Creative Healthcare Marketing That Moves the Needle | EP 15

In this episode of Healthcare Marketing Edge, Tim Bouchard, Owner/CEO of Luminus, speaks with Deborah Castaldo, an independent healthcare consultant, about the critical need for creativity in healthcare marketing. Deborah shares her journey from a TV news anchor to a strategic marketer in healthcare, emphasizing the importance of connecting with patients on a human level. They discuss the challenges of breaking through clinical jargon, engaging the community, and addressing patient perceptions. Deborah provides insights into successful marketing campaigns and the necessity of measuring success while building internal support for creative initiatives.

Tim Bouchard (00:00)
Welcome to Healthcare Marketing Edge, where we share stories and strategies to grow your practice. I’m Tim Bouchard from Luminus, a healthcare marketing agency specializing in helping practices acquire patients and grow their practice. Today, we’re talking about something healthcare marketing desperately needs more of, creativity, which I’m super excited to talk about. We’ve done a lot of performance-based stuff on this podcast to date, and I’m excited to get a little bit of creative showing its face in one of these episodes. Our guest is Deborah Castaldo, an independent healthcare consultant at Writing and Creatives.

who took a hospital with a 17 % awareness rate and transformed it to 68 % in just two years through campaigns that broke every healthcare marketing rule. So that’s fun. If you’re tired of safe, boring, clinical healthcare marketing, way overproduced performance marketing, doesn’t move the needle and kind of bums you out, this might be a fun episode and a little inspiring and something different. So Deborah, welcome to the show. If you want to tell everyone a little bit about who you are, what you do, and we’ll get into it after that.

Deborah Castaldo (00:37)
you

Thank

Hi, thanks so much for having me. ⁓ Well, I’ve had a zigzag career that I think most really good marketers have. You know, I started out as a TV news anchor and I went into nuclear power and then utilities. And then I volunteered to help a hospital with one of their galas. And 30 years later, here I am having been an executive ⁓ at several different hospital systems.

Tim Bouchard (01:23)
All So why do you think health care marketing needs more creativity? And if someone isn’t being creative, what do you think it’s costing them right now?

Deborah Castaldo (01:33)
Well, know, I think I think the well, the caveat that I would say is obviously if your hospital is in crisis, ⁓ if if you have a real problem in the community, then you need to also be very serious about the approach. But creativity actually speaks to the human beings that we’re trying to serve and speaks to the human beings in a way that they understand. You know, being in a hospital is like being in a forest. You’re so far in there. Everything is evidence based.

Tim Bouchard (01:46)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (02:00)
Everything is traditional. Everything’s measured, regulated. It’s hard to be creative, but we’re talking to real people in their everyday lives. So what reaches them? It’s not clinical speak. It’s reaching to them in a way that really connects.

Tim Bouchard (02:17)
Yeah. And even if you go smaller for like healthcare practices, it’s like being in a maze too. You’re just, you’re kind of like put in your file spot and then take it from step to step to step to try and efficiently get you in and out as possible because, know, there’s a lot of efficiencies and volume based issues on the practice side too. You’ve developed a reputation for being a really strategic marketer. How did you come about that?

Deborah Castaldo (02:36)
Yeah, that’s right.

You

You know, I’ve always been creative in my personal life. I’ve always been creative. So when I went into hospitals and I was tasked with marketing, I just took that creativity with me. But I realized that it really started breaking some barriers, but it also started getting people’s attention. So that is why I figured out pretty quickly it could be the secret sauce behind marketing, because

The same, if the same thing you’re doing all the time isn’t working, that doesn’t mean it’s right just because it’s what you’ve always done and because what the hospital feels is comfortable and safe.

Tim Bouchard (03:27)
Speaking of that, if you are bringing a more creative idea, maybe not quite like a performance-driven idea or something like that, up to whether it’s marketing, practice, or organization leadership, what’s usually their first reaction when you bring that to the table? And based on that reaction, how do you kind of get them involved and on board with that?

Deborah Castaldo (03:52)
It’s either they start to shut down and you can see their eyes. Yeah, no, I’m not doing this. They’re checking out. Or it’s deer in the headlights like that sounds really dangerous. There are very, very few people. think in my career, I’ve worked with two people in the hospital in the hospital setting who really got it and said, go, just go, just do it. This is great. I love it. We need it. Go do it. And I think it goes back to

People in a hospital are so used to everything being by the book, whatever book that is, right? It might be the joint commission survey, it might be regulations, it might be CMS payments, it might be the community ⁓ health experts and the mayors that are pressing on them. There’s a million different pressures, but we need to speak to the people who need our services.

And that’s where creativity comes in every single time.

Tim Bouchard (04:53)
And you mentioned the clinical speak being a barrier to that too. And we’ve talked actually about that on the pod before too, even my first episode with my creative director Tess, we talked a little bit about patient centric writing and even just flipping the framing, let alone being creative or ⁓ inspiring them to react to something. when you were talking about that glossed over effect and sort of like the checked out effect, I think a little bit of that is

Deborah Castaldo (04:58)
it.

Mm-hmm.

Tim Bouchard (05:23)
when creative is brought to some ⁓ clinical leadership, they don’t quite connect with it because they’re top of their game, knowledgeable, detail oriented, outcome driven professionals in the trade. But, you know, they’re kind of like looking for the medical terminology to grasp onto what you’re bringing to the table. So they’re looking for the clinical, but you’re bringing the creative and you’re pulling, you have to pull them over to the patient side.

Deborah Castaldo (05:33)
Mm-hmm.

That’s right, yeah.

Tim Bouchard (05:53)
What

are you using to help pull them over, I guess, is the question I want to get to.

Deborah Castaldo (05:59)
So, you know, I used to flip the script and I used to say to them, do me a favor. When you go, and I would say this directly to the physicians, when you go home or when you’re in your car, think about what gets your attention. Think about what you look at, what stops you, what you hear. Just think about it and then we’ll meet again and I’ll ask you the same question. What got your attention?

So take yourself out of your clinical practice and think about yourself as a consumer and see what works. And every single time it opened up their understanding of what we were trying to do because they were always thinking as a physician and they never took offense. I just said, you’ve got to just, and back when everybody was reading newspapers,

I would say, bet you, I will bet you breakfast that when you pick up a newspaper, you look at the front page, you look at the back page, and then you open it. Because they would argue with me, why are you buying ads on the back of the first section of the newspaper? Right? I’d say, just give it a test. So, ⁓ you know, and then as we proceeded to using other media and making other media buys, but I would use the same, the same question.

And that’s what really started to open it up.

Tim Bouchard (07:30)
So if you’re able to, without getting too specific and more like the general premise of what you did, you had mentioned in talking with me previously to the pod about that hospital project you had worked on to boost that turnaround for them. Can you talk about like just generally speaking what the challenge was that they faced and types of approaches you took to help move them in the right direction?

Deborah Castaldo (07:50)
Yeah, it was a 125-year hospital, know, typical New England hospital built on a hill and then the neighborhood built up around it, right? The community knew it well, but they always felt like it was their hospital, so they could kick it down the street if they wanted to, but no one else had better kick it down the street. So I was hired and the president said to me, Deb, ⁓ marketing to me is like nailing jello to a tree. I don’t understand it, so just please go do.

Tim Bouchard (08:07)
Mm.

Deborah Castaldo (08:18)
what you do. said, okay, fine.

Tim Bouchard (08:20)
I want to reuse whatever that saying was. I’m logging that because that’s too good. I like it.

Deborah Castaldo (08:23)
So

I walked in, there was no branding, no messaging, no photography, ⁓ no writing standards, there was no control on the collateral. ⁓ I think I said no photography. There was basically a desert in the market. They thought marketing was, the doctor walked in said,

please update this brochure. They said, okay, and they were fine. So I built the department from the ground up, which is just one of my absolute favorite things to do. And the challenge was, simply put, was twofold. Number one, no one inside the hospital knew what marketing was or what its potential was or how it could serve them. So I immediately made all of them my clients. That was first of all. My door was always open. I mean, it was…

a tsunami, but my door was never shut for that purpose. And then externally, no one had spoken to the community. And so here in New England, especially in Massachusetts, we are in this very, very dense, highly competitive healthcare environment with some of the best hospitals in the world are 45 minutes down the road. Right. So the default is, well, I’ll go into Boston. Well,

Tim Bouchard (09:46)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (09:48)
If you don’t speak to people and you don’t educate people and they don’t know what’s going on in your hospital and what you really have and start to really believe it, you don’t have a chance of fighting that. They just make their own decisions.

Tim Bouchard (10:01)
Well, and there’s a reason why the Boston hospitals are so enticing too. It’s a reputation, brand exposure, the stories that they put out about the things that they do, the research they’re involved in, everyone knows. So when you’re thinking, you know, a lot of the good cancer institutes do that too. They’re very good at having their story-based outcomes, their research breakthroughs, or at least research efforts that they’re putting in, their fundraising efforts around those things. They’re always there.

Deborah Castaldo (10:07)
That’s right.

That’s right.

Tim Bouchard (10:29)
And there is something to be said for, you could say it this way, being in the community because you’re present versus just being a thing that exists.

Deborah Castaldo (10:39)
That’s right. But people have to know you and the first time they meet your hospital shouldn’t be on the worst day of their lives. No, who wants to go to the hospital? Nobody wants to go to the hospital. So how do you that’s the first barrier. How do you talk about the hospital in a way that connects with the family that is not they immediately think of death, disease, injury, the emergency department, right? How do you create a

Tim Bouchard (10:48)
⁓ yeah, for real, that’s well put. Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (11:09)
personality for your hospital. That was the first challenge.

Tim Bouchard (11:14)
Yeah, and you also had mentioned that the reputation side even about how people had viewed the hospital. you know, there’s things like now there’s public reviews out there. There’s things like health grades and even physician based feedback systems, ⁓ even internally, their operations is very much integrating now patient feedback, not just at the end, but along the process to ⁓ did that come into play at all as part of this?

Deborah Castaldo (11:24)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

yeah, I moved into town and my neighbor came to see me and said, whatever you do, don’t go to that hospital because I wouldn’t take my dog there. And then later I found out she was the head of the nurses union. I’m like, are you kidding me? But that spoke to the state of the morale inside the hospital, right? They didn’t buy into the premise or the mission of the hospital because no one told them what it was. There was no culture.

Tim Bouchard (11:52)
⁓ no.

Deborah Castaldo (12:13)
There was no communicating with the employees. It had all just gone silent. So I was part of the turnaround team that rebuilt that culture. And they were hemorrhaging, just hemorrhaging cats. So the first year we made $53,000 and we were really excited because we weren’t in the red anymore. Yeah. Right.

Tim Bouchard (12:37)
Nice. What a great first step. So

you’ve put in all this foundational work. You’ve started building up the brand foundation. You’re starting to address things like reputation and being part of the community, all the things that are starting to get implemented through there. ⁓ What are there ways, whereas I’m assuming there was campaign work involved with this too, and actually purposefully getting in front of people and trying to deliver that message too. How did that side of this go?

Deborah Castaldo (13:06)
So every day I asked myself, what have I done today to connect with the community? Right. So we did everything. put, so I first started thinking about it this way. Where are people’s eyes during the day? Where are they looking? Are they sitting at the softball field or the little league field and they’re looking at the fence? Are they sitting in a coffee shop and they’re looking at the bulletin board? Are they in their cars?

Where are their eyes? Because I need to be in every single one of those places. Then one day I was looking at my dog and I said, ⁓ every time I pet my dog, feed my dog, I’m looking at their neck and their collar. So I put the hospital name on dog tags, gave it to every groomer in town. I created ⁓ campaigns that involved the community businesses. I created these crazy events like

The day before Thanksgiving, had a high, I read about a high heel dash that took place in Maine. We had a high, a 50 yard high heel dash with men and women wearing high heels. I don’t know where the guys found the high heels, but they had these stacked red shoes. And, and we got Boston TV coverage. Boston never left the city, right? But we were lucky. It was a slow news day. It was a crazy event. We had trophies. We had everything.

Tim Bouchard (14:13)
haha

Deborah Castaldo (14:26)
But the whole purpose of that was to call attention to heart disease. There was always a strategy behind it. One of the biggest successes we had was I created this event called Circle of Fire for Women of Menopause because, you know, the hot flashes. So we had these foam hats like you see at the Statue of Liberty, except they were flames. We had drumming groups that came ⁓ because drumming goes to your brain stem is very calming.

Tim Bouchard (14:43)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (14:55)
But that was the carrot. I used to tell the board, look, you’re not going to get as many people in the room by saying, come talk about heart disease as you are with, talk, come make a healthy barbecue sauce with us. Come sit in a circle and listen to a drumming group and then you get the speaker in there. Once you fill the room, you can tell them what you need to tell them.

Tim Bouchard (15:20)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (15:24)
Right? So that’s what I mean by you turn it on its head. How do we attract them with something that in its essence promotes health, but is entertaining, something you want to leave your house for, and then we’ll educate you once we get you in the room.

Tim Bouchard (15:42)
And a lot of that education,

well, it’s twofold. On the hook, you need to understand who the patient is, who the audience is, and what gravitates with them. That helps feed the creative side of what you’re doing. And then even on the education side and the value prop side, you have to understand what their one to three top pain points are for even approaching a practice or a hospital about whatever it is, condition, whatever. ⁓

Deborah Castaldo (15:51)
That’s right. That’s right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tim Bouchard (16:10)
how have you dug further into that side so you can marry the two things and also make it valuable to do that creative outreach and bring them in.

Deborah Castaldo (16:17)
So the second hospital system I was with, they had two campuses ⁓ and they were really competing with Boston. And yet we knew that we had a lot of physicians that were Ivy League trained ⁓ and we knew that we had some of the same equipment as Boston. But how do you make a patient actually believe

that you have a physician that’s as well-trained as the Boston physicians. Because on the face of it, that makes no sense. Like if the doctor’s really good, why aren’t they in Boston? So the barrier is that belief, right? That it just defies reality that they’re not at a Boston academic teaching center. So I started digging it. said, every single time we get a new doctor,

please send me where they were born. That’s the first thing I want to know. And sure enough, these Ivy League-trained physicians, Harvard-trained, know, fellowship-trained physicians, were born in the Merrimack Valley, where the hospital was located. So I developed a campaign with the headline, Guess Who Came Home to Practice. So now,

Tim Bouchard (17:34)
Mmm.

Deborah Castaldo (17:41)
The choice was the physicians. Yes, they could have gone to Boston, but they wanted to come home to practice and bring their expertise home to where they grew up. And the copy supported that. And we did special photography, white background, focused on the provider. We had physical therapists in their hockey gear. One was an equestrian. She was in her equestrian gear. So we made them

believable human beings and we fill their practice.

Tim Bouchard (18:15)
And that also probably helps too, because they are looking locally for the solution then, and that also helps them from a treatment standpoint of, I’m going to go into this, I can do this close by. I don’t have to go to the big city a state away. And that even helps just from them getting the support that they need.

Deborah Castaldo (18:16)
And that’s awesome.

That’s right. That’s right. ⁓

And you see the important, the really important point here from a standpoint of creativity is that if the ad campaign said, Dr. Smith is a Harvard graduate and has opened up her practice, they’re like, yeah, okay, whatever. Why is she here? She probably graduated at the bottom of her class. Why is she here? Getting, addressing that very specific laser point of a barrier was the whole point.

Tim Bouchard (18:53)
Yeah.

Deborah Castaldo (19:06)
and to a skin, but I had to sell it inside. had to present it, give the reasoning, give the strategy behind it. And every time I went to the psychology of it, I could see it. It would dawn on them. ⁓ I get it.

Tim Bouchard (19:25)
So this is good to you from the leadership side, then you’re starting to put everything together. You’ve got the creative hook angle. You started to address pain points. You have ways of flipping the script from just pushing the hospital system to talking and making connections with providers to the audience. How are you relaying what that’s doing for the hospital or practice back to the leadership team? So they understand the impact of that creative and patient centric approach.

Deborah Castaldo (19:53)
Monthly presentations. What a pain in the neck. What a pain in the neck. God, every month I had to put that report together, but I reported directly to the board of directors every month. And that was because the president made that possible because it was important to him. Actually, that was at both hospital systems. I reported directly to the board of directors. I was part of the senior team.

Tim Bouchard (19:55)
Hmm. I got beaded into him.

Mm.

Deborah Castaldo (20:22)
And I reported every single week, right, what we were doing, but I always was able to educate them on the strategy and the results. And sometimes it didn’t work. know, things don’t always work. Sometimes things aren’t measurable, but they go to image. And when you’re trying to turn around the reputation of a hospital, then you have to educate people about this is image.

not going to be able to measure it, this we can measure, right? Your patient panel we can measure. We can do a survey in two years to ⁓ measure top of mind awareness, right? But it’s all part of being the inside expert and being an educator to the administration, the staff, the housekeepers, the department directors. This is what marketing does.

This is what we can do for you. This is why we are an expert and we’re not just sitting here playing with pictures.

Tim Bouchard (21:24)
And to that point, did that change the way that they interacted with you afterwards? Did you find it easier to get new ideas out there or start new initiatives?

Deborah Castaldo (21:34)
For the most part, yeah. I mean, there were some people, you know, I worked for one president who would always say, I really think you’re gilding the Lily. You know, I really don’t, I don’t buy this. But the statistics were in front of her. I think she was pushing my buttons because every time there was a new physician, guess who they invited to the table to be part of the business plan development? Marketing, right? So whatever.

Tim Bouchard (21:43)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (22:01)
I just continued to position myself as an expert internally that nothing was going to change her mind except that we kept filling patient panels.

Tim Bouchard (22:12)
So let’s say someone is still listening to this episode and they’re like, yeah, I need this. I’m trying to push this. I’m having trouble with it. If you could point them to one thing maybe that their healthcare organization that they’re assisting with marketing creative, whatever it is that their role is, ⁓ they’re looking for something they’re struggling with so they can take it to leadership. Where should they start to look to see if they might have?

a connection or creativity problem with their core audience.

Deborah Castaldo (22:44)
Well, I would look at something that is measurable. I would look at a patient panel for a physician and I would choose a physician that is really hungry because then you’re not putting yourself at risk. You’ve got to build your insight, your internal reputation before you can. This is risky stuff, right? Being creative is risky and you can’t take it personally and you have to be able to present 10 ideas and they shoot them down and you’re like, okay, well, there’s more where that came from. But I would choose

a physician that wants to build a panel or a service line that is, that wants to build their volume. And then I would present the audience. I would present the barrier, but find the real barrier. What’s the real barrier? Do you not have parking? Do you have a house across the street that screams at everyone who gets what? Don’t take what, what the

Tim Bouchard (23:36)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (23:44)
No insult to the physicians, but don’t take what they’re saying as the barrier. Talk to their staff. Talk to the person who answers the phone. Talk to the housekeeper, the security people. Find the real barrier and then come up with the creative solution and then go to the physician or the service line director and say, okay, here’s what’s really going on. And this is how we’re going to address it. And we want to try it.

Tim Bouchard (24:11)
I like that. I like that. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you wanted to make sure you dropped into the conversation before we wrapped up?

Deborah Castaldo (24:11)
I like that.

I think just an example of the really one of the most effective campaigns and that was ⁓ we needed to build mammography volume. We went from three analog to two digital. ⁓ you know, every, but there’s mammography campaigns every single October now. It’s like, this is going to be really challenging. But the barrier that we found, which we knew was time. So we went to store owners and said, okay,

Tim Bouchard (24:38)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (24:48)
The department director at radiology has timed it. It is literally 15 minutes from the time you enter the hospital until the time you leave. What can you do for a customer in 15 minutes? And then we did an ad campaign in the time Meg Silicor can brew you a cup of tea. You could be having a mammogram. So we, we removed the barrier. Like you can’t argue with that. And we tripled, we tripled the mammography volume on fewer machines. So.

Tim Bouchard (25:11)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah Castaldo (25:17)
Find the real reason. Dana Farber has the best slogan I’ve ever heard in my life. You may have cancer, but what cancer doesn’t know is you have us. That says everything. So just find the barrier and then try a creative approach and see what happens.

Tim Bouchard (25:32)
Mm.

Cool, I’m sure someone’s getting inspired by this now. why don’t, yeah, it’s very good stories, very good insights on the history of how you’ve done a lot of these challenges, gotten over the hump and gotten results too. So thanks for sharing all of that creative healthcare marketing ⁓ voodoo that you’ve been doing. Why don’t you also remind people where they can find out more about you?

Deborah Castaldo (25:48)
Hahaha!

Thank you.

⁓ I’m on LinkedIn, Debra Castaldo. ⁓ You can email me at dbkiara, which is like the girl’s first name, c-h-i-a-r-a at outlook.com. ⁓ And we can talk.

Tim Bouchard (26:26)
Great. Listeners, if you want to break through the noise with creative strategies that actually resonate with patients from a patient centric way, check out our patient pipeline blueprint session offer. It’s a workshop to uncover how you can attract new patients and convert more inquiries into appointments for your practice. Learn more luminous dot agency slash blueprint. And lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to health care marketing edge on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Deborah, thank you. I’ll see everyone else on the next episode.