11 ways to find great topics for your hospital blog

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.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On February 1, 2016
Custom publishing, Print magazines

What does your ideal patient look like? I’d bet influence is an attribute you value highly.

Influential healthcare consumers have value beyond the potential to become patients. They’re those who make decisions for their families, or whose recommendations are trusted by their friends and loved ones. Their knowledge and experience make them a reliable source of information. The benefits of reaching them are multiplied because every one of them could mean multiple new patients for your hospital or health system.

But how do you reach these ideal consumers? Online targeting is powerful, but there’s no “influential” check box in Facebook’s ad manager or Google Adwords.

The answer is simpler than you may think: To reach super influential healthcare consumers, you need to invest in print.

Posted by Nigel Edelshain
On January 29, 2016
Blogging

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk writing one of these blog posts when I received an email from one of our editors. He said he had several new blog posts ready to go and I should review them before they were sent to the client.

So I stopped writing my post and hopped over to review the client’s posts (clients come first!). What I saw was not what I expected. In fact what I saw put me in such a state of uncertainty that I could not even start writing my blog post again.

Instead, I ended up conducting a few hours of research on the Internet. Finally, I gathered together enough data to shake me out of my writing paralysis. In fact, it inspired me to write an additional post—this one! Here’s what I found.

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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)

How to reach the most influential healthcare consumers

What’s the perfect blog post length? Examining the data

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