0086: Healthcare Marketing Secrets Revealed with Author, Speaker, Host, Director of the Health Marketing Academy, and Founder & CEO of Digital Marketing Agency Dr, Rachel Haviland

Ea interviews, episode 86, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Welcome to another episode of Expert Authority Effect Interviews. I have a question for you. Have you ever wanted to grow your healthcare practice? Have you ever wanted to acquire more clients? Are you tired of having to stay up with all of the things that are changing in the marketplace? You just want to work with your patients and help them, right? Well, I have a treat for you. I have Dr. Rachel Haviland with us today. She's an author, a speaker, and healthcare marketing professional. And she's gonna be coming up right after we thank our sponsor to be sharing with you the best practices to get more clients to your practice and grow it, acquire more clients so you can help them have a better life. I'm going to bring her up right after we thank our sponsor. Why every business needs a book, including yours. Would you like to save five plus hours with every prospect? Generate more leads and profit in your business? Now visit businessbookchecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Rachel Haviland. Rachel, how are you today?

I'm doing great, thank you, Mario.

Well, I know you have a ton of value and you're going to be sharing it with Expert Authority World, and it's a pleasure to have you. Why don't we jump into it? Why business? Why did you want to start it? Why health care? I mean, what got you into this?

That's a really interesting place to start because it's one of the questions that I'm asked most often because I actually spent 19 years in cancer research before I switched careers into marketing. So I obviously, I grew up in England, so I've seen the health care over there, I've seen the health care over here. And doing cancer research on a daily basis, I kept asking myself, why aren't we teaching people how to be healthier? Why isn't there more of a focus on prevention? I got to the point really, where trying to find a cure for cancer, which is as scientists, I started to look around for, okay, what's my second career going to be? This was 10, 11 years ago. This is right around the time that Facebook is taking off. Amazing technology. We know a lot more about it now, but back then it was still fairly new. And I looked at it and I thought, that is an amazing way to get a message around the world. If I want to help teach people about how to be healthier, how to take responsibility for their health, how to prevent disease. This would be a good way to do it. I really need to learn how to use Facebook. So I look back and laugh now because of how big Facebook has come. So that's really how the marketing agency started. Instead of really moving into creating my own practice, and I probably have to go back to school for more certifications because I didn't have enough, rather than doing that and actually opening my own practice, I just saw, and I decided that it was better for me to focus on helping what I call true health practitioners to actually get more patients and teach people how to be healthier and to take responsibility for their health than it was for me to start my own practice. So that's how the marketing agency started. Really?

Well, it sounds like a good segue that you were able to transition yourself into without having to spend, what, another five, 10, 20 years with.

I probably went back to med school. Exactly. So, I mean, don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of studying since and tens of thousands of dollars invested, you know, in that education, just in a different direction, away from the healthcare and into the marketing side instead of.

And then you just have to call yourself to help with the marketing because it would be your area of expertise and you'd still need it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been an advantage both for myself.

The agency, and I love how you were able to see the future before it happened. I mean, I remember when Facebook came out, and what's crazy now is there's friends of mine and colleagues and whoever. Basically anyone with kids, it's like their kids are younger than Facebook. Facebook, it's like, yeah.

When you think about what we grew up with, you know, and the technology that was available to us and what has changed in, let alone the last 10 years. But even just the last two years, you weren't kidding when you said in the introduction, you know, if you're struggling to keep up with how fast marketing is changing, that's absolutely. The primary purpose of my job is to. Is to stay up to date with that and then pass that knowledge on to clients.

So how are you helping? Who are you helping, and how are you helping them?

Yeah, so given my background, really, my focus is on working with integrative and functional medicine and holistic health practitioners, because that's what fits with my values. That's what I saw after 19 years in cancer research. Reclaim our health and to stay healthy, basically. So I work with those health practitioners to position them as experts in their industry and particularly in their community, their local community, as well as online, so that they can kind of become the Dr. Oz of their industry in their particular niche, so that people see them as that expert and they can consistently attract new patients, charge more and be seen as that expert.

Well, that sounds fantastic. I know a lot of people would like to have that done. I'm sure you can't get into the proprietary nature of everything you do, but why don't you give us a synopsis of how are you actually doing it? I mean, if someone comes to you right now, which they should call her, what are you going to do over the next 30 to 60 days with them to give them that transformation?

Yeah, the foundation really is in determining the strategy. And they have so many ideas. And my job really is to rein them in and to actually take all those ideas and to give them a strategic plan that they can then implement step by step with me holding their hand and helping them to do some of the work too. So it's a combination of some consulting, some training, and also some done for you services. And I think the biggest impact at the beginning, really when they first start working with me, is helping them overcome that fear. Whether it's fear of technology, fear of putting themselves out there, fear of promoting themselves online. Before our interview, we were just discussing.

How wonderful video is to promote. Promote our businesses. But if you had asked me to be on here a year ago, not so sure I would have wanted to do it. So I understand completely what that fear involves and how to overcome it. So that's really one of the things that we work on is overcoming those fears, that showing them how simple marketing can be, but effective, and then actually helping them overcome those fears in simple ways.

Fantastic. So tell me about the transformations. Who's one client that comes to mind that you've been able to give them the big biggest transformation. They were in a bad place or okay place before they talked to you, and then afterwards they were just so happy that they did.

I think, I think the first case study that comes to mind is.

A pediatric ER doctor. She's a child safety expert who is a client of mine and very, very passionate about child safety. She sees so many horrific things in the emergency room that are happening to children these days and she just really felt compelled to create a website about it. So about a year ago, we created a website for her called pdmom.com that's P-E-I-M o m.com and it's all about child safety, but from a unique perspective. So she has articles on there from professionals, just like her doctors. And she also has articles from parents and then also from teenagers and from kids. So you're getting the different perspectives.

From the different angles which you don't usually get. So from that point of view, it was a very unique project. She spends a lot of time researching the apps, the games, the social media that our kids are on and reporting back on the dangers. Basically that's her niche. A year ago we posted a blog post she had found in a video on YouTube Kids, which is specific. That's an app that's specifically designed for kids. She found this video where right in the center of the video was spliced these suicide tips, which is not what you want your children to be seeing.

How did that even get through?

Exactly. That has been a question ever since it's now been reported to YouTube and has been removed. And she's had a big impact in actually helping YouTube to figure out how to, how to determine this. Because it was just a kid's cartoon. And then spliced in the center of it maliciously, obviously was a 7 second clip of somebody talking about committing suicide. Cut a long story short, in January of this year, that blog post of hers went viral on social media. Obviously parents were horrified that this kind of thing is going on. Most of the time they just stick their kids in front of YouTube kids and just let the videos run and they don't think about it. So it went viral online, then it got picked up by the media? Yes, she was picked up by. She was contacted by BuzzFeed and Yahoo News and interviewed about this video and what parents needed to look for. And within say a five day period, we went from just two or 300 visits per day to over 20,000 visits per day on her website. Then the Washington Post picked up and asked for her an interview. And I said, okay, hold on a second.

We need to do some stuff here. Can you put them off for a couple of days? Because when you get that kind of exposure, you need to switch your servers so that they don't crash. So we had to move the entire site to a new server. And I said, okay, we're good. You can let them publish the interview. It was published on a Sunday night, so within 36 hours we'd had 65,000 visits to the site and it just went up from there. And in the six weeks that this went viral, we had over a million visits to the website.

Wow, that's fantastic.

It happened incredibly fast and the engagement is wonderful, but it's like a flood. You know, you get so many comments, so many interactions, so many private messages. At one point we were fielding, you know, two to three requests for interviews per hour because then it went off around the world. She was interviewed in multiple different countries. But yeah, these are good problems, good problems to have.

Yeah, yeah.

But what was interesting was then the trolls come out and that's, that's the problem that you, you kind of know is coming in.

The blue haired ones, the green haired or the red haired one, you know.

They are, they often are green haired little monsters. And I think that's one of the things that creates a lot of fear in people, is actually being out there and being criticized and how to deal with that kind of criticism and rejection. Well, this was on mass scale. I've never seen anything like it. I actually had to shield her from a lot of the, of the trolls that were out there, but she, she took the brunt of it. But there were some really nasty ones that I deleted. They hide behind, you know, the, the basic anonymity that you have online. And even some people that, you know, don't care about anonymity, they can be really, really mean. But at least she knows next time it happens, she's like, well, I dealt with that. Nothing happened. I didn't die. I can deal with it next time.

Well, I hope she doesn't have to go through the negative again. But I, I'm happy to hear she had a lot of positive out of it.

Yeah, yeah. So now we're leveraging that, you know, that, that credibility and that authority into consulting speaking gigs. And she's working on a coaching program for parents as well.

That's fantastic. How are you leveraging video? Let's talk about that.

Yeah, So I remember that one of the first time I spoke on stage, it was terrifying. So you stick me in front of a camera, it's even more terrifying. I understand completely where my clients are coming from when they say, I don't want to be on camera. So it's much easier to write a blog post or even do a podcast guest podcasting because people can't see you. But video really is where things are going and it's something I've had to ease myself into gently and something that I work with clients on. So it's much easier to do video like this, being interviewed. So one of the first things that we start people with is a podcast interview because even though we record them on Zoom, we just use the audio, but it gives them a chance to actually see what it feels like to be on video without actually, you know, having the pressure of using the video. And then we can ease them into doing video interviews like this, where they can be on screen with me and then gently, as they get used to it, then ease them into, you know, them. Them creating videos, them doing Facebook lives just on their own. Once they gain that confidence.

Well, I got to give you credit to what you were telling me before we went live, because you have to be insane to go live, let alone do it on video. But audio is where a lot of people like, as you were saying, because you can hide on there. And I got to admit, when people ask me to do interviews, I love doing them. And it's honestly, like, kind of relaxing in a break for me, because I don't have to go through 48 things on the checklist. It's just one. Make sure the mic's on. Yes, but what I. The downside is you can't read the nuances. There's no body language. You can't tell in emotion. You can't see the person. So I think it makes it more difficult. And when you were saying you use the video for the audio, even if you're not doing it live or recording it, I was like, that is genius. Because I have no doubt it makes for a better interview. What's your experience doing it both ways?

It really does make a difference. And that was. Once we started, we switched away from doing live interviews on blog talk radio and switched to pre recording them. It was so much easier, so much more relaxed. We could do it at our own convenience. And I thought, you know, do I want to do this as a teleconference? You know, call into this line and we'll record it. I thought, no, we, you know, we have zoom. Why don't we do it on video? It's so much nicer to feel like you're there in person. You can see their facial expressions, you know, when they're ready to answer your question or they're getting ready to interrupt you, what you're saying at that point. And it just makes for a much easier flow. But we tell them beforehand. If you're going to come on the show, we are going to record it with video, but we actually only use the audio for podcasts. But then also what we're doing is they settle in and they get comfortable, and they're like, okay, this is kind of cool. I'm kind of enjoying it. And it's. It's a lot of fun. So I will actually take a couple of clips of their interview and as video and use those to promote the show. And I just show them and say, hey, you know, these were great segments of what you said on the podcast. You know, is it okay if I share these as video? And by that point they're like, well, the interview went great, so why not?

Yeah, it's nice to have that visual, too. When I launched the show, I was using much less complicated setup, and I was actually doing the. I was promoting the live. And I will say you'll drive yourself nuts, because I was doing testing a week before using that clip to promote the live. And then I realized if Facebook drops down, if YouTube drops down, if any, I mean, there's so many technical things that can go wrong.

Mm.

It's just insane. So you should always have a good recording. But it's just so fun, too, like you're saying, and the able. You know, you can't promote just an audio. I mean, you can. But when you can have both of our faces and put a title on it, how much more can you leverage that across social. What social platform have you found has been working the best for you to promote your podcast and your clients?

Facebook, mainly. Facebook and Instagram, definitely. Certainly with, you know, for example, if you're a nutritionist. But I think also with Instagram, you can share, you know, lifestyle pictures, lifestyle videos, you working out or, you know, what to eat when you're going out, things like that. Both Facebook and Instagram are perfectly designed for that.

Excellent. Well, I'm going to ask you one last question before we go to the imperfect action round. And I've been calling this the expert authority roller coaster. And these are just kind of, you know, questions about how would you change the world? Who's your favorite celebrity? If you could fly a spaceship, what color would it be? What? How are you feeling today? You want a softball or hardball question?

Oh, let's go for a hardball. I know you well enough.

Is the moon landing real?

Oh.

Interesting.

A lot of conspiracy theories about that one. Yes.

So it wasn't a yes or no.

You just how interesting I automatically think about, yeah, how would I market that?

That's a huge event. How would I market it? Definitely. We'd be live streaming that stuff everywhere. We could possibly live stream it. Right?

You know, one of my favorite channels. First off, props on the answer, because you really didn't. Let's be honest, you really didn't. But that was very diplomatic and, you know, that's cool. It was great. It's interesting to me Because I've asked other stuff. And what did I say? Oh, on that one, I asked what's better, the US or Canada? From the guest who was from Canada. And I was like.

Yeah, if you, if you ask me that one, I would say the U.S. sorry, I've been here 18 years. Love it. Oh, cool.

That is a good one.

I was kind of hoping you would ask me the one about, you know, how do I want to change the world though?

But yeah, how would you want to change the world?

So for a long, for a long time with, with the marketing agency, I've, I've worked on multiple projects in multiple different industries. I think 36 different industries at the last count. It wasn't always focused on healthcare. That wasn't until I started to think about, okay, how would I really like to change the world? And I worked with my business coach to set some goals. So my lifetime goal is to positively impact the health of 1 billion people.

And doing that through marketing and working with, if I can work with 10,000 health practitioners over the next 30 years and help each of them reach another hundred thousand people, that's a billion people. It's doable. Together we can do is doable.

And you just made me think of some of my clients, some of my friends, colleagues and past guests in the healthcare space and let's get them on board because we need to all talk. So I'll tell you that after the show. But honestly, you just triggered like my Rolodex mentally.

Great, thank you.

Fantastic. So we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. Why every business needs a book, including yours. Would you like to save five plus hours with every prospect, Generate more leads and profit in your business? Now visit businessbookchecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today. All right, we are back with the imperfect action round. Dr. Haviland, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am, I am. I highly embrace imperfect action. It's the only way to get things done.

Absolutely. So 60 second rapid fire questions. Number one, what is the fastest path to the cash?

I think the, the fastest path to cash for my clients is really a shift in philosophy. So a lot of them come to me and they want lead generation, they want to get more patients and they're focused on cash flow of the practice. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that sales aren't important. Obviously if you don't have sales, you don't have a business. I'm not saying that at all. I work on helping them shift their perspective slightly towards focusing on service instead. Getting them back to what their mission is, why they want to serve their clients, who their best clients are, what they need when they come as patients to them, and how they can best help them get results. Because once you switch back into that service aspect again, you can just see their eyes light up, that passion comes back and all that stress and resistance is gone. So I think the fastest path to cash is to focus on service.

Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way they can fix it?

I think the biggest problem really is not thinking strategically.

I get a lot of people come to me where they've tried various different marketing tactics. It's easy to find tactics online. You can easily Google say how do I use Instagram to promote my business? How do I use Facebook to promote my business? But unless you bring it all together into a strategic plan, it's just not going to work. And not thinking strategically leads to short term thinking. They're just thinking about okay, what are other short term marketing techniques that I can use now to create cash now versus going back to okay, what's the long term plan for this business?

Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

I think it really comes back to overcoming that fear of being the face of your practice or your business.

Being willing to be authentic, transparent and vulnerable online and through video and really connecting with people through video. It's hard. It's really hard. I appreciate that. It's something I still struggle with. But it's through that vulnerability and that authenticity that you will make those true connections, build those relationships and ultimately grow your business.

I like that. I like that a lot.

Last one Second from Last books what is the best book you could recommend?

The best book Pretty much anything by Tim Ferriss. I as a scientist I love his experimental approach. The way he comes up with different ideas and then tests how how best to hack it basically.

Excellent. Well I appreciate everything you've shared. I know Expert Authority World has also where can we find and learn more information about what you're doing and you.

So my website is rachelhavilland.com that's Haviland H A V I L A N D and also the Health Marketing Academy. So the Health Marketing Academy is where health practitioners get to see behind the scenes on successful marketing campaigns and actually get ideas and inspiration for their own campaigns as well. And you can learn more about that@healthmarketingacademy.com.

Excellent I'll make sure that's in the show notes as well. Dr. Haviland, it's been a pleasure having you here. Thank you for sharing.

Pleasure has been all mine. Thanks Mario.

All right, Expert Authority World, we have another great episode. I'll see you on tomorrow's why Every Business Needs a Book, including yours. Would you like to save five plus hours with every prospect? Generate more leads and profit in your business? Now visit businessbookchecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today. Hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show if you and also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow.