Meeting Prep

Meeting prep is just as important as the meeting itself. Refresh yourself on the strategy. Next, go through the dashboard yourself and notate any wins or warnings. In the meetings, we want to draw clients' attention to things that are going well.

For warnings or problems, we need to not just be aware of them, but understand why AND have a plan of action. This is why we cannot simply review the report 20 minutes before the meeting. If there is a problem, we will likely need to ask the relevant team to dig into the data as to why, then formulate a corrective plan.

Meeting prep should be done 2 days before the client meeting.

Cadence

Monthly

The monthly meetings are a chance to connect with clients, share results, and get updated on anything the client has coming up that we can incorporate into marketing.

Keep in mind that our strategies are always done quarterly. Unless something is very wrong, monthly data is not overly relevant. SEO takes months to show results as does paid media. We can get leading indicators on such things as impressions, website traffic, or click-thru-rate, but monthly data is not overly predictive for any channel other than PPC. We always want to reinforce this with clients. Clients have a tendency to focus on the short term, but short term data fluctuations are mostly noise, not signal.

An example we often give is real estate in Wisconsin. If you looked at house sales in Wisconsin from October to April, a six-month period, you would get a false read as this is still winter in Wisconsin, when few people are buying homes. Even though there is six months of data, that period of time gives you an inaccurate view of home sales in the state. To truly understand Wisconsin home sale trends, you need to compare full years.

In the marketing world, this is true for most marketing channels. Changes to SEO often aren't even indexed by Google for at least a month. So any impact to results won't start showing up until month 2 or 3. Paid media is all about frequency, building trust, and nurturing people through a decision-making process. The fastest this will start to have impact is one quarter (three months). For this reason, we do not want to emphasize short term data. One month, traffic may be up, the next it's down. Calls goes up, calls go down. There are a million variables at play and no way to separate signal from noise unless there is a massive change. 

We want to see improvement on a quarterly basis. Note that this is more important for new accounts than established ones. If we're working with a provider that's been around for fifty years and there are no changes to their budgets, they're most likely going to get the same results. If things are stable, that's good. 

We want to remind clients that marketing is as defensive as it is offensive, especially for established providers. For example, the biggest SEO gains are going to be seen in the first couple years of work. After that, primary silos and efforts should be well-established, so that means we're going after long tail, lower volume terms. Additionally, competitors will constantly be trying to outrank us, so much time is spent reworking old content to get it back or make sure it stays on top. 

For startups or clients that had weak marketing previously, we can expect faster growth, but the quarterly and monthly cadence framework remains the same.

In the monthly call, we reference the strategy and discuss what are efforts are maintaining alignment with it. Except for PPC, we should not be updating or changing the strategy until we get to the quarterly meeting unless there is an egregious issue such as calls dropped by 20% or more.

• Dashboard report
• Highlight any major successes or problems
• PPC discussion
• Check on upcoming events, updates, or client needs
• Draw attention to specific actions such as "we completed over 50 split tests on Facebook ads and have now narrowed down to the top 4 performing ads" or "we completed all foundational citation work and produced two pieces of content in the surgery silo."
• Discuss ongoing efforts continuing to the next month

When reviewing the dashboard, review the entire dashboard the first meeting with a new client so they understand the different parts and how it relates to the results we want to see. Outside of that first meeting, we then only highlight relevant sections of the report.

Quarterly

Quarterly meetings are where we dig deep into results, look at the impact of the current strategy, and make updates for the next quarter. Oftentimes, our overall strategy will stay similar, but we will likely refresh ad campaigns or add in new layers. 

We want to look at:

• Messaging
• Audience targeting
• Channel strategies
• Overall budget and budget per channel

Everything we discuss should be backed up by data. Examples:

• "Our current messaging strategy is resonating with audiences as indicated by a strong click-thru rate across Facebook and TikTok campaigns" 
  
  
• "Inquiries rose 10% this quarter with most of that growth coming from increased brand search and improved rankings in Google Maps for the key terms "counseling near me," "treatment for depression", and "therapist for anxiety. The brand search increase is a result of our paid media campaigns across channels, with our depression and anxiety silo work driving the improved Google Maps rankings.'
  
  
• "We've seen an increase in Page 1 rankings across several high-intent terms, which has results in a 5% increase in calls. Your competitor took over the number 1 spot for "dental implants", which cut into search-driven inquiries. We are working on that from the SEO side by re-optimizing that page and adding in some supporting content. We suggest adding in additional PPC budget in the meantime to ensure we're showing up at the top of results for those searches."

We may see something in the data such as women are responding more to our ad campaigns, so we may suggest allocating a larger portion of the budget to women-only campaigns. Another approach to the same data could mean we want to split test more campaigns for men to see if we can get their numbers up. The answer to this question would come from the client, who do they see becoming patients? We'd want to focus on the demographic that utilizes, or makes the family decision to utilize, services the most.

We want to go through each channel and discuss the strategy as well as its contribution to overall results. Note that clients often need a reminder on top and mid-funnel strategies since these channels do not usually generate direct inquiries. Help the client understand how a channel like Facebook or TV drives results through overall lift. Key metrics to look at are not per channel inquiries, but total traffic, especially brand search, and total inquiries.

We also need to keep site of realistic goals. An expanding client or one whose services are underutilized needs to see growth. For an established client that's often running near capacity, the goal is to maintain.

Also, very important, as always in marketing, we're focused on qualified inquiries. We cannot control admissions, intakes, sales, or census. We can generate the qualified inquiries, but it's up to their call or admissions team to close them. Census, in particular, is the result of many factors. If a client keeps discussing census, they need to look at things such as length of stay, inquiry-to-admission conversion rate, and frequency of service utilization. Our job in marketing is qualified inquiries.