Timothy Zercher 0:00

Well, Moisha, thank you so much for coming in, uh, joining us and spending some some of your valuable time. We really appreciate it. And thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh so first question what pulled you into the multi-location healthcare marketing and growth? And uh what was kind of the first, I guess we could say, like marketing system that was broken that you fixed?

Moishe Kaufman 0:18

Yes, I got into healthcare marketing at Brighter Strides about two years ago. I walked in and everything was siloed. A lot of vendors were servicing the same companies. There was a disconnect between marketing departments. So you'd have the SEO vendors, not speaking to a paid ads vendor. First thing came in, audited all the vendors, decided to bring a lot of the in-house or go to agencies that are outside the space that I've worked with previously who I trust and know, building out so dashboards for clean visibility, hired a coordinator to come in and just make sure everyone can go together. And the first step was making sure every department is able to speak to each other and to work together. So information is being shared between different departments. And it was how do we keep everything accountable? So everything informs each other and helps each other. If we're doing research on SEO, and we have keywords here that can help out paid ads and go into market auction insights on paid ads and look at how that goes there. We're doing content creation for blogs. Can we take that and give that to the social team? So it's about building an engine, connecting the loop, all going back to how do we get families into care faster and deliver them the best quality service and communicate that effectively.

Timothy Zercher 1:28

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. As someone in marketing, I have seen exactly what you're talking about, those silos that are so destructive because often you're often ending up bidding against each other, like your own team, wasting money and time. And I've seen that happen so often. It is refreshing someone that's paid attention to that. So you've also helped scale multiple kind of seven-figure budgets and build out really complex funnels. What's one dashboard metric that you tend to trust the most or pay the most attention to that you think other people are undervaluing, not paying enough attention to?

Moishe Kaufman 1:58

It's funny. I think that you look at any sector of marketing now, and it's a very different game than it was years ago. I've been in digital marketing now for about a decade, and you go through SEO, the metrics I would look at for a website performing is very different than I would have two years ago. You know, you're looking, we're in the age of zero-click attribution. You go through on paid ads, like what I used to track for, let's say Meta is so different right now. Like used to be in control. Now it's with a new Andromeda update. It would be like, here's my creative, you tell me what's going on, I'll check back in. You lose a lot of your autonomy there. So right now in the healthcare space, what I'm tracking the most is what is our speed to contact? And that speed to contact is not just from lead in to when our intake team speaks to them. But I want to look at so every part of the system from a lead comes in all the way into in services, how long is that taking? Where is the biggest issue is where we can streamline things? And how can we take the same systematic approach we do to marketing to get a lead into the door and going funnel to funnel to carry that through all the way to the end? So that goes down to our conversion rate from lead to in service and our time from lead to in service. Now, taking that and looking backwards from how we go through marketing is our messaging better. So adopt your referral is going to convert better across the board because that trust factor is ready there, then a paid ad. Starting all the way from the end of their in-service now. How do they get there quicker? How do they convert the best? And where did they come from? So it's going that playing the long-term game and optimizing for those two metrics, which are really one and the same.

Timothy Zercher 3:32

Absolutely. Absolutely. And tiny, tiny improvements in either of those metrics can have massive impact in the total ROI of a campaign or you move a one percentage point on a lead to in service.

Moishe Kaufman 3:44

You move up, you know, if your average timeline is looking at three months plus, some places are at six months plus, you move that back by a week. That's a significant advantage. The key thing here is early intervention really, really matters. Talk about neuroplasticity, how kids, you know, you try teaching a child a new language, they can learn it pretty quickly. You try to do that with an adult, it's much harder. So let's get the help to these kids they need as soon as possible. You have insurance issues, you have different depending on the payer, you may have certain regulations you have to follow that there is like fixed delays. But if there's something that is in your control and it comes to scheduling, it comes to having your team be more operationally efficient, know your numbers the same way you would for a regular marketing funnel, and then make very slight improvements.

Timothy Zercher 4:31

Absolutely. Absolutely. And and then watch as those slight improvements pay off huge over time. It's all about compound gains. Everything. Everything is, right? Especially in marketing, but I think almost in almost every industry it is. So you talk a lot about disconnected systems and how that causes wasted spin, frustrated families, wasted time. What is one of the first integrations that you look at when you're trying to build out a new system, when you're trying to eliminate the disconnect? What's what's like the first thing that you look at?

Moishe Kaufman 4:56

The first thing is how does each component inform the next? I like to think in, I believe I'm a systems thinker, but it's about flywheels. Everything has to follow the next part. And if I'm building something and it's not going to be a compound change, a result so far in the future, so far ahead of where you are now, it's almost not worth doing in the first place. So you need to do short-term things, but it's about how does this go that I won't have to do this and think about this again. I love to speak about the idea of owned media, rented media versus owned media, right? So you look at your runny ads, the second you stop paying for them, there's nothing there. So an SEO, people like to say it's definitely a step better than paid ads, but you also have the issue of there's going to be a new update every, every month, every quarter that you have to adjust with and you have to keep rolling with. So it does need a lot of nurturing and keep getting backlinks and people are going to be competing there. Creating the relationships with the providers in the community has the biggest effect for long term. So it's trying to look at, and that's in healthcare, but the idea is how do we create the maximal impact for long term while not like sacrificing the short term at the same time. So this is what we do right now get us the leads we need right now, the immediate numbers while building for the long term. That is the goal every time is first is gain visibility, complete understanding over the landscape you have. And then step two would be to get control. You'd be shocked at how many times you walk into a new company and now it's consulting and going to companies and they don't have access. Oh, this ad team made this account. We don't have that. Oh, we had this social team do this. We don't have access to that account. So it's like gaining control over the system, having a unified place that you have full visibility, you have control, and then it's implementing change that will all inform each other and build for the future.

Timothy Zercher 6:46

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if they're all in a unified place, you have individuals you can hold responsible as well. So I think that's the thing that kills me when groups have really, really fractured marketing systems. No one's responsible ultimately when the phone isn't ringing, when the leads aren't coming in, because it's always everyone can point a finger at somebody else for some other broken system. And you need to have one team, one person in charge focusing things.

Moishe Kaufman 7:09

Yeah, there's an intrinsic relationship between responsibility and authority. So I like to give team members the full control to do their job. Here's your task. You are responsible for it, you are compensated based for it. Always have to give people incentives to do their work, you know, beyond that. You have to also tie them to the larger mission of what are we doing? Why are we doing this for? What value are you bringing to the world, to this company, to yourself, beyond just a paycheck? It's amazing, you know, when you work in a career where you're helping children and you're changing lives of families. Hearing a mother say her child hugged her for the first time, spoke to her for the first time, it's really like heartwarming to hear that. And the idea that you could have a small part of that is amazing. It really makes the harder days really much easier to get by.

Timothy Zercher 7:55

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's the biggest part. Yeah. Doing work that actually has a larger, longer impact is worth a lot by itself outside of whether you get you get paid well for your job.

Moishe Kaufman 8:04

Yeah. When you tie that together and give someone unique responsibility, your job is this, own this. A team member comes to me and says, What do you think I should do? This or that. So what do you think? Oh, I think we should do that. Okay, great, do it. Why are you asking me? This is your domain, you own this. You want help with something? Sure. It's the same with you give someone control and power over it. Now you can you could hold them responsible, but also it lights a fire under them. They want to take it over. Like, this is mine. Here's work done out. Are you happy with this? Do you feel satisfied with this? You should be upset about it. This is your domain. This is not my domain. I ultimately, you know, you're gonna report back to me, but this is yours. Go own it, take care of it, giving each person that responsibility and then coming together and having a you know, a weekly stand-up call, like, hey, what did you do last week? What do you do in this coming week? What blockers do you have that I can eliminate? And it's you have that sense of collaboration, you have a task board that people can put on things there, you have a clear defined roles, that's how you find success.

Timothy Zercher 8:58

Absolutely. Absolutely. Completely agree. So last couple of questions that are are very, very marketing focused, right? Well, first one is what is right now the best marketing thing that your team does to bring new clients in outside of word of mouth, what's the the strongest performing channel or strategy?

Moishe Kaufman 9:15

It's funny. It's uh that changes on a regular basis.

Timothy Zercher 9:18

Yeah.

Moishe Kaufman 9:19

This is an old one. So there's tactics and strategies. The biggest tactic we're looking at right now is AI power lead response. So the gap between form submit and first human contact is where people are losing families. So if you can have AI bridge that gap with an intelligent first touch, that would be a text, a call, something that just acknowledges the parents immediately, and that first part gathers key information before a human follows up, that's a game changer. So building automated email nurture sequences for leads that are not ready to convert, educational content about ABA, what to expect, insurance questions, we create guides, we create lead magnets. The idea is, you know, 95% of your target audience is not in market right now. And if you're just competing for that, say 5%, it's it's probably less, it's probably 3%, to be honest. Yeah. You're competing at a very bad game. So it's how can we build for that long term? So building content pieces and the key thing now is taking the combo of AI speed with human-centered content is how we differentiate ourselves in a big way to be able to 10x each team member by go max out your usage on whatever subscription you have, go get yourself a second subscription and take these ideas we have for how to communicate authentically and get it out to people at all different points of the funnel and follow up and nurture them.

Timothy Zercher 10:38

Yeah, that makes complete sense. What is one marketing tactic that you're really just watching right now in the marketplace, whether it's one that's good or one that's really bad and just keeping an eye on it?

Moishe Kaufman 10:47

It's funny because I just spoke about AI powered lead responses.

Timothy Zercher 10:50

Yeah.

Moishe Kaufman 10:50

The bad AI-powered lead response of just throwing a chat bot that is not set up correctly, it's throwing on automations that are not configured, it's removing the human in the loop, removing the personality. So a very key thing. If you can improve a system that's already being done and you could take an admin task, take data entry, take something that will just help in a very small way, just remove 10 minutes of someone's workflow. That's the way to do it. When people are just like, oh, I could just replace these people, I can outsource it, I can get it done for like cheaper without looking at how is this actually going to help your team, help the families you're servicing. That's where I find it's very gimmicky. You have auto-replies on socials, customer service being sent to it. I mean, we've all had that experience. You're trying to reach a company and you're going through a loop and it's like, get me a human, get me a human. You're stamming zero on your phone. Yeah. That's something that we try to, it's like use every tool at your disposal to make this better, but make sure you're not losing the humanity.

Timothy Zercher 11:51

Absolutely. I love that. I think that more people need to hear it. The number of clients that come to me that are like, hey, we want to install a new chat bot on the website, and they have not even tested it themselves. They have no idea how its responses work. They have no idea how it was trained. So they have no idea what kind of responses it's actually going to generate. It's shocking because I've seen AI bots convert people for services that we don't even offer for clients before. And it's it's painful because it's like, well, now that parent is expecting a call to start speech therapy, and that's not something we do, and we've wasted weeks of progress for that potential kid, which sucks.

Moishe Kaufman 12:24

Absolutely.

Timothy Zercher 12:24

I mean, besides the brand damage in the marketplace that creates, because that's obviously, obviously significant too. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, we really appreciate you taking time, appreciate you sharing some of your experience. Hopefully, we can have you on again sometime to talk more marketing stuff. I know that uh you and I could probably talk about marketing all day long, but we appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely.