We Are, Marketing Happy - A Healthcare Marketing Podcast

Hosted by Hedy and Hopp

Business Marketing

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Episodes

133

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Healthcare marketing is always evolving, and We Are, Marketing Happy is here to help you make sense of it. Hosted by Jenny Bristow, CEO and founder of the healthcare marketing agency Hedy & Hopp, this award-winning podcast explores the latest shifts, challenges, and innovations shaping the industry today. Follow along, share with your team, and let us know what topics you’d like us to explore next. Learn more about Hedy & Hopp at www.hedyandhopp.com.

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60 recent

August 28, 2026Episode 13415 min

From Order-Taker to Leadership Role

Being the smartest person in the room doesn't mean much if you're not in the right room. Too many talented healthcare marketers are stuck in an order-taking trap: executing requests without strategy, reporting activity without outcomes, and watching from the sidelines while leadership makes the decisions. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow discusses five concrete moves that can help you reposition marketing inside your health system. Move 1: Ladder Up to the Strategic RoadmapStop building your marketing plan in isolation. Get a copy of your organization's strategic plan and map every marketing objective to it line by line. For every initiative, be able to answer: which strategic pillar does this support? Move 2: Stop Reporting Activity. Start Reporting Outcomes."We published 12 posts this month" is not a business result. "Our orthopedics campaign was associated with a 14% lift in appointment requests" is. Pick 2-3 metrics you can confidently connect to actual patient volume (call tracking, appointment request form fills, new patient volume by specialty) and report on them consistently quarter over quarter. Move 3: Learn to Speak CFOMarketing has its own vocabulary. Leadership cares about revenue, margin, and acquisition cost. Before your next leadership meeting, take one campaign result and rewrite it twice: once in marketing language, once in finance language. The difference in how the room responds will tell you everything. Move 4: Pick One Winnable Proof PointYou don't have to prove marketing's value everywhere at once. Choose one high-margin service line, run one well-scoped, fully tracked campaign, and turn the results into an internal case study. One clear before and after. That's your proof of concept for everything that follows. Move 5: Get in the Room EarlierPerception shifts when you show up with market intelligence before anyone asks for it. Bring search trend data, patient sentiment themes, and competitor moves to strategy meetings proactively. When leadership starts seeing you as someone who knows the market, the invitation to the table follows naturally. Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

August 21, 2026Episode 13314 min

Gen Z’s Reality Check on Marketing & AI

We've had a lot of great guests on We Are, Marketing Happy , but this week's guest might be our most special yet. Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow is joined by her 16-year-old son, Owen Dibble, who spent his summer interning at the agency and attending an AI-intensive camp. The result is one of the most honest, refreshing conversations we've had about marketing, AI, and what the next generation is actually thinking. What Owen Expected vs. What He Actually Found: Owen came into the internship thinking healthcare marketing was mostly client emails and creative strategy sessions. What he found was a complex, rigorously process-driven operation with more tools, quality control steps, and backend work than he ever imagined. The experience stuck. After spending the summer working alongside Hedy & Hopp's team, Owen went home and immediately applied what he learned to his own businesses. Within weeks of implementing SEO and GEO improvements, the phone started ringing from the exact geographies he had optimized for. The AI-Intensive Camp: Owen also attended a week-long AI camp this summer where he learned everything from Python to how AI models actually work under the hood. His biggest takeaway: AI is less mysterious than it sounds. At its core, it's a math problem predicting the most likely next word. He also learned firsthand why trying to "jailbreak" a model and remove its safety guardrails backfires. Gen Z & AI — The Real Story: Owen's take on his generation's relationship with AI is honest and nuanced. Most of his peers are using AI at the surface level — and many view it as a job threat rather than a tool to master. His perspective? AI is like the internet when it first came out. People were afraid of it then too. Now it's a baseline requirement for working. The students who learn how it actually works will have a significant advantage. His advice for students considering marketing or AI as a career path: stop watching and start playing. Sit down, explore the tools, and figure out how everything works. That hands-on curiosity is what separates the people who use AI from the people who understand it. Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

August 14, 2026Episode 1328 min

How Patients Find (and Trust) Health Info

Your patients aren't Googling you and landing on your website anymore. That foundation has shifted, and as healthcare marketers, the moment we've been nervously anticipating is officially here. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp’s CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow talksabout how patients are actually finding and trusting health information today,what that means for your content strategy, and what to do about it. The AI Search Shift: The numbers tell the story: ● 88% of healthcare-related queries now trigger an AI Overviewat the top of Google search results ● Organic click-throughs drop more than 50% when one appears ● Healthcare site referral traffic from Google is down about35% year over year ● 1 in 4 adults are now using AI tools for health information ● About 40% of patients use AI directly to research providers What Triggers an AI Overview: AI Overviews are most commonly triggered by longer, more specific,research-style queries — showing up 74% of the time for those, compared to 36%for short queries. A search like "dermatologist near me" may be unaffected for now. But "how can I tell if a mole on my arm is potentially cancerous?" is almost certain to trigger one. The goal shifts from ranking in the top three to being cited, and that's where Answer Engine Optimization(AEO), also called GEO, comes in. The EEAT Model: Google and AI tools evaluate health content through the lens of Experience,Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT). Real clinician involvement, cited sources, and dated reviews are three of the most important signals for showing up in AI Overviews. The good news: educational content hasalways performed better with patients too. Educational posts historically get 2 to 3 times more engagement than promotional ones, and patients who engage witheducational content are 60% more likely to book and 40% more likely to referothers. What to Actually Do About It: Start with an audit of your last quarter of content and ask: what percentage is "why you should choose us" versus "here's something useful to know?" From there, build content structured around real patient questions,lead with the answer up top, add schema markup so AI can parse your content, get clinicians visibly credited with bylines and review stamps, and keep yourstats and clinical information current. Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

July 31, 2026Episode 1317 min

Data and Dashboards Within Epic

If your organization runs on Epic, you may already have everything you need to prove ROI for your marketing campaigns. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow talks about the analytics tools and reporting options built directly into Epic, and how healthcare marketers can use them to connect campaign spend to real patient outcomes and downstream revenue. The Tools Inside Epic Worth Knowing: Chronicles: Epic's real-time transactional database where live data lives. This is also where Reporting Workbench runs: the home of pre-built reports you can pull from any time Clarity: A relational database that runs nightly data extracts. It’s a reliable source for deeper historical reporting Caboodle: Epic's internal data warehouse, built for deep campaign analysis and connecting marketing data to clinical and financial outcomes LinkSource: Epic's native tool for campaign tracking. When a patient visits a landing page and schedules an appointment, the UTM parameter from your ad gets attached directly to their patient record, so you can pull downstream data on appointments attended and revenue generated Analytics Catalog: A search engine for existing reports already living inside Epic. This makes it easier to find what's already built before starting from scratch SlicerDicer: A flexible, self-service tool for pulling and slicing data out of Epic on your own terms The big picture: when these tools work together, you can put UTM parameters on your ads, attach them to patient records at the point of scheduling, and pull through appointment attendance and downstream revenue, all within Epic. From there, you can build dashboards that show true campaign ROI and make smarter decisions about where to allocate your media budget. If this all sounds unfamiliar, but your organization is already using Epic, don't miss Hedy & Hopp's free webinar series, Summer School: Epic for Marketers! Although the series wrapped up this week, you can still access all sessions on-demand when you register. Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

July 17, 2026Episode 13010 min

Speaking Boardroom: How to Pitch Marketing Metrics to the C-Suite

There's a reason marketing budgets are the first thing cut when a health system hits a hard quarter, and it's not because the work isn't valuable . It's because most marketing leaders are presenting their results in a language the C-suite doesn't speak. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow gets into the specifics of how healthcare marketing leaders can walk into a board meeting and command the room — by ditching the marketing metrics and picking up the financial ones. Here’s what’s covered: The Three Financial Metrics the CFO Actually Cares About: Patient Acquisition Cost by service line replaces cost-per-lead with something the board can actually act on, like a precise price tag for bringing a new patient through the doors of a specific clinic. Contribution margin takes it a step further, showing the revenue generated by marketing-driven patients after accounting for the variable costs of their care. And service-line ROAS, broken down by high-margin procedures like cardiology, orthopedics, and neurology, replaces blended averages with numbers that actually mean something to a CFO. The shift in language is everything. Building the Executive-Ready Dashboard: The golden rule of board presentations: if a slide takes five minutes to explain, it's already lost. The three-column framework simplifies everything: the input (marketing spend by service line), the output (EHR-verified new patient encounters), and the impact (contribution margin and estimated lifetime value). Anchor it to your organization's current strategic plan and your dashboard becomes a strategic alignment tool. The Defensive Play — Framing the Cost of Inaction: The most powerful thing a marketing leader can do when budgets are on the table is reframe the conversation. A 20% budget cut isn't "saving money,” it's ceding market share to the competitor down the street. Show the historical correlation between reduced ad spend and the downstream drop in high-margin elective procedures, and give leadership a real choice: "We can reduce spend by 20% to hit this quarter's cost-cutting goal, but our models show this will result in a $150k drop in surgical contribution margin next quarter." Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

July 3, 2026Episode 12814 min

The 5 Pillars of AI-Powered Paid Media in Healthcare Marketing

AI in healthcare marketing is an exciting topic. This week, we're getting into the specifics of how it actually works in practice. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow explains the five pillars Hedy & Hopp uses to integrate AI into paid media management, and what that's actually meant for client results. The golden rule that anchors all of it: AI accelerates and informs, but humans own the strategy and validate the outputs. Hedy & Hopp’s Five Pillars of AI Integration in Paid Media: • Smart Planning & Budgeting: Rather than relying on platform-suggested defaults, we use AI to analyze multiple first-party data points alongside real inventory data and performance signals so budget allocation is driven by real intelligence, not guesswork. • Precision Persona Building: AI makes it possible to build out multiple granular personas (pulling in demographics, household income, personal values etc.) at a scale and speed that traditional processes simply can't match. Human teams then pressure-test every persona before anything goes live. • Emerging Channels: Patients are already turning to ChatGPT and other LLMs with healthcare questions before they ever book an appointment. Hedy & Hopp is placing clients within those results. Think of it like paid search for the AI era. • Real-Time Insights: AI layered on top of custom Data Studio dashboards (many of which now include Epic patient appointment and revenue data via Hedy & Hopp's UTM Connect tool) means trends get flagged faster than any human analyst could catch them. This enables quicker feedback loops and smarter optimizations. • Creative Optimization: AI handles the versioning work like regional variations, DMA-specific copy, and localized iterations so campaigns can move faster without sacrificing quality. Concepting, however, stays firmly in human hands. Ultimately, this isn't about automation for automation's sake. It's about building smarter, human-led paths to paid media performance! Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

June 19, 2026Episode 12711 min

The Three Pillars of Healthcare Influencer Marketing

Healthcare marketing is leaving the glossy, corporate-ad era behind. What patients actually respond to now is real faces, real stories, and real expertise — and that's reshaping who gets a microphone in your marketing strategy. This week, we're breaking down a framework for healthcare influencer marketing built around three distinct buckets, each serving a different purpose: reach, trust, and content fuel. 1. External Social Media Influencers (Buying the Audience) : This is about borrowing an existing audience. You partner with established creators (lifestyle, parenting, wellness, or condition-specific) to break into demographics you haven't reached yet. The healthcare wrinkle: the FTC and FDA don't play around with disclosure, so #Ad labeling is mandatory, and you'll want to vet a creator's history to make sure nothing in their past content conflicts with your brand. CreatorIQ or Sprout Social both help with exactly this kind of audience and brand-safety vetting before you sign anything. 2. Internal Brand Experts (The "OG Medfluencers"): Your own doctors, nurses, researchers, and therapists who are already building an audience bring something no outside partnership can buy: built-in clinical credibility and hyper-local trust. Because they're still employees, they need clear boundaries between personal opinion and your organization's official position, along with genuine support like studio time and compliance help. Tools like EveryoneSocial or DSMN8 make it easy to push pre-approved, legally cleared content straight to your internal team so they can share with confidence. 3. User-Generated Content (UGC): Rather than paying for someone's following, UGC means sourcing the raw, unscripted content patients are already creating (recovery journeys, clinic walkthroughs, unboxings) and putting it to work across your owned and paid channels. The one rule you can't skip: a HIPAA-compliant release form before any patient face or story touches paid media. Archive.com automatically captures organic content your brand gets tagged in, while Bounty and Skeepers help you run micro-campaigns for content that's pre-licensed and ready for ads from the start. The takeaway: external influencers expand your reach, internal experts close the trust gap, and UGC delivers the content that actually performs! For more on this topic, check out e pisode 107: Influencer Marketing in Healthcare . Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

June 12, 2026Episode 1269 min

Scaling Shared Marketing Services

Many healthcare organizations face the challenge of centralizing marketing initiatives across local offices or different departments. In this week’s episode, our CEO Jenny shares a model for successfully implementing shared marketing services that’s especially useful for private equity groups, expanding hospital systems, and nationwide organizations that offer local autonomy. By collaborating with individual teams, rather than forcing mandates, organizations can minimize teams “going rogue” and producing off-brand materials. The Four-Pillar Shared Marketing Model Self-Serve Brand Toolkit: Provide an easy-to-use digital asset management (DAM) system or use tools like Canva Enterprise, to allow teams to customize approved templates with relevant information, making it easier for them to stay on-brand than to create their own materials from scratch. Network Effect and Knowledge Sharing: Treat the organization like a marketing laboratory by testing strategies in one market and productizing successful results to roll out to other locations. This ensures offices benefit from collective intelligence rather than just purchasing individual services. Centralized Strategy with Local Execution: Have the headquarters handle time-consuming, expensive tasks like strategy development and creative asset production. This offers a financial incentive for local offices to opt in, while still allowing them to manage their own local media buys. Shared Reporting Dashboard: Develop a performance dashboard that provides leadership with a macro view of the total marketing ecosystem while allowing teams to drill down into their specific micro performance. This provides value for local offices by solving complex infrastructure and analytical challenges. Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

June 5, 2026Episode 12512 min

Right People, Right Seats: Building a Modern Healthcare Marketing Team

In the healthcare marketing industry, just when you think you have everything under control, a new change comes along. And, honestly, it's a heavy responsibility for leaders to build a team structure that can withstand the pressures of the ever-evolving healthcare marketing space, but it also keeps things exciting! In this week’s episode, our CEO, Jenny Bristow, shares two key concepts from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) framework that have helped Hedy & Hopp build a solid marketing team that has withstood many industry changes: the accountability chart & the “Right Person, Right Seat” framework. The Accountability Chart: The accountability chart is distinctly different from traditional job titles and organizational charts in that it focuses on the essential functions a team needs to operate efficiently. Start by mapping out core functions, such as content strategy, paid media, analytics, etc., and assigning responsibilities to each “seat.” When developing an accountability chart, it’s critical to ignore current personnel to design an ideal structure from scratch, ensuring zero ambiguity regarding who owns each function. The "Right Person, Right Seat" (RPRS) Framework: Once the ideal structure is developed, evaluate current staff through two lenses: Right Person & Right Seat. Right Person assesses whether the individual shares the organization’s core values. Right Seat utilizes the “GWC” framework (Get It, Want It, Capacity to Do It) to determine if a person is suited for a particular role. In other words does the person understand the requirements of the role? Are they genuinely excited and motivated to perform the responsibilities of the seat? And do they possess the mental, emotional, and technical capacity to succeed in the position? Separating the person from the problem is vital when restructuring. If a team member lacks the capacity for a specific modern technical role, it does not necessarily mean they must leave the organization; they may simply belong in a different seat. Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

May 29, 2026Episode 12413 min

The Future of Healthcare Marketing: A Roadmap for New Grads

Why healthcare marketing? For many people in the industry, healthcare marketing is a deeply purposeful career path that allows them to positively impact others’ lives and improve access to healthcare. In this week’s episode, our CEO Jenny offers guidance for new grads and professionals on rising industry trends and important skills for success in healthcare marketing. Major Industry Trends Shifting Search Journeys: The percentage of patients using Google for traditional searches is shrinking, as people turn toward generative AI for pre-diagnostic research. Authenticity Beats High-Production Value: With the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated media, there is a growing demand for transparent, unpolished video content. Privacy and Measurement Challenges: Marketers need to get creative in order to prove ROI while maintaining compliance, as HIPAA and state-level privacy laws have made it more difficult to track campaign performance. Essential Skills for Success Keep a Human in the Loop: Use AI as a productivity tool, rather than a replacement for critical thinking. Be sure humans are in charge of the storytelling. Engage Audiences with Microlearning: Work on translating complex clinical topics into engaging, short, mobile-first videos that can quickly educate and build trust. Adopt a Privacy-First Analytics Mindset: Focus on downstream business outcomes, like patient appointments, while ensuring patient information remains secure and compliant. Proceed with Empathy and Health Literacy: Focus on writing copy that is easy to understand and empathetic, that AI cannot easily replicate. Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.