In this episode, hosts Brad and Michael sit down with Chris Suchánek, founder of Firm Media, to explore challenges in medical marketing. After witnessing firsthand how larger firms work with doctors, Chris built a marketing agency to provide a better, more effective approach for health care professionals. Learn the biggest pitfalls in medical marketing, how to maximize your ROI, and strategies to position your practice for long-term success.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Contact ByrdAdatto if you have any questions or would like to learn more.
Transcript
*The below transcript has been edited for readability.
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues simplified through real client stories and real world experiences, creating simplicity in 3, 2, 1.
Brad: Welcome back to another episode of Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, with my co-host, Michael Byrd.
Michael: As a business and health care law firm, we meet a lot of interesting people and learn their amazing stories. This season’s theme is Unintended Consequences. We sometimes find ourselves in a situation that can be traced back to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated decision.
Brad: Yeah. And this season we’re examining these unintended consequences through real client stories, and sometimes even some amazing guests might even join us.
Michael: Now Brad, I’m excited to bring on our first guest for this season today. We have some marketing wisdom coming their way, but before we get there, I wanted to get the juices flowing. I did some research to prepare for today by looking up marketing [00:01:00] campaigns that had unintended consequences.
Brad: Now, Michael, you said research when you said research, are you talking about you’re using Google or your long assistant known Mrs. Siri to help you?
Michael: Brad, I actually went with ChatGPT this time. You need to keep up with the times.
Brad: Look at the big man over there, Michael, using AI. You’re so cool.
Michael: Robots.
Brad: Alright, robots. What did you find with your research from ChatGPT?
Michael: Do you remember the McDonald’s Grimace shake that was promoted a few years ago?
Brad: Yeah. Something to do with the purple shake.
Michael: Yes. Well, this was seemingly like the typical formula for McDonald’s. They have a lot of campaigns that seem to center around specialty items like the McRib that comes and goes, and then sometimes they even bring their characters in. They have Grimace, Hamburglar, Ronald McDonald, and here they [00:02:00] were using grimace to promote a new kind of short term shake, different colored shake. This is what the grimace shake was.
Brad: Sounds like a solid plan. You keep promoting your brand, but using your old IP via these characters that have long history with the organization.
Michael: Yes. Unexpectedly – unexpected consequences, Brad. This trend went viral on social media where users started creating funny videos featuring the grimace shakes and the sale skyrocketed. I actually have a personal connection to this because I remember my daughter, Alex, who’s now 15, obsessing about wanting a grimace shake and driving to multiple McDonald’s locations in search of this special shake. And I’m guessing since then she may have had one or two shakes, so it wasn’t about the shake. It was about the TikTok.
Brad: I got you. Well, lucky for me, my family and I did not get caught up in this grimace shake obsession. It could be. because I’m not on TikTok. [00:03:00]
Michael: Yes. You don’t know what that is.
Brad: I don’t.
Michael: You still think it’s a clock?
Brad: I thought so.
Michael: Yes. Social media is not always your friend though, Brad, in a marketing campaign, but you need to get on social media to understand that.
Brad: I’m reading all about it.
Michael: Well, I found another article during my deep research where the unexpected consequences did not go as planned.
Brad: Oh no.
Michael: Do you remember back in 2012 when Mountain Dew had a Dub the Dew campaign?
Brad: Yes, who could forget that one?
Michael: Mountain Dew was releasing a new apple flavored drink and they created a campaign for Mountain Dew fans to help name the drink.
Brad: You know, on my bingo card today, the phrase “Mountain Dew fans” was definitely not on it. But I didn’t even realize there was a fandom for this.
Michael: I’m not sure I realized that either. Well, the unintended consequence was that internet trolls hijacked the contest, leading [00:04:00] to wildly inappropriate suggestions for the name of the new drink that were actually the contenders and even the winners. And because this is a family-friendly podcast, we can’t go there and talk about those.
Brad: Yeah. I’m sure our 13-year-old boy brains would be giggling at all these inappropriate names. But we should probably bring on our guests keeping us in line before we really just go off the rails.
Michael: Yes. So let’s get to it. Joining us today is Chris Suchánek. He is the CEO of Firm Media. He is 25 plus years as a leader in digital and traditional marketing in the medical industry. And I had to read this a couple times. We may even have to ask about this. He won a Grammy award.
Brad: What?
Michael: Yeah. I don’t know. We’ll have to check on that one. Co-founder of International Non-profit, Project Boone, and he is a first time guest on our podcast. Chris, thanks for being here today.
Chris: I’m so excited to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
Brad: Well, this is good being [00:05:00] a lot of fun. And we’re going to hit you with a really important question right away. Chris, have you ever had the Grimace shake or apple flavored Mountain Dew?
Chris: I have not, but I did get to hear the opening dialogue. My wife and I own some restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area, so I do understand the fandom around things like Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper.
Brad: Okay. Alright.
Michael: There you go. Good to know. Well, let’s get into the fun stuff. So I guess first, introduce yourself to your audience, to our audience. Tell them about yourself and your background.
Chris: So, as you mentioned, my name is Chris Suchánek and I’m the CEO at Firm Media. I’m a little bit of a serial entrepreneur, some restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area, and then a nonprofit in Mexico, and then also an arm of it here in the United States. Super busy and I really love creating things and watching my thoughts become things. It’s probably my favorite thing to do. My desk is situated at Firm Media, which is [00:06:00] where I spend most of my time, and all of my energy goes into marketing, digital marketing for specialty medical practices. When I say specialty medical, think oral surgeons, plastic surgeons, periodontist, facial plastic surgeon, med spas, and the like. That’s in our wheelhouse – that you mentioned the Grammy, so I might as well hop over to that and clear that up.
I spent 10 years in the music business straight out to high school. Got to go be in the music business for about 10 years. Got a couple lucky breaks. I ended up eventually with a funded independent label. The label was funded by EMI music publishing and a couple other financial backers to help me sort of find talent and release albums for a 10 year period. And consequently we ended up releasing 35 albums in three countries, got to be on a team that worked on a specific album that eventually won a Grammy. So that was a real highlight of that time that I got to spend getting my feet wet in marketing, specifically traditional [00:07:00] marketing because it was before digital marketing existed. And the Grammy changed me forever because prior to the team that I was on winning the Grammy, I used to go to work every single day and sort of believed that I was good at what I did. And after we were told that we won that Grammy, the entire team of people that went into the office next day, the energy was measurable. We went from people who sort of thought we were good at what we did to knew that we knew how to do what we were doing and really, really changed my perception of good to great.
Michael: That’s awesome.
Brad: That’s amazing.
Michael: Yeah. Well, transition us.
Brad: Yeah, I mean, you, you talked a little bit about it already, but love to hear more about firm media.
Chris: Sure. Firm Media is a digital marketing agency, digital and traditional now. Excited to talk about that. A little transition a little bit. We focus on specialty medical marketing as I mentioned before, specifically [00:08:00] oral surgeons, plastic surgeons, and then the stuff that surrounds that. We are an award-winning agency. Within the first five years of starting the agency, we were named Agency of the Year by the American Advertising Federation. We’ve won some sort of award for our media development, photography, web design, video production, all of that stuff over the last 15, 17 years. Super excited about the quality of the products we put out. For a while there. When I first started Firm Media, I wanted to be in the background, so I tried to build a team of people around me that would take us to the next level.
And after a little while realized that these specific skill set that I had could not be replicated, so I put myself back in the driver’s seat. That was a little more recently, but it’s been fun. It’s put me back in the consulting seat. It’s got me back on airplanes and meeting with people, like you Michael, I was able to fly out and have lunch with you. That connection [00:09:00] that I have for the last 20 some odd years of being in the specialty medical space, most specifically I started out with plastic surgeons, has kept me connected to what I believe is the top 10%, maybe even the top 1% in the industry. Some of the people that are the best at what they do, which has kind of launched me into – I’ve recently started writing specifically for specialty medical marketing in Forbes Magazine, which is sort of elevated my profile a little bit. I will be keynote speaker on AI and digital marketing at the American Society of Plastic Surgery meeting this year for three hours on two stages, and then other various things that I’m doing. So, it’s also springboarded me forward to be able to be the consultant that I really enjoy being.
Michael: That’s awesome. Talk about to transition. So you went out of, you know, you’re in the music industry for 10 years. Is that when you started working with doctors right after that? Or kind of bridge that gap between the music [00:10:00] and Firm Media? Or maybe that’s when you started Firm Media?
Chris: It’s a good question. So the reason that I left the music business is because the internet, I don’t know if y’all remember, but CDs used to be $15 a piece, and then Napster came along and started selling or giving away songs for free. And the knee jerk reaction from the major labels was to pull all their funding from the independent labels. And I was one of the people that they pulled it from. So that meant, 10 years free ride of traveling around the country and owning tour vans with trailers behind them and recording in studios and even touching a Grammy once or twice, all ended very abruptly when Napster came along and the internet became a thing.
Michael: Yeah.
Chris: I decided that I wasn’t going to go start over in the music business because that would’ve meant probably getting a job working at a major label or something like that, and that’s really all I was qualified for at the time. [00:11:00] So I decided to take some aptitude and interest tests and figure out what I should do next. All signs pointed to either the entertainment business or leading in teaching. So I got a degree in psychology thinking I might want to go that route. As soon as I got that degree in my hand, I decided that is not what I wanted to do. I actually did it for 10 days and then decided that that’s not what I wanted.
Brad: Well, that was a quick turnaround, huh?
Chris: Yeah, I’ve met the two gentlemen that owned some predominant names, domain names in the plastic surgery industry. Now, remember, this is still pre-Google. So, domain names, there was a.com boom where that was really important thing to own, and they own some very predominant domain names in the plastic surgery market. And that put me in touch with probably 750 plastic surgeons nationally. It taught me how to build directories. It taught me about every nook and cranny in the industry. So after being there about eight years, that’s where I got the idea to start Firm Media, [00:12:00] which is a boutique style, high quality agency.
Michael: That’s so fascinating. And I can see kind of the pattern too of this theme of, you know, changes in the way the internet – from having the Napster to pre-Google, to the evolution of how marketing is affected, in our case, what we’re talking about today just kind of medical advertising. I’d love to kind of focus on that for a moment. So our theme this season, as you’ve heard us say, is Unexpected Consequences. Talk about some marketing decisions you’ve seen by doctors that can lead to unintended consequences.
Chris: Ooh, there’s so many. I don’t have any case examples of situations like you referenced where there were unintended – like either pros or cons from a marketing perspective. But I can say that there are unintended consequences [00:13:00] of people either trying to overeducate themselves on how marketing works, and then spending a lot of time tinkering around with it themselves. I have this theory that sometimes things are better launched and tweaked than they are to try to perfect them before launching them. I find that a lot in some of these industries. I think one of the biggest issues is early adopters to digital marketing, plastic surgery – oral surgeons were later adopters to this. This is a common series of events, right? I’m a plastic surgeon or a med spa, I believe that digital marketing is going to help me market my practice or my location.
So I reach out to three digital marketing agencies, I have a conversation with them, and I choose the lowest priced one in combination with the person I trust the most. [00:14:00] I work with that person, and that is a bad recipe for finding a good marketing agent, right? A good marketing strategy and a good marketing agency. And you would think that that would be a pretty good recipe, right? You got to find somebody that you trust and you got to find something that you can afford. But I have an article that I’ve written recently titled “Trust versus Value in Digital Marketing.” And what I think it’s overlooked is the value that a marketing agency offers comes specifically from the strategy they can provide, and the systems and protocols they have to implement that strategy. And then also, the systems and protocols they have to report on that strategy.
You’re not going to get that with the lowest price. What you’re going to end up doing then is probably hiring, this is a common conversation that I have. I’m talking to you and I’m really impressed with the strategy that you’re talking about and I really like your credentialing, but you’re much more expensive [00:15:00] than the other two agencies that I’ve worked with. Can we work on the price? Now, you’re calling me because you’ve been flushing money down the toilet for the last six years with two different agencies, and now you want me to solve the problem and you want me to do it at the price that they would do it at. It just doesn’t work like that. Or they’ve been burned so many times by paying the lowest amount of money or what the market will bear for building a website. And then they circle back with me, and now they’ve been to a bunch of launch and learns and webinars on how marketing works, and they want to micromanage that process. What ends up happening is, instead of hiring me as a consultant and us working together to help grow your practice based on your financial goals and marketing you for your top line revenue drivers, you are now afraid that you’re going to get burnt like you did with the other people. So you’re micromanaging the process and all of our conversations revolve around you, [00:16:00] the practice owner trying to prevent me from trying to sell to you. Yeah, does that sort of set up the dynamic?
Michael: Yeah, absolutely.
Brad: And I think you’re started answering this, but as you’re talking – I started thinking about going back to challenges. So when you do have this new doctor that’s joining Firm Media, what are some of the challenges that they’re faced with when you start working with those doctors?
Chris: I think the biggest issue is along the lines of what we just talked about. And I think that is that there are so many options for marketing agencies that are low priced that probably do pretty good quality work in certain areas that they don’t understand the value or they don’t understand what to look for. Not even that, let me backtrack a second. Remember, all of these agencies are using the exact same acronyms. But how they’re done, that doesn’t mean the same thing. So really understanding [00:17:00] what you’re really looking for is the best consultant to be working on your project for you to help you better understand how this whole thing works. I really think that’s the key issue.
This is important to explore. You might find an agency that does really great SEO. They may able to say every one of our clients rank on the first page of Google for X amount of the phrases they want to be found for. That’s a really great thing for an agency to say. And you may even be told by a friend of yours, I work with this agency and I rank really well for the phrases I want to be found for. That means the people on their team, let’s say the person in the SEO department that’s working on their team is really good at doing SEO, but it’s going to be really hard to get Dave or Kevin or whoever it is in the SEO department to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the searcher that is the ideal client or patient for the practice. So they’re really great at SEO, [00:18:00] but what keywords are you getting them to rank for? Are these top line revenue drivers? Are they helping you move forward to meet your financial goals? So many variables, and that’s really hard to get. Someone who does really great SEO is not what you need. You need someone to do really great SEO based on a really solid strategy.
Michael: Yeah. So I want to touch on this. I want to make sure our audience kind of can pick up, you know, I think we’re all picking up on a certain depth and to the strategy and intentionality behind what you’re doing for a client. For those that are not sophisticated in marketing and they’ve all heard terms, the buzz terms, like SEO or pay-per-click or whatever. Talk a little bit about your approach. Like you said you have strategy ideas, but then what is the difference between – what is digital marketing and what’s the difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing that you’ve mentioned a few times? Just for our [00:19:00] doctors in the audience to understand like, what is this world that’s out there that could help them have an effective plan?
Chris: So two questions that you’re asking, I’ll try to track them both and then answer them both separately. First of all, AI has changed this game exponentially. Now, I think I’m pretty good at interviewing a client, figuring out what their sort of positioning is, and then figuring out how to build a strategy off that. Over the last couple years, I’ve built sort of systems that helped me to come up with specific interview processes that helped me build brand positioning documents and directive documents that get pushed to the team to help them better, sort of, better be an extension of the practice online. And what I mean by that is, there’s a lot of practices where you sit them down and plastic surgeon included and say, “Hey, what are your differentiators?” And they struggle to answer that question. [00:20:00] But if you dig deep enough, you’ll get really good answers. And if those answers make their way into the content, that’ll be a key differentiator in their digital marketing and on their website, right?
So with that being said, I develop a full brand positioning document, and then off of the full brand positioning document, I developed four directives. One directive is for marketing, one directive is for web design, one directive is for media development, and the other directive is for content writing. And those four directives help guide the path of the next 12 months of marketing that we’re going to be doing. So that’s one part of it, right. So, that’s the differentiator. I think the other question – does that answer your question?
Michael: It was very helpful.
Brad: Very cool too.
Chris: I’m super excited about that. AI has stepped that up immensely. Most of my speaking is going to be about those specific subjects. I’m watching that unfold and impact campaigns at levels like I’ve never seen before. One of the issues that a lot of practices have; they don’t understand the [00:21:00] value of brand positioning, and then they find out how expensive it is to hire a brand strategist, and they want nothing to do with it. They just want to hire an agency and get them to rank in the search engines and then get leads from the website. If you really understand what brand positioning is, marketing gets you leads, and as soon as the marketing stops, the leads stop coming. But if you use a brand first approach and then do your marketing, there’s a chance that you could turn these leads into fans because they believe in your business and they believe in your business model if it’s branded well. Nike’s been doing this forever. They’re a brand first shoe company and they speak directly to a specific population that continues to buy their product. It’s so important to be a brand first. I consider Firm Media brands first agency, and most people want nothing to do with it. They don’t want to spend the time, energy, or money to do it. They want to get straight into the website and get the leads.
Brad: That’s awesome. Well, we have time [00:22:00] for one more question. And this last kind of a speed round question here. So we got about a minute left. What do you see ahead for the marketing and the medical practice over the next five years?
Chris: Actually, that was the second fold of your question earlier, which was what do I see traditional marketing being? And that’s actually the answer to this question, so I’m glad that was the question. Along with the advent of AI, there’s sort of a combining or synergism between digital and traditional marketing. So, I’ll just give you a scenario. I’m opening a new med spa, I’m a plastic surgeon who bought a practice and I’m trying to establish myself as the practice, the new face of that practice, or I’m the juggernaut plastic surgeon who used to market real aggressively or didn’t need to because there weren’t a lot of plastic surgeons in the industry in the area, and now I’m being out marketed by all the new people, right? So what I need to do is I need to create brand recognition or name recognition.
[00:23:00] Hypothetically for that particular practice, I could geofence a five mile radius of that practice, and basically draw radius around that practice, and then I can start asking for data points like which households, and I’m not talking about neighborhoods, which households have the right household demographic, the specific profile of a potential patient for this particular practice. And it can give me the answers right down to the address. So let’s say I wanted to open a meds spa and I wanted to send a flyer, a mailer for three months to every household within a five mile radius of the new med spa. Years ago, the amount of postage and printing would’ve been cost prohibitive, right? In LA that could be hundreds of thousands of households, but what if I could narrow that number down to say, 20,000 of the exact households that I want to target and mail that postcard to it. On top of that, I could go in to Hulu, Roku, and any one of the other streaming platforms [00:24:00] with ad networks on any of the stations I wanted to, and target the exact same household and show them a connected TV ad for the med spa.
Brad: That’s amazing.
Chris: On top of that, I can get the geofence information for the cell phones in those regions and show them a social ad for that practice, right? That’s just three pieces of what I – it’s just good old fashioned mixed media marketing being blended together and look through a digital lens, which I believe is going to be the craze for the next five years. I’ve invested a lot in building those platforms.
Michael: It’s fascinating. I can’t believe we’re out of time. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Has been really helpful. Loved hearing your perspective. I appreciate you joining the Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. We are grateful. We are going to go to break. And then on the other side, Brad and I will wrap up with a few legal insights. Thank you.
Chris: Thanks for having me.
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto, with my co-host, Michael Byrd. Now Michael, this season, our theme is Unintended Consequences, and we just had a great conversation with Chris over at Firm Media about understanding marketing for medical practices.
Michael: Yeah. And it struck me as he was talking about kind of anecdotally mistakes and unintended consequences that practices have, where they jump [00:26:00] into marketing relationships with media companies that don’t work out. And they usually jump into them for the wrong reasons as he said, was either struck by price or they make a connection. And his feedback was that there’s more to it than that to get value out of having a great strategy. And what struck me, as you and I know, is that traditionally marketing companies have really strong consequences that are hard to get out of. And I don’t know why it’s in that industry, but if you jump into something that’s not effective, you may be locked into a financial commitment that maybe three or five years down the road that you can’t get out of. And we’ve seen some really difficult kind of crisis situations where we’re trying to work out conflict because it’s not working. And so I think that the lesson learned is [00:27:00] really making sure you do your homework and are trying to make a wise decision and fully informed decision when you’re starting one of these relationships.
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. Well, believe it or not, that is all the time we have for today’s show, but we’ll be back next Wednesday when we continue to talk about Unintended Consequences, and this one’s going to be about partnering with an employee. Thanks again for joining us today. And remember, if you like this episode, please subscribe, make sure to give us a five star rating and share with your friends.
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Outro: ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney [00:28:00] on your legal issues.
