Amanda Brummitt, founder of The Brummitt Group, joins us to discuss business development and online marketing strategies for infusion centers. Learn more about The Brummitt Group and the services they provide.
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Transcript: How to deploy an infusion center social media strategy with Amanda Brummitt
Dylan McCabe: WeInfuse Podcast episode number 32. Welcome to the WeInfuse Podcast. My name is Dylan McCabe. And in every episode, we give you a seat at the table as we interview owners and key industry leaders in the infusion space so that you can take your own practice to the next level. And I’m excited about this interview because it’s with Amanda Brummitt, from the Brummitt group. She helps healthcare organizations and infusion centers develop the right business development and branding strategy so that they stand out in a crowded marketplace, you’re going to get a lot out of this interview, including strategies with Facebook, different strategies with LinkedIn, just making sure you’re dialed into the right audience with each one, the types of things you can do to manage a good reputation online and even manage negative feedback. Just how to create a great customer experience. And make sure that you are connecting with people the right way so that they come to you versus their competition. Before we do that, I want to make a shameless plug to WeInfuse software. If you have not done so yet schedule a time to talk with one of our account executives about how WeInfuse can save you time and money, you owe it to yourself to at least see a demo of the software. That way you can check the box and say, well, I’ve seen it. Now I can make a decision whether you’d like to buy or not, but I guarantee you will be blown away. There is nothing like the wind view software system out there. And it truly will save you time and money by streamlining multiple steps in a process and making it easier for everyone involved to carry out their work on a daily basis. Alright guys, let’s jump into this interview with Amanda Brummitt. All right, as I stated, We have special guests on the show today Amanda Brummitt with a Brummitt group. So Amanda, thank you for joining the show.
Amanda Brummitt: Thanks for letting me be on the show.
Dylan McCabe: Yeah, this is going to be good, because we really haven’t had anybody dive deep on branding in business development and social media and just really executing a more sophisticated strategy with that. And you and I both know that that can be the difference-maker and help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. So before we jump into all of that, just for our listeners, just kind of share a little bit of your background story and your role in the industry.
Amanda Brummitt: Sure. So bachelor’s degree in business master’s degree in healthcare administration, I grew up in the hospital executive role with HCA, then went into practice management and started my own consulting company 13 years ago, I work across all anything within the healthcare space across multiple specialties. And most recently, I’ve helped a couple of infusion clients with both setting up home infusions, some of the marketing and business development on that, and then an infusion center, developing their branding and marketing materials, and just really making a cohesive brand that they can hand off to their sales team.
Dylan McCabe: That’s great. And so tell us a little bit about the Brummitt group, what’s the Brummitt group about what’s your, what’s your main focus and stuff like that?
Amanda Brummitt: Sure, at our core, it’s strategy. And within that strategy, there’s a lot of operations, a lot of marketing, a lot of development. So it can be anything simple, from any logo, to really intense, like we’re about to open up a new center, and we need a full-blown plan for making sure that we can get it up and running and busy, quickly.
Dylan McCabe: Oh, that’s great. And that’s something that a lot of people when they’re doing research, especially opening an infusion center, starting from the ground up, after they get past what, what’s my target market, my target audiences is a good place geographically speaking, and that’s where they really start scratching their head is okay, what’s our kind of our go-to-market strategy now that we know we’re going to build this thing out? And after they think through making strategic relationships with providers, it’s like, well, how do we let patients know we’re here? So that’s what we’re going to get into. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about business development, branding. What are some of the keys to branding success for infusion centers that you see need to be implemented? You mean, somebody in your situation you can quickly see on the outside looking in where there are big gaps, or there’s big weaknesses. So what are some of the things you see as keys to branding success?
Amanda Brummitt: Sure, well, for an infusion center, you have a few different customer sets, you’ve got the physicians, you’ve got patient, you’ve got people in between hospitals. So I think it’s really important that they have a really broad online footprint. And it needs to all be consistent. And that needs to be across LinkedIn and Google My Business for more of your business customers. But then they also need to be on the softer side with Facebook, Yelp, places like that. They need to really have a consistent story about what their center is, why they’re unique, why patients and physicians should choose them. And then that story needs to be told on those various platforms. Each one is tailored to the audience. So for LinkedIn, they need to have a great length company page with lots of information that rheumatologists and gastroenterologist and oncologists would go and look at and things that would be of interest to them on Facebook, they can make that more direct to consumer more about some of the different products that they provide different ways that they improve that patient experience. And then they should pick one platform, I like Instagram for this, to have sort of a behind the scenes of who our center is and that’s where you talk about your employees, talk about your customers, and let people sort of see behind the veil of the center. And at the end of the day, all of those platforms, they need to be consistent. They need to have your hours, they need to have your right address, and they need to have all the correct information so that when people are looking for you, they can find you. And most importantly, so when a patient gets in their car and is getting ready to come to your center for the first time, whether they go to Google Maps or ways or MapQuest, they find you and they find you the first time.
Dylan McCabe: That’s good. Yeah, you make it easy, right. And so let’s break those apart. Let’s talk about those two different groups. I see something a lot on LinkedIn. And I just kind of shake my head with a background in online marketing and stuff like that, because I see a lot of posts by infusion centers on LinkedIn. And it’s targeting the patient like, come sit in our comfy chair and get your privacy and stuff like that. And I’m thinking, man, a lot of your patients aren’t even on LinkedIn. So what would you do if you had a customer that was doing a lot of that? What would be the advice you would give to them?
Amanda Brummitt: Well, so I would flip some of that direct to consumer stuff to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, something like that. And I would also think about looking through the lens of the customer, comfy chairs are great, but patients want to hear about it from their perspective. So I’m thinking about what’s going to make it best for them, what’s going to make easiest for their lap, why they would choose you but from their perspective, not yours. Specifically, on LinkedIn, it’s definitely a business crowd on there. I think you’re going to have a lot of practice administrators, office managers, discharge planners, hospital C suite, some physicians too. So on LinkedIn, I personally would talk about what my physician clients want to hear, do you have patients not tolerating extra Well, we might be able to help with that can do want to consider XYZ treatment, I would also really strongly encourage on LinkedIn, that it not be self-promoting, but they do a lot of education. So is there internally they run across a cool article about some new drug that can help with some disease in an infusion center, post the article and talk about it, talk about why it works, talk about why it doesn’t work, like it’s just as much traffic, and thinking about what their customers want to hear what their customers care about the things that make their customers job hard, and talk about that, rather than about themselves, because everybody’s got comfy chairs.
Dylan McCabe: That’s so good. And I love the fact that it’s really your approach is more educational so that you’re equipping people, and you’re helping them because a lot of people don’t have time to sift through all these articles, or they’re busy doing what they’re doing day in, day in and day out. But if you come from the standpoint of I’m an industry expert, and I have this stuff to help you make your life easier, makes it a lot easier to segue into a more of a sales conversation or strategic relationship conversation. So I like that’s great.
Amanda Brummitt: Absolutely. And you actually pegged it with an industry expert; you want to use both your company page and your personal LinkedIn page as a place to position yourself as an industry expert. So people think I’m going to go to them when I need something.
Dylan McCabe: So good. Well, what’s something so that’s something to do on LinkedIn, make it more about your potential, your client, your target customer in mind, make it more educational, less about you less self-promotion? What about Facebook? What are just some good tips on maybe Facebook and Instagram to really target that customer?
Amanda Brummitt: Sure. So you want to think about what is your customer looking at? What is your customer Googling, what is your customer out looking for on Facebook, and it’s usually its solutions. So they have a pain point and they’re on there searching for it. So I would talk about disease processes, treatments, but talk about them from the patient’s view. And if particularly in a competitive market, I would also talk about infusion centers, and what the good and the bad is in them. You use your competitor’s weaknesses as your strengths. So if there’s a long wait that your competitors don’t talk about wait time, but say are you trying to get in and out for your infusions on your lunch break? Do you need a more efficient setup, we can help with that. Or if it’s, if it’s billing, if they’ve got all kinds of billing problems, to talk about on Facebook that managing your chronic conditions hard enough, you shouldn’t have to be stressed with the logistics and the billing of it, and then talk about a solution for that. So really thinking about what they’re looking for, and not just simply what you’re selling.
Dylan McCabe: So if I hear you correctly, it sounds like you’re saying find out what your key differentiators are? And then turn that into more of a story like well here’s, here’s who we are. And here, do you struggle with this, here’s how we help instead of, instead of, obviously, you don’t want to talk negatively about your competitors. But I like that because you’re really dialed in at the point of finding out what your customer struggles with.
Amanda Brummitt: Absolutely. And if you happen to have a happy customer that you’ve already solved that problem for, it’s also a great opportunity to do a testimonial with that patient. Of course, with a HIPPA release done, and let them tell the story of how your infusion center made their life better.
Dylan McCabe: Yeah, that’s good. So let’s talk about that. If you’re trying to ramp up your social media, you do have that happy customer experience. You want to turn that into something you can put on your website. What are some ways that you’ve seen that make that easy? Because sometimes that can kind of fall flat, you ask the person for a testimonial? They don’t get around to it? How do you remind them? How do you follow up? How do you get it on video, just what are some kind of keys to making that process easier?
Amanda Brummitt: Sure. There are several different ways and the gold standard is you go hire a company that’s what they’re an expert at. There are lots and lots and lots of reputation management companies out there right now that can help you get reviews. And so that is absolutely an option. If you want to do it in house, it’s very doable as well. I first I’d like to pull from anything we already have going if you already have like a net promoter survey going out. Or if you already have a Press Ganey survey going out, include some kind of release in there and pull from that if you already have it and push that out on social, always a good option. short of that I like to empower the staff, that when they have a patient that comes in and says, oh, Sally, I had such a good experience with X, Y, and Z the other day, and it’s really appreciated you, I think it’s a good opportunity to gently ask for that review and say, what, Mrs. So and so that is so good to hear, I’m going to share that with the staff, would you mind taking just two or three minutes and sharing that and either let them dictate it to you and you take it down or let or let them write it down? The forms are simple and easy. And if anybody needs one, they’re welcome to email me and I can shoot them over the template that we use, you should always have those ready. And if they’re comfortable, I think a quick iPhone video is absolutely fine. I had a surgeon that I worked with. And he was so clever. He when he had had a patient come in and had a great experience, he would ask them if they would be willing to do it, he would clip on his iPhone record like a 60-second video, usually at the end, they would have a big hug. And they would sign the form and it was done. Those amateur type videos actually do really, really well on social; they have a very high trust level. So I think those can help some more passive strategies that you can do signage around the center, asking for reviews and suggesting specific places, you want to be careful sending like an email asking for reviews, some of the different platforms, it’s against their terms, if you select for Yelp, you don’t want to flat out ask for a review. But I often ask people to follow us on Yelp. And then a lot of times that review naturally happens, you can stick it in your email signature line; you can have a little card that you hand out. And as you probably already know, quantity is huge with reviews because if you get one negative review and you only have one positive review, then you’re what two and a half star. So you want to get a decent number of them up there so that you can kind of play defense on any bad reviews that come in. Basically just picking two or three strategies within that review space and committing to it. And give it to a friendly staff member that loves stuff like that and let them own that process.
Dylan McCabe: That’s great. I love what you said there at the very end, give it to a friendly staff member and let them own that process. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how kind you are how great your services if you don’t make it a part of your standard process. It’s not going to work or it’s just going to follow flat out for a few weeks. So I just think that’s great for our listeners that you need to have a customer feedback strategy in place. And it’s not just about getting reviews. I know with my experience with online marketing, it’s not just about getting reviews; it’s really about initiating feedback. Because let’s say you have a situation where the customer had a negative experience, but they’re not going to say anything until they walk out the door and get on Google, you want to ask for that feedback upfront and say, Hey, we want to offer world-class customer service. But if there’s anything we did that would prevent you from giving us a five-star review? Will you please let us know we want to do better? Yeah, well, actually, I’m pretty peeved that I call up here three times, and I couldn’t get through. And data will all of a sudden, you turn that negative feedback after talking and showing that person you care into a positive review. So that’s something that we learned is that we as much as we want a positive review even more than that, we would just want to initiate feedback, and get the conversation going and manage it, and then market it.
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, I totally agree. And I would say that if one patient has that experience, there are probably others that have it as well that haven’t shared it. So it’s an awesome opportunity to improve your patient experience.
Dylan McCabe: It’s good. So when you come in and you work with these, these different healthcare companies, what’s something you see that they just tend to miss over and over and over again, that you, it’s easy for you to see, because you’re an expert in this space. And you have to come in and say, Hey, guys, this is one of the most pivotal things you need to get.
Amanda Brummitt: So a couple of different things. One is, is looking at marketing, again, from their view, and not putting on their patient hat or their physician hat. So, pivoting into their customer’s view is one another would definitely be not being consistent, having too many different strategies and not, let’s pick three strategies and let’s do it. And let’s get metrics. And let’s see how it’s happening and change our strategies as we go based on that feedback from the metrics. So that’s a big one. And then really just not managing that entire reputation across the continuum. Having platforms out there that may they may have that information on inaccurate information, I find setting up a Google Alert is a great way to avoid that one. So yeah, those are some of the ones that I see pretty often.
Dylan McCabe: Okay, so let’s talk about that. Because some of our listeners may have never set up a Google Alert. What is that? And why would you do that?
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, so everybody needs a Google Alert, whether they’re winning an infusion center or not, it’s super simple, you open a browser and type in Google Alert. And it’ll give you all the instructions; you are using a string of characters to get an alert anytime anything comes out online about it. So for us, obviously, we use it for all of our customers. And if I was doing it for WeInfuse, I would have, WeInfuses one word, WeInfuses two words, in quotes, I would have all of the main people’s names included in there. And they’re all separate alerts because if anything ever pops up good or bad about we and views, I want to know about it first for my for the actual infusion centers I would also add some strings of words for things that you don’t want bad experience, or overpriced or any of those kinds of keywords that would alert you that something’s wrong. I always like to run alerts on those. And then personally, for anybody I always run them on myself, I run them on my kids, because you always you just you want to know what’s going on. So if nobody hears anything else today, set up a Google Alert on your own name. And I promise you’ll be glad you did.
Dylan McCabe: That’s funny; I bet there’s going to be so many people doing that after they listen to this. So then what do you do with it, though? Let’s say you set up a Google Alert for infusion center. And yeah. What do you do with it? What’s the purpose behind that?
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, two different purposes. One is identifying anything out there that is just inaccurate about your center, like maybe an old location, maybe a provider that has moved on or anything like that, you as you get those alerts, and you see that information, you take it and you update it and you claim those profiles and make it all right. Secondarily, you, my thing is, I want to be part of the conversation. I don’t want to be the conversation. So in when people are talking about your brand online, you want to know, and if it’s positive, then you want to share that if it’s negative to your point earlier, you want to jump in and fight Find out what happened, see if you can reach resolution with that person go back and do some training on it. And just really use those as an opportunity to know what’s going on. In particular, I had one a few years ago where there was a pretty ugly legal battle going on. And so we started using certain keywords around that. So that if anything came up, we would know about it quickly. So Google’s a good one, Google won’t get you on all the platforms. Another one that I do specific for reviews is Yelp. They have an alert system that you can set up but yeah, religious getting that information in and using it as a way to make sure that your online reputation is accurate.
Dylan McCabe: That’s good. Yeah, it’s so Google mainly pulls from the Google world, right website links and stuff like that, it’s not going to tell you if somebody mentioned your infusion center in a Facebook group or something like that. But there’s there is software out there for that or people that want to take it to the next level, and you have to pay for it. But there is software out there like that. But I think that’s great. I actually don’t have any Google Alerts set up. So now you’ve scared me into setting one upon myself at the very least. That’s really good. So when you go to work with a client, and they’ve got a Facebook page up, and they’ve got that person on staff that’s excited and wants to get things going, and they want to start creating posts for Facebook? What do you recommend about is there a mix? Is it mostly video? Is it blog posts that you curate from other websites? Is it what? How do you coach them on how to have a good Facebook strategy? The reason I say that is because we all know there are some people and they have Facebook pages, and they’ve got like, hundreds of likes and followers and tons of Facebook rate ratings and recommendations, then you’ve got other Facebook pages. And the people, they’re good people there has a good health care practice. And it’s just crickets. I mean, there’s social media is just, it’s just dead.
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, so one is to actually post and be consistent. If I go look up a brand, and they haven’t posted since June of 2018, I question whether or not they went out of business or if they don’t care. So consistently posting and even if consistent for your center means once a week, I’d like you to post more often that but once a week it’s okay, even once a month, if it’s something that the best you can commit to. So as far as what kind of content videos do insanely well, within the algorithms, they rank higher. Most consumers would prefer to watch a video than to read it in like an article. So videos, particularly with captions, if you can do that are good. The other thing is, I would make sure to tell stories about people. And we can argue all day long about whether or not this is right, it drives me nuts. But I can write the most beautifully procured blog post about infusions and how to do them right, or how to how to different things about that. And it will get maybe 10 likes, but if I put a picture up of a patient getting her infusion, and her talking about what an amazing nurse, john is and what a great experience she had, that will get more way more traction, 100 times more traction then an educational article. Do I think we need educational content on Facebook? Absolutely, by all means, build that in there. But it can’t all be educational; a lot of it needs to be about patients about people about things in the community. And pictures are key; I find that people are just inherently nosy. And they are going to go click on an article about a person before they’re going to click on something that they need to read about rheumatoid arthritis. And then I would also make sure to vary the content to your different audiences. So again, I would think Facebook is mostly patients, but you’re going to have physician offices on there sometimes and things like that. So sort of having your content strategy that’s variable on that. And I would also make sure whoever’s doing it is committed to it, and either schedules it all ahead of time, which is one of the beauties of Facebook. That’s how we do it; we sit down at the beginning of the month and schedule it all out. Or if they want it to be more on the fly, that is something that they put on their calendar, and every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, they’ve got time to schedule it. So that it’s on there, and then it’s consistent.
Dylan McCabe: And again, people may say, well, how do I do all that? Well, there’s software out there like Hoot suite and there are some nails there are so many others that have come out since Hoot suite came out that make it easy to line up your social media and then schedule it and stuff like that.
Amanda Brummitt: Absolutely. And I like Facebook’s organic scheduling. We build our schedule for the whole year. Our basic topics And then on the first week of the month, we sit down and just crank it out in a normal Facebook account when we’re posting three, four times a day, I can knock it out in one hour, because you’re just in the mode and you’re getting through all of them. So I would definitely encourage that, with the one exception that currently pandemic going on. And some of the social things that we’ve had going on, I have for the first time in my life, had to pay very closely attention to things that we had pre-scheduled, because there were things that we scheduled on a Monday and by Thursday, we’re now insensitive. So just keep an eye on that if you’re scheduling far ahead.
Dylan McCabe: Yeah, well, it’s I feel like it’s hard to walk out the door without offending somebody these days. But it definitely takes a good strategy in place for that. Well, we could, we could continue talking about branding and strategy to tell your story and to engage with people in a special way. We could talk about this for hours. But if you were to distill it all down and wanted to make sure somebody didn’t miss the main thing, what’s the main thing that you would want to give as a parting piece of advice?
Amanda Brummitt: Be consistent, and have your name out there accurately across multiple platforms? And don’t, don’t let it be something that you’re going to get to next week or next month? Either hire somebody to do it, empower somebody on your team to do it, or sit down and do it yourself and pick three, four, or five platforms, and just knock it out?
Dylan McCabe: That’s good. Be consistent, be focused. Follow one course until success. That’s how I break down the word focus into an acronym. Yeah, well there are definitely some people listening to this. They’re thinking, Okay, that all sounds great, but I just want to hire somebody like Amanda. So how can people get in touch with you, if they want to talk with you further about how to do all this stuff?
Amanda Brummitt: Sure. Yeah. So I’m, I’m happy to help people officially, I’m also more than happy to just hop on a call with someone and give them ideas. So that they can do it all internally, our website is Brummittgroup.com or our phone number is (214)295-6130. And I really mean that a lot of times, we can just hop on a call, and I can tell them what they need to do. And then their own staff can do it. So I’m glad to help anybody do that.
Dylan McCabe: That’s so good. Well, that’s what this podcast is all about. It’s about equipping people and enabling them to achieve their dreams and goals in the infusion center space. So Amanda Brummitt with the Brummitt group. Thanks for joining the show.
Amanda Brummitt: Thank you.
Dylan McCabe: All right, great interview with Amanda Brummitt. I love how she’s just, she’s just so calm and cool and collected. And you can tell she really knows her stuff. When it comes to helping healthcare organizations take their branding and their development side to the next level. And I really like what she said about staying consistent. Make sure you have consistency in your posting, whether it’s on LinkedIn or Facebook or both. Make sure your message is consistent. Make sure the amount of posting you do is consistent. Its consistency is key when it comes to content marketing with your business. So great stuff there. If you want to learn more about her and contact her. She’s available on LinkedIn; we’ll put her LinkedIn link to her LinkedIn in our show notes here for the podcast. We will include a link to her website as well if you want to follow up with her. And guys, if this has been helpful to you, please take a minute to rate and review the podcast on iTunes. It really helps us get the word out. Okay, guys, this is Dylan McCabe with the WeInfuse podcast and I will catch you in the next episode.
Guest Speaker:
Amanda Brummitt, Principle at The Brummitt Group, has dedicated her time and efforts to offering insight into the healthcare industry. Amanda founded The Brummitt Group in 2008 with a desire to deliver exceptional service to clients. She specializes in strategically planning growth and development for hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, physicians, medical billing companies, imaging centers, and long-term acute care centers.
