Sept. 5, 2021
Building a Marketing Strategy to Reach an Unreachable Audience with Colin Jeffries
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/
Send us your questions or comments
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WEBVTT
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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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.
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Hey, Colin.
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Welcome to the Virtual CMO Podcast.
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I'm so glad you could join us today.
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Eric, thank you so much for having me looking forward to our conversation today.
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Yeah, same here.
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Well, I know you're a fellow podcaster.
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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.
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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.
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Absolutely.
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So I've been doing marketing for a little bit over a decade.
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I have a variety of experience, everything from events and hospitality to healthcare where I currently am.
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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.
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So I have the privilege of leading BrightView's marketing team.
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Right now we're a team of four, when I started it was a team of zero.
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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.
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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.
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And there has just been a ton of it throughout, primarily the Midwest.
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So we're really trying to grow to meet that need.
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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.
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And there are a lot of factors that distinguish those as being very different.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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But what a lot of folks don't realize is that for-profit and not-for-profit is really just tax status.
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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.
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And so I would say from a marketing perspective, you know we're still trying to reach the same audiences per se, right?
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We all have our target segment that we're trying to reach.
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We all have our niche that we're trying to pitch if you will.
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And so those elements are actually identical, dare I say, very, very close.
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But some of the differences are generally in the nonprofit space, you're also trying to reach folks like grant writers.
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So my writing team is more involved with grants if you will from a non profit perspective and a for-profit perspective, obviously.
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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.
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I think sometimes there's this misperception out there that in the not-for-profit.
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world that they really don't spend a lot of money or they don't do a lot of marketing.
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And I think sometimes the opposite is true.
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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.
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Would you agree?
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Yes, absolutely.
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From what I've seen I think there's a misperception of unsophistication, if you will, and then not for profit space.
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And that travels across industries.
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You know sometimes, academia.
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Is seen as being not as sophisticated as the private sector.
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Sometimes the public sector is is seen as not being as advanced or as cutting edge.
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So I think that's a myth or misconception that lots of different verticals deal with.
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And not-for-profits certainly are not absent in that discussion.
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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?
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You know, you look at some of the marketing that happens in the B2C world.
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You want to go buy a new pair of shoes you go to Macy's, you get re-targeted all over the place.
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That's a fairly easy customer to reach with your product, right?
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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.
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So how do you reach this unreachable audience?
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Well, it's a huge question.
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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?
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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.
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She has expendable income, you know?
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I mean, And in there are billions of dollars spent by Kantar and Nielsen and Arbitron and all of these other organizations.
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How do you reach this person?
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What are her psychographics?
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What media is she consuming?
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How is she consuming that media?
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What messages really speak to her?
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What messages really don't speak to her and so on and so forth.
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And then on the flip side of that, Okay, somebody like on BrightVIew, for example, our average patient is in their thirties.
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And so how do you reach somebody who's in their thirties?
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Who's most of our patients unfortunately are unemployed, most of our patients do not have reliable transportation, many of them are housing insecure.
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So now you're starting to talk about somebody who literally has no expendable income.
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Who does not have commercial insurance in a lot of cases, because that's generally carried by the employer.
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And you sort of go through the list.
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Well, no one's spending money on this person's media consumption habits, how this person interacts with different messages?
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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.
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They're absent for these folks who we consider, essentially like housing insecure, unemployed, and so on and so forth.
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So it is a huge challenge.
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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.
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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.
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So you're not listening to the radio, you're not listening to podcasts, your media consumption is limited in that regard.
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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.
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So OTT might not be an effective way to reach you.
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And the list goes on, right?
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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.
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So, what we did is we just started experimenting with things.
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I'm a huge believer in the growth hacking mentality of applying the scientific method to marketing.
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That's a Sean Ellis reference there.
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Kudos to Shawn, he's wrote the book growth hacking or hacking growth, I think.
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A great marketing mind, learned a lot from him.
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So very interesting because.
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I sort of took that model and we can make some reasonable assumptions about bright use patient population.
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But I didn't want to just assume, and test and scale based on assumption.
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So we did focus groups.
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This was obviously pre COVID.
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When you could do those sorts of things in person.
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Did focus groups to try to figure out, Hey, when you were in active addiction, what media were you consuming?
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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.
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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.
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I was wrong.
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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.
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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.
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So that way I was able to use those media sources to reach other folks who were currently in active addiction.
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So that was really beneficial.
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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.
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Talking to real people who met our patient, segment if you will.
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I hate to say archetype because they're actual patients.
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So even better than an archetype.
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But really getting from them what they thought.
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And the really fascinating thing is Eric, you seem like a very polished marketer, I'm sure you're extremely intelligent.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And so it was fun to engage in those conversations because frankly they're they were used to being written off.
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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.
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But oftentimes it's not really backed up by a whole lot of data.
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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.
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And I think a lot of businesses could learn from them.
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That's exactly right.
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And the nice thing about this is it's never too late to do that.
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And it's very easy.
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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.
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It's almost as simple as if you have a lobby.
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If you have a waiting room, if you have a website, you can interact with folks on your social media channels.
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If, if that's the easiest way to do it.
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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.
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So absolutely.
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I'm a huge proponent of just developing those IRL in real life relationships, if you will.
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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?
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You would be surprised.
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I mean or the answer is, I don't know, and that's acceptable.
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And we're not digging in and asking.
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Okay, well, you know, let me lead the witness a little bit.
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You can really answer the question specifically off the top of your head, but did you see a radio?
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Did you hear a radio spot?
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Did you see a TV spot?
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Something of that nature, where we're sort of making suggestions and then they're able to say, oh yeah.
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I think it was a TV spot that I saw.
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Yeah.
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So after you did all this research, you started to really understand what kinds of media your target clients were consuming.
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What then did you find was working from a digital marketing perspective or did you broaden out, did you use other channels as well?
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So we did start small.
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Again, I'm a proponent of testing and scaling.
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So we started, obviously you have to be able to be found, so we started doing some search engine optimization.
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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?
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So we started to do some SEO, we obviously then invested in SEM, we started to do some Facebook ads.
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It turned out that YouTube was a hugely consumed media by folks in active addiction.
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So we developed some spots and started running some highly targeted pre-roll on YouTube.
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And then it turns out that direct mail was actually surprisingly effective.
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Very fascinating.
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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.
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And so for us to expect that we can just blanket mail or do every door direct mail in getting an effective response.
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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.
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So yeah, we really leverage that.
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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.
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We did find out what was more important to folks.
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They didn't really care about the qualifications, if you will, of the folks that were providing medical care or clinical care.
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They really cared about can you see me quickly?
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And so we did shift our messaging a little bit.
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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?
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Can you see me in the next four hours?
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Can you see me right now?
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And so we pivoted our messaging according to that, but it definitely informed our tactical execution.
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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?
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Or was it tangential?
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That's a great question.
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So the short answer is no, they were going on YouTube to consume content essentially.
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So not related to addiction, but I would say more entertainment related or humor, those sorts of things.
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We found actually that a lot of the, I'll call them adrenaline style videos.
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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.
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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.
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But we do a little bit of targeting with that as well.
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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.
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Now as you started to grow the team, you said you're up to four people that are on the team.
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What do you have this team working on?
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Are you becoming a content factory?
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Just developing all kinds of new content now that you've found these channels that are effective?
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Well, Eric it's 2021.
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If you're not a content factory, you're missing the boat.
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That's so true.
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The short answer to that is yes.
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I think we've realized very quickly that you have to have video content.
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That is the equivalent of maybe 2010, 2015 of not having an SEO strategy.
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So folks have to find your video content, they have to find your, I'll call it blog content.
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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.
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I say blog, meaning just copy content or textile content.
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It can be a web page, it can be a post on a social media platform, those sorts of things.
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But we'll call it text content or blog content.
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Absolutely, that's obviously SEO related as well, but there's also a lot of benefits that we found.
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We made a blog publication related to, I think it was the 10 documentaries that every addiction professional should know.
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There was another one I think like 10 blogs related to substance use disorder that you should read.
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Those sorts of things where we found lists.
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And I'm not saying listicles as in three things to do or five things to do, these are in depth lists.
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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.
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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.
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There's a lot of interest there.
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And then from folks who are either new to the behavioral health space or who are working in it actively.
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There's definitely a need for content there.
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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.
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They don't know where to turn for appropriate media consumption.
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And so we're really trying to step in and fill that gap as well.
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Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast.
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But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level?
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If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you.
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We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step.
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We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads.
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How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers.
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How to strategically package and position your products and services.
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How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business.
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To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services.
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Now back to the podcast.
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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.
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So a whole back linking strategy to make sure that your content is out there in other sites.
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So if people wandered onto a different site, they would still eventually find a link back to yours.
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How important has that backlink strategy been for you in terms of driving traffic back to your site?
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That's a great question.
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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.
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So BrightView, I'll just give an illustrative example of the importance of backlinking.
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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.
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This is a pretty common practice among folks who are trying to build a high quality backlinks.
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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.
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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.
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And we've received a pretty decent response.
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We've had a handful of applicants and then we've received several backlinks from it as well.
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Which has been exciting.
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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.
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But that's a quick anecdote of just how dedicated we are to building backlinks and how important they are.
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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.
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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.
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Yes, that's absolutely true.
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And those are important as well.
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But going beyond local citations to intentionally building backlinks is absolutely crucial.
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So appreciate the setup there.
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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.
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And it's a win-win situation.
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And you do that by developing valuable content that people would actually want to link to on their site.
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So I think it's an important strategy.
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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.
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What has been your marketing strategy about not only collecting those reviews, but in terms of managing them?
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So imagine that you go and you see someone.
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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.
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