The Virtual CMO

Building a Marketing Strategy to Reach an Unreachable Audience with Colin Jeffries

September 06, 2021 Eric Dickmann, Colin Jeffries Season 6 Episode 8
The Virtual CMO
Building a Marketing Strategy to Reach an Unreachable Audience with Colin Jeffries
Show Notes Transcript

In episode 89, host Eric Dickmann interviews Colin Jeffries. Colin is an entrepreneur, podcast host, and Marketing & Communications Director at BrightView. He has over a decade of experience helping organizations reach the right audiences at the right time with messages that galvanize the best prospects to action. Jeffries’ background in digital marketing, content marketing, advertising, branding, strategy, and segmentation help him bring a holistic perspective to help organizations grow. Colin has honed his skills by serving in a wide array of industries. In addition to serving a broad range of healthcare practices and providers, Colin is a pioneer in direct-to-patient marketing for addiction recovery. He was one of Venue Magazine's 40 Under 40 and is a sought after speaker on the topic of behavioral health marketing.

For show notes and a  list of resources mentioned in this episode, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/building-marketing-strategy-reach-unreachable-audience-s6ep8/

A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.

The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at: 

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Eric Dickmann:

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Hey, Colin. Welcome to the Virtual CMO Podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Colin Jeffries:

Eric, thank you so much for having me looking forward to our conversation today.

Eric Dickmann:

Yeah, same here. Well, I know you're a fellow podcaster. We'll get into that a little bit during the show, but it's always nice to have fellow podcasters on the show and we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics and a popular topic for our audience, which is all around digital marketing and how to reach an audience. And I'd love it before we dig into things, if you could just give a short introduction to yourself and a little bit about your background.

Colin Jeffries:

Absolutely. So I've been doing marketing for a little bit over a decade. I have a variety of experience, everything from events and hospitality to healthcare where I currently am. Financial services, real estate, home improvement, so you name it and within healthcare, a couple of different opportunities that have everything from nephrology to life sciences, to orthopedic, sports medicine, spine care, and then now in substance use disorder and mental health, which is what BrightVIew does. So I have the privilege of leading BrightView's marketing team. Right now we're a team of four, when I started it was a team of zero. So have had the opportunity to really grow BrightVIew's marketing footprint, to grow the responsibilities of the organization from a marketing perspective, to grow our influence, things of that nature, which has been really, really exciting. Right now, BrightView has 40 centers in four states, and we are actively growing because unfortunately, a substance use disorder and addiction is a really awful thing. And there has just been a ton of it throughout, primarily the Midwest. So we're really trying to grow to meet that need.

Eric Dickmann:

One of the things that I thought was fascinating about your background is you've got experience in both B2B and B2C, and in the for-profit and the not-for-profit world. And there are a lot of factors that distinguish those as being very different. And so maybe just to start out, what have you seen moving from the for-profit world to the not-for-profit world as being some of the biggest challenges?

Colin Jeffries:

I think the interesting thing is in the for-profit world, there's always discussion about return on invested capital, return on ad spend, and things of that nature. And I think that a lot of times the conversation in the not-for-profit world from the outside perspective is more so about getting grant money and things of that nature. But what a lot of folks don't realize is that for-profit and not-for-profit is really just tax status. And so a lot of the conversations that we're having in the for-profit space are the identical conversations that we're having in a not-for-profit space with the exception of what do we do with some of this capital. And so I would say from a marketing perspective, you know we're still trying to reach the same audiences per se, right? We all have our target segment that we're trying to reach. We all have our niche that we're trying to pitch if you will. And so those elements are actually identical, dare I say, very, very close. But some of the differences are generally in the nonprofit space, you're also trying to reach folks like grant writers. So my writing team is more involved with grants if you will from a non profit perspective and a for-profit perspective, obviously. But I would say, the important things about marketing the fundamentals, having a clear message, having a clear audience, making sure that you're testing and you're optimizing your messaging are all very similar across both for-profit and not-for-profit.

Eric Dickmann:

I think sometimes there's this misperception out there that in the not-for-profit. world that they really don't spend a lot of money or they don't do a lot of marketing. And I think sometimes the opposite is true. They have to do a ton of marketing to raise the awareness, to reach their target audience, to pull in clients, to pull in that money. Would you agree?

Colin Jeffries:

Yes, absolutely. From what I've seen I think there's a misperception of unsophistication, if you will, and then not for profit space. And that travels across industries. You know sometimes, academia. Is seen as being not as sophisticated as the private sector. Sometimes the public sector is is seen as not being as advanced or as cutting edge. So I think that's a myth or misconception that lots of different verticals deal with. And not-for-profits certainly are not absent in that discussion.

Eric Dickmann:

Well and you've got a challenge too, because the clients that you serve, they're not the easiest people in the world to reach, right? You know, you look at some of the marketing that happens in the B2C world. You want to go buy a new pair of shoes you go to Macy's, you get re-targeted all over the place. That's a fairly easy customer to reach with your product, right? But you're talking about people who are suffering from addiction, who might not be on their phones, might not be on certain websites to be able to find. So how do you reach this unreachable audience?

Colin Jeffries:

Well, it's a huge question. That's the question that I've been really dedicated to solving the past several years since I've I joined BrightView and for context for your audience, so you know, we joke in marketing that everybody wants to reach this suburban housewife, right? She's got a couple of kids, she's making healthcare decisions for them, she's got a husband, likely, she's making decisions for him. She has expendable income, you know? I mean, And in there are billions of dollars spent by Kantar and Nielsen and Arbitron and all of these other organizations. How do you reach this person? What are her psychographics? What media is she consuming? How is she consuming that media? What messages really speak to her? What messages really don't speak to her and so on and so forth. And then on the flip side of that, Okay, somebody like on BrightVIew, for example, our average patient is in their thirties. And so how do you reach somebody who's in their thirties? Who's most of our patients unfortunately are unemployed, most of our patients do not have reliable transportation, many of them are housing insecure. So now you're starting to talk about somebody who literally has no expendable income. Who does not have commercial insurance in a lot of cases, because that's generally carried by the employer. And you sort of go through the list. Well, no one's spending money on this person's media consumption habits, how this person interacts with different messages? And you know car dealers, you mentioned Macy's and selling shoes, Amazon, all of these giant retailers that can afford to spend money to segment their audience, to analyze the psychographics, to build out customer profiles or archetypes and so on. They're absent for these folks who we consider, essentially like housing insecure, unemployed, and so on and so forth. So it is a huge challenge. Because when you think about your own media consumption habits and when your audience thinks about their media consumption habits, When you listen to podcasts, when you listen to the radio, you're likely driving in your car to your job. Okay, well, if you are struggling with transportation insecurity or if you're struggling with unemployment, you're not driving to and from your job. So you're not listening to the radio, you're not listening to podcasts, your media consumption is limited in that regard. If you don't have stable housing, you're likely not sitting on your couch or sitting in your bed watching television, you're likely not taking your laptop in streaming Tubi TV or Amazon Prime, or some other streaming platforms. So OTT might not be an effective way to reach you. And the list goes on, right? I won't go through every marketing tactic, but suffice to say it's very difficult to reach somebody who is disconnected in those ways. So, what we did is we just started experimenting with things. I'm a huge believer in the growth hacking mentality of applying the scientific method to marketing. That's a Sean Ellis reference there. Kudos to Shawn, he's wrote the book growth hacking or hacking growth, I think. A great marketing mind, learned a lot from him. So very interesting because. I sort of took that model and we can make some reasonable assumptions about bright use patient population. But I didn't want to just assume, and test and scale based on assumption. So we did focus groups. This was obviously pre COVID. When you could do those sorts of things in person. Did focus groups to try to figure out, Hey, when you were in active addiction, what media were you consuming? My hypothesis was these folks are not spending time on Facebook because Facebook has a correlation, not Facebook in particular, but social media, excessive social media use in general has a correlation to things like depression, anxiety increases. So my philosophy, my hypothesis was, Hey, if folks are already struggling with things like mental illness, they're probably spending less time on social media. I was wrong. I assumed that they were spending more time on subreddit sites like Reddit or Imager, 9Gag, those sorts of things, but that was actually incorrect. So it was great to sit across the table from actual patients and talk to them about their media consumption habits to really unpack where they're spending their time or where they were spending their time in active addiction. So that way I was able to use those media sources to reach other folks who were currently in active addiction. So that was really beneficial. We then took that and we created some messaging around it, we tested that again, using surveys, using focus groups, using one-to-one interviews. Talking to real people who met our patient, segment if you will. I hate to say archetype because they're actual patients. So even better than an archetype. But really getting from them what they thought. And the really fascinating thing is Eric, you seem like a very polished marketer, I'm sure you're extremely intelligent. And you're used to people asking you our opinion, asking you to weigh in seeking your wisdom and your advice on a variety of topics. And the fascinating thing is when somebody struggles with addiction, they're so used to being written off to being call it stigmatized, that no one cares about their opinion. So as soon as we gave them an opportunity to help other people then get into treatment, based on the marketing that we were leveraging, it was very refreshing to have them open their eyes and say, it's so exciting that you value my opinion and you value my insight, I would love to provide that to you. And so it was fun to engage in those conversations because frankly they're they were used to being written off.

Eric Dickmann:

Well I think what's so interesting about what you're saying is this not only applies to your specific business and the customers or the clients that you're trying to reach, but this really applies to any business and you see businesses making the mistake all the time of making assumptions about their target customers and where they're going to be and what types of media they're using. But oftentimes it's not really backed up by a whole lot of data. And it sounds like you really went through the effort of saying, you know, before we spend a lot of money on this, we're going to find out really what might work or what might have the best potential of working. And I think a lot of businesses could learn from them.

Colin Jeffries:

That's exactly right. And the nice thing about this is it's never too late to do that. And it's very easy. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up an offsite focus group and bringing in people who meet your customer archetype to interview them. It's almost as simple as if you have a lobby. If you have a waiting room, if you have a website, you can interact with folks on your social media channels. If, if that's the easiest way to do it. If you have a showroom, if you have a lobby, if anything of that nature, you can sit across from people who are your customers and talk to them about their media consumption habits, about how they know about your business, about why they are or are not leaving reviews for your business, those sorts of things. So absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of just developing those IRL in real life relationships, if you will.

Eric Dickmann:

Well how many times do people even like when they get a new client, do they even not ask, where did you hear about us?

Colin Jeffries:

You would be surprised. I mean or the answer is, I don't know, and that's acceptable. And we're not digging in and asking. Okay, well, you know, let me lead the witness a little bit. You can really answer the question specifically off the top of your head, but did you see a radio? Did you hear a radio spot? Did you see a TV spot? Something of that nature, where we're sort of making suggestions and then they're able to say, oh yeah. I think it was a TV spot that I saw.

Eric Dickmann:

Yeah. So after you did all this research, you started to really understand what kinds of media your target clients were consuming. What then did you find was working from a digital marketing perspective or did you broaden out, did you use other channels as well?

Colin Jeffries:

So we did start small. Again, I'm a proponent of testing and scaling. So we started, obviously you have to be able to be found, so we started doing some search engine optimization. We did that before focus groups because I don't need a focus group to tell me that people are looking for us online, right? So we started to do some SEO, we obviously then invested in SEM, we started to do some Facebook ads. It turned out that YouTube was a hugely consumed media by folks in active addiction. So we developed some spots and started running some highly targeted pre-roll on YouTube. And then it turns out that direct mail was actually surprisingly effective. Very fascinating. So we started to use direct mail in a limited capacity because again, a lot of folks that we're trying to reach are struggling with housing insecurity. And so for us to expect that we can just blanket mail or do every door direct mail in getting an effective response. A little bit foolhardy, I would say there's unfortunately not a great way to reach the patient population that we're trying to reach using direct mail, but we have seen pretty decent responses from it which again came out of those surveys and out of those focus groups. So yeah, we really leverage that. Not I wouldn't say to form our marketing strategy per se, because we kind of knew what the messaging was that we wanted to convey. We did find out what was more important to folks. They didn't really care about the qualifications, if you will, of the folks that were providing medical care or clinical care. They really cared about can you see me quickly? And so we did shift our messaging a little bit. It wasn't overly focused on provider qualifications or anything of that nature, but it was very focused on quality of care and they, and we found out through this endeavor that patients really cared about, well, can you see me today? Can you see me in the next four hours? Can you see me right now? And so we pivoted our messaging according to that, but it definitely informed our tactical execution.

Eric Dickmann:

Now, when you said that you found that YouTube was a pretty effective channel for you, were you finding that people were going on YouTube and they were doing searches on addiction related topics? Or was it tangential?

Colin Jeffries:

That's a great question. So the short answer is no, they were going on YouTube to consume content essentially. So not related to addiction, but I would say more entertainment related or humor, those sorts of things. We found actually that a lot of the, I'll call them adrenaline style videos. So like people are awesome, GoPro, those types of videos that the red bull media house style video content performed pretty decently with our patient population. We do a little bit of behavioral targeting if you will, in our pre-roll at some level because we don't want to just hit everybody, you know carte blanche that's searching for those types of videos. But we do a little bit of targeting with that as well. So it's been kind of fun to see how that's picked up, because again that was not something that I thought would be effective until we started talking to our patients.

Eric Dickmann:

Now as you started to grow the team, you said you're up to four people that are on the team. What do you have this team working on? Are you becoming a content factory? Just developing all kinds of new content now that you've found these channels that are effective?

Colin Jeffries:

Well, Eric it's 2021. If you're not a content factory, you're missing the boat.

Eric Dickmann:

That's so true.

Colin Jeffries:

The short answer to that is yes. I think we've realized very quickly that you have to have video content. That is the equivalent of maybe 2010, 2015 of not having an SEO strategy. So folks have to find your video content, they have to find your, I'll call it blog content. Even though I feel like blog content can be misinterpreted as being overly specific, it has to be between 500 and 700 words and whatever else. I say blog, meaning just copy content or textile content. It can be a web page, it can be a post on a social media platform, those sorts of things. But we'll call it text content or blog content. Absolutely, that's obviously SEO related as well, but there's also a lot of benefits that we found. We made a blog publication related to, I think it was the 10 documentaries that every addiction professional should know. There was another one I think like 10 blogs related to substance use disorder that you should read. Those sorts of things where we found lists. And I'm not saying listicles as in three things to do or five things to do, these are in depth lists. A lot of outbound do follow back links, those sorts of things that have performed very well because there's an appetite for people to learn about addiction. If you have a loved one, if you have a child or a spouse who is, either inactive addiction, or you're afraid that maybe they're abusing a substance. There's a lot of interest there. And then from folks who are either new to the behavioral health space or who are working in it actively. There's definitely a need for content there. And we're trying to raise our bar to really meet that need, as well as then serve our referral partners and our patients, because some of them don't know what questions to ask. They don't know where to turn for appropriate media consumption. And so we're really trying to step in and fill that gap as well.

Eric Dickmann:

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. When you talk about referral partners, and I would think that for an agency like yours, that it would be really important for other places that people may end up on the web to refer back to you. So a whole back linking strategy to make sure that your content is out there in other sites. So if people wandered onto a different site, they would still eventually find a link back to yours. How important has that backlink strategy been for you in terms of driving traffic back to your site?

Colin Jeffries:

That's a great question. So the short answer is backlinking is almost as important to, as a great content marketing strategy, because as any SEO will tell you, the backlinks are almost everything. So BrightView, I'll just give an illustrative example of the importance of backlinking. So about six months ago probably we started researching some ways to build backlinks and we got a recommendation of essentially forming a scholarship where we would create a scholarship, we could send it out, and that's a great way to build a lot of.edu backlinks. This is a pretty common practice among folks who are trying to build a high quality backlinks. So we kind of did some digging, we decided that we would form a$1,000 a year scholarship for folks who are pursuing Master's degrees, who want to be clinicians, and serve patients with SUD. And we created this, we packaged it up, we send it out to a lot of contacts that have many of our clinical staff have at various academic institutions that are training the next generation of counselors. And we've received a pretty decent response. We've had a handful of applicants and then we've received several backlinks from it as well. Which has been exciting. But there's definitely appetite there to actively make those backlink connections and then obviously to serve the next generation of folks who will be helping our patient population as well. But that's a quick anecdote of just how dedicated we are to building backlinks and how important they are. Not only to your point, the sort of directories, if you will, a lot of those citations where you were making sure that it's not just an old logo and an outdated URL, but it's your most recent logo. It's a high quality description of what you do and who you serve, lists of insurances that you accept, your 24 hour hotline, all those things. Yes, that's absolutely true. And those are important as well. But going beyond local citations to intentionally building backlinks is absolutely crucial. So appreciate the setup there.

Eric Dickmann:

Well no, I think it's such a good topic to talk about because you know backlinks are important not only to your domain authority, which helps you with SEO for sure, but you also want to make sure that you're connected to other players who have valuable content and that you know, you can drive audience to them, they can drive audience to you. And it's a win-win situation. And you do that by developing valuable content that people would actually want to link to on their site. So I think it's an important strategy. And you also mentioned earlier, this whole idea about reviews and so I'm sure that reviews are a critical place, whether they're on Google or on Yelp, or any other review site that would talk about the quality of the services that you provide. What has been your marketing strategy about not only collecting those reviews, but in terms of managing them?

Colin Jeffries:

So imagine that you go and you see someone. You are participating in a business and you have a great experience, it's night and day different than anything else that you've experienced in that industry, but you are hesitant to leave a review because maybe it's for a political consultancy and you don't want to leave a review because they lean left or they lean right. Maybe it's for a shooting range, and you don't want people to think that you own a gun because maybe you live in a place like New York or a state that's not gun friendly, let's say. And so you're very hesitant to leave a review because you're afraid that that might come back and negatively affect you if employers were searching for you. We run into that every day at BrightView

Eric Dickmann:

I bet.

Colin Jeffries:

Where people don't want to be identified as a patient, and we have a discreet model, we respect patient privacy of course. However, we found that there are a couple of ways that work well to generate reviews. And we try to have them generate a public leak because we want to make sure that or being found on, you know, the Google map pack and in GMB searches, Google My Business searches, those sorts of things absolutely. But it is definitely challenging in a sensitive space like mental health and substance use disorder. It's not like having a shoe shop where somebody comes in, you know, you did a great job polishing my shoes, so five star review. I don't care if an employer sees that in the future, or if I'm dating someone and they do a search for my email address and they find that review somehow. There's no backlash that could happen, right? And SUD space, very different. So we use a net promoter score system that I think is extremely beneficial and providing relatively sraightforward, frankly feedback from patients, what is their actual experience? You start to have enough people complaining about parking. You realize, Hey, parking is probably an issue. You have enough people complain about wait times, you realize they wait times are probably a problem. And then you are able to take steps to address those issues without having a bunch of people leave those reviews on your Yelp or your GMB, or, you know if you're a restaurant, it's Urban Spoon, if you're a healthcare provider, it's Healthgrades or Rate MDs, or another site as well. Well, there are tons and tons of these different nuanced subcategory, if you will, specialty review sites, we try to make sure that from BrightView's perspective, we're ranked well on GMB from a review perspective. That's been kind of our bread and butter, just because search is so important to us. And because there are so many different directories that you can be essentially ranked five stars with two reviews, and that does you about as much good as being ranked five stars with one review on 15 different sites. So we really try to focus on GMB to build critical mass there, if you will. And we've done that by texting folks again, using the NPS system. So it's been really beneficial from our perspective because we're able to reach out to them via text, ask them, Hey, how likely are you to recommend BrightView? They'll respond with 0 through 10. Those who are familiar with NPS know that it's a weighted average based on their response. And then we're able to use that system to sort of triage those requests and complaints to continually improve our care and our service. And then folks who do rank as well, we're able to then text a link to them, where they can leave a review for us on Google My Business. We found that again, it's a very sensitive topic. And our industry is not one that folks go out and leave reviews for super frequently, but we have been able to build very, very solid reviews. You can look at our Cincinnati Center, our Columbus East or Columbus West Center, our Toledo Center, our Young Sound Center. And, you know, we're serving several hundred patients in some cases, 5 to 700 patients at any of those given centers. And we have between 50 and 80 reviews in some cases. Now many of our centers, you know we're in. Dover, Ohio or Paris, Kentucky, or Nicholasville, Kentucky, or Georgetown, Delaware.

Eric Dickmann:

Smaller places, right?

Colin Jeffries:

Exactly. We're fortunate if we can get 12 to 15 reviews, but that still gets us over the initial threshold of 10 reviews on GMB. And generally patients are inclined to leave positive reviews for us, which has been great. Now I will caveat that by saying at BrightView, we're a little bit of a different business than you know, a restaurant or somebody where Eric, if you and I were to sit down over lunch and we had small portions, expensive bill, the food was terrible, the service was awful, we would probably leave a one-star review and never go back to that place. But in some instances, BrightView patients feel like the best way for them to get attention and to vent is to leave a one-star review. So we also have a robust handling system, if you will. For those bad reviews on the backend, because we do want to make sure that even if a folk, even if a person is giving even a folks, I guess, are giving us a 10 on the net promoter score system and consistently let's say they're involved with BrightView for six months, and we are reaching out to them every couple of months and they, they gave us three tens on the net promoter score system, and then five months into treatment, they leave a one-star review on GMB and they say, this time I was 10 minutes late, usually have a good experience. It took me an hour to be seen, whatever that some complaint related to our level of service. We want to reach out to them that same day or within 24 hours and rectify the situation because what we don't want to do is have a patient who's generally happy, who's generally content with our services get mad at one particular instance. And then vent about it, and then try to come back later as a patient because that creates a level of awkwardness with the staff when they realize you left a one star review, now you're coming back for services. So we try to mitigate that as quickly as possible for our reputation and also to make sure that the patient is getting the care that they need and the service level that they expect from us.

Eric Dickmann:

Well, I love the thoughtful approach to that because I think one of the challenges that many businesses have, and you know, the audience for this show are generally small, mid-sized businesses. But when you look at all the things that you can do from a marketing perspective, all the social media channels that you can be on the web, all the ways that you can get your name out there. And then you add things like reviews on there. Well reviews are going to be more pertinent for some businesses than others and yeah, if you have a liposuction clinic, maybe somebody isn't going to want to say that they got their fat sucked out at the liposuction clinic, right? You know you might not have a customer base that has all that enthusiastic about putting their name to it. And with things like Google and Yelp, you don't have any control over how that gets displayed, you know? Their user ID is going to show up with their name, and you can't anonymize it. So you know, you have to think about that.

Colin Jeffries:

When given some of my B2B work, we've had very good success reaching out to different vendors or other partners, if you will. And you know, oftentimes we'll be really ecstatic with their service, so we'll go leave them a review as the organization. And don't be afraid to reach out to your vendors and say, Hey, we really appreciate your work on XYZ. Would you mind leaving a review for us? And obviously the review is coming from a person that has interacted with you. So they can leave a review that says, I love working with XYZ organization. They provide the best labeling that we've ever worked with, we're so excited to work with them and so on and so forth. Or if it's a vendor where they can talk about your mission and how they play a key part in it, that's always great as well. Now at BrightView, that's a little bit less applicable because most of our vendors are centralized. We're primarily using vendors in specific areas, like we have Ohio related vendors, we have Kentucky related vendors, but in the B2B space, that can be way better than trying to track customers down to get reviews.

Eric Dickmann:

Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. And again, you just have to understand the market that you're serving and the kinds of people that can really provide that benefit to your business, but don't have unrealistic expectations and not every one of these tools is going to be appropriate for every business. I think that's so important for people to understand. So looking ahead to the next year, you know obviously COVID has ended or is ending, people are spending money on marketing again, there's a lot of activity happening, what are you looking forward to? What are you excited about in terms of your marketing programs going forward in this next year?

Colin Jeffries:

A list would be shorter and things I'm not excited about Eric. This is my wheelhouse. I love talking about this. So I think the biggest thing I'm probably excited about is we're starting to break into a little bit, and I hate the term influencer marketing for a lot of reasons. So I'm not going to say influencer marketing.

Eric Dickmann:

You and me both, yeah.

Colin Jeffries:

We are starting to do more partnerships. And so what we're doing with those is you know again, given our space, we're not paying influencers on social media tens of thousands of dollars to push our content. What we're doing is we're reaching out to folks who've already built an audience and we're doing some collaborative content. And we're also working with folks who are kind of auxiliary to our industry or in our industry. And you know, we do outpatient only services. So we're working with some folks who provide inpatient only services.We're working with folks who provide recovery housing or working with folks who do a podcast based on recovery, things of that nature, where it's not exactly what we do, but it's auxiliary and there's a lot of opportunity for list sharing and for collaboration. So we're unpacking some really big topics and I'll give you a couple of them, and please don't hold my feet to the fire because as you know with collaborations, you walk in with an idea and you walk out with 15 ideas and then one of them sort of mutates and becomes a 16th idea. And that's what everybody runs with. But we're looking at, you know, inpatient care is excellent and required for a certain amount of patients, it's not required for everybody. Outpatient care is phenomenal and it's the best option for many patients. It's not the best option for everybody, so BrightView being outpatient only, any content coming from us will be seen as bias because we want you to pursue an outpatient model, right? That's the perception. Similarly, any content coming from an inpatient only provider will be seen as bias because likely they want you to pursue an inpatient option? Well, what if an outpatient only provider and an inpatient only provider got together on some content and they talked about, Hey, If you are low acuity, if you are a student or you are a parent, or you have these responsibilities, outpatient is probably great for you. If you are extremely high acuity, if you don't have external responsibilities like a family or things of that nature, maybe inpatient is a good option for you. And here are some factors that might determine whether inpatient is best or whether outpatient is best for your desired goals and outcomes. I think that could be a very valuable piece of content and I'm not really seeing that anywhere in our space. We're also looking at some other folks who have more national reach. So we've done a few collaborations with a guy named Sober Sammy, out in California. BrightView does not serve patients in California. Our patients are Ohio, Kentucky, Delaware, Virginia. But he has a decent audience that he's built up with his extremely infectious TikTok videos. And so we've had the opportunity to collaborate with him and talk about mental health and addiction, and why there's so much stigma around recovery. And some topics like that have just been really excited to unpack. So that's the big thing that I'm really looking forward to is providing some additional content that's really valuable. And it's not marketing content per se, right? We're not saying come to BrightView, you know, tell your friends and family, you refer more patients to us, anything of that nature. It's designed to be really beneficial for our industry and then for our communities too. Um, folks with SUD face so much stigma. And if we're able to collaborate with some different providers and we're able to collaborate with some different folks who have built up their own audiences and we're able to reduce some of that stigma, that's really, I think a win.

Eric Dickmann:

Well, I love that because I think one of the reasons that, you know, the influencer marketing gets such a bad name is because the perception is there are a lot of people who are doing it, who really don't have much value to add, right? They're out there, they've made a name for themselves, but it's a name based on very flimsy credentials. And I think when you talk about it in terms of collaboration, how can we collaborate in a way that allows us to expand our audience, but provide something of value? Then absolutely. It's a channel that needs to be taken advantage of, we're living in a tremendous time of creativity and you know, we've got to take advantage of those collaboration opportunities to unleash that creativity for positive gains.

Colin Jeffries:

Exactly, yeah. Influencer marketing is sort of like affiliate marketing. Uh, affiliate marketing's morphous cousin, if you will, right? When you're a service-based business, it's just very challenging to have any sort of real return on investment calculation from your influencer marketing campaign. What's an impression worth? Are you just doing CPM buys? You know, those sorts of things. It gets really challenging. Whereas I think what we're trying to do is truly collaborate, do some list sharing, obviously where you know, everybody involved is kind of emailing that content out to their list, if you will, they're sharing it on social media. We're building some cross-pollination. But we're not dedicating it to selling books or selling widgets, or getting email signups or registrations for our webinars or what have you. It's a lot more what I would consider conversation driven. And then you know, just based on my experience with SEO and with social content in general, and in marketing content, right? You have to be a media house. Everybody thinks you're a media house, except for you. And so when you realize, there's opportunity here for BrightView to help some other organizations take steps in content marketing. There's opportunities for us to learn from people like Sober Sammy or Tony Laura, and some other folks who have already built up great audiences in this space, even if they're in different geographies than us. You know, we're always trying to learn and we're always trying to figure out what's working and learn from folks who already have the best practices figured out.

Eric Dickmann:

No, I love that. And I think it's going to be a successful strategy for you. And, you know as we sort of come to the end of our show here, we had talked at the top of the hour about you being a podcaster yourself. And I'd love just for you to share with the audience a little bit about your podcast and the topics that you guys cover.

Colin Jeffries:

Absolutely, yes. So I co-hosted The Rethink Marketing Podcast, my other co-host and I, we have kind of an interesting perspective because I I've worked client side for my entire career essentially. And he has worked agency side essentially, most of his career. So he has really good perspectives on selling marketing engines, how to build them, how to reach the right audience, those sorts of things. And then I have kind of the flip side of that, of segmentation, scalability, internal budget management, hiring those sorts of things. So it's been a really fun journey. We speak a lot to SMB marketers, to folks who maybe run a business and they're not quite at the point of needing a full-time marketer, but they want to grow, they want to scale. And so how do they do that effectively? We've interviewed some just phenomenal folks who opened my eyes and provide some amazing insight that I always enjoy hearing. It's called the Rethink Marketing Podcast, you can go to therethinkmarketingpodcast.com and learn more., listen to us. We're on iTunes Spotify, Google Podcast. iHeart, you name it, The Rethink Marketing Podcast. Some topics that we have coming up, this is one that I'm really passionate about. I am a firm believer that you need to stop saying unique selling propositions, I think it's outdated, I think it's irrelevant. And so I have in mind exactly what you should stay in say instead of USP's. And that episode is dropping, I think in two weeks. So you'll have to tune in and check it

Eric Dickmann:

out. Oh, that's great. I'll definitely check out and we'll make sure we have the links to that in the show notes. And Colin, as we wrap up here, I'd love it. If you could just tell people where they could find you on the web, and if they're interested more in the services that you guys provide, where they could find the information about that as well.

Colin Jeffries:

Absolutely. So you can call BrightView's 24/7 hotline, you can find out more about BrightView, and schedule online at brightviewhealth.com. Social media is not exactly my forte, if you will, personally. So I limited myself to one platform and that's LinkedIn, you can find me just Colin Jeffries, C O L I N J E F F R I E S on LinkedIn and I should be relatively easy to find, even though I'm not on a ton of social media platforms, I do try to make sure that folks can access me easily in that regard.

Eric Dickmann:

Hey well, good for you. The less social media platforms, I think in this day and age, the better. There's just too much to keep track of. So yeah, good for you for limiting it to just one. And we'll have all that linked up in the show notes too, so that people can find you. Collin, I've really enjoyed this conversation with you today. You're a very thoughtful guy, clearly a guy that basis is marketing strategy on analytics, on data, on really thinking through, you know, what is going to be effective to reach the audience that you're trying to reach. So this is a kind of conversation that I love and I'm anxious to check out that latest episode of your podcast as well.

Colin Jeffries:

I appreciate it, Eric, thank you so much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed our conversation today. You asked fantastic questions and I appreciate it.

Eric Dickmann:

Hey, thank you very much. We'll talk again soon.

Colin Jeffries:

Sounds great. Thank you.

Eric Dickmann:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.