Why you will probably need help with online directories

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On March 21, 2016
SEO

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.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On March 14, 2016
Social media

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.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On March 11, 2016

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.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On March 4, 2016
Blogging, SEO

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.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 26, 2016
SEO

SEO is a complicated beast. You have to worry about where your hospital ranks in organic results as well as where physical locations and even individual doctors rank in local results.

To make matters worse, the game keeps changing every time Google updates its algorithm. In 2015, we saw the mobile-friendly update, a Panda quality filter update, the RankBrain machine learning update and two more unnamed major updates in addition to hundreds of smaller updates. In 2016, we’ve already seen major changes to AdWords that push organic results down even further.

But most hospital marketers wear many hats. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to become an SEO expert on top of everything else. Fortunately, there are many tools out there to help you evaluate and monitor the essentials. Here are some of the best.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 22, 2016
Online reputation management

Online reputation management is one of the biggest topics in hospital marketing today. Millions of patients are rating and reviewing their healthcare providers just as openly and easily as they do restaurants and landscapers, and millions more are using those ratings and reviews to choose doctors and hospitals when they need medical care.

Knowing what patients are saying about your hospital online is of utmost importance. Here are eight things you need to know about online physician reviews.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 19, 2016
Digital magazines

Over the last couple of months I’ve been researching our next generation platform for producing digital magazines. Everyone knows what a magazine is so producing a digital one should be a pretty simple exercise.

In fact figuring out what a digital magazine is is making me feel surprisingly like Alice in Wonderland. The world of digital magazines is much curiouser than I imagined when I first headed down this “rabbit hole.”

Just like the white rabbit, I’m often in a rush as I have customers waiting. I’m sure your land is full of “important dates” too so if you’d like to know about digital magazines I thought I’d save you some time by recounting my findings so far in ”digital magazine wonderland”.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 12, 2016
Custom publishing, Print magazines

The rise of ad blocking technology has made the future of digital advertising very murky indeed, both for online publishers and advertisers.

Fortunately, reports of the death of print are no more true than reports of the death of Mark Twain in 1897. While advertisers scramble to find a solution for ad blockers, magazine media isn’t just enduring—it’s thriving.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 8, 2016
Mobile marketing

We’ve been doing some work recently on our next generation of digital magazines (more about that soon). It’s an interesting project as we’re trying to do things that push the “technology envelope.”

Last week as I was working on this project when a fundamental question struck me: “How do people actually read a magazine on their iPad anyway?”

If you’re involved in any kind of content marketing or app building this is an important question. You can’t really provide a great user experience if you don’t know how people view your content.

Being the data-driven engineer that I am, I could not just let this question go. I needed to find some quantitative research. This is what I found.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 5, 2016
Email marketing

Email marketing is consistently shown to have a better ROI than any other digital marketing medium, but most marketers aren’t making the most of it, especially in the healthcare space.

Emails can be ineffective for a number of reasons. A new report from GetResponse combines analysis of 700 million emails with survey responses from nearly 2,000 marketers to see what’s working and what could be improved. Here are problems that are particularly prevalent in healthcare—and what you can do to correct them.

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Why you will probably need help with online directories

11 ways to find great topics for your hospital blog

How to use long tail keywords on your hospital’s blog

6 tools for evaluating your hospital’s SEO

8 things you should know about online physician reviews

My journey in digital magazine wonderland

Nobody advertises in print magazines anymore!

What does the data say about your readers’ mobile habits?

4 problems with your hospital’s email marketing (and how to fix them)

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