The Rise of Social Media Influencers in Medical Device Marketing

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Hello, everyone. Stuart Gandolf back again today with another podcast. And today I’m just like scoring lately on guest.

It’s like, I’ve always had good guests, but lately it’s been particularly good. So today I’m introducing to you Wendy Soljak. Who I met at a medical device conference. And, you know, I thought of the presenters at that conference, I thought she was one of the better ones.

So, I invited her to join me and you on the podcast today. Welcome, Wendy.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Welcome, Wendy. Thank you. Thank you, Stuart. So, it’s such pleasure to be here with you.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So Wendy, by the way, is Associate Vice President of Consumer and Practice <arketing for NeuroStar, which is a company we’re familiar with.

We do a lot in the TMS space. so this topic is more broad. And so the topic that she’s going to cover today, and she’s going to do something a little different today, she’s going to do a shortened version of her presentation from the meeting, swimming with influencers on social media. So with that, I’d love you just to sort of walk us through the presentation you shared with me. And I’ll add color commentary and hopefully fun interesting comments along the way.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, no, I love it. And so I’m going to share my slide deck while we go through it. We’ll talk about the content on the slide, but we’ll also answer questions that you might have or dive deeper as you will.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Absolutely. by the way, for the audio listeners, make up most people. We’ll still talk about this on the slide, so it’s not a big handicap.

If you want to go back and see the recording on YouTube, you can, but we’ll make sure we talk these points through it so that it works for the people that are listening in.

So great, let’s get started.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, great. All right, so some fun facts about me. Realistically, you’re probably listening to this on the podcast that you won’t be able to see this, but so I thought it might be some interesting to share some of these fun facts.

One, my mom didn’t want me to go to business while I ended up in marketing and in business. I actually, in business school, realized that I love peanut M&M’s and I love product management.

So I wanted to be a peanut M&M product manager, but I and to jump in medical devices.

And so because of my degree in biology, and I went from marketing to sales and then back into marketing. So I had the full commercial experience. And over 20 years of medical device marketing, I like to say that I’ve worked on all the important organs. I’ve worked on lungs, the heart, skin, fat, and brain. So now I’m here at Neurostar working on brain type things.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

By the way, I love peanut M&M’s too. That’s really funny. I like those in the mini Cadbury eggs that come around in Christmas, not the big ones, the little ones that are kind of like, that size.

that’s really funny. And for of you who are listening, Wendy’s worked on some brands that we’re very familiar with at our company.

I mentioned Neurostar, but also Covidian, Cool Sculpting as a brand, Allergan, and some others. So just got some great experience. Go ahead, Wendy.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, for sure. So my question for the audience. audience really usually starts with have you ever used a social media influencer for your brand? And many of the conferences that Stewart and I go to are medical conferences, medical device conferences, and most of them say, well, actually no, I haven’t used a social media influencer. Stewart, have you also found the same in your conferences?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, it’s really interesting. This has gone from zero interest to increasing interest really quickly.

But most people still haven’t. And it’s funny because we’ve done a couple of, you know, 20 years almost, we’ve been a company.

We never did social influencer topics once up until like the last say six or eight months where there’s increasing interest.

So, it’s a huge, you’re at the, I think it’s been around obviously, but in healthcare, you’re kind of at the forefront, Wendy.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, we’re at the forefront. We had, we had a lot of colleagues who say, I want to work with influencers, but I just don’t know how, right?

And so that’s where this whole topic kind of came together. So the topics that we’ll discuss here are, you know, about the rise of influencers, who are the ideal influencers for a medical device brand, or medical brand, how to recruit influencers, and then some case studies that I’ll be presenting from my own experience, and then some tips and tricks I learned along the way that I’d like to share with folks too, because we do come in a regulated environment.

It’s not like, you know, where we’re influencer for cosmetics, for example, we are in the medical space, so we have different rules.

So I’ll first talk about the rise of influencers, and I think everybody understands how important influencers are in our social media world today.

It is one of the fastest growing channels for customer acquisition. And in general, businesses are making about $7 for every $1.00 spent on influencer marketing. So it’s not a surprise that it’s a big source of interest for folks. On the consumer side, 70% of consumers trust micro influencers more than they trust celebrities.

Why? Because it’s relatable. The people connect with influencers who share their interests, even small influencers, struggles, lifestyle, the aspirational content that we are looking for, want to get inspired, to see what’s possible, and to dream big.

And there’s authenticity, which is the secret sauce, right? Audiences, social media audiences today crave genuine, unfiltered moments. It doesn’t have to be super stylized.

It’s just an everyday person, just like me. So no matter what you do as a brand, you can only tell it so many times through ads, through commercials before it becomes noise. And where influencers come into play, is you really need someone else, an average person to advocate for you. Now the funny thing is, everyone thinks they’re an influencer and they’ll tell you what platforms they are most active in. I was with a mom group recently and they’re like oh, yeah I’m an influencer. I’m like okay, you know well let’s start there you know where people think they’re an influencer, where are they? Right? The top five platforms for influencers are Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X, you know that platform. The thing is, most of the time influencers are like, I need to be on TikTok, I’m an influencer if I’m on TikTok, I’ve got millions of followers, my video went viral, but most influencers, if you talk to them, the platform that works the most for them works the best for them is the Instagram platform.

So, 93% of influencers are on Instagram.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

And that insight is really important, I think, as so often people get overwhelmed before they even start, right?

to try to cover every possible channel. about LinkedIn? about edit? Whoa, whoa, whoa. We haven’t got started yet. Like, let’s start with most important.

So I think that’s an important insight. Thank you. Continue.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, no, and to that point, you know, I talk about X as being one of our top platforms, but blue sky is coming out, and that’s a brand new platform.

And we’ve got colleagues and friends who are saying, like, hmm, should I ditch my X account for a blue sky account?

And I always go back to the same thing. I say, find the platforms that work best for you and work on those before you go and start different platforms.

And you have spent a lot of time and energy doing that. So if you’re going to work with influencers, find the influencers who work on the top two platforms, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, I include with Instagram at the same time, because it’s really meta altogether.

And I’d say spend your time finding influencers who are present on those platforms, because that’s where the consumers are.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

And I love your tiers of influencers here. Let’s talk about that just for a moment.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, yeah, there’s lots of different tiers of influencers here. there’s five different tiers all the way from nano, which is one to 10,000 followers, micro influencers, 10 to 100k, mid-tier, and then macro and then mega, are like your celebrity status influencers.

But the reason why I put these tiers here is so that we can all understand, let’s say if I have a low budget, I’m probably not going to be able to afford a celebrity status.

I probably want to work with nano influencers. That helps define the group that you’re looking for. Now, if you’re looking to do an awareness campaign, looking for a nano influencer isn’t going to get you very far an awareness campaign.

You want somebody who’s in the mid-tier or macro or a mega influencer, so you want to aim towards people with over 100,000 followers if you’re going to build an awareness campaign.

No sense in doing an awareness campaign with nano influencers who are who generally have about one to 10,000 followers, right?

Yeah, and this will play out in a little bit as we go further and discuss more. Remember when I said Stewart that, you know, everybody says they’re an influencer nowadays?

Well, being an influencer is a legit career. I tell the story, I was at my kid’s second grade class and they had to make a little poster of what they want to be when they grow up.

My kid says I want to be a scientist and I want, I love dinosaurs, right? Typical second grade things. There’s another second grade, but there are actually a few second graders in his class who said they want to be an influencer when they grow up, a YouTube influencer.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

And so it’s so funny, my friend of mine is a neuroscientist and he’s, you know, dean of neurobiology over at UCI in California Irvine.

And these are all bio kids, super smart kids getting in there. And a lot of them would rather be an influencer.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

You know, I know, right? And so we talk about this.

Well, what, like, does an influencer really pay? And the average salary for an influencer is somewhere between 41 to $91,000.

That doesn’t include residuals, which is the commissions that some would make for, you know, if you were to go on Amazon and buy something from one of their links, they get residuals from it.

So it is a legit career now. And that’s why it’s important to have this conversation and trying to find the right influencer for you because you can hire and influencer. It’s about who are you looking for. So, that actually leads us into our next section, Who Is Your Ideal Influencer? And why, right? I always like to say, satay with a goal. Is your goal physician acceptance, is it treatment validity, is it consumer awareness, notoriety perhaps, or is it goodwill? And, you know if it’s a physician for example, you want to find a physician. Medical influencers generally have a belief that they are an authority figure, so my opinion matters. A former patient or therapy advocate are saying things like, you know, I’m doing this to help others like me. And then a celebrity person says, I’m here for my fans. So they want to engage and do things, partner with brands that help their fans.

And so the sweet spot for many of us in the healthcare space is actually somewhere in the nano and micro influencer level.

And why do I say that’s a sweet spot? It’s often because cost has a lot to do with it.

And also the people that we’re trying to target are more localized or regionalized or have a specific source of interest.

For example, at NeuroStar, we’re looking at people who are affected by mental health conditions like depression or OCD. So it’s a very niche market.

So we’re probably aiming towards these bottom two. So influencer engagement is typically also measured by folks with, you know, content that has an impact on their influencer earnings. Followers is not always indicative of engagement. So here’s two examples. One person who’s called, ItsLivB, her engagement rate is 1.4 percent.

Kim Kardashian on the other hand has 0.4 percent, so a lot less. However, Kim Kardashian has 334 million followers.

I’m sure it’s grown since the time it puts together this presentation. Liv only has 121,000, so a very, very big difference.

And then you could see that engagement level and the followers play into their cost per post. And so let’s talk about what those fees are.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s amazing. 334 million is like the population in the United States.

@15:54 – Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

I mean, it probably is like everyone in the United States is following her. It’s amazing. It is a worldwide figure.

fees, fees, stories, posts, reposts are all dollars. They’re all, you know, a way for an influencer to make money, right?

And, and that costs as an ever changing landscape and the pricing will continue to change as the perceived value of an influencer continues to increase.

So if you were to do like four influencers, right? For one post, $500 each, one story, let’s say $500 each.

That’s $4,000. But it’s not really the price of that $4,000. You can say that’s very inexpensive. But it’s the biggest hindrance is actually the marketers time to review all that content.

And also that influencer management, because it is like hand holding, you know, like a celebrity almost, you know, and they’re putting together their content, you’re helping them.

They’re not a subject matter expert, so you really need to be in there to help them create their content in a way that is going to meet your business needs.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s great. Wendy I have a quick question for you, because there’s a lot of data on your slides, would it be okay if we link up to your deck on our post so that people want to come back, because there may be some A-students listening to the audio here that want to come back to see it.

So for those of you then that if you’re interested in this topic, we want to go back and you’re listening to it, you want to go back to the slides, it will be available in healthcare success.com.

Just go to the search bar, look up Wendy’s name and you can find the actual slides. So great. Thank you, Wendy.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Absolutely.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

If find the deck on the post, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Well, as I mentioned before earlier, finding ideal influences for medical devices can be tricky, right?

Because a lot of times our medical devices are in a niche environment. So, you know, it could be an actual patient or a caregiver, or it could be a therapy advocate who can identify with your product.

And we’ll show some of these later. And we talk about the case studies. Here’s an actual patient. Kristen is an influencer that we are working with.

She is a former NeuroStar patient. Her treatment was not sponsored just in case anybody’s interested. She is also mental health therapist.

She has 235,000 followers. In a with MeltWater, you can actually see what they MeltWater would estimate Kristen’s pricing at, know, so, you know, they estimate her story based on her engagement level, her followers, is $926. She is used to collaborate, she’s got a media kit, and as I mentioned, her media kit states that her cost to work with her for a story or a story video is $1000 to $1500, so it’s very consistent with what MeltWater has estimated.

Here’s a therapy advocate example that we worked with, my colleague, know, worked with our peer agency to work with Kyle Richards.

Kyle Richards did not have Sientra implants, however, she had a personal story, her mother had breast cancer and she saw how much that impacted her, so that therapy advocate was the tie-in to our brand, and of course the full circle program, which is a it’s a

It is a first nationwide program to provide no-cost breast reconstructive surgery for patients who can’t afford to have breast reconstructive surgery.

So she put her stamp behind that. The next section I’m going talk about is how to recruit patients. There’s two easy ways you can do it.

One is to organically have people self-applied. You can set up a, like a Google Sheet or a similar form that collects that information and then that allows you to reach out to them.

And you can add it to your social media profile or one of the links on your Instagram. Another way, for example, how we found Kristin, was she tagged us in her content.

And this is a snapshot of our Instagram profile. Every now and then we looked at the tagged post part.

And she tagged us in a video that she used, and so that’s one of the ways that you could find an influencer who’s already familiar with your brand that cuts down on a lot of time.

There are other ways to recruit our agency, minds, Instagram but also partners with an influencer headhunter. Their pricing is about $1,200 and then 20% of the costs when influencers post.

You could do a casting call post on social, friends and family. Like I mentioned, you can have an influencer platform that you can engage with.

You can also use a PR agency, but generally the PR agencies are working with big money. So they’re the ones finding like the celebrities for you or those mega influencers who are really going to move your brand forward from an awareness perspective.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

And I think that it’s interesting too, like with you guys and NeuroStar and if you give like that. Maybe a 30-second plug in what you guys do just because the audience may not know because I think there’s a lot of engagement based upon the kinds of work that you guys do.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

I’m sorry. Say it again.

@22:09 – Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

I’ll just saying so TMS is a there. I’ll just jump in. So TMS is a therapy.

If you’re not familiar with it that is really revolutionizing psychotherapy, particularly with depression and OCD. There’s other uses that are off label.

And so the nature of what you guys are doing now, I can see why influencers are naturally coming to you because it’s the kind of topic that people are, you know, it’s life debilitating if they feel like they’re getting a solution to a problem.

They feel like others do, you know, it’s like it’s just something they feel comfortable publicly going public about. mean, it’s probably people aren’t going to be super big about talking with their venereal disease and on, you know, an influencer, but depression is something that is so debilitating.

And with you guys helping it’s sort of What’s the right words amazing? It’s like it would appeal to a lot of people. I think most people would know that It’s so debilitating.

So you guys are really in a good sweet spot for that You know, it’s like doing some obscure urological device might be harder, but for you guys I could see it really working well, and then you guys are Able to tag people are tagging you on their own, which is awesome.

Yeah, very you know, there’s no sort of BS there And I think all these other methods are great. It’s funny because it is a specialty There’s various platforms to find influencers, and it’s a whole thing And I’m sure you’ll be talking about this more but the organic side of looking into your own patients and looking to People that are already following you if that’s an option is great.

So cool.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah. Yeah, mean NeuroStar is really amazing I mean from the perspective that Over 20 million Americans suffer from depression, right and

the previously, a lot of the options are drugs, therapy, talk therapy, for example, ECT. But now there’s finally a therapy, TMS transcrano-magnetic stimulation, where it’s a non-drug, non-evasive approach with long-term results to depression.

So that’s one thing that, you know, they help to help with the symptoms, but it’s not a long-term solution.

And it’s one of the great things that I find very fulfilling about working in medical devices is actually helping patients get connected to innovative technologies that can help, you know, improve their condition.

And NeuroStar is one of them, of course, you know, the thing that with all these technologies that I’ve worked with, it’s actually just awareness.

It’s about having utilizing these tools and your tool belt like influencers to help spread the word because you might have the coolest device out there.

But if nobody knows about it, how many people are you really helping, right? So our job as marketers is to help bring that forward.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Awesome. Okay.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah. So some case studies, we’ll end with some case studies here, at NeuroStar. In the last year, we’ve seen a 2,200 followers, increased follower growth on our Instagram platform.

A lot of it was due to influencer partners that we did for National Depression Awareness Month. You mentioned, are you heard me mentioned about Kristen?

We certainly had a lot of likes through that. We also partnered with Jamie Moller, who is another therapist who also got the NeuroStar treatment, not sponsored treatment.

And so between their two follower groups, we’ve been able to reach over, you know, 300,000, nearly 400,000 people. So, you know, working with influencers is a different tool in our tool belt rather than just Google and meta advertising, right?

MiraDry is a, another sweat, is a sweat reduction product, it’s a non-surgical, non-surgical sweat reduction product that helps permanently reduce underarm sweat and odor.

When I worked on the brand and we had four million visits, had four times follower growth, and we did a lot of it through influencers.

know, we started first with Joey Gorga, Real Housewives, and so we spent all, we spent some, you know, fair amount of money, but we also found other ways to work with influence, other influencers that were less expensive, but, you know, certainly also had a lot

very good range of results. There’s Amber McLean, who’s a race car driver at Lindley Post and Raven Gates. Gia was actually, ironically, the niece of Joey Gorga.

She got the treatments and then was subsequently featured in People magazine. it helped really affirm that MiraDry can be, is frequently used for a lot of people too.

And then I always like to joke that my crowning achievement, of course, was when Lance Bass’s talent agent called us and said, Lance Bass is interested in the MiraDry treatment.

It’s got to be a prank. mean, Stewart, if Lance Bass’s talent agent called you, I’d be like, but I hope that you up to this, right?

But he truly did. He and his husband, know, went and got a MiraDry treatment. Lance Bass is over a million followers.

post had over 10,000 likes. Awesome. So, um, Sientra, when we worked on that implant brand, we saw 2x follower growth.

We went from nobody, uh, tagging us to working with a lot of different user-generated content. And it was, you know, cheaper than, um, than going to advertise with lots of celebrity, um, folks.

But we were able to measure ROI through a rebate program. Each influencer had a custom referral link. And then the Google Analytics, um, side of the, the web, the website tracked the engagement time once they came to our website, any searches, any patient interest that we then passed on, um, to, uh, Sientra Surgeons.

And so that kind of leads me to our final thoughts here. You know, how do we work with. influencers in medical devices.

as I alluded to at the beginning of the call, it is different. This was a recent, this happened in July, towards the end of July, FDA called out Brittany Mahone’s post for on Instagram.

It was a sponsored post. was false and misleading because it failed to include any risk information. So we never want to have that type of situation.

Those are the situations where our regulatory department gets really nervous about. So some of the things that I would recommend and of course talk with your regulatory department is you have to disclose hashtag add or hashtag sponsored that individual results may vary.

Be upfront about what your indications are and what your important safety information is. And then we use MLR as the term, but it’s legal, medical and regulatory review of all content.

That’s really to keep us safe from situations like this with the FDA. Other tips and tricks is looking at influencers on how to complement your existing strategies.

Finding a connection or a theme. What’s the connection? Can you wrap it into a campaign? So for us, two big moments in time is October, National Depression Awareness Month or mental health awareness month, which is in May.

So, you know, how do you work in your influencers into those moments in time? Followers are great, but it’s not everything.

So engagement is a much better measurement stick and also, you know, MLR all content before you post. You want to make sure it’s on brand, on label.

And then, last but not least, you want to make sure that there is a. contract with your influencer. know, nothing that is like, you know, I’m just gonna Venmo you some money if you could just make this post for me.

I always make sure that there’s a contract. I want to make sure that there’s a very clear definition of usage rights exclusivity.

That’s important too because you don’t want them posting about you or and then somebody else the next day who might be a competitor that dilutes your message.

And if money is tight in your budget working with influencers, you can negotiate on usage rights one month versus two months or exclusivity.

You could say, I want you to be exclusive for one week and see how that changes or as opposed to six months or a year.

So, you know, just think about all of those things as you put yourself into a contractual conversation with the influencer.

And so, yeah, I do invite, you know, Stewart, everybody, if anybody has questions, here’s my contact information. I’d love to speak to anybody about this. And how we could partner.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Awesome. love that.

Good. So, Wendy, thank you. That was awesome. I have a couple quick questions for you. One is, I often hear people worry about just dealing with, you know, any pool of humans, like personality is going to vary.

And I think influencers by definition, a lot of them at least, are going to be, maybe on the more extroverted side, sometimes I hear their flakier, or sometimes they’re some easier to deal with than others.

So like, in that topic, any insights of like how to find something you can work with or not, or, you know, maybe it’s all worth it anyway, or like, what are your thoughts there?

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

That’s a great question. So before I jump into any influencer type engagement or contract, I have a meeting with them first.

I want to know, are they going to be able to. One book, like for example, book time on my calendar, are they going to show up on time?

Are they well-versed, do they speak? I look at their other content that they’ve done, whether it’s for brands or for themselves, and I scrutinize all of that before I engage with them.

I find that those are usually the best situation of how you can figure out whether not you can work with them.

Other influencers have a talent house, so I’m working with a talent house right now for an influencer. Talent house is based in Canada, but they really know their stuff.

So they’re very much, you know, very timeline-driven, they organize everything for, those are the best situations because there’s somebody on the other end who’s helping manage that. its like their talent manager.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

God, that makes sense. then another question. The one of the things I just was listening to something else the other day, you know, is talking about make sure your contract has language about you being able to use the assets that come out of this for an extended period of time.

Otherwise, like, if it’s just a post and it comes and goes and seconds, but if you have rights, I’m curious, you’re nodding your head here, but like, just off the top of your head, doesn’t have to be everything, you know, like what are the key terms you think should be in a contract?

Like, that would be one, I think, is like, you know, how long is this, you know, how can you use it? What can you do? What can you not do? Certainly our assets available, but anything else you think would be really important to negotiate as you’re working with an influencer?

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Yeah, so it’s a great question. You know, obviously talk with your legal team about it, but what I usually throw out to, let’s say the talent house is I want to do “X”, right?

I want it for six months exclusivity. I want, and I always aim higher, right? want to this month, exclusivity, I want 100 like usage rights in perpetuity.

I want it to be a post where you’re going to collaborate, tag me, like add our brand as a collaborator on your post.

And then they tell you what the prices are for all of those things. Like, I want to link your story.

Well, let’s say for a link in the story, that’s $500.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah.

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

You know, for one year of exclusivity, it’s, it’s $1,000 for every month. I’m like, Oh, my God. So that, you know, you think about all these things, and then you look at your budget and you’re like, okay, let’s see my budgets $1,000.

What is most important to me? The things that I would guide somebody to look at is usage rights, you know, you want to get it for as long as possible, like perpetuity.

And if possible, and that you can advertise with that post or you can boost that post, because that brings that post to more and more people, friends and family of both collaborators, I would also ask if you can exclusivity to make sure that they’re not posting a competitor of yours, but also that they’re not posting immediately maybe a day before and a day after you.

That’s important because if they’re posting five things on that day of which you are just one of the five things, your content gets, doesn’t get seen by as many people and people don’t react to it as much because the algorithm isn’t allowing it to focus on you, for example, if they’re posting about your brand and then they post a really funny video afterwards.

Well, the funny video is probably gonna get more likes.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s great. That totally makes sense. And then I guess the last question I would have for you because this is common and all right so you’re the market you know depending on the business some marketing people have lots of esteem and then see the table and other companies and other providers they’re kind of kicked to the kids table so they you know they’re not in the in the room where it happens so if you’re in that other category where you really need to sell your boss and you don’t want to have them look what you like they’ve got through heads because there might be like the common thing is fear this is going to screw up our reputation this is going to be expensive it’s not going to yield anything any tips for someone is thinking about and trying to sell this internally

Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

yeah yeah we were just in that same boat we actually had a policy where we couldn’t work with influencers but one of the things we did was we worked ahead of time with our regulatory and legal partners to say this is what we want to do these are the goals are as well we made them partners as part of our overall goal and they understand that

influencers now are a way of life. And so they were very interested in helping us be part of that project.

But we also look for influencers that were a safe bet. So for example, you know, working with Kristen and Jamie looking at their content, they had produced content for quite some time.

It wasn’t their first time. It wasn’t their first rodeo. And they were very mental health providers as health care providers.

They understood that we have rules with the FDA that we have to, you know, stay with. And so they were very, very keen on working with us.

I think if I was a first time person, I would try to sell my boss on, you know, if it’s a $1,000 $3,000 budget.

So, you know, see if you can get that budget to be split amongst two influencers. answers and use that as a pilot or learning opportunity and see how well they do before investing.

We saw great success with Kristen and Jamie and so you know it was it was something that we baked in now to our 2025 plan but we did that in Q4, 2024, as a proof of concept not only to our boss but also to ourselves can we do something like this can we execute on this do we feel comfortable and confident if there were any red flags how do we deal with it right so you know I definitely am a big fan of piloting first before you run.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That’s great advice because that’s very real and I thought those tips were great I love the idea of talking to compliance first if you have that here because you took away the big objection we can’t go because of compliance they’re gonna tell you no before you even say get the words out right now we already talked to compliance and then starting with some safe bets with a modest budget was great and I think also I would just add

from just from experience of doing this for so long, setting appropriate expectations.

what does success look like?

Because we didn’t get 700 leads from this. well, it wasn’t really the right expectation in the opening. Anyway, Wendy, you’ve been great.

I knew you would be. This was fun. Some of the stuff we talked about here at the end was even more fun to me to like talk about the stuff between the lines.

So great job. I’ll make sure you put your LinkedIn profile on the post as well. So people can reach out to Wendy directly.

Thank you for being here.

@40:30 – Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

Of course. Any time I love doing this. And thank you so much for inviting me.

@40:33 – Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

All right. Keep in touch.

@40:30 – Wendy Suljak (NeuroStar Advanced Therapy)

All right.

Thank you.