Happy Thursday, Hospitalogists!
Every now and then I do more of an introspective post on how I think things are going with Hospitalogy, what's happened over the past year, and where things are headed next. Today's newsletter is that. I'll cover growth, struggles, triumphs, and more (and of course my college football picks for the week). Tune in. |
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STATE OF THE HOSPITALOGIST |
But First…Some Big (Small) News I've been waiting for a while to drop this news, so here goes! My wife and I are expecting our first, a son, near the end of September, and we're incredibly excited. While we're learning how to keep a small human alive, things will change for Hospitalogy over the next couple of months while I'm out on leave over Q4. - First, I will continue to write the Tuesday newsletter, but bear with me as I adjust to a new life :)
- Secondly, I've opened up my Thursday sends to the Board Room to give them opportunities to guest post on the newsletter. The Board Room is full of thoughtful folks and I'm excited to give them the chance to share their perspectives across healthcare with you all.
I'll be hitting the ground running again in December! All About Hospitalogy Growth Since launching Hospitalogy officially in April 2022 with ~2,000 subscribers and through a combination of organic (naturally acquired) and paid growth, Hospitalogy sits at around 20,800 subscribers as of this writing. So far in 2023, I've averaged growth of a little over 1,000 subscribers per month (including the list clean in June). For those who might be relatively new to Hospitalogy, I write 2 newsletters a week (among other initiatives which we'll dive into). Tuesday is my 'news-based' roundup and analysis, where I write about 1-3 big headlines that week and drop a host of other links & analysis useful for healthcare folks across strategy/finance/M&A/health tech. On Thursday (like today), I write an essay that can be a number of things - a commentary or editorial, a financial analysis, strategy breakdown a guest post, or anything healthcare business related, really. Based on that output, folks from across healthcare (hospitals & health systems, payors, investors, consultants, health tech) have subscribed. My audience comprises a wide array of incredible people who, simply put, are way smarter than I am. Meeting subscribers is the favorite part of my job. It's also the hardest part - I feel compelled to respond to each and every one to you because I consider that a privilege to do so! One of the north star metrics tracked is unique opens - i.e., 'how many people are actually reading Hospitalogy?' and to that end, it looks like things are going well. After cleaning up the list a bit in May, my average unique opens per send are at or above the 14,000. Although open rates are a bit inflated post-Apple changes, an open rate of ~60+% is where I sit today. This something I want to maintain, even with continued growth. |
I'm not going to lie to you guys. The grind is real, and writing is an art that can't be manufactured or faked. Sometimes I'll look up from my desk on a Wednesday without having a clue as to what I'm writing the next day. Content creation, maintaining an online presence for growth, and holding yourself to a certain quality standard on weekly basis is tough. Impostor syndrome is real. Sometimes, people online yell at you for no reason. Or chastise you for writing about your golf round (hilarious). A growing pain has been to not take these things personally! What has worked well? I go into this in my upcoming toolkit, but I would attribute the growth primarily to consistency and quality of the content - the ability to drop writing and analysis that attracts the healthcare industry's attention (data visualization, analysis, not shying away from hard truths) specifically valuable to my audience. For anyone wanting to dive into the content game full send, I highly encourage you to think about how you can balance consistency and quality to grow your audience (YOUR target audience), as I'd consider those the two most important elements. Set expectations, but be realistic. How to define quality, though? For me, a quality send includes original thought or analysis and is novel and useful to my target audience. I'll usually know I hit the mark when I get good, thoughtful responses from folks via my newsletter inbox - or when people are sharing it in their company Slack channels. The ultimate compliment, in my mind! |
You might remember Freshpaint from my last virtual event, where we chatted about how marketers survive a HIPAA world. Given the headaches that tracking technologies are causing, healthcare marketers everywhere are wondering what the heck they need to do to keep the advertising lights on while staying HIPAA-compliant. As if on cue, Freshpaint has put together a comprehensive write-up based on their countless conversations, lots of webinars, and frequently asked questions from marketers and compliance experts. The article answers 26+ of the most common questions facing healthcare marketers today including: - How HIPAA impacts the data marketers need to be successful
- Why tracking technologies from popular tools like Google Analytics, Facebook, and others creates risk for health care providers
- What approaches health care marketers can take to keep those tools running while staying compliant
A highly recommended read for anyone facing these issues and I'm a big fan of the Freshpaint team! They have a great resource center chock full of good content for healthcare marketers. Read the Article |
What's next for growth: Along with just doing my newsletter thing, the growth plan for Hospitalogy includes continuing to grow on the social platform formerly known as Twitter, and LinkedIn (which has seen amazing reach for me as of late - I will quickly pass Twitter at this rate). We're also adding in a referral program with referral rewards that will ACTUALLY be useful and desired by you guys, including a revamping of the Hospitalogy Health Tech index as the first reward, and other useful or fun stuff mixed in. The Expanding Hospitalogy Ecosystem Although I wish everyone could give everything away for free, Hospitalogy is also a business and attached to Workweek. The team at Workweek has been instrumental to my success. They are utterly fantastic. Aside from newsletter sponsorships and finding the right advertising partners (thanks to Freshpaint for sponsoring today's), we've launched a number of initiatives to monetize Hospitalogy in a thoughtful, valuable way: - Board Room: We launched Board Room in late Q1, and it was a slog getting the executive healthcare community from 0-1. Today, the community sits at around 45 healthcare executives & professionals and the organic direction it is heading makes me look forward to the future.
- Virtual events: Something incredibly unnatural and uncomfortable for me as an introvert was diving headfirst into virtual events / webinars. Apparently you guys love my virtual events, so we'll keep doing them!
- Sponsored deep dives: I love highlighting companies working to change healthcare and wrote about First Dollar in January. This is an arena I want to continue to expand on and do more often - providing fair analysis for companies but also highlighting them and the problems they're trying to solve. Sponsored deep dives (and deep dives in general) help me & readers learn more about the various corners of healthcare.
What's next? Toolkits and Resources including databooks for publicly traded players and nonprofit health systems, talent acquisition & hiring, live events down the line, and continued Board Room growth. I also want to continue to grow in writing ability. Sometimes I hide behind big words, buzzwords, and analysis, and I apologize for that! My best performing content so far into 2023 I like to think that my writing is getting better and my voice is getting stronger (always looking to improve, of course) as I continue down this creator path. With that being said, here are some of my favorite essays so far from 2023 based on audience reaction and my own enjoyment writing them: Thank you for supporting me - and HOW to support me best When I started the Healthy Muse (my original newsletter back when I was a consultant in late 2018), I had no vision or strategy around growing it into what Hospitalogy is today. I had no idea that I'd someday be a healthcare creator with the opportunity to meet smart, thoughtful, passionate folks across the ecosystem. So, thank you for reading Hospitalogy. Thank you for being a part of this. And thank you for supporting me and what I've created. My mantra from day one of this thing was to grind the crap out of this newsletter, put one foot in front of the other, and provide you with consistent, reliable, quality content & analysis, and I hope to continue to do that to provide healthcare industry folks with the most value I can eke out of my 5'9 frame. If you love what's being built here and want to maximize your ability to support me, you can do the following: - Share the newsletter around with your colleagues whenever you find it useful!
- Open EVERY single newsletter I send out (Unique Open Rate on my email is my north star metric)
- Click on the newsletter sponsorships that are relevant to you and learn more about them. I personally write the ad copy for all of my newsletters and we are thoughtful about who we work with on the advertising front.
- Join my Board Room community
- Give me feedback!! Respond to the newsletter with your thoughts, shoot me notes or inside baseball around the stuff I cover, and inform my future content. What should I write about? Who should I meet? What do I need to be paying attention to? Readers are the blood of Hospitalogy. The cardiovascular system, if you will. Ha!
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- Blake's Bets Week 2! Running record so far: 2-3 (why you should never listen to me). Week 2 picks:
- USC -29 vs. Stanford
- Texas +7 @ Alabama (c'mon Horns!!)
- UCF -3.5 @ Boise State
- Notre Dame +7.5 @ NC State
- SMU +15.5 @ OU (c'mon ponies!!)
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Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. — Blake |
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