Most healthcare marketers treated the 2022 HHS tracking crackdown as a crisis to survive. Clint Paul, Director of Marketing Analytics at Hospital for Special Surgery, treated it as a blank slate. In this episode, Clint shares how a forced compliance reset became a three-year journey to connect siloed data across web analytics, call tracking, and Epic, and ultimately prove that marketing was driving real patient appointments. He breaks down how he built the technical foundation, earned trust with skeptical IT and legal teams with preparedness, and created the cross-functional alignment that made it all possible.
💡 Episode Summary
Most healthcare marketers treated the 2022 HHS tracking crackdown as a crisis to survive. Clint Paul, Director of Marketing Analytics at Hospital for Special Surgery, treated it as a blank slate. In this episode, Clint shares how a forced compliance reset became a three-year journey to connect siloed data across web analytics, call tracking, and Epic, and ultimately prove that marketing was driving real patient appointments. He breaks down how he built the technical foundation, earned trust with skeptical IT and legal teams with preparedness, and created the cross-functional alignment that made it all possible.
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⏱️ Episode Timestamps
*(03:52) - How HSS thought about marketing performance before the data journey began
*(06:56) - Flying blind: clicks, cost-per-click, and the 2022 HIPAA wake-up call
*(10:03) - Rebuilding from scratch: HIPAA-compliant analytics and getting back to baseline
*(15:14) - The big idea: connecting web data to Epic to see the full patient journey
*(28:00) - The slide that changed everything: proving digital marketing's direct impact on booked appointments
*(41:09) - Practical first steps for healthcare marketers not yet on this journey
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💬 Quote
“ As we build this model out, knowing a bit more of the revenue piece, I think that will then come into play of like, Okay, here's the ROI that we want to maintain and having that be a secondary metric outside of the cost per. The cost per is going to be the most immediate and actionable one because our patient value, lifetime value can be a seven, eight month journey from that initial appointment to any sort of surgical procedure or anything like that. For marketing and optimization and things like that, we obviously can't wait eight months to know what Google Ads keywords are working for us. Having that be the transaction-based metric with the secondary of like, here's how we're going to optimize towards this lifetime value piece, it's gonna be huge. It just levels the language playing field of what we're doing to someone like finance who's just thinking and balances and things like that.” – Clint Paul
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🔗 Links
Connect with Clint Paul on LinkedIn
Connect with Ray Mina on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
[00:00:00] Clint Paul: As we build this model out, knowing a bit more of the revenue piece, I think that will then come into play of just like, okay, here's, here's the ROI that we wanna maintain. And it's kind of having that be kind of a secondary metric. Outside of the, the cost per 'cause, that's gonna be, the cost per, is gonna be the most immediate and sort of actionable one because our, our patient value, lifetime value can be a seven, eight month journey before, from that initial appointment to any sort of surgical procedure or anything like that.
[00:00:49] Clint Paul: So. For, for marketing and optimization and things like that. Like, we obviously can't wait eight months to know what Google Ads keywords are working for us. So like having, having that be the sort of transaction based metric with the secondary of like, here's how we're gonna optimize towards this lifetime value piece.
[00:01:10] Clint Paul: I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be huge. Just like I, like I keep saying like, it just levels the, the language playing field of what we're doing. To someone like finance who's just thinking and balances and things like that.
[00:01:25] Ray Mina: So we've been talking a lot. I would say if there's a theme with marketing rounds, a lot of the conversations we've had around, you know, how hard it is in healthcare to actually prove like how marketing is working and, and what marketing is for, it makes it really complex when you're dealing with privacy.
[00:01:40] Ray Mina: Regulations, but then even just the disconnected data sets, marketers don't have access to all the data. And it's something for me as a marketer, I don't feel good about like the work I'm doing and I don't feel good about my ability to iterate without really connecting the dots. And my next guest literally spent three years.
[00:01:58] Ray Mina: Stitching together that silo data to answer, answer that question, which we all have, which is like, what are we here for? Like, what are we doing? What are we impacting? And I think what you'll find about this conversation today, it's not just about visibility and dashboards, it's really about how changing the way marketing is viewed in the organization.
[00:02:17] Ray Mina: It's around how you can collaborate with data across teams and ultimately like marketing. The reason we do marketing in the first place, it's not a nice to have. It shapes how our organizations grow. So I'm joined on marketing rounds today by Clint Paul, who's the Director of Marketing Analytics at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
[00:02:34] Ray Mina: Thanks for doing this with me, Clint.
[00:02:36] Clint Paul: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ray.
[00:02:38] Ray Mina: I always like a lot of people, you know, may not, someone might be in urgent care or in health tech, like what is Hospital for Special Surgery? It's a cool name. Other than, other than the cool name. What? What do y'all do?
[00:02:49] Clint Paul: It is a orthopedics hospital that is based mainly in New York, but we also have locations in New Jersey, Connecticut, long Island, Florida.
[00:02:58] Clint Paul: We are. We've been around for over 160 years. We are the number one ranked orthopedics hospital in the country or world, depending on who you ask and when. So a lot of complex cases, a lot of just kind of anything that deals with movement and impairments to any of that is kind of. Kind of our deal.
[00:03:24] Ray Mina: So if I used to race, if I was stupid enough in my, in my youth to race Ironmans and I have a chronic hip issue and I wanna get back to riding my bike, I might wanna come see one of your world-class.
[00:03:35] Clint Paul: We would be seeing a lot of you. Yes, a hundred percent.
[00:03:39] Ray Mina: Very cool. Well, I, I teed it up in the beginning, which was like, you set, you, I kind of gave it away, right? You set along the three year journey to connect the dots and silo data, but. Before we get into like what you did and how you did it, how did the organization actually think about marketing performance before you started down this road?
[00:03:58] Clint Paul: It's been a journey, I would say even before all of the HHS re-regulation or reinforcement of regulations, digital in particular was sort of. Kind of a newer initiative for the hospital in general. I've been here about five and a half years, so I've seen kind of that evolution and when I was brought on was sort of to continue to push that sort of digital, not digital first necessarily, but like the digital aspect of marketing and sort of help quantify things like that.
[00:04:30] Clint Paul: So it, it ranges in terms of people's sort of comfort level with digital as well as their sort of. Are they doing? Like what are they doing? And like, why can't you measure some things? And so it's, it's a range from like the, I'm sure they're doing a great job. I don't really understand it, but like they say, they're doing a great job, so it's great all the way to like.
[00:04:55] Clint Paul: I don't really believe what these guys are saying 'cause like, I don't understand digital, so that's all like, I wanna see a billboard. Like those are tangible things to me. I don't want to be able, like if I Google myself, why am I not showing up? Like those sorts of like skepticism. So it's a, it's a wide range of, of comfort level with digital in particular.
[00:05:14] Clint Paul: But our evolution over these past years, even just with sort of setting up the basics of 2022, obviously. Scorched Earth, get rid of everything that we were building towards and start fresh, which at the time was a scary thing. But it sort of let us be kind of intentional about what we were building back up and how we were doing it and sort of what levers and what data we have available to us and like kind of.
[00:05:45] Clint Paul: Incrementally building things back up, getting a HIPAA compliant analytics platform and like how does that all play together? Just building up those little things along the way has been, has been huge and getting away from optimizing towards clicks and these sort of like just super high level, not really an indicator, just like knowing what's popular and like these broad keywords that people might not really be interested in as far as like.
[00:06:15] Clint Paul: Prospective patients, things like that. So like building all those things back and getting smarter about things has been, it's been quite the journey outside of even just this, this project.
[00:06:26] Ray Mina: Yeah, because when this, when this stuff hit us in 2022, it was kind of crisis mode for a lot of organizations. Like you had to go dark, and I love that you tapped into that.
[00:06:36] Ray Mina: That moment actually ended up being. A strategic advantage that you could leverage to get to a better place even than you were at before when you went dark. Like what, what metrics were you able to leverage? Like how did you actually answer that question when someone knocked on the door and said, how, how's it going this quarter?
[00:06:54] Ray Mina: Like, what, what's going on with marketing?
[00:06:56] Clint Paul: Yeah, it was, it was clicks and sort of efficiencies through there. It was a lot of flying, a bit blind. I mean, I guess the good thing was we had an excuse, like it wasn't like true. It wasn't like we could say like, oh, we just don't wanna do it. It was like, no, we can't, and like legal will not allow us to do it.
[00:07:15] Clint Paul: So it was a lot of clicks and click-through rate and cost per click. And knowing what we know now, like those things are so inefficient for any sort of like. Any correlation to appointments or anything like that?
[00:07:33] Ray Mina: Yeah, we've seen the data firsthand when you can connect downstream and you have a lot of assumptions about how an individual campaign or an individual bidding strategy is working, but then when you actually see the revenue side of the data, you're like, oh, whoa, that was not what I expected.
[00:07:49] Ray Mina: Maybe I should try a different approach. Is there, do you have an example? Do you have a memory that was frustrating to you early on when someone was asking you like. How's it going or had a question around marketing and you couldn't, you couldn't provide a clear answer
[00:08:04] Clint Paul: For me, particularly as like a data analytics person.
[00:08:08] Clint Paul: The entire process of those couple months was pretty frustrating to like not have that line of sight and like Yeah, I pretty much took it upon like I was like, we need to. Push this forward and kind of like, we need to figure out solutions because this isn't, this isn't gonna get us anywhere. Yeah, and it's not even the optimization piece is one thing, but it's also just like if we can't convince people what we're doing matters, then like we're, we have a short term excuse, but we need to get our act together and be like, all right, yes, this is an obstacle, but here's what we're doing and here's how we're driving things and all of that stuff.
[00:08:53] Clint Paul: It was frustrating initially and then I was like, head down, like how do we solve this problem? 'cause we can only kind of wallow in that for so long before people start asking, well, okay, yeah, that's pretty terrible, but what are you guys doing about it? So we need to have like answers for those sorts of, of questions quickly.
[00:09:13] Ray Mina: I think that's so key. Like I said at the top, like people who don't under a lot of people listen to this podcast, understand marketing, but if you don't understand marketing, it's not a nice to have. Marketing doesn't create dashboards and, and pretty spreadsheets or PDFs. Marketing actually drives brand and business, like, you know, Hospital for Special Surgery is known for athletes who wanna return to their sport.
[00:09:37] Ray Mina: Like, that's a job for marketing to do, to make sure that people know that. And so not, not having vis, you know, not having the visibility into how it's working puts the org at risk. Because what if you start cutting the things that are actually necessary? We, you, you're frustrated, like, you're like, I gotta, I gotta get the lights back on to improve.
[00:09:55] Ray Mina: Where did, where did you start? Like what, what did getting, what did getting started and improving things actually look like for you on day one?
[00:10:03] Clint Paul: Immediately it was, let's get our analytics platform back, back into, into shape so that we know-
[00:10:11] Ray Mina: Which was, what were you using at that time?
[00:10:13] Clint Paul: Google Analytics initially, and then we got rid of, I think we went overboard, but of course as the data guy, I think we went overboard with like what legal wanted, but we got rid of a lot of pages that could have even.
[00:10:28] Clint Paul: We didn't go completely dark, but we got rid of tagging on a majority of our pages just in case. So then we switched over to Buick Pro, which had a BAA allowed sort of more of like a server side kind of analytics tool. But that allowed us to get everything back to at least begin to quantify these sort of cost per click acquisitions.
[00:10:56] Clint Paul: To see what's happening on the site to at least get a sense directionally of is this working? Is this not working? Even though we still didn't have full visibility into that, but that was like task number one of like BAA agreement, web analytics platform like. An immediate need for sure.
[00:11:16] Ray Mina: And then it went further than that.
[00:11:18] Ray Mina: Like my experience in healthcare was like initially that was everybody's first reaction was like, oh my God, Google Analytics. But then they started realizing the rest of their. You know, Google Analytics is a free tool meant to serve the, you know, web and and advertising ecosystem. And if Google Analytics is not safe, then therefore all of those ad platforms that use even more data not safe, probably even worse than Google Analytics for their usage.
[00:11:44] Ray Mina: Where, what were the, what were the additional like key systems that you started to look at and you had to try to solve for?
[00:11:52] Clint Paul: Yeah, we did sort of the reverse. It was like all of our. Google Analytics was like one of the last ones I will to give our legal and compliance team some credit. They were way on top of this.
[00:12:03] Clint Paul: Like before, before the revised announcement, Eva went out, like during that spring, we were pretty much like starting to proactively handle a lot of this. So it was immediately like meta ga or meta Google ads, like, you're, you're done. And then like, then they started asking questions about Google Analytics and then we were like, okay, like.
[00:12:25] Clint Paul: Add it on. Like why, why not? We're already sort of carving out everything. Like may as well just go all in. But that was, yeah, it was. It was all those things. And even we were using a call platform. I won't call them out by name, but we were using a call platform and when we were sort of doing all of this sort of inventory, we weren't really loving the answers of how they were keeping us HIPAA compliant.
[00:12:48] Clint Paul: We were like, all right, you guys gotta go too. So like, just start. Oh wow. Completely fresh from like everything.
[00:12:54] Ray Mina: Yeah, so, you know, part of this is restoring data. Just get to baseline for that ecosystem because if you, you know, disclaimer, if you don't have data for, forget about analytics. If you don't have data to provide back to advertising platforms in the ecosystem.
[00:13:11] Ray Mina: These tools suck at their job. Like they're only good at their job if you can actually leverage their machine learning. And if you don't, your competitors or other people bidding for similar keywords or running similar ads are using data and they're just gonna run laps around you. So short answer, you're gonna spend a lot more money to try to like capture the same consumer without data.
[00:13:31] Ray Mina: So it's kind of, it's kind of a no go from a CFO standpoint to keep doing this. Right. Yeah.
[00:13:36] Clint Paul: And being. Being a specialty hospital in New York City where there is no shortage of hospital systems, right, is a challenge in and of itself too. Of like, we don't have that referral pipeline of like, oh, I go to NYU and for my physical, and then I say, Hey, my knee kind of hurts.
[00:13:54] Clint Paul: And they're like, oh, go up to the fourth floor or whatever, and like, go get that checked out. Like we don't have the luxury of that. So our job is almost like. I won't say twice as hard, but it's, it's more difficult to be like, Hey, here's one, what orthopedics is like, like what we do and like all of that stuff.
[00:14:14] Clint Paul: But then also why that matters. And then third, why we are the ones you should go to for that treatment. So it's a lot to cram into like a 32nd messaging or anything like that of just like, it's a lot of storytelling and a lot to communicate.
[00:14:34] Ray Mina: Yeah. Marketing, really highly competitive environment, different type of business model, like marketing really, really matters to capture the minds of the, of the patient.
[00:14:44] Ray Mina: Yeah. So you, you get, you gotta get back to baseline, but that's actually not the golden part of your story. Like you went, you went further because you recognized that. Even outside of analytics and ad platforms, there's all these different systems that wow, if you could start to connect the data across them, you could actually take a step change in getting better at, you know, using unit economics, triangulating on the right consumers.
[00:15:10] Ray Mina: Tell me about like some of the systems that you started to take a look at.
[00:15:14] Clint Paul: It was always something in the back of my head. 'cause there's only so far. Within our ecosystem that you can track and really know things before it goes into Epic. And then we sort of lose sight of it from any sort of connection standpoint.
[00:15:29] Clint Paul: So it was always in the back of my head of like, all right, this is nice. We know up to a certain point that we're sort of assuming there's gonna be some drop off, but we don't really know what someone's doing after this point in time of any sort of booking that they do. So as we were building all of these things back.
[00:15:46] Clint Paul: Especially with having a BA, A with our analytics tool. They had an offering to start, like dumping data into our data lake, just raw analytics data. So that sort of sprung into my head of just like, all right, if this is something that we can start to. Kind of access and play around with a little bit. Like there's maybe something there where we can kind of connect these two tools and how do we do that?
[00:16:17] Clint Paul: Like what, what needs to be done? So like that was just a whole thought process of, of kind of figuring out what links we could sort of finagle between the two platforms to say like, all right, this person could be this person. And like, how do we do that with a level of confidence? Things like that. So like.
[00:16:36] Clint Paul: The wheels were in motion as pretty much after we got, we started with that analytics platform. It was like, all right, what's, what's the next thing? Because like we could build back of how to optimize, how to do all of that. Like we have a pathway there once, like the next layer that we can dig into to just sort of know what we're responsible for.
[00:16:59] Clint Paul: But then also just like the customer journey and being smarter about. What are they engaging with? What are some touch points where we could start to say like, this person might be interested in making an appointment? 'cause we get millions of visitors to our website over the course of a year. So like not the vast majority of those people are not going to step foot into one of our hospital locations.
[00:17:23] Clint Paul: Like it's just not gonna happen. They're researching, they're doing all this. So like to know kind of the touch points. Outside of just being like, ah, it makes sense. If they're looking at a locations page or a physician page, maybe they're a little more like lower funnel, but knowing how those all interplay with each other is unlocking a huge level of just knowledge.
[00:17:46] Clint Paul: Even if we're, even if it's not a direct, we can use this to optimize type thing. Just knowing that patient journey and getting smarter about that and using that for messaging and just. What sort of content do we want to develop to nurture that? And like all of those things, being in the sort of marketing kind of ecosystem, being able to sort of spread that out to different departments and lead, that was like a huge, a huge thing for us, for sure.
[00:18:19] Ray Mina: Yeah. I, I love that like, obsession with the patient journey because some of these things like. Does they take a lot of time and thought like, you know, if someone needs to do a hip replacement from a chronic overuse injury in sports, it's not like they wake up one day and they're gonna do it. That like maybe feel good one month and maybe like, oh, maybe I'll wait another year.
[00:18:39] Ray Mina: So there's like a, there can be a long time, right? In order for that person to become a patient, even though they're doing research and trying to learn more about how you can actually help them. The other thing that you mentioned that we've seen a bunch firsthand is, is that, you know, a lot of people are optimizing around what's happening at the web level, but, you know, and, and it's not like selling shoes where that's good enough, like in healthcare it's like, did, did they, did they actually come and get services and did those services result in the outcomes that, you know, the pa both the patient and the organization wanted?
[00:19:13] Ray Mina: And a lot of that data lives in Epic. And definitely is not able, you cannot connect outta the box to something like Google or to to meta you. You can do that in other markets. Like that's what things like Shopify, they do it. You know, Salesforce has some integrations for B2B marketers, but like in healthcare, that just doesn't exist.
[00:19:33] Ray Mina: And the reason for that, right, is that there is going to be a drop off. Not everybody who books an appointment ends up getting to the desired outcome. And we talked about it. Machine learning that matters. Like if you're asking Google to optimize for patients that attend appointments, that's very different for Google than, you know, it might not seem like it is, but it's a very different outcome than, you know, someone who did some kind of web booking.
[00:19:59] Ray Mina: Right?
[00:20:00] Clint Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And like that's, it's very eye-opening. And I will say it's like similarly, when we brought back our phone tracking. We previously were doing like, like I'm sure most people listening of like calls over two minutes and that'll count as a conversion. And then like once we brought that back and I started listening to calls, I was like, guys, like we've way overestimated what's going on for two minutes on one of these calls?
[00:20:30] Clint Paul: Because they even. Even trying to categorize them manually myself, I was like, I'm not even sure what the outcome of this call was. So like being able to layer that into the mix, like our assumptions are so off in some instances, but then also just like it AP in other instances. But just to be like, you have the immediacy of the booking action, which is nice.
[00:20:57] Clint Paul: But then if you have to start like. Reporting back to the business about what's happening after that, then it's, then it's yet again another black hole that just, if you're talking to finance, they're not really gonna care about if you drove X amount with like 30% of them canceling an appointment and you don't know that.
[00:21:19] Clint Paul: But like, so being able to like access that level of the story, even if. Even if it's not, we're not optimizing towards that yet. But even just to know that, and to be able to report on that is, is huge as far as telling the marketing story to different departments and that level of collaboration, things like that.
[00:21:39] Clint Paul: Like having, being able to speak the same language is, is huge.
[00:21:46] Ray Mina: Yeah. I think it's such an important thing, what you just said, because I, I think there was a point in our journey as marketers where, especially in the early days of digital, where it was like, eh.
[00:21:55] Ray Mina: Good enough. Right? But in 2026, it, by the way, like it's the same out for anyone in healthcare.
[00:22:01] Ray Mina: Feeling the pressure of budgets and pressure to, to prove performance, it doesn't make you feel better, but it's, it's happening across marketing across every industry. And 2026, like it's good enough, is not good enough anymore. Like we gotta get really precise because our budgets and our resources and, you know, we're being scrutinized, it's all under extreme pressure and it's only gonna get worse.
[00:22:24] Ray Mina: So like. Uh, this kind of level of certainty, you know, the two minute, like, oh, I'm good enough, or I'll use some AI to on a guest that this call, like, you may be wildly off. And that's what we, that's what we keep seeing over. And when we get past, like this probabilistic measurement to like deterministic, like it actually happened, the gap is usually way bigger than you think.
[00:22:44] Ray Mina: And that could be the difference between, you know, the budget that you have and getting the outcomes that you need.
[00:22:50] Clint Paul: It's, it's totally true, and every patient journey is so different that like, even just making those assumptions is, is very difficult Before you have any idea of what that looks like because you're like, ah, yeah, like they're going to these pages, then they book an appointment like it, it's Smooth sail.
[00:23:10] Clint Paul: They've done a ton of research and then it's like, oh no, actually they. Had the incorrect insurance and now there's a back and forth with the office and now like all of those types of things that can pop up that aren't marketing's fault, but we, if we're reporting that, like, yeah, we did it and then we didn't do it.
[00:23:30] Clint Paul: Like that's, we don't want to be telling an incorrect story.
[00:23:34] Ray Mina: No. And you know, we have a cu Yeah, I'm not gonna share their name, but we have a customer who had an assumed customer acquisition costs and after. We connected data for them and and ran some experiments. The actual acquisition cost was two x the assumed, so imagine spending a year and a half of all the ad spend.
[00:23:54] Ray Mina: And then going to, you know, leadership and saying, well, good news is we can measure it now. Bad news is we're upside down by a factor of two x. Like anyone who's had that conversation with their CF two X is a big deal. Probably busted unit economics with your growth model. So pretty, pretty big deal to understand this stuff.
[00:24:12] Ray Mina: The hard part that I've seen over and over again is not even technical. It's getting buy-in. With the IT team that owns Epic because marketing does not own Epic. Sometimes we're second class citizen because there are a lot of demands on, not because they're not great people, it's just they have a lot of demands that IT team that owns Epic, everybody wants them to do something and so marketing is kind of an afterthought.
[00:24:39] Ray Mina: How did you, how did you fight to get, maybe fight's the wrong word, but how did you push to get alignment about how important these resources would be?
[00:24:48] Clint Paul: Isn't too bad of a word.
[00:24:51] Ray Mina: I love it. By the way, I'm not hating. I'm not hating on the Epic IT team at all.
[00:24:57] Clint Paul: No, I think persistence. This is. This in particular touches a lot of different areas of the business.
[00:25:05] Clint Paul: It makes InfoSec uncomfortable. It makes it have to do something that's outside of their normal purview when they could be dealing with like checking off boxes that will directly benefit our doc, our doctors and nurses. Like this isn't a nothing request, so. It was just a bit of persistence. I think the main thing for me and what I try to do with these sorts of things is to know enough about what needs to get done to save them the trouble of coming up with an answer themselves.
[00:25:39] Clint Paul: So like trying to build out everything to come with to them with a complete request. And saying like, this is what we want to do. These are the, the portions of our web data that we think are coming into Epic that we would wanna mix on. I'm not gonna write the SQL quote code for all of that, but like, here's what I think we should be able to do, and like, when you have the resources, let's, let's see if we can do that.
[00:26:04] Clint Paul: And that, that's been successful. That's been my approach with bringing things to legal now that I've gone through this exercise of. HIPAA compliance and BAAs, like knowing how to shoo off ideas that I just know are not gonna get off the ground that we don't even need to bring to legal. Like when I bring something to them, I want it to be like trusted that it's not just gonna be me being like, tell me what you guys think about this.
[00:26:30] Clint Paul: And they're gonna be like, no, obviously we can't do that. So like trying to safeguard the reputation of marketing. To be like, these guys know what they're talking about, and when they bring us requests that they're gonna be thought out, they're gonna be vetted somewhat and like perhaps that helps with the collaboration effort.
[00:26:49] Clint Paul: I'd like to think it does, but we got it done. So I guess, I guess it didn't hurt. That approach.
[00:26:56] Ray Mina: I think you're right. I think you, if you bring it unless, 'cause again, remember they're like tapped on resources. They're like, they, you know, if marketing, marketing doesn't have resources, like the, the Epic IT team is also like under, under hire.
[00:27:08] Ray Mina: So making it a complete ask versus something exploratory where they feel like they're gonna be, you know, spinning their wheels for a while, probably goes a long way. So thi this journey wasn't just about getting to baseline. You basically started to connect the data in a better way. To really get to that holy grail, which is like understanding the full, you know, consumer to patient journey at some point.
[00:27:30] Ray Mina: And, and you and I were at our event a couple weeks ago in New Orleans. We did this great event for healthcare marketers called House Call. It's all about like sharing ideas and connecting with each other. And Clint was on stage. And you shared this slide that you said was like, you know, like maybe, maybe second favorite to your children that goes to your leadership.
[00:27:52] Ray Mina: Like what did all this effort result in? Tell me like visually, like what did that slide represent to leadership?
[00:28:00] Clint Paul: Yeah, so this was a culmination of sort of the first layer. There's we're, we're still very much in this building out phase. Of all the opportunities that we have with this sort of match data, but this was like the lowest hanging fruit is visualizing the sort of last click attribution for appointments that were truly booked appointments.
[00:28:24] Clint Paul: And what we saw was when we sort of visualize the share of all the different channels, we could see that incremental build as we started doing different initiatives. So to have that. Not be sort of a guesstimate or just like, yeah, they made it to like this far along in the booking process to have it be like, these are booked appointments.
[00:28:46] Clint Paul: Here's, here's the share that marketing can say we're directly responsible for to a certain degree, and seeing everything that we've done of like, oh, we tried this in this month. And then there's like a little bit of an uptick and then like, oh, we built on that. We started like. Doing other things and kind of optimizing differently, and then like all of a sudden there's a spike that has maintained that now we're like equal share of marketing to organic search to direct.
[00:29:16] Clint Paul: So it was like as soon as I started showing that around, it was like, oh, now we understand what you've been saying. And now I'm like, this is amazing day though. And I'm like, yeah, and it's only gonna get better.
[00:29:29] Ray Mina: You're literally able to show. With the, this visual, like over time shows how the, you know, digital marketing efforts grew, not just incrementally, but significantly to match other channels.
[00:29:43] Ray Mina: 'cause a lot of times it's like, well, you know, a lot of this is coming from our brand or from coming from other sources. Like, how do you prove that digital you're, you basically. Have the data to show that you actually directly bent that curve and had an impact. What did that unlock for you? Like o once, once leadership started to have more confidence and, and you have the data so you have more confidence, what does that change?
[00:30:08] Ray Mina: Like, do you get more budget? Does it give you more flexibility and campaign strategy? I'm just, just curious like what, what it unlocks.
[00:30:15] Clint Paul: Yeah, I think, I think right now it has allowed us to sort of proactively. Kind of pitch ourselves a little bit of like, Hey, here's, here's what we're doing and here's how this is kind of working from an actual, an actual kind of metric that the entire business can get behind of.
[00:30:39] Clint Paul: Like, this is what we're here to do is drive appointments and here's how we're doing it. And then just sort of showing the roadmap of where we're going and how. This is just the first part of it. Which then unlocks the conversations with finance of like, we haven't gone to them asking for more money yet, but we have again, proactively kind of said like, Hey, here's what we have so far.
[00:31:04] Clint Paul: Here's how we're trying to start thinking about this. And eventually what we want to get to is a full ROI to be able to say like, we spent. X in Q1 and now six months later, seven months later of like, let's fulfill the patient journey and see what those net out as. To be able to have that connection is like that's the holy grail and that's to be able to tell that part of the story is very enticing to different departments and especially finance to get to get that sort of buying.
[00:31:42] Clint Paul: Finance and marketing are not always the best of friends.
[00:31:47] Ray Mina: Yeah. That finance doesn't understand marketing and marketing is like, well, well, can't you see how this is working? And yeah, I, I agree. It's, but it's important that, it's important that marketing and finance find alignment because that's where, that's where the budget, like if there's going to be a budget decision, you're gonna need that partnership to unlock it.
[00:32:07] Clint Paul: A hundred percent.
[00:32:08] Clint Paul: And to be able to put something. In a spreadsheet to send to them. That's like hard facts. Like now all of a sudden we're speaking the same language. Now all of a sudden, we don't really have to convince them that brand versus digital. Like we can say like, here's what we're doing, here's how it's actually contributing to the business, and like, let's, let's have a discussion of how we report on that and how what, what this means to everyone so that we can.
[00:32:36] Clint Paul: Moving forward. I don't want to tell people like fake numbers that are gonna be meaningless. Like I want alignment over everything so that when I present something, it's like, yeah, this is, these are the definitions that we all agreed on and, and this is. This is the story.
[00:32:56] Ray Mina: Yeah. Yeah. Great marketers like you, Clint, like we, we wanna show, we wanna show the proof and the results, not just, you know, we don't wanna do campaigns and we don't wanna spend time and energy on things that aren't working and we wanna keep doubling down.
[00:33:09] Ray Mina: 'cause usually it's like a handful of things. You can make work really well and that's where you wanna invest your time versus spreading yourself thin across like a hundred. Different experiments that, you know, none of them have traction. You, you mentioned that you haven't, like the next phase is talking to finance about potential, maybe future investments where there's more budget or, or more opportunities unlocked.
[00:33:32] Ray Mina: Where have you seen measurable, measurable improvements so far? Has it been in, in just improvements in conversion rates, improvements in cac? Like what, what is, what has driven some of this step change that you've seen?
[00:33:45] Clint Paul: Yeah, conversion rates for sure. The, the level as we've been building all of these tools back up, the level of access to that data has, has increased.
[00:33:57] Clint Paul: And the, the optimizations that we've been able to make has been incrementally, like before we knew it, we were like, oh, like we're in some point, like from a cost per click standpoint, like. Easily half from being able to optimize towards like actual measurable results. But yeah, I think, I think initially it's the cost per the cost per acquisition.
[00:34:24] Clint Paul: Um, and kind of where we're going to go is gonna just allow us to optimize smarter and to know more about what's actually happening for like. To know the messaging that's working from a true standpoint of like people are booking appointments and even just knowing targeting and does a New York campaign that gets seen in Connecticut mean that that person's going to Connecticut or New York, like knowing the locations and just how to sort of like slice and dice things and is fine messaging better than just overall brand messaging and just knowing, knowing those levers to pull and what's actually.
[00:35:07] Clint Paul: Attributing to things is gonna be a huge, huge thing moving forward.
[00:35:13] Ray Mina: I agree. We've seen firsthand that, you know, some of our, some of our customers who've connected the data end to end and just have better, not only better visibility to make decisions, but also can start to activate some of that data. You can send more valuable signals back to ad platforms.
[00:35:30] Ray Mina: It varies like no one can promise because every, you said earlier, every single workflow and every environment's a little different. But we've consistently seen like a 20% improvement in customer acquisition costs. So like imagine if you have a million dollars of spend, you just created a additional budget of 200 K without like asking for any more money.
[00:35:49] Ray Mina: So there is definitely a lot of like upside opportunity in, in doing what you're doing. I am just curious like how the conversations you've had as you interface with leadership and finance and, and the rest of the marketing org, what, what, what are the North Stars? Is it, have you set like a goalpost of like, revenue that we drive?
[00:36:08] Ray Mina: Like are there, is it continuing to drop the acquisition costs? Like what, what's the thing that everyone's marching towards?
[00:36:15] Clint Paul: Yeah, I think, I think for us trying to not over promise, we're trying to maintain. A certain level of cost per acquisition, and it varies by location. There are different factors to different things, but that's, that's our biggest thing for right now.
[00:36:34] Clint Paul: I think as we build this model out, knowing a bit more of the revenue piece, I think that will then come into play of just like, okay, here's, here's the ROI that we wanna maintain. And it's kind of having that be kind of a secondary metric. Outside of the, the cost per, because that's gonna be, the cost per, is gonna be the most immediate and sort of actionable one because our, our patient value, lifetime value can be a seven, eight month journey before, from that initial appointment to any sort of surgical procedure or anything like that.
[00:37:14] Clint Paul: So. For, for marketing and optimization and things like that. Like, we obviously can't wait eight months to know what Google Ads keywords are working for us. So like having, having that be the sort of transaction based metric with the secondary of like, here's how we're gonna optimize towards this lifetime value piece.
[00:37:35] Clint Paul: I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be huge. Just like I, like I keep saying like, it just levels the, the language playing field of what we're doing. To someone like finance who's just thinking and balances and things like that.
[00:37:50] Ray Mina: Yeah, and some of the, like looking out further, you know, a year from now when you do have some of that data, you know, you can't, you can't know it in real time, but you will at some point understand like the journey and like where the marketing inputs have the biggest outcome in revenue.
[00:38:05] Ray Mina: I'm assuming that that's gonna be a very powerful conversation with finance because that's where you start to get into. Being able to invest more where it makes sense as a group.
[00:38:14] Clint Paul: A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and like I said, like the, the last click stuff is nice, but that's the lowest hanging fruit.
[00:38:21] Clint Paul: That's just us being able to say like, look, look at the direct correlation of what we're able to measure to then build out that sort of like multi-touch is gonna be huge too. 'cause then it's like all of a sudden those higher funnel tactics you're gonna see like, oh. Those do play in, like we're not just making it up like these do play into the journey of the patient at some point, even if it's not, when they're reaching that lower funnel piece,
[00:38:49] Ray Mina: the thing our leaders miss is like that, that billboard on the at or the like banner at the stadium, the thing that's so tangible.
[00:38:58] Ray Mina: That you like, oh yeah, we should invest in that. That's exactly what you just, that that's the same as digital marketing. You know, more upper funnel marketing is a really less expensive and, and easier to scale up and down billboard. It's just that it's so hard to measure. The difference is like the billboard at the stadium.
[00:39:17] Ray Mina: Your friends will come to you and be like, oh, that's really cool. I saw you there. And then that's enough validation for you as a leader. Whereas no one's really gonna come to you and say, I saw. You know, I saw your ad in New York Times, or what, no one's gonna comment on that part, right? Because it's just kind of like a little bit more below the surface and we can't measure it.
[00:39:37] Ray Mina: And so it's hard for leadership to understand that, like the digital banner and billboard has huge impact on the brand.
[00:39:43] Clint Paul: And maybe even more importantly, there's less of an opportunity if someone is on their way to the office to see a competitor on a billboard to then be like, why are we on this billboard?
[00:39:52] Clint Paul: Like, why am I seeing exactly these people?
[00:39:55] Ray Mina: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, the, the real world, like brand marketing is still powerful. Like I'm, I'm sure you as a digital marker, marketers see it as like coexistence that, like you probably do a bit of both because they both have this impact, but digital.
[00:40:11] Ray Mina: Isn't just about getting patients, it is not just about a Google ad converts to a patient. It's about building that brand and building that trust over time. So when I'm ready, like I really already need to have you in mind. It can't be like, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go get a hip replacement from just anybody.
[00:40:28] Ray Mina: Like, I'll, I wanna return to my sport. I wanna make sure I'm going to someone who's like the best in the business.
[00:40:33] Clint Paul: That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[00:40:35] Ray Mina: Yeah, so there are a lot of people in healthcare that are not anywhere close to where you're at on the journey. I, when I first started like meeting healthcare marketing leaders and learning more, I just kind of assumed that we were already there.
[00:40:49] Ray Mina: But, you know, over the last three years I've learned that it's a pretty, it's a pretty big gap between, you know, digital and then that, that, you know, complete patient journey. So if folks that are listening to this podcast wanna. Kind of take a first step. What would you, what would you, what, what's the most approachable thing that you would recommend to them?
[00:41:09] Clint Paul: The least scary first step is sort of getting a handle on your web analytics and making sure that those pages are tagged properly. That like, if, if there's anything within URLs, things like that, like getting that house in order is gonna make your life a lot easier. To start compounding those things in the future.
[00:41:36] Clint Paul: So like if, if you have all these URLs that are just see these disparate things with no real kind of mechanics behind them, it's gonna be a mess to try to match that up to anything tangible. It's no small lift to, to do all of that. But that would be whatever sort of custom events, anything like that, that you would need to start building out, that would be the first step.
[00:41:59] Clint Paul: 'cause you're not gonna get anywhere with a, with a mess on that front.
[00:42:05] Ray Mina: And then for as, as if people get that to a decent place and then they wanna go a little bit deeper, as deep as you've gone, what, what would you say is the part they need to buckle up around and have patience? That it's gonna be like a hard part of the process.
[00:42:21] Clint Paul: Unsurprisingly, the IT buy-in. I would say as you're cleaning up your web platform, start poking around with the Epic team and the IT team because that's gonna be the thing that's takes the longest. The actual, once everyone's bought in and like you have the web stuff in a good place and they're ready to roll with all of this, the actual like connection piece isn't even that difficult.
[00:42:47] Clint Paul: If everything runs as it. Is assumed to run. The hard part is like everything, it's the, the setup, the foundation, the building blocks for these things and getting everyone rowing in the same direction is, is the key. So whether it's boxes of chocolate that you leave at the office store, whatever, whatever you gotta do to butter up the, the ethic and IT teams as you're kind of.
[00:43:15] Clint Paul: Figuring out how best to plan out your, your analytics. I think, I think that's, that goes a long way.
[00:43:22] Ray Mina: Yeah. And you, the other piece of advice you gave earlier on is like, go make sure you understand what you need and what you need to ask before you go and be, you know, be respectful for that team because they, again, they have a lot on their plate offered anybody like connect with me on LinkedIn and I can definitely like.
[00:43:39] Ray Mina: Point you in the direction of, like, give you some advice on how to prepare for that conversation. But definitely go into a prepare. Don't, don't make it exploratory. Make sure you're really clear on what you need.
[00:43:50] Clint Paul: Yeah. Don't, don't waste their time because then you're already starting off. It's already gonna be difficult to get it, to get it done.
[00:43:59] Clint Paul: And you're starting off even more if you're like, Hey guys, I just wanna like chat. I have this idea and I wanted to get your thoughts on how we could do it. Like, no. It's gotta be like, Hey, we have this web data. Here's, here's some things that we set up that I think it could be easy to start passing through into Epic.
[00:44:14] Clint Paul: And like, here, here are the steps I think we need to take. Let me know in your expertise if these aligned with reality of how things could work. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, this guy's just not asking us to do his work for him. He wants to actually collaborate and, and it makes it. It makes it less onerous of a, of a request.
[00:44:38] Ray Mina: The other thing to, to not leave out is what's the business impact? Why is this important to the business? And, and it, and we've, we've covered a lot of why it is on this call. Well, Clint, I appreciate you doing marketing rounds with me today. Wealth of knowledge. Appreciate the journey you've been on. And again, thanks for jumping on on a Monday.
[00:44:57] Clint Paul: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:45:01] Producer: Today's episode is brought to you by Freshpaint. If you're a healthcare marketer under pressure to do more with less, Freshpaint helps you stretch fixed budgets, prove what's working, and protect the strategies that drive growth. Freshpaint brings performance and privacy together in one platform so you can see real outcomes across channels and double down where ROI is highest. With Freshpaint, privacy becomes your performance advantage. Turn better data into smarter decisions, find more high value patients, and keep your growth plans on track. Learn more at freshpaint.io.