Chryssa Rich is an Idaho-based marketing expert whose experience spans multiple industries including finance, automotive, agriculture, health care, entertainment and real estate.
She earned numerous awards during nearly a decade agency-side in Austin, Los Angeles and Boise, and in 2013 joined Primary Health Medical Group as Director of Marketing, where she directs brand strategy and all marketing efforts for the group’s 23 locations across southwest Idaho.
Chryssa holds a BFA in graphic design from Boise State University and an MA in Advertising from the University of Texas. In her free time, she enjoys camping, biking and traveling with her family.
All right, good morning. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm so excited to be back in front of a big group. Being in healthcare, of course, we kind of had to stay away from that type of thing for a while. So I'm really excited to be back. My name is Chryssa. I'm director of marketing for Primary Health Medical Group. I'm going to talk to you today about high level brand strategy.
We are gonna dive right in. I would like everybody to please get out the billboard template that's in your folder behind your agenda.
And I want you to grab a Sharpie cuz I'm a marketing person. There's always gonna be a Sharpie at the table. And I want you to take one minute to sketch out a billboard for your business. One minute, rough it out, drop a billboard for your business and use that top template cuz we'll come back for the second one. Doesn't have to be perfect. Just sketch it out. If you're in charge of your billboards, what is your billboard going to look like for your business? 30 seconds. Okay, 10 seconds to wrap up. Put your final thoughts down on the page. Okay, set those aside. We will come back to those at the end of the presentation.
That's a pretty loaded term, right? Brand strategy is the holistic approach behind how a brand builds identification and favorability with customers. So think of brand strategy as everything you're doing to make yourself known and to gain new customers when you're building your strategy. There are so many different ways to approach it. I've narrowed it down for fi to five points to focus on for today. Identifying your target audience, developing your U V P, your unique value proposition, developing your messaging, assembling your toolkit, and then measuring and adjusting. And that measurement piece is so important.
So when it comes to identifying your target audience, I'm sorry, it cannot be everyone. I think it sounds great to say I'm, I'm targeting everyone. I'll get more customers that way, right?
It doesn't work that way. If you need help kind of narrowing in on who your target audience might be, sit down and start making a list.
So you're not going to be making a marketing change or a business change based on every survey response that comes in, but you are going to be looking for those themes, those things that keep rising to the top, that are going to help you focus in on who your ideal target audience is.
When you do this, it's really important that you let go of assumptions. So you might think, oh, I know exactly who I'm targeting, I know exactly who my ideal customer is. And you might be wrong. So keep an open mind to what the data is going to show you.
I have a great example of this. Before I worked at Primary Health, I was with a pet health insurance company. And when I started working there, it was after the recession, they'd gotten rid of their entire marketing department. And I realized that we had no idea who our customers were. We knew everything about the pets who were being insured, their breed, their zip code, their nicknames, when they had their last vaccines, their spay neuter status. But we didn't know anything about the humans who were actually purchasing from us. So some of us from different departments got together just based on our gut and we're like, yeah, okay, so here's probably who it is.
Probably middle class, right? They've got a little extra money to pay to take care of their pets, probably have kids, probably a busy family. They don't have time to worry about unexpected vet bills. So we sent out a, a pet parent survey and the results started to come in and we realized we were totally wrong. The reality is that most of our policy holders were at the high and low end of the income bracket. High end, because that group is accustomed to ensuring pretty much everything; and the lower brackets, because those typically were seniors on fixed incomes, who knew they wouldn't have access to cash or credit in a pet health emergency. We also discovered that they pretty much didn't have any kids living at home because when you don't have human kids at home, your pets are your kids and they're going to get more of your attention.
So we were totally off base and our current customers were able to tell us who they were.
All right, next up, developing your UVP. This is your unique value proposition. It's the core benefit that sets you apart from the competition. When developing your UVP, you want to be concise and specific. Avoid those vague terms, avoid those vague promises.
You also want to make it about your customer. So your UVP should not be about something that you're doing or a way that you're feeling. It should be about how your customer is going to feel or the benefit that your customer will experience working with you.
Some examples of a weak UVP: we care about you, our business cares about your family, right? How often do we see that type of thing? Same thing with five star service, best service in the Treasure Valley. That's really hard to understand specifically what that means.
I like this one for Uber. The smartest way to get around. Or this one for Slack: Be more productive at work with less effort. So you've got action verbs in there and you've got clearly stated benefits to what your customers are going to ex experience working with these brands.
Now keep in mind your UVP isn't necessarily your tagline or a headline. So the Uber TV ads aren't going to say Uber, the smartest way to get around. But the UVP is going to drive your marketing messaging and support your overall messaging.
Once you've developed your messaging and it's time to make the marketing pieces, I want you to focus on one thing in each marketing piece. And I have a whole separate talk on one thing that's a lot of fun. If you're interested in that, chat with me afterwards.
When you focus on one thing in marketing, it's easier to communicate. It's visually going to be more appealing because there's less going on and it's going to help you focus on your most valuable message. It's gonna help you cut the clutter.
I love this print ad for McDonald's. It's obviously quite old because wifi in restaurants is not news anymore. But think about all the things you could say about McDonald's, the 99 cent menu, the frozen cokes, the McRib, all the news, right? But this print ad focus just on the fact that, hey, we have wifi now, very effective and has really withstood the test of time.
Okay? So what is your one thing? How on earth are you gonna pick which one thing to talk about in your marketing pieces? Ask yourself these questions.
Here's a bonus box for you. These are the items that I've identified as the most cost controllable marketing avenues.
Okay. Let's go back to the billboard template. Think about what we just talked about in terms of your unique value proposition and your one thing approach to your marketing pieces. You're going to take one minute to make yourselves a new billboard on the bottom template there. And then if we have any volunteers to show the before and afters, I always like to highlight a couple of them. I think nine out of 10 times your second billboard is going to be so much more strategic and effective, even after just a 15 minute exercise.
So thinking about your UVP and thinking about one thing in your marketing pieces, think about 15 seconds. It's a quick exercise. Do we have any volunteers, anyone super proud of their after that they want to share? I'm not going to choose volunteers. This is a personal exercise, but if we have anyone who wants to share, we'd love to see it.
All right, we got one. You want to bring it up here? Okay. You're Taylor and you are with Ping Plotter. Solve internet problems. Ping Plotter. Good. So really his before was great. Second one: Better remote workers. Ping Plotter. Okay. Okay. Right. How is that for the UVP? Solve internet problems versus Better remote workers? Right. Billboard B is the winner. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Anyone else want to share theirs? Better remote workers. Everybody wants that right now.
Are you volunteering someone over there? Okay. I'd love to see it. Heather, who are you with? Heather. She Is Social. The first one says, Let's get social, has kind of like an Instagram. Bottom one says, Making social media easy. That's good social. That's great. So yeah. Love it. Thank you for sharing.
Even just tweaking a couple words like that on the billboard. Now we know what they're offering us, right? Now I know what it what for me as a customer I can expect as a benefit working with them.
It would be really tricky to narrow it down to just one thing in terms of what's working, because we have so many different needs, right? Among our patient group the more targeted, more specific stuff is always going to be more effective. So we do a targeted direct mail piece to new movers that say, Hey, you picked a great neighborhood, we should know because we're here too. And then it directs them to their neighborhood Primary Health. We see a really strong ROI on that new mover. We do that every 90 days.
Other things, when we can target email communication, make sure that we're reaching out to the right people, getting the right message to the right people, that's pretty much always going to be a win for us. The thing with the QR code in front of a clinic, it's super vague. It's not targeted at anyone specific. They have to notice it. They have to need a pediatrician, they have to want to scan the QR code. My gut told me it wasn't going to work. But I had to let the projects speak for itself instead of just being an idea killer.
So the benchmarks are a little bit different. For each item, if it's something online, you typically want to wait till you have at least 500 to a thousand impressions, 500 to a thousand opportunities for someone to engage with you to look at that click through rate or to look at the ROI, and be able to make a call. In the case with the QR codes and the posters, for example, they're getting almost no scans. So that's super obvious right now. Maybe the staff aren't putting 'em out every day. So I told my team, I said, let's give it the month of May, but then I'll probably be ready to call it. So really sometimes it's a wait and see, but kind of like figuring out your target audience. You're looking for those themes. You're looking for those trends. And so it depends on each piece. Yes.
We are not. We're not using AI. We don't have such a high demand for content that we have that need. I think for some e-commerce companies where they're needing to generate content constantly, I could absolutely see where that would come in handy. And, and I've done that. I've, like with the pet insurance company, it's an online brand and so you're, you're living and dying by your blog sometimes. But yeah, at Primary Health we don't have such an immense need for that content to use AI. And that's really attributable to the fact that we have so many in-person locations and that the people's experience with brand experience with us is really an in-person experience above all.
That's a great question. So we have five brand values that we, that we want to be high quality, comprehensive, convenient, affordable and friendly. Our marketing focuses solely on urgent care, even though we offer a number of different service lines. And so we go back to those five brand values in terms of all of our marketing. So we want everything we do in and outside the clinic to reflect back on those five values.
That's a great question. I think it would definitely tend toward positive. But you might touch on a nerve, right? A frustration that they're feeling with the current situation. So I think there would be a way to kind of word it so that you're acknowledging, hey, what you're doing right now is really hard and we're here to make that easier for you. That type of situation. But I think generally you're going to be leaning toward positive because you want your customers to be feeling optimistic about a relationship with you or your business.
So actually, like I said, direct mail is one that's so, so valuable for us and, and really impactful. It's important that you know who you're marketing to, who you're mailing to. And so again, do tests and, and, and direct mail. I guess I should add that to my little bonus box there. That's another one where you can go to the company and say, you know what? I have $500 to spend on this campaign. How many households can I hit that are going to reach these, you know, demographic guidelines and see how it works?
See, you know so what we do in our case is the service we use includes a matchback. So 90 days later we can find out how many households came into a Primary Health for the first time after getting our postcard compared to a control group. And that service is included with the company that we use that does the mailing for us. And it shouldn't be a lot. So direct mail can add up, but when you get to certain quantities, you're looking at less than a dollar a household to target. And when they're already going to be somewhat qualified, that's a pretty reasonable price. Of course, business cards and flyers and stuff, those are so low cost. Just having them handy is valuable.
And I always say that I can't make somebody need an X-ray. I can't make somebody have a sore throat, but I can make them think of Primary Health first when it happens. So we are really all about awareness. And when I was in an e-commerce company before, we were living and dying by those daily quotes and sales, right? And you see 'em coming in through Google all day long, switch over to Primary Health and you might launch a marketing effort and you've got to do a 6 to 12 month look back to start figuring out how effective is this. During Covid we were getting thousands of first-time patients every month for covid testing and vaccine.
That is a once in a lifetime opportunity to have that many new leads handed to you, right? And so we put them into a special 12 week follow-up campaign that's a combination of direct mail, text, and email. And we are literally on a 12 month schedule of lookback to see what percentage of these customers have returned to primary health for a need other than covid vaccine and testing. And we're right at about 35%.
So now we start tweaking that follow up series and withholding certain groups to see which piece of that follow up marketing campaign is more effective. And I won't have that answer for at least 6 to 12 months because people don't need urgent care, right? It's like 1.3 visits a year or something is the average. So yeah, it's definitely the long game. Definitely a wait and see.
At Primary Health, we will easily go 4 to 6 months without emailing our full patient list. Because if we don't have something important to say, we're not going to bug people and make them unsubscribe because then when we do really want, let them to know that the new Nampa clinic is open, they'll still be on our email list. But we do reach out more frequently if we have something specific to say to a targeted group.
So I think as long as what you have to say is valuable to them, not just you, and you're targeting your communications and they're hearing from you once a month is reasonable. I think we've all had that experience where you make an online purchase and you immediately start getting multiple emails from that place.
And what do you immediately do? You've hit the unsubscribe button. Your future 20% off on something I might need is not worth what you're doing to me right now in my inbox. So I mean, I would start with once a month a little bit more if you have something really specific to say, but be very judicious with it.
In terms of the one thing, and I'm able to get into a little bit more detail on that in my talk. That's just about the one thing that's really going to depend on your product lines and what your own schedule looks like. But you would definitely want to plan ahead maybe for the entire year in terms of which one thing you're going to focus on at a time. I think it makes sense for them to run parallel if they're targeting different audiences. I think for the sake of clarity, especially if you're working with a smaller marketing budget, just go big on the one thing that has worked and maybe spend a quarter on that and then shift gears.
But you want it to be cohesive, right? So you want it to be reflective in what you're talking about at events, what you're doing on social, what's highlighted on your website. If you can batch it like that and make a focused effort I think you're going to see good results from that.
So it kind of depends, obviously in healthcare, it's private. You can do all kinds of shady stuff with that data. We do none of it. <Laugh> You can upload email lists to Facebook and target those people, you know, I mean, in theory, we could pull an email list of every patient who's come in with hemorrhoids and target them on Facebook. No, that is too far. Technically it's legal, but absolutely not.
For the direct mail that's really kind of our heaviest data point. We work with a company called DXM. They're in Georgia actually, and they pull that data for us. We don't ever see that data and we don't ever get to keep it. We basically rent it for a one-time mailing. So if you've moved, you know that you get all kinds of coupons and new mover type stuff in your mailbox. That's where those come from is companies can go out and do a one-time mailing to that list without ever keeping the data.
In terms of internal data, we have just an incredible amount of reporting. The patients who opt into our secure system are the ones that we can put into that 12 week follow-up program for new patients, for example. So they opt into that and then we can securely send them text messages and that sort of thing.
Anything else? Great questions today. Okay, thank you.