I’m presenting a webinar in 2 weeks on the subject of hospital blogging. I thought I’d start the presentation by talking about the benefits of publishing a blog.
I’m sure you’re already aware that blogging takes a bunch of time. If something is going to soak up so much of our most valuable resource then it should really pay off.
So I got to work looking for data to show the benefits of blogging, especially the ROI. This post covers my findings.
Email marketing consistently shows one of the highest ROIs of any marketing platform—up to 4,300 percent!
Video, meanwhile, drives engagement and action on social media and landing pages. Adding it to email is a logical next step.
Unfortunately, inserting a video into an email isn’t like adding one to your website or Facebook page. Different email clients treat video in different ways. If you try to embed a video player in the message body, it simply won’t work in most popular clients.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use video in your email marketing, though. Here’s how to do it.
I’m using our website as a Guinea pig. This is the first post based on my findings from that work.
This week I was researching how to choose keywords for our site based on the technique described in this post by Robbie Richards. The approach that Robbie recommends uses an SEO tool I had heard of but not used called SEMrush.
The findings from the audit were surprising. My guess is there’s a good chance that you may learn something valuable about your website if you followed the same process.
We’ve been discussing ways to grow our email lists.
A little “bell” in the back of my mind jingled and reminded me about pop-ups as a mechanism to increase the speed at which we accumulate email signups. The “pop-ups” I am thinking about are those boxes that appear over what you are reading and make you an “offer you can’t refuse” in exchange for your email address.
But pop-ups are evil, right? No hospital marketer would ever use one. The only people who use those are sleazy marketers looking to make a quick buck.
Not only would they damage our brand they don’t even work. I would never enter my email address into a form after seeing a pop-up. However, being one for data-driven decisions, I could not help but do some research before deciding. This is a summary of what I found.
The growth of video has been well documented. People spend more time watching video than they do on social media, and Cisco projects that 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be video by 2019.
Video usage on smartphones and tablets is growing even more quickly. Mobile video consumption is expected to surpass desktop consumption by the fourth quarter of 2016.
But while it’s clear that mobile video is growing at an incredible rate, it’s less clear how consumers are viewing video on mobile devices, especially smartphones. Which way do they hold their phones? Do they watch only short videos and leave longer ones for larger screens? And where are they watching?
Here are the answers to those questions.
This week I’ve been working on our new physician marketing programs.
As I worked on these future marketing packages I realized that we should not only describe what physicians need to do to boost results but also give them a clear plan of how to get started and how to grow.
This post gives an overview of the digital marketing areas that should be addressed by a medical practice and the order in which they should be tackled.
The world is full of online directories and review sites. There are literally thousands of them.
Your hospital, system, outpatient centers and physicians will be listed in many of these directories even if you didn’t request it. The goal of these sites is to amass data and gather traffic by being a source of that data so they will list you even if you don’t know about it.
This poses a big challenge for busy marketers as it’s up to you to make sure all your listings and reviews are accurate and represent your brand appropriately.
Quick, what’s the fastest growing social network? If you said Instagram, have a gold star. It’s most popular with young, affluent adults, and it’s gaining ground with older adults as well.
When it comes to engaging users on social media, Instagram can’t be beat. In fact, it blows every single other social network out of the water, boasting engagement rates many times that of Facebook and Twitter. Forrester called it the “King of Social Engagement” in 2014, and it didn’t have any trouble holding onto its crown in 2015.
That means you can make a big impact with a small following, and growing your follower base can have huge results. Whether you’re just starting out on Instagram or your Instagram marketing needs a checkup, keep these six tips in mind.
We know from our research that only 40% of hospitals have blogs and yet many experts single out a blog as the jumping off point for an effective content marketing strategy.
I believe one reason many hospital marketers have not embraced blogging is the perceived difficulty of creating content week in and week out. A key element of that perceived difficulty is “writer’s block”, specifically coming up with blog post topics.
Here are 11 ideas to help you generate ideas for post topics and make it much easier to maintain a blog.
If you have a blog, you’ve probably tried targeting some of the top keywords for your hospital’s specialties. But targeting only top keywords isn’t the most effective strategy.
You could be missing out on a lot of potential traffic—and potential patients—because it’s hard to rank for top healthcare keywords. And even if you could rank for all of them, those top keywords still account for only a small percentage of all searches.
Enter long tail keywords. Long tail keywords—phrases of three or four or even more words—have less search volume overall than shorter keywords, but it’s often easier to rank for them and the users you acquire from them are usually more likely to convert.
