We Are, Marketing Happy - A Healthcare Marketing Podcast

Hosted by Hedy and Hopp

Business Marketing

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Episodes

136

Latest episode

Oct 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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October 30, 2026Episode 1389 min

Patient Experience Report & Insights

Patient satisfaction is high — 93% high, according to Alchemer’s 2026 Healthcare Patient Experience Report. But dig a little deeper into the data and a more complicated picture emerges. In this week’s episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow walks through the report’s key findings and what they mean for healthcare marketers, from the gap between patient feedback and follow-through, to the gender and generational divides shaping how patients find, choose, and leave providers. Key findings from the report: The Feedback Follow-Through Gap: Over 73% of patients received prompt acknowledgment after giving feedback, but only 50% actually saw any action taken as a result. 11% said nothing happened, and 18% were never told either way. If patients are taking the time to share concerns, having a real resolution process (not just an auto-responder) is a significant opportunity. The #1 Trust Driver: Feeling listened to. More than 50% of patients said feeling heard by their provider was the most important trust factor — beating out clinical expertise (41%) and communication clarity (43%). As Jenny puts it, this can be a tricky one for marketers to navigate. The Gender Divide: When patients said they were leaving a provider, women most commonly cited poor communication. Men most commonly cited long wait times. The reasons were starkly different. The Generational Divide: 78% of patients aged 18-44 read online reviews before choosing a provider, compared to only 35% of patients 65 and older. Younger patients have a low tolerance for administrative friction and will readily switch providers over a poor digital experience. Older patients prioritize continuity of care and relational medicine. A Notable Example: Despite a strong clinical reputation that came through consistently in reviews, Mayo Clinic’s average rating was dragged down due to scheduling and front desk friction. Marketing can’t fix everything, but online scheduling and reducing administrative burden are squarely in the lane. Jenny’s bigger takeaway: marketing rarely succeeds in a silo. Patient experience, IT, and clinical teams all play a role in what patients find, access, and experience, and the marketers who build strong cross-functional relationships are the ones who move fastest. Full report available here: Alchemer 2026 Healthcare Patient Experience Report 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.

October 23, 2026Episode 1377 min

Marketing Sensitive Topics

Healthcare marketing is rewarding work — but when the service line involves behavioral health, addiction treatment, oncology, bariatrics, or sexual health, the playbook looks a little different. In this week’s episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow shares how to compete for attention on sensitive topics without violating platform restrictions, alienating patients, or creating content that feels clinical and cold. Four key strategies for marketing sensitive service lines: Target the moment, not the condition : Rather than trying to identify and target people with a specific diagnosis (which platform restrictions make increasingly difficult anyway), build content around the searches people actually make. Someone with depression isn’t searching “depression treatment” at 2 a.m. — they’re searching “why can’t I get out of bed?” Meeting patients at their actual moment of need sidesteps platform restrictions and delivers far more relevant content. Market to the care circle, not just the patient : For service lines like addiction, behavioral health, and memory care, the decision maker is often a family member. Campaigns that speak to caregivers — who face fewer stigma barriers and are often in active problem-solving mode — tend to convert better. Think about CTAs and content designed specifically for the people who love the patient, not just the patient themselves. Lead with normalization, not services : Before a patient will ever click through or submit a form, they need to feel like they’re not alone. Content that says “this is common, this is treatable, you’re not broken” builds the trust that service-forward messaging simply can’t. Design the landing page experience for privacy : Clear confidentiality messaging, discreet contact options (text or chat over phone), and minimal form fields go a long way for patients who feel vulnerable. Every field you ask for before someone is ready is a barrier. View every touchpoint through the lens of empathy before anything goes live. Jenny also references a recent eMarketer piece — Healthcare Marketers Can Make Patients Laugh If They Listen First — which adds four layers worth knowing: listen to the community for 6-8 months before creating, make the situation funny (never the patient), recognize that awareness alone doesn’t drive action, and earn the right to use humor by building trust first. 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.

October 9, 2026Episode 13615 min

SHSMD26 Recap

SHSMD 2026 is in the books — and the Hedy & Hopp team is back with takeaways, highlights, and a few sessions worth talking about. In this week’s episode, Jenny is joined by Marissa Gurrister (Director of Growth), Sarah Cutcliffe (Director of Epic Services), and Lindsey Brown (VP of Integrated Marketing) for a full recap of the conference, from their sold-out workshop to their favorite sessions to the booth backdrop everyone raved about. The Workshop: From Access to Action: Turning Epic Into a Growth Engine for Healthcare Marketing Jenny and Sarah presented a 90-minute lunch workshop on pulling patient appointment and revenue data out of Epic and using UTM parameters to build a complete picture of campaign performance. The room ran the gamut — from attendees furiously writing down tool names for the first time to seasoned Epic users asking detailed implementation questions. The Q&A made one thing clear: marketing and IT are still figuring out how to work together, and that conversation is happening everywhere. Favorite Sessions: Jenny — From Acquisition to Acceptance: Building Awareness and Preferences in New Communities (OhioHealth)A session led by Cody Albert and Christina Thompson, MA on integrating newly acquired and rural hospitals into a broader health system, covering communication strategies and lessons from previous acquisitions. M&A’s impact on healthcare marketing isn’t slowing down. Lindsey — Nine Lessons from a Values-Driven Culture (Dayton Children’s Hospital)This was a presentation led by Kristen Bowser, APR and Ashley Junkunc, MA on what it actually takes to build a values-driven culture; not just externally, but all the way through to clinicians, nurses, and front desk staff. A great reminder that a rebrand without internal implementation isn’t a rebrand at all. Sarah — The Playbook: Where Rivals Unite to Champion Women’s Health (Ohio State & Michigan)Ohio State and Michigan (yes, those rivals) partnered to present how they reimagined women’s health care at their respective institutions, driven by data showing poor outcomes in existing structures. A powerful session led by Luanne Thomas Ewald , Jennifer Dauer and Priya Bathija on using data to make the case for change and then actually making it. Marissa — Beyond Automation: Human-Centered Community Engagement in an AI Era (Rochester Regional)In this session, Rachel Conley took a refreshing step back from the AI conversation to talk about community sponsorships, local events, and what it looks like to build trust with your community the old-fashioned way (a jazz festival, a 5K, and genuine human connection). Quality over quantity in action. One more note: AI was woven into conversations at SHSMD this year, but it wasn’t the star of the show the way it was in previous years. The novelty has worn off. What the room cared about was meaningful outcomes…and that’s a healthy shift. Stay tuned: the team heads to HCIC in Orlando in two weeks. A similar recap is coming! Connect with Jenny: Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/ Connect with Sarah: Email: sarah.cutcliffe@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-cutcliffe-294a8971/ Connect with Marissa: Email: marissa.gurrister@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissa-gurrister/ Connect with Lindsey: Email: lindsey.brown@hedyandhopp.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseycbrown/ 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.

September 25, 2026Episode 1359 min

See You at SHSMD (And Meet Sarah Cutcliffe!)

SHSMD 2026 is just around the corner — and we're heading to Baltimore with a brand new face on the Hedy & Hopp team and a session we've been looking forward to all year. In this week's episode, Jenny chats with Sarah Cutcliffe, Hedy & Hopp's new Director of Epic Services, for a quick preview of what's coming at SHSMD and a little background on the person bringing deep Epic expertise to the team. About Sarah: Sarah's Epic journey started nearly 20 years ago when Epic recruited her straight out of grad school. Since then, she's worked as a trainer, consultant, and analyst across health systems nationwide — most recently as Director of Performance and Optimization at Hospital for Special Surgery. Her superpower: understanding what health systems actually need and translating that into what Epic can actually do. The SHSMD Session:Jenny and Sarah are presenting a sold-out, 90-minute lunch session on Sunday titled From Access to Action: Turning Epic Into a Growth Engine for Healthcare Marketing . The session covers the analytics and data tools available within Epic's tool suite and how to use them to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way — with 30 minutes reserved for Q&A. Can't make it to SHSMD? Keep an eye on our social media for session recaps and to be the first to know when the free webinar repeat is available! 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 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.