When Instagram was launched in 2010, its primary focus was to feature photos that were specifically taken on mobile devices. The platform quickly became known for selfies and food pictures. Later on, it became a marketing platform for businesses and professionals to tell stories, deliver meaningful messages, and engage with their followers. If you play your cards right, Instagram can help you build a huge and loyal community and eventually grow your brand or business.
Unfortunately, Instagram is not the easiest platform to master. Knowing what mistakes to avoid is important to help you succeed on the platform.
Let’s take a look at six common Instagram mistakes that can keep your brand from growing. If you’ve fallen prey to any of these mistakes, be sure to fix them immediately.
Buying Instragram followers
Building a huge following can be a tedious, time-consuming process. But there’s a shortcut. You can buy instagram followers. Yes, you can instantly grow your followers from 100 to 10,000. It can be tempting, I know, but please resist the urge to do so.
You see, bought Instragram followers are not the same as the followers you genuinely acquire through your posts. Why? Because they have zero interest in you. Some of them aren’t even real people. That means they will not engage with you nor buy your products or use your services. What’s the point of having lots of followers when no one seems to be interested in what you have to offer.
Also, Instagram will purge your account once they spot that you have fake followers. Not only will it be a waste of money, but your fake followers will also be removed from the platform one-by-one.
Using poor quality photos
Most people are drawn to beautiful things. The same principle applies to social media, especially on Instagram. If you want to capture your audience’s attention, make sure that your posts are visually appealing. Remember, Instagram is a visual medium.
You don’t need to invest in a topnotch camera to take great photos. These days, your smartphones can take some pretty incredible shots. For best results, use natural light when taking pictures. If you’re taking pictures inside, take them in front of a window.
Not using Instagram stories
If you’ve only been using Instagram to post photos to your feed, you’re missing out on many valuable features the platform has to offer.
Instagram stories allow you to share “moments” of your day quickly and easily. It enables you to show your fun and creative side without affecting your Instagram feed. It’s a fantastic opportunity to experiment and engage your followers in a unique way. It’s fun, colorful, human, and different.
With Instagram stories, you can post as many photos and videos as you want without annoying your audience.
Focusing on photo quality rather than audience value
While photo and video quality is essential, you should also consider the value of the content you’re publishing.
When Instagram users follow you, that means they’re interested in you. They want to benefit from your content. Create quality content that will provide value to your audience and something to engage with. Share industry news. Ask questions. Use quizzes and polls. Get your audience involved.
Don’t just post for the sake of posting. Give people a reason to start following and keep coming back for more. Take time to create posts that your followers actually care about.
Posting duplicate photos
Instagram users want to be entertained. And users follow you because they want to get to know you better. And one of the best ways to do so is by telling stories, sharing updates about your practice, or your recent offers.
Instagram users will be quick to unfollow you if you’re continually posting duplicate photos and videos. Come to think of it. Why should they bother following you if you’re not sharing anything fresh, new, and exciting?
No link in bio
Traffic is the lifeline of all businesses, be it online or offline. After all, you can’t generate sales when there is no one to sell to.
Your Instagram bio provides a small window of opportunity to tell prospective clients and patients everything they need to know about you and your practice. So make sure you have a link in your bio at all times. Used correctly, it can help drive traffic to your website and convert leads to patients.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Instagram-Mistakes-Blog.png12602240Kathlyn Angeles-Timbolhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles-Timbol2020-09-23 12:42:552023-03-17 12:36:186 Instagram Mistakes That Keep Your Brand from Growing
Today, I am going to be talking to you about using Search Engine Optimization strategies in Pinterest marketing. 2020 has created a very interesting landscape for business owners, and this is because we no longer have to stay focused on reaching clients in our local geographic area. Because of telehealth and platforms like Zoom, we can really look and start expanding and reaching people nationwide. Pinterest is a fantastic way to go about doing that because you aren’t necessarily going to reach people within your geographic location. Because of the use of Zoom, clients are used to working with people who really could be anywhere. They’re used to getting information from online, rather than going and sitting down with an individual. So 2020 has really created this landscape where even as a small business who really works with individuals locally, you now can really extend that net a lot wider, and Pinterest creates the perfect opportunity to do search engine optimization and reach the folks who are specifically looking for your product, your services, and your expertise. How Pinterest search algorithm works is it looks at four different top things:
The domain quality
The pin quality
The Pinner quality
The Topic relevance.
Let’s dive into these individually. The first item is domain quality, this is really to ensure that the websites that have pins coming from it are highly ranked in terms of Pinterest, so if you have never pinned before, if you’ve never claimed the website before, anything like that, Pinterest is less likely to show your pins to other users in Pinterest.
So how do you improve your domain quality in the eyes of Pinterest?
How to Increase Domain Quality on Pinterest
Well, the first thing to do is to convert your Pinterest account to a business account. This provides a lot more tools and resources such as the analytics and things like that, so there’s a lot more reason to do this. However, doing this well really just allow you to be more legitimate in the eyes of Pinterest as well. Once you convert your Pinterest account to a business account, you then need to claim your website, so this basically is like adding a verification emblem almost to your website to make sure that Pinterest knows that you are the one who’s actually creating the content on the site and then pinning it. And it’s pretty easy to do, typically, it’s just that HTML file that you load up through your file manager on your website, so you can do this via FTP or just logging into the C-panel of your hosting account, clicking File Manager and then uploading it to the root directory. Click a button on Pinterest, it’ll automatically verify your site.
Claim Website on Pinterest to Increase Pinterest SEO
The next item is, once you claim your website, you then have the opportunity to create Rich Pins, so when you are pinning, make sure that you are creating rich pins. We’ve talked about this in other episodes before, and the process for doing it, but let’s say you’re a dietician or nutritionist and you have posted a recipe on your website. The rich pin, then actually grabs the information from that recipe and showcases it directly on Pinterest. This helps having rich pins and information like this helps your pin to stand apart against others, it also it makes it so that that pin has more engagement in interactions. To increase your domain quality, we also recommend pinning often, so this helps you just create more engaged users, and then also Pinterest does reward people who spend time on their platform.
And then the last thing to increase the domain quality is to pin high quality content. So you want to pin content that will drive people to your website and get more interaction, the more interaction you get, the more Pinterest will recognize your domain. So the second item is the pin quality, so you want to make sure that the quality of your pins is high. The pin quality is really determined by the popularity of your pins and the engagement level of your pins, so you want to make sure when you’re pinning something that you have a nice title, for example, a title that somebody is going to want to click on to learn more, so you can try a lot of different types of titles on there, a lot of different types of image structure on there, but you want to make it so that when somebody sees your pin, they’re probably going to recognize that to you and click the pin because they know that they’re going to find the high quality content on the other side.
Use High-Resolution Photos on Pinterest with Text Overlay
We recommend for these pins to use a high resolution photo to make sure it’s either square or tall, so a two to three ratio is typically good, then use text overlays so that you have the title of the blog post or more compelling the information for why somebody should click it or save it. Then we recommend putting either just text on there that says your website URL or that has your logo on there, and that’s for that brand recognition. And then if you do have some sort of freebie or give away on your site, I also put a little snippet of text about that as well. And so when you do that, you can use variety of different tools. We often use Canva, but there are others out there to create different versions of this pin, and so as you’re pinning all of them, you’ll be able to see which ones are getting more engagement, then start making more that are similar to that.
Pinner Quality to Increase SEO on Pinterest
The next thing is the Pinner quality. Pinterest, again, likes people and accounts that are active on Pinterest, so you wanna make sure that you are active on Pinterest, so we utilize tailwind as a way to make sure that we are pinning and re-pinning other popular pins, and then you also need to create fresh content. On most networks, there’s a variety of different types of users, there are some users that just sit back and launch, there are other users who are creating content, and then there are other users who both create and share content. So that’s the type of user you want to be on Pinterest, and so when you are pinning, you need to make sure that you pin things to correctly categorize boards, and this just shows your audience as well as Pinterest, that you have some sort of strategy and rationale behind the things that you are pinning.
Use Pinterest analytics to determine which pins are trending, then you can create more pins for that blog post, for example, or pin similar pins to it. And so this is something that we highly, highly recommend doing on Pinterest. The next thing is the topic relevance, and so your goal when you are creating a pin should be to have pins that relate to other pins that are being searched for and re-pinned, and then one way to do this is to do a search on Pinterest and see what specific keywords and phrases are coming up, then you can look at pins that are coming up for that. If you find that some of them aren’t really related, that might be a great opportunity to create a blog post and a pin that does directly relate to there.
Increase Your Pinning Topic Relevance on Pinterest
Now, one thing that we recommend doing is having either a similar image, which graphically Pinterest will recognize as being similar, but then also making sure that you’re utilizing the right keywords in your description as well as in the link and the text and everything surrounding the pin, so that Pinterest really sees that your pin is related to that other pin. To find these keywords, again, just make sure that you are utilizing Pinterest search feature and just start typing in items and it will, just like Google’s, it will come up with recommended searches that other people have done and that are popular on the network. Another place to optimize for these keywords is in your business name, your profile, bio, and then also the specific boards and descriptions that you have on Pinterest.
All of these things working together can help you to increase your Pinterest search engine optimization. And because Pinterest is really a visual search engine that we’ve talked about in the past, it can be one of the top, it can quickly turn into one of the top traffic sources for your business as well. So as we close out, I wanted to give just a couple of more ways that you can make your website a little bit more Pinterest-friendly. So after you have claimed your website and enable the Rich Pins on there, make sure every blog post that you write has a variety of different pins loaded into the content and pinnable content, you can then also add a plug and if you’re using WordPress to enable share buttons, so somebody can quickly easily click the Pinterest share button and pin the image.
Consider Adding Prompts in Text to Pin Now and Read Later
You can also even add text near different parts of your content that say something along the lines of “Pin it now for later”, and this is a great way to get other people to pin it because maybe they don’t have time to read a 10,000 word blog post, so by adding these pins within the content, or pictures within the content with “Pin it, save it for later” text report, you’re just reminding people that they can, in fact, click to pin and save the blog post so that they can come back to it later. Additionally, the last thing that I want to also say is, if you have something like an e-commerce store, typically, we always recommend having the product images, the square. Sounds good, right?
If you think in the lens of Pinterest, you might want to actually play around with having those vertical images, so the 2 x 3 ratio, and so these vertical images of your products might potentially help you rank higher on Pinterest, so you have the picture gallery of all the pictures, just try loading them in different size and see if more people start pinning them. This is something that we are starting to play with for our clients who are utilizing Pinterest and have something like a Woo Commerce or Shopify shop.
Thank you so much to tuning in, and I hope that this gives you some insights into how Pinterest can help you drive more traffic to your website, now that 2020 has really opened up the geographic landscape for the people that you can help. I look forward to seeing you next time on The Social Speak Network podcast.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/pinterest-seo.png12602240Caitlin McDonaldhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngCaitlin McDonald2020-09-16 13:09:272020-09-16 13:14:55Pinterest SEO in 2020
You’ve probably heard more than a few times that email marketing is dead. But statistics say not a chance. In fact, studies suggest that email marketing beats Facebook and Twitter in customer acquisition by 40 times. And for every $1 spent on email marketing, it generates $44 in ROI.
Email is one of the most efficient channels for delivering advertising messages to people who have shown interest in your services. It allows you to connect with them on a personal level, which helps you build a relationship with your audience and drives your practice forward.
So how do you ensure that your email efforts drive in the most bang for your buck? Here are some tips.
Create attention-grabbing subject lines
How many unopened emails do you have in your inbox? 500? 850? If you’re like me, then you probably have thousands.
You have great content to share, but it won’t matter if the emails aren’t’ getting opened and read. To boost your email open rates, you need to craft subject lines that subscribers simply can’t resist.
Keep in mind that people only scan their inbox very quickly, so make sure to keep your subject lines are short. Also, do tell them what’s inside. If a person signed up to your list and you promised to send them an in ebook in return, then you can use subject lines like “Your guide awaits!” or “Your ebook inside!”. This is better than just saying “Thank you”. It’s short, direct to the point, and lets them know that something is waiting inside the email.
Hit the right frequency
Think of the last time you unsubscribed from an email. If you’re like most people, I bet you did because you’ve been receiving too many of them from a single sender. That said, you need to consider this when sending emails to your subscribers.
The last thing you want is to bombard people on your email list with offer after offer. You don’t want to do it so infrequently either that they’ll end up forgetting about you.
So how often should you send emails to your subscribers? Honestly, there is no chiseled-in-stone answer.
But you can start by keeping an eye on what industry leaders are doing. They have done their homework and have built schedules that perform well.
Segment emails
Many of you probably receive dozens of emails every single day. Now, let me ask you. How many of these emails do you read? How many of them really resonate with you? I bet many of them don’t, right?
If you want to increase your open rates as well as your conversion rates, then you need to make sure that you’re sending the right messages to the right people. How? By segmenting your emails.
Segmentation means breaking your email list into smaller segments. This allows you to personalize your emails and ensure that the messages are completely relevant for each recipient. By doing so you’re likely to get 15% more opens and 60% more clicks than if you don’t segment your campaigns.
Make recipients feel special
Growing your email list is vital. But you also need to think of your existing subscribers. These people are the ones who avail of your services and helped you grow your practice. In addition to health tips and advice, you also need to give them something extra. It can be in the form a discount, free visit, or an exclusive offer.
Studies suggest that people tend to desire and give more value to things that are scarce. You can leverage on the principle of scarcity to make your readers feel special.
Let’s say you just published a book. Let your subscribers know that you’re giving them a chance to buy the book before you release it in public. Or you can also give them some discount vouchers for the trust and loyalty they have shown you.
Create a powerful CTA
The goal of email marketing is to get the reader to take action. A clever copy with a powerful call-to-action can make all the difference in your campaign.
A call-to-action is an important step towards actively directing the readers to your goal or objective. Simple call-to-actions such as “call now”, “schedule an appointment now”, and “buy now” usually works, but don’t limit yourself to the common ones. Try to think outside the box and create a powerful CTA that would grab a reader’s attention.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Email-Marketing-Tips-Blog-1.png12602240Kathlyn Angeles-Timbolhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles-Timbol2020-09-09 14:26:482020-09-18 12:53:29Email Marketing Tips for Your Healthcare Practice
We have a lot of different digital tools that we use on an everyday basis. And a lot of times we get asked, “How exactly do you use Zoom or how do I convert an image into a PDF? How can I edit a PDF? How can I create custom images?” So there’s a lot of different tools that we have found and that we use on an everyday basis that we’re gonna show you in today’s videos.
Today’s blog discusses some of the digital marketing tools that make your life easier. Read on to find out what these tools are.
When you set up a Zoom account, you will either have the free version or a paid version.
I think the paid version is $15.95 a month. The free version only allows you to have up to 40 minutes per call. For the paid version, I think there is no time limit on how long you can go. There are a little bit more bells and whistles and security to the paid version.
Once you download Zoom, you’re going to have Zoom on your desktop. It’s gonna be a little icon on my desktop that I can go to.
Start a live video
I can schedule a meeting. I can start a live video like this. And so once you open up your Zoom, your face is gonna show up on video if you’re choosing to have that video option. Now, you are then the admin, the operator of your video. On the bottom when you do that, you will see, you’ll have your microphone button where you can mute. It will show a video camera where you can stop and start the video.
Then, you have some buttons in the middle. Security, Participants, if you are wanting to invite people. You can get the invite link from there. You can let people in. So when you had sent out an invite for a Zoom and they click on the link, it’s going to put them into a waiting room until you click approve on that person.
Chat
There’s going to be a Chat option, which is great because that allows you to chat with your participants. If you are doing like a webinar, you’re not gonna use those two options, Participants or Chat, if you’re just doing a video recording such as this.
Share Screen
If you click on to Screen Share, a window will come up on your side that then shares the tabs you have open and you can choose the tab that you want them to see.
So this is great if you’re doing a presentation. You can have a PowerPoint up. You can have Google slides. These are really good for how-to videos and explaining to your audience about something.
Once you’re done sharing, you would just click Stop Share and it’s gonna come back to video mode. That’s why we use Zoom to do a lot of our videos because the quality is great. It allows us to have this face-to-face shot, but then it also allows us to share our screen so we can walk through if we’re talking about Google Analytics or maybe we wanna do a presentation on Facebook ads.
This is great if you are in the health and wellness industry and you wanna do an interview. You can have your participant sign up and they can be side by side on the screen with you. You can do different maybe how-to videos. This is great for cooking.
Record
Then, you’re gonna have a recording option. The one thing I really like about using Zoom is it obviously records the video, but it also records the audio of that. So you can then use that audio for a podcast if you wanted to. So you’re gonna have those recording options. Okay?
Go live on other platforms
Then, there’s gonna be an option where it says, “More.” This is if you want to go live on Facebook, live on Workplace or live on YouTube, which is great options, but you’re not gonna do that if you’re just doing a simple recording for your digital marketing.
You can really get creative with Zoom and how to utilize this for your digital marketing strategy and you will just go over to zoom.us and be able to create your account from there.
If you have questions with Zoom, this is also great if you’re gonna do a free webinar. You can create that webinar and be able to put that landing pitch together of what it is. Each webinar would have a password. Same with your meetings, it’s very secure. I know in the beginning when… Back in March, there was a little skepticism around Zoom and Zoom meetings getting hacked, which did happen, but I do feel that it is still one of the most user-friendly and safest tools out there to get those videos done, to be able to have your TeleVisits, exactly how you can do your telemedicine calls with your patients and really being able to again stay face-to-face with them.
So this is just one of those tools that we get asked a lot, “How do you edit a PDF? How do I write on a PDF? How can I save something as a PDF?” And so this is PDFescape, and this tool is awesome.
This tool is really good if you need to sign a PDF. If you need to upload an image and turn it into a PDF or a presentation, an email, this is great.
How to use PDFescape
You can use the free version, you can just go click on to the Unregistered For Free. You can also pay for the paid version as well, but the free version is great. You can just go on here, choose your image that you want to upload and you want to be changed into a PDF, so you can upload that.
It’s going to upload into here, you can also then add some text to it if you want to add text to it. Let’s say you needed to sign something, there’s a free hand here, you can sign it, and then you can click these green arrows over here that says Save and Download, and that’s going to automatically save this as a PDF document. And so this is great, if you receive a PDF document that you need to fill out, maybe it’s a contract, anything, any document, and it’s not allowing you to write on the PDF, you can upload that PDF document directly into this tool, and then you would just click a text box, highlight where you want it to go and type in your text there, sign in, and then you can save this to your computer and email it back to the person that needs it.
Another digital marketing tool that we use is called Canva, and we talked about this tool a lot. We just did a blog on it, not too long ago, on how to create your custom graphics using Canva. This is probably a tool that I use every single day, multiple times a day because we create all of our social media graphics through here.
New Canva Features
Animated social media tool
Our blog graphics, our YouTube thumbnails, and they have a new animated option that came out, and we talked a little bit about the animated social media tool, which just adds a little bit of flare to your image. It does download as an MP4 file and they’re usually like five seconds long. If you click Play, it just adds a little bit of eye-catching appeal to your image.
Youtube intros
The other thing I want to show you, that they had come out with, is these new YouTube intros. So, Canva pulls royalty-free images, from different sources, like Pexels, or Pixabay, they have their own media library as well, but they also now have a video library, which is really cool.
Most of them are free, some of them are paid. If it does not say “free” in the bottom right-hand corner, then you have to pay for them, and it will tell you how much they are. But you can see that this is just a short little video.
Now, you can come down here, on the left-hand side, where it says “videos” and you can search. So let’s just search “social media” and it’s gonna pull up different videos that are around that topic. And they’re 10 seconds, they’re 27 seconds… So it really depends on what you’re looking for.
And so this makes great little videos for your YouTube, you can also use these for social media, they have the social media size as well. So this is a great way if you wanted to just add a little intro with your company name, your name, and maybe the title of that video right before they watch your video.
So, then let’s take this off, let’s change this to “Social Speak Network,” and I want this to be our font, so I wanna come back over here and use our font, and then I can change our names here. Now, if I don’t like this piece, if this isn’t matching, I can take away that, take away this, and then add a different box that is gonna be a different color. But let’s just say I like this. I can click here to play, and it’s a 10-second video. So, there are thousands of videos to choose from, this is a really cool feature that Canva has to offer.
Get more features with Canva Pro
If you are already on the pro version, which means you pay, I think, $12.95 a month, you get all of these already included in your plan. There are so many different options. It’s just a fun way to spruce up your digital marketing and add that video, that professional feel to it, without having to do the labor behind it. So this is in Canva, in the pro version, but this is just a YouTube thumbnail that you can put in front of your videos.
As I said, you can create these videos for your social media post, your social ads, your blog post, whatever you want to do, they have this video options here for you.
TubeBuddy is an extension that you can download. There is a paid feature to this, which I think we paid annually and it was nothing, it was great. So this is like it says your best friend to the road of success on YouTube. So let’s dive into the backend of our YouTube account.
Optimize your Youtube videos
So you’ll see this TubeBuddy button here. And this allows us to really optimize each of your videos. We’ll just go into one of our videos, how to use Canva. Now what this does is it allows you to create a thumbnail through here if you don’t use Canva. You can create it through TubeBuddy directly through them.
Advanced keyword research
This also allows you to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for your videos. So this will automatically come up with related search terms. So here’s how to use Canva for Instagram, and then you can click onto that, it’s gonna put a check-mark there, so it’s gonna automatically put it into your tags for that video.
So how to use Canva for a YouTube video thumbnail. And so this is a great way to make sure that you are utilizing the correct tag words for each video of what people are going to be searching for. And so this is probably my favorite thing to do with TubeBuddy because I wanna make sure that the videos I’m putting on to YouTube people are actually gonna be searching for. You can share it to Twitter, you can share it to Facebook, you can add your info cards and in-screens. And if you scroll down here, these are your recommended tags. So this is gonna tell you how many people are searching on that topic.
So this one, how to use Canva for YouTube thumbnail we have 25, the relevance is a score of 25. So Canva tutorial for teachers. So you can really get very specific on your tag words, and you can create your info. So you would go here, you can create templates through TubeBuddy.
Rank higher in search results
So think of TubeBuddy as your YouTube video checklist and how to optimize each video and making sure that you really are filling out all of those blanks. And it’s gonna tell you to do that, like we may not add an in-screen on every single video because some of them are just training but it’s going to give you that checklist to make sure that you are adding those things to your video.
So this is what you can scroll through and make sure, so six of the 10 best practices are complete. So if I wanted to add an on-screen, I can go to in-screen, I can go to info cards. And then if I wanted to share on Facebook and Twitter, I can do that as well. So TubeBuddy is a great tool if you’re really wanting to thrive with that video marketing strategy. It also gives you analytics which is awesome.
Take your Youtube channel to the next level
Since we’ve been using TubeBuddy, our views have gone up quite a bit actually, and the watch time is increasing as well. So we’ve grown our subscribers by 15, we’ve been using TubeBuddy for about six months now, maybe a little bit longer than that. But I really love all of the data that TubeBuddy gives you. By using the TubeBuddy, Keyword Finder, the SEO studio, all of these different things, it allows you to just go a little bit deeper.
I think they have a ton of different pieces of training and features on there. It only costs $19 a month. If you pay annually, then obviously you get it a little bit cheaper. So you can cancel anytime. But I just think that this is a great tool. It’s easy to use, it goes right into your YouTube account, and you are able to make sure you’re optimizing each of those videos.
So if you need help with your video optimization, and how to install TubeBuddy and get it working for your videos, let us know, we’re here for you.
Okay, the next digital marketing tool that we are going to use and talk about is called Outwrite. This was previously GradeProof, and the other tool we use is called Grammarly.
Correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors instantly
So Grammarly and Outwrite are both Chrome extensions. These tools help you in making sure that your grammar and your spelling are correct.
Most business owners are great at what they do, but when it comes to writing content, maybe that’s not your strong suit. For me, personally, writing is not a strong suit for me. I would rather do a video, be able to talk out that blog, and then have it transcribed, which we’ll get to next. But with Outwrite and Grammarly, I feel a lot more confident in what I’m writing. This will show you a few examples of how it’s going to help you. And again, with both of these, there’s free options and paid options. We use the free options, but it will give you an example.
So I have it pulled up, I just have a little blurb from a video description we are working on. But as you can see as you scroll through, it will highlight what should be fixed. So, I should have an A in front of that and an S at the end of this word. Now, the other thing that it will do is it will also highlight when you should have a comma when you should take out a comma.
Works wherever you write online
Now, these aren’t perfect. But they do help with just the basic grammar, spelling, making sure that everything is correct before you send that email off or before you put that blog post up. They do work in email, so we have G Suite, and so, as I’m writing emails, it will highlight in green, if I needed to add a comma there, it will highlight in red if a word is misspelled.
So, it’s a really great tool, both of them. And you’ll see here I have the Grammarly and Outwrite, and they both work, they’ll both tell you what they’re, so, right here, it says, “Open Outwrite.” And this will tell me potential improvements and, obviously, if you pay for either one of these, then it will show you more. So, it’s just a really great way, if you’re not an editor or a copywriter, sometimes, we’re human, we make mistakes. So having these two tools really help just make sure you are putting the best version of your writing out there, and a lot of our clients get held back by the fear of having a typo, or something that’s not grammatically correct on their website.
So this just takes that extra step, and it also does work with WordPress as well. So if your website is in WordPress and you’re adding new content to your website, it will highlight in red or green what things need to be updated. So, again, this is Outwrite and Grammarly that we use. If you have questions on how to install those, or how to use them, please let us know. We are here to help you.
The last digital marketing tool that we use is called Scribie. Scribie is a transcription service.
Transcribe your audio and video files
This is where a lot of our clients love to be able to do videos, have those doctor, or nurse, or staff interviews, and then they want to be able to take that content from the video and use it as content for their blog post.
This is something that we do all the time because when you’re putting the work into your videos, we can repurpose that video more than just a video.
When you record a video on Zoom, you can get a video and audio file. You can upload either one of those into Scribie and it’s going to transcribe that video that I had done. And you can download it in any format you want – Word doc, PDF, and other formats. But we usually just download the Word doc, because then we can edit it from there. And again, this is a transcription service, so what will happen is it will transcribe every single word. I like to say “So” a lot, and that comes up in the transcription.
AI-powered automated transcripts
So let me just show you what the transcription looks like. So this is what, how it comes. What we usually do is copy this content into a Google doc, and take out the timestamps, we need to edit this a little bit more, make sure that the spelling and grammar is correct, take out all of my “Sos” and “Ands”, and make sure that it looks nice and crisp, and clean.
But, the cool thing is, is that video that took you 10 minutes to do, or less, you now have an awesome blog that you are able to use. So, let me go back to Scribie.
Low transcription rates
For each video that we upload, you do pay to have the transcription, but it usually is about 80 cents a word, so I think the most we’ve paid is maybe $10 for one of our videos. But, usually, they’re between $4 and $7, on average. So this is just a great tool, it’s very convenient, it emails you the transcription when it’s done, it’s very affordable, and it’s something that, if you’re already doing those videos, but you’re not updating your blog, you’re just putting them on to YouTube, get them transcribed, so then you can use that content on your website, for SEO. So, go on over to scribie.com and upload your first video file, and get your transcription, and let us know how you like it.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Digital-Marketing-Tools-Blog.png12602240Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2020-09-02 08:00:512020-09-02 14:55:356 Digital Marketing Tools to Make Your Life Easier
Today’s blog discusses the quick, easy, and simple processes that we use in order to repurpose the videos that you’re creating for social media. We’ve been discussing how important it is for your medical practice, your wellness center, to be doing videos as a way to stand out online and really create that personal relationship with your target audience and with those prospective patients. However, we then take the video and we recommend utilizing it in a lot of different ways.
One such way is by taking the transcript and turning it into a blog post. So this requires you to upload the video to YouTube, get the embed code, paste the embed code into a blog post, then create the description, put that into the blog post, and then grab the transcript of this after you upload it to a place like Scribie, for example, and put that into the blog post as well.
To simplify this process, we utilize Zapier.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is a communication tool between YouTube and your blog. And we use it for a lot of other systems and processes as well, where if you have something repetitive that you’re always doing over and over again.
There are hundreds of other platforms like it, can connect those two items that you’re just copying and pasting and make it, so it’s a really easy flow from one to the other.
How to use Zapier
So let’s jump in, and I will share my screen. So what we’re going to see first here is Zapier. I already have the dashboard set up.
Make a zap
Start by clicking, “Make a Zap.” Every video that we create, we wanna make sure that we’re sharing it to social media. So on our backend, every single video that gets uploaded to YouTube then also gets posted to our Basecamp work. But I do not have it set up where it also creates the video blog post.
So what we’re going do is YouTube, and you can always search for that as well. And I’m going to click, “A New Video to a Channel.” And then we can click, “Continue.” And so we already have our YouTube account hooked up here, but if we didn’t, then we would go through the process of linking it up.
Log in on your account
Now, for Zapier as well as any other time that you’re linking two different pieces of software online, I just recommend logging into those accounts beforehand, making sure you’re in the right account, and then going through the process of trying to sync that. One of the reasons why I do that is because you might be in your personal account rather than the company account, for example, and you don’t wanna link up your personal stuff with the company stuff. You might as well just make sure from the very beginning.
Get the channel ID
So here, we need to get the channel ID. You could also do, “Upload a Video to a Username.” However, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what the username is, but the channel ID is very simple to find.
So I am going to just click this button right here. So I already clicked to upload a video, but the channel ID is just this next one after this channels here. Oops. We’ll click, “Continue.” And then I always recommend testing this trigger, so fingers crossed it worked. Awesome. So our last video that we did is, “Five Content Marketing Ideas for Healthcare Practices.” This was our blog post last week. And look at this, it pulls in the description, when it was published as well as the thumbnails. So that is really cool that it also does the thumbnails because we’re going to be using that for our featured image down the road here. Okay. So what we have is, when this happens, so when a new video is uploaded to the channel on YouTube, we do this.
And so here we want to do WordPress, and we want to create a post. Okay, we’ll click, “Continue,” and we want the WordPress that we already have connected. But, again, you’d wanna make sure you’re logged in here, and it will just prompt you through the steps, so making sure that you have access and you’re giving Zapier the access to that account.
Create a post
So what I wanna do is create a post. However, you could also do pages, media, forums, etcetera, products, pop-ups, whatever you have there. We wanna do a post for this part. The title is the title of the video. And you could also do… If you want to, you could put video in the title there or you could put “From the Wellness video channel” or something. I don’t know, whatever you want to put there. I’m just going to put the title just to keep it simple. The featured media. So here, we might have to play around with it just a little bit to make sure that we get that image there. And it looks as though… There we go. So instead of doing the featured media, what we wanna do is this custom one, and so this will actually pull in that featured image, the thumbnail image, that you had selected when you upload the YouTube video. So I believe I want to do the default URL. Let’s see.
Width and height
I’m going to do the high one, max res. Let’s do this one. Basically, what I was looking at here is the default width and everything, and so the max res is going to be the biggest option that we can do.
Content
So here we just click the description and it will automatically put that description in there. Now, you could add more content in here if you want. For example, you could have, “In this new video we discussed five content marketing ideas for healthcare practices.”
And then you could have the title, period. And then we’d want to have the description here. You know what? I’m going to make this at H3, so you can add some of that SEO stuff in here already, just as HTML. Okay. And so it says “uses WordPress text editor, supports HTML.” So here, I added that little header tag as well as the paragraphs there. Status, so we want the status to be a draft, you could have it be published immediately, but I always recommend just double-checking to make sure that all the settings are correct.
The excerpt
It’s up to you if you utilize excerpts on places on your site. I’m going to leave this blank. Most websites do have this just be a blank field and Google then would, if it needs an excerpt from something it’ll just grab the content. Post date, what we want to do here is the date, the publish date. Okay. Post format, typically, we wanna keep this just as standard, potentially your blog has different formats there, and then the post name we use the title. Okay.
Comment status
I’m going to do closed. Typically for wellness websites and healthcare websites, we do want that to be turned off. However, if you are an influencer or something like that, keep it turned on. We don’t want it sticky. And then we can also do some tags, so for the tags, I’m just going to do… Oops, I forgot the category. So you can have the category as well, I would recommend having something with video. Let’s see. There we go. Oops, it didn’t actually… Yeah. That would be fine. Let’s save. So I’m just going to keep this one tag, we have the category selected here, you could have a different category as well, video blogs or something like that would be good, or just use the base category that you have.
Preview
And again, this is just so that you have fewer items to fill in as you’re reviewing the blog post. So we’re going to do “Test and Continue.” And we created a post. So let’s go in here and check out our post, so that you can see what it looks like. Okay. And if you take a look here, we have this post right here, so we’re going to just click to preview, and as you can see, we have “In this new video about healthcare marketing, we discussed five content marketing ideas for healthcare practices.”
Embed the video
And then it says, b, the content from the description, and you know what we forgot to do? We forgot to embed the video. So this is why you always do the test. So let’s jump on back up here and we’re going to customize the post. And so let’s put in that embed code, and what we’re going to do is, this is the embed URL, and so then you just need to put that into the correct script. So I’ll make sure to post that script down here in just one moment.
Okay, so how the embed information works from YouTube, is there is a standard information that you can even just get when you are on YouTube and you click to embed something. Again, this is just setting it up one time and then it’ll continually do it correctly. But what we wanna do here is I pasted in that information, and I want to write in this SRC, quotations, I wanna put in the correct information there. So here I’m grabbing the embed URL, and I’m just pasting it in there, or clicking so that it goes in there. So let’s just double-check to make sure that this works correctly. And I’m going to re-test. Save, we’ll go back to the posts. I might have to delete that post just to make sure that it… Yeah. Have to delete that post. Trash. Okay. Re-test.
And so an easy way to get that embed code… Again, I’ll paste it down below, sometimes those quotation marks they’ll copy and paste incorrectly just from YouTube. Click “Share.” And so we grab this embedded code.
So you can do this on any video that pops up. It doesn’t have to be yours. Copy this information right here. And again, this SRC Embed right here, this URL is that embed URL that Zapier will be able to provide for you. So that’s how I recommend getting it, I’ll just copy this just so that I can put it in our YouTube description, and then you’ll be good to go.
Final thoughts
So this is really the process that we utilize as a way to make it easier to manage all that content that you’re creating. We’re telling you to create these videos, so what’s the easiest way that’s going to save time and save money to get those videos from YouTube and then into the blog post, because you want this content to live on your blog as a way to really get the most out of it. And make sure that you have that SEO benefit as well as the ability to share it more easily to your newsletter or to an email or something like that. To get people back to the website so that hopefully they’ll end up requesting a consultation.
So if this was confusing to follow at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out, put a comment down below, it was kind of one of our more technical topics. However, Zapier does do a fantastic job, really just making sure that the steps are pretty easy to implement. If it’s your first time going into Zapier and setting up an account, it might look a little confusing. Just click that “Make a Zap” button, search for what you wanna do and you’ll be able to set it up.
Of course, we’re more than happy to schedule a consultation as well. In this call, we’ll see if we’ll be able to be a good fit for your team in order to help you with all of your digital marketing efforts.
If you’ve liked this video, please subscribe, also please check out our podcast over on Podbean and iTunes, and don’t forget to head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Zapier-Blog-1.png12602240Caitlin McDonaldhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngCaitlin McDonald2020-08-26 12:49:082020-08-26 16:49:48Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube
Content marketing involves creating and sharing content that attracts and interests your target audience. The goal is to create high quality content that your audience will find valuable. When done right, it can convert prospects to patients or clients.
If you’re thinking of using content to attract patients and clients, it’s a great decision. By providing your audience with useful and relevant content, they are more likely to engage with you, share the content with their family and friends, and return for more. Not only will it capture the attention of your target audience, it will also help you build your credibility and position yourself as an industry leader.
As compared to other sectors, the healthcare market has shown a slow adaption rate when it comes to content marketing. By implementing a content strategy now, you’ll have less competition in your industry and get ahead of your competition.
Here are 5 content marketing ideas for your practice.
Blogging for Health and Wellness Practices
There may be lots of content out there, but they will never be enough to satisfy our thirst for knowledge.
Blogs are a great way to share new and relevant information while attracting new visitors to your stie. But before you start putting your content strategy into action, it is important that you know your audience well. The more effort you put into understanding your audience, the better you’ll be able to cater to their needs.
Keep your audience in mind when writing your content. Capture their attention by choosing topics they actually want to read about. If you’re a pediatrician, you can use your blog to offer insightful advice to parents, establish relationships with your audience, and attract new patients.
Once your blog is up and running, you’ll be surprised at the opportunities it brings. Establish your authority as a thought leader and you’ll find your practice climbing to the top search results.
Interactive content for Medical Marketing
Content marketing doesn’t have to be a one-way conversation. Get your audience involved through interactive polls, quizzes, and challenges.
Let’s take UnitedHealthcare’s “We Dare You” campaign as an example. They were able to position themselves as a leading healthcare brand using this strategy. As part of their campaign, they provided their followers with quizzes and monthly challenges. The goal is to encourage people to make small changes and live healthier lives. Followers are then asked to share a photo of themselves performing that challenge.
“We Dare You” campaign received two silver awards – one for digital marketing and one for social media.
Patient spotlight series
Sharing patients’ stories and testimonials on your website is a great idea for the same reason Amazon user reviews are so powerful.
Unlike in retail industry, healthcare providers do not offer refund or “return services”. This is why patients conduct thorough research and read online reviews before booking an appointment with a healthcare provider. Without these reviews, you’ll be missing out on hundreds of new patients each year.
Make it easier for potential patients to choose you by shining a light on patient success stories. Patients trust other patients. And in success stories, you, your staff, and the facility are presented as capable. That’s what patients are looking for – a capable healthcare practitioner who can help them with their medical condition.
Video content in Healthcare Marketing
We don’t have to tell you how big video content is in today’s marketing world. People love videos. In fact, recent study shows that more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on Youtube every single day.
We believe that video would be an excellent marketing strategy for your health and wellness practice.
There is a wealth of video content ideas that you can explore – from sharing medical information to how-to videos.
If you’re a physical therapist, you can create a video series showing patients how to perform exercises at home. If you’re a yoga instructor, you can do some pose tutorials for different levels. Or talk about your personal experiences practicing yoga.
Infographics for Healthcare Data
People love information. But if you’re posting links to your blogs on social media, they might not even read them. Why? Because most people have a short attention span. They want to get the information they want without too much exerting too much effort. They want content that are easy to digest and understand. This is where infographics come in.
Infographics are more eye-catching than plain texts. They contain both photos and content, which naturally draw the eye. Infographics are also extremely shareable. Every click or share means more people seeing your content.
Overall, infographics are a fun, engaging medium that can generate a unique connection with your target market.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/5-Content-Marketing-Ideas-blog.png12602240Kathlyn Angeles-Timbolhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles-Timbol2020-08-19 14:22:382020-08-28 09:37:455 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Practice
People are searching for everything online – from restaurants that will deliver food to their doorstep, to the latest fashion trends. Searching for a health practitioner is no exception.
Your potential patients are looking for you online. The search engine is usually the first place people go to when looking for a healthcare provider. As such, the goal is to make sure you show up at the top of the search engine results page.
When done properly, SEO has the potential to earn an impressive ROI for your practice and attract the leads you need to grow.
Here are 5 SEO strategies to get more patients for your medical practice.
Optimize your website
A well-optimized website can help bring in people who are interested in your service, but who aren’t necessarily familiar with you. Not only will it help boost awareness of your practice, but you’ll also look more credible to prospective patients.
Doing SEO requires knowing who your target audience is, as well as their pain points. You need to start by conducting keyword research.
Using keywords that best describe your business and industry will help make your website more visible. Tools like Keyword Tool and Google Keyword Planner can help you find keywords and key phrases people search online to find your practice.
Create high-quality content
Building a website that highlights your service isn’t enough to get you the top spot on the search engine results page. You also need to create high-quality content.
Not too long ago, ranking your website on search engines was easy. All you need to do is write keyword-packed contents and you’ll start seeing results. But not anymore.
Search engines like Google love fresh, unique content. While keywords are still a vital ranking factor, you also have to consider the quality of your content. Write for your audience first and then search engines.
Having more custom content on your site can drive more traffic to your site and help you rank higher in search results. Write content that is interesting, informative, and unique. Make sure that you do it better than your competition.
Claim and optimize business listing
If you want to attract more patients, then you need to get listed in local directories. While most patients do use search engines when finding healthcare providers, not all of them would book an appointment immediately after making a quick Google search. In fact, studies suggest that 77% of potential patients do further research and read reviews before making a decision.
Claiming and optimizing listing on local business directories can increase your chances of being found by search engines.
Prospective patients usually visit third party sites such as Google My Business, Healthgrades, and more. You want to increase your local footprint to ensure that they find you no matter which site they are looking for. Having customer reviews will also help you gain the trust of prospective patients.
Optimize for local search
One of the best ways to convert a searcher to a patient is to ensure that your location shows up at one of the top three positions in a search engine’s “near me” map.
Potential patients usually search for facilities and doctors nearby. Optimizing your site for local search will make you more visible to people in your area, and ultimately contact you right when they need you.
Be sure to register your business on Google maps. Don’t forget to add your location to your page titles and content on your site.
Build a strong social media presence
Living in the digital world, having a social media presence is a must. While social media isn’t a direct SEO ranking factor, it does help with your ranking somehow.
If you want to get SEO benefits from your social media marketing, then you need to optimize your profile first. Also, make sure that you post updates regularly. You don’t need to create an account on different social platforms. Just choose one or two platforms and maintain an active presence on those channels.
Share your blogs on social media. This will help you reach a wider audience as well as build trust. If people start sharing your content, it’s more likely that more people will link to it. Links are a hugely important SEO ranking factor.
Final thoughts
With the world going digital at a rapid pace, more and more people are turning to the internet to find answers to their health queries and find health practitioners.
Your medical practice can’t grow if it lacks the attention of prospective patients. It’s time to start taking a more focused and strategic approach in getting your practice in front of thousands of potential patients with search engine optimization. If you still haven’t invested in SEO, then you’re giving away clicks to your competitors.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/5-SEO-Strategies-Blog.png12602240Kathlyn Angeles-Timbolhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles-Timbol2020-08-12 13:05:422020-08-28 09:38:075 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice
On today’s blog, we are going to be talking about Instagram Stories. We’ve done a few videos in the past on Instagram Stories, but Instagram is always adding new features to the Instagram Stories, different options you have when you do a new story, and I wanted to just walk through those today so you can see why it’s so important to do Instagram Stories.
So, let me jump on out of here real quick, and let me go into our Instagram account. And as you can see our screen, the circle icons up top are the Instagram Stories. These are what people see right away when they get on to Instagram, and people tend to scroll through Instagram Stories before they scroll through their Instagram feed. With that being said, you can see the importance of having Instagram Stories a part of your Instagram strategy. Instagram Stories only stay up for 24 hours, unless you highlight them to one of your boards, and I’ll show you how to do that.
Creating an Instagram story
Let’s go back to our home page and we wanna create an Instagram story. So you’re gonna go up to the top where you see your circle icon with the blue plus sign, you’re gonna click onto that, and this is gonna bring up the different options.
So I’m gonna put this in the background instead of my computer, so this what’s called normal option. Instagram has added a few different options for you, so this one is breezy.
If you want this effect again, you can save it here, you can send that post to somebody. This is also where you’re gonna get the twinkle. So you’ll see when people take selfies or pictures of things, that you’re gonna see these twinkles, this is underneath this normal option.
Live video
You can still do a live video, which would be just like this us talking. It will automatically cut it the correct way, and this is gonna tell you right now that you have six active followers that have the potential of watching your Instagram Live and being able to engage.
So, you would hit record here on this button and being able to start that process. So that is the live option.
Create
The next option is Create. This is where you saw in the beginning slide, the welcome to Social Speak Network. Now, I can go to create and I can click onto this happy face up here, and this is all the options that Instagram gives you, so you can add a location, you can mention somebody, you can add hashtags, you can add cute little images which are called stickers. What I love this feature is really the data that you’re able to collect from an Instagram story.
Poll
So if you have an event, you can do a register link here, but if you’re wanting to find out what your audience is looking for, where do they need help?
This is really good for your content strategy if you’re trying to figure out where people are needing help at. So you can do a poll and I can say, “Do you need more help with your social media?” You say social media marketing or your SEO website marketing. Okay, they’re two different things, but just so… And you put the answers here, social media and SEO website. So this is gonna be my question.
Now, I can change that text that I want, and I can say, “Do you need help with your social media marketing or your SEO website?”
If you’re a fitness coach and you’re wanting to do a new Zoom class, this can be something along the lines of, Would you rather do a morning class or an afternoon class? And then you can add another poll, so you would add another question here on the next slide.
Quiz
So this is just a really great feature. You can also do a quiz where… True or false.
If you’re a health coach and you’re wanting to see what your audience knows about their nutritional facts of their food, that’s a great option. Also, you can ask questions. Rather than doing a poll, you can just ask a question to your audience as well, and you can do a countdown.
So, there’s a lot of different options here on this area under Create that I really like, and so we’re just gonna exit out of this real quick, we don’t need that.
Boomerang
Boomerang is those fun videos where it takes a two-second video. Again, this is great for the Monday morning coffee cup, cheers to Monday morning. This could be a happy Friday, this can be different quick little snippet videos.
Layout
Then the one new thing that they have come out with is this layout. This is an awesome feature for product, so you can have a four-picture grid up to a six-picture grid. So this is great if you wanna take a picture of new products that have come in or if you’re highlighting staff members, you can just keep taking those and then being able to have that as a story.
Super Zoom
Then Super Zoom this is good if you can go in here, and this usually has options like hearts or flame. You’ll see it as you hold your thumb on that button, and it’s gonna just slowly but surely go deeper to an object. So this is just something if you wanted to have maybe like a quote of the day or just different features that Instagram Stories has to offer.
Highlight a story
Let’s go back to Create, and I wanna show you how to highlight a story. I’m gonna go on here, and you can change your colors if you want to as well, down here on the left, or the right-hand corner.
So, I’m gonna go back to this bluish-purple, and I’m gonna click onto the icon and I’m gonna do a poll. And my question is going to be, Would you rather have a company manage your social media marketing or your SEO and website marketing?
There’s a certain character count here, so we may have to think of that question. Let’s say, “Do you need more help with your social media or SEO website?” So let’s keep it short and simple. And then in this option here, you can say website and SEO.
So, now that I have this complete, now I just want to hit… You can change this to close friends if you have a list already made. Otherwise, I just like the stories going out to everyone, and what you can do is then just click on your stories.
Now, this can link to your Facebook as well. So if you click on to your Send to, it can go to your Facebook stories or just Instagram Stories. So what I always do is I just click on the bottom here and it’s shared. So now when we click onto that icon again up top, our story’s uploading, and it’s right here.
Now, if we want to highlight that we’re gonna click on to highlight, and if you already have these boards created, you can go into tips for you, whatever board you have that you want this in particular slide to go to, you could click right on to that and then it would say it’s added to those tips.
So, this is a way that you can go from having that Instagram story only show up here for 24 hours, to now showing up here at the end. So they’ve got through, they’ll say, “Oh, this is so great.” And then they’re gonna be able to then see that story right there.
Final thoughts
So this is just, again, another way to help you get in front of your audience stay top of mind, and this is what people are going to be seeing, as they get on to Instagram, they’re going to see the stories and click on those before they go on to the feed.
So really thinking of behind the scenes photos that you can put into the Instagram story, Instagram Exclusives for just your Instagram followers, promoting webinars, new blog posts. Those are things that Instagram Stories work really well for.
If you have any questions about your Instagram strategy, please let us know.
In this blog we talk about email marketing for your healthcare practice or your wellness practice. Email marketing helps to serve a lot of different purposes. And so, we’ll talk about what those purposes are for your practice, as well as the different types of emails that we recommend making sure that you are sending out.
First and foremost, email marketing helps you to increase the ROI from your digital marketing efforts.
Increase ROI of Healthcare Digital Marketing
How does it do this? Well, the first thing that it does is it keeps you top of mind with the folks on your email list. Sometimes your email list might be comprised of past patients, or it might be comprised of somebody who just downloaded a resource from your website, or even somebody who just requested a consultation with your practice.
By receiving emails in their inbox at set frequencies, whether it’s daily, monthly, weekly, you are able to stay top of mind with them. When they think of your specialty, you immediately are the person that they think of. Just because you keep on popping up in their inbox.
Additionally, email marketing helps you to build trust with your patients and with your email list.
Build Trust with Prospects Online
Now you’re able to build trust because whenever you send out an email, you are sharing valuable and educational information with your email list. So the more you share this valuable and educational material, the more they will learn to trust what you have to say.
Put a Face to the Name with Email Marketing
Lastly, email marketing helps you to really get your email list knowing your physicians or your specialist. And so, by including things like videos or pictures of your staff and of your physicians, you are able to get them to know who you are as an office and who your specialists really are. So these are really important for making sure that you are increasing the ROI of your digital marketing efforts.
Types of Email Marketing to Include in Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy
Now, what types of emails do we send out? So there are a few different types of emails, and the two most important ones that we’re going to talk about today are the automated emails that somebody would receive right when they request a consultation or right when they download a resource from your website and ongoing email newsletters.
Automated Emails Immediately After A Prospect Joins Your List
How many times have you had that happen where somebody fills out the form, you give them a call, and they have no idea what you’re calling about?
The reason why we want to send them something immediately is that online people are busy, they might click to download something on their phone or even click for a consultation, and then they forget about it.
We see this sometimes, especially when we’re running ads on Facebook, where somebody will fill out a form, and then after 30 minutes or an hour, they might forget that they filled out the form or not recognize your call when you call them to schedule that actual appointment.
By sending a follow-up email, especially one that includes a short message from your specialist, it helps them to remember who you are and to put a face to the name, so that they actually have a lasting relationship connection with your practice. So we definitely recommend any time you collect name and email address, to then send out a email immediately. Now, you can set this up through your contact management system, and through your medical record system that sometimes those have the capability to do this, or if you utilize something like MailChimp or Salesforce, that is an option there as well.
Integrating Email Newsletters into Healthcare Marketing
The next thing that you will be wanting to have the emails for is your newsletter. We recommend sending out a newsletter at least monthly, though a lot of our clients do send them out weekly. These newsletters are great places to share educational information with the folks on your email list. We recommend including videos of your physicians or your specialist, as well as tips, and even sometimes recipes, or exercises that your email list can do at home to help with the things that your specialty is around as well.
I bring up orthopedic surgeons quite a bit, but you could have knee exercises or stretching exercises included in that email list, to help people share it with their friends and family who might be going through the same thing. Or, for a pediatrics office, potentially, you have something in there that is geared towards healthy snacks for children at different age groups or different milestones, as well as some STEM toys or projects that they could be doing at home with their parents. The parent can share this content with their friends and family if they find it educational and share-worthy.
We highly recommend having this email marketing be a large part of your digital marketing strategy, so that once you collect the names and email addresses of individuals and they have opted into your email marketing, they not only receive an immediate email to remind them who you are and put a face to the name, but then they also receive these ongoing email communications so that you stay top of mind and they learn to know, like, and trust you.
If you have any questions about how to utilize email marketing for your wellness center, please head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and request a consultation. We can’t wait to talk with you in more detail about how you can increase the ROI of your own digital marketing campaigns. And if you like this video, be sure to click that subscribe button or follow us on Podbean or iTunes.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Dynamic-Headlines-3.png7201280Caitlin McDonaldhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngCaitlin McDonald2020-07-22 14:07:072020-07-22 14:07:07Email Marketing to Increase ROI of Healthcare Digital Marketing
LinkedIn is the world’s most extensive professional network, with over 675 million monthly users in more than 200 countries across the globe. It makes an invaluable addition to your digital marketing strategy – from making connections and improving brand awareness to generating leads and establishing partnerships. But in order for your marketing efforts to be effective, you first need to grow your network.
Building a bigger network on LinkedIn won’t happen overnight. These strategies will help make the idea of growing your connections more realistic and less intimidating.
Make the right impression with your profile photo
We all know that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But let’s face it. If the cover isn’t inviting, people won’t be interested to open the book and read its content.
In today’s digital world, a profile photo represents your sole opportunity to make a strong visual first impression.
Humans are innately wired to make a snap judgment based on appearance. You can’t control how everyone will perceive you. But you can do something to ensure that your picture will portray you in a positive manner.
Use keywords on your profile
A fully optimized LinkedIn profile can ensure your profile is fully discoverable on the platform and even on search engines like Google.
Keywords can make the difference between your profile attracting the views you want or being lost in the digital space, so it is important to understand which keywords matter to attract the right views.
If you work in an industry that has career-specific terms, use those keywords. You can add them everywhere in your profile, but there are 3 main areas that are most important – header, summary, and experience section.
Share content
While building a bigger network is your primary goal, you also want to use LinkedIn to build your relationship with your followers. One way to do this is by sharing valuable, educational content.
Publishing articles is one of the best ways to establish your personal brand and share your expertise in your industry.
It’s common practice to share blogs that you think will resonate well with your audience, but it would be better if those insights are your own. Plus, it creates additional opportunities for engagement since your network will be notified every time you post an article.
Make sure your content mix includes eye-catching visuals. We found that posts with video and visual content heightened the level of engagement on the platform.
Personalize your connection requests
Don’t just hit “connect” when you want to send a connection request. Always go to the person’s profile, hit the “connect” button, and briefly explain why you want to connect with them.
Personalization is the key to getting strangers to connect with you on LinkedIn. Spend a few thoughtful moments to compose a personalized connection request. If you can find a topic to bring up or if you have a mutual connection, that makes all the difference.
Engage with your connections
There are lots of activities that happen on LinkedIn – article mentions, new job titles, birthdays, and more.
Interacting with your connections when they have new things happening is a great way to develop a relationship. So go ahead. Comment on a status update. Say “congratulations” when someone gets a new job. Like new profile pictures. Thank people for their recommendations and endorsements. You never know where a single meaningful connection with another person can take both of you.
Join groups
Joining groups is one of the fastest ways to make hundreds of connections. Please note, though, that there is a difference between simply joining a group and being efficiently engaged.
If you are serious about using LinkedIn to your advantage, then make sure that you join the right groups. Look for 5 to 10 groups you can be active in.
Engaging in group discussions puts you in front of people who are already actively engaged with a particular topic. Spend a bit of time liking and commenting on other’s posts. Once you’ve been in the group for a bit, you can start posting your own content.
By providing valuable information, you’re showcasing your expertise around that subject and build relationships.
Add a follow button to your company’s website
One “set it and forget it” tip is to add a follow button to your company’s website. This simple addition can help turn your website visitors into LinkedIn page followers.
Before you hit the publish button on your next blog post, make sure that you include a CTA that would lead your readers to take action after they finish reading your posts.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Building-a-Bigger-Network-Blog.png12602240Kathlyn Angeles-Timbolhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles-Timbol2020-07-15 10:42:462020-08-28 09:39:577 Strategies for Building a Bigger Network on LinkedIn
