OR_MarketingMonday_MaddieCoffin: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Andreea Borcea:
Welcome to the Marketing Mondays podcast, where we explore how we can make your offerings stand out in the health and wellness space. Through conversations with thought leaders and innovators in health and wellness marketing, we’ll discuss marketing best practices, case studies, and innovative ideas to help scale your business and grow revenues with impact. I’m excited to be your host. My name is Andreea Borcea. I’m a fractional CMO and owner of the Dia Creative Marketing Agency.
Andreea Borcea:
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Mondays! My name is Andreea Borcea, I’m CMO of Dia Creative, a digital marketing agency, and I am excited to talk to Maddie Coffin today. She’s a senior marketing manager at HLTH. Welcome to the podcast!
Maddie Coffin:
Hi, thanks for having me on.
Andreea Borcea:
Well, let’s start very simply, what is HLTH? And it’s spelled different, H L T H, for everyone.
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, so HLTH, just without all the vowels. HLTH is a platform, it brings together the entire health ecosystem focused on health innovation and transformation. So we have an annual conference, this year it’s in the fall in Las Vegas in November. And yeah, we bring together industry-leading speakers, C-suite audience, senior, just a senior audience in healthcare to bring the health community together, to lead the dialogue for development, for a better health ecosystem, and just a better future of health.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that mission, that’s amazing, and it’s exciting you get to be in person again. So you’re going to be having this event pretty soon.
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, definitely, it’s been a bit of a struggle, I think, through the pandemic for many companies, but specifically in the events industry is something that we really had to kind of adapt to how that makes sense for events and how that will impact us in the future as well. So I think we’ve adapted pretty well. We’ve had a successful in-person event last fall, that was our first in-person event since the start of the pandemic, and we saw really great numbers and a lot of people were very excited to be back in person, so we’re definitely excited for this event coming up. I think it should be really big and really exciting.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that, yeah, I think especially last year, people were just so eager to get out there and even more so today like people are more comfortable and they’re ready to meet in person and solve the world’s great health crises all, all in one place, right?
Maddie Coffin:
Definitely.
Andreea Borcea:
Well, very cool. So let’s dig a little bit deeper into you. What were you looking for when you pursued a career in marketing?
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, so I kind of fell into marketing. I didn’t really pursue a career in marketing per se, so I actually studied biology in college. I was pre-med, I guess, thought I was going to be going to med school. I had the opportunity while I was in college to shadow an ER doctor, and one of the first patients we went to go see had a jackhammer in his foot, and you could see blood and his, the bone in his foot, so I saw that and almost immediately fainted.
Andreea Borcea:
Oh, no!
Maddie Coffin:
So after that shattering experience, I decided being a doctor probably was not the path for me, but post-graduation, I ended up working in a microbiology lab for a few years doing pharmaceutical product testing, was there for a few years, didn’t really love the lab environment and kind of wanted to be in more of a collaborative environment, working more with people and was looking at kind of more mission-focused organizations as well. So it kind of did a 180 and started working at a nonprofit in more of a customer service-focused role. So really loved working for that organization, working towards such a great mission. It was a veteran service organization that provided mentorships for transitioning veterans, but there I built their digital media marketing team since we didn’t really have much of a social media presence, so I kind of built that and worked in marketing, kind of as a side project at that job, and got really interested in kind of the marketing aspect of our organization. But as I kind of learned more about my interest in marketing, I really wanted to kind of get back to my interest in biology and healthcare space. So that’s what brought me to HLTH, where I am now, and it’s been really fun, just kind of combining my interests in kind of an analytical and technical side of marketing, but also the opportunity to bring kind of creative ideas to the table at HLTH where, not your typical stuffy conference, we’re a pretty fun organization and try to bring really fun and crazy ideas to the table. So that’s been a really exciting aspect of my job now.
Andreea Borcea:
It’s definitely a lot more fun than being in a lab, right? There’s all these fun, crazy marketing ideas.
Maddie Coffin:
Yes, definitely.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s awesome. I like that you’ve had this kind of long journey to get to where you need to be, and it sounds like a great opportunity to work for nonprofit because it gave you the flexibility to even consider marketing, and now here you are at HLTH. That’s really cool.
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, definitely.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that. So obviously through HLTH, you work with a lot of healthcare and wellness marketers. What are the most effective things that you’ve seen these people do?
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, definitely, I mean, especially since the pandemic, there have been so many health tech companies, health digital health companies that have emerged. Even from our event, we have like over 100, over 600 sponsors and a large majority of kind of like healthcare and healthcare-focused solution providers. So yeah, so I think the best health and wellness marketers are the ones that can easily differentiate their product from all of these other new companies that have emerged, and kind of, just to show their audience why out of all these options, theirs should be the products that they choose and invest their time or their money into. And yeah, so the marketers that do that, that’s, kind of make it easy for the customer to understand the value and how to utilize the product and really clearly articulate the solutions that they provide and how they can easily incorporate it into our everyday life. And specifically for health and wellness, personal health is such a huge investment and a central part of our everyday lives. So I guess like this industry specifically, you need definitely need more convincing to get people to really try the new product that is for focusing on health and wellness because people don’t want to risk trying a new product if they’re not sure if it’s really going to have a positive impact on their health. And there’s a lot more risk in this industry and it’s just important to show that your product is legitimate and can really help improve the overall health of the audience. But I think also, just in that vein, like just humanizing the process to show.
Andreea Borcea:
The relatability probably.
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, the relatability and just how you can really incorporate it into your life and just showing real people using the products and real proof that it works to show to kind of build trust with the audience.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, I honestly think that’s one of the biggest challenges with marketing in general across every industry, is distilling down what you do in a way that someone gets it. And in particular because, especially when I found this across every client I’ve worked with, like if you’re in it and deep into it, people overcomplicate what their company does. I can’t tell you how many people you talk to and just like, what does your company do? And 20 minutes later, I’m still like, not clear. What do you do? And for healthcare in particular, not only are you fighting like, show me what you can do for me, but also, but are you legit, right? And can I trust you? And how does this actually affect my life? Because health is one of those things that people are so nervous about. And if I buy a cruddy lamp, you know, whatever, it sucks, I lost 25 bucks. If I buy a cruddy medical product that’s supposed to tell me if I’m healthy or not, that’s a much bigger risk.
Maddie Coffin:
And I think especially in the health space, not many people know the specifics about like the scientifics behind it, and there’s a lot of big words that a lot of, like the common person doesn’t know, and it’s really just figuring out how to make it as easy for the regular person to understand without a background in healthcare and all of that, and just making it really, making your value proposition just really succinct and easy to figure out how it can incorporate into your everyday life.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, that’s why I really like that you live between the intersection of biology and marketing because you have that science background and clearly you’ve been in customer service and marketing enough to know how to speak like a human being. So, someone who doesn’t have that background, they can still understand what you’re saying and like why this matters. You know, along those lines, we keep bringing up trust and that’s always the one I bring up, I feel like, every episode. Are you finding anything, particularly, that resonates with building trust from all these healthcare companies that you’ve been working with?
Maddie Coffin:
I touched on it a little bit, it’s just really humanizing the process, really kind of showing the impact of what they’re doing to someone that is in their kind of their own state, that their own experience, that they can really relate to, kind of having testimonials and reviews by real people really helps to build trust and know that, oh, someone else has tried this before and it helped them. It’s, I think for me, even for small products like on Amazon, I go straight to the reviews to see how, like if they’ve used it, if they actually liked it. I don’t want to just like spend money and then be upset when I get the product. So really just seeing how other people are resonating with the product and how it’s helping them in their daily lives.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, I definitely feel like the more people you see where it’s made a difference, the better because you’re like, At least I’m not the first to try this thing. Have there been any big surprises that you found in recent or past marketing initiatives?
Maddie Coffin:
I mean, specifically for our company, since we’re an events company, I think our first in-person conference that we had was last fall, HLTH 2021. So that was the first in-person conference back from the pandemic, and the surprise was just the pure excitement for people to come back to in-person. It was definitely just being on-site, and so it was in Boston. Being on-site with all of these people was just, it’s exciting, and you could feel the excitement just to be human interaction, to see people in person, to talk people in person just, I think it makes a huge difference. I know so many companies have transitioned to be kind of fully remote, which definitely works, and I do love the aspect of, we’re a hybrid company, we can work from home half the week and work in the office, and I do like the flexibility, but you definitely can understand that being in person makes a huge difference, especially for conferences. You can’t make those connections that you do at the conference virtually. It’s just, you need that human touch part of it.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, I was watching the conference industry really closely over the pandemic because I was like, oh, how is this going to work? And I saw some of them put up like these cute little like virtual reality-type rooms or these little cartoony things, but I just feel like that feels a bit too much like a video game for me to feel like I’m connecting on a professional level with somebody. So I’m super excited conference season is back and that like you’re running this and that, there’s going to be such an opportunity to meet so many people that are trying to make an impact on health, that’s really cool. As the conference focuses a lot on health and marketing and making an impact moving forward, are you seeing anything that you think is the future of healthcare marketing and where we’re headed?
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, I think health and wellness is becoming such a huge part of our everyday lives. It’s definitely a booming industry, and there’s been like growing conversation around, kind of, consumer-driven healthcare. So something that we’re incorporating this year into our event is WELL by HLTH, which is kind of our event within an event that focuses on the intersection of health and care. So this, WELL by HLTH will be a dedicated experience for senior executives and leading consumer brands in the area of consumer-focused wellness and lifestyle brands. So that includes wearables, fitness, mental wellness, nutrition, sexual health and psychedelics, and food innovation. Yeah, I think it’s just, it’s a really interesting market for people to be entering as consumers, employers, and patients are really taking a greater interest in their overall health and well-being. So it’s a really great opportunity for health and wellness industry executives to really get ahead of this accelerating trend.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely, healthcare, I think, is where a lot more VC investment is going, where a lot more people are trying to innovate. It’s one of the places I think people have just gotten so frustrated with traditional medicine and archaic treatments and slow-moving that like, everyone’s just like, Look, all right, it’s time, we’re all here, we’re ready to go. Well, cool. So last question for you. How do you stand out and how do you make an impact?
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, I think specifically for HLTH, we really attract a highly senior audience across the entire health ecosystem, and really just the entire health ecosystem: providers, payers, employers, consumer tech and wellness investors and startups, life sciences, the patient community, government, and media, among others. And we really kind of elevate the conference experience, emphasize the ROI from coming to the event, the high caliber content we have, the really valuable connections that you make at these events in the business that you get done at the events, all in a really fun and creative new way to feel different from your typical work conference. And even this year we have a new format to our conference just kind of really stand out and make sure to show that we are innovating and changing and always providing a new experience. So this year we have kind of a festival-type feel to our clients. We’re going to have stages all throughout the Expo floor, So our show floor will be, have all different types of stages, all with kind of different themes. Some like a garden theme, there’s a disco theme, there is like a newsroom, so.
Andreea Borcea:
Oh my gosh, that sounds fun.
Maddie Coffin:
Yeah, so it’s going to be really fun, really immersive event experience so that you kind of are, really feel a part of the action at every turn. And additionally this year we’re building out kind of curated attendee journeys so that each person, I mean, we’re expecting 8500 plus people at the conference, but even though there are so many people, we kind of want to make it seem intimate and customized to each attendee. So we’ll be building out for our agenda, for each kind of type of attendee that is joining to be able to customize their agenda to be like which sessions specialized towards what I’d be interested in as a startup, as a health tech company, as a provider, that kind of thing. We try to make things new and innovative, really bring the entire health ecosystem together and make meaningful connections and accelerate the innovation in the industry and really just make the work for our attendees as easy and enjoyable as possible.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s really cool. It’s like Dreamforce for health, Salesforce’s Conference, you’re going to have some really awesome activities and a great way to connect. And I think honestly when people have a lot of fun at a conference, like that’s when you meet really cool people and it attracts great innovators and you’ve got great conversation and I love that. So the big question then is how do people find out more about the HLTH conference sign-up? Are you still accepting attendees?
Maddie Coffin:
Yes, so we will be accepting attendees up until the event, November 13 to 16, 2022. We’ll be in Las Vegas, so that should be a lot of fun. But you can check out more about the event or company as a whole and just everything we have going on at Hlth.com/2022event. That’s H L T H.com/2022event. And then also if you’re interested in purchasing a ticket to come to HLTH, you can get a special, $150 dollars off with the code MarketMonday150, though, doesn’t need to be capital or lowercase, whatever you want. If you want $150 dollars off your ticket to HLTH, you can use that code, and we’d love to see you there.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that, thank you so much for the discount code for everyone, too. That’s awesome! This was a super fun conversation and I am excited, HLTH Conference sounds amazing.
Maddie Coffin:
Yes, we’re really excited too, and we hope to see all these listeners there.
Andreea Borcea:
Perfect! Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Mondays. My name is Andreea Borcea, I’m the CMO of Dia Creative and your host for this podcast. You were just listening to Maddie Coffin, who is a senior marketing manager at HLTH Conference, HLTH.com. This conference is coming up in November in Vegas. It sounds like it’s going to be a blast and you could save $150 dollars by using the code MarketMonday150 on their website. Reserve your ticket now! They’re also still accepting sponsors, so make sure to do that. Thanks, everyone, and join us every week for more marketing insights from Marketing Mondays on Outcomes Rocket.
Andreea Borcea:
Thanks again for listening to Marketing Mondays. If you have any marketing questions at all, feel free to reach out to me directly at DiaCreative.com. That’s D I A Creative.com.
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