How Healthcare Marketers Can Improve the Mobile Experience

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

With the dramatic rise of mobile-enabled devices, healthcare marketers are looking for new ways to connect with mobile users. Stand-alone mobile sites and mobile apps just aren’t cutting it.

It’s time to consider a whole new approach to the mobile Web. One that is much more efficient for healthcare marketers to maintain and improves the mobile experience for visitors to your website.

It’s called responsive design.

Responsive design enables a website to automatically adjust to the device being used. Every site visitor has an optimal experience regardless of whether they are accessing the website with a Smartphone, tablet or on a desktop computer.

Geonetric’s Vice President Ben Dillon shares how Cone Health and Rush-Copley Medical Center leverage responsive design in his latest article “Connecting With Mobile Users: Responsive Design Offers a New Approach” which appeared in Issue 2, 2013 of the Healthcare Strategy Alert! published by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists.

Check out the article and see how responsive design helped these healthcare organizations meet their online goals.

Newsjacking Angelina Jolie

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Jill Jensen

You may find no better subject for newsjacking than Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. The New York Times op-ed piece by Angelina Jolie—My Medical Choice—caused a big stir and lit up the interwebs within hours of its publication on May 14, 2013. And it was still going strong a day later.

Did you get on the bandwagon? Did you newsjack this story? Or were you curating content? Each approach has its merits, but you need to be aware of what you’re doing so you can be effective and efficient. Since trend data on this topic may not even show up for a couple of days, you want to engage the conversation at the sweet spot where everyone’s still talking.

Newsjacking provides your expert, quotable insights on a topic. (See our recent post, Newsjacking: Seize the Second Paragraph, for details.) It offers your original perspective and helps position you as the go-to source for more information on the issue. If breast care, cancer care, or genetic testing are important services for your organization, be prepared to join the conversation quickly.

Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames, Iowa, took that approach by repurposing relevant content for the current context. Key points? They knew they had an existing piece that fit the bill—a patient’s decision after genetic testing—and they understood how to reframe and expand it with original information to hit the topic of the day. Of course, they were paying attention to the news and took advantage of the opening.

https://twitter.com/MaryGreeley/status/334328983313326081

When you curate content, you sort through the fire hose of online information, pull out interesting links from assorted sources, and republish them under a cohesive theme with a bit of context as framework.

Curating content is a valuable service—one that definitely should be part of your marketing toolkit. But why not take a few minutes to talk with the breast care/cancer care/genetic testing specialists at your facility, gather comments on the issues involved, and be ready to make an original contribution to the conversation? You’ll build credibility in your own market, as well as with news organizations who will recognize your value and come knocking the next time they need expert input.

Whether you newsjack or curate, go light on the self-promotion. Just being in the conversation—and providing information that helps your readers—garners more than enough attention. Remember, it’s always about being helpful to your audience first.

The Keys to Creating Great Content

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

You know it was a great workshop when you took away so many great points you couldn’t even fit them all into one blog post!

As I mentioned in my Invest More Time in Developing Content for Digital Properties post, I recently attended the content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week.

One great insight I heard is the fact that truly great content marketing happens at the intersection of user needs, resources and business strategy.

As Ed Bennett, Scott Linabarger and Shel Holtz explained, to create great content, adhere to the following strategies:

Align with business needs. Some content is simply going to be more valuable to the organization than others, so focus on strategically important specialties and then partner with your service line marketing folks to understand what moves the business. Content is a long-term strategy and not an event, so meet regularly to identify, prioritize, review and plan. At the Cleveland Clinic, Scott Linabarger asks the following questions to determine what content will be most valuable: What will people travel for? What do we do best? What do we offer that is unique? Where are the growth opportunities?
Be user focused. This applies not only to the writing style that you employ but also to the content you choose to develop and the way you deliver it. Start with a general idea of user needs and then refine with analytics. For example, Cleveland Clinic noticed an increase in food-focused searches on its site around 4:00 pm on weekdays. Why? Most likely consumers are getting hungry or planning dinner. An interesting insight, but what can you do with that information? The Clinic started regularly posting recipes in the late afternoon with great success. To ensure that they’re posting recipes that their audience wants, they occasionally ask their Facebook followers what they’d like to see. A typical morning post might be about breakfast choices, information to help in planning your day, or a topic about things that are interfering with a good night’s sleep. Mid-afternoon is often recipes. While a late night post could discuss how doing yoga improves sleep.
Editorial calendar. It’s hard to consistently deliver great content if you’re waiting for a spark of inspiration. Plan in advance what content is needed and commit to a regular schedule.
Stretch your content investments by leveraging a range of formats. Look, for example, at how McKinsey Quarterly unbundles research reports – they offer a summary abstract, the full report, the full report in eBook format, along with podcasts, short video interviews and sometimes even infographics.

For more information on content marketing and content production for your website, check out Geonetric’s white paper on Web writing for healthcare and learn more about the latest in content marketing trends.

Invest More Time Developing Content for Digital Properties

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

In truth, we should be spending more time on content and less on functionality, organization and design.

This was the underlying message in a content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week. The workshop, led by industry heavyweights Ed Bennett from University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), Scott Linabarger from the Cleveland Clinic and consultant Shel Holtz not only discussed the growing importance of good content, but also focused on steps to develop and promote this information. Here are just some of the highlights:

Every organization is a media company now.

This used to be the case for companies that made their money selling content or allowing the rest of us to accomplish our marketing goals by advertising alongside that content. Today, thanks to Tivo, dual-screen viewing, or the ability to tune out, consumers can easily ignore the flood of messages that make up a normal day.

People couldn’t care less about our hospitals right up to the point when they need us.

So the best strategy is have the content they need available and findable at that moment when an individual consumer needs it. Then become the key health information resource for them. Regardless of their health situation and level of engagement.

We’re seeing convergence.

PR is no longer just earned media. The lines blur. Earned, owned or paid and social are all colliding. When someone sees a video that a friend shared, they don’t care if that video was created as a TV ad created by your agency or by an enterprising individual in your emergency department. They only care if it’s interesting, relevant and engaging.

Content must be discoverable.

UMMC’s Ed Bennett asks a simple question – Why do our Web visitors come here? The answer is often as simple as they were recently diagnosed with some condition, searched the Web for more information and found UMMC content. So the discussion moved on how to make your content findable:

The most obvious, but sometimes overlooked answer is to get your content online. For example, you may put out a print magazine, but it’s never there when you need it. Putting that content online creates an asset with lasting value.
Avoid vapor – have good content and lots of it.
Don’t ignore the long tail – UMMC has 80 doctors and other medical professionals answering an amazing 12,000(!) patient questions every year. They’re creating great content that’s very discoverable. The long tail is important here because these are the terms that allow you to compete with fewer people for consumers who are more likely to come to you.

It’s important to create content that’s very shareable as well.

My.Clevelandclinic.org is a busy site with more than 4 million visits per month. The health encyclopedia format worked well for findability in search engines but made the content less prone to be shared so they’ve added a new Web property called HealthHub for newsy, topical health articles written by or reviewed by Cleveland Clinic experts. HealthHub features 3-5 new posts each day in one of five content categories:

Improve my health today
Validate me and my condition
Give me hope
Cure me now
Tell me something I didn’t know

Shareability and findability are both important.

Don’t just study Google’s Pagerank algorithm. Also learn about Facebook Edgerank, the rating it uses to determine what posts appear in a Facebook user’s new feed. Edgerank takes into account not only how current a piece of content is, but also an individual’s relationship with the brand posting it based on how they’ve interacted with that brand since becoming a follower. Clicking “Like” on a post doesn’t account for as much value as clicking on the link in a post or sharing posts from the brand with their own friends. So getting Facebook followers is important but most people who like a brand on the popular social networking site never go back. Engagement is more important to Edgerank than the sheer number followers that you have.

When looking at content sharing the number of views is less important than the number of shares. If they’re not talking about you, you don’t exist.

That’s not all!

As you can see, it was a great session with a lot of takeaways. In fact, I couldn’t fit them all into this blog post. Check out The Keys to Creating Great Content for more information from this workshop.

eHealth Symposium 2013: Creating, Innovating, Pushing Boundaries

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Engelmann

Last week we held our 8th annual eHealth Symposium. Clients from all over the country came to Iowa to work together on pushing the boundaries of healthcare marketing. With a jam-packed agenda of topics ranging from the latest website design trends to agile marketing methods to newsjacking, clients left with brains full of new ideas, knowledge and relationships:

Heading back to the ‘boro.Taking with me great information, good memories and new @geonetric friendships. #geolive

— Matt McKinney (@MattMcKNC) April 25, 2013

Clients also received a healthy dose of Iowa hospitality, which consists of overwhelming friendliness, and over-the-top food:

Taking a lot of inspiration, ideas and knowledge back from #geolive. With all the great food, probably also bringing back 5 lbs.

— karamoran (@karamoran) April 24, 2013

It helps that we hold the event at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center, which is unlike any hotel you’d expect to find in Iowa:

Is this a Vegas Hotel? No, it’s Iowa. Really. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The entryway to the Hotel at Kirkwood. Gorgeous, fantastic coffee, friendly staff, and cozy places to hang out between sessions. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The Hotel also happens to come with a culinary school serving up delicious meals every 2-3 hours. In fact, that’s how we kicked off this year’s event, with Chef Anthony Green, talking about ways to take an ordinarily mundane recipe, Caesar salad, and kick it up a notch or three.

Everything’s better deep fried: Chef Anthony Green kicks a mundane Caesar salad recipe up a notch by making it from scratch, then deep frying it or pureeing it.

Our clients are such good sports – they volunteered to help whip up a deep fried Caesar salad on TV in front of everyone.

You never know what you're volunteering for when your raise your hand. You might wind up making a deep fried Caesar salad from scratch.

Chef Green asks for a volunteer from the audience – did you know you’d have to touch anchovies?

Having pushed culinary boundaries, it was time to move into more serious material. Two days full of speakers and presenters covered topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Speakers and presenters covered a dozen topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Geonetric experts doing what they do best: helping clients get the most from their relationship with us.

John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, was our keynote speaker. He blasted apart conventions about branding. His entertaining and irreverent message was pitch-perfect, as Geonetric and clients work together to shake up the staid industry of healthcare marketing.

Author and brand guru John Morgan, our keynote speaker, discussed building brands in today’s social world. Fun fact that I learned: they have a pharmacy at Disney World. You’ll have to read his book to learn why it matters. *shameless plug*

Ben Dillon presented on emerging trends in our industry, and how they affect clients.

eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, presents on emerging trends in the industry.

Geonetric’s eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, mesmerizes the room with that same sultry radio voice he uses in webinars. It makes statistics much more exciting!

There’s so much to learn that we used “Date-a-Geek” speed dating to make sure everyone had a chance to discuss critical topics around content, mobile vs. responsive design, and keeping up with the latest technologies and practices.

Relationships have to start somewhere. Why not start by speed dating?

With clients representing hundreds of hospitals, there’s issues that are unique to larger hospitals or rural hospitals. Our peer group roundtables let them focus on those topics, and learn what’s working and what’s not with peers facing the same challenges.

Peer group roundtables let clients with similar market needs and competitive situations discuss areas most important to them.

We’re renowned for our deep relationships with clients. One of the best ways clients get the most out of symposium is to spend some one-on-one time with their client advisors to work through the next year’s plans:

Clients love spending 1:1 time with their client advisors. And our advisors love it too!

We ended the program with a panel featuring Leslie Kelly Hall from Geonetric partner Healthwise and Gabrielle DeTora of DeTora Consulting, who gave us insights on the evolution of marketing’s role in engaging patients more deeply in their health, and how technology and data are fundamentally changing the role of marketing in healthcare.

Panelists Leslie Kelly Hall and Gabrielle DeTora gave an important outside perspective on eHealth.

@lesliekellyhall says “Empower patients and give them tools that allow them to do things for themselves.” #geolive twitter.com/HW_JoAnna/stat…

— JoAnna Brogdon (@HW_JoAnna) April 24, 2013

To add a little serendipitous fun, we hid Amazon gift certificates and gave out clues:

We have a winner! Congratulations Heather on finding the Amazon gift card – on your birthday no less! ow.ly/i/1XJI4 #geolive #hbd

— Geonetric (@geonetric) April 24, 2013

By the end of the day, with brains overflowing, we had switched to beer while playing darts, pool, and laughing at a local pub, followed by a good night’s sleep back at The Hotel.

Geonetric upstairs: Closed to the public

Sure, we’ll rent out the whole floor of a bar for a party. Of course we brought the deep fried green beans if you’re hungry.

Our post-Symposium surveys reveal that clients loved the event, learned a lot, made new friends, and are excited to come back! We’re already planning for the 2014 eHealth Symposium, to push the boundaries even further! We might even find something else tasty to deep fry.

Newsjacking: Seize the Second Paragraph

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Jill Jensen

After a couple of weeks filled with amazing news headlines — from letters filled with ricin sent to a senator and the U.S. president, to bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon, to deadly explosions at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas — newsjacking might seem like a no-brainer for your marketing department. But take care to know what’s really involved and establish some basic guidelines for your organization to follow.

Exactly what is newsjacking? According to David Meerman Scott, author of the latest e-book on the subject — Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage — it’s the opportunity to instantly put your organization into the news of the day and keep it there over time. It’s a social media post or news media promotion that points to relevant content in your online media room or blog.

When you newsjack, you provide your expert, quotable insights on the news topic — insights that help position your organization as the go-to source for more information. You want to quickly deliver well-written, verifiable, and valuable information that journalists can quote verbatim — as if they’d talked to you in person. It should flesh out the “why” behind the “who, what, when, where” and help keep the story alive. Your take becomes the second paragraph in the story they’re telling.

Examples range from Kate Middleton’s morning sickness episodes to Oreo tweeting “You can still dunk in the dark” during the Super Bowl lighting snafu to reminders about the warning signs of stroke that appeared after the death of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. Almost any topic offers an opening for newsjacking. To make the most of it, you need website content that is helpful, welcoming, user-focused, and action-oriented — content that describes how your services benefit your patients and how it fits a news topic. Posting your ‘take’ on the story to your blog also helps search engines find you.

Geonetric client Adventist HealthCare tapped into an online conversation with this successful newsjack:

Want to begin newsjacking? Geonetric can help you get started!

Reinventing a Website

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Michelle LeCompte

Seven hospitals. 2,500 affiliated doctors. More than 70 additional locations representing physician practices, imaging centers, surgery centers and more. All under the umbrella of HCA Virginia. And all represented by dozens of disparate, unconnected websites.

Sound familiar?

Freestanding hospitals are increasingly joining forces as large healthcare systems, which results in expanded offerings — more providers, broader services, advanced technology — and new brand identities. If you’ve experienced this as a healthcare marketer, you can appreciate the thought and effort that goes into communicating these changes. If you haven’t, you can learn from those who’ve been there.

The sweeping changes that accompany large-scale restructuring demand strategic communication. You have a new opportunity to express who you are and what you do. You have a chance to reshape the perceptions of consumers, referring physicians and competitors.

To their credit, HCA Virginia used the transition from a collection of hospital sites to an integrated central site as an opportunity to transform their online presence. They built a new website from the ground up, eliminating four websites representing seven hospitals in the process.

New Brand

They invested in a new brand campaign – Life/You Only Get One – promoting the combined power of their network, expertise and technology.

New Content

They also created entirely new Web content, dedicating the time and resources to getting it right. In partnering with them on this project, one of our objectives was to express the breadth of services across the entire system. We started by identifying and learning about each hospital’s offerings, a process that yielded great insights about the mix of offerings across HCA Virginia.

As is typical of many hospitals, many services were under-represented on the Web or had no visibility at all. On the new site, all services are included, along with reasons to choose HCA Virginia for care:

New Structure

The new site was not without its challenges. Individual hospitals were accustomed to a separate, robust Web presence. With the new site, content on services focused more on the system brand and less on distinct facilities. Had we created robust content for the system and for each entity, we would have ended up with a lot of duplicate content (and risked a negative impact on organic search).

HCA Virginia was willing to make hard choices to meet their objectives. Consumers and community physicians learn about services at the system level and follow paths to accessing care at specific facilities. While content for each hospital has been significantly reduced, coverage of healthcare services has been expanded. As a result, the new website has less than 500 pages and a lot more impact.

Grant Sanborn, Director of Interactive Marketing for the HCA Capital Division summarizes it well: “Ultimately, the way we structured the content is logical and makes sense for consumers, which was our goal. The new site consolidates content around services, displays the breadth and depth of what we offer, raises the profile of physician practices, and, in the process, lifts all boats. “

Learn more about this initiative by watching our webinar: The Content Conundrum.

Healthcare Content Marketing: Which Dinner Guest Are You?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Content marketing can be a tough concept to wrap your head around. The idea that we should market by not bragging about ourselves seems counter-intuitive to many marketers.

But really it makes a lot of sense. It helps to think it through with a real-life example. So let me tell you a story. It’s called “A Tale of Two Dinner Guests.”

Think back to dinner parties you’ve attended in the past. You probably remember that one person who talks a little too much about himself. The subject of conversation doesn’t matter— he always finds a way to spin it to be about him. He name drops here and there, and certainly shares lots of chatter intended to say, “Look at how awesome I am!”

Elsewhere in the room was probably a party guest who is always surrounded by a flock of people. She is smart and speaks with authority on a variety of topics. But more importantly, she’s a good listener and spends more time asking the right questions than talking about herself. Other guests find her interesting and respect her perspective. And chances are those same guests are quick to reach out to her when they need help in her area of expertise.

Now, think about your marketing. Which dinner guest are you? Do you constantly interrupt the conversation screaming, “Look at me!”? Or are you a good listener, letting others direct the conversation and providing useful and interesting insights?

Content marketing is about being that second guest. Spending less time telling people how awesome you are and instead, demonstrating it by providing interesting and insightful information about the topics your audience cares about.

In some ways, this isn’t such a radical concept for healthcare organizations. You probably send out a monthly magazine through one of the custom publishing houses. That’s content marketing!

But content marketing has become far more sophisticated since it went digital. Pinpoint targeting and real-time tracking are now the norm.

To learn more about how organizations have embraced content marketing and how your organization can do the same, join us for our complementary webinar on March 28 at 3:00 p.m. CST – Content Marketing for Healthcare.

Web Writing Best Practices for Developing Useful Healthcare Content

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

Web writing has a different set of rules and its own best practices. Effective Web content helps attract new visitors to your site, tell your unique story, build relationships, lead visitors to take the next step and promote your services. But where do you start?

Ben Dillon, VP and eHealth Evangelist at Geonetric, goes beyond just the basics of Web writing in Get to the Point: Web Writing for Healthcare. In this white paper, Ben answers your top content questions and provides proven tips and tricks to help you:

Write effective Web copy
Establish your voice and tone
Create a Content Marketing Program
Structure your information architecture
Learn the latest in content marketing trends

Download the white paper now.

Got Style? Why Your Organization Should Have a Customized Web Style Guide

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Jade DeLang Hart

We’re talking Web content style here. Before you prepare to strut your organizational stuff on the Web runway – regardless of the platform – make sure your style is intact and impeccable.

How? With a customized Web style guide that’s specific to your organization. If you don’t have one, you should. This is the document that defines and standardizes how your organization communicates online. It may be part of your overall brand guidelines, but Web content should be addressed specifically since writing for the Web differs from other forms of marketing and corporate communication.

OK, maybe this isn’t the most intriguing part of your marketing and communications program, but it’s an important, and often overlooked, tool in projecting your best image to the world.

Why Do You Need a Style Guide?

Defining your unique brand, style, voice, tone and editorial preferences in one place benefits your organization in several ways:

Professionalism – A unified voice and consistent editorial style project a polished and professional image of your hospital.
Brand and image credibility – Nothing dings your credibility like inconsistent use of your corporate name or logo and other careless inconsistencies.
Readablity – Good editorial style is invisible to readers. Inconsistent style and usage get in the way, distracting readers from your key message and even bouncing them off the page.
Efficiency – Putting your style guidelines in the hands of writers, editors and other contributors saves them time researching, allowing them to focus on the message rather than the mechanics.

What to Include in Your Style Guide

Keep it straightforward and scannable, just like your website. Make it easy for contributors to find what they need quickly. And don’t relegate this to the summer intern to develop. It needs a thoughtful approach by someone who knows your organization and your audiences.

Brand Guidelines

Include your brand identity guidelines to make sure your online voice stays consistent with other messaging. Define your voice and tone and include examples of sentences that do and don’t use the preferred voice.

Example: We are known for our personal service and compassionate care; our ability to interact with patients as individuals is a hallmark of our brand. Let’s speak as a caring doctor would to a patient: with confidence, warmth and clarity.

You’ll also want to consider your point of view – first person using “we” and “our,” second person focusing on “you” and “your,” or third person talking about patients and facilities. It all contributes to the image you’re projecting.

Editorial Style and Usage Guidelines

Here is where you define the editorial details specific to your organization that people can never remember:

Question: Is board-certified hyphenated or not?
Answer: Board-certified – Hyphenate only when used as an adjective.

Question: Do we capitalize medical conditions?
Answer: Capitalization – Do not capitalize medical conditions unless they contain a proper noun. Examples: congestive heart failure, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Achilles tendinopathy

Question: How do we write phone numbers?
Answer: Follow this convention for phone numbers: 812.333.4941.

This section needn’t be all-inclusive. Instead, spell out those details you’re most concerned about standardizing. For everything else, select and refer contributors to your preferred editorial standard, such as The Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style.

Web Writing Best Practice Tips

It’s a good idea to include some tips to help contributors who may be new to Web writing. For example:

Always focus on the end user. Visualize your audience. If your audience is the general public, limit the use of medical jargon.
Keep it simple and scannable. Web users don’t read, they scan.
Make it easy to take action. Help users complete tasks by including clear calls to action (register now, learn more, get directions).

Design Guidelines

Include information on pre-set styles, templates, and other design aspects of the site, including how to size and insert images on the page.

Add anything else you want to standardize, for example, how to write calls to action, how to give geographic directions or contact information, and guidelines for internal and external linking. It’s your style guide. Make it work for your organization. Then be sure to distribute it to all contributors to your site.

Getting Started

VitalSite makes it easy to build your style guide into your content management system so it’s available to all contributors. VitalSite installations come with a “Content Master Guide” which contains pages on:

VitalSite Styles and Templates – defining and showing examples of all design styles and templates available on the site
Standards and Best Practices – giving tips on file naming, page titles, heading, hyperlinking, keywords, and more
Brand Standards Guidelines – a page for clients to insert or link to their brand guidelines
Working with Images – pointers and reminders to use when adding images to the site

These recommended sections offer useful information for all aspects of content development and management for your site; you can augment and customize them to reflect your organizational preferences.

Geonetric Can Help

If you need help creating your own Web style guide, contact us. Our content team will be happy to help you put your best foot forward. When it’s time to roll out the red carpet on your new or updated Web content, you’ll be stylin’.

The Case for Content

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Ben Dillon

When we began helping hospitals develop websites more than a dozen years ago, content was just something that had to get done. It was written at the last minute. Copy and pasted as-is from brochures. Developed by a summer intern without a lot of thought.

Fortunately, this is changing. Healthcare organizations are realizing content is one of the most important assets on a website. Here are a few reasons why:

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine rankings and search traffic are probably a top goal for you. You want to be found, and Google is the gatekeeper. Google lets us know what drives its hundreds of algorithm changes. At the top of its list is content quality. Google wants original content that’s well written and presented in a readable fashion without many ads. Google also likes content other people like. It tracks links and other “social cues” such as how many people share it on Twitter. Bottom line: Poor content doesn’t get shared.

Permission-Based

Content needs to be more than well written and factually accurate. It also needs to be interesting. In our permission-based world, you need to earn your way onto consumers’ radars. Your content should provide information people want in a way that encourages them to share it through social media. Or better yet, your content should be so interesting and reliable that consumers want to follow it directly.

Site Visitor Needs

When someone arrives at your site, they want information from you. They’re looking for education about disease, assistance with making decisions and information that sells them on your organization and services. Good content helps them make those decisions, while bad content just might encourage them to go elsewhere – like to your competitor’s site.

Well-constructed content reinforces the visitor’s decision to come to the site, grabs their attention and leads them to engage with the site further or to take an action. Remember that the goal isn’t to get visitors TO your site but to get them to USE your services and become a patient!

Duration

So much of what we do in marketing is gone in an instant if you don’t keep feeding it. That PPC campaign may be great, but if you stop putting money behind it, the benefit goes away. Social media can be effective, but that post from today drops off the radar in the blink of an eye.

Website content on the other hand is an investment with a long shelf-life. Creating a great piece of content delivers SEO benefits and value to visitors for years to come.

Foundation

It’s easy to get wrapped up in interactive site capabilities, calls to action, videos and campaigns. There’s a lot of fun stuff we do online. Whereas writing thousands of pages of content is not exciting. It’s hard work. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored!

The content on your website is a foundation – the bedrock on which great experiences happen. Organizations that launch creative campaigns without a solid foundation of content to back it up often don’t see the value they expected. There’s no substitute for having solid content on your site. Once you have that in place you can do great things!

I hope this gives you some insight into why great content matters. To learn about how to get great content and use it effectively, join us for a free webinar event – The Content Conundrum on Feb 21 at 3:00 p.m. CT.

3 Quick Reasons to Use Countdowns in Social Media Marketing

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

When it comes to marketing campaigns, using a countdown isn’t a new idea. It’s a proven tactic – and healthcare marketers should consider incorporating the countdown concept in their social media strategy more often. Particularly when promoting your organization’s events. Whether your goal is to raise awareness of a new hospital opening or register participants for a fundraising event, countdowns can provide great visuals and fresh content across social media channels.

Fresh, Shareable Content

North Kansas City Hospital has been counting down the opening of their new emergency department by posting on Facebook and Twitter. Followers of their social media channels are kept up-to-date on the project and help spread awareness of the new emergency department coming to the area. When their followers like, comment or retweet the post, it then appears on that follower’s social media feed for their followers or friends to see as well. Countdown content also offers great flexibility on the frequency of posts, although having consistent posting intervals are recommended (daily, weekly, etc.)

Social Media Users Respond to Visuals

Incorporating visual elements into your social media marketing efforts has never been more important. According to a recent HubSpot study, photos on Facebook pages receive 53% more likes and 104% more comments than the average post. Pinterest has grown so quickly that it is now the fourth largest traffic driver in the world.

Countdowns provide a great way to incorporate eye-catching posts that will stand out on your social media channels. The best part is the creative opportunities countdowns offer. The countdowns can have visual elements such as numeric graphics, photo teasers, or a combination like Geonetric used for our Operation Overnight charity event.

Build Anticipation

Justin Timberlake went back to the basics when he included a traditional countdown with a simple call to action on a microsite to build anticipation for a future announcement. His team sent out teasers days in advance across his social media channels and kept the reason for the countdown vague to pique interest.

There are many ways to utilize the countdown whether its mysteriously like Timberlake did or more straight forward and informative like counting down to the start of a gala. Either way, a countdown is a fun and sharable way to generate buzz and share your organization’s information.

RIP Status Quo

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Bill Basler

Goodbye 2012 – The End of the Also-ran

I am a unique healthcare institution but my market sees me as garden-variety.
In a sea of consumer healthcare choices, I blend in.
I struggle to keep up with my competitors.
Status quo is my middle name.

Hello 2013 – I Resolve to be Original

I will express my uniqueness in everything I do.
I will make it easy on healthcare consumers to understand that I am different – that I am the one.
I will no longer be content in presenting myself in the same way that my competitors present themselves.
I am the better choice.

Here’s How Geonetric Can Help

We enjoy helping healthcare organizations find their own voice. Whether it’s branding strategy, service line campaigns, content marketing, or a new website design, opportunity knocks.

Healthcare organizations do not achieve greatness by accident. They are built by committed leaders stepping up, trying new things, and embracing change. With your help, we resolve to help you find your voice.

RIP status quo.

Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2013

Posted on January 10, 2013 by David Sturtz

It wouldn’t be January without a few predictions, so here are my top three areas to keep an eye on in 2013.

Browsers, Browsers Everywhere

As predicted, 2012 saw continued proliferation of Web-browsing devices and platforms – the iPad mini, Microsoft Surface, Windows Phone 8 – the list goes on. If you’re thinking of creating a mobile site we highly recommend you consider responsive design. Responsive design is the new table-less Web design – a watershed moment in how websites are constructed to adapt to any screen size.

From a design perspective, addressing the needs of smaller screens has created a trend toward leaner websites with minimal, but sophisticated, designs.

Check out our video to learn more about responsive design.

Semantic Search

Search engines are rapidly evolving into answer engines. Rather than responding to users’ queries with a list of links to possibly relevant Web pages, the search result has become the answer itself.

For healthcare marketers, SEO is more than ensuring you have keyword-rich Web pages and inbound links from high-ranking sources. SEO also involves confirming that search engines have accurate data about you – your locations, phone numbers and social media pages – all the data elements that get returned to searchers without them ever visiting your site.

Content Marketing

Content marketing grew rapidly in 2012. Simply put, content marketing is when you create content to engage consumers and encourage them to take some action. Healthcare content is increasingly diverse, including infographics, video, digital magazines, eBooks and more.

We see a continued rise in content marketing for 2013, which means a continued focus on social media. If your social media strategy can be summed up as “like us on Facebook,” you’ve fallen behind. Make sure you’re treating your social media activities in the same way as traditional media – incorporating owned, earned and paid media.

These are the three main trends we’re keeping our eyes on. No matter what trends you’re paying attention too, it’s sure to be an exciting year!

Category Archives: Content