Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Larry. Larry, welcome to the show.
Larry Kaiser00:00 — you.
Thanks for having me, Ben. Looking forward to the conversation.
Benjamin Ard00:06 — Yeah.
Larry, this is going to be cool. This is something marketers are really focused on right now. But before we dive in, Larry, let's let the audience get to know you a little bit. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about your background, work history, all that fun stuff, I think it'd be a great for great way for us to kick off the episode.
Larry Kaiser00:22 — Sure, well, my name is Larry Kaiser. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT. We are a staffing digital transformation consulting firm focusing on things like Epic Electronic Health Record or ServiceNow, Workday, AWS, in the cloud for EHRs and so forth. So pretty much any and all needs a provider organization may have in healthcare, we provide some consulting services around that. I've been in healthcare IT for 22 years.
which is a great industry to be in. I never thought I would be in the industry for 22 years, that's for sure. And I got my start as an RFP manager. So I went from RFP manager and 22 year old, I became a CMO about six years ago. So I've hit every aspect of marketing and healthcare IT and it's a lot of fun to do.
Benjamin Ard01:10 — I love it. That's amazing. Well, Larry, I'm excited. This is a conversation. After COVID kind of went away, events started to make a comeback. People are craving in-person opportunities to meet. You just got off a couple events. You're just about to go to more events. A huge amount of your budget is going towards events. So today we're going to talk about content, how it focuses, or how we can focus content with events, collecting it pre-post, all that kind of fun stuff. So we'll dive into it.
Larry, why are you focusing so much on events right now? What, is kind of the point? What are you seeing from event marketing at the moment?
Larry Kaiser01:43 — Well, healthcare IT is very much a relationship driven industry. It's multi-billion dollar industry, but extremely niche. And if you don't have that in-person meetings and the in-person relationship building, ultimately you're not gonna do very well.
in this industry. So for us, my organization, roughly 60, a little bit over 60 % of our budget is dedicated to the events. So I just said we just came off to the largest health care IT shows in the industry of Vive and HIMS and Q1. And it's very, very important for us to get in front of people. We work very hard.
whether it's having a booth or having a reception. Sometimes these are sponsored receptions that we're the only vendor in the room. But for us, you have to make those relationships. You have to build them. You have to cultivate them. It takes time. It takes energy. But if you don't do that, you're not going to be successful. So that's why it's very important for us.
Benjamin Ard02:38 — I love it.
Yeah. So with those two big events and I kind of in a former company worked in the industry, I know those are big time events. What are you noticing trend wise? What are you doing? That's really working at these events to get in front of the right people, to make a presence, to kind of engage before, during, and after any trends you're noticing about things working at events today.
Larry Kaiser03:02 — Well, each show is different. The first show of our year was Vive, which is a newer show. It's only been around about five years, but it's probably one A or one B in the industry right now. In that show, we have a pretty substantial spend as a sponsor, where we...
have stage presentations that we are sponsoring. So we get on stage and find everybody on the floor. So we have to pick these topics, usually some are digital transformation side or lately we're able to merge a lot of those things together. So one is getting the speaking engagements. And that's number one, right? Finding that client that's going to give you the advocacy to go on stage with you, share their story and how we assisted them being successful. From a content perspective, once we get that, it's a matter of working through the talk track.
promoting it, of course, on social and so forth. And that's been very successful for us. We have a booth at that show and this is our second year doing it. Next year, I decided to contract for a bigger booth because you need that presence, right? You need people that will walk by your booth and stop and your presentation. Hey, come by the booth and talk to us. Also at that show, we do a sponsored reception. It's basically a white labeled reception, but we get to control who comes to it.
And that has been very, very, the ROI on that show is very high because it's extremely targeted because we can control a lot of pieces of it. At this show, it's probably more the decision maker, right? That CIO or that C-suite area level for us. So buying into that show, right? Investing in that show.
and doing everything that we're doing allows us to get the people we need to get with, make those connections, like I said, and build those relationships. Some of those relationships are people that have been coming to multiple events over the years. Some of them are new. Just because you make a connection with somebody on day one doesn't mean they're signing a contract with you on day two. It takes time. The other show we went to, Hymns, is probably more decision influencers. We don't have a booth at that show. We have...
Last couple years we've had a meeting room where we've had obviously meetings and we had our own reception where we get almost 200 people at that reception, right? Whether it's partners or prospects or clients. Next year we're switching it up a little bit. We're getting a kiosk where we're gonna be able to have a presentation. We wanted to get the presentation on the floor.
So with that comes the kiosks. So we're going to focus on a lot of AI focused stuff around one of our service lines and have a client presentation up there as well. But really it's that reception. That reception drives everything. People will come to our receptions and you can shake hands, kiss babies, right? You're giving them a ⁓ casual way to come in, meet you or
continued a conversation you had someplace else. We include our partners in there because this is a very partnership driven industry as well. So we work with the likes of AWS and Microsoft and ServiceNow and Workday and various other vendors that are specific to certain service lines. And they come into our reception as well because even though we know them, it's still sitting down with somebody and.
having a beverage or sharing a quick meal is always a great way to build those relationships up. So those are the trends I'm seeing. I'm seeing more organizations are focusing on that social aspect, more so than even the business aspect of being on the floor with a booth or something like that. But any opportunity you can get to sit down with somebody as the only vendor in the room, I'm seeing more more firms doing that. And that's something we've been doing for 10 plus years.
Benjamin Ard06:24 — I love that.
Building the relationships, having an opportunity to be outside of a work setting per se and get to know the individual, get to know their real needs and wants, making sure you can work together, build trust. That's amazing. In your industry, we talked about this a little bit before we hit, you know, click record. Thought leadership is kind of a big deal when it comes to your content. You're talking about getting in front of these individuals. You're using partners. You have stage presence. You're talking and educating.
how do you figure out what content to present? And then after you've presented and shared that content, how are you repurposing and using maybe recordings or anything after the event to kind of draw people back in and kind of get extra value out of the event and that sponsorship?
Larry Kaiser07:09 — Yeah, really good question. we, as a services-driven organization, and as you and I are talking about, thought leadership, content creation is really what drives that. That's how you share your expertise, that you know what you're talking about, how you share your clients' successes, and so forth. So we aim to publish at least one piece of content a week, whether it's a blog post, or a case study, or a white paper, or an infographic, or whatever it may be. So if we know that...
At a particular conference, we're doing a session about cloud services, for example. Well, leading up to that presentation, we maybe will repurpose some older content that talks about that topic leading up to it to promote that, we have this presentation. We're talking about this topic right here. Then, at most of these events, these presentations are filmed. We just got our.
filmed presentations from the Vive conference, for example, and they start hitting. We published one last week and one going this week. But we're able to take that video, right? We put it using some AI or just listening and transcribing or the transcription program. And we pull content out of that. And we may write a blog post about what that presentation covered. And then we embed the video in it. Or we may do a white paper or something like that. We were able to pull it out.
and then use it in multiple different ways for several different touch points. For example, the presentation we did at Vive a couple of months ago, one of those individuals who was on that panel is gonna be on our podcast. I think we're recording it in another month or so. We're gonna publish that leading into the specific show we're going to. In this case, it was Microsoft, so we're gonna go to Microsoft Ignite. We're gonna publish that podcast.
leading into that and then repurpose the video that we recorded at the other show, which is talking exactly about what we're going to be doing at Microsoft. So you're able to tie it all together into weave it across all your channels and get the most bang for your buck from that content. So that presentation, which, you know, let's just say it costs $25,000 for that sponsorship, I'm able to pull so much stuff from it to help us garner additional opportunities with other vendors. So that's how we approach it, at least.
Benjamin Ard09:13 — I love it. Now, distribution is always a side of content that I'm really fascinated by. We have the means, you're going to events, you're creating really powerful content, you're repurposing other content leading up to it, things of that nature. How are you distributing the content? Obviously with SEO and things kind of changing towards AI-based search, things of that nature. Have you focused a lot on email distribution, social media? Is it traditional SEO and other opportunities?
How are you actually getting eyeballs on the content that you're working so hard to produce?
Larry Kaiser09:44 — Yeah, so I think that's a multi-tiered answer there. So healthcare IT is a very, again, a very unique industry. So a lot of traditional marketing activities don't necessarily work. You could stop any, you can go into a healthcare IT trade show, speak to any CIO and they'll say, what is the least favorite way you wish to do something, get content? They'll tell you email across the board.
I have been told a number of times that you can send me all the emails you want. It's never getting to me. I will never see it. So we don't do much with email at all. LinkedIn is our primary distribution channel for content. We've experienced exponential growth. So 24 into 25, we grew by 100%. We doubled our following.
In 2025, we had an 88 % growth. I wasn't ever going to expect to get 100 % growth two years in a row, but we got pretty darn close. It does get a lot harder. It does. And then three years ago, I decided people really, how many times do you see on people's website, sign up for our newsletter, give us your first name, your last name, your email, and your company. People don't want to give their data out.
Benjamin Ard10:31 — Incredible.
That's also incredible.
It's a lot harder the second year once you had the first year.
Larry Kaiser10:55 — Right. So we pulled that down and we when LinkedIn launched their newsletter functionality several years ago, we signed up. We started doing that. So people can subscribe to your newsletter without giving out their personal information. Now, the one downside is that, you know, probably about 99 percent of people have their personal email, right? Not their work email. But I'm not seeing it. But I can tell you in we have two hundred and five thousand followers on LinkedIn.
Our newsletter has close to 60,000 subscribers. So when we publish a piece of content and we publish, we post something on LinkedIn at least once a day. And there's one unique piece of content published every week. This is, we started publishing our newsletter on Wednesdays this year.
So if we publish a new piece of content, it's either Monday or Tuesday right now. And then on Wednesday, we publish the newsletter, which is a recap of the current piece of content we've done. We reflect on the two pieces of content from the two previous weeks. We put in an events section of upcoming events. And then we put some high profile news articles we may have come across that people may not have seen.
So we publish to LinkedIn directly, and we use the LinkedIn newsletter functionality for most of our content. Of course, it all leads back to our website. We want to get the eyes on the website. ⁓ We no longer publish our content on X, Twitter. Occasionally, depending on what the content is, we'll publish it on Instagram or Facebook, usually for publishing videos, like if it's a video promo for our podcast. That'll go on Instagram.
Benjamin Ard12:07 — Mm-hmm.
Larry Kaiser12:20 — LinkedIn, sorry, Facebook is more our cultural employee engagement kind of platform, but occasionally we'll post content on there as well just because my original, you see the logo here on my shirt, we changed on our 10th anniversary. So.
Four and a half years ago, we updated the logo of the organization. while it doesn't look like it's the same exact shape, the infinity symbol, Meta didn't like it. So when I updated our logo on our page, they deleted my page. So we had to recreate our Facebook page. We lost a couple thousand followers on there. But really, it's all about LinkedIn.
Benjamin Ard12:43 — Mm.
Larry Kaiser12:54 — That's where our target market lives and that's where we post it more than anything.
Benjamin Ard13:00 — I love it. Recognizing where your audience is just because there's a channel out there doesn't mean you need to invest it if your audience is not taking there. And I love the acknowledgement like everyone's going to say, well, email is the greatest thing ever. And for you to say, you know what, our audience hates it. So we're going to be okay with that. We're going to be okay not going investing in that.
Larry Kaiser13:06 — I will.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we have several, like we, there's a blog in healthcare IT that's like the most read blog in healthcare team. We have a, we're a sponsor of that. So they run all of our content. You know, the organization, another organization we work with, we can give them anything we want to give them and they'll post it on their website again, cause we're a member. So we take advantage of that partner stuff as well. But yeah, you don't just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Benjamin Ard13:35 — Mm-hmm.
I love it. Very cool.
Yeah. A hundred percent. So there's this emerging trend and we're getting close to running out of time. So I'll try to sneak this question in right at the end. And this has been incredible. There's this trend where, especially with LinkedIn content, businesses are promoting employees to publish content, to be their thought leaders and things like that, as opposed to coming out from the brand. What is your thought leadership program look like with events? You know, are you, you putting specific people on stage?
Larry Kaiser13:43 — when it comes to putting your content online.
Benjamin Ard14:11 — Obviously you're using partners, so there's user generated content, partner content, but how does like the individual publication and authority really come through the events and content side of things? Or do you focus more on the brand and your industry? that work really well? How does, like, how is that crossing your plate? What's your thoughts there?
Larry Kaiser14:31 — We approach that a couple of different ways. Usually at a trade show, if an SVP is on stage with some clients, we'll maybe give the SVP some content to post along with the standard stuff. A lot of times when we do it, it's more so we do that specific people with webinars. We'll write content for them to post and Ghost write it for them. In some cases, they'll write it themselves.
⁓ But really at the shows we're focusing more so on the brand. With I would say, let's say the brand is 90 % and specific individuals are 10%. Depending on the event, yeah.
Benjamin Ard15:05 — Love it.
Very cool. Awesome. Well, Larry, to keep these episodes short, let people get back to their days. We have run out of time, but thank you for the time and effort. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Larry Kaiser15:14 — Of course, thanks for having me.
In a business sense, I live on LinkedIn. So you find me on LinkedIn. That's where personals are personals with LinkedIn for sure.
Benjamin Ard15:26 — Love it. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. We will link to Larry's LinkedIn profile right there. Click on the link. Tell Larry you came from the podcast. Tell him hello and thank him for all the good insights. Larry, again, thank you for the insights and everything you shared today. It was wonderful. Really appreciate it.
Larry Kaiser15:44 — Thanks for having me, Ben. was an enjoyable conversation.
