Enfold Heading and Menu Settings – Center Logo on Menu

enfold theme menu customizations

This month we have been asked numerous times for a logo to be centered on the WordPress Website. As we typically utilize the Enfold Theme for our WordPress Websites, we needed to do some customizations to the header and menu to make the formatting work.

It is simple enough, however, with just a bit of CSS to center the logo on the menu so menu items appear on either side (and in line) with the logo image!

Sets and CSS to add from Enfold Tutorials is at:

https://kriesi.at/documentation/enfold/menu/#toggle-id-147

/*————————*/
/* CSS – Logo center split menu
/*————————*/

@media only screen and (min-width: 780px) {
/*In the below code nth-child(x) the value of x should be half the number of total menu items*/
#top #header .av-main-nav li:nth-child(3) {
/* Adjust the width of the logo */
margin-right:150px;
}

#header .main_menu {
/*background: gold;*/
width: 100%;
left: 50%;
transform: translateX(-50%);
}

.av-main-nav-wrap {
left: 50%;
transform: translateX(-50%);
}

#header .logo {
left: 50%;
transform: translateX(-50%);
z-index:999;
}

#header .logo img {
top: 50%;
transform: translateY(-50%);
max-width: 100px;
}
}

When a logo is centered on Enfold using CSS, the social media icons appear behind the menu. To fix this, simply add the following to your General Styling Settings under Quick CSS to have the icons Float Right.

#top nav .social_bookmarks { float: right; }

This video tutorial for the Enfold Theme goes into the Header and Menu Settings specifically for:

  • Appending search icon to the Main Menu (Theme Options – Main Menu)
  • Adding Social Icons to the Main Menu (Theme Options – Header – Extra Elements)

If there are other items you have questions about on Enfold, please let us know! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Social Speak Network YouTube Channel!

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Social Media Plan 2021

Social Media Plan 2021

In today’s blog, we’ll be covering six tips to create your healthcare social media plan for 2021. Yes, 2021! We are entering the fourth quarter already of 2020, and it’s really important to be proactive when it comes to your social media strategy. Because the more that you plan, the easier it is.

 

Social media review

You’ve heard of us talking about this a little bit throughout the year. We always like to do a quarterly check-in and just see what’s working and what’s not working.

So if you haven’t done your review yet, take the time this fourth quarter to really look at each of your social media platforms, (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube), you need to look at their Analytics. Look at each quarter, look at the whole year, look to see what posts have gotten the most engagement, and also look at your Google Analytics to see where that social traffic is coming from.

Are you getting a lot of website traffic from Pinterest or Facebook? Are you getting a little website traffic from Instagram, but you’re getting a lot of engagement? So really looking at each platform, what is working, and what’s not working on each one. Why? It’s because each platform has its own purpose.

Like with Instagram, you may get a lot more engagement, but you’re not gonna get a lot of traffic to your website; whereas Facebook and Pinterest, maybe you get less engagement, but more traffic to your website, so looking at those and looking at them individually and seeing what’s working. So that was number one, doing your social media review.

Content

So after you do your review, make sure you write down what content works the best, and figure out new ways to implement new content for 2021.

According to Tubular, by 2021, 80% of Internet traffic will be from videos, that’s huge, 80%. And a lot of that is done by the phones.

So you have to think of what types of posts you’re putting up. Are you doing more personal posts of you and your staff, patient testimonials, and short little videos? Are you doing doctor interviews, patient interviews, educational videos where you are talking, maybe you have a weekly FAQ section?

What are the types of content that you have put out over 2020 and what’s work the best? And then make a list of the content that you want to do more of in 2021 and things you wanna try.

So maybe you’ve just been posting, repurposing content from outside sources, which is great. It’s always good to share articles from your industry, Facebook loves that. But maybe you want to have original content. Maybe you should start blogging in 2021 and have that content go out to social media and drive that traffic back to the website. Think of different types of content that you want to implement into your social media plan for 2021.

Set goals

I know sometimes it sounds so like, “Oh, it’s just social media, we don’t need to have goals.” But you do. You need to really look at how many followers and likes do you have right now, and what’s that number you wanna get to. Sometimes, it’s not always the quantity, it’s more quality.

So you may have 1500 likes, but your engagement with them is amazing. So you may say, “Okay, I’m not really worried about growing my likes on my Facebook page, but I wanna reach even more people.” And so looking at those goals, maybe you tapped into Facebook ads a little bit in 2020, but your goal is to really master Facebook ads where you can see that return on investment, “I wanna grow my email list by 200 people in 2021.”

Well, you’re gonna grow that email list by creating really successful Facebook ads, you’re not gonna grow that email list by just posting. So setting those goals and looking at how you can utilize Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and making sure, looking at the kind of, if you’re new to the Facebook ad world, okay, you may be tapped into it or you boosted a post, but you really didn’t get anything from it.

Let’s dive into that a little bit more. What post did you boost, did you create a specific audience? Sometimes we have clients that say, “Oh, I tried the ad thing, it didn’t work for me.” But they have a brick and mortar practice in one city, but their ad is going out to everyone. So if you have a brick and mortar practice, you wanna make sure that you’re only doing a 25-mile radius and you wanna utilize the tools that Facebook provides you to set that target audience, that’s really important to make sure your ad is going to the right people. So setting those goals for your social media is a really important step.

Make sure you’re reaching your target market

So there’s a couple of ways you can do this. Obviously, a lot by trial and error of what platforms you’re posting to and where that engagement is coming from. You can also do a survey. You should have a patient database or an email list, and you can ask them what social media platforms are they a part of, even if you have, like your sign-in sheet at the front desk, add a couple of columns.

Where are you most active on social media? And just have Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn or Twitter, and then ask them. If you have a good relationship with your patients, they already know, like, and trust you, and they want to help you be successful because they’re coming to you for a reason, and hopefully they’re so happy about the results that they have seen with you, that they wanna be able to share your posts and tell their friends and families.

So if you are connecting to them on social media, that’s a great way to create those posts to talk to that target audience. You could also go a step further if you already have a large client database.  When you’re looking at those Facebook ads, you could upload a lookalike audience, so it will target people that have the same similarities as that list already.

If you’re putting all this time into Twitter and you’re putting up three or four tweets a day, and you’re following all these people, but you’re not getting any engagement, that may be a platform that you say, “You know what, this isn’t something that is going to work for us, we need to let Twitter go,” or “We’re only gonna post once per week, and we’re gonna focus our time on these platforms.” So just knowing where your audience is at.

If your audience is women and mothers, you need to be on Pinterest. You need to start creating those Pins, especially if you are an OB/GYN or an Endovascular Center that focuses on uterine fibroid embolization, you need to be on there because that’s where women are going.

Pinterest is a visual search engine, just like Google. The demographics on there are about equal, but women have a little bit higher presence on Pinterest, so if women are your target market, you gotta get on Pinterest and Instagram because that’s really where you’re going to reach them.

Look at your competitors

So you wanna see what are they doing. Facebook came out with page transparency about two years ago.

So if you go to a Facebook page on the right-hand side, it will say page transparency. That allows you to see what ads they have running and how they’ve been doing. You can kind of, in a way, spy on what they’re doing. This really gives you a good foundation of what’s working and what’s not working.

If you are an individual healthcare practice, like a Family Medicine Practice, you may wanna look at the larger hospitals of what they’re doing because that would help give you an idea of the content that they’re putting together, the ads they’re running, and then how you can tailor your own ads to reach your target audience.

So it’s really important that you’re always looking at those competitors, both in-state and out-of-state, nationwide, just so you can see, “Okay, well, we did a similar post, but they had a thousand likes and 15 shares and we didn’t have anything, why is that?” And so it allows you to see how things can be done as well. So that’s number five, looking at competitors.

Create your social media calendar

Once you have done all of these steps, you are now at the place, you have your notes, you’ve looked through everything, you have a good idea of what you wanna do, what you wanna implement, now it’s time to go back to that content calendar and create your social media content calendar for at least, at least the first quarter of 2021.

You are gonna create that, we will put a link to a social media content calendar that we use that you can make a copy of, and you’re going to in there put what networks you’re gonna work on, what resources you’re going to share from, what content ideas that you are going to implement, what videos you need to record, what goals you have? You wanna be able to run this many Facebook ads and put everything together.

So come January 1st, and hopefully, before that, you already have your social media posts written for January. You’ve already looked at what those national observance days are for the health and wellness industries so you know what topics you’re gonna talk about. You’ve already spoken to your doctors, your staff, your patients, and you have set up those times to interview them.

Using Zoom to do an interview call is awesome because you’re allowed to talk, they’re allowed to talk, and you can record that and then upload that directly into YouTube and use it as a social media post or as a blog post. So looking at what videos you want to implement and just having everything in that content calendar.

So come 2021, you are ready to hit the ground running and you are organized, so now, if you just do the first quarter of 2021, come February, you wanna start planning the second quarter, so you’re always about six weeks ahead.

And it’s important too because the industries are always changing, there are always new things coming up, and new news stories, so on your content calendar, you may have a place holder for an article or industry tip, and those are things that are gonna be more in the moment post. You may just schedule those a week in advance. But you wanna know your foundation, you’re gonna be able to know the National Observance days, again, the interviews, you can schedule those out, you can talk about, you put together the topics you wanna talk about, create those images in Canva, find that content that you wanna put with it. So you’re just making sure that you are ready for 2021.

Schedule a free consultation

If you need help putting this social media strategy together, we are here to help you. Head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com, and schedule a free consultation today and we can help walk you through what’s the best steps for your business to start and how we can implement a plan for you. So we are here to help you and we look forward to seeing your social media strategy.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN 2021

Social Media Plan for Your Yoga Practice for 2021Social Media Plan for Your Mental Health Practice for 2021

Social Media Plan for Your Health and Wellness Practice for 2021

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Pinterest SEO in 2020

SEO on Pinterest in 2020

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:

  1. The domain quality
  2. The pin quality
  3. The Pinner quality
  4. 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.

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Email Marketing Tips for Your Healthcare Practice

Email Marketing Tips for Your Healthcare Practice

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.

Email Marketing Tips for Your Healthcare Practice

 

Email Marketing Tips for Your Nutrition PracticeEmail Marketing Tips for Your Health and Wellness Practice

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Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

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.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”Enter Embed URL from Zapier Here” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

 

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

 

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

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5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Practice

5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Practice

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.

5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Practice

5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Nutrition Practice5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Yoga Practice

5 Content Marketing Ideas for Your Healthcare Practice

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5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice

5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients 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.

5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice

5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice

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Email Marketing to Increase ROI of Healthcare Digital Marketing

Email Marketing for Healthcare

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.

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