Mastering Healthtech Event Engagement Strategy

Aaron Hillman:

One of the ways that we’re trying to make some change and really get clear is using the same KPIs, at least the descriptors, for every event so that we know, event or event, what we’re tracking against. Of course, the targets change a little bit. If we’re going to have an event where we have 20,000 people versus 3000, it’s reasonable to change the number of booth visitors you’re going to have or the number of meetings you’re going to have. But using the same descriptor is really important because what that gives you at the end of the year is a full picture of how’d you do it? And what are we going to programmatize in our marketing planning and strategy for the following year?

Intro:

Have you ever wished you had a healthcare provider on speed dial? Someone you could call to validate your product market fit? Someone to listen and help you see your solution differently? Welcome to Healthcare Market Matrix, a podcast to help you see your market clearly. 

We dive deep into the challenges faced by healthcare organization leaders that technology has the chance to help them solve. It’s all about gaining the kind of understanding you need to effectively connect with your market. Join us as we explore the Healthcare Market Matrix.

Introducing Aaron Hillman

John Farkas:

All right. Welcome everyone to the Healthcare Market Matrix, and we are really excited about what we have to put in front of you today. Almost no matter where you are in the health tech universe, engagement around events is a part of the marketing equation for most everybody.

And Aaron Hillman, who is our guest today, has a lot of valuable experience in creating and optimizing those experiences, and the experiences that ultimately lead to meaningful engagement. And engagement’s not just a word I’m throwing in there. Engagement is the word. Because if you want to think about the kind of investment, the kind of time, everything that surrounds events, it doesn’t make any sense if engagement is not a part of the equation. And yet it is so often overlooked as a primary objective, and that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about in the context of our time together today.

Aaron Hillman is the senior director of global, client, and industry engagement at Philips. And he has a long history of creating successful strategic and tactical plans for high volume and high value healthcare marketing.

And really, if we’re wanting to take a look at what’s going on in our world today, it’s been an interesting move since the pandemic watching the pendulum swing from no events, practically, to kind of back at it again. And what is consistently surprising to me is how many people spend so much money on events and so little thought on how to optimize engagement. And it’s unfortunate thing, and it’s a problem that’s common to many of us.

And so we’re taking a little detour from our normal content and focus for Healthcare Market Matrix to focus on this, which is a critical component for so many of our listeners. And super excited to have Aaron join us for this. Aaron’s a part of Ratio’s advisory board, and he’s there for a reason because his expertise and experience here is invaluable.

So Aaron, welcome, and thanks for joining us today on Healthcare Market Matrix.

Aaron Hillman:

Hey, John. Always great to be here. Thanks for having me back again. I consider it a true honor to join Market Matrix, and Ratio of course, so give me a ring anytime for these.

I’ve been in healthcare IT for almost 20 years. Really, really close. And it’s been an interesting journey because it’s not always been marketing, but it’s always been touching marketing. And it’s always been client focused, whether that’s patient, whether that’s clinician, whether that’s C-suite, whether that’s IT, and/or all of the above at once.

It’s been really interesting to have this variety of roles. Most of it is focused around the advocacy of the customers and prospects that we work with as vendors. But through all of it, I think the string that has brought me through all of this journey is truly how we engage. And 20 years ago, that was not really a word that we used to talk about marketing. We used the functional words. Much like we used to describe and sell healthcare IT solutions as feature function, we used to talk about marketing in that capacity.

Now as we think about the new world, especially post-pandemic, it is thinking about engagement, and truly integrated engagement, and that means a lot of different things, which I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit of. But that’s how we’re thinking about it now is the end-to-end marketing life cycle and what it means to reach the people that we want to reach and how we do so.

And so that’s been a really interesting transformation I think in the world of marketing too over the course of the time that I’ve been in these various roles and different organizations.

Changes in Engagement Post Pandemic

John Farkas:

So talk to us, so just knowing that with the background that you’re coming at this with and knowing some of the dynamics that you’ve seen change, I’m just curious, and I’m taking you a little off script here, what would you characterize as some of the change that you’ve seen since the pandemic in the context of engagement? If you were to characterize just in a nutshell what’s moved or changed or is different, how would you characterize that?

Aaron Hillman:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question because I think I’d actually… I think the pandemic showed us a new way. And the new way has actually come together with a little bit of, air quotes, the old way in a really interesting manner. In that I mean we realized that we could do a lot of things virtually, just like we’re doing this today. I’m in my house, you’re in your studio. This is great. We can meet with C-suite or clinicians virtually and get a lot done.

There is still no substitute for getting together. What I think has changed is the way we focus that energy. If you went to HIMSS this year, you’d note that the aisles were a little bit less crowded, the booths were a little bit less crowded, overall attendance was a little bit less. And I think the reason for that is those senior leaders that used to attend those shows, those big engagement activities, would go and wander, and see their friends and do business and meet with vendors, and kick the tires as it were.

Now, I think it’s a really focused effort because time is really, really expensive. There’s less money in the industry from a provider side of the house to really go out and do that, they go there looking for a specific thing. Sort of the way I go shopping for clothing. I don’t go to 10 stores. I go, if I want this blue shirt, I go to the store that has this blue shirt, I pick out the blue shirt, I try it on. Good, great, I’m gone. They’re going to vendors in the same way and they’re going with purposeful conversation because they’ve had the chance to have the virtual interaction in advance and set the meetings at advance. And so it actually changes the paradigm of how marketing and sales engages with them prior to the in-person events. And so it actually creates a greater demand to pre-prepare in a way that is changing the culture of how marketing and sales or a commercial organization as a whole I think should and can work together as well.

John Farkas:

Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think that that understanding, especially at some of the bigger shows that are expensive and have some barrier to entry and all that, that are other national level opportunities for getting together, I’m always interested in, it confounds me that there’s by so many people such a little acknowledgement on the fact that the people that are there, I mean, there’s always going to be some casual observers, but there are real buyers there looking for real things. That’s some of the reality. And the willingness to still show up and hope that people walk by is still a reality. And not taking some of the initiative and building what I know we’re going to talk about, building a progression to the event, creating journeys that make sense for people so that the event is a culmination or the event is an opportunity. That’s something that I want to get into, and we can work our way toward that here.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

Aaron’s Backstory and Journey

John Farkas:

So let’s look at show strategy. How are we going to identify some of the key shows and how do you create a strategic approach to that?

And before we dive all the way in that, Aaron, you gave us a little bit of your backdrop. But go a little farther into… Aaron comes at this honestly, folks. I mean, he’s got some real experience navigating a lot of engagement. And if you were at HIMSS this year, I would argue that Philips had one of the, if not the most engaging presence there, just from the booth itself as far as what kind of attention it commanded. I think if I was there not knowing Aaron, it would’ve commanded… It did command my attention. It commanded my attention sometimes when I didn’t want it to, which is quite all right, because at the end of the day, that’s part of what you’re trying to do. And so there’s some real intent and thought around that I think that goes into that. And that’s just the booth presence. That’s not talking about the journey to that.

So give us a little bit about your background coming to this and what that journey has been and what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way?

Aaron Hillman:

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words about the Philips booth at HIMSS. Obviously a massive team effort goes into creating that and ideating all of those pieces, and I’m thrilled to be part of that team. And we create a really great experience end to end, not just at the event, as you said, but before and after.

Like I said, I go back about 20 years. I started in what I’ll call the first EMR revolution here in the United States, working for a little company called Meditech. I was a solutions demonstrator. So I lived on the road. I visited three hospitals a week, usually. I demonstrated everything from the radiology solution, which we called, its, through to the physician documentation solutions. I was fortunate enough to begin what we called the Physician Liaison Program. And at the time, the purpose there was to recruit and work with C-suite clinicians, usually CMIOs or CCOs, CNIOs, to actually demonstrate the wears to their fellow clinicians. And so we had a little bit of what I’ll call a traveling roadshow with a number of clinicians that we recruited and trained and worked with, and we went and did demonstrations. And the credibility was incredible. It made a big difference and it showed the value of the solutions.

From there, I spent time at everybody’s favorite speech recognition solution called Dragon. We all now know it as Nuance Microsoft or Microsoft Nuance. What a growth that has been for them. And I was there during the days of the launch of their first cloud-based solution, Dragon Medical One. That was really fun. I was responsible for large IDN and academic segment systems across the US and some global. That was the first what I’ll call real marketing we did, where we actually created really strong messaging, at least in my marketing career. And was part of the product launches and the strategy. And it was really a wonderful time in healthcare to be bringing about this technology that was powerfully changing how clinicians worked. The EMR was that first phase. The really the development of voice documentation is the next. And now we know they’re doing tons of ambient and AI and other wonderful things that are making that process even better and more patient-focused.

I spent a bit of time at GE Healthcare there after that doing some, what I’ll call heavy IT work. I was globally responsible for the vendor neutral archive and analytics solutions from a solutions marketing perspective. And I also ran their central marketing team for a while. So comms and marketing ops, sales enablement, events and exhibits, and I was one of the partners on analyst relations. So quite a bit of varied work there. Within GE Healthcare, I was really privileged to have a bunch of wonderful teams that I got to work with and lead, and a mentor who really brought me along, actually a couple of really great mentors there.

I took a little dip out of large companies there for a little bit after that and worked for a company called Butterfly Network in the point-of-care ultrasound space, working on their software solution. It was truly a moment of how do we change binary decision making and understanding ultrasound in this respect from a diagnostic perspective and a marketing perspective. It was really a growth opportunity to really think about how we thought end-to-end engagement across a variety of different types of users, and how that actually helped us craft a message, not just in those single moments of engagement in an event, but longitudinally end-to-end with a strategic marketing plan.

And of course now at Philips, almost two years there in this client and industry leadership role. I’ve got a wonderful team. We work across all of the Philips businesses to think about engagement broadly and globally. And the end result is what you see at things like ECR, RSNA, HIMSS, Arab Health, and many others.

But it’s all of the things in between too. All of the socials, all of the campaigns, all of the digital, all of the content. We partner across all of those in order to create this longitudinal message that Philips, that our enterprise informatics business, is bringing to the world and to the clients and to the patients.

So it’s been a really, honestly, sort of a diverse and awesome journey for me. And it has allowed me to experience a lot that I think is maybe a little bit of an unusual marketing trajectory, honestly. So it’s been wonderful.

Prioritizing and Being Intentional with Engagement

John Farkas:

So super good backdrop there, Aaron. I think that what is true is, I know there’s people here that are listening that are all across the continuum as far as their budget capacity and what they would see as their ability to engage. And Philips arguably is on the top of the food chain. There’s few organizations that have the kind of resources to facilitate the kind of engagement that you have the opportunity to do. And you guys are not without struggle. I mean, there’s always some challenges in that because there’s a whole lot of elements in the organization that need to work together to facilitate engagement, and we’ll get to talking about some of that.

But what I want people to hear as they’re thinking about this and hearing from you is that facilitating engagement isn’t about budget, it’s about intent. And that’s a real critical designation or differentiation. If you start hearing this conversation, and I wanted to say this early, if you hear this and start saying, “Well, I can’t afford to do that.” Well, that’s not true. I mean, if you can afford to go to an event, you can afford to create engagement about it. It’s about prioritization and intent. And I just want to bring that forward because there’s a lot of people who don’t see it that way, and are thus wasting money in events when they’re not building the proper infrastructure around it to facilitate engagement. And so we can talk about that.

But let’s start with how do you begin identifying the key points, like the shows, and taking a strategic approach to that? So how would you begin this conversation? And I know it starts with figuring out what shows you’re going to go to. Who’s going to be there, what types of decision makers? How do you make those those decisions?

Aaron Hillman:

So I’d take a step back even further, actually, John. So choosing the shows is an important part of the process, but I actually think it’s maybe one of the latter parts of the process. This is about business prioritization and understanding the complexity or non-complexity of the business.

And so very simply, enterprise informatics at Philips, there’s five businesses in there, and there’s 15 businesses across all of Philips, so that’s very complex when we start to think about a show like EMS or ECR or Arab Health.

If I’m a single solution company, Butterfly was a great example of that, where they sold point-of-care ultrasound devices and software. And there were some variances in the flavors of that, of course, but you were really focused on one thing. It actually allows you to first think about the audience you’re selling to and what’s important to them, and that’s the point at which you want to begin in order to create these campaigns of how you target. Because once again, an event is a moment in time, even if it’s a couple of days, of course. But we’re talking about marketing strategy around the year, hopefully, and how you lay out the budget and where you prioritize that and who you’re aiming at and what tools are useful for that. And it even probably goes down to something as simple and finite as what does your funnel look like? And who are you trying to hit? What are your business priorities for the year?

And then you decide upon what the strategies are, what the tactics are. And then maybe what events you’ll go to that are both for what you’re trying to achieve, the solutions that you’re talking about, and whether or not if you have a multi-solution or multi-business organization like Philips, how you come together, where you aim together, and where you aim separately.

John Farkas:

Individually.

Aaron Hillman:

And we even do that regionally too. If you get to be a big enough company, the regions may do things separately from what we do globally, which may be separate from what we do at a different region level. And so it really does get down to the breakdown of what is your business priorities for who and where.

John Farkas:

Yep. That sounds good. So establishing that is obviously the first stop. And then how do you see what comes next once you have that laid out?

Aaron Hillman:

Well, you look at budget and you look at priorities and you look at what content or strategies are going to work for those folks. And marketing is, I think I said this the last time we met, marketing is one to many. So I can’t go talk to 300,000 C-suite providers globally by myself. We do that through digital media. We do that through broad engagement. We do that through social networking. I think the development of socials and which tools we use for that is actually really interesting and changing a little bit.

And the next steps are truly where you want to meet those people. Where are they going? And I think that, back to an earlier question you asked, John, which is what has changed since the pandemic. Where these people are going is changing. And I think HIMSS versus maybe ViVE is a good example of that, wherein you’re getting the folks that are going to HIMSS to kick the tires and buy the thing eventually really testing it out. If you’re going for thought leadership and to learn and to network and stir your brain, you might go to ViVE or you might go to another self-professed thought leadership event, or you might go find it on webinars. We’re seeing incredibly high attendance and registrations on webinars, and even post-initial viewing, continued engagement on those going forward.

The real trick to all of this is how you follow up on it. And that’s what makes the dough rise, to mix metaphors and make a pun. Without the follow-up, without the sales engagement pre, during, and post, it doesn’t go anywhere. And so that’s actually a really important part of the cycle. And that falls on the businesses and the marketing teams to make sure they enable the sales teams as well, but it falls on the sales teams to also come and engage.

So this is that traditional symbiotic push and pull of marketing and sales that’s ever present. And actually I find that to be a very, very positive thing because without that, let’s say there’s a fake ball in the middle, which is the client, without both sides holding on, that ball drops. And so to me, it’s all of those pieces that come together to create the outcomes and ROI for the businesses, but it also creates value for the customers to learn, understand, and move forward if relevant to them.

The Challenge of Aligning Marketing and Sales

John Farkas:

So let’s dive into that. Because the devil’s in the details, because getting marketing and sales aligned is one of the great challenges in looking at the event world. And figuring out how to put that together to me ends up being one of the differences between success and wasting money.

And so what does that ultimately need to look like? How would you characterize the conduit that needs to be in place between… How would you distill that, or the conduit that needs to be in place to be successful?

Aaron Hillman:

Well, I mean, it’s like any other relationship. In short, it’s communication, in my mind, really if I’m boiling it. But if we want to expound a little bit, what I’d argue is it’s communication and connectedness and alignment at the senior leader level, the middle leader level, and even at the functional levels. And sometimes even criss-crossing between those because there’s a lot of mixing and conversation, in my opinion that should be taking place, but it’s also alignment on the goals. It’s as much early awareness as possible.

And it’s also sort of, my opinion, it’s a willingness to accept the fact that not everything’s going to be perfect and out in front and laid bare on a beautiful plate in a Michelin star style. Sales and marketing is messy. We don’t always get all of the information in advance. Sales doesn’t always get in advance either. So we need to be flexible for each other and adapt. But more than anything else, it’s standing next to each other arm in arm, saying, “We’re going to go get this. And we’re going to prosecute this together,” because that is the way. And when I say commercial organization, what I really mean is sales, marketing, service, and anybody else that might be touching the clients or prospects. Product marketing is in there, but product management is definitely in there too. So we’re talking about the whole kit and caboodle in order to really drive this.

And so to your question of what does good look like? Good looks like symbiosis within an organization and just supporting each other when we decide a thing is going to happen, whether it’s drilling emails to get people to attend a webinar, or whether it’s setting meetings for an actual in-person event, or using the content to drive top of funnel. Something like a podcast is a great opportunity to really reach many, many people. And by sharing it through the many different venues and networks that many of us have, we all have, it creates demand. And demand is what drives the interest and how we get those people to come back and talk to us more. And we do that together, in my opinion.

John Farkas:

So I know a number of the organizations that we’re talking to are earlier stage. They’re looking at some of the spend that they’re looking at on some of these shows and the events as being a big ticket item relative to their overall budget. And often, I see them looking at the events as big moments in time for their organization. They’ll time product launches in and around that. They’ll do elements to help use those as well. Ideally, they’re using those shows as momentive events.

Talk about aligning those shows with business objectives. How can we think about using those moments in time to help drive some of the rhythm of what’s going on in the context of the organization?

Aaron Hillman:

I would categorize them as springboards. And there’s lots of good ways to do announcements. I would argue that most organizations probably don’t evangelize their wins, large or small, enough. It’s hard to keep up, honestly, because they happen every day. But it’s an important part of the engine, the marketing engine and the sales engine.

When we think about that longitudinal engagement strategy for the year, we think about where the ROI is going to come from, and it should be aligned across the product roadmap or the business roadmap, which hopefully are very closely linked together.

But let’s use HIMSS 2023 a year ago as a good example of where Philips did something like that. So every year, Philips launches what we call the FHI report. It’s the Future Health Index. It talks a great deal about what we see as the future of healthcare. We work with analysts. We work with businesses. We work with policy. And we share this, and it’s a pretty momentous launch where we’re talking about what we think is going to happen through the rest of the year.

We did that at HIMSS because we used the press and the momentum, as you say so well, to springboard that announcement into much higher visibility. We did 14 NPIs, or new product introductions, at HIMSS this year. That’s a huge amount.

And so driving engagement and awareness of those for the clients and the persona we’re targeting is a really important part of that. I would argue that’s true for all healthcare organizations, vendor organizations. We’re trying to reach the right people. And we use those moments where we know the people are at least watching and listening, if not there in person, to drive awareness of the thing we want to talk about.

If we think about ROI at a deeper and broader level, what I’d say is this. Yes, events are expensive. There’s no two ways about it. And you can go small and spend 10 or $15,000, you can go huge and spend 8 or 9 million. There’s lots of different ways to go about this. And of course there’s always that middle ground there, depending on the show and priority and budget of the organization. And Philips will do some of all of those. I mean, 9 million was hyperbole. But we go really big and we go really small and we go somewhere in the middle.

What I’d say is this, it’s thinking about the metrics that you’re driving to, the pre, during, and post engagement with the clients and how you’re driving awareness of not only being there, but what you want to say, the value proposition of the solutions that you’re bringing. And then how you transition those, let’s call them inquiries, which is a moment in time of touching an individual client or prospect, and turning those into leads, which then it turns into ostensibly funnel or they get dispositioned out and you move on. That’s all part of the strategy.

But if you think about ultimately what pays off for a big event, or any kind of event actually, a couple of really great leads leading to a couple of really great closed opportunities pays for the event, but it also creates ongoing demand where if we’re evangelizing the outcomes, the wins, “Hey, we met with so-and-so at HIMSS, and we led through this process and we’re really excited to announce that we’ve created a ten-year strategic partnership based on X,” whatever idea or value prop or thing that brought them in, it creates buzz around what it is that we’re trying to talk about at a larger scale.

And so I think it is a self-fulfilling prophecy to think about that engagement strategy and how we hit those people, but not only that, what we’re talking about and how that gets continued down the line.

John Farkas:

Yeah. I find it useful to look at events as a point in the storyline. And the question is, does the event make sense in the storyline? Are you creating it to make sense in the context of the storyline? And how is it propelling the plot? How are you going to use it to propel the plot? Have you told the story to the point where the event makes sense in the story? And were you using it as an appropriate plot accelerant?

And if you’ve done that effectively… First of all, you’ve got to realize that if you’re showing up at a show and you haven’t told the story around it, you’re not realizing your full potential at the show.

Aaron Hillman:

Absolutely.

John Farkas:

And so when you’re thinking of it from a strategic perspective, have you taken the time to think about the whole story, the beginning, the middle, and the end, and where this show falls in that continuum? And what needs to happen as a result of that? To tell the right story, what are the things that you need to have done to make sure that you are optimizing for that?

And sometimes, depending on who you are and wherever you’re bringing people into the process, there can be a couple stops on that trajectory. You could have HIMSS and RSNA, and one could bounce from one to the other because there’s a point in the story and then there’s a second point in the story depending on how that all comes together.

And so my encouragement to the folks listening is make sure you have framed out that story, and that everybody in your organization that needs to understands what’s happening there and the importance of it. Because so much is lost if the only people telling that story is the marketing department.

Aaron Hillman:

Yes.

John Farkas:

And that’s a real critical understanding.

Aaron Hillman:

It is, and it goes all the way up to senior leadership. Senior leaders have great networks, and we really want to bolster that. But it goes to everybody. It’s not just marketing. When we’re coming up a couple of months before HIMSS or a couple of months before RSNA, everybody ought to be blasting the world with the story. And that goes to my earlier point, which is, the earlier we can tell the story, the better, within reason of course. If you’re doing it six months in advance, it’s fuzz. It’s fluff. But it’s about setting clear objectives. It’s about the time window for planning. It really is about making sure that you’ve got really clear objectives about the outcomes and the key performance indicators that you’re trying to achieve.

One of the ways that we’re trying to make some change and really get clear is using the same KPIs, at least the descriptors, for every event so that we know, event or event, what we’re tracking against. Of course, the targets change a little bit. If we’re going to have an event where we have 20,000 people versus 3000, it’s reasonable to change the number of booth visits you’re going to have or the number of meetings you’re going to have. But using the same descriptor is really important because what that gives you at the end of the year is a full picture of how’d you do it? And what are we going to programmatize in our marketing planning and strategy for the following year? Which is a really important part of the outcomes that come from this string of engagement.

It’s not just the event, remember. It’s all of the things. So how many impressions do we get from the socials? How many hits on the web page do we get? How many people registered for the pre-webinar? How many people actually showed up and stayed for the pre-webinar? How many people came and asked for meetings pre-event? How many people came and asked for content through the landing pages after the event? All of those things are really important, but you’ve got to make that plan in advance, and you’ve got to make sure everybody is aware, including sales, service, product, and leadership, of course in addition to the entire marketing team, about what we’re aiming at.

And it’s a change in culture. We are evolving every day. It’s been a really fun process over the past 5, 6, 8, 10 years. And we’re getting really sophisticated, and that is a great thing to see as well. As we move into this next phase where I think it’s going to get even more narrow, we’re going to have to be even more specific with the folks that are attending any given engagement, and think about how we really capture their imaginations, moving beyond the what to the why and the so what.

John Farkas:

Let’s get practical about some of that.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

John Farkas:

Because again, a number of the folks that are listening here are dealing with what I would characterize as very lean budgets that they’re trying really hard to figure out how to optimize, and organizations that are in various stages of alignment, in and around marketing.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

How to Approach Event Planning

John Farkas:

So that’s just some of the reality. So let’s take HIMSS as a for instance, since it’s one of the more ubiquitous shows. But anybody listening, there could be seven different shows that are appropriate to your particular vertical that we could be talking about.

So let’s use that as a point in the calendar. And talk about when do we start thinking about it? How do we frame a story around it? What are the conversations we’re having, how far in advance, with our organization building toward it? And how are we looking at the outcomes? And I know that we are working… Well, we’re also looking at needing to do that all in the context of budget constraints and stuff like that.

So how would you walk us through the narrative there and how you would approach it?

Aaron Hillman:

HIMSS is an interesting one because the conversation never stops. I think this was number 18 or 19 for me, maybe 17, in the 20 years of my experience. And in that experience, it literally will just roll into itself.

But as an example of planning for 2024, we started planning a week before HIMSS 2023. And for 2025, we started two weeks before HIMSS 2024. That doesn’t mean we get weekly planning meetings at that point, but we know that we’re going in some capacity. We generally have a booth reserved already.

And for our listeners out there, depending on the size of your organization, your relationship with HIMSS, or any of the trade associations that put on these events, you might go really early in the selection process. You might decide three months before. And there’s still an ability to go. It depends on what you’re doing, how you prioritize it, what your budget is, et cetera, as John said so well before. For a large organization, matrix organization like Philips, we’re thinking about it very, very early.

I guess what I would simply say within that framework is do your marketing plans first. If there’s one piece of advice that I can give you when I’m evaluating the value of any given event, do my marketing plan. If I’ve been in existence and I’ve gone to these shows already, what I would do is look at the outcomes. And if you don’t have those outcomes mapped, try to find the data, because I assure you it’s somewhere, to understand how those went for you. If you haven’t been before or that show has never existed before, which is happening more and more too, we’re seeing really interesting thought leadership oriented events springing up around the world, you have to decide if you take a gamble, if you dip your toe in first to see if it’s worth it for the following year. If you go huge because you know it’s the right audience for your market, great, or for your vertical, great.

But when you think about the value of events, think about it in the total value of your engagement strategy. If you’re investing 80% of your total marketing budget in events, you’re probably not hitting everybody you need to and not getting value out of your overall investment. Think about them as a moment in time where you are doing some good or using it as a springboard for a product launch or a major announcement or a huge strategic partnership that is happening with you and another vendor or with the client. But also think about what the value to the individual business is across each of those moments for the entire year.

Optimizing Shows for Product Launches

John Farkas:

Very good. As you think about using shows, events, for product launches, which I know is a fairly common tactic, how would you look at optimizing that? One of the challenges I see often is people will use a show as a venue to launch a product, and they haven’t done very much to telegraph that prior to. Because from my perspective, you’re coming to a show and you’re going to have a product launch, and if nobody knows about the product launch until three weeks before the show, you’re not going to have that much interest in it.

You said you guys had 14 things that you were announcing in the context of this year’s HIMSS. That’s a big bunch of stuff to communicate. I’m guessing that you had let people know that something was coming, and what maybe even to think about something that was coming. So talk about how that usually manifests.

Aaron Hillman:

Yeah, I think it depends on what you’re releasing. NPIs come in lots of different flavors. They come in flavors of new versions. They come in flavors of we end of life’d a solution and we’re launching its next iteration. Or, “Holy cow, this is revolutionary brand new, you’ve never seen it before.”

And we have all seen through the healthcare industry those different things that are happening. And you telegraph them all in different ways. If you’re end of lifeing something and you’re moving your existing client base into the new thing, you tell them what’s coming and what’s exciting about it and why it’s valuable, and how you’re going to help them get there. So, “Come and see us at HIMSS to learn about X, Y, Z because it’s the next thing for the thing you already have.” Because that’s part of software in particular, but all things is they reach an end of useful life and we have to introduce a new solution based on new technology or new improved functionality that do the thing. But again, it’s about the so what now, it’s not about the feature and function, it’s about the why is this so good? And what is this going to do for you?

For a huge new announcement, or the Future Health Index as a good example, we will tease the entire market. You want everybody to know, “A thing is coming. We have done this before, but this thing is new, and we’re really excited about it.” And again, why? Why are we excited? What is it going to bring? And we can’t tell you all the things yet, but please be excited because it is worth being excited about.

And so to your point, John, it is telegraphing what things to whom, and that goes back to the engagement strategy. It goes back to the marketing strategy of tying that very closely to the product roadmap and when are we releasing things and what are we releasing? And how big of a noise do we make about each of those individual moments? And frankly, the engagement plan ought to structure around those two. And it’s hard to do, especially when you’ve got a lot of businesses and a lot of complexity. But I think a really important part of the marketing planning process annually is that tie with product.

John Farkas:

Yeah. I think it’s super critical because it’s so easy, and this is a trap that a lot of organizations fall into, you are the ones, and this is 101 in so many ways, but it’s so important to keep in mind, you are so much more familiar with whatever it is you’re bringing to market. And you might think you’ve pushed it into ubiquity or that people are familiar with it, and chances are that is not true.

And so the fact that we need to look at this as a part of the story, make sure we’re telling the whole story, make sure we’re telling the story clear enough and enough to bring people along with it and want them to engage with you to learn more about the thing that you’ve determined is really important for them to hear about, that’s super important to understand that you can’t quite do enough of that. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s about repeated exposure, helping them understand why this is important, and not underestimating how hard you’re going to have to work to get above the din of what other people are saying in the market to get their attention that might have the opportunity to get them to walk by your booth with intent.

That’s what you want. You want them to seek you out with intent. You want them to have put a note in whatever their plan is, “I need to go see this organization because they’re talking about this and that’s important to me.” And you want them to know that they need to do that.

Aaron Hillman:

Sorry, just to interject for a brief moment, I would go one step further, John. I’d go one step further in saying not only do I want them to put it in their diaries that they’re going to come see me about the thing, I want them to have either reached out through a landing page or a social post and said, “I want a meeting with you,” because I want to be prepared to host them, or I want my sales team to have used the registration list or just looked at their own contact information in their market, in their region, in their zone, whatever the case may be, and touched that leader that is our target for that event and said, “Are you going to be here? We’re really excited about this thing. How about a meeting? Let’s show you it first hand.”

So I love a walk by, don’t get me wrong. We said that earlier. It’s great when they walk by and go, “Cool, I want to stop.”

John Farkas:

Yeah, I’d much rather have an appointment.

Aaron Hillman:

I’m not sure if I have an appointment, it’s one of my favorite phrases. But what I want them to do is walk up to the registration desk and say, “Hi, I’m Aaron Hillman. I have an appointment at 11:30 with John Farkas, and I can’t wait.”

John Farkas:

Yeah. That’s it.

Aaron Hillman:

That’s the thing. And it takes the prep and preparation and that longitudinal plan to get there to do that, and the buy-in of all the of pieces of the org.

Closing Thoughts

John Farkas:

The longitudinal plan, the story, making sure that you have it well understood organizationally and buy-in through all the important and pertinent parties and are ready to execute it. That’s a seriously important component of event success, and one that we can’t communicate the importance of enough.

And Aaron, I want to thank you for joining us and talking about that today. It’s an important part of the story. And we are really very available to talk about how we can help create those stories because they’re really important, and happy to take that to the next step if any of our listeners are interested.

Aaron Hillman, thanks for joining us today and for all of your insight and experience that you shared with us.

Aaron Hillman:

John, as I said before, truly an honor and a pleasure. I always love our good chats. And to anybody out there listening, if you want to chat or come and find me, obviously LinkedIn’s a great way. If you know me personally, send me a text or phone or a carrier pigeon, whatever works for you.

But thank you again, it’s truly an honor to be here and talk about this important and rather complicated topic.

John Farkas:

No doubt. Thanks for joining us today on Healthcare Market Matrix.

 

Outro:

Healthcare Market Matrix is a Ratio original podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, then jump over to healthcaremarketmatrix.com and subscribe, and we’d really appreciate your support in the form of a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. It does make a difference.

Also, while you’re there, you can become a part of the Healthcare Market Matrix community and get access to courses and content that’s created just for you by signing up for InsightSquared, a monthly newsletter dedicated to bringing you the latest health tech marketing insights right to your inbox.

Ratio is an award-winning marketing agency headquartered in the Nashville, Tennessee. We operate at the intersection of brand and growth marketing to equip companies with strategies to create meaningful connections with the healthcare market and ultimately drive growth. Want to know more? Go to goratio.com, that’s G-O-R-A-T-I-O.com. And we’ll see you at noon Central next week for an all-new episode from our team at Ratio Studios. Stay healthy.

Aaron Hillman:

One of the ways that we’re trying to make some change and really get clear is using the same KPIs, at least the descriptors, for every event so that we know, event or event, what we’re tracking against. Of course, the targets change a little bit. If we’re going to have an event where we have 20,000 people versus 3000, it’s reasonable to change the number of booth visitors you’re going to have or the number of meetings you’re going to have. But using the same descriptor is really important because what that gives you at the end of the year is a full picture of how’d you do it? And what are we going to programmatize in our marketing planning and strategy for the following year?

Intro:

Have you ever wished you had a healthcare provider on speed dial? Someone you could call to validate your product market fit? Someone to listen and help you see your solution differently? Welcome to Healthcare Market Matrix, a podcast to help you see your market clearly. 

We dive deep into the challenges faced by healthcare organization leaders that technology has the chance to help them solve. It’s all about gaining the kind of understanding you need to effectively connect with your market. Join us as we explore the Healthcare Market Matrix.

Introducing Aaron Hillman

John Farkas:

All right. Welcome everyone to the Healthcare Market Matrix, and we are really excited about what we have to put in front of you today. Almost no matter where you are in the health tech universe, engagement around events is a part of the marketing equation for most everybody.

And Aaron Hillman, who is our guest today, has a lot of valuable experience in creating and optimizing those experiences, and the experiences that ultimately lead to meaningful engagement. And engagement’s not just a word I’m throwing in there. Engagement is the word. Because if you want to think about the kind of investment, the kind of time, everything that surrounds events, it doesn’t make any sense if engagement is not a part of the equation. And yet it is so often overlooked as a primary objective, and that’s a lot of what we’re going to be talking about in the context of our time together today.

Aaron Hillman is the senior director of global, client, and industry engagement at Philips. And he has a long history of creating successful strategic and tactical plans for high volume and high value healthcare marketing.

And really, if we’re wanting to take a look at what’s going on in our world today, it’s been an interesting move since the pandemic watching the pendulum swing from no events, practically, to kind of back at it again. And what is consistently surprising to me is how many people spend so much money on events and so little thought on how to optimize engagement. And it’s unfortunate thing, and it’s a problem that’s common to many of us.

And so we’re taking a little detour from our normal content and focus for Healthcare Market Matrix to focus on this, which is a critical component for so many of our listeners. And super excited to have Aaron join us for this. Aaron’s a part of Ratio’s advisory board, and he’s there for a reason because his expertise and experience here is invaluable.

So Aaron, welcome, and thanks for joining us today on Healthcare Market Matrix.

Aaron Hillman:

Hey, John. Always great to be here. Thanks for having me back again. I consider it a true honor to join Market Matrix, and Ratio of course, so give me a ring anytime for these.

I’ve been in healthcare IT for almost 20 years. Really, really close. And it’s been an interesting journey because it’s not always been marketing, but it’s always been touching marketing. And it’s always been client focused, whether that’s patient, whether that’s clinician, whether that’s C-suite, whether that’s IT, and/or all of the above at once.

It’s been really interesting to have this variety of roles. Most of it is focused around the advocacy of the customers and prospects that we work with as vendors. But through all of it, I think the string that has brought me through all of this journey is truly how we engage. And 20 years ago, that was not really a word that we used to talk about marketing. We used the functional words. Much like we used to describe and sell healthcare IT solutions as feature function, we used to talk about marketing in that capacity.

Now as we think about the new world, especially post-pandemic, it is thinking about engagement, and truly integrated engagement, and that means a lot of different things, which I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit of. But that’s how we’re thinking about it now is the end-to-end marketing life cycle and what it means to reach the people that we want to reach and how we do so.

And so that’s been a really interesting transformation I think in the world of marketing too over the course of the time that I’ve been in these various roles and different organizations.

Changes in Engagement Post Pandemic

John Farkas:

So talk to us, so just knowing that with the background that you’re coming at this with and knowing some of the dynamics that you’ve seen change, I’m just curious, and I’m taking you a little off script here, what would you characterize as some of the change that you’ve seen since the pandemic in the context of engagement? If you were to characterize just in a nutshell what’s moved or changed or is different, how would you characterize that?

Aaron Hillman:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question because I think I’d actually… I think the pandemic showed us a new way. And the new way has actually come together with a little bit of, air quotes, the old way in a really interesting manner. In that I mean we realized that we could do a lot of things virtually, just like we’re doing this today. I’m in my house, you’re in your studio. This is great. We can meet with C-suite or clinicians virtually and get a lot done.

There is still no substitute for getting together. What I think has changed is the way we focus that energy. If you went to HIMSS this year, you’d note that the aisles were a little bit less crowded, the booths were a little bit less crowded, overall attendance was a little bit less. And I think the reason for that is those senior leaders that used to attend those shows, those big engagement activities, would go and wander, and see their friends and do business and meet with vendors, and kick the tires as it were.

Now, I think it’s a really focused effort because time is really, really expensive. There’s less money in the industry from a provider side of the house to really go out and do that, they go there looking for a specific thing. Sort of the way I go shopping for clothing. I don’t go to 10 stores. I go, if I want this blue shirt, I go to the store that has this blue shirt, I pick out the blue shirt, I try it on. Good, great, I’m gone. They’re going to vendors in the same way and they’re going with purposeful conversation because they’ve had the chance to have the virtual interaction in advance and set the meetings at advance. And so it actually changes the paradigm of how marketing and sales engages with them prior to the in-person events. And so it actually creates a greater demand to pre-prepare in a way that is changing the culture of how marketing and sales or a commercial organization as a whole I think should and can work together as well.

John Farkas:

Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think that that understanding, especially at some of the bigger shows that are expensive and have some barrier to entry and all that, that are other national level opportunities for getting together, I’m always interested in, it confounds me that there’s by so many people such a little acknowledgement on the fact that the people that are there, I mean, there’s always going to be some casual observers, but there are real buyers there looking for real things. That’s some of the reality. And the willingness to still show up and hope that people walk by is still a reality. And not taking some of the initiative and building what I know we’re going to talk about, building a progression to the event, creating journeys that make sense for people so that the event is a culmination or the event is an opportunity. That’s something that I want to get into, and we can work our way toward that here.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

Aaron’s Backstory and Journey

John Farkas:

So let’s look at show strategy. How are we going to identify some of the key shows and how do you create a strategic approach to that?

And before we dive all the way in that, Aaron, you gave us a little bit of your backdrop. But go a little farther into… Aaron comes at this honestly, folks. I mean, he’s got some real experience navigating a lot of engagement. And if you were at HIMSS this year, I would argue that Philips had one of the, if not the most engaging presence there, just from the booth itself as far as what kind of attention it commanded. I think if I was there not knowing Aaron, it would’ve commanded… It did command my attention. It commanded my attention sometimes when I didn’t want it to, which is quite all right, because at the end of the day, that’s part of what you’re trying to do. And so there’s some real intent and thought around that I think that goes into that. And that’s just the booth presence. That’s not talking about the journey to that.

So give us a little bit about your background coming to this and what that journey has been and what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way?

Aaron Hillman:

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words about the Philips booth at HIMSS. Obviously a massive team effort goes into creating that and ideating all of those pieces, and I’m thrilled to be part of that team. And we create a really great experience end to end, not just at the event, as you said, but before and after.

Like I said, I go back about 20 years. I started in what I’ll call the first EMR revolution here in the United States, working for a little company called Meditech. I was a solutions demonstrator. So I lived on the road. I visited three hospitals a week, usually. I demonstrated everything from the radiology solution, which we called, its, through to the physician documentation solutions. I was fortunate enough to begin what we called the Physician Liaison Program. And at the time, the purpose there was to recruit and work with C-suite clinicians, usually CMIOs or CCOs, CNIOs, to actually demonstrate the wears to their fellow clinicians. And so we had a little bit of what I’ll call a traveling roadshow with a number of clinicians that we recruited and trained and worked with, and we went and did demonstrations. And the credibility was incredible. It made a big difference and it showed the value of the solutions.

From there, I spent time at everybody’s favorite speech recognition solution called Dragon. We all now know it as Nuance Microsoft or Microsoft Nuance. What a growth that has been for them. And I was there during the days of the launch of their first cloud-based solution, Dragon Medical One. That was really fun. I was responsible for large IDN and academic segment systems across the US and some global. That was the first what I’ll call real marketing we did, where we actually created really strong messaging, at least in my marketing career. And was part of the product launches and the strategy. And it was really a wonderful time in healthcare to be bringing about this technology that was powerfully changing how clinicians worked. The EMR was that first phase. The really the development of voice documentation is the next. And now we know they’re doing tons of ambient and AI and other wonderful things that are making that process even better and more patient-focused.

I spent a bit of time at GE Healthcare there after that doing some, what I’ll call heavy IT work. I was globally responsible for the vendor neutral archive and analytics solutions from a solutions marketing perspective. And I also ran their central marketing team for a while. So comms and marketing ops, sales enablement, events and exhibits, and I was one of the partners on analyst relations. So quite a bit of varied work there. Within GE Healthcare, I was really privileged to have a bunch of wonderful teams that I got to work with and lead, and a mentor who really brought me along, actually a couple of really great mentors there.

I took a little dip out of large companies there for a little bit after that and worked for a company called Butterfly Network in the point-of-care ultrasound space, working on their software solution. It was truly a moment of how do we change binary decision making and understanding ultrasound in this respect from a diagnostic perspective and a marketing perspective. It was really a growth opportunity to really think about how we thought end-to-end engagement across a variety of different types of users, and how that actually helped us craft a message, not just in those single moments of engagement in an event, but longitudinally end-to-end with a strategic marketing plan.

And of course now at Philips, almost two years there in this client and industry leadership role. I’ve got a wonderful team. We work across all of the Philips businesses to think about engagement broadly and globally. And the end result is what you see at things like ECR, RSNA, HIMSS, Arab Health, and many others.

But it’s all of the things in between too. All of the socials, all of the campaigns, all of the digital, all of the content. We partner across all of those in order to create this longitudinal message that Philips, that our enterprise informatics business, is bringing to the world and to the clients and to the patients.

So it’s been a really, honestly, sort of a diverse and awesome journey for me. And it has allowed me to experience a lot that I think is maybe a little bit of an unusual marketing trajectory, honestly. So it’s been wonderful.

Prioritizing and Being Intentional with Engagement

John Farkas:

So super good backdrop there, Aaron. I think that what is true is, I know there’s people here that are listening that are all across the continuum as far as their budget capacity and what they would see as their ability to engage. And Philips arguably is on the top of the food chain. There’s few organizations that have the kind of resources to facilitate the kind of engagement that you have the opportunity to do. And you guys are not without struggle. I mean, there’s always some challenges in that because there’s a whole lot of elements in the organization that need to work together to facilitate engagement, and we’ll get to talking about some of that.

But what I want people to hear as they’re thinking about this and hearing from you is that facilitating engagement isn’t about budget, it’s about intent. And that’s a real critical designation or differentiation. If you start hearing this conversation, and I wanted to say this early, if you hear this and start saying, “Well, I can’t afford to do that.” Well, that’s not true. I mean, if you can afford to go to an event, you can afford to create engagement about it. It’s about prioritization and intent. And I just want to bring that forward because there’s a lot of people who don’t see it that way, and are thus wasting money in events when they’re not building the proper infrastructure around it to facilitate engagement. And so we can talk about that.

But let’s start with how do you begin identifying the key points, like the shows, and taking a strategic approach to that? So how would you begin this conversation? And I know it starts with figuring out what shows you’re going to go to. Who’s going to be there, what types of decision makers? How do you make those those decisions?

Aaron Hillman:

So I’d take a step back even further, actually, John. So choosing the shows is an important part of the process, but I actually think it’s maybe one of the latter parts of the process. This is about business prioritization and understanding the complexity or non-complexity of the business.

And so very simply, enterprise informatics at Philips, there’s five businesses in there, and there’s 15 businesses across all of Philips, so that’s very complex when we start to think about a show like EMS or ECR or Arab Health.

If I’m a single solution company, Butterfly was a great example of that, where they sold point-of-care ultrasound devices and software. And there were some variances in the flavors of that, of course, but you were really focused on one thing. It actually allows you to first think about the audience you’re selling to and what’s important to them, and that’s the point at which you want to begin in order to create these campaigns of how you target. Because once again, an event is a moment in time, even if it’s a couple of days, of course. But we’re talking about marketing strategy around the year, hopefully, and how you lay out the budget and where you prioritize that and who you’re aiming at and what tools are useful for that. And it even probably goes down to something as simple and finite as what does your funnel look like? And who are you trying to hit? What are your business priorities for the year?

And then you decide upon what the strategies are, what the tactics are. And then maybe what events you’ll go to that are both for what you’re trying to achieve, the solutions that you’re talking about, and whether or not if you have a multi-solution or multi-business organization like Philips, how you come together, where you aim together, and where you aim separately.

John Farkas:

Individually.

Aaron Hillman:

And we even do that regionally too. If you get to be a big enough company, the regions may do things separately from what we do globally, which may be separate from what we do at a different region level. And so it really does get down to the breakdown of what is your business priorities for who and where.

John Farkas:

Yep. That sounds good. So establishing that is obviously the first stop. And then how do you see what comes next once you have that laid out?

Aaron Hillman:

Well, you look at budget and you look at priorities and you look at what content or strategies are going to work for those folks. And marketing is, I think I said this the last time we met, marketing is one to many. So I can’t go talk to 300,000 C-suite providers globally by myself. We do that through digital media. We do that through broad engagement. We do that through social networking. I think the development of socials and which tools we use for that is actually really interesting and changing a little bit.

And the next steps are truly where you want to meet those people. Where are they going? And I think that, back to an earlier question you asked, John, which is what has changed since the pandemic. Where these people are going is changing. And I think HIMSS versus maybe ViVE is a good example of that, wherein you’re getting the folks that are going to HIMSS to kick the tires and buy the thing eventually really testing it out. If you’re going for thought leadership and to learn and to network and stir your brain, you might go to ViVE or you might go to another self-professed thought leadership event, or you might go find it on webinars. We’re seeing incredibly high attendance and registrations on webinars, and even post-initial viewing, continued engagement on those going forward.

The real trick to all of this is how you follow up on it. And that’s what makes the dough rise, to mix metaphors and make a pun. Without the follow-up, without the sales engagement pre, during, and post, it doesn’t go anywhere. And so that’s actually a really important part of the cycle. And that falls on the businesses and the marketing teams to make sure they enable the sales teams as well, but it falls on the sales teams to also come and engage.

So this is that traditional symbiotic push and pull of marketing and sales that’s ever present. And actually I find that to be a very, very positive thing because without that, let’s say there’s a fake ball in the middle, which is the client, without both sides holding on, that ball drops. And so to me, it’s all of those pieces that come together to create the outcomes and ROI for the businesses, but it also creates value for the customers to learn, understand, and move forward if relevant to them.

The Challenge of Aligning Marketing and Sales

John Farkas:

So let’s dive into that. Because the devil’s in the details, because getting marketing and sales aligned is one of the great challenges in looking at the event world. And figuring out how to put that together to me ends up being one of the differences between success and wasting money.

And so what does that ultimately need to look like? How would you characterize the conduit that needs to be in place between… How would you distill that, or the conduit that needs to be in place to be successful?

Aaron Hillman:

Well, I mean, it’s like any other relationship. In short, it’s communication, in my mind, really if I’m boiling it. But if we want to expound a little bit, what I’d argue is it’s communication and connectedness and alignment at the senior leader level, the middle leader level, and even at the functional levels. And sometimes even criss-crossing between those because there’s a lot of mixing and conversation, in my opinion that should be taking place, but it’s also alignment on the goals. It’s as much early awareness as possible.

And it’s also sort of, my opinion, it’s a willingness to accept the fact that not everything’s going to be perfect and out in front and laid bare on a beautiful plate in a Michelin star style. Sales and marketing is messy. We don’t always get all of the information in advance. Sales doesn’t always get in advance either. So we need to be flexible for each other and adapt. But more than anything else, it’s standing next to each other arm in arm, saying, “We’re going to go get this. And we’re going to prosecute this together,” because that is the way. And when I say commercial organization, what I really mean is sales, marketing, service, and anybody else that might be touching the clients or prospects. Product marketing is in there, but product management is definitely in there too. So we’re talking about the whole kit and caboodle in order to really drive this.

And so to your question of what does good look like? Good looks like symbiosis within an organization and just supporting each other when we decide a thing is going to happen, whether it’s drilling emails to get people to attend a webinar, or whether it’s setting meetings for an actual in-person event, or using the content to drive top of funnel. Something like a podcast is a great opportunity to really reach many, many people. And by sharing it through the many different venues and networks that many of us have, we all have, it creates demand. And demand is what drives the interest and how we get those people to come back and talk to us more. And we do that together, in my opinion.

John Farkas:

So I know a number of the organizations that we’re talking to are earlier stage. They’re looking at some of the spend that they’re looking at on some of these shows and the events as being a big ticket item relative to their overall budget. And often, I see them looking at the events as big moments in time for their organization. They’ll time product launches in and around that. They’ll do elements to help use those as well. Ideally, they’re using those shows as momentive events.

Talk about aligning those shows with business objectives. How can we think about using those moments in time to help drive some of the rhythm of what’s going on in the context of the organization?

Aaron Hillman:

I would categorize them as springboards. And there’s lots of good ways to do announcements. I would argue that most organizations probably don’t evangelize their wins, large or small, enough. It’s hard to keep up, honestly, because they happen every day. But it’s an important part of the engine, the marketing engine and the sales engine.

When we think about that longitudinal engagement strategy for the year, we think about where the ROI is going to come from, and it should be aligned across the product roadmap or the business roadmap, which hopefully are very closely linked together.

But let’s use HIMSS 2023 a year ago as a good example of where Philips did something like that. So every year, Philips launches what we call the FHI report. It’s the Future Health Index. It talks a great deal about what we see as the future of healthcare. We work with analysts. We work with businesses. We work with policy. And we share this, and it’s a pretty momentous launch where we’re talking about what we think is going to happen through the rest of the year.

We did that at HIMSS because we used the press and the momentum, as you say so well, to springboard that announcement into much higher visibility. We did 14 NPIs, or new product introductions, at HIMSS this year. That’s a huge amount.

And so driving engagement and awareness of those for the clients and the persona we’re targeting is a really important part of that. I would argue that’s true for all healthcare organizations, vendor organizations. We’re trying to reach the right people. And we use those moments where we know the people are at least watching and listening, if not there in person, to drive awareness of the thing we want to talk about.

If we think about ROI at a deeper and broader level, what I’d say is this. Yes, events are expensive. There’s no two ways about it. And you can go small and spend 10 or $15,000, you can go huge and spend 8 or 9 million. There’s lots of different ways to go about this. And of course there’s always that middle ground there, depending on the show and priority and budget of the organization. And Philips will do some of all of those. I mean, 9 million was hyperbole. But we go really big and we go really small and we go somewhere in the middle.

What I’d say is this, it’s thinking about the metrics that you’re driving to, the pre, during, and post engagement with the clients and how you’re driving awareness of not only being there, but what you want to say, the value proposition of the solutions that you’re bringing. And then how you transition those, let’s call them inquiries, which is a moment in time of touching an individual client or prospect, and turning those into leads, which then it turns into ostensibly funnel or they get dispositioned out and you move on. That’s all part of the strategy.

But if you think about ultimately what pays off for a big event, or any kind of event actually, a couple of really great leads leading to a couple of really great closed opportunities pays for the event, but it also creates ongoing demand where if we’re evangelizing the outcomes, the wins, “Hey, we met with so-and-so at HIMSS, and we led through this process and we’re really excited to announce that we’ve created a ten-year strategic partnership based on X,” whatever idea or value prop or thing that brought them in, it creates buzz around what it is that we’re trying to talk about at a larger scale.

And so I think it is a self-fulfilling prophecy to think about that engagement strategy and how we hit those people, but not only that, what we’re talking about and how that gets continued down the line.

John Farkas:

Yeah. I find it useful to look at events as a point in the storyline. And the question is, does the event make sense in the storyline? Are you creating it to make sense in the context of the storyline? And how is it propelling the plot? How are you going to use it to propel the plot? Have you told the story to the point where the event makes sense in the story? And were you using it as an appropriate plot accelerant?

And if you’ve done that effectively… First of all, you’ve got to realize that if you’re showing up at a show and you haven’t told the story around it, you’re not realizing your full potential at the show.

Aaron Hillman:

Absolutely.

John Farkas:

And so when you’re thinking of it from a strategic perspective, have you taken the time to think about the whole story, the beginning, the middle, and the end, and where this show falls in that continuum? And what needs to happen as a result of that? To tell the right story, what are the things that you need to have done to make sure that you are optimizing for that?

And sometimes, depending on who you are and wherever you’re bringing people into the process, there can be a couple stops on that trajectory. You could have HIMSS and RSNA, and one could bounce from one to the other because there’s a point in the story and then there’s a second point in the story depending on how that all comes together.

And so my encouragement to the folks listening is make sure you have framed out that story, and that everybody in your organization that needs to understands what’s happening there and the importance of it. Because so much is lost if the only people telling that story is the marketing department.

Aaron Hillman:

Yes.

John Farkas:

And that’s a real critical understanding.

Aaron Hillman:

It is, and it goes all the way up to senior leadership. Senior leaders have great networks, and we really want to bolster that. But it goes to everybody. It’s not just marketing. When we’re coming up a couple of months before HIMSS or a couple of months before RSNA, everybody ought to be blasting the world with the story. And that goes to my earlier point, which is, the earlier we can tell the story, the better, within reason of course. If you’re doing it six months in advance, it’s fuzz. It’s fluff. But it’s about setting clear objectives. It’s about the time window for planning. It really is about making sure that you’ve got really clear objectives about the outcomes and the key performance indicators that you’re trying to achieve.

One of the ways that we’re trying to make some change and really get clear is using the same KPIs, at least the descriptors, for every event so that we know, event or event, what we’re tracking against. Of course, the targets change a little bit. If we’re going to have an event where we have 20,000 people versus 3000, it’s reasonable to change the number of booth visits you’re going to have or the number of meetings you’re going to have. But using the same descriptor is really important because what that gives you at the end of the year is a full picture of how’d you do it? And what are we going to programmatize in our marketing planning and strategy for the following year? Which is a really important part of the outcomes that come from this string of engagement.

It’s not just the event, remember. It’s all of the things. So how many impressions do we get from the socials? How many hits on the web page do we get? How many people registered for the pre-webinar? How many people actually showed up and stayed for the pre-webinar? How many people came and asked for meetings pre-event? How many people came and asked for content through the landing pages after the event? All of those things are really important, but you’ve got to make that plan in advance, and you’ve got to make sure everybody is aware, including sales, service, product, and leadership, of course in addition to the entire marketing team, about what we’re aiming at.

And it’s a change in culture. We are evolving every day. It’s been a really fun process over the past 5, 6, 8, 10 years. And we’re getting really sophisticated, and that is a great thing to see as well. As we move into this next phase where I think it’s going to get even more narrow, we’re going to have to be even more specific with the folks that are attending any given engagement, and think about how we really capture their imaginations, moving beyond the what to the why and the so what.

John Farkas:

Let’s get practical about some of that.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

John Farkas:

Because again, a number of the folks that are listening here are dealing with what I would characterize as very lean budgets that they’re trying really hard to figure out how to optimize, and organizations that are in various stages of alignment, in and around marketing.

Aaron Hillman:

Sure.

How to Approach Event Planning

John Farkas:

So that’s just some of the reality. So let’s take HIMSS as a for instance, since it’s one of the more ubiquitous shows. But anybody listening, there could be seven different shows that are appropriate to your particular vertical that we could be talking about.

So let’s use that as a point in the calendar. And talk about when do we start thinking about it? How do we frame a story around it? What are the conversations we’re having, how far in advance, with our organization building toward it? And how are we looking at the outcomes? And I know that we are working… Well, we’re also looking at needing to do that all in the context of budget constraints and stuff like that.

So how would you walk us through the narrative there and how you would approach it?

Aaron Hillman:

HIMSS is an interesting one because the conversation never stops. I think this was number 18 or 19 for me, maybe 17, in the 20 years of my experience. And in that experience, it literally will just roll into itself.

But as an example of planning for 2024, we started planning a week before HIMSS 2023. And for 2025, we started two weeks before HIMSS 2024. That doesn’t mean we get weekly planning meetings at that point, but we know that we’re going in some capacity. We generally have a booth reserved already.

And for our listeners out there, depending on the size of your organization, your relationship with HIMSS, or any of the trade associations that put on these events, you might go really early in the selection process. You might decide three months before. And there’s still an ability to go. It depends on what you’re doing, how you prioritize it, what your budget is, et cetera, as John said so well before. For a large organization, matrix organization like Philips, we’re thinking about it very, very early.

I guess what I would simply say within that framework is do your marketing plans first. If there’s one piece of advice that I can give you when I’m evaluating the value of any given event, do my marketing plan. If I’ve been in existence and I’ve gone to these shows already, what I would do is look at the outcomes. And if you don’t have those outcomes mapped, try to find the data, because I assure you it’s somewhere, to understand how those went for you. If you haven’t been before or that show has never existed before, which is happening more and more too, we’re seeing really interesting thought leadership oriented events springing up around the world, you have to decide if you take a gamble, if you dip your toe in first to see if it’s worth it for the following year. If you go huge because you know it’s the right audience for your market, great, or for your vertical, great.

But when you think about the value of events, think about it in the total value of your engagement strategy. If you’re investing 80% of your total marketing budget in events, you’re probably not hitting everybody you need to and not getting value out of your overall investment. Think about them as a moment in time where you are doing some good or using it as a springboard for a product launch or a major announcement or a huge strategic partnership that is happening with you and another vendor or with the client. But also think about what the value to the individual business is across each of those moments for the entire year.

Optimizing Shows for Product Launches

John Farkas:

Very good. As you think about using shows, events, for product launches, which I know is a fairly common tactic, how would you look at optimizing that? One of the challenges I see often is people will use a show as a venue to launch a product, and they haven’t done very much to telegraph that prior to. Because from my perspective, you’re coming to a show and you’re going to have a product launch, and if nobody knows about the product launch until three weeks before the show, you’re not going to have that much interest in it.

You said you guys had 14 things that you were announcing in the context of this year’s HIMSS. That’s a big bunch of stuff to communicate. I’m guessing that you had let people know that something was coming, and what maybe even to think about something that was coming. So talk about how that usually manifests.

Aaron Hillman:

Yeah, I think it depends on what you’re releasing. NPIs come in lots of different flavors. They come in flavors of new versions. They come in flavors of we end of life’d a solution and we’re launching its next iteration. Or, “Holy cow, this is revolutionary brand new, you’ve never seen it before.”

And we have all seen through the healthcare industry those different things that are happening. And you telegraph them all in different ways. If you’re end of lifeing something and you’re moving your existing client base into the new thing, you tell them what’s coming and what’s exciting about it and why it’s valuable, and how you’re going to help them get there. So, “Come and see us at HIMSS to learn about X, Y, Z because it’s the next thing for the thing you already have.” Because that’s part of software in particular, but all things is they reach an end of useful life and we have to introduce a new solution based on new technology or new improved functionality that do the thing. But again, it’s about the so what now, it’s not about the feature and function, it’s about the why is this so good? And what is this going to do for you?

For a huge new announcement, or the Future Health Index as a good example, we will tease the entire market. You want everybody to know, “A thing is coming. We have done this before, but this thing is new, and we’re really excited about it.” And again, why? Why are we excited? What is it going to bring? And we can’t tell you all the things yet, but please be excited because it is worth being excited about.

And so to your point, John, it is telegraphing what things to whom, and that goes back to the engagement strategy. It goes back to the marketing strategy of tying that very closely to the product roadmap and when are we releasing things and what are we releasing? And how big of a noise do we make about each of those individual moments? And frankly, the engagement plan ought to structure around those two. And it’s hard to do, especially when you’ve got a lot of businesses and a lot of complexity. But I think a really important part of the marketing planning process annually is that tie with product.

John Farkas:

Yeah. I think it’s super critical because it’s so easy, and this is a trap that a lot of organizations fall into, you are the ones, and this is 101 in so many ways, but it’s so important to keep in mind, you are so much more familiar with whatever it is you’re bringing to market. And you might think you’ve pushed it into ubiquity or that people are familiar with it, and chances are that is not true.

And so the fact that we need to look at this as a part of the story, make sure we’re telling the whole story, make sure we’re telling the story clear enough and enough to bring people along with it and want them to engage with you to learn more about the thing that you’ve determined is really important for them to hear about, that’s super important to understand that you can’t quite do enough of that. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s about repeated exposure, helping them understand why this is important, and not underestimating how hard you’re going to have to work to get above the din of what other people are saying in the market to get their attention that might have the opportunity to get them to walk by your booth with intent.

That’s what you want. You want them to seek you out with intent. You want them to have put a note in whatever their plan is, “I need to go see this organization because they’re talking about this and that’s important to me.” And you want them to know that they need to do that.

Aaron Hillman:

Sorry, just to interject for a brief moment, I would go one step further, John. I’d go one step further in saying not only do I want them to put it in their diaries that they’re going to come see me about the thing, I want them to have either reached out through a landing page or a social post and said, “I want a meeting with you,” because I want to be prepared to host them, or I want my sales team to have used the registration list or just looked at their own contact information in their market, in their region, in their zone, whatever the case may be, and touched that leader that is our target for that event and said, “Are you going to be here? We’re really excited about this thing. How about a meeting? Let’s show you it first hand.”

So I love a walk by, don’t get me wrong. We said that earlier. It’s great when they walk by and go, “Cool, I want to stop.”

John Farkas:

Yeah, I’d much rather have an appointment.

Aaron Hillman:

I’m not sure if I have an appointment, it’s one of my favorite phrases. But what I want them to do is walk up to the registration desk and say, “Hi, I’m Aaron Hillman. I have an appointment at 11:30 with John Farkas, and I can’t wait.”

John Farkas:

Yeah. That’s it.

Aaron Hillman:

That’s the thing. And it takes the prep and preparation and that longitudinal plan to get there to do that, and the buy-in of all the of pieces of the org.

Closing Thoughts

John Farkas:

The longitudinal plan, the story, making sure that you have it well understood organizationally and buy-in through all the important and pertinent parties and are ready to execute it. That’s a seriously important component of event success, and one that we can’t communicate the importance of enough.

And Aaron, I want to thank you for joining us and talking about that today. It’s an important part of the story. And we are really very available to talk about how we can help create those stories because they’re really important, and happy to take that to the next step if any of our listeners are interested.

Aaron Hillman, thanks for joining us today and for all of your insight and experience that you shared with us.

Aaron Hillman:

John, as I said before, truly an honor and a pleasure. I always love our good chats. And to anybody out there listening, if you want to chat or come and find me, obviously LinkedIn’s a great way. If you know me personally, send me a text or phone or a carrier pigeon, whatever works for you.

But thank you again, it’s truly an honor to be here and talk about this important and rather complicated topic.

John Farkas:

No doubt. Thanks for joining us today on Healthcare Market Matrix.

 

Outro:

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