Tag Archive for: creative communications

Healthcare Marketers: Listen and Engage through Social Media to Learn About Your Audience

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This week in our Healthcare Branding Series, let’s concentrate on the importance of listening and engaging with your social media audience.DHG-blog-ProTips-v3

To engage healthcare consumers who visit your website, you must know what types of content they want. If you’re unsure, try engaging them in various ways on social media, and listen to their feedback and input to gain insights that can help drive your digital content strategy. Here are some tips to get you started:

  • Create social posts that interest your followers. Do you have something relevant to say about a trending healthcare topic, such as the flu or a popular news story? Share tips and information on a wide range of issues – from health-related facts and warnings to health promotions and educational events. Pay attention to likes, comments or shares – people read click because they find something interesting; they share because they’re convinced others will find it interesting too. Likes and shares, then, are decent indicators of what types of content people want to see. Use that information to steer the direction of your future blog posts.
  • Ask questions. You don’t have to be hard-hitting. The questions can be light and fun. And since photos have an engagement rate of 87 percent (as opposed to four percent with links), why not share a photo with a question to get followers talking. The answers have the potential to offer great insight.
  • Generate engaging moments. Social networks are for sharing. Engage your followers by encouraging them to post something. After all, you must give to get. For example, during American Heart Month you could urge followers to share selfies of their favorite ways to exercise for heart health. You can ask for photos of their best all-pink outfits for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It could even be a simple question, such as, “What are you most thankful for this Thanksgiving?” Take the responses as indications of where and how to invite and inspire people into a conversation, to take part in a community forum, so to speak. Low response rates mean people don’t find it a worthwhile topic to act on.
  • Observe patient connections. Patients sharing their experiences with one another can be a very powerful thing. Not only can they receive emotional support from others with their condition, but patients can also offer word-of-mouth recommendations for physicians or services. Watch and listen to the conversations they’re having. What questions are they asking other patients? What are their concerns? This insight may provide ways to improve on and offline patient experiences.

When you engage with followers, you may at times receive very honest opinions about your organization. If  you receive praise, don’t forget to say thanks. If you get a complaint, recognize that it’s an opportunity for informed improvements driven by customer feedback. Always acknowledge patient or visitor concerns.  If there are multiple similar complaints, review how your hospital or practice is living your healthcare brand.

For more information, visit our other topics in this series:

Healthcare Marketers: Expand Your Reach with Online Videos

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In our last blog post, we discussed the importance of giving patients what they want to see on your healthcare provider website. As you plan your content strategies, think about the rapidly growing reach of online videos. They’re an effective way to build your brand by engaging your audience.

Check out these related insights from a health consumer study by Google and OTX:

  • One in three people (32 percent) watch health videos online. That outranks the number of people watching videos about food, celebrities, beauty and fashion, sports and many other content categories.
  • More than half (54 percent) of patients want information on specific conditions when they watch health videos online. Additionally, 49 percent express interest in videos featuring experts, e.g. physicians (like these videos we helped create to introduce the doctors of Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s affiliated OB-GYN practice).
  • Four in 10 patients (43 percent) say they used a search engine for more information on health topics featured in online videos. Many took further action as well: 21 percent signed up for a health-related newsletter, 12 percent clicked on an ad, 10-16 percent recommended a website or forwarded a video link to someone, while another 7 percent shared a video via chat or blog. When you look at it this way, it’s easy to see how online videos make a very effective ‘gateway’ touch point between your organization and the people you want to reach.

In addition to being easy and relatively inexpensive to distribute, online videos excite and resonate with people who prefer to learn by watching (roughly two-thirds of the population). For your audience, videos are more closely linked to a storytelling experience than text on a screen, which makes video a more engaging and memorable medium by its very nature. Videos also offer a great deal of flexibility when it comes to production and execution:

  • They can be made on any budget. If spending is an issue, consider using a flipcam in a quiet work space with an attractive backdrop and good lighting. Feature your physicians speaking naturally (albeit from a well-prepared script) to deliver a clear, concise message with minimal post-production editing.
  • They can be repurposed for a variety of applications. Think outside your website and YouTube – your video content could be integrated into a webinar, included in e-newsletters, featured on your facebook page, displayed on tabletops at recruitment fairs and more.
  • They make very compelling online ads. If your budget allows it, go beyond educational videos and into the advertising arena. Video ad spending is projected to increase by 40 percent this year alone. Public service announcement videos are also effective at building brands by reaching out to people in meaningful ways.

If you’re new to video content creation and optimization, contact us for some useful tips. Then start planning – and producing – to establish new connections using online videos.

Lawrence Memorial Hospital Renews Commitment with Dobies as Healthcare Marketing Agency of Record

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Lawrence Memorial Hospital (LMH), a 173-bed, not-for-profit hospital in Lawrence, Kan., recently renewed its contract with Dobies Health Marketing as agency of record. Since 2008, Dobies Health Marketing has provided strategic marketing counsel to the hospital, along with the development and implementation of marketing campaigns that increase awareness of LMH services.

SHSMD Word Cloud Finds the Focus of Today’s Hospital Strategists and Marketers

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In our last post, we talked about word clouds and their practical uses beyond the blog. This week, we’ll continue that discussion in lieu of our recent discoveries at SHSMD Connections 2011, an annual conference hosted by the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development. The event was a meeting of the minds from all levels of hospital communications, and the word cloud was our way of learning more about what’s on their minds.

SHSMD attendees participated by entering today’s hot topics into our word cloud app. But what do the results tell us about the directions and challenges hospital marketers face as we head into 2012?

The most commonly used phrase was “physician strategies,” with “social media” coming in close behind. Many hospital strategists are looking for effective ways to engage with physicians and patients. While social media continues to grow as a cost-effective way to expand reach and frequency, strategists are struggling with how to reconcile professional relationships with online social platforms—and even how to get people to “Like” or “Follow” their hospitals in the first place, let alone leverage that affinity. It’s a challenge many of today’s healthcare marketers must untangle, and clearly engagement is the name of the game.

Other issues taking center stage for healthcare marketers include:

• Direct marketing – promoting what works to grow market share.

• Brand building – on-target messaging in the midst of health reform and ACO debates.

• Market-driven plans (and plans that drives markets) – thinking strategically and delivering creatively.

• Better returns – demonstrating improved ROI and ROE as direct results of marketing efforts.

If your marketing initiatives don’t include solid strategic planning in the areas described above, you’re missing opportunities to enhance relationships, grow in volume, improve your brand and more.

What about you—what’s on your mind in healthcare marketing today? If you didn’t share with us at SHSMD, feel free to do so in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

Word Clouds Put the “Fun” in Functional for Marketers

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You’ve seen them on blogs as handy visual aids that spotlight keywords from page content. Word clouds make it easy for web surfers to determine if any given blog or post interests them enough to keep reading. But for marketers, word clouds offer communication tools that can be used outside the blog as well.

At their most basic level, word clouds make text on a page look more exciting than, well, text on a page. You can use them to convey data and information in a way that breaks the mold of standard presentation formats like slides, spreadsheets and pie charts.

Looking for a creative way to share marketplace feedback to your executive and board leaders? Instead of a report with lengthy quotes and testimonials, consider presenting a word cloud that displays what consumers are saying in one quick, easily digestible image. Information that’s easy to absorb at a glance resonates more with readers.

Word clouds can also help you take a keen look at the content on your website, particularly if you’re not employing search engine optimization tactics. In seconds you’ll know exactly what words appear most frequently on key pages. You can use the results to assess whether or not you’re communicating what you want—and don’t want—to say. Try the same thing with key pages from your competitors’ sites to compare and contrast key messages.

And speaking of your Internet presence, do you know what’s being said about your organization online? Word clouds are a great way to determine if your online press is positive and aligns with your key messages. Google your organization or a specific topic, then enter text from the search results into a word cloud app. You’ll get an instant visual representation of your online image and what it says about you.

Your consumers and employees have suggestions for improvement – do you know what they are? Word clouds can help you figure it out. Just as they can be used to draw attention to your strengths, they can also uncover weaknesses. Without making it public, try making a word cloud to zero in on specific areas needing improvement.

There’s no shortage of word cloud generators available online. Look around on sites like Wordle, Tagxedo and Word It Out (to name just a few). Pick the app you like the most and discover what it can reveal about your marketing and communication efforts. Why not start right now? It’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s fun.

 

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