was um about approval approval. How to get usually that's an intake question. So during the intake process, I recommend that they do forms that include a approval for marketing, that they accept marketing messages. And uh because they all give their email address and their phone number and they accept getting updates about their upcoming appointment. They get and then uh text messaging, they want to get reminders about an appointment that's coming up, right? Um, you're already sending those out, but that's the only thing that they have uh given permission to do, but if you can get them to also accept marketing messaging, then yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Okay, so you gotta you gotta get that in writing somehow,

TikTok Live Versus Instagram Live

SPEAKER_01 11:52

right? You know, one of the things that I have seen with a doctor that I know in the Houston area who is a plastic surgeon, is he likes to go live on TikTok. And not everyone is a TikTok user, but I like to use TikTok and I look at TikTok. And because I know him and I've followed him, he pops up and he pops up a lot, actually. And he talks about the procedures that he does. He talks about and people ask him questions like, hey, what is a mommy makeover? What can I expect, you know, from from this kind of procedure? And he'll talk about it. You know, he's he's very direct and explains all that stuff. And to me, that seems like an amazing uh thing to do. Are you seeing doctors doing that more and more? Do you think that going live on TikTok or Instagram is a good move? What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

It can be, yeah, it definitely can be. And I've had I've had a couple of clients who were able to do that, want to do that. That's part of it, right? And it can be very beneficial. Going live, particularly on TikTok, is very beneficial. So if you're trying to grow on TikTok, live stream is a very big deal. Um, on Instagram, I don't see people going live as often. Uh, I feel like it might be happening more frequently now. And it is beneficial for the people who are already following you on Instagram uh because they'll see you as live at the top of their window there in your app on their phone. But going live on TikTok, uh, you actually have a higher chance of reaching brand new people. So on Instagram, it gets pushed out to your followers more. Uh on TikTok, it's getting pushed out to everybody because it's not just your followers who see the general live, but it also shows up in other people's feed. Okay. If the live is going well, yeah, right. Then then it gets fed to other people who might have an interest based on their algorithm.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Okay. This show is sponsored by Seasoned Advice HR Services, where I help eye care businesses to make more money and save more money by hiring better, retaining better, and reducing your HR risk. If you would like an HR assessment or ongoing HR support, please reach out to me at seasoned-advice.com. I was going to, it's funny, I was gonna pull up this guy's Instagram, but because he's a plastic surgeon, there's actually a whole bunch of graphic content on there. And so I'm like, maybe I don't want to pull that up. But he does there's they try to infuse humor in some of these clips also. And I've seen this with many different providers. Is that something you recommend to doctors is to make things funny, maybe get the staff involved, do some viral dance clips or whatever? Has that been useful?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

I think it depends on the culture of the practice. It's um a lot of people are hesitant to get involved in social media because that's what they think they have to do to succeed. Okay, and it really isn't. It it's really about authenticity. So I've worked with practices where they were all about it, but that was their personality. And then I've seen people try to force it, and that backfires in a few different ways. Not just that it comes off as an authentic to the viewer, but also if you manage to pull it off and you draw in people for it, you know, they come in and they're um they are thrown off because the culture that they encounter once they walk through the door is not what they were sold. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Interesting, yeah. That makes sense. Be authentic, right? You know, you don't want to um you don't want it to not reflect your current um your actual culture.

Staff Content With Clear Guardrails

SPEAKER_01 16:17

You know, one thing that I have recommended to practices, because I think that it's a good way to get the staff involved, is to find a staff member who's really savvy in social media and see if you can get them involved. Hey, can you create some fun content for our page to help promote the products that we sell or our procedures? And some people are really excited to run with that. Do you think it's a good idea to enlist the staff? Like make, let's say that you're a physician and you're not so whatever creative. Do you think it's a good idea to enlist the staff to help with that? And what are maybe some pitfalls that that could arise?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Staff should absolutely be involved because it's it's a team effort. The whole practice is a team effort, right? But you know, you definitely want to have some guard rules in place and uh policies and procedures uh related to content approvals and uh planning content and not not so much just letting people just oh, we're gonna do this and then we're gonna just post it that like then it needs to be part of a larger plan uh most of the time. And uh yeah, just being careful with policies and procedures because sometimes content goes out that the physician would not have approved. And I know you and I had a conversation about some recent examples of that. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Yeah, there was, yeah. So let's get into that a little bit. So there was a um, I think the one we talked about was a I think it was an OBGYN clinic in California, I want to say, where I believe the employee posted on her personal profile, it might have been the company, uh, but she it was a very she was trying to be funny, but it was ended up being very off-putting, I think, and very offensive. And it was really lacking in in in perspective. And um I can't remember if it was done on the company, if it was done on the company profile, that was one, that was definitely bad.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

But if they are employees and staff, then um posting about the practice on their personal profiles, most of the time I would say it's a no-go. And if it is happening, it needs to be primarily posted on the company page. If it's not going to be posted on the company page, it shouldn't go out anywhere. And uh, so even with private social media behavior related to work, there needs to be a policy in place.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yeah, totally agree with that as a HR practitioner that be really clear because I've seen people get in trouble. And this young lady did, multiple people lost their jobs in this situation. And if and for those of you all that saw the content, you would probably understand why. And I think you know, maybe that's one of the risks of having a social media page that is very fun and and humorous, is that maybe people might think, oh, that's kind of how we do things, and maybe I'll make a funny video on my account and share it. And so I think if you're gonna be funny and humorous and stuff, there you need it even more clear, be more clear with your staff. Hey, this is funny and stuff, but that's our that's the business, you don't post about it, and then there's HIPAA concerns and everything like that, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely HIPAA concerns. And um, when you're curating content for the practice that involves patients, more authorization forms.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah, yeah. You gotta get you gotta exclude the private, the PHI from the from those uh from this. What um, yeah, so we've kind of touched on social media. Let's say that you know that there's an office that doesn't want to do the live thing. You've talked about how that can be beneficial. You know, what are what are other things? You know, we've talked a little bit about the newsletter. What are other things a clinic could be thinking about besides doing LinkedIn Live or TikTok lives and sending newsletters and things? Is there any other kind of tricks up the sleeve that clinics could be thinking about trying?

Paid Ads Strategy Meta And Google

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Uh, don't sleep on paid social media ads. They they can be really beneficial, particularly with uh drawing people in some of those like low risk treatments to get people through the door. Then you wow them and then they convert to higher procedures, as long as you have the training in place within the practice to convert people from the lower price procedures up to the higher price procedures. But yeah, meta-ads are really great to that. Google ads are good for the higher price point. So if you're trying to just market surgeries and things like that, Google ads are better for that because people already have the intent in place. So when I'm on Google, if I'm set an ad for Bluff Robusty, it's because I'm actively searching for it. So that's a good place to have the surgery promoted via ads on social media. And a lot of practices make this mistake. You don't want to be trying to sell people on the surgery on social media because you're interrupting their feed with something that they may or may not be interested in looking for right now. Their ready to buy mindset isn't quite there. But what they will take action on is neurotoxin, facials, appeals, micro noodling, sometimes even lasers, but that depends. But um yeah, on social media ads, that's too start lower on Google ads, start higher. Don't try to advertise for the lower price point things on Google at all. The cost per click is too high. On Meta, it's lower. So that's the strategy that I'm always um telling people to use. That's what you got. That's how you have to approach it.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

That that's blowing my mind right now because, you know, I don't know. For most people, maybe I'm like I like to think I'm like most people. That's probably not nearly as true as I would like it to believe. But I just think, oh, ads are ads. But that makes total sense. If I'm going on Google and I'm searching for something as specific as blephroplasty, or or maybe I might just say, like, hey, can you whatever get rid of my wrinkles or I don't know what? You know, you're you're looking for that thing. You're much more farther down the funnel, the sales funnel, than someone who's just like flipping through Instagram. And that is that seems like a genius tactic right there. I had a thought that kind of just like it went through my brain and it went right back out. But I'm sure I will, I'm sure I will think about it again. Gosh, I love that. I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:34

It's like it was there and then it was gone. Yeah, it'll come back to me if it's really that important.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

It had something to do with you know, grabbing people's attention in the moment there, and had something to do with targeted ads. Because you can, on like Meta, for example, Facebook, you can drill down a little bit more, right? Like you can you can help to refine who sees that ad, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Oh, yeah. And there's so many different ways that that can be done uh in the ad dashboard in order to make sure that you're targeting the right people. Uh demographics in terms of interests and behaviors. Um, because we all know that meta is tracking us. If we're logged in, it's tracking us all over the place. And uh, you know, so interests and behaviors in general are great ways to target uh people on meta location as well. Uh, one of the things that I try to do is encourage practices to invest in some market research, uh the local area. You know, the more affluent zip codes nearby. And keeping in mind uh how people are in the area travel because certain parts of the country people are willing to travel an hour to get to a practice, whereas others are like, it's more than 10 minutes away, I'm not interested. And so it really depends on the culture of where we are in the country. And so these are this is information that I get from my clients about uh behaviors of like how far is your farthest client away from your practice, and how far are they typically on average? Um, and then looking at the more affluent zip codes, if we can zero in on those, yeah. And that depends on the goals of the practice

HIPAA Limits Retargeting And Tracking

SPEAKER_00 25:21

as well. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that we can target people within Meta, but then there's also some things that as great as they are for marketing, we cannot use them. Uh, and that's because of HIPAA.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

For sure. Like some of the big hospitals have been sued for engaging in these practices. Wow. And now the smaller clinics are also being sued. And that's usually how it goes. It's like they'll start with like a big company and then it'll start to trickle down. And that big company getting sued is like a warning for all the smaller ones to stop doing that thing. Okay, fix the thing. Right. So, for example, you know, we used to install what's called a pick pixels on the website. So anyone who visited the website got tracked by Meta. Right. And then we were able to deliver ads to them in Meta. We've all experienced this. We search for a product and suddenly we're seeing the ads everywhere. It's Google ads, it's meta ads, it's all of it. And it's because of the tracking that was installed on the website. Can't do that in medical or even aesthetic medical. Oh, wow. Because people see it as a violation of privacy and they have proven this in court. So, as beneficial as retargeting ads are, yeah, I don't even allow the pixel to be installed on the website, even if we're not using it because of the perception.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Okay, good to know. Yeah, good to know. That's one thing you've got to keep in mind there. Um I'm wondering, you know, I'm gonna assume here that dermatology is is really progressive and like they're they're kind of doing a lot in the marketing and advertising just because you know, when you think about cosmetic and you think about discretionary spending, I think dermatology, are there other specialties where you feel like they could learn something from dermatology and maybe be more aggressive in how they promote what they do? Like maybe there's a missed opportunity that they're maybe because they're gun shy and they feel like, oh, we shouldn't market that heavily. You know what I mean? Like, do are doctors reticent about being more aggressive on advertising and marketing, you think, than they need to I the ones that I've seen that are the most hesitant, and it's because they've been burned a lot, because they are not familiar with terms of service are gynecology and gynecologic surgery practices.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

And it's not even about like the example that we just discussed where some staff members did something inoffensive that was not approved and would not have been approved. It's just basic marketing and uh usually advertising as well. And uh, you know, I actually gave a talk on this at the AMSVAL show years ago discussing, you know, how difficult it is to advertise specifically, advertise, pay advertising, certain procedures because of how the platform perceives them. But that there's ways around it if you know how to talk about it, where to send people, the messaging needs to be precise and careful.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

I'm starting to draw some conclusions about what you're talking about here.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yeah, you know, it's like certain procedures, you know, there are many different benefits. And if you just kind of zero in on a couple that are, you know, more health and less sexual health, you have better outcomes in terms of having your ads be permitted on the platform. Wow, okay, and not having your ad account shut down, not having your Facebook shut down.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Yeah. So like I've I've run into quite a few uh gynecology practices where and it's frustrating because it's it isn't what the platform is saying it is, because of course they don't actually know what they're talking about. Platforms, they don't know, they're not doctors. Yeah, um, but um it can be it's challenging, but it's possible because we've done it.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Okay.

unknown 29:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

That that's interesting. I mean, that that would uh I could go down a whole rabbit hole of patriarchy and uh different different um standards, I think, based on the gender.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

I have stories.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yeah, well, um yeah, you know, these things are important too. Yeah, that's a that's an interesting point. I had never thought about. Awesome. Well, you know, I I really think I think that I suspect that medical providers tend to be more reticent probably than they should be, to get the word out and and aggressively market. And I think that's a great service that you provide for that community. And I've enjoyed, I I I've definitely learned a few things here.

How To Connect And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_01 30:25

How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about how you can help their clinical business with marketing?

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Oh, uh, we are at totalsocial solutions.com and you just fill out the contact form there. They come directly to me and others, but me and we can set up uh initial phone call, learn more about the business, what their needs are, what their goals are, and discuss what's working, what's not working, and come up with a plan uh to execute on in order to help them reach their goals.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Awesome. Great. Well, I'll put a link to your website in the show notes. And yeah, Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your your wisdom here with me, and I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

No, thank you. And uh thank you for your patience with my technical issues today. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Awesome. Well, that brings this episode of iCare Leadership Live to a conclusion. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app and share it with someone who would value the content. I promise to bring you more guests and content to help make you a better iCare clinical leader. I also invite you to subscribe to my HR newsletter for iCare leaders. You can find information about that at seasoned advice.com. Now go out there and lead with confidence.