2219 - Tailored Strategies for Effective Health Marketing with Patient Procure's Jake Sucoff

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1:05With us right now, Jake Sukhoff. Jake, you are the founder of Patient Procure. Your website is patientprocure.com. Jake, it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. It's good to be here. As we get started here, before we kind of get into everything, a little bit about yourself personally. What are you doing for fun lately? Or what are you geeking out on when nobody else is around necessarily? Yeah, well, I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, so I don't really have a lot of hobbies these days. It's mostly, you know, going to swim class and ninja class and trying to be outside as much as possible.

1:42But when I do have a moment to myself, I play a lot of music. I have, I play guitar. Oh, you play guitar. I play guitar. Yeah. I play guitar. I sing. And I also recently bought a synthesizer, this Juno 06, and I've been experimenting a lot with making beats. So that's been really, really fun and gratifying um like that time after my kids go to sleep and uh between like 8 30 and midnight when i'm really uh the only part of my day when i'm truly alone uh i'm getting lost in that world right now which is man i just is it the ju06 sound module is that it it's so it's based on an old uh like full keyboard synthesizer called the june the juno 06 and I got a newer version that's very small and it has a book is what it says.

2:35Yep. And it's got this, uh, attachable keyboard. And so I've really been messing with the presets, but you can shape the, the sound of the notes that you're creating, which is something I don't have any experience with that. I grew up playing the saxophone and music theory was always difficult for me to wrap my head around. I really was able to survive on the strength of my ear and my ability to hear things. And so it's a whole new element. Oh, that's so cool. I learned about music, which has been great. Yeah. Are you playing right? Like, are you, are you thinking about like doing maybe like some, some chill vibes or.

3:13I know, no, I am not a chill vibes person. It is dancey. It's disco. It's upbeat. I like. Oh, that's so cool. Do you think you'll post that? Have you posted anything online yet? So I've been posting a lot of me playing guitar and saying beats are not close to being ready. But my goal is to get to a place where I can start to feel comfortable about putting them out into the world. That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, Jake, let's talk about patientprocure.com because I believe my experience, the world you serve badly needs the service you provide, in my experience. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what Patient Procure is?

3:52Sure. So Patient Procure is a full-scale marketing agency that works with healthcare professionals. We've done work with solo concierge professionals who don't take insurance all the way up to large multi-state operators that have 15 to 20 brands and hundreds of physicians across many different states. And we're really a kind of one-stop shop for any healthcare organization that needs to do marketing. We do paid ads management, organic social media management, email marketing, SEO, conversion rate optimization and web development. We do reputation management, reviews, just whatever doctors need and healthcare organizations need.

4:36and it's been really interesting. On one hand, it's a lot of services. Some might say too many services. And at the same time, I've found that clients really don't want to work with multiple agencies. And if they're not ready to build marketing teams in-house, they want one point of contact who's going to do everything for them. And so that's been a boon for us. We are, you know, there's a bit of not really understanding or rather I should say it's difficult to standardize things because every client has vastly unique needs. But it allows us to put together a plan that is customized and specific to the organization and their needs.

5:24So, you know, we're in the early days still. We've been around for just under a year now, but we've got a bunch of clients. It's going really well. And every day I get more and more information and get closer to understanding exactly how I should be presenting these services and what's best for the clients. Hmm. Well, all right. So when somebody, a founder starts a small healthcare company, maybe they're a doctor, you know, maybe they've just been in the business for a while. You know, chances are they have a lot of skills and to assume that marketing is one of them, that's kind of a pretty bold assumption because it is, it's, you know, if you're doing your, it's almost like a fool who represents themselves in court has a fool for, what do I say?

6:11You know, A lawyer represents himself in court as a fool for a client or something like that. It's kind of like that same thing. If you're doing your own marketing, you start to become that jack-of-all-trades, master of none. And I don't think that that's what you want to build your entire business on. Your clients coming in is the lifeblood of your business and what is going to sustain you for years to come and hopefully be this legacy that you can then be a part of. Marketing is such a key part of that. But where do you see, and I don't know if you come across people that are trying to do a lot of this stuff in-house, where do you see them most stumbling when they try to do it in-house?

6:50Because it's, like I said, these are, I wouldn't do my own marketing, and I'm a pretty savvy marketing guy. I mean, I don't even know where to begin with that answer. There's so much, but I say all the time, you know, my physician clients went to medical school to practice medicine, not to run their Google ads or to optimize their Google business profile. Of the area, I'll mention one because it's top of mind. I've run into the situation many times where I run very profitable meta or Google ad campaigns and hand over a huge number of prospective patients leads to the practices. And then they don't have the ability to actually book these patients.

7:36And no matter how many times I say, listen, this is something we can do. We have a whole follow-up sequence. We can institute technology to help you convert these patients. They say, no, I have people at the front desk, they're patient coordinators. They're going to do this. It is a vastly different skill to chase down a lead and to call them and email them and send them text messages relentlessly until they book an appointment than it is to be a patient coordinator where you need to understand the inner workings of the business insurance. You have to be empathetic. You have to, you know, patients have questions they need the answers to.

8:12And those are not the same people. And I feel like physicians often feel like, oh, I'll just have, you know, Marlene works the front desk. She'll call these leads and she'll make sure they get booked. And not only does she not have the bandwidth, she has way too many things on her plate already. She doesn't have the skill or expertise to do it. You need basically almost a sales representative to do it. So that's been one of the big challenges that's top of mind for me. But in general, look, none of this is rocket science. And I don't want to denigrate my profession, my business. I love what I do.

8:46It's challenging, but none of this is rocket science. Anybody who went to med school and became a doctor can figure out all of the things that I do, but it's time consuming and it takes experience and there's some nuance to it. So it's just very rarely a good use of time, especially if you have a new practice and you're trying to get up off the ground. I mean, there's some low hanging fruit, like with Google Business Profile that will help starting to get some phone calls and leads in. But it's really not a good use of time to be focusing a lot of your energies on marketing optimizations. Yep.

9:24Yep. Yeah. No, then there's a lot of moving pieces, you know, and then as, you know, someone who's in leadership, um, listen, you know, if you're hoping that your folks are just going to figure it out and then you have to manage all of that, uh, it's a lot of stress. I mean, there's a lot of things that are involved in, you know, our businesses already have an unquenchable appetite for this. Now, Jake, you've mentioned a few, I'd say, parts of the user journey for typical clinicians or small medical practices that I think are unique. When we think about, and maybe there are folks that are quite familiar with marketing that are listening to us right now, What is unique about the top of the funnel marketing associated with medical companies that you think are unique that aren't necessarily a factor in other industries?

10:21I could ask this another way. Why does someone hire you versus why don't they just hire a general marketing strategist? Sure. Sure. So let me start with the first one and then I'll go to the second one. You know, what's unique about health care versus, you know, for instance, marketing for direct to consumer goods. And, you know, there's some complexities in certain direct to consumer goods. But if you're a patient and you're suffering from some condition, some disease, and you don't know everything you need to know about it, that top of funnel should be comprised of education. And I think oftentimes it's easy to get really technical really fast for doctors.

11:03And that's not necessarily the best path towards starting to educate your patient to understand what they're dealing with and convincing them to come in. So I think for top of funnel, you need a mix of the accessible, you know, long form written and short form video that just touches upon, hey, this is the condition you're dealing with. And here's everything you need to know about it. And, you know, we're not even talking about middle of funnel or bottom of funnel where we're introducing them to the practice and your unique methodology and then trying to actually getting them to book an appointment.

11:35But just the understanding of this category, what are the conditions? What are the treatments? sort of the options and doing so first from a very easily digestible format of, hey, you just got diagnosed with such and such. Let's talk about it. Here's the things you need to know. Here's your treatment options. And then you can also get into, you know, starting and this kind of moves on a little bit out of top of funnel into middle of funnel. You know, let's talk more in depth about all of these things. Here's some side effects here, some other alternative treatment options that aren't as well known.

12:08So I think that that's, you know, top of funnel. If you have one specialty, that's how I would think about it. How we do things differently. I really like to focus on, regardless of how large the practice is, individual physicians and getting them to record video so that they can connect with patients on a deeper level. You know, I think it's, it's one of the reality is patients are going to look for as much information as possible online before they make a decision to book an appointment with a physician. So the larger your footprint is, and having an ability to connect with a patient outside of the examination room where, you know, on average, the length of a visit is what, like 12 minutes or 15 minutes.

12:53And usually it's, in my experience, much shorter than that. You're sitting in a waiting room and then you're in an exam room and a nurse comes in and then they leave and then you get like five minutes with a doctor before they leave. To be able to answer a lot of the questions that a patient has before they even get into the office is a huge benefit. So to record yourself answering frequently asked questions, like I just said, talking about the conditions, talking about the treatments, talking about how you're special. That's how I differentiate myself because I get really focused on getting my physician clients to record that content and then repurpose it into as many different mediums as possible so that we can then run it across LinkedIn and Instagram and, you know, email newsletters and, you know, every platform we possibly can, putting it on YouTube so that there's more touch points possible between physicians and their patients.

13:52patients existing and prospective patients. So I like to lead with that. You know, a lot of physicians in my experience. Yes. Even, even though a lot of them have ego, even the ones with ego often don't want to put themselves out there, not because they're embarrassed or because they don't have the confidence to do so, but usually because they feel kind of grimy. They don't want to feel like influencers. They don't want to feel like they're snake oil salespeople, right? And it can feel that way. And that's why I try to take the onus off of them and onto me, show up. I have a set of interview questions.

14:31I prepare so that we understand what are the topics we're talking about? What are the conditions? What are the treatments? What are the unique differentiators that you have as opposed to other physicians who are working in the same specialties? And then we take that content and then that's it. They just show up, they record, they leave, and then I repurpose it and I publish it and distribute it as widely as possible. And I think that that's, I mean, look, this isn't, again, this isn't rocket science, but I haven't found all that many healthcare marketers that run things the same way. Yeah, yeah, very cool.

15:03PatientPrecure.com. To our friend that's listening right now, Jake, what would you recommend their next steps? It looks like you have some great resources available too, even if someone's maybe not ready for a conversation. I, you know, I put out a lot of this content, which has some concrete examples and advice about what you can do to get started. So you can take a listen to that. And I'm always happy to have, you know, give out free audits and give up free advice and talk to people. You can always shoot me an email at jake at patientprocure.com. I'm happy to take a look at what you're working on, give you some tips and with no expectation of having a retainer agreement, just because I think you get out of the world what you put into it.

15:45And, you know, one of the reasons why I love this area is that I feel like I'm actually contributing something to the world. I'm helping people find the health care that they need. I'm helping physicians find the patients so that they can help them, you know, live better lives and improve their communities. So any way I can contribute and help physicians, healthcare organizations, I'm happy to. Jake Sukhoff, again, founder of Patient Procure, your website, patientprocure.com. When you go to the website, you can click on see plans. You'll see everything. It's all productized and all up front. And then, of course, just click on book a call or get started to get started.

16:27Jake Sukhoff, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it.

16:36Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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