How to Elevate Your Content Marketing to Thought Leadership Marketing

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Stewart Gandolf

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of our podcast today. Today, I am glad to introduce Kate Warnock. She is a friend of a friend and a deep experience in healthcare, and our mutual friend said, ‘Oh, you just have to talk to Kate. You have to talk to Kate!’ So okay, great. So, I had a pre-interview with Kate and was impressed with what she had to say. And I invited her to join us on the podcast.

Currently, a senior director of Communications and brand strategy for Forcura. Previous experience includes Blue Cross Blue Shield and lots of other things. First of all, welcome, Kate.

Kate Warnock
Thank you so much, Stuart. I'm thrilled to be here.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm happy to have you, too. I love that background. It looks real.

Kate Warnock
This is part of our brand strategy is everyone wants to work for Forcura, because it looks like this is this is like our home. So.

Stewart Gandolf
So this little background is real, and it's like it's become a thing. But it's like, Oh, like, I built this office a while back. and I want it to be like an artist loft in a multi-purpose room, and it's worked out pretty well.

So, anyway. But First of all. I introduced you very briefly. I'd love you to just tell us a little bit about your background, and you know, why does healthcare marketing even interest you?

Kate Warnock
Well, Stewart, thank you. Thank you again, and shout out to Victoria, who's the reason why you and I met. That's our mutual friend and, boy she taught me a lot back in the days that we were working together. So funny enough, I have been in the health industry, my entire career. The health industry is kind of something that my family has been, and my father was a healthcare executive, and after I graduated college foolishly thought I was going to go on and become an academic and go on to graduate school, and, you know, sit in the ivory tower, and my parents were like, ‘Maybe before you commit 7 years of your life, maybe work for a while and see how it feels.’ And so yeah, my dad actually got me my first job, and I was working at Blue Cross Blue Shield back in the day on the marketing team. And it was just such an immersive experience for me. I really came up through the demand gen side, Stuart, back in the day.

I mean, I'm old enough that this was back in the day of like sending out. You know, FSI, freestanding inserts and newspapers direct mail kits back when kits had to be versioned and everything. So really, that was that was my, you know, cut my teeth on, you know, just the classic demand generation, and then took a long hiatus, Stewart, to raise our 2 kids and got back in the game right when social media was becoming a thing for the corporate world. So that's what I re-entered into.

Also, back at Blue Cross and you know really that I've become really passionate, Stewart. Honestly, you'll see on my LinkedIn profile that I say that I'm an advocate for a better healthcare system in the United States, because I feel like I've seen a 360 of you know the payer side, I'm now on the technology side Forcura as a healthcare technology company and you know, really understand very well what needs to work. What needs to be, you know, fixed, and I feel like I can contribute to that in my day to day job. So that's why I'm passionate about this field.

Stewart Gandolf
That's great. I noticed you also have a very worthy nonprofit that you're on board with, and so that's great, too.

Kate Warnock
Yes, thank you.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, it's funny, like, I find that.

I stumbled into healthcare marketing years ago. And but today, what's fun is a lot of people are drawn to work with our team, at least because they want to do something. They don't want to really be dealing with blood and bandages, but they want to do something that helps healthcare get better. And so, it becomes a passion for a lot of people which is great.

So today we talked about. And when we had our sort of pre-interview we talked about thought leadership and how to build that. And you know the phrase that you like is “Thought Healthcare, Thought Leadership Marketing” before we get into all that. Just help us understand, like you know what that means. And also help, you know, clarify for the post-acute sector, like, you know, kind of what you're doing these days, because those are some terms we're gonna use a lot. I wanna make sure that people are on the same page with you.

Kate Warnock
Sure that sounds great. So yeah, so I'll start first with, you know, what end of the care continuum for cura operates in, and this was really new to me when I joined the company back in 2019. So, I had been on the payer side. So, everyone's familiar with health insurance where I moved to with Forcura. Our clients were B2B. We are not patient facing. We're B2B, and our clients are in the post-acute care sector. So that means, if you think of the acute side is where you receive your hospital care, you know surgery, that sort of thing. That's the acute side of health care and so much of the marketing spend is in that sector, because that's where so much of the spend is in healthcare, the predominantly on the acute side of care. Post-acute care, that's where patients go when they are discharged to typically from a hospital. They are going to go into a post-acute setting if they need additional follow up care. So that might be a skilled nursing facility, nursing homes, that's part of the post-acute care sector, but so, too, is your home. You might receive home based care, home health care. So, all of Forcura’s clients are in this post-acute sector up until recently, I'll say.

And so again, that's care that's received after you've been discharged from receiving another kind of care.

Stewart Gandolf
Very good. And so, yeah, so the if people often you know the industry term is sniffs or skilled nursing facilities, and those are nursing homes, and there's home care and home health which are different a little bit.

Kate Warnock
Absolutely, and then Hospice would also qualify, as you know, as post-acute and even rehabilitative care services. So again, something that is not going to be delivered within a hospital setting, typically is going to be your post-acute setting. So, the other question, though, Stewart that you asked me was, what about thought leadership.

Stewart Gandolf
Yep.

Kate Warnock
You know, and kind of unpack that because that's so much of our conversation today. So thought leadership marketing is kind of content marketing, honestly. And if you think about the sales funnel you want to start with, you know you think of the conventional brand awareness, you know, and then you go down the sales funnel and you start to qualify your leads, and you get into that demand gen portion of marketing. So thought leadership really exists to expand that top of the funnel. It's how is it that you can cast that net wider by producing content that positions your business, your organization, as the expert in that field. So as thought leaders around a particular topic. So, what’s really fun about this portion of marketing to me, you're not necessarily focused on selling the features of your product where you know it's very specific to demand gen, you really are trying to, you know, focus on the values and benefits of what you're selling thought leadership kind of levels up. What's important in the industry that you're selling to.

So, whether that's a product services? What have you. Your clients have concerns that are kind of broader. If you think about that 36,000 level foot. That's where you want to start positioning your brand, make that your brand become known, and start to build that trust in the value that you can provide, because you're participating in conversations that are important to your clients. So that's thought leadership to me.

Stewart Gandolf
Great. It's so. It's so funny. So, I have to throw in 2 cents, because we're part of the reason why I enjoyed talking the 1st time is that we have so much in common. So, it's funny. I just got off the phone seconds before your call with an association that's looking to build their footprint. And you would think associations don't have competitors. They do, and they have such a great story. And we talked about this, the thought leadership part because it's like you don't really have to go to them so like. What? Why, what is the there, there?

And you know, like we as a company with our company, our agency, you know, we started content marketing before that term was common we were doing. We had a blog the first day we were doing eBooks and white papers, and.

Kate Warnock
Yep.

Stewart Gandolf
We used to do conference calls. This is before the webinar thing was very common. And we built our company on this. So, I love this stuff, and we are in fact on a podcast or something about that. So, I would just say that the idea of content, though and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts about the thought leadership.

But you know, as opposed to content marketing, because I feel like so many people just do content marketing because they feel like it's something they're supposed to do. But they're not really accomplishing stuff. They're just doing stuff. They're doing tactics. What are your thoughts there?

Kate Warnock
Right? So, I think the difference might be. you know, content marketing, especially with our AI tools. Right? Generative AI, that you can now prompt. Whatever tool you're using, ChatGPT, HubSpot, whatever. They all have an AI integration. Now you can prompt them with the topic, and it spit something out. And people feel like that's good enough, and they're going to publish it. And that counts as content marketing.

To me, thought leadership. The distinction is, you have a perspective on a particular topic, and you bring with that perspective expertise that you can weigh in on something you can provide a you know, value to your client that it's something that if I was going to search for. it's going to help me do my job better. That to me is thought leadership where I can read something. I get something from it, and it makes me, you know, more informed. It gives me, perhaps, new resources to look at. It's something that is. Again, it's the utility of the content that I'm putting out there. So again, content marketing could be just a generic. Whatever thought leadership you really have to earn it. And so, I think that's where you know, with your organization I’m sure, you really have to find the right perspective. So, what are the conversations you want to join? What is it that's going to advance your industry position because you really can back it up with people that when you put them on a stage, you feature them in a podcast you're going to have them quoted in a white paper.

It really resonates and it makes sense, and you know there's intelligence behind it. So, I think that's why it appeals to me. As I said, where I thought I was going was, so I was going to be an academic. So, I was really used to doing research. So, you kind of know the difference when you read something that's really well crafted, really thought through versus something that you could kind of tell someone rushed out the door and it was. It's just one of dozens of something that's going to be produced that week. There's a difference in the value and in the integrity of that piece.

Stewart Gandolf
So just a couple of quick thoughts I have to jump in. The one is in the call I just had. I referred to a moment ago I explained to I, my prospective client, that in healthcare it's there's three things that really are going to matter to get you to be successful, and particularly if you're working with physicians or other professionals in the field.

It's credibility, credibility, and credibility, you know. I guess it's such an important thing, and I feel like. you know, like from the very beginning in marketing. you know, the quality of marketing varies from like, you know, sadly laughable to like really good. And there's no license required. So, I think content. And raising the bar from just content mere content to thought. Leadership is a huge difference, right? And thought leadership, if you have, it actually adds value to your organization. I mean it. Actually, the numeric. And I know that because people tell us about our agency, right? We've done this for a long time. and it's but it takes time to build. It takes insight. It takes intelligence so like the you know, like one of the things that you know we talked about before is, if you're working in an organization you're trying to sell your leadership on this.

You know, they may want, demand generation or you know, other forms of marketing like, what? How is the content? Like sort of the pros and cons of doing the thought leadership, marketing versus traditional sort of demand generation. And why should we put budget toward this long-term thing when we could just, you know, do a pay per click campaign? Theoretically.

Kate Warnock
Yeah, so we have a saying, in our organization and our VP of Marketing would tell you this—Brand Drives Demand.

So, what you just said? It's credibility and integrity in the market. Why am I going to buy something from you? If I don't feel like you're best in class, that you're going to help my business, you know, not just sell me something. You're going to continue a relationship. So, if you start with that thought, leadership perspective. It's not meant to be siloed from demand.

Honestly, they should flow together. And so, funny enough, we just had our planning meeting to stand up our campaigns for the first half of 2025, and we have a really nice, very simple template of you know. What's the product that we're going to focus on, you know, or what feature? Who's our market and what's our thought leadership component? And what's our demand gen component? And honestly, you can flow right down.

So again, if you think about that funnel you want to invest in your brand because you're obviously trying to grow your market right? You want to share. You increase your share of voice in the market. You want to have new prospects pulled in, and so it can be less expensive to publish something that's going to bring in an influx of leads for your organization. But it was a thought leadership piece, right? You know, it's something that's then going to fill your funnel for ongoing nurture campaigns that then turn into. You know those sales opportunities. So, in our organization, they're not meant to be a separate thing. They are funded the same way because they're really seen as parts to a whole.

Ultimately, thought leadership. Should you're in business to keep your business growing, and you know, have help it its targets. That's a thought leadership should do.

Stewart Gandolf
So, I agree wholeheartedly, and one of the things that like for our own agency and for our clients too, like we'll create content it'll be. It has its first life, for example, on LinkedIn and emails and all that.

Then the next life is on through SEO, that it grows over time. But even there it's not done, because then it's credibility on the website to new visitors. And then after that, our salespeople actually use that same content for credibility. So, it's like right before they even know that we exist. But even if the sales process, if it's good content, we use it all the time, and almost every meeting I have with a prospective new client and many with existing clients like, oh, I have something on this. Let me send this over to you right now in the chat. That is such a credibility, builder, and it's also just easier for us. So, for example, yesterday we were talking to somebody who has an app they want to roll out to cardiologists like, well, here's my webinar on B2B marketing to doctors. This will be really helpful for you. So, it's like that's, you know, from us, not so much from a sales standpoint. It saves time for me to be able to do and have that kind of stuff on the shelf. And it's also the credibility factor. I do want to go back to something you said earlier, because I'm big on metaphors as you get to know me, Kate. So like in the music industry, you know, it used to be that—I got this from Rob Biagi. He's a music guy on YouTube. But you know, in the old days, the classic old days. You know it used to be really hard to put together an album and then put together music, and it required absolute perfection, and musicians and recording studios, and all that. It was also difficult to consume music. You had to go buy the album and take it out and unwrap it. It was like a thing. Now, it's like, it's really easy to create music. And it's really easy to buy music. So, while that's great, it's something's been lost along the way. And with content. I think it's the same thing you just mentioned, like it's you know, going from really thoughtful content to just stuff and like what happens is, things change. So, for example you know, like, for our own newsletter, for example, our engagement rate, compared to what it was 10 years ago, is different, because there's just so much out there, right? So, it really has to be strong content, in my opinion. So how did you recommend? How do you guys focus on trying to stand out with just a glut, because anybody you know anybody can call himself a marketer. Anybody can go to ChatGPT and come up with an article.

Kate Warnock
So what is it? I think the easiest thing for anybody who's listening to this, and they're figuring out how would I get started.

Look at your IP, right? What is? What is it that your company is really known for? What do you do exceptionally well? And the funny thing is with thought leadership. It doesn't always have to be related to selling your product. It could be. You have a phenomenal engineering team, and you know, they've got a relationship with a 3rd party vendor that they use. You know, it's a really critical relationship. They're very high, you know, highly functioning users of this software sort of thing. You might actually want to look at your engineering team, or you know the head of engineering and suggest that you know, they have a case study, you know, position, your expert user for this 3rd party tool, especially if they're really well regarded in the industry. If they might have a speaking opportunity, you know, if they have user conferences or that sort of thing. So, you can really look at what is it the intellectual property that you're really known for, what are the relationships that are super strong, that are really, you know, again, high value to your organization. But you also think you know, an outside vendor that has that relationship with you would really want to promote that, too, to help them make new sales. So, really thought leadership doesn't have to be limited to your actual product.

It's the most—for funding that's going to be the most obvious direction, right? That you want to focus on something that's obviously going to generate sales and revenue for your organization. I'm suggesting, though, that to be perceived as experts in time, also look to your internal experts and see in their field. How can you position them? So, if they're active on LinkedIn, that all rolls back to your brand that all, then, is that perception of an organization. I know if I'm going to be working with a new vendor, the 1st thing I do is, I go to LinkedIn, and I looked up the executives. Where you know, where do they work for you know? How long have they been in the industry, are they, you know. Are they publishing something? Are they being cited? Articles? So, you know, again encouraging your leaders to have a pretty active social presence. It's only gonna benefit your brand. It's gonna obviously be good for your individuals. But it's gonna roll back to your organization, too.

Stewart Gandolf
That's a great point that's relatively new, like the we saw in the in the hospital market. You know, you have all these doctors running around. Somebody might actually want to talk to them and see you know how they can work, but also, like you mentioned on the nonprofit side. The SaaS businesses that we work with the Telehealth like all of these things. And you're right. It's just a different thing. How do

you know. Another way to stand out, I would assume from your standpoint, would be sort of having that point of view like, how do you get that out of people, not “just the facts, ma'am”, but like the point of view or the personality. And is that something you find is an important factor to bring things to life.

Kate Warnock
Very much, because what we're really getting to I think Stuart, is that you're looking for something that you can tell. It's not a copycat, right? It's something that's really, truly unique to your organization. And that's what's gonna cut through. Right? I think that that really becomes obvious. When there is a perspective. Or there is—another way that you could think about it. How is it that I can tell a narrative through thought leadership that, I know my end goal is that I want someone to arrive at what my product is, or my company is, or my executive. Where do I start? And how do I tell a narrative that concludes with my organization? So, think of it as working backwards from what you do. So, a great example of this in our industry or post-acute industry.

We see generative AI is, you know, not everyone ran towards it in in our, you know, and I'm sure that that's not. I'm familiar to you, too Stewart, some people, you know it. It launched on the scene November of 2022. It blew up. Everybody's like, Oh, my G*d! And you see that typical, you know, swirl of what does this mean for me? You know. What does this mean? I'm going to be out of a job, is it going to help boost my productivity or can I trust the output that I'm getting from gen AI?

So Forcura, we ran towards this technology in a very careful way. We have experts in house that actually have master's degree in artificial intelligence. I mean, we're very well positioned to look at this technology and say, what's a safe way forward to actually help solve problems for our clients. And so, we also partnered with AWS, you know, a giant in the field. And we ultimately, you know, got a product to market in just about 6 months’ time using gen AI. Well, some of our clients were ready to jump right into it. Others were like, “I don't know that I can trust this, you know it's gen AI, it's too soon, it's too early” sort of thing. So, what we decided we would do, we tackled this on many fronts. We worked with one of our industry trade media outlets to create a survey where we surveyed the market and said, ‘What are your plans to invest in gen AI?’ ‘Are you already doing it?’ ‘Are you going to be doing it soon?’ ‘Are you taking a wait and see, or are you saying it's never going to be for me?’ and if you're looking to invest in it, ‘Where are you looking to apply it?’

You know how? ‘What problems are you trying to solve with it?’ And if you're not investing in it, ‘What would help overcome those barriers? What, what are the concerns? And how would it? How could you know what would need to happen for you to become a little bit more open to the thought of using this technology?’ We literally packaged this into an eBook, and not only did we get those thoughts, we also then correlated it back to what percentage of your business is reimbursed by Medicare Advantage in our sector, Medicare Advantage does not pay our providers very well. It actually pays far below your traditional Medicare reimbursement. And so how does that lever—If most of my business is being reimbursed by Medicare advantage—does that make me more likely to invest in this tech, or less likely to invest in this tech because we had a feeling there was a relationship between the two. We also asked, What's the size of your organization? And again, in our sector size correlates to patient census.

So how many patients are you taking care of on an average day? You know the larger ones are going to be over 800 patients, the smaller ones are much less than that. So again, looking for the opportunities of what's a narrative that we can tell around a topic that's super critical to our sector that I know ultimately is going to end them at Forcura’s doorstep. So, we just packaged, you know, produced this report. We're super excited. We're getting all sorts of leads off it, but we're also going to have an in-house webinar where I have our CEO and two of our clients are going to be talking about the results and giving color commentary. And then we also have a speaking opportunity for our CEO. At this media outlet has a conference in December. And he's going to be on the panel talking about these results. So, I mean, we're getting lots and lots and lots of different ways to talk about generative AI in a way that shows our authority gives us an opportunity to say we totally understand the market conditions that might make you run towards it or hold back from it. And here's how we're deploying it.

So, it's giving us, you know, this foundation. This, you know, this, this you know, kind of irrefutable proof that we really know what we're talking about. And, by the way, aren't you curious about where you stand compared to your peers. Is your peer down the street running towards gen AI or are they holding back? Is it going to give them an advantage. Is it going to give me an advantage to wait and see? So, I think it's just thinking about topics, Stewart, that you know there is curiosity from your end users and figuring out what's the right way for me to take what we're doing and position it in a way that's going to make someone feel like, okay, these folks are definitely the authority.

Stewart Gandolf
I love it, and that's, I think the other thing you didn't mention there is. You're leveraging one idea across multiple channels, which is great.

Kate Warnock
Yes, absolutely.

Stewart Gandolf
And it's inspiring to me, because, you know, I do this too. But it's like as we're talking. It reminds me if I did not lately, you know. My, so it's like, it's, that's what's stimulating about podcasts because, it's like, yeah, that's like, okay, that's we do that. But I haven't done that for a while. I'm not focused on it. So, I love it. That's fantastic.

Kate Warnock
Stewart, I have one more thing to share! So, you know, as again, part of this, you know. Is there anything more buzzworthy than gen AI. I don't care what vertical you're in, your industry is talking about it. So, I mentioned that we've got these internal experts that have all of these degrees on social media, we created the AI authority campaign. So, on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook, we're not active on X, you are going to see whiteboard sessions with our Chief Technology Officer, our Head of Data Science, our Head Data Engineer. You're, gonna you know, breaking down concepts in a way that anybody can understand. We have another series where it's called Elevator Rapid Fire, where, within the span of going from the 1st floor to the 4th floor, we're asking our expert. What does this mean? And they're giving you the little bite size response, and away you go. So, it's again. It's a way just to say we have the experts that if you have trepidation around using this new technology, here's why you can trust us to do right with our application of gen AI for you, because we've got these people that are absolutely leaders in the field.

Stewart Gandolf
That's awesome. That's an awesome example. And I know we're talking our prep. We talked about some examples. Another thing you'd mentioned was Forcura Connect Summits. And so, I'm curious.

Kate Warnock
Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf
That's also a fun topic. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Kate Warnock
So back in the day, pre-COVID, if we can think of those days, a lot of our lead generation was at industry events, there were state shows. There were, you know, big association shows everything, you know, and most of our sales pipeline was generated at these conferences, COVID comes and—poof!—that's all gone. What are we going to do? This is when we really started to turn to this content marketing platform and think more intelligently around. How can we create these relationships with people? Because we're very, very good, meet any of our sales folks or product anybody? We're very personable people here at Forcura. How is it that we can build these relationships and position ourselves in our industry again as a leader and someone that you want to partner with for your technology. So, gosh! I think it was June of 2020, and our she our Chief Operating Officer who was a Marketing by training, Annie Erstling, looked at marketing team and said, I think we need to have an industry conference that we need to host, how fast can we put it together? And in less than 2 months we stood up our 1st ever virtual conference, called the Forcura Connect Summit, and it was one day we did hire an outside agency to help us with, you know, kind of planning and everything. But I was the one it was, it came to me to detail out what was every single session going to be?

What were the speakers that we were going to host? And so, we leaned really heavily, Stewart on, you know, pulling in, we also work, we, our technology integrates with other technology. So, we pulled in those tech partners to help us fill out this schedule. So, that was a great relationship building opportunity. We gave them stage time and really let them promote their own expertise. We also sourced some folks that I had worked with, you know, in my pre-Forcura days, so brought them in to again to give that high level perspective on. Here's what's happening in the health industry, and what better time to talk about it than in the middle of COVID? So, we did this. The summit. We did it again the next year, but we decided instead of one day, we would break it across a few days. And so, yeah, so I think it really gave us an opportunity to really own ‘soup to nuts’ everything that was happening with this event. So, versus, you know, sponsoring an event where you're a speaker, and you're just one of, you know, 100 panels. We really got to own this industry conference, and I would say it was very successful.

We didn't have huge numbers, I'll be honest with you know, with people who attended. But what it did do was prove that we had a lot to say. We said it very intelligently, and then we use that content to repackage into your blogs, into, you know, more webinars that we could kind of follow up on these themes and revisit them the next year and bring in different perspectives around it. So again, for putting together that brand voice and things that we have opinions on. It was a really nice thread over several years. To give us that narrative.

Stewart Gandolf
You know it's funny because I love again the leveraging, the content, the I'm curious. Did you still do it, or did you? Was that a one-time thing during COVID like, have you thought about.

Kate Warnock
We did it. So, we did it a couple more times, and we I think it became.

I think, honestly, with Covid. So many people took to webinars that we, I think we all burned out. I mean that we were all on Zoom all the time, and it just became, it lost its luster. And when we went back to having events in person honestly, there is no, there's nothing like standing across from someone in real life instead of having to talk over a screen.

So, what we did, instead of having these summits, which was just kind of a one-time. One-annual thing, we now have quarterly events, and we just had it's just a webinar. But again, I own these as far as programming, and each quarter, we have a thought leadership webinar, which we call it Forcura Connect Event and the topics, are whatever is again relevant thinking about the larger marketing calendar. What's the focus on the product? What audience are we talking to? What's our demand gen goal? It fits in with all of those other things. So again, this this quarter, it's going to be our CEO and two of our clients talking about gen AI.

Stewart Gandolf
Great, that's fantastic. Sure. Send me some links of the things we're talking about today, the survey or the report. And this is fun for our readers slash listeners to be able to source that. So, let's talk a little bit about the ROI, and measuring success like is, you know direct measures and indirect measures. How do you guys challenge?

Kate Warnock
Yeah, so we're lucky enough. In that everything that we do. We have a central repository for all of our marketing activity. It's where we also host our website. And so, everything is trackable. We use HubSpot. So HubSpot, you know, is our web hosting. And it's also our CRM, so any sort of registration for a webinar, I'm able to see. How does that influence a deal down the line?

You know? What kind of pipeline does it drive, and ultimately, how many sales, because everything is tracked through this one platform. So, there's—we're so fortunate—I've been in other business environments where you don't have that easy connection of you know your thought leadership to the ultimate sale. Here at Forcura, we do, so, you know, but it's also, you know your kind of event specific metrics. Obviously, you want to look at the number of registrations you want to see the number of people that actually attended live. You want to see what your click through rate is for content and post, you know, and hopefully, again, anybody who's really on their ball. You're monitoring those individuals, and you're kind of lead scoring them so that you can then direct your marketing activity appropriately.

You know. So, what's the right offer. What's the right cadence, that sort of thing? So, if you think about thought leadership from that perspective, you really should be driving that sales pipeline. So, however, in your organization that looks, that's the easiest way to think of it.

Stewart Gandolf
So let's talk about you mentioned HubSpot, which we also use. And we're actually HubSpot partners. So, we use it for ourselves and for clients.

Kate Warnock
Nice.

Stewart Gandolf
But the question I have is, because this is critical, like your sales team. How do they embrace it? Do you have it all set up? Are they getting alerts? Are they aggressively going into the platform like, how do you use it with sales? Is it a kind of an afterthought? Or is it integral to their sort of everyday job?

Kate Warnock
Every single thing that that our sales team does is managed through HubSpot. Same thing with our relationship management team. So, not only is it used before the sale. It's used after the sale. So, for us, it's incredibly important because we're subscription based. We want to maintain relationships over time with our clients. So, it's as important—it's even more important, really—to give our clients high value content which could include this thought leadership content. They want to know, our clients want to know, what's happening with gen AI. So, we everything, all of our touch points are managed through HubSpot. And I would say we are super users of that platform. Every list gets loaded there. All of our intelligence is loaded there. We manage, you know, we write, you know, if there's a touch point with our relationship manager team, they're capturing notes there so that anybody who pulls up that profile, maybe this is also a client that we're actively trying to upsell our sales team wants to see what's the most recent contact. What's the temperature of this client? Are we in the green status? Is everything going well? Before they reach out to them for sales opportunity? So, everything is managed through HubSpot at Forcura.

Stewart Gandolf
So that's great, you know, for those of you that may not be as familiar with HubSpot. The, you know, HubSpot is, you know, it's hard evolved to become a marketing automation platform, but it has a CRM. And we, too, use it as our CRM. We don't use it as just the marketing automation. We used to have Salesforce. I think Salesforce for like really big enterprise businesses, maybe, but for us, for sure, it was overkill like everything you wanted to do was hard and expensive, and within a consultant, whereas HubSpot has an 888 HubSpot number call, and they answer it. They actually help you.

Kate Warnock
Right, right.

Stewart Gandolf
So. But I think it's also interesting is you're doing something we haven't done, which we haven't brought it to the back end when clients on board, but we've talked about it, and it is a great idea we just haven't gotten there. We have other systems we use. But that way you have continuity, I would say, you know yet again, just these are examples. From my day, like today, I was sharing with a prospective client just how fast people go to your content, and I think it's important for our listeners to understand. Like I will see. Boom, boom! Boom! 4 or 5 pages like that fast, like, within 7 min they'll inquire, and they may click through and download the eBook, but then they just keep going. They don't even read it. They just keep going. So, recognize that even if you're writing long form, you have to be able to handle the short term impulse, because most I mean, there are people that hang out in the weeds for years.

And this is funny. This is a funny story. I haven't told this to anybody. Hardly. We did when I 1st started the company. We did audio CDs, and we sold them through medical economics on a share basis. So, grow your healthcare back then was for practices, and I just got an inquiry like, 2 months ago this. That was 18 years ago. I bought your CDs in the day, and I'm finally ready to get started.

Kate Warnock
That's the longest like the longest lead time I've ever heard.

Stewart Gandolf
You know what I had to tell him. It's like, I'm sorry you're too small for us. You should have hired us then. We can't work with you anymore. We don't work with like individual doctors like that.

Kate Warnock
Oh, my goodness!

Stewart Gandolf
New Jersey held on to it like, so it's just really funny. But that was the content marketing again. That was pretty innovative for its time. Right? You know, the very specific. And they worked. It was really good, you know. So, like this.

Two more questions before we wrap up here one is. I think you can look through our list if there's anything else I missed. Please add that to our list. I think I've covered most of what we had planned on. So, one question is, though, that wasn't in our prep was the long term viewpoint, because which

I just backed into that. But that's really it. I feel like one of the challenges I have when we start talking about this and budgeting this with clients is everybody wants like an instant hit. And like I've been doing this for 18 years. It's like, so it doesn't mean you can't get some early wins. But it's like there's a commitment level. Help me with this, Kate. Tell me, tell them, tell them what I'm telling you in terms of the commitment level.

Kate Warnock
So I would say, if people really understand the value of what you're going for, you are positioning your company in a very competitive market in a way that nobody can copycat.

And that takes time, effort, and expertise. You're not there to, you know, I heard it, and I'm sure you did, too, Stewart. When ChatGPT came out, people fired their content team. So, all I have to do is drop a prompt in, and it spits something out, and I publish it. And I'm on. And I'm good.

Here's the thing thought leadership is going to take real expertise, nuance, follow through, and anything you're going to get from something that you can spit, you know a machine spits out. That's a great 1st draft. I would never publish something that just popped out from a ChatGPT. As good as it could be, it could always be better so, you know, as far as thought leadership and thinking for the long term. What you're there to do is to future proof your organization.

Everyone is always evolving. And if you're great today you need to be looking 3 or 4 years, or however long, for your industry is appropriate down the road and understand where we skating towards what are the needs gonna be, how do I get part? How do I get our voice? Our brand known down there. So that by the time we've evolved to that point. My market's ready for us.

Stewart Gandolf
That's a really good yeah point, the idea of future proofing. And that's so true and I don't know. I just to me again, being in this world of healthcare, you know, to stand out from just being an ordinary market. That's why I went through this category from day one, I mean, like I still get inquiries. From the 1st blog we wrote, I wrote a blog sort of tongue in cheek about how to market to doctors and I still get inquiries from that, you know, that's what. 18 years ago. So, there's like that. One was in particular just kind of a fun one to write. You can look it up if you want.

Kate Warnock
Just to kind of, you know, tag on to that. You know, we also use thought leadership. Think of it this way. You're going to have new markets that you want to enter into. If you tried to sell something, it's like walking up to, you know someone at a cocktail party and ask them out on a date.

No one's ready for that. Right? I don't know who you are, so we use thought leadership again this year. We're expanding into your sector, the physician sector, because what we realized is that again, we work so closely with our clients. We have a client advisory board. We have meetings all the time with our, we send our teams out to our clients so we can get into their environments and really see how our product is working in the wild.

But we recognized that the problems that we were solving for our clients could be solved by the physicians, that they have to work with every single day. There's 1 thing that connects a Home Health Care Agency in particular to a physician is that the Home Health Care Agency has to get their care plan signed off and authorized by a physician before they can bill for those services.

So, I might have someone who was sent home, and yes, they had a referral for home health care by the discharge planner, that sort of thing, and the person just had a hip replacement, and they're going to need to have some wound care and that sort of thing in the home. Well, my agency accepts that patient into care. I just spent 30 days delivering care. Cost me $4,000 to care for that patient. I don't get to bill for that until the physician signs off on that order, and then I'm allowed to bill.

So, there is a real, you know, a real connection between our clients, a lot of our clients and the physician community. Yet the physicians aren't necessarily compensated or incentivized to take the time to review those care plans, sign off, and send them back to our clients in a timely manner. We recognize that our technology could be installed in the physician offices so that it would remove all the friction points. It would simplify the process. It would give the physician and his staff or her staff the opportunity to review things in a click. Sign 50 orders at once after they review them, send it back. Take the fax machine out of the equation.

We just saved that physician massive amounts of time and money, too, and we improve the relationship with our clients who are using that technology. So anyway, so thought leadership was the right way for us to go into the physician sector. They don't know what Forcura is. So, we commissioned another study. We did this one with fierce healthcare this year, and talked about those administrative burdens that they may never have even quantified. And that's what we did. Do you know how much time you're spending on managing patient care, coordination for your post-acute partners. Now you do, so again we skated towards what's the end solution Forcura, but we didn't lead with. Here's what Forcura is we led with “what's your problem.”

Put the put the research behind it so that it's again it's and it's again by a highly reputable industry outlet, fierce healthcare. And we got a great report out of it.

Stewart Gandolf
So if somebody's looking in your audience is looking to hire someone as a thought leadership marketer, either internally, or maybe even externally, or as an agency, or whatever like. What kinds of skill sets should they be looking for? What matters.

Kate Warnock
I would say it would be hard to hire a thought leadership individual.

It's not impossible, outside of your industry. I think, that the best fit, the fastest, get the ball in motion is going to be hire someone from within the industry that has an understanding, I mean healthcare, I don't know that there's anything more complex than healthcare, Stewart, there's so many different angles and that sort of thing to hire someone cold from outside in.

I think it's going to take longer to get that person up to speed, because we're so highly regulated. And you need to understand, you know, how things work.

So, I, personally, personally, would have a bias to look to someone who at least had a healthcare background. It doesn't have to be their most recent. But, boy, you're going to get someone who, I think is better equipped to get them up and running. I would absolutely look for samples of their work. And you know. And hopefully again to your point, multimodal, have you produced webinars? What kind of white papers have you put out? What's you know? Interesting content. You know your most interesting content. I would be able to, you know, maybe even provide a prompt to the individual and say, what would you do with this topic and see what they come back with. You need someone who's going to be creative, disciplined and a really great collaborator across a lot of teams. You've got to have someone that can really position your concept, as you said, thought leadership isn't always going to get the instant budget approval. You've got to be able to put someone in your organization who can truly point to the downstream effect of—here's where we're starting, but here's the outcome to the business, and be able to make that business case.

Stewart Gandolf
Great Kate, that was awesome. So much fun to have you today. My dog is barking in the background but thank G*d for mute buttons. But I would just say that the I agree with everything you said today. It's really fun to, you know, meet you and here's somebody else who just loves the content marketing stuff again, like that term to me, is content just by its definition, is like a little light. Right? It's not about content. It's about thought leadership. So might be something similar in our title of this particular podcast. Thank you. So much, I appreciate your time today.

Kate Warnock
My pleasure. It was. It was a blast.

Stewart Gandolf
Thank you.