HIStalk Interviews Jodi Amendola, CEO, Amendola Communications

Jodi Amendola is co-founder and CEO of Amendola Communications.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

Amendola Communications is a full-service agency that focuses on healthcare, healthcare tech, and life sciences. I’ve been in the industry for over 30 years, always on the agency side. I have worked with all types of companies of all sizes and stages of development to help them differentiate from their competitors; tell their story; and meet their growth goals through strategic acquisitions, IPOs, or organic growth.

I’m also a Forbes Agency Council contributor, digital health judge, PR pro, marketer, and storyteller.  love working every day with my 25-member A team and our 45 to 50 clients in the space.

Are companies still focused on lead generation?

Lead generation has taken front and center stage over the past one or two years. It has been a tough market and the sales pipeline and the sales cycle has been delayed. Everybody has been super cautious and there’s that trickle-down effect. Lead generation has become more important than anything else in our toolset.

Having a good list that is targeted is the biggest differentiator I’m seeing. That spray-and-pray approach that we had many years ago doesn’t really work. 

Lead generation once implied posting gated content, such as white papers, that required recipients to first provide their contact information. Social channels such as LinkedIn and YouTube allow anyone to view content. How does lead generation work for companies whose content is out in the open?

Most of our clients do a balance of both. They both have a place. We still do gated content, the high-value content. But LinkedIn and videos are posted on YouTube all the time. They are just another channel, another vehicle for sharing your thought leadership in generating your brand awareness.

Companies often cut back on marketing and PR during those lean times you mentioned. How does that decision play out as business conditions improve?

I’m happy to report seeing a little bit of an uptick in activity starting just last month. I would say that in October, things started to turn around a little bit. People are preparing for 2025, but tough times do often lead to folks cutting. That’s a time where the wiser strategy would be to increase the spend.

So many clients are focusing on wanting to fuel the sales pipeline, generate awareness, and differentiate themselves, so that stop-and-start can really hurt them. PR and marketing rely on momentum and dominating the conversation, and if you step back, your competitors will step right in.

Another option during the difficult times would be to evaluate, strategize, and pivot to focus on the activities that are really working and take a more focused approach. Maybe cut a little bit, but be laser focused and targeted instead of just cutting everything.

Do companies sometimes design their PR and marketing campaigns around attracting investors or acquirers rather than customers?

Absolutely.  One of the first questions we ask is, what’s your end game? What is your goal? Is it to attract investors? Is it to get acquired? Is it to go IPO? We need to know that to know who the best target audiences are for their customized PR marketing program.

We have seen a lot of that this year. I personally have had a couple of clients get acquired. That’s hard, because we may lose a client if they get acquired by a big company. I’ve had clients over the years get acquired by Aetna, Philips, and Stryker, and those big machines usually have their own internal marketing and PR infrastructure. But absolutely, many clients point towards a specific goal when we start out.

How do you advise companies to participate in conferences?

With budgets tightening, people are more judicious about which shows they attend, and mostly, which shows they exhibit at. I just came back from HLTH, for example. I had 21 clients there, but only five had booths. That’s definitely a big change from years ago, where I would have 25 clients at HIMSS and all 25 had a booth.

Companies are focusing on which shows will give them the biggest bang for the buck. They are choosing between HIMSS and ViVE since they are only two weeks apart and it’s hard to justify resources for going to both.

You want to consider your target audience. A health tech company that has a lot of HIT customers might find that HIMSS is a better choice. HLTH might be a better choice for a health tech company that is actively looking for funding because it’s a more investor-focused show.

Companies also need to focus on smaller, more targeted shows that address niche solutions or that have a regional focus. HFMA and HIMSS have local regional shows. We have one client, for example, that focuses on Alzheimer’s, so they attend big conferences like HIMSS and HLTH, but they also attend several Alzheimer’s and dementia-focused conferences.

The cost of spending money for a booth is often reallocated these days to doing a nice networking event or hosting a happy hour or a dinner instead. That gets them out of the booth and gives them the ability to do more networking and to take a targeted approach to meet with the folks who are really important to them. That is a high priority during tough economic times.

I’m still seeing user conferences. I’m seeing clients that are doing their own events, webinars, and in-person meetings. It’s a great way to bring together their clients and their partners to collaborate, introduce new product launches, brainstorm, and then get good content and video that can be leveraged for PR and marketing.

How do you advise companies on using X and LinkedIn?

They absolutely need a strategy. LinkedIn has grown in importance over the last couple of years. X has really decreased, and in fact we barely ever create an X strategy for our clients any more. It may be repurposing what we’re doing on LinkedIn on X, but LinkedIn is where it is at. That’s where the decision-makers are. That’s where the conversations are happening. It’s a platform that allows you to be authentic and conversational and provide thought leadership.

The trick with LinkedIn is being consistent and having an ongoing presence. Not only on the corporate side, but having people who are important in the company showcasing the corporate account through their own personal accounts. I always say that people follow people.

How should companies tailor content so that doesn’t just get a lot of likes, but that also gets a message to the decision-makers who might actually buy their product or service?

There’s paid LinkedIn and organic LinkedIn. We do both, but the key is storytelling for engagement. LinkedIn is a two -way conversation. You have to engage with your targets with comments, likes, and posts, and you have to vary  your content.  You have to be consistent with your content. Share that you are a thought leader. Talk about lessons learned. You have to provide value and education instead of being self-serving . 

Every since TED talks caught on, we’ve heard about the value of storytelling, but LinkedIn posts are often dull truisms or gimmicky broad advice. How do you show individuality?

You can certainly repurpose articles, but share your point of view. That’s where the storytelling comes in. How does it solve your client’s pain points? Showcasing your expertise, maybe some of your success stories, advice, or lessons learned. Sharing surprising facts or presenting a challenge to engage them.

Treat it like a community. Don’t just post and expect engagement. You have to engage with them and hit them in different ways.

Today we really don’t advocate writing long white papers. People just don’t have the attention span. You want to hit them with something that’s impactful on social. It could be a video or poll. There’s lots of different approaches.

How do you recommend the use of podcasts or video interviews?

We definitely recommend doing podcasts and video interviews. We live in this multimedia-driven world, and people like sound bites and the option to listen or watch something versus read a long article. It’s the world that we are living in. It’s also a nice way for the CEO or whoever the thought leader is to express their insights and showcase their personality.

But you have to be cautious. You have to look at the details about the podcast or the video. How big is it? Who is the target audience? Because increasingly, podcasts are content marketing vehicles, and they may be positioned to look more like an independent channel or a media outlet. You want to make sure that the podcast is affiliated with a company that you’re OK with. Then, listen to those podcasts. Listen to the previous interviews and see if it makes sense to you. 

Once you do the podcast, if it’s right for you, then we always recommend that our clients amplify the podcast on their corporate and personal LinkedIn channels. Leverage it everywhere, such as e-newsletters to customers and prospects, and on your website. The key is to keep it short. Keep it focused. Have them professionally done. It’s positive because video content on LinkedIn increases linger time, which can improve a company’s LinkedIn metrics. 

How is AI being used in PR and marketing work? 

Just as AI tools are growing in popularity in healthcare, they are definitely advancing in marketing and PR, and I think they are here to stay. We use AI tools on a daily basis for identifying relevant journalists based on keywords from a press release, a thought leadership pitch, or transcription from an intake call or meeting.

We can build from that, but PR is relationship-based. We leverage our long-term relationships with the media. Sometimes we can supplement that approach and connect with a new member of the media. Some of our team members use generative AI for getting their creative juices going, like for research, ideation, and facilitating their writing thought process. But nothing can replace the brains of our writers or our PR pros, at least not yet. 

We know that hallucinations that can occur with tools like ChatGPT, where the tool says something that’s incorrect, but states it in an authoritative way. That can be dangerous. And as you know because you accept submitted articles, there’s definitely the risk of plagiarism. Some of these tools are pulling information together from multiple sources without any citations. This creates legal and ethical implications if you don’t use duplicate copy checkers. We use AI, but with caution.

Consumer-focused companies create buyer personas, then test and target their message. Does that work in the limited universe of health systems?

Absolutely. You have to start with the buyer persona. If you don’t know who your buyer is, then how are you going to target them? Very often clients know who their buyers are and flesh out the buyer personas. Sometimes there’s the actual buyer and then the influencers of that buyer, so we need to have at two -pronged approach in reaching both of them.

Then the trick is the messaging to those audiences. What is the value proposition to those buyer personas? Companies usually have multiple target audiences, so it’s understanding the value that they bring, how they solve those pain points, and then being able to promote their story to solve those pain points. But in a concise way. It’s like the elevator pitch. If you ask somebody what they do, they should be able to tell you in just a couple of sentences and not ramble on and on.

What are companies asking you to do for them over the next year or two?

This year we’ve seen a lot of integrated marketing campaigns. A campaign approach with all facets, such as social media, PR, lead gen, and digital, combined into one consolidated program versus operating in silos or trying one area over another. It is staying on top of the latest LinkedIn algorithms, staying on top of the SEO algorithms, being different.

A lot of companies want to be different now, not just do the same old, same old, because budgets are tighter. I think things will open up a little bit, especially the first quarter of the year and as we get into trade show season. Metrics is really a game changer. Everybody wants consistency and metrics and to know how you’ve influenced the sales cycle.